All Muscle, No Backbone

Due to the all-encompassing nature of sharia law, there are very few areas of private or public life that Islam does not legislate over in some way. Similarly, there are increasingly fewer areas of life where Islam is not taking hold, and where it is not convincing weak-willed non-believers to bend over before it.

Consider the case of Kulsoon Abdullah, a Muslim woman from Atlanta, USA, who - along with the US Olympic Committee - petitioned the International Weightlifting Federation to change its rules to allow her to wear Islamic dress during participation in competitions. Previously, the rules had mandated that competitors must have bare arms and legs so that judges can tell when the elbows and knees have "locked" and a lift has been properly completed.

Having won her appeal, Abdullah has been successful in having the rules changed so that she can now wear "a hijab and a body-covering unitard".

This case raises some interesting issues.

Islamic law mandates that when out in public, women must cover everything except their face and hands, in accordance with the words of Muhammad:

“Asma, daughter of Abu Bakr, entered upon the Apostle of Allah wearing thin clothes. The Apostle of Allah turned his attention from her. He said: O Asma, when a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her that she displays her parts of body except this and this, and he pointed to her face and hands.” (Abu Dawud b.32, no.4092)

However, additionally, the body coverings that Muslim women wear must not be tight-fitting or reveal their figures. For example: "Women are forbidden to wear thin clothes which reveal their shapes when they go out." (Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, A Treatise on Maliki Fiqh, p.386) A fatwa issued on the website of the popular South African Muslim preacher Ebrahim Desai emphasises this point repeatedly. Kulsoon Abdullah's form-fitting "unitard" clearly violates this explicit law.

Furthermore, Abdullah shouldn't even be at the event, since Islamic law forbids women from leaving the home without the permission of their husbands and for any reason other than attendance of serious events such as funerals (Qayrawani, p.387; Reliance of the Traveller, p.538), and they certainly couldn't be in the presence of men to whom they are not related.

In other words, Kulsoon Abdullah is barely following Islamic law at all. There is therefore a very good possibility that her demands to wear a loosely defined "Islamic dress" while weightlifting have next to nothing to do with piety, and everything to do with getting one over the Infidels. After all, if she can win a small battle like this now, what larger battle can she win next time? If she can convince the Infidels to change the rules of the game to accomodate her religio-political ideology, what other concessions might they make, if threatened strongly enough with the stigma of "Islamophobia" and religious discrimination if they fail to comply?

Well...perhaps they'll allow sharia law to supercede their own law in Britain, or America, or France, or anywhere else in the Western world?

But that couldn't be what's going on, could it? It's just a woman who wants to do some weightlifting. Go back to sleep.

Weirdest Anti-Terrorism Conference Ever

Our allies and our enemies...but which is which?

This past weekend, the leaders of some of our most vital Muslim allies in the Middle East attended a conference entitled "World Without Terrorism".

Were these important moderate Muslims there to renounce violence in the name of Islam and come up with transparent, effective ways to combat those Muslims who besmirch the name of their peaceful religion by committing acts of terrorism with a Qur'an in their hand?

Of course not, silly. Their main aim, according to the participants, was to "clearly define terrorism and to identify its root causes," particularly "satanic world powers which use terrorism in their policies and in their planning to achieve their illegitimate goals," such as the "Zionist regime" and Zionism in general, which have "from their very beginning perpetuated global terrorism". The conference also aims to highlight the way that "the U.S., the U.K., and other Western governments had 'a black record of terrorist behaviors.'"

Well, what else would you expect when the conference is led by Iran's Ali Khameini and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

This conference, whose sole purpose was to demonise the West and Israel, was attended by three of our main "allies" in the Muslim world: Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Pakistani President Asif 'Ali Zardari, and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. None of these men appeared to have any problem or, crucially, any strategic disagreements with the pro-genocidal Ahmadinejad or, for that matter, with the actually-genocidal Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, who also attended this "anti-terrorism" conference despite being wanted for war crimes.

Indeed, these so-called "allies" actively endorsed the views of Khameini and Ahmadinejad that "the Zionist regime feel proud of their terrorist background", and that the 9/11 attacks were cooked up by the West and Israel to justify colonialist ambitions in the Middle East, with their own anti-Western statements. President Karzai requested aid from Iran. The Iraqi President emphasised that Iraqis were united in their opposition to the Coalition prescence in their country, and again asked for Iranian assistance in driving it out. And Zardari told the Iranian leadership that the U.S. was trying to sow division in Pakistan for its own ends, and promised that his country would work toward expanding its relations with Tehran.

To top off this wonderfully surreal and downright dangerous meeting of "allied" minds, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon actually praised the conference, saying that it would do wonders for the future prevention of terrorism.

In other news, David Cameron praised Levi Bellfield for his groundbreaking work on a new seminar series for convicts entitled "A World Without Child-Killing".

Sold

Nancy and Christine: Where is the world's outrage?

Over at FrontPage, the invaluable Raymond Ibrahim provides details of the latest human rights outrage from "democratised" Egypt - an outrage that has been completely ignored by the entire English-speaking media, leaving Ibrahim to summarise the details published in the Arabic media about the incidents:

The two girls, Christine Azat (aged 16) and Nancy Magdi (aged 14) were on their way to church Sunday, June 12, when they were seized. Their abductors demanded $200,000 Egyptian pounds for their release. The people of the region quickly put their savings together and came up with the ransom money; but when they tried to give it to the kidnappers, they rejected it, saying they had already “sold” the girls off to another group which requires $12 million Egyptian pounds to return them.

Ibrahim concludes with the following comments:

Therefore, next time you hear about an Egyptian Muslim preacher boasting that Islam permits Muslims to abduct and ransom infidels as a great way to make a living and own female sex-slaves, or when you hear about a Kuwaiti political activist praying to Allah that Kuwait would formally institutionalize sex-slavery, do not brush these aside as mere words, for here are their fruits.

Another Genocide In Sudan?

Omar al-Bashir: Mass-mudering jihadist war criminal

This disturbing piece in TIME magazine highlights the now very real possibility of another genocide in Sudan:

Sudan's history is strewn with cases of mass atrocities against non-Arabs in the south and north, with Darfur being only the latest; reports in recent weeks from Sudan's South Kordofan state suggest history could be repeating itself yet again. There, members of a minority, opposition-aligned African ethnic group are being slaughtered "like animals," in the words of one alarming church statement. The diverse tribes live in a rugged land of mud-hut villages called the Nuba Mountains. So far, besides an aerial-bombardment campaign against the Nuba areas, the targeted killings against them have been mostly confined to the major towns, as tens of thousands flee into the hills where, for now, they are mostly safe.

But internal U.N. documents obtained by TIME show that refuge might soon come under attack too. Hundreds of military vehicles have streamed into South Kordofan's capital of Kadugli, the center of the bloodbath, according to U.N. reports. Preparations for a major ground offensive were becoming increasingly clear, the U.N. Kadugli base warned in a June 15 confidential dispatch, which urgently called for political intervention to ward off the crisis.

As well as racial tension between the Arabs and the blacks, the slaughter in Sudan is also, as described by the perpetrators, a textbook Islamic jihad. Only three days ago, Christians and their churches in the South Kordofan area were brutally assaulted by Muslims allied to the Sudanese government, who screamed "Allahu Akbar!" as they attacked. As described by Nina Shea of the Centre For Religious Freedom, Sudan's war criminal President Omar al-Bashir has for many years waged an explicitly self-defined "jihad" against the predominantly black Christians (and fellow Muslims) of Sudan, while according to the man's own documented words, his long-term intention is to implement sharia law in his country. And we're not talking the fluffy, friendly "family law" version of sharia that many Western commentators assure us is the sole function of Islamic law, but full-fledged, Dark Ages barbarity, including but not limited to the brutal flogging of women:

Separately, Mr Bashir also commented on a recent high-profile case in which a video posted on the internet showed a woman being flogged by police in the north.

"If she is lashed according to Sharia law, there is no investigation. Why are some people ashamed? This is Sharia," the president said.

Also according to Shea:

For years Khartoum has treated the black, Sufi Muslims of Darfur as second-class citizens, systematically discriminating against them in providing development opportunities, government services, and positions of power. When they rebelled against this policy of extreme marginalization, they became — in the view of a regime that conflates religion with politics — "apostate." Under Islamist rules, apostates are to be put to death or taken as slaves. In 1992, six pro-government Sudanese imams issued a fatwa making this explicit: "An insurgent who was previously a Muslim is now an apostate and a non-Muslim is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them." Though the fatwa was intended at that time for the Muslims of the central Nuba province and the Christians and animists of the south, it equally applies today to the Muslims of Darfur.

Despite President Obama dedicating a "generous" two-minute radio address to these jihadist atrocities a few days ago, the international community has by and large tragically and shamefully failed to act decisively in bringing Omar al-Bashir and his Islamic supremacist cronies to justice. The results have been disastrous, and could end up even more so, as the TIME piece solemnly concludes:

In the early 1900s, Winston Churchill, then a young British soldier on a military campaign in Sudan, described how a fierce Sudanese battalion was sent down to fight the Nuba, a "mountain people who cared for nothing but their independence," just to give the elite soldiers something to do. In the 1990s, as many as half a million Nuba were killed when the Sudanese government declared jihad against them. When I was in the Nuba Mountains in April, I found a people terrified that war would return but resigned to their frightful and uncertain future. Given their history and the history of their government, they seem to have good reasons to be fearful.

Talking With The Taliban?

It has been hinted at many times in the recent past, and although details are still extremely sketchy, it appears to be happening at last: the Coalition in Afghanistan is "in talks" with the Taliban.

Where does one start with this idiocy? In recent weeks, "militant factions" of the Taliban have attacked and killed innocent people in banks, shopping centres and hospitals. Additionally, as the BBC notes in its coverage of "the talks", even as these talks were supposedly going on, Taliban suicide bombers killed nine people at a police station. There is no record that any "moderate factions" of the Taliban have opposed any of this.

You don't negotiate with people like this - you murder them, and when that is not possible, you utilise your best resources to cut off their funding and methodology of attack.

Aside from the moral and tactical stupidity of these talks, there is also another aspect to consider. A few days ago, USA Today reported that "The number of attacks by Afghan security forces on U.S. and allied troops has increased dramatically this year", with 40% of all such attacks since 2005 occuring this year alone.

Then there is the fact that Islamic law (to which our enemies rigorously adhere) allows for peace talks and truces only as a temporary cessation of hostilities for tactical purposes. In the words of the important manual of Islamic law Reliance of the Traveller, which has been endorsed by some of Islam's highest authorities:

There must be some interest served in making a truce other than mere preservation of the status quo...Interests that justify making a truce are such things as Muslim weakness because of lack of members or materiel, or the hope of an enemy becoming Muslim...If the Muslims are weak, a truce may be made for ten years if necessary, for the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) made a truce with Quraysh for that long, as is related by Abu Dawud. It is not permissible to stipulate longer than that, save by means of new truces, each of which does not exceed ten years.

In light of all this, what steps are being taken (or could conceivably be taken) by Coalition negotiators to ensure that Muslims who claim to be our friends are being sincere, and will not turn around at the first available opportunity and kill their new-found allies?

Why, absolutely none, because to even contemplate such a thing, even in spite of all the evidence, would be "Islamophobia", and no one wants that.

In a statement reacting to this latest news, the UK said it supported "Afghan-led efforts to reconcile and reintegrate members of the insurgency who are prepared to renounce violence, cut links with terrorist groups, and accept the constitution".

Where are these people? Have our intelligence services and army identified a single person fitting this description? And if so, what criteria did they use to determine it?

In any case, any "moderate Taliban" members who accept the constitution of Afghanistan would also accept stoning and religion- and gender-based discrimination, since all these things are part of sharia law which, thanks to our own enlightened efforts, is enshrined in the Afghan constitution as the ultimate arbiter of all laws in that country (see Chapter 1, Article 3).

All the talks in the world won't change these facts.

Bernard Lewis On Communism And Islam

The following are extracts from an essay by the renowned historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, published in the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1954. Despite his now unfortunately highly apologetic stance towards Islam, this essay, entitled "Communism and Islam", demonstrates a couple of things:

1) That once, Professor Lewis viewed Islam itself (i.e. not "Islamic fundamentalism") honestly as inherently opposed to Western conceptions of freedom and democracy

2) That once, it was acceptable in academic circles to criticise Islam without being labelled a bigot and a racist.

Although Communism isn't now the threat it once was, Lewis' observations are just as relevant today as they were back then.

Finally, before reading Lewis' well-reasoned analysis, take a look at these words written by philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1920:

Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam.

Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind not unlike the early successors of Muhammad.

Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of the world.

It is sad that in the modern day, those few souls who dare publicly to compare Islam to the totalist despotism of Communism are either hauled before a court on charges in "offending a group of people", or praised as heroes for simply saying what men used to be able to say understatedly and as a matter of course only a few decades ago.

From Bernard Lewis' 12-page article, with some key passages highlighted:

I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition...The political experience and traditions of Islam, though very different from those of Eastern Europe, do nevertheless contain elements which might, in certain circumstances, prepare the way for Communism.

Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and democracy are identical - attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of the uprooted Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or capable of understanding traditional Islamic values, and who tries to justify, or rather, re-state, his inherited faith in terms of the fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the romantic and apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West...In point of fact, except for the early caliphate, when the anarchic individualism of tribal Arabia was still effective, the political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy. I say autocracy, not despotism, since the sovereign was bound by and subject to the Holy Law, and was accepted by the people as rightful ruler, maintaining and maintained by the authority of the Holy Law. But still, it was authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law...

Quite obviously, the 'Ulama [scholars] of Islam are very different from the Communist Party. Nevertheless, on closer examination, we find certain uncomfortable resemblances. Both groups profess a totalitarian doctrine, with complete and final answers to all questions on heaven and earth...Both groups offer to their members and followers the agreeable sensation of belonging to a community of believers, who are always right, as against an outer world of unbelievers, who are always wrong. Both offer an exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory of the true faith over the infidel evil-doers. The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, two necessarily opposed groups, of which the first has the collective obligation of perpetual struggle against the second, also has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. There again, the content of belief is utterly different, but the aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same. The humorist who summed up the Communist creed as 'There is no God and Karl Marx is his Prophet' was laying his finger on a real affinity. The call to a Communist Jihad, a Holy War for the faith - a new faith, but against the self-same Western Christian enemy - might well strike a responsive note.

Why We Must Map Sharia And Islam In Britain

The Middle East Forum has just made available for download a much-anticipated, landmark study published in the latest issue of Middle East Quarterly, entitled "Sharia And Violence In American Mosques".

Authored by legal expert David Yerushalmi and Mordechai Kedar of Israel's Bar Ilan University, the 14-page paper is the culmination of the Mapping Sharia Project, whose initial findings were first revealed in 2008.

The study's methodology was rigorous, objective and thoroughly scientific, and involved in-depth undercover investigation and mapping of 100 American mosques across 14 states, randomly sampled but representative of the overall Muslim community.

Among the study's findings include:

- "Of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all." This amounts to a total of 81% of American mosques which, to some degree, advocate political violence against non-Muslims in service of sharia governance.

- "In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts. The leadership at shariah-adherent mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshipper study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-shariah-adherent mosques." Additionally: "[O]f the 51 mosques that contained severe materials, 100 percent were led by imams who recommended that worshipers study texts that promote violence."

- Mosques that were identified using empirical, well-defined criteria as being strictly "shariah-adherent" were "more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their non-shariah adherent counterparts.”

These important data have a number of key implications. First of all, they completely validate Rep. Peter King's much-maligned claim that around 80% of American mosques have been taken over by extremists, almost to the exact percentage, as well as the previous testimony of Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Muslim himself, who provided an identical estimate of the jihadist infiltration of American mosques in front of the US State Department in 1999.

Another important observation of the study is that rigourous adherence to sharia is shown to be strongly correlated to the likelihood of violent texts being sold, recommended and preached at any given mosque, along with the promotion of establishing a sharia-based caliphate in the United States. This underscores the importance of forbidding sharia any foothold in any part of the Western world, no matter how innocuous and harmless it appears to be, since bringing sharia into non-Muslim societies inevitably brings jihad also, and those who most vigourously advocate the implementation of some sharia laws into the Western legal system are the most likely to advocate total Islamic political takeover of Western countries by way of full-fledged sharia - in other words, sedition.

Here in the UK, the Home Office recently announced that it is planning to move on to a broader definition of "Islamic extremism" that, rather than simply focusing on violent terrorism, will include non-violent "advocacy of sharia law". Now, then, is the ideal time to undertake a large-scale investigation of British mosques similar to this latest one from America. We've already seen some evidence of radicalism in British mosques, and an investigation by The Times has also revealed almost half this country's mosques are under the control of the hardline Deobandis, who preach jihad and hatred of British values. But a rigourous study of the kind we have seen from this new report is needed in order to dispel any lingering doubts that when it comes to the Problem of Islam, the UK and the US are indeed close bedfellows.

Rape And Pillage In The Muslim World

Al-Huweini: He needs sex slaves because no one would sleep with him voluntarily

At FrontPage, Raymond Ibrahim outlines the severity of the threat Christians face today from Muslim pillage and abduction.

He first provides some recent examples from the Muslim world (links in original):

- Pakistan: Muslim landowners used tractors to plough over a Christian cemetery in order to seize the land illegally. A young Christian mother was raped by six men. “In both cases, police covered up for the culprits.”

- Iraq: A Christian youth was kidnapped and decapitated: his family could not pay the €70,000 ransom demanded by his abductors. “The murder was meant to intimidate Christians so that in the future they will more readily pay ransom demands.”

- Egypt: Christian girls continue to be abducted and forced into conversion or concubinage (which amount to the same thing) and “kept as virtual slaves.”

He then demonstrates why this kind of violence and abuse of Christians is so common - because mainstream Islamic authorities endorse it. He translates some old and some recent statements of popular Muslim preacher Abu Ishaq Al-Huweini.

First the old:

If only we can conduct a jihadist invasion at least once a year or if possible twice or three times, then many people on earth would become Muslims. And if anyone prevents our dawa or stands in our way, then we must kill them or take as hostage and confiscate their wealth, women and children. Such battles will fill the pockets of the Mujahid who can return home with 3 or 4 slaves, 3 or 4 women and 3 or 4 children. This can be a profitable business if you multiply each head by 300 or 400 dirham. This can be like financial shelter whereby a jihadist, in time of financial need, can always sell one of these heads (meaning slavery)...

When asked to "clarify" his position on TV last week, he went on to say all of the following:

According to Huwaini, after Muslims invade and conquer a non-Muslim nation—in the course of waging an offensive jihad—the properties and persons of those infidels who refuse to convert or pay jizya and live as subjugated dhimmis, are to be seized as ghanima or “spoils of war.”

Huwaini cited the Koran as his authority—boasting that it has an entire chapter named “spoils”—and the sunna of Muhammad, specifically as recorded in the famous Sahih Muslim hadith wherein the prophet ordered the Muslim armies to offer non-Muslims three choices: conversion, subjugation, or death/enslavement.

Huwaini said that infidel captives, the “spoils of war,” are to be distributed among the Muslim combatants (i.e., jihadists) and taken to “the slave market, where slave-girls and concubines are sold.” He referred to these latter by their dehumanizing name in the Koran, ma malakat aymanukum—“what your right hands possess”—in this context, sex-slaves: “You go to the market and buy her, and she becomes like your legal mate—though without a contract, a guardian, or any of that stuff—and this is agreed upon by the ulema.”

“In other words,” Huwaini concluded, “when I want a sex-slave, I go to the market and pick whichever female I desire and buy her.”

Lest Muslims begin attacking all and sundry, however, Huwaini was careful to stress that Islam forbids Muslims from plundering and enslaving fellow Muslims—including “heretical” Shias. He used the Iran-Iraq war as an example, saying that a Sunni man is not permitted to enslave and abuse a Shia woman, “for she is still a Muslim and thus considered free.”

As a postscript, if you want to know where these Muslims' propensity for slavery and pillage comes from, read my review from 2009 of John Azumah's book The Legacy of Arab-Islam In Africa.

Finally, read this infamous hadith in which Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam and the uswa hasana, or "excellent example" (see Qur'an 33:21) for Muslims to follow, witnesses his men raping female war captives, and does not condemn the practice:

“We went out with Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) on the expedition to the Banu al-Mustaliq and took captive some excellent Arab women; and we desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, (but at the same time) we also desired ransom for them. So we decided to have sexual intercourse with them but by observing 'azl (Withdrawing the male sexual organ before emission of semen to avoid conception). But we said: We are doing an act whereas Allah's Messenger is amongst us; why not ask him? So we asked Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him), and he said: It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born.” (Sahih Muslim b.8, no.3371)