Geert Back Here!

Geert Wilders: the only politician in Europe worth listening to

Some good news at last from the dhimmi state, my home country of the UK:

Far-right Dutch MP Geert Wilders has won an appeal against a Home Office decision barring his entry to the UK.

Here the BBC is trying to scare you. Wilders is "far-right"...booga-booga! This is simply the left-wing Beeb's way of saying that Wilders' views are beyond the pale of respectability and civilised discourse, with an added implication that he is a white supremacist or something just as bad. In fact, he is not, but you wouldn't know that from reading this article.

The Freedom Party leader, who has been accused of Islamophobia, planned a UK visit next week, his solicitor said.

The Home Office said it was disappointed, and would decide in "due course" whether to fight the ruling.

A spokesman said: "We are disappointed by the court's decision. The government opposes extremism in all its forms.

"The decision to refuse Wilders admission was taken on the basis that his presence could have inflamed tensions between our communities and have led to inter-faith violence. We still maintain this view."

In fact, all Wilders would have done is what he has done already: hold up a mirror to Islamic societies and demand that they be seen as they really are. Any violence that would have occured would have been committed by Muslims opposed to his presence there, and thus his point would have been proved.

Sharia Misunderstood?

Dahlia Mogahed's panties after her broadcast

Nobel laureate Barack Obama's adviser on Muslim affairs, Dalia Mogahed, has provoked controversy by appearing on a British television show hosted by a member of an extremist group to talk about Sharia Law. The White House adviser made a series of outrageous remarks on a London-based TV discussion programme hosted by Ibtihal Bsis, a member of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir party. The group believes in the non-violent destruction of Western democracy and the creation of an Islamic state under Sharia Law across the world.

Before I go into some of the details of this story, it is worth providing a little background on exactly who Dalia Mogahed is. Last year, she coauthored a book entitled Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, with John Esposito, a known apologist for Islam. The book claimed that the vast majority of the world's billion (and counting) Muslims were "moderate", with only 7% being radicals. In order to concoct this information, however, Mogahed and Esposito classified Muslims who hate America, want to impose Sharia law on Western countries, support suicide bombing, and oppose equal rights for women - but do not "completely" justify 9/11 - as "moderates". Details here.

Anyway, back to the story at hand:

Miss Mogahed, appointed to the President's Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships, said the Western view of Sharia was "oversimplified" and the majority of women around the world associate it with "gender justice".

Of course. It's not as if there is gender inequality in Islam or anything like that. Only an Islamophobe would think that. Islamophobes such as the noted Muslim scholar Baydawi, who wrote: “Men are the maintainers over women just as rulers are over their populous...due to the completeness of men’s brains over women’s deficiency, their management skills, and their extra requirement of worship; this is why men were chosen to be prophets, religious leaders, rulers, and enforcers of commandments, legal witnesses in a court of law, fighters in the cause of Allah, receivers of more share of the inheritance and in control of divorce.”

Outside of the cosy padded cell of LaLa Land, Islamic tradition and law do deny the equality of women in numerous ways: a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man (Qur'an 2:282); a son's inheritance is twice the size of a daughter's (4:11); Allah has made men the “protectors” of women because they are superior to them (4:34); and the majority of the people in Hell will be women (Bukhari v.1, b.2, no.28). This is what sharia law really mandates, and I believe Mogahed knows that.

During the 45-minute discussion, on the Islam Channel programme Muslimah Dilemma earlier this week, the two members of the group made repeated attacks on secular "man-made law" and the West's "lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism".

"Man-made law" is also known as shirk, or polytheism, which according to the Qur'an is a "most heinous sin indeed", and Allah will never forgive it. (4:48) And notice how Mogahed proclaims sharia to be superior to individual liberty itself, implying that whatever sharia represents, it doesn't represent true liberty or freedom.

They called for Sharia Law to be "the source of legislation" and said that women should not be "permitted to hold a position of leadership in government".

As I said: bang goes liberty.

Sharia in its broadest sense is a religious code for living, which decrees such matters as fasting and dressing modestly. However, it has also been interpreted as requiring the separation of men and women.

It also includes the controversial "Hadd offences", crimes with specific penalties set by the Koran and the sayings of the prophet Mohammed. These include death by stoning for adultery and homosexuality and the removal of a hand for theft.

Miss Mogahed admitted that even many Muslims associated Sharia with "maximum criminal punishments" and "laws that... to many people seem unequal to women," but added: "Part of the reason that there is this perception of Sharia is because Sharia is not well understood and Islam as a faith is not well understood."

This is absolute rubbish, of course. Sharia is what sharia is, and I can readily document and demonstrate that any given ruling is indeed genuine sharia, and not some "misunderstood" version of it. But even if it were true that sharia is only nasty when people "misunderstand" it, Mogahed glosses over the implications of the fact that the main ones doing the misunderstanding are Muslims themselves. Stoning for adultery has been implemented in Indonesia, while in Afghanistan apostates from Islam have been put on trial. If they are really misunderstanding sharia, Dalia Mogahed has done absolutely nothing constructive to stop them from doing so, and has in fact only encouraged them by peddling this kind of corrosive nonsense.

During this week's broadcast, she described her White House role as "to convey... to the President and other public officials what it is Muslims want."

Typical: demands that Americans accede to Muslim wishes, with no indication that Mogahed wishes to engage in any actual dialogue, whereby both parties express their concerns to each other in a free, open environment. Instead, Mogahed sees her role, in true Islamic supremacist fashion, as simply telling us ignorant kuffar all about Islam while we listen and nod politely.

Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, said Miss Mogahed was “downplaying” Sharia Law.

“There is a reason sharia has got a bad name and it is how it has been exercised. Regrettably in the US there have been acts of injustice perpetrated against women that are driven by the Sharia-type mindset that women are objects not human beings,” she said.

She cited the example of Muzzammil Hassan, a Buffalo man who ran a cable channel aimed at countering Muslim stereotypes and was charged earlier this year with beheading his wife after she filed for divorce.

“Americans understand by example, it’s not as if we are an ignorant mass of people. Just as we don’t broad brush all Muslims, so should Dalia not downplay the serious nature of sharia law.”

Bravo, Ms. Wright.

Myths of the Arab-Israeli Conflict - #3

"Israel is an apartheid state"

This is more Palestinian propaganda and bears no resemblance to reality. The founders of the Zionist movement explicitly rejected the idea of an apartheid system. In 1934, David Ben-Gurion, who later went on to be Prime Minister of Israel, said of a proposed Jewish state: “We do not want to create a situation like that which exists in South Africa, where the whites are the owners and rulers, and the blacks are the workers. If we do not do all kinds of work, easy and hard, skilled and unskilled, if we become merely landlords, then this will not be our homeland.”

Today, within Israel, Jews are a majority, but the Arab minority are full citizens who enjoy equal rights. Arabs are represented in the Knesset, and have served in the Cabinet, high-level foreign ministry posts (e.g. Ambassador to Finland) and on the Supreme Court. Israel allows freedom of movement, assembly and speech, as well as the building of mosques. Some of the government's harshest critics are Israeli Arabs who are members of the Knesset.

The situation of Palestinians in the territories is different. Because of security requirements and the violence of the Muslims in the territories, Israel has been forced to impose restrictions on Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that are not necessary inside Israel's pre-1967 borders. But the point is that the principal impediment to Palestinian independence is not Israeli policy; it is the unwillingness of the Palestinian leadership to give up jihad and agree to live in peace beside the State of Israel.

There is no doubt that there have been abuses, and that Arabs have legitimately complained of discrimination on various occasions. But no country is perfect when it comes to racial and social problems of this kind, not even the democratic countries of the West. The central point, however, is that Israel prizes freedom and equality above all, and this is often demonstrated in the media. For example, several Israeli TV commercials have essentially spread the message that Arabs on the other side of the "apartheid" security wall in the West Bank are no different to Israelis, and are not all "bad guys". Despite their placement in commercials intended to sell products, it nevertheless remains clear that Israeli popular culture has a tendency to humanise Arab Muslims rather than demonise them.

The issue is also less problematic when viewed in comparison to the treatment of Jews and other religious minorities in most Muslim countries, where non-Muslims suffer severe and very real curtailments of their human rights. In Saudi Arabia, for example, non-Muslims are completely forbidden from entering Mecca, the very definition of apartheid:



If Hamas were allowed to form a Palestinian state in the region, this state would undoubtedly inflict similar discriminations on its Jewish and Christian inhabitants.

Myths of the Arab-Israeli Conflict - #2

"Israel is building illegal settlements in the West Bank in defiance of international law"

The claim that Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank are illegal is based on faulty premises, as has been definitively demonstrated by Professor Julius Stone, one of the world's foremost experts on international law. Firstly, these lands were not considered the legal territories of any High Contracting Party when Israel won control of them; their occupation after 1948 by Jordan and Egypt was illegal and neither country ever had lawful or recognised sovereignty. The last legal sovereignty over the territories was that of the original Palestine Mandate, which actually encouraged Jewish settlement of the land. Second, since Israel captured these lands in lawful self-defense during the Six-Day War, which was a pre-emptive strike against Egyptian forces massing on the border, settlement on these lands is therefore not illegal under international law.

The irony is that there IS an illegal settlement program going on...in Israel. In recent years, over 100,000 illegally constructed housing units have been built in Jerusalem by Arabs. When moral idiots such as Obama (whose “non-interventionist” policy in the Middle East is mysteriously repealed in the case of Israel) begin to focus on issues like this, and not just on imaginary Israeli “apartheid” (dealt with in the next instalment), then there can be real progress in this conflict.

Myths of the Arab-Israeli Conflict - #1

This occasional feature is designed to pierce the lies and inaccuracies that currently pervade general public perception of the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours, particularly the Palestinians. As the creep of Eurabia has continued its rapid expansion, the anti-Israel bias in the media and in the upper echelons of our leadership has become more and more virulent, and so it has become increasingly common for the average man or woman on the Western street, whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian or atheist, to hold the misguided belief that Israel and the Palestinians are morally equivalent - or even that Israel is the real bad guy in the scenario.

This viewpoint is not only wrong, but it's also dangerous. Israel is the only fully functioning pluralistic democracy in the entire Middle East, and as such represents a beacon of civilisation defending Western, Judeo-Christian values against an onslaught designed to eradicate those values. Israel's enemies wish to destroy it utterly - but they wouldn't stop there. The next stage would be to establish a Caliphate in the very heart of Europe and beyond, as Hamas MP and cleric Yunis al-Astal made clear in 2008. As such, Israel represents the last vanguard against a great victory for Islamic jihad, and a sad day for true lovers of freedom.

Anyway, the first myth is debunked below. Enjoy.

"Israel 'stole' land from the Palestinians/is occupying Palestine"

Here's what happened: After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, part of it became the United Nations Mandate for historical Palestine. The British promised to make the Mandate a homeland for the Jews. But in 1922, Winston Churchill gave 80% of Palestine to the Arabs. This 80% made up what is known today as the Muslim state of Jordan. That could have been the Palestinian "homeland", if the Muslims had accepted it.

But they didn't. In their eyes, 20% of the Mandate for the Jews was still too much. So in 1948, the UN divided that 20% into two more parts, one for the Muslims, the other for the Jews. At this stage, the Muslims had 90% of the original Palestinian Mandate in their grasp.

But that still wasn't enough. The Muslim opponents of the creation of a Jewish state rallied behind the call of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “If the Jewish State becomes a fact [the Arabs] will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea.”

What was it they objected to in the first place? To answer this question, one needs to understand Islamic law. All of historical Palestine was conquered by Islamic armies in the seventh century. According to the sharia, whenever a Muslim land is usurped by unbelievers, all Muslims must fight to reclaim it. Israel, as an infidel polity on such “Muslim land”, must be eradicated by jihad and reclaimed for Islam. Ibn Taymiyya (d.1328), the famous jurist of the Hanbali school, wrote: “If the enemy enters a Muslim land, there is no doubt that it is obligatory for the closest and then the next closest to repel him, because the Muslim lands are like one land.” The Hamas charter makes clear that this is the primary reason for waging jihad against Israel: “The Islamic Resistance Movement maintains that the land of Palestine is Waqf land given as endowment for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection...This is the legal status of the land of Palestine according to Islamic law. In this respect, it is like any other land that the Muslims have conquered by force, because the Muslims consecrated it at the time of the conquest as religious endowment for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection...There is nothing that speaks more eloquently and more profoundly of nationalism than the following: when the enemy tramples Muslim territory, waging jihad and confronting the enemy become a personal duty of every Muslim man and Muslim woman.” (Articles 11 and 12)

Israel in its current form constitutes less than 1% of the entire Middle East, but Muslims are unable to accept even this little Jewish presence on "their" land. On the day Israel was created in 1948, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq all declared war on it, claiming that Israel had “occupied” their land. And it had, of course, according to traditional Islamic law. But the Muslims have no more “right” to live in Palestine than do the Jews, since the Jews had been living there long before the Muslim armies invaded and captured the land in the first place.

In short, the Arab-Israeli conflict is caused by Islamic jihad, not by “illegal Israeli occupation” of “Arab” land.

I anticipate that some readers may recollect that Israel actually invaded the Gaza strip in 1967, and they may wonder how that doesn't constitute an illegal occupation. It is to this issue that I will be devoting the next instalment of this series, which will also deals with those terrifying Israeli settlements which keep Barack Obama awake at night.

McChrystal Unclear

I think it's best if you keep it shut, Stan

In this article at the Washington Post, we are treated to the "wisdom" of Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan.

McChrystal's willful blindness to the hard realities of Islam is painfully clear. Having originally decided that the best course of action was to win the Afghans' "hearts and minds", which didn't work because Islam teaches hatred of non-Muslims and the Afghans are particularly devout in their Islam, Stan The Man Without A Plan has now turned his dull eyes to giving the people "'trust and confidence' in themselves and their government." Which means, in essence, nothing at all.

Then - and this is the real corker - McChrystal seeks to expose what he calls the jihadists' "flagrant contravention of the principles of the Koran", including indiscriminate use of violence and terrorism, and attacks on schools and development projects.

One can only assume that this fool hasn't actually read what the Qur'an says about violence against unbelievers, or what Islamic law teaches about terroristic acts such as the slaughter of civilians and suicide bombing.

This is what our troops are fighting and dying for?

Israeli Snake Strikes On The Way?

Argh! Jewish snake assassin!

Here's what Islam does to your brain:

Palestinian Muslims believe that Israel is training snakes to attack them as assassins.

No, really.

And nor is this the first time those crafty Zionists have utilised animal power to attack Muslims. The Palestinians have previously accused Israel of using rats to drive Palestinians out of their homes. Meanwhile, Iran has actually arrested peeping pigeons and secret squirrels for being Israeli spies. And don't forget the wild boars.

Such conspiracism is funny, but it also represents a festering Muslim hatred for Jews which goes back to the inception of Islam. Long before the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which many in the Muslim world still take as gospel truth, Jews have been accused of engaging in conspiracies to either take over/corrupt the world or, more specifically, destroy Islam.

It begins in the Qur'an, where Jews are accused of "spreading corruption" in the land (5:64), and most notably murdering or attempting to murder prophets (2:61), including Jesus (4:157). This theme culminates in the allegation that Muhammad's final illness and death in 632 AD were caused by his poisoning by a Jewess at Khaybar two years earlier. For example, Ibn Sa'd, a noted biographer of the Prophet, wrote the following about this incident:

“She poisoned the goat putting more poison in the forelegs…The Apostle of Allah took the foreleg, a piece of which he put into his mouth...The Apostle of Allah sent for Zaynab Bint al-Harith [the Jewess] [and]…handed her over to [those] who put her to death…The Apostle of Allah lived after this three years, till in consequence of his pain he passed away. During his illness he used to say: I did not cease to find the effect of the poisoned morsel I took at Khaybar.”

Since then, the conspiracy theories have kept coming. The famous Muslim historian Tabari (d.923) was influential in spreading the allegation, still believed by some Muslims today, that the entire Sunni/Shi'ite divide was created by a renegade Jew as part of a larger plot to destablise and destroy Islam. Later, when the Jew Sa'd ad-Daula was appointed as vizier to the Mongol Emperor in thirteenth-century Iraq, outraged Muslims (outraged because sharia law forbids infidels from obtaining positions of power over Muslims), levelled all kinds of calumnies and libels against him. One of these accusations was that he was planning to cut down ancient trees in Baghdad and use them to build a fleet so he could attack Mecca and convert the Kaaba into a heathen temple. This incitement led eventually to Sa'd's murder.

Anti-Jewsh conspiracism serves to justify the fiercest and most murderous kind of hatred towards Jews, and it is vital to remember that the sources for it pre-date non-Islamic sources of antisemitic hate by over a thousand years.