Happy Ashura!

Sunday was Ashoura Day for Shi'ite Muslims around the world, the day they commemorate the killing of Muhammad's grandson by mutilating their own children and filling their streets with rivers of blood:



Diversity requires that we show respect for this retarded barbarism.

Burkha Fashion Show

Bill Maher is a hard Leftist, but occasionally he does brilliant things like this:

Merry Christmas, Infidels

"Your King Osama looks like a dirty wizard or a homeless Santa." ~ Bruno

Over the Christmas period (and I hope yours was happy and prosperous, by the way*), I spared more than a passing thought for those Christians around the Islamic world who were left unable to celebrate their holy day, due to fear of punishment by the adherents of that most tolerant of religions: Islam.

In Pakistan, the Christian community of Gojra spent their Christmas in tents after Muslim mobs destroyed their homes, and continued to fear further attacks even afterwards.

In West Java, Indonesia, all churches were guarded by heavy police details over the Christmas period, while others weren't able to celebrate in a church at all because they have been refused permission to build them. Dozens of churches in the province have closed since 2004 after being stormed or attacked by Muslim mobs. In 2000, churches were bombed across the archipelago on Christmas Eve.

Meanwhile, in Basra, Iraq, the Christian community voluntarily chose not to celebrate Christmas overtly this year out of respect for Shi'ite Muslims, who celebrated the "martyrdom of Imam Al Hussain and his brother Al Abbas" at the same time. Just imagine the reverse situation, where Muslims voluntarily hold back from celebrating their religious holidays out of respect for Christians. And then come back to the real world.

In the West, most people take religious freedom for granted. Despite the fears of many on the Left about the Christian Right, Muslims in the West enjoy almost total religious freedom. By contrast, non-Muslims in Islamic countries do not have such freedom. The concept of freedom of religion, as defined in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, simply does not exist in Islam. Neither does the Golden Rule, which was articulated by Jesus, and is a major cornerstone of every other world faith...except Islam: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Here in Britain, and Europe, and America, we all understand this maxim, even if we do not always practise what we preach. But in the Islamic world, there is very little knowledge of even this basic concept, and that is why Christians are today suffering martyrdom even on their holiest of days.

*And yes, that includes you, "Andrew McCann"

The Legacy of Sharia

The societal damage caused by sharia law can be witnessed today in the story of the Muslim man who forced his 16 year old son to marry and then rape a twelve year old girl - who was also his cousin.

This kind of thing demonstrates the contempt that some Muslims in Britain (about forty per cent, perhaps?) have for British law. "The 54-year-old organised a sham Muslim ceremony between his son, then 16, and the girl at his home in Woolwich, south-east London, in March last year." He knew that the ceremony was illegal under British law. But he didn't care.

Lest anyone think his act was un-Islamic, he was simply following the example of the "Prophet" Muhammad, who "married Aisha when she was a girl of six years of age, and he consummated that marriage when she was nine years old.” (Bukhari v.5, b.58, no.234, and many others) Muhammad is, according to the Qur'an, "a beautiful pattern of conduct" (33:21) who Muslims should strive to emulate in all aspects of their lives. And this is the result.

It should be obvious that all the while Britain's at least 85 sharia courts are left open (many of which are already sanctioning illegal acts), there is a danger that incidents like this will be repeated in a more formal setting. The only solution is to shut them all down. But the government won't do that. It would be "Islamophobia".

Little girls be damned.

D.R.I.P. (Don't Rest In Peace) Ayatollah Montazeri

D.R.I.P

Predictably, the BBC today covers the death of Iranian "reformist" cleric Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri with a treacly biography that seeks to paint him as a "moderate" alternative to current President Mahoud Ahmadinejad, who he did admittedly oppose for political reasons.

Unmentioned by the BBC, Montazeri was an upholder of the age-old Shi'ite doctrine of najis, which teaches that non-Muslims are not only spiritually impure, but also physically unclean. In her in-depth analysis of the status of non-Muslims under the rule of the Islamic Revolution, Eliz Sanasarian demonstrates how, as a direct result of najis policies which were championed by Montazeri, non-Muslims in Iran were subjected to institutionalised discrimination. For example, non-Muslims were denied production jobs because Muslims refused to touch goods that had been manufactured by infidels, for fear that Muslims would be "contaminated" by them.

Such is the man who is reduced by the BBC to a "reformist" and even a human rights advocate! In fact, the only reform Ayatollah Montazeri was interested in was a break away from the relatively moderate, secular Pahlavi rule and a return to the theocratic bigotry that had prevailed in the country since the early 1600s.

Antisemite Erdogan's Self-Deception

Prime Minister "Mas-Com-Ya" Erdogan

According to a statement issued by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier this week, "Islamophobia is a crime against humanity just like anti-Semitism".

The ironies of Erdogan's statements are numerous. The equation of that chimeric phenomenon known as "Islamophobia" with antisemitism is self-evidently ridiculous, but more glaring is Erdogan's apparent self-deception, given the fact that his own country, and indeed his own good self, is full of bigoted antisemitism.

The Turkish media is rife with Jew-hatred conflating Judaism with Zionism and making ahistorical accusations against the Jews (see here, here and here), none of which has ever been condemned by Erdogan. What's more, Erdogan himself wrote, directed and starred in a theatrical play entitled "Mas-Com-Ya" ("Masons-Communists-Yahudi [Jews]"), which was staged all over Turkey in the 1970s. The play focused, according to historian Rifat N. Bali, on "the 'evil' nature of these three concepts, and the hatred towards them."

Also during his statements earlier in the week, Erdogan is reported to have said: "Islam means peace, and it cannot tolerate terrorism. We reject all attempts to link Islam with terrorism.” One must assume, then, that his first target for opprobrium must be the many thousands of Muslims around the world who are currently linking Islam with terrorism.

Why are you laughing?

Finally, the report notes:

The agency noted that Erdoğan also called on the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Arab League and all concerned parties to present a unified front to help end Islamophobia.

But not, you'll note, to end terrorism committed in the name of Islam.

Pakistan: Muslim Employers Poison Christians

A Christian sanitation worker was struggling for his life yesterday in a hospital in Pakistan's Punjab province, after two Christian co-workers had already died because Muslim employers apparently poisoned them.

The father of the three workers, Yousaf Masih, said the incident happened on Monday, in a banquet and wedding hall where his sons demanded wages owed to them.

Masih said the Muslim managers of the facility were angry that Christians dared to ask for payment. "My sons were apparently forced to consume some kind of poisoned drink, or a drug...They were left there to die," he said, adding that their bosses also made abusive remarks about Christianity.

But never fear, for Obama Nobel says that Islam is a tolerant religion.

Who Cares About The Copts?

As if further confirmation were needed of the gross hypocrisy inherent in the Islamic mindset following the Swiss minaret controversy, this article from Bloomberg outlines it yet further:

On a side street in the far northeast Cairo suburb of Ain Shams, the door of a five-story former underwear factory is padlocked.

This is, or was supposed to be, the St. Mary and Anba Abraam Coptic Christian Church. Police closed it Nov. 24, 2008, when Muslims rioted against its consecration. Since then local Copts have had to commute to distant churches or worship in hiding at each other’s homes.

While Muslim leaders criticized the Nov. 29 vote in Switzerland that banned construction of minarets, they don’t support Christians who want to build churches in some Islamic countries. Restrictions in Egypt have exacerbated sectarian violence and discrimination, say Copts, a 2,000-year-old denomination that comprises about 10 percent of the population.

The day after the Swiss vote, Ali Gomaa, one of Egypt’s top Muslim clerics, called the decision “an attempt to insult the feelings of the Muslim community in and outside of Switzerland.”

Copts quickly said that neither Gomaa nor any other Islamic leader mentioned the Christian situation in Egypt.

“Without the merest attempt to put our house in order, are we in any position to taunt others to put theirs?” Youssef Sidhom, editor-in-chief of the Cairo-based Egyptian Coptic weekly newspaper El-Watani, said in a telephone interview. “They should be ashamed.”...

“The decision of the Swiss people stood to be interpreted as xenophobic, prejudiced, discriminative and against the universal human-rights values,” said the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which represents 57 Muslim-majority nations.

Members include Saudi Arabia, where non-Muslims are arrested for worshipping privately; Maldives, the Indian Ocean atoll where citizenship is reserved for Muslims; Libya, which limits churches to one per denomination in cities; and Iran, where conversion from Islam is punished by death, according to a 2009 U.S. State Department report on religious freedom.

Read the whole thing.

Cairo Human Rights Group: "Arab Countries Fail On Human Rights"

A new report from the independent Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies reveals plainly what I have been saying here since I started this blog back in March - Muslim countries are leading the world stage today in terms of human rights abuses. The report also takes Barack Obama to task for his failure to take notice of this fact, which he could have addressed (but failed to) at his pathetic June 4th Cairo speech to the Muslim world. Obama - winner of the Nobel Prize for Nothing - is, of course, far more concerned with the fact that a few soldiers at Guantanamo played loud music to some terrorists.

Extracts from the article describing the Cairo human rights report are reproduced below. But don't worry: perhaps my occasional visitor who goes by the name of "Andrew McCann" will come along and tell us that this has nothing to do with Islam, and that only "losers" care about these human rights abuses.

The report by the independent Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies surveyed 12 countries and said that most of them repressed human rights activists, press freedoms, and discriminated against religious minorities.

The state of human rights in the 12 countries—Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen— "has worsened compared to 2008," the report said....

"Egypt continued to top the list of countries in which torture is routinely and systematically practiced," it said, adding that dozens had died in the country of torture or excessive force by police.

The report also found torture was "routine" in Bahrain, "rampant" in Tunisia, and practiced in Saudi Arabia against terrorism suspects.

Human rights advocates faced harassment in several Arab countries, with Syria, which has jailed dozens of democracy activists, holding the "worst record in this regard."

Religious and ethnic minorities also continued to suffer discrimination in several Arab countries, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the report said.

"Despite the Saudi regime's attempt to appear to champion religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue in international forums, in practice the national religious police continue to exhibit violent behavior," it said.

Egypt, where roughly 10 percent of the 80-million-strong population are Coptic Christians who frequently complain of discrimination, "is increasingly acquiring the features of a religious state," it added.

The report also said that US policies were "wholly inimical to reform and human rights in the region," and accused President Barak Obama's administration of abandoning support for reform initiatives in the Arab world....

The rights group's representative in Geneva, Jeremie Smith, warned at a press conference that Arab countries had exported attempts to undermine accountability to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

"Arab governments have largely taken strategies that they have perfected at a national level to avoid accountability, and they have exported them to the United Nations system," he said.

Regarding the Islamic subversion of the UNHRC, see here.

Book Review

"THE LEGACY OF ARAB-ISLAM IN AFRICA: A QUEST FOR INTER-RELIGIOUS DIALOGUE" BY JOHN ALEMBILLAH AZUMAH

On November 4th, I posted the first half of a two-part essay on slavery in Islam and the West. After losing the second half of the essay, I promised that it would be replaced, with a review for this book.

The book is a historical overview of the Muslim enslavement of Africans over the last fourteen hundred years. Due to its very specific subject matter, the book necessarily overlooks the over one million white European Christians who were taken captive by the Muslim pirates of the Barbary Coast between 1530 and 1780, as well as the tradition of self-criticism and abolition that separates the West not only from the Islamic world, but from every other civilisation that has ever existed.

Azumah's analysis is essentially designed to prove one basic point: that regardless of the evils committed by Westerners against the African population, Muslims have been no less guilty of the enslavement of Africans (as well as the inhabitants of every other area they have conquered throughout history). Azumah, who works at the Henry Martyn Institute International Centre for Research, Interfaith Relations and Reconciliation in India, argues that this is absolutely necessary in order to initiate meaningful dialogue between Muslims and people of other religions in Africa.

Although the book achieves the author's basic intention, I feel that it does not go far enough in emphasising that the Islamic slave trade was actually worse than the Western slave trade. For example, while Westerners are estimated to have enslaved roughly ten to eleven million Africans between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, Muslims are estimated to have enslaved at least seventeen million Africans between the seventh century and the nineteenth. That the Islamic slave trade ultimately lasted longer and enslaved more people than its Western counterpart is a fact that is never subjected to any exposure in Western academic circles.

Azumah's book contains a detailed exposition on the way that the mere non-belief in Islam of the indigenous African people was used as a primary justification for their enslavement by the Muslims. For example, the medieval Muslim jurist Abd al-Aziz bin Ahmad al-Bukhari (d.1330) declared: "Servitude is a vestige of obstinacy in refusing to believe in the One God (kufr), and this in the eyes of the law is death itself." Ahmad Baba, a seventeenth-century Muslim leader from Timbuktu, wrote a popular enslavement manual called the Mi'raj, which became a standard reference used by Muslims in Sudan. This manual states plainly that "the reason for slavery [in Islam] is non-belief".

Azumah also dedicates a whole section to demonstrating overwhelmingly that Arab Muslims were prone to racist attitudes towards black Africans, which may surprise those Western liberals who see only white people as the epitome of bigoted racism. The Spanish Muslim thinker Sa'id al-Andalusi (d.1070) wrote that blacks were "more like animals than men". Ibn Sina (d.1037), a Muslim philosopher known in the West as Avicenna, also wrote of blacks as inherently inferior to lighter-skinned people, and believed that they were by their very nature slaves (incidentally, the Arabic word abd is used synonymously to mean both a slave and a black person). Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d.1274), believed that "the Negro does not differ from an animal in anything except the fact that his hands have been lifted from the earth". Finally, the great Muslim sociologist Ibn Khaldun (d.1406) wrote: "[T]he Negro nations are, as rule, submissive to slavery because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes quite similar to those of dumb animals".

The rest of the book is dedicated to describing the terrible conditions African slaves were subjected to by their Muslim masters, which easily match those imposed upon slaves in the West. One of the most heinous aspects of this is the practice of castration, which Azumah describes as follows:

The operation, done on boys aged between eight and ten...was carried out with an exceedingly high death rate...[O]n the whole about 30 per cent survived the operation in Bagirmi, while other estimates put the mortality rate at up to eighty per cent. This barbaric act was made particularly cruel for black victims in that, in contrast to their white counterparts whose operations did not deny them the ability to perform coitus, the castration of blacks involved what was commonly referred to as 'level with the abdomen', i.e. a complete amputation of the genetalia.

Azumah also demonstrates the total devstation wrought by the (alarmingly violent) Islamic slave trade in Africa, and provides enslavement figures:

In 1894, thanks to the French efforts to assess the situation of slavery in the region, it was revealed that about 30 to 50 per cent of the total population of the Western Sudan were slaves, with up to 80 per cent near some commercial centres...

In Kankan 57 per cent of the population were slaves while in Sikasso, the capital of Tieba, two-thirds of the population were found to be slaves in 1904. The same percentage was estimated for the slave population of Bobo-Dioulasso. In areas immediately around Kong and Bandama, however, the proportion of slaves approached 80 per cent. In Northern Nigeria the same pattern of slave concentration is revealed...

Within the Sokoto caliphate as a whole, during the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, slaves are said to have 'certainly numbered in many millions and perhaps as many as 10 million.' On the island of Zanzibar in east Africa in 1907 there were 27,000 freed slaves, and 140,000 slaves out of an estimated population of 208,700.

Finally, Azumah points out that slavery was not formally abolished in Saudi Arabia until 1962, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania in 1981 - all under Western pressure. The Islamic world never spawned its own abolitionist movement, and slavery has always been accepted in Islamic societies, due to its basic acceptance in the Qur'an and in the example of Muhammad, who is known to have owned around sixty slaves in his lifetime. The beliefs enshrined in these sacred Muslim sources about the inherent inferiority of unbelievers militated against any Muslim movement to abolish slavery. Moreover, there is evidence that slavery is still practised in many Islamic countries, such as Sudan, today.

The author concludes this fascinating book with an appeal for genuine dialogue on this issue, which must necessarily involve Muslims taking a step back and engaging in some meaningful self-criticism akin to that practised in the West during the abolition era:

[T]here is no doubt that contemporary relations between communities in general are rooted in the historical past. The historical past, which was in itself formed by religious and ideological traditions has made some significant 'mis-steps'...It is these 'mis-steps' that both the Arab-Muslim and black African sides have to acknkowledge, and accept so that lessons can be learnt from them, to make dialogue worthwhile and sustainable. Unless we are prepared to react to history together, we are left with no alternative but to use history to react against each other...

This may be called critical faithfulness...Acknowledging the 'mis-steps' within one's inherited tradition is, first of all, a sign of strength rather than weakness. This strength of integrity is...crucial for dialogue. Second, critical faithfulness to one's tradition will, on the one hand, help bring restorative justice to victims, and prevent the injustices associated with these aspects from repeating themselves, on the other hand. Third, being critically faihtful to one's tradition will enable an intelligent appropriation and adaptation of these traditions in contemporary times.

Finally, critical faithfulness will help bring about change in old and preconceived unhelpful attitudes and perceptions so as to promote mutual respect and peaceful co-existence between and among communities. Inter-religious and inter-ideological dialogue is therefore inpossible without the parties involved being prepared to be critically faithful to the various inherited traditions.

Azumah's insights underscore the desperate need for Muslims to acknowledge the errors of their past, and indeed, their present, as well as to confront the ideological basis for slavery in Islam. All the while they refuse to do this - and all the while Leftists in the West continue to focus all their attention on our own past crimes (for which we have already paid our pennance by inventing abolitionism, the ultimate display of self-criticism) - people will continue to suffer as slaves under the yoke of Islam.

Hypocrisy?

As Muslims whine and seethe and complain over the the banning of minarets in Switzerland (not whole mosques, remember, just the entirely unnecessary minarets), the double standards are there for all to see. Islamic law forbids the public practise of non-Muslim religions. The fourteenth-century Islamic legal manual Reliance of the Traveller says the following about non-Muslim communities living under Islamic rule: "...non-Muslim subjects are obliged to comply with Islamic rules that pertain to the safety and indemnity of life, reputation, and property. In addition, they...are forbidden to...ring church bells or display crosses, recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals and feastdays; and are forbidden to build new churches."

Reliance of the Traveller is not just a medieval document. In 1991, it was endorsed by Cairo's Al-Azhar University as conforming "to the practise and faith of the orthodox Sunni community". Al-Azhar, the oldest and most prestiguous educational institution in the Islamic world, is the closest equivalent in Sunni Islam to the Vatican.

Based on this immutable law, Saudi Arabia completely forbids the building of churches and the public display of non-Muslim religions, and bars non-Muslims from even entering Mecca:


The Maldives is currently very close to implementing similar laws. Have any Muslim human rights activists campaigned against this open infringement of religious freedom around the Muslim world? What do you think?

Hypocrisy on their part? It may seem so, but as Hugh Fitzgerald points out today at Jihad Watch, these double standards simply reveal

the complete obliviousness, by almost all Muslims, to the very idea of the Golden Rule: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. The apostate Ali Sina has written at length - see here -- convincingly and eloquently about the Golden Rule, a simple code for conduct that is present, Ali Sina notes, in all the major world faiths with one exception - and that one exception is Islam...

Ali Gomaa is not being a hypocrite when he attacks the Swiss for voting against the minaret. He's not even up to the possibility of hypocrisy. It never occurs to him, for it simply has never entered his head that the same rules should apply to Islam as apply to other faiths...

I wouldn't call Ali Gomaa, or Muslims hypocrites. They are far far beyond hypocrisy in their deep beliefs. They simply can't fathom why, in what universe, anyone would expect them, the Muslims, ever to treat the bearers of Untruth, the Ungrateful Infidels, in a way that would not make clear the many legal disabilities under Shari'a that non-Muslims must, by right, endure. Shari'a is the Holy Law of Islam, to which the manmade laws of the Muslim state or states can only aspire to copy exactly in every particular, but must at least try asymptotically to emulate. Under it, non-Muslims deserve to be humiliated, deserve to be degraded, deserve to live in conditions of physical insecurity. How could it not be? For how else can the Truth of Islam, and the superiority of the Muslims, the "best of peoples," otherwise be declared in all its unswerving rightness?