The Blog of Record

“I had a moment when I looked around . . . and just thought, ‘If someone from the West could see us right now, they would think we’re a bunch of fanatical jihadis on some kind of an insane mission’.”

Hmm, I wonder if their religion has anything to do with it:

Pashtun men commonly have sex with other men, admire other men physically, have sexual relationships with boys and shun women both socially and sexually — yet they completely reject the label of “homosexual.” . . .

The U.S. army medic also told members of the research unit that she and her colleagues had to explain to a local man how to get his wife pregnant. 

The report said: “When it was explained to him what was necessary, he reacted with disgust and asked, ‘How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean, when one could be with a man, who is clean? Surely this must be wrong.’” 

The Pashtun populations are concentrated in the southern and eastern parts of the country. The Human Terrain Team that conducted the research is part of a military effort to learn more about local populations. 

The report also detailed a disturbing practice in which older “men of status” keep young boys on hand for sexual relationships. One of the country’s favorite sayings, the report said, is “women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” 

The report concluded that the widespread homosexual behavior stems from several factors, including the “severe segregation” of women in the society and the “prohibitive” cost of marriage.

Yeah, you could say that homosexual behavior is widespread in Afghanistan when even the Taliban is flamin’ gay:

The blurred spot in the photo is the head of a man who is being stoned to death for adultery in Somalia as villagers are forced to watch. A wonderful Islamic custom whose beauty we are too inveterate in our cultural imperialism to appreciate, I am sure.

The first step toward solving a problem is admitting that the problem exists, and the French seem to be the only people in Europe still willing to do so:

France is to launch a hard-hitting campaign aimed at ‘reaffirming pride’ in the country and combating Islamic fundamentalism.  

As well as providing civic lessons for adults – including classes about the country’s Christian history and liberal political institutions – the government will encourage school children to sing the national anthem at least once a year. 

In words which are certain to infuriate ethnic minority groups, Immigration Minister Eric Besson even suggested that ‘foreigners’ should learn to speak better French.

His proposed measures contrast sharply with the situation in Britain where ‘citizenship education’ centres on multicultural diversity and the European Union, while ‘God Save The Queen’ is not even taught in schools. 

In an interview broadcast on national TV, Mr Besson said : ‘It’s necessary to reaffirm the values of national identity and the pride of being French.

‘I think, for example, that it would be good for all young French people to have the chance to sing The Marseillaise at least once a year.’ 

Mr Besson, who was himself born in the former French protectorate of Morocco, also suggested an immediate two-month long ‘great debate on national identity’ entitled ‘What does it mean to be French?’ 

Making clear that radical Islam was a threat, Mr Besson said: ‘In France, the nation and the republic remain the strongest ramparts against … fundamentalist tendencies. France is diversity, and France is unity.’ 

They even want to ban burkhas on French streets:

‘For me, there should be no burqas on the street,’ said Mr Besson. ‘The burqa is against national values – an affront to women’s rights and equality.’

Say what you will about the French, but they love their country too much to allow it to become Francostan.

At least she was not 6, like Muhammad’s favourite wife:

A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children’s rights group said Monday.

Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children.

“Although the cause of her death was lack of medical care, the real case was the lack of education in Yemen and the fact that child marriages keep happening,” said Seyaj President Ahmed al-Qureshi.

Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year, al-Qureshi said.

Child brides are commonplace in Yemen, especially in the Red Sea Coast where tribal customs hold sway. Hodeidah is the fourth largest city in Yemen and an important port.

More than half of all young Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18 — many times to older men, some with more than one wife, a study by Sanaa University found.

But of course it’s not for us, Western imperialists who are to blame for all problems in the world, to criticise their beautiful culture.

“Laws that once ruled supreme in Kabul are now being enforced in cities across Britain”:

For the first time, the Islamic Sharia Council has granted access to a newspaper to observe the entire sharia legal process in Britain. Over several weeks, I was allowed to witness the filing of complaints, individual testimony hearings and the monthly meeting of imams, or judges, where rulings are handed down.

And these rulings are enforceable by county and high courts.

Saira Khan, runner up in the first series of The Apprentice: “Why I, as a British Muslim woman, want the burkha banned from our streets.”

The main reason why this should be done is obvious: putting a burkha on a woman in a Western country ensures that she will never integrate into society and fulfil any dreams she has about her life other than being a housewife – or, rather, house slave. Ms. Khan names another one:

Shockingly, the Dickensian bone disease rickets has reemerged in the British Muslim community because women are not getting enough vital vitamin D from sunlight because they are being consigned to life under a shroud.

If some Christian custom was endangering the health of women, I don’t think the British government would hesitate for a second to ban it.

Ms. Khan ends with a question for British Muslims:

My message to those Muslims who want to live in a Talibanised society, and turn their face against Britain, is this: ‘If you don’t like living here and don’t want to integrate, then what the hell are you doing here? Why don’t you just go and live in an Islamic country?’

Because they feel they do, I guess. They’ve transformed entire British cities into “Muslim communities”, with no-go zones for non-Muslims, and the rest of the country bends over backwards to “accommodate” their every wish even before they wish it. Why would they ever leave for some other Islamic country?

A reporter from Pakistan comes to London and is unpleasantly surprised to see people in the city’s many Muslim neighborhoods who, if they were dressed in all that Islamic garb in Islamabad, would be immediately picked up for questioning by the police. Praising the Taliban and jihad for them is something akin to a hobby.

How a push against Islamization, if and when it materializes, may result in non-Muslim immigrant minorities in Western countries becoming de facto pro-Islamization fifth columns.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

Saudi Arabia: A girl’s puberty is a precondition for divorce - but not for marriage.

Of course they won’t annul the marriage – their prophet married a 6-year-old girl, and they can’t make him look bad.

Dubai, built by slaves:

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. “To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell,” he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal’s village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they’d pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don’t like it, the company told him, go home. “But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket,” he said. “Well, then you’d better get to work,” they replied.

Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.

He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-deckerbunk-beds, where he lives with11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is “unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night.” At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.

The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn’t properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. “It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink,” he says.

The work is “the worst in the world,” he says. “You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable … This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can’t pee, not for days or weeks. It’s like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren’t allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer.”

He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn’t know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.

Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. “Here, nobody shows their anger. You can’t. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported.” Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.

The “ringleaders” were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. “How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets…” He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: “I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings.”

Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. “We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can’t, we’ll be sent to prison.” 

(Via James Hudnall.)

She already knows the most important thing: Allah will strike the Jews.

(Via Blame It On The Voices.)

A British imam was raping his daughter for ten years, and when she fled her family to avoid being sent to Pakistan for a forced marriage and became a Christian, he led a gang through the streets trying to kill her:

We are all too familiar with the persecution of Christians in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet sitting in front of me is a British woman whose life has been threatened in this country solely because she is a Christian. Indeed, so real is the threat that the book she has written about her experiences has had to appear under an assumed name.

The book is called The Imam’s Daughter because “Hannah Shah” is just that: the daughter of an imam in one of the tight-knit Deobandi Muslim Pakistani communities in the north of England. Her father emigrated to this country from rural Pakistan some time in the 1960s and is, apparently, a highly respected local figure.

He is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to “honour” in her family’s eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her.

Hannah Shah says her story is not unique – that there are many other girls in British Muslim families who are oppressed and married off against their will, or who have secretly become Christians but are too afraid to speak out. She wants their voices to be heard and for Britain, the land of her birth, to realise the hidden misery of these women.

Hannah’s description in the book of the moment when her “community” discovered the “safe” home where she had fled after becoming an apostate is terrifying. A mob with her father at its head pounded and hammered at the door as she cowered upstairs hoping she could not be seen or heard. She heard her father shout through the letter box: “Filthy traitor! Betrayer of your faith! Cursed traitor! We’re going to rip your throat out! We’ll burn you alive!”

(Via Betsy’s Page.)

This Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilali character looks terribly out of place in a country like Australia. Doesn’t seem very bright either, getting busted by his own security camera:

This sheik guy gives Muslims a bad name, or something.

(Via LGF and Newsalert.)

In a country like Canada this question is, of course, purely hypothetical. But it’s really just a particular case of a wider question: Is immigration policy still a means of ensuring a country’s continued development – and then the country is entitled to pick and choose whom it wants as new citizens based on their acceptance of its values, - or is it… well, I can’t imagine what else it can be.

Actually, I can – there’s Britain, where the Labour government has been importing Muslims by the million, while making sure to do nothing to integrate them, as the surest way to expand Labour’s voter base.

As if the economic crisis brought on in large part by the government buying homes for poor minorities never happened, Minnesota’s state government has found another “underserved group” with a “home ownership gap” that it must help out: Muslims who can’t buy homes because Islamic sharia prohibits charging and paying interest. Meet America’s newest sharia lender: the state of Minnesota.

I wonder if Minnesota’s government would move in to help if a Christian sect had objections to lending at an interest.

Ed Morrissey: “Gee, what a surprise — government distorts the lending market again”:

How does it work?  The state buys the home and then sells it to the buyer at an inflated price, more or less masking the market interest rate as principle.  They they set a 30-year payment schedule where the family pays down the debt, but without any interest.  The state makes a profit eventually, and people get to buy homes rather than rent.

My objections to this have less to do with the religious aspects of this than the intrusion of the state into a private lending market.  Other private lenders had begun meeting the market demand by crafting shari’a loan models themselves.  The state’s entry into this market will act to push others out, as the state has more lending power and more credibility than private lenders do.  That essentially steals capital from the market, and it also reverses the tax flow, as profit in the private market would generate revenue to the state.  Minnesota is cheating itself in this transaction.

Moreover, our state faces a $7 billion shortfall over the next two years.  Why are we buying houses for people at six figures a throw in exchange for monthly payments over the next 30 years?  The capital we have needs to go to more legitimate state functions, instead of distorting the lending market once again.  And how well qualified are these buyers, anyway?  As we discovered in the Community Reinvestment Program, when the government pushes loans to an “underserved market,” it usually means significantly increased risk.  Will the state foreclose on delinquent borrowers?

Gee, what a surprise — government distorts the lending market again.  And while I’m mainly discounting the religious angle of this story, it’s interesting to note that the usual “separation of church and state” argument from the Left has been conspicuously absent here.  Is it a legitimate function of American government, at the state or federal level, to set itself up as a lender just to help a religious sect get around its own set of beliefs?  I’d say no.

At this point, Britain is so scared of its Muslims that they can do or demand pretty much whatever they want:

A gymnastics club was forced to stop holding classes at an independent girls school after Muslim parents complained about boy members of the group.

The problem was not that the boys did something bad – they didn’t; it was their mere presence.

On its website the school describes how it has a Christian Foundation and is devoted to unleashing creativity and innovation and ‘celebrating multicultural understanding and respect.’

Multiculturalism is simple: the most scary and violent culture gets the most understanding and respect.

Theodore Dalrymple concludes from the disgraceful affair (you can read about Wilders here):

By banning Mr. Wilders from entry into the country, then, the British government revealed that, at heart, it agrees with, or even went beyond, him: that Moslems are predominantly violent irrational bigots, incapable of holding their own in argument, and of whom it, the government, is physically afraid.

Plus this:

A few days before last Christmas, I went to one of the Indian restaurants in my small town in England, which is owned and run by Moslems. It was hung with Christmas decorations, and when I left the staff wished me a Merry Christmas and handed me a Christmas card. And then I thought of the Christmas cards I had received from America, with their snivelling, pusillanimous greeting of Happy Holidays, not one of them daring to mention Christmas.

Not merely Christmas - God doesn’t fare any better. Whenever someone dies or there is a disaster, the official statement now never says “His family is in our prayers” or anything like that. It’s now “The immediate thoughts of the whole company are with his family” or something equally careful not to mention the un-PC G-word.

An interesting analysis of what makes the West the West and what it must do to survive in the current conflict with Islamism.

The humor is what makes this short film different.

The author is Pierre Rehov, a Jewish ex-French filmmaker who left France for the U.S. for the reasons he explains in this interview:

On a personal level, my own small company has been harassed by the French tax people for about 10 years, since the first days of my involvement in politics. This is the French way to appear as a country of free-speech but to stop you from talking loudly against the diseases of its society, such as its traditional pro-Arabs politics.

My mistake was to file a claim against France 2 in 2001, with the help of the B’nai Birth, for having deliberately participated in the Muhammad Al Dura’s hoax. As a filmmaker, I knew that something was wrong in those images, and conducting my own investigation in Israel and Gaza was my very first involvement in the Middle-East crisis. Later, some of my work would be used by Esther Shapira in her film “Who Killed Mohammad Al Dura,” and I was delighted to see my friend Philippe Karsenty taking up the case and leading it to a victory.

But the first result of my own claim was to see the French IRS jumping on my company and starting an investigation — which was going to last more than 10 years. I sued them, of course, and I won the first time, as I will certainly win the other cases, but this is expensive, exhausting, and the cost of lawyers was more than my company could handle. Unfortunately, many Jews who made Aliyah to Israel, or moved to the US, would tell you the same story.

On a political level, it is a bit difficult living in a country where Israel is accused by 90% of the media for committing war crimes each time it defends itself and where you have to listen to Arabic music each time you take a taxi and be insulted if you dare saying to the taxi driver that you would appreciate if he could turn down the volume. It’s not the easiest thing to live in a country where the so-said anti-racist organizations, such as MRAP, organize rallies against Israel during which people shout “death to the Jews,” and where I am myself am considered a racist, or even a fascist, just because I support Israel, the US and western values, and because I don’t like to see men believing in their own supremacy against women. All these were reasons for me to leave.

France is no longer my country, even though I respect the new president, Mr. Sarkozy, as much as I disrespected Jacques Chirac. I think that I made my decision the day Chirac gave a national funeral to Arafat. It took me time to get organized, but I must say that I now feel perfectly well in the USA.

(Via Amy Alkon.)