Race Relations

Ben

Positive Discrimination Alert: Fire chiefs were accused on Friday of discrimination by trying to ban white men from joining up. They were condemned after barring white males from recruitment sessions in an attempt to boost ethnic minority and women applicants.

Ben

I've posted this before, but my music share contribution this week is "My Immortal" by Evanescence. A beautiful song, sung by a beautiful woman.

Ben

Moroccan organisations in the Netherlands want the Dutch public prosecution department to prosecute Freedom party PVV leader Geert Wilders for discrimination against Muslims, because of a ten-minute film about the Qur'an that Wilders has not even made yet. Wilders plans to make the film to show the world what kinds of unwholesome things are recommended in the book, but these people want him prosecuted before they've even seen it.

This line is quite hilarious:

"Wilders is a racist with regard to Islam. His comments are not aimed at a race, but at a religion and population group."

Here, the man admits that Islam is not a race, but he still calls Wilders a racist. So he's effectively saying that Wilders is a racist without the racism.

Ben

This might be a fun book to look out for: "A Practical Guide to Racism" by C.H. Dalton

From the blurb: "A humorous and irreverent evaluation of the world's diverse populations, written by the fictional son of an elitist family, argues in support of supremacist belief systems while diminishing the sufferings of minority groups." Sounds particularly un-PC, doesn't it!

And you can read an extract from the book here, covering the various gypsy scams and cons.

Ben

A few Indian passengers on a Chennai-London flight have accused an airline of racial bias as it allegedly provided accommodation only to white-skinned people.

British Airways flight BA36 from Chennai to London was postponed due to a technical snag. And while foreign passengers were reportedly provided hotel accommodation and many routed through other airlines, at least fifteen Indian passengers claim they were left to fend for themselves.

Naturally, BA denies the claim, but here's something to think about, which isn't made clear in the article: Were all these Indians together in one big group, or were they all separate parties who made separate complaints? If it was the former, it makes it much less likely that this was racism by BA, because it is quite likely that in the chaos of postponement and re-organisation, one large group, which happens to consist of Indians, may be overlooked. If there were actually several independent groups of Indians making this complaint, then there can only be two explanations: sheer bad luck/coincidence or racism.

Ben

A story based on the Three Little Pigs has been turned down from a government agency's annual awards because the subject matter could offend Muslims.

The digital book, re-telling the classic fairy tale, was rejected by judges who warned that "the use of pigs raises cultural issues".

This story is yet another example of shameful British dhimmitude, but it is not surprising - after all, we have been here before.

Ben

1. Canada is poised to become the first country to significantly distance itself from a major anti-racism conference the United Nations is planning for next year. Insiders say the government feels the new conference is shaping up to be like the anti-West and anti-Israel free-for-all that critics said the initial gathering quickly turned into. Arab- and Muslim-led verbal attacks on Israel at the 2001 conference were so dominant the United States and Israel walked out in protest. Beyond Israel, some Arab and Muslim countries additionally seek the 2009 agenda to focus on "Islamophobia". While that could mean a legitimate study of discrimination against Muslims, UN skeptics say it is actually code to characterize Western anti-terrorism efforts as a plot to subjugate Islam. The 2001 conference also saw Nigeria and Zimbabwe lead African countries in a demand Western powers apologize for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and pay huge reparations.

2. Authorities in Brazil have opened a probe into suspected racism at the Sao Paulo Fashion Week after reports that non-white models were badly under-represented on the catwalk. The Sao Paulo Fashion Week's organizer, Paulo Borges, had defended the small number of minority models by saying there were fewer non-white models available for the designers.

"We're not convinced," the prosecutor said.

Well, you wouldn't be, would you?

Ben

Racism and attacks against eastern European immigrants are increasing in West Yorkshire. But this story has yet to make the national news press, and the reason for that may be because the perpetrators of this wave of racist crime are "angry Asians".

Perhaps it is too early yet to to decry the lack of coverage in the mainstream media of these actions, but something tells me that the MSM simply won't ever be interested in stories about racism in which the villain is not Evil Old Whitey.

Ben

"On the same day that The Sun printed a story about Jade Goody with the headline 'Racist Scum', they also printed a story about that Chinese snooker player with the headline 'Pot Noodle'."

~ Ricky Gervais, Fame

Ben

This is a fascinating article by Tawfik Hamid an Islamic ex-jihadist, in which he explains the process by which he became one, and how he thinks differently now. It's interesting in many ways, perhaps most notably because it illustrates something that I have said here many times, and which those who set out to discredit me and misrepresent me have always ignored: there is a very clear pattern in the Islamic world that shows that as Muslims become more devout and study Islamic theology and law more and more, they begin to somehow get the idea that Muhammad said they should hate and fight non-Muslims. And yet all the time, people accuse me of stirring up hatred by quoting the Qur'an as a non-Muslim with no Qur'anic studies qualifications, as if I have interpreted these passages myself, when in fact it is incredibly learned scholars in the Islamic world who are coming up with this stuff. There has also been a great outcry among dhimmis I've debated online whenever I suggest that moderate Muslims should be examining and reforming the elements of Islam that lead to jihad violence. But here, we see one moderate Muslim encouraging, and actually doing, exactly that. I have been asked a number of times who I consider to be a genuine moderate Muslim, and who I think we should ally with. Well, Tawfik Hamid is one.

So this is a note to all those apologists: next time you call me a bigot, please also take the time to spew some vitriol at Tawfik Hamid, as well.

Below is an extract from his article, but you should read the whole thing. I've bolded the most important bits.

By immersing myself in Salafi ideology, I was better able to judge the impact of its violent tenets on the minds of its followers. Among the more appalling notions it supports are the enslavement and rape of female war prisoners and the beating of women to discipline them. It permits polygamy and pedophilia. It refers to Jews as "pigs and monkeys" and exhorts believers to kill them before the end of days: Say: "Shall I tell you who, in the sight of God, deserves a yet worse retribution than these? Those [the Jews] whom God has rejected and whom He has condemned, and whom He has turned into monkeys and pigs because they worshiped the powers of evil: these are yet worse in station, and farther astray from the right path [than the mockers]" (Koran 5:60). Homosexuals are to be killed as well; to cite one of many examples, on July 19, 2000, two gay teenagers were hanged in Iran for no other crime than being gay.

These doctrines are not taken out of context, as many apologists for Islamism argue: They are central to the faith and ethics of millions of Muslims, and are currently being taught as part of the standard curriculum in many Islamic educational systems in the Middle East as well in the West.

Moreover, there is no single approved Islamic textbook that contradicts or provides an alternative to the passages I have cited. It has thus become clear to me that Salafi ideology is what is largely responsible for the so-called "clash of civilizations." Consequently, I have chosen to combat Salafism by exposing it and by providing an alternative, peaceful and theologically rigorous interpretation of the Koran.

My reformist approach naturally challenges well-established Salafi tenets, and leads Muslims who follow Salafi Islam to reject me. Why? I have not altered the Koran itself. My system is simply one of inline commentary, in which dangerous passages are flagged and reinterpreted to be nonviolent. I have added these inline interpretations to key Koranic passages and examples of the commentary are freely and easily available.

For over 15 years I have tried to preach my views in mosques in the Middle East, as well as to my local community in the West, but have faced the unwavering hostility of most Salafi Muslims in both regions. Muslims who live in the West - who insist to outsiders that Islam is a "religion of peace" and who enjoy freedom of expression, which they demand from their Western hosts - have threatened me with murder and arson. I have had to choose between accepting violent Salafi views and being rejected by the overwhelming majority of my fellow Muslims.

I have chosen the latter....

Ben

Below, Pat Condell releases another brilliantly stated deconstruction of the closing down of free speech in the West, particularly when it comes to accommodating Muslims, and bowing before their every whim. O Dhimmi Canada.

Ben

OK, this isn't the start of a new series or anything. But I've published all of the "Islam 101" articles I have written online, and they have been read by people, and I recently had a private request from a reader to write one specifically about honour killing, which I covered briefly in my article "Islam Oppresses Women". I was hesitant at first, but eventually decided to grant the request, and here's the result, relatively brief since it was a "made to order" piece, but just as juicy. Enjoy:

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ISLAM AND HONOUR KILLING

It seems that honour killings are widespread in the Islamic world. But just how widespread are they? How much of a problem is honour killing within Islam? And does it have anything to do with Islam?

The answer to the latter question is slightly more complicated than yes or no. Islamic spokesmen will, of course, state that there is nothing in Islamic teaching which would encourage such a thing. This may be technically correct. But the commonality of honour killing in the Islamic world, coupled with other important evidence, suggests that these murders may be fostered by cultural attitudes of shame and honour, rather than an emphasis on individual responsibility, which have been inculcated by Islamic values.

For example, in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down, on Islamic grounds, a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honour killings, claiming that the laws "violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values". In a sad but inevitable consequence of this, a man who in 2007 murdered his sister because he thought she had a lover was given only three months in jail, which was suspended for time served, allowing him to walk free. But even before that, honour killing was hardly treated harshly in Jordan. In 1994, a sixteen year old girl was tied to a chair by her thirty-two year old brother, who then slit her throat and ran out into the street shouting, "I have killed my sister to cleanse my honour!" Her crime was that she had been raped by another brother, a twenty-one year old, and her judge and jury were her own uncles, who decided that she was too much of a disgrace to the family to be allowed to live. In the end, the killer was given a 15-year sentence, which was later reduced to seven.

Another country rife with honour killings is Pakistan. In 2006, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimated that about a thousand women are killed for honour there every year. In 2001, a Pakistani woman had both her eyes, nose and ears gouged out by her husband, because he wrongly suspected she was having an affair. He was arrested, but male relatives shook his hand and decided that she "must have deserved it".

In Iraq in 2003 a seventeen year old shot his mother and half-brother because he thought they were having an affair, and killed his four year old sister because he thought she was their child. He claimed that he did all this to "cleanse its [his family's] shame". The same year in Baghdad, another woman was killed by a male relative for suspected adultery. The killer cut off her left hand to display as proof to tribal leaders that the deed had been done.

In Egypt in 1997, a man whose daughter had eloped cut off her head and carried it down the street proclaiming, "Now the family has regained its honour." In Iran in 2002, a man beheaded his seven year old daughter because he suspected that she had been raped by her uncle. He said: "The motive behind the killing was to defend my honour, fame and dignity". Some people called for this man's death under Islamic law, but ironically only the father of the victim can demand the death sentence.

Honour killings are also extremely common in Palestine. In Gaza in 2005, five members of Hamas shot a woman to death, brutalised her corpse, and savagely beat members of her family, because they believed that she had been engaging in "immoral behaviour". In 2003, a Palestinian girl became pregnant after her brothers raped her. Her mother demanded that she kill herself, and when the girl refused, the mother killed her by wrapping a plastic bag around her head while she slept. "This is the only way I could protect my family's honour", the mother said.

But no longer is this culture of honour killing confined to the Middle East. This practice has now come to eastern Europe with Muslim immigration. A Turkish woman was killed by her brothers in 2005 for leaving an arranged marriage. One young Muslim in Germany thought she deserved her death, saying, "Well, she lived like a German, didn't she?"

And now, with the murders of Aqsa Parvez and the Said sisters, honour killing has apparently come to the West, too. It may not be widespread at the moment, but it will spread unless something is done about it.

So what CAN be done about it? Muslim leaders will no doubt continue to deny that it has anything to do with Islam, claiming that honour killing is a cultural practice. But it is not as simple as this. In many parts of the Islamic world, religion and culture are fused together; these lands are enmeshed and permeated with their religion, so much so that a dinstinction is not always easy to find. Muslims often tell us that Islam encompasses all areas of life, leaving no aspect untouched, and this is so - Islam's culture of shame and honour has left its mark on the Islamic world. Not only do many Muslims commit honour killings, but they also often imbue it with religious significance, and justify it by invoking Islam, as was the case with the Jordanian Parliament.

And so it becomes increasingly encumbent upon Muslim leaders around the world to work against this culture. It is all very well repeating endlessly that Islam does not justify honour killings, but such denials are not working in any way to prevent people from committing them based on religious principles. What are these same Muslim leaders doing to teach against the attitudes that lead to honour killing? Without them taking action, the problem is unlikely to go away.

Indeed, it's likely to increase.

Ben

I've decided to bring back the weekly music sharing after a long absence. For those who are not familiar with this feature, this is where I inflict my esoteric musical tastes on you, and give you tinnitus through the noise.

First up is some insane Satanic orchestral black metal from Norway, with Dimmu Borgir's wonderfully titled "Progenies of the Great Apocalypse".

It's important to note, however, that this kind of music is quite extreme even for me. I love heavy metal, but black metal, growled vocals and all, is something that I only delve into occasionally. I would prefer they actually sang, but I can put up with bestial vocals like this when certain people do it, and in short bursts. And besides, there is a bit of clean singing in it from the band's bassist, and the classical arrangements are fantastic. The song lives up to its name, although since this is the edited version (the full album song is longer), it loses a bit of its impact, particularly around the middle, but it's still a good example of symphonic black metal at its best. That doesn't mean you're going to like it, though, but I do.

Ben

Islamic jihadists will now be referred to officially as engaging in "anti-Islamic activity", says UK Home Secretary Jacqi Smith, since these "extremists" are not acting in accordance with Islam's true teachings, but are acting contrary to them.

That'll show 'em! Now we've changed the terms, just watch the problem evaporate!

*ahem*

Won't this get kind of confusing, since, for example, a protest by a group of people who hate Islam and call for all Muslims to be nuked could also be classed as "anti-Islamic activity"? How do they distinguish between the two?

*ahem*

I would also really LOVE to see what Jacqi Smith actually knows about Islam.

Ben

I've been meaning to post about this for a while now, but kept forgetting. Then today I saw this article and was reminded.

The gist of it is the controversy surrounding Ron Paul, one of the US Presidential candidates, who it emerged recently had, for many years, had obscenely racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and downright nasty things published in newsletters under his name. Paul claims that he did not write or edit these newsletters, and that those who did were not acting according to any of his own wishes or beliefs. He claims to utterly repudiate all of this. But questions have been raised as to how he could go so long without ever realising what was being published under his name. So it seems that at the very least he has been unbelievably dysfunctional to allow these kinds of things to be published in his name.

What the above article doesn't pick up on, however, is that there is some evidence that Ron Paul DID contribute to the newsletter. For example, the December 1990 newsletter calls Martin Luther King a child molester; in the same issue, we suddenly read this:

Now, Ron Paul's wife is named Carol, and research confirms that in 1990 he did indeed have grandchildren. Other personal details of Ron Paul emerge in other newsletters also. So it appears that Ron Paul contributed to the newsletter, and yet failed to actually read or show concern about the contents of that same newsletter, or express any repudiation of its views at all until he was called out on it recently. Which seems...unlikely.

Could these entries in the newsletter have been forgeries? Perhaps. But if they were, the personal details - at a time when Paul was not very well known and the Internet was a less wonderful thing than it is now - suggest that the writer of the entries had close connections with Ron Paul.

Basically, whatever way you look at this, it works out bad for Ron Paul.

Ben

I have just seen that at the blog search website Blogged, this website has been given an average review rating of 7.9 - "very good". That can't be bad, I suppose! I'd like to thank all who voted for me, my mother, my doctor, my dog, etc.

Ben

A former BBC presenter has won damages after being wrongly arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred for light-hearted remarks at a country fair.

Robin Page, who hosted TV's One Man And His Dog, fought a five-year campaign to clear his name after being locked up in a cell for his jokey introduction to a pro-hunting speech.

He told a meeting in Framptonupon-Severn, Gloucestershire, in 2002: "If you are a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, onelegged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you."

"I believe I have scored a significant victory over the ludicrous and sinister, politically-correct 'hate crime' culture that is currently doing so much to prevent free speech in this country. It is absolutely outrageous," said Mr. Page.

Indeed.

It is great to see Robin Page refusing to repent to the PC thugs, and not taking the recently fashionable route - a la Gillian Gibbons and PC Rob Murrie - of making groveling, sniveling apologies for any "offense" caused. And it's good to see justice prevailing in the end.

Ben

1. Blah blah blah - Hillary Clinton supporters are racist; Barack Obama supporters are sexist - blah blah blah. *yawn*

2. Book Finds Missing Link Between Evolution and Racism. Hmmm, now why would the Christian News Wire pick up on a story like this...?

Ben

A Muslim police officer given bacon and wine as a Secret Santa gift decided to treat it as a harmless, if tasteless, joke. But a non-Muslim colleague failed to show the same level of tolerance.

The officer who supplied the gift, 26-year-old PC Rob Murrie, was reported to his superiors for racism. And PC Murrie subsequently came under such pressure that he felt he had no option but to resign from the Bedfordshire force.

Yesterday, the target of the joke, 31-year-old Arshad Mahmood, said he still regarded PC Murrie as "a good officer and a good friend", while Muslim community leaders accused police chiefs of "overreacting" to the incident at Luton police station.

Here we can see the folly of PC culture. Here we have a good man in the Muslim employee who does not give a stuff about the joke, and yet the officer who gave him the present was forced to resign.

Don't get me wrong: such a joke is no longer clever or funny, if it ever was to begin with. But it is not "racist" (somehow no one seems able to grasp the fact that Islam isn't a race) and no offense was meant by it; it was just a joke in poor taste. It is the PC nanny state gone mad.

This line also caught my eye:

"I would never have given him the present if I had known the consequences. I suppose it's like giving condoms to a Catholic."

But that DOES happen; I have heard cases of people posting condoms through Catholics' letterboxes. And no charges have ever been pressed against them, and Catholics themselves have never been overly offended or filed police reports. So why are Muslims being consistently given protected status?

I was also disappointed to see that the police officer who played the joke, while acknowledging that this country is too PC, apologises for his joke and bows down in submission to the state, rather than standing up against this tyranny. But at least we have seen a rare case in which a decent Muslim actually took some ribbing on the chin instead of crying, screaming and decapitating at the first opportunity.

Ben

Iran has confirmed that two convicted rapists are to be given a hundred lashes each and then cast off a cliff.

The article tries to soothe our worries by telling us this is an "ancient Islamic punishment" - but no more is it "ancient", it seems.

Ben

Non-story alert: The BBC is more "hideously white" than ever, after it was revealed that the number of black executives has dropped to the lowest in years.

Embarrassing new figures show it has even fewer ethnic minority bosses now than it did four years ago when former director general Greg Dyke used the phrase to describe the corporation.

So what? It is worth noting how the BBC preaches diversity but doesn't seem at first glance particularly diverse itself (although not so often examined is the fact that the BBC has in the past given deep thought to the possibility of Muslim women wearing headscarves while reading the news - and let us not forget that Sri Lankan-born George Alagiah is one of their main anchors), but here's a radical thought: Perhaps more black people and ethnic minorities should apply for jobs at the BBC. I'm sure you'd see a change in these statistics then.

But the BBC, like the good liberals they are, have a plan to clear themselves - positive discrimination: "Now the BBC has controversially said it will "fast-track" young ethnic staff to senior positions, leading to accusations of positive discrimination." Great thinking, there, Auntie!

Ben

In the most farcical racial story of the last few months, a TV sports presenter has been suspended for making a "racist" remark live on air about golfer Tiger Woods. Kelly Tilghman was fronting a U.S. TV programme with Britain's Nick Faldo when she suggested rival players should "lynch" the world number one as the only way to beat him.

Now, OBVIOUSLY the presenter was not intentionally trying to summon up images of the Ku Klux Klan when she mentioned lynching. OBVIOUSLY, had the player in question been white she would have made the same comment, and this whole affair would never have made the news. OBVIOUSLY it was just a case of unfortunate wording, and OBVIOUSLY if you actually asked Tiger Woods whether he was offended by this he'd say no. But that means nothing to the PC lunatics, who make a habit of destroying people's careers because of their own hyper-sensitive whims. Just like Don Imus, Kelly Tilghman has been treated appallingly here.

It's also noteworthy that the odious Al Sharpton has gotten involved in the affair, too. "Whether she's a racist is immaterial," Sharpton said. "The channel has to be accountable to the public."

Yes, Al, with you it IS immaterial whether she is actually a racist or not, because your motives for getting involved in this have nothing to do with civil rights and everything to do with manipulatory politics and intimidation.

Ben

It is a firestorm of controversy in the Buffalo Fire Department. There are claims of racism from 13 Buffalo firefighters, including battalion chief Joe Fahey. "To put it plainly, I was discriminated against because I'm white." said Fahey.

He and the others won a discrimination law suit against the city. They placed high on a state required promotion exam, but all were denied permanent advancement. Fahey, instead, got a provisional or temporary promotion.

Human Resources commissioner Leonard Materese testified in court that the battalion and division chief promotion lists were "killed" or expired because there were not enough African Americans on the lists. His testimony was, "The problem is that if we kept those lists in place and the longer we kept them (the promotion lists) in place, the more white males would be promoted into these positions."

Fahey's attorney says in a weird twist of fate, the new exam that's suppose correct a perceived racial imbalance, actually hurt a minority. An African American firefighter was in line for advancement to captain on the first list, but because it was allowed to expire, he wasn't able to take the city's new exam for the higher rank of battalion chief.

"Ironically what the city did here was prevent an African American from being in a position to take the battalion chief exam."

Ben

IPSWICH Town Football Club are appealing for witnesses after receiving complaints about racism among a section of the North Stand during their FA Cup tie with Portsmouth.

The club said an investigation had been launched into allegations that a group of teenage boys were involved in racist chanting throughout Saturday's match with Premiership League outfit Portsmouth.

Monkey noises aimed at some of Portsmouth's African contingent, as well as racist remarks shouted at England star Sol Campbell, through both the first and start of the second half, were among those said to have occurred.

Ben

A man stormed into a takeaway to protest to the staff about how his daughter had allegedly been treated, and in his bout of anger allegedly made a racially charged remark, the nature of which is not clear. And apparently, he is now in court for "racially-aggravated disorderly behaviour".

Stories like this always make me wonder why the prosecutors have nothing better to do.

Ben

The fourth and final part of my second Islam 101 series deals with democracy and Islam, and whether the two can ever go hand-in-hand. Thanks for taking the time to read these (if you have) and I'll be back with a new series in a couple of months.

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ISLAM IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Bible, Matthew 22:21)

One doesn't have to look too hard to notice that most Islamic countries are not that democratic, and that the more hardline the ruling Islamic regime is, the less democratic their governing system. But is this a product of Islam itself, or merely incidental?

The truth is that sharia law, implemented in full, is about as far from democratic as you can get. It is an authoritarian, theocratic system with Allah alone at its head, and there is little room for freedom or the democratic process.

Islamic law is based on the Qur'an and Sunna (hadith traditions, etc) and these are fixed and unchangeable. The world is to be run according to Allah's law, never under the laws of man, who is not infallible like Allah. According to the 20^th century Muslim Brotherhood scholar Sayyid Qutb, “It is Allah and not man who rules. Allah is the source of all authority, including legitimate political authority. Virtue, not freedom, is the highest value. Therefore, Allah's law, not man's, should govern the society.” Islamic law provides a complete system for living one's life, directing the faithful in all areas of everyday existence, even down to which hand to hold one's penis in while urinating. The political and the religious are inseparably interwoven in Islam.

All of which means that Islam is much more than just a religion: it is in fact a political ideology, also – one which assumes that it must rule over all others. More evidence for this comes from the Muslim calendar. Westerners familiar with the way the Roman calendar begins at Jesus' birth may be forgiven for thinking that the first year of the Muslim calendar would have some religious significance. Was it the year Muhammad was born? The year he died? The year he became a Prophet? In actual fact, it is none of these. The first year of the Islamic calendar marks the Hijra – Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD. This event marks the moment that Muhammad became a political and military leader, and Islam became a state. This is a clear indication of Islam's political nature, and it has only been demonstrated further in the centuries following the Hijra.

The notion of a separation between church and state has always been heretical in Islam. While the West has developed a system whereby religious and secular authorities act mostly independent of each other, Islam's political nature has always inhibited this. The distinction between the religious and the political has been made, in a rudimentary form, in Christian teaching, but was never transferred to Islam.

Indeed, some Muslim scholars have been highly critical of the Western democratic system and its Judeo-Christian roots, critiquing them as inferior to the Islamic model. Sayyid Qutb wrote that Christianity “is an individualist, isolationist, negative faith. It has no power to make life grow under its influence in any permanent or positive way.” By contrast, “Islam is a perfectly practicable social system in itself...It offers to mankind a perfectly comprehensive theory of the universe, life and mankind.”

Qutb is not alone in this belief. The influential Pakistani scholar Sayyid Abul A'la Maududi declared that “the purpose of Islam is to set up a state on the basis of its own ideology and programme.” The charter of Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that seeks to destroy Israel, affirms the idea that Islam and secularism are incompatible: “Secular thought is diametrically opposed to religious thought...For the Islamic nature of Palestine is part of our religion, and anyone who neglects his religion is bound to lose.”

Western colonialism in the last couple of centuries has led to the amalgamation of Muslim and Western modes of society in the Middle East, such that many modern Muslim countries have now partially imbibed Western democratic values (which is a major reason why most Islamic countries do not embrace full Islamic law at its most extreme today). And yet some Muslims still do not accept these values – not even the concept of human rights.

In 1970, the Iranian Sufi leader Sheik Sultanhussein Tabandeh wrote A Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In it, he argues that if a Muslim is killed, capital punishment must be enacted, but if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim the punishment should only be a fine, “[s]ince Islam regards Muslims as on a lower level of belief and conviction”. Indeed, by and large, the Islamic world has never embraced the idea of human rights and the dignity and equality of rights of Muslims and non-Muslims, formulating its own human rights documents based on Islamic principles, which specifically reject the idea of religious freedom. For instance, the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam states that “Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Shari'ah.”

“According to the norms of Islamic Shari'ah”? Given that we have already seen that sharia commands the death penalty for leaving Islam, among other things, this guarantees that in fact no one has the right to advocate or propagate anything at all, unless it coincides with sharia.

And this is one of the main reasons why Islam is incompatible with democracy: because it rejects the idea that everyone is created equal, Islamic law denies equality of rights to religious minorities. And this influence has bled through into Islamic countries that are supposedly moderate and democratic. There is not a single Muslim country in the world today where non-Muslims enjoy full equality of rights with Muslims. In every Islamic country, Jews, Christians, and people of other religions face institutionalised discrimination which is either tolerated or actively encouraged by the leadership.

The following are some representative examples of the discrimination against religious minorities in Muslim countries:

EGYPT: In 2003, 22 Christians – many of whom were Muslim apostates – were arrested and tortured. The same year, the Brethren Church of Assiout was demolished so that the Christians could build a new one, but before they could begin, their building license was inexplicably revoked – bringing to mind the dhimmi prohibition against building new churches or repairing old ones.
PAKISTAN: Blasphemy is still heavily clamped down on in the “moderate” Pakistan. In late 2003, Anwar Masih, a Christian, was arrested for blasphemy, provoking local residents to pelt his house with stones. The police did nothing about the attacks on his home. The following month a Christian church was attacked and ransacked by a Muslim mob, but the police refused to file any report and the doctors at the local hospital ignored the injured Christians at the direction of an influential Muslim cleric. The following year, another Christian charged with blasphemy, Samuel Masih, was beaten to death with a hammer by a Muslim policeman as he lay in hospital suffering from tuberculosis.
KUWAIT: Hussein Qambar Ali was convicted of apostasy after he converted to Christianity, even though the Kuwaiti constitution guarantees absolute freedom of religion. At his trial, a prosecutor said: “With grief I have to say that our criminal law does not include a penalty for apostasy. The fact is that the legislature, in our humble opinion, cannot enforce a penalty for apostasy any more or less than what our Allah and his messenger have decreed. The ones who will make the decision about his apostasy are: our Book, the Sunna, the agreement of the prophets and their legislation given by Allah.”
INDONESIA: When three Muslims beheaded three Christian girls in 2005, they received sentences of up to 20 years in prison. But the following year three Christians were executed for allegedly inciting violence against Muslims during riots, even though it was never definitively proven that they had done any such thing; and even though the violence was not one-sided, no Muslims were prosecuted. Also, Muslims have burned down well over a thousand churches since the 1960s and virtually none of the perpetrators have ever been punished.
MALAYSIA: In recent years, several large Hindu temples have been classified as “illegal structures” without explanation and demolished. In early 2007 the government ordered that a civil rights group dedicated to religious freedom be disbanded. Also, the Islamic Religious Department seized the fifteen-month old child of a woman who had converted to Hinduism, and the woman herself was made to attend a “rehabilitation centre”. In 2005, Bibles in the Malaysian language were banned.
TURKEY: Often hailed as a moderate, secular state, Turkey has nevertheless seen a great challenge to its status from hardline Muslims who want to bring back Islamic law. But even so, it already discriminates against Christians. To this day it still refuses to give legal status to the Catholic Church. Also, while Turkey does not enforce the death penalty for apostasy, two Islamic converts to Christianity were put on trial for “insulting Turkishness” in 2006. Also, several Protestant churches have been stoned and firebombed with no interference by the police.

Islamic countries may be democratic in terms of voting and elections, but in terms of equality of rights for people of all faiths and freedom of conscience, they are anything but democratic.

The fact is that Islam is the only religion in the world which comes with a built-in series of legal directives which it seeks to impose on the land. The religion is the law, and vice versa. This is the system the jihadists are fighting to implement here in the West, in the Middle East, and all around the globe. It is totalitarian, barbaric, and totally in opposition to Western notions of freedom and human rights.

Does this mean that no government can ever be simultaneously Islamic and democratic? Not necessarily, but the creation of an Islamic state that also grants full equality of rights to all can only be achieved if prominent Muslims reject the discrimination enshrined in the sharia and embrace the values of freedom we so cherish, as imperfect as they may be. But so far, they have not done this in any significant numbers, and so the discrimination and inequality goes on.

Ben

"If the Enemy in the War on Terror (WOT) states that he fights jihad in furtherance of Islamic causes that include the imposition of Shari’a law and the re-establishment of the Caliphate; and Islamic law on jihad exists and is available in English; then Professionals with WOT responsibilities have an affirmative, personal, professional duty to know the enemy; that includes ALL the knowable facts associated with the law of jihad."

Who said that?

It was Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon's expert on Islamic law and radicalism - who has just been fired for being too un-PC...and correct. The sacking came after complaints from pro-Muslim officials who had long wanted his head.

This is an absolute disgrace. Here we have a man with invaluable knowledge regarding our enemy in this war, and he is being dismissed because he is treading too close to the line of political incorrectness. Such actions demonstrate how suicidally clueless Western leaders are when it comes to the nature of jihad and our enemy.

This week, with this act of intellectual cowardice, the West lost a little bit of its already-crumbly defensive bastion.

Ben

Race Relations is one year old today! How time flies when you're having fun!

Ben

OK, first of all, I want to apologise for my poor post count in the month of December. I had tons going on, more so than at any time in the rest of the year, it seems, and didn't have much time to post. Hopefully, January will be a return to a bit more regularity.

In the news today, a new report says that staff training at immigration detention centres must be improved, recording a catalogue of "racist" behaviour in the system.

I think it's clear that there is some legitimacy to this. But one only has to look at the examples of "racism" given to see that there is little concrete evidence of racism there. There are references there to the immigration officials treating their "detainees" like animals or generally being rude or disrespectful to them. But this does not necessarily mean racism. Most of the insults directed could have been directed at any group of people in the same circumstances. We know that prison officials taunt the inmates, and "Animals, lock-up time" is a phrase that has no doubt been used in prisons, too. There is too much haste among people to cry "Racism" whenever the victim is black or foreign, even if no mention of race is ever made by the perpetrator.

The only one in there that is of any concern is the claim that one of the officers at the centre said "black bastards" - and I do not even have full confidence that this allegation is even true. But even if it is, it brings up another point I have made here many times: that while calling someone a "black bastard" is inexcusable, it is no different to calling someone a "fat bastard" or a "ginger bastard" or a "bald bastard", or anything else. If we are going to so ardently investigate cases of one of these insults, let us investigate them all.

Ben

Race Relations had 42 hits this month. Of these, the majority were once again from the US and UK, although this month Canada, Slovakia and Argentina get special mentions.

As always, the most interesting part of this month's stats are the searches that led people to find the site. Easily the most searched-for keyword of late has been "anjem". I'm not sure what these people were looking for, but I'd assume that in searching for this they ended up finding this post, in which I linked to a video of British jihadist Anjem Choudary justifying terrorist attacks against innocent civilians. I also continue to be amazed by the amount of people who get here by searching for Muhammad's "raisin-head" quote. I had no idea it was that well-known.

One of the more bizarre search strings was "do radical muslims killed women", and one chap even got here by searching for "islam is vile". Not sure what that led him to since I have never said that here, but whatever it was I hope he enjoyed it.

And on a related note, I'd like to once again thank everyone who has visited the site and attempted to contribute. It is appreciated. I hope you will all come back again some time.

Also, I'll be gone again until the New Year, and will begin posting again in 2008. Happy New Year for the 1st, everyone, and make yourselves a resolution not to be racist or Islamophobic...

Ben

So did you catch the "Extras" Christmas special last night?

Excellent, wasn't it?

Extras has never at any point been as funny as The Office. In terms of laughs, series one was the best. Series two was a little disappointing. It had its funny moments, but Gervais and Merchant lowered their standards somewhat, producing a series of pretty unrealistic, somewhat unlikely situations and reducing the character of Maggie to someone whose only purpose was to say the wrong thing at the wrong time and get Andy in trouble. And this after she was supposed to have grown up at the end of series one.

The special was really more drama than comedy, with high emotional stakes, but there were some funny moments - and the drama was excellently written and acted. And at the end of it all, there was a real message there. Andy's climactic speech on the nature of celebrity and the media was brilliantly written and acted by Ricky Gervais - I actually found myself getting quite emotional as he was speaking it! Those who put Gervais down should check out his acting here, as well as in the final scene of the second series of The Office in which a tearful David Brent begs not to be made redundant.

Overall, Extras has never reached the heights of The Office at its best - but what else has? Series one was the funniest, series two was the weakest - and the special was the most dramatic work Gervais and Merchant have done to date. No one should doubt their abilities as heavyweight television writers. Five stars.

Ben

The following is a reproduction of a recent exchange I had online, debating with your typical liberal PC Islamic apologist. I thought I'd post it as an example of the kind of thing I have to put up with when I attempt to educate people on Islam, and the typical responses I give. Also, it is noteworthy that this kind of level of "debate" really is what your average Western dhimmi goes in for.

-----------------------------------------------------

Quote: What I meant was...
all your posts on concerning Islam
should be considered 'racist'.

My reply: Really? And what race is Islam again?

Quote:

I must say...
you sure did a lot of research.
Now I could do research
of my own to refute
your ridiculous claims,
but frankly...
I'm lazy.

How convenient.

Quote:

I am just gonna say this...
The words of the Prophet...
The verses of the Quran...
The words of the Prophet's companions...
cannot be interpreted by just anyone.

Only experts in the fields
of Islamic studies and Arabic Literature
are qualified to do so.

I see. And yet those "experts in the field", some of the greatest scholars and jurists in the history of Islam, seem to have come to the conclusion that Islam is teaching Muslims hatred and violence, as I have demonstrated many times with quotes from great Islamic thinkers. And in the modern day, influential clerics and imams seem also to have got the impression that Islam is violent: Omar Rahman, a lecturer at Islam's highest spiritual learning centre, Cairo's Al-Azhar University, once said: "Listen, my brother: there is a whole sura [chapter of the Qur'an] called 'The Spoils of War'; there is no Sura of Peace. Jihad and killing is the head of Islam. If you take it out, you cut off the head of Islam." Rahman later went on to mastermind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.

Did you catch that? That quote insinuating that violence was integral to Islam was not made by a "racist" - a highly educated Muslim said that; a Muslim who was teaching other Muslims about Islam - and who went on to be a terrorist. How does that happen?

And with this we get to the real crux of the thing: I am not a Qur'anic scholar. I have never claimed to be. And I don't interpret ANY passage of the Qur'an or Islamic tradition for myself. I only ever report on how jihadists use this material to justify violence, and how traditional Islamic scholars - not just "extremists" - interpret this same material. And according to you, doing that makes me hateful. It's amazing how many people today will accuse someone who reports on another person's hatred of being hateful themselves. It's the PC way to deal with uncomfortable ideas.

Quote:

It's like trying
to explain to a KKK
member that Blacks
are humans too and should be treated as such.

No, it's really not, because I have never said that Muslims are not human and should not be treated equally. In fact, I've actually said in the past: "I believe in the dignity and equality of rights of all people, and will continue to oppose the elements of Islam which contravene the Universal Declaration of Human Rights". How hateful!

Quote:

What happened to you?
Seriously.
Did a Muslim kid steal your lollipop
when you were young?

No. But someone must have stolen your spine.

Ben

OTHER OPPRESSIONS

“Allah's Apostle never killed anyone except in one of the following three situations: (1) A person who killed somebody unjustly (2) a married person who committed illegal sexual intercourse and (3) a man who fought against Allah and His Apostle and deserted Islam and became an apostate.” (Sahih Bukhari v.9, b.83, no.37)

We have seen that if you are a woman or a non-Muslim, you are going to have an uncomfortable time (to say the least) under sharia. But if you're a Muslim male, it's entirely different, right?

Not quite. While Muslim men enjoy many luxuries under Islamic law, sharia still holds plenty of seventh-century barbarisms in store for anyone who breaks its rules, and others who misbehave are also likely to find themselves in trouble. Islam matches, and maybe even exceeds, the brutal punishments laid out in the Old Testament of the Bible – the main difference being that Islam has never evolved away from these harsh rulings, and they are still part of Islamic law today, for any Muslim authority to legitimately enforce if they so choose.

Perhaps the most notorious and well-known of the Qur'an's over-the-top punishments is the penalty of amputation for theft: “As for the thief, both male and female, cut off their hands. It is the reward of their own deeds, an exemplary punishment from Allah. Allah is Mighty, Wise.” (Qur'an 5:38) This prohibition, however, does not seem to have been absolute, as Muhammad encouraged the taking of booty from his enemies after raids and battles on numerous occasions, and the Qur'an even directs that one-fifth of all war spoils should be donated to Allah and his charitable works (8:41).

Islam also mandates death penalties for a variety of offenses, one of the most striking being for apostasy – leaving Islam. Numerous hadith traditions have Muhammad recorded as saying simply, “Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” (Bukhari v.9, b.88, no.6922, and others). Umdat al-Salik says that “when a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostasizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed”. Many radical Muslims take this law very seriously, and it has even been implemented in the new Afghanistan, which – backed by Coalition forces – is supposed to be a flowering democracy: Abdul Rahman, a convert to Christianity, was arrested and put on trial for his life there in 2006, only to later be released due to international pressure.

Homosexuals are also to be put to death, in line with Muhammad's sayings: “If a man who is not married is seized committing sodomy, he will be stoned to death” (Abu Dawud, b.38, no.4448); “Kill the one who sodomizes and the one who lets it be done to him” (quoted in Umdat al-Salik). There are currently several convicted homosexuals awaiting execution in Iran.

Sharia also punishes adultery with death by stoning. Apologists for Islam are quick to point out that while Islamic law may indeed command this, the punishment is not mandated in the Qur'an, which says only that adulterers should be given a hundred lashes (24:2), and that therefore the law can be easily reformed. However, in one hadith tradition caliph Umar explains that the Qur'an did originally contain a verse calling for the stoning of adulterers, but it was somehow inadvertently dropped (Bukhari v.8, b.86, no.6830). Also, Muhammad himself enforced the stoning punishment, as on one occasion when he came across some Jews who had convicted a couple of adultery. Muhammad asked them what their prescribed punishment was for such a crime. Ever since the destruction of the Temple Mount in 70 CE, the Jews had moved away from barbarous capital punishments, and the group that Muhammad encountered attempted to dissemble, claiming that the punishment the Torah prescribed for adultery was lashes only. However, Muhammad called them out on this and scolded them for ignoring their scriptures, before ordering that the couple be stoned anyway (Bukhari v.4, b.61, no.3635). Convicted adulterers are still feeling the sting of those stones in the Islamic world today.

When British teacher Gillian Gibbons was recently arrested in Sudan for allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad, many Westerners were surprised at the anger and death threats that came her way from Sudanese Muslims. Left unexplored in the mainstream media were the roots of this farce, going back to the time of Muhammad, who ordered the assassinations of people who wrote “insulting” poems about him. To this day, some Islamic legal schools still teach that non-Muslims in Islamic countries who “mention something impermissible about Allah, the Prophet . . . or Islam” can face one of four fates: death, enslavement, ransoming in exchange for money or release without paying anything, depending on the will of the person in charge. It is unanimously agreed among all the schools that if a Muslim insults Muhammad they should be put to death.

Islam is also very clear in condoning slavery. Muhammad owned dozens of slaves and did not at all disapprove of the practice. He even gave Muslims permission to have sex with slave girls they owned: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.” (Qur'an 4:24) Islamic tradition records numerous unsavoury incidents in which Muhammad gave his men permission to rape women they had captured in battle, e.g: “We got female captives in the war booty and we used to do coitus interruptus with them. So we asked Allah's Apostle about it and he said, 'Do you really do that?' repeating the question thrice, 'There is no soul that is destined to exist but will come into existence, till the Day of Resurrection.'” (Bukhari v.7, b.62, no.137) In other words, you can have as much sex as you like with your captives; the women won't get pregnant if Allah doesn't want them to. The Prophet also did it himself, “marrying” the wife of a Jewish leader whom he had just ordered beheaded after the siege of Khaybar. It is not recorded whether she consented, but it seems unlikely that she would marry and have sex with a man who had that same day murdered her husband.

Slavery has been a constant throughout Islamic history, particularly trading among non-Muslim slaves. Muslim forces would launch regular raids on non-Muslim lands specifically to acquire slaves, particularly from Greece and India, and would then sell them off for trading in other parts of the Islamic world. These slaves often also faced pressure to convert to Islam. One English captive from the eighteenth century recounted how he finally gave in to this pressure after his Muslim captors resorted to torture, setting him on fire on multiple occasions.

There is even evidence that some Western Muslims still keep slaves today. In 2006 a Saudi man in the US was found guilty of keeping a woman as a slave. The following month an Egyptian couple living in California were convicted of keeping a ten year old girl as a slave. And in early 2007 an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington and his wife were charged with keeping three Christians in slave-like conditions.

But how is this any different to Christianity? The Bible, like the Qur'an, takes slavery for granted, never condemning it, and the Old Testament even contains regulations about selling your daughters as slaves.

And yet there has been opposition to slavery within the Christian world as far back as the Dark Ages. St Isidore of Seville declared that "God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman". Charlemagne and other Christian leaders also opposed it. In the 1500s, the Catholic missionary and bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas was instrumental in enacting a Spanish law forbidding the enslavement of the Indians. Furthermore, the end of slavery has its roots in Christian principles, as pioneering abolitionists such as Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Garrison were motivated by their deep Christian faith, and the Biblical assumption of the dignity and equality of all who are redeemed in Christ. Even Abraham Lincoln was compelled to help the families of slaves by appealing to Christian principles, including the Golden Rule of Jesus: Treat others as you wish to be treated.

This is not the case with Islam. Islamic slavery lasted longer and brought suffering to more people than did Christian slavery. It is estimated that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved 10.5 million people, while the Islamic slave trade lasted from the seventh century to the nineteenth and involved 17 million people.

There was no abolitionist movement within Islam. When slavery did end, it was through British military force. Slavery is still openly practised in Sudan, and only ended in several Islamic countries (through Western pressure) very recently. And there is evidence that it is underhandedly practised in a good deal of other countries, such as Niger, which only abolished slavery in 2004 but where the laws are largely ignored and as many as a million people remain in bondage.

There are, of course, brave anti-slavery campaigners in the Muslim world, but they are finding it hard going because of the support for it in the Qur'an and Muhammad's (the Perfect Man's) example.

With all this oppression mandated in Islamic law, you may find yourself wanting to stay indoors and relax with a bit of self-expression or appreciation of the arts. But alas, this is forbidden also. Muhammad banned musical instruments: “Allah Mighty and Majestic sent me as a guidance and mercy to believers and commanded me to do away with musical instruments, flutes, strings, crucifixes, and the affair of the pre-Islamic period of ignorance. On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will pour molten lead into the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress. Song makes hypocrisy grow in the heart as water does herbage.” (quoted in Umdat al-Salik) No doubt this would have been on the mind of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini when he famously uttered, “Music is treason to our nation and to our youth.” Muhammad also prohibited representational art: “Angels do not enter a house wherein there is a dog or some images (or pictures, etc) of living creatures (a human being or an animal etc).” (Bukhari v.4, b.59, no.3225)

And don't even think about sitting down and chilling out with a glass of wine, for alcohol is an “abomination, of Satan's handwork” (Qur'an 5:90).

It seems that Islam, in its traditional form, really doesn't allow you to do an awful lot, even if you're an astute believer. Of course, many Muslims do not subscribe to many of their religion's harshest ideals, and most Muslim countries are not enforcing full sharia law. But this system is precisely what Islamic supremacists want to impose on the rest of the world – by violence, if necessary. It is a system which is discriminatory and barbaric, and it stifles - maybe even denies - freedom of thought and expression. Which is why those of us in the West who value our freedom need to be aware of what it is we are defending ourselves against, if we are ever to summon up the will to prevent it from coming to pass.

For, as we shall see, Islam and liberal democracy do not go hand in hand.

Ben

Israeli football club Betar Jerusalem is being punished for its fans' "racist" chants against Sakhnin. The fans supposedly chanted "Muhammad is dead".

Yep, racism. How can the Sakhnin team live with themselves now, carrying all that hurt?

Ben

I'm at a different computer today, and so had to sign in, rather than just opening up Blogger and finding myself already signed in, as usually happens at home. And so I opened up the main page and found that I have had a bunch of unmoderated comments which I have failed to publish. I could have sworn I turned comment moderation off already; in any case I've done so again and now all the worthy comments (barring the adverts) are published on the site, and hopefully in future all comments will be published automatically (even adverts). In the mean time, I just want to apologise to everyone who attempted to post a comment here and found that it never got published and I never responded to it. It won't happen again, I hope.

But as I'm not at home and only have temporary access to a computer, I'm also going to take this opportunity to say that I won't be posting again until after Christmas. I've got some busy days ahead, limited Internet access, and won't have the time. In any case, thanks to all who have read (and commented on) the blog this year, and I hope you will keep coming back in 2008.

Merry Christmas. I would say "ho ho ho!" but that's banned, along with the n-word. :)

Ben

The findings from the Count Me In 2007 census ethnicity data shows that African people in Britain are over three times more likely to be admitted and detained as inpatients in mental health and learning disability services than the UK’s ethnic majority. The report acknowledges that a whole slew of factors are responsible for this - one of them, of course, being racism, which it seems to concentrate an inordinate amount of time on, although it presents no evidence to show that this is a factor at all. Indeed, it can't.

Anti-African racism in the UK health services...hmmm, that must be why we employ so many of them as doctors.

Ben

Cypriot society is deeply racist towards non-locals, according to a survey of migrants, repatriates and Pontians.

Now, given the recent farce of the Israel "anti-Arab" racism survey, forgive me if I'm a little skeptical about the methodology of this one. For starters, just because "Sixty-three per cent of those asked reported suffering from discrimination and prejudice on a daily basis", that doesn't mean they actually WERE suffering from any discrimination and prejudice, as has been shown numerous times by the innocuous claims of "racism" we see from immigrants over here.

Ben

At Family Security Matters there is an excellent article by Gabriel Garnica on what racism is - and what isn't. Here's an extract:

"The biggest tragedy in this society is that instead of combating racism and all form of prejudice in general and from any who exhibits it, we spend an inordinate amount of time defining prejudice by the standards and measures of political correctness. Given this distortion, we find that it is acceptable to exhibit prejudice against Whites, Christians, conservatives, the rich, the successful, the patriotic and all members of any non-White group who likewise exhibit these characteristics.

Do the same thing against non-Whites, Muslims, liberals, the poor, the marginalized, those who blame America for everything and any Whites who champion these characteristics and you are a hateful criminal out to impose your views and likely to destroy our society as we know it.

This double-standard, so perpetuated by the liberal media, is a despicable result of defining racism and all forms of prejudice by politically correct measures. Its heinous evil is two-fold. First, it creates more racism even as it pretends to confront it. Second, it allows the politically correct racist or prejudiced person to use this label as a shield against his or her own foibles and hypocrisy."

Be sure to read it all.

Ben

1. Wesley Snipes has slammed the media for portraying him as a "bad guy" after he was charged with tax fraud, claiming he is a victim of racism. I've covered this one before.

2. An excellent piece by black writer Elbert Lewis Jr, in which he chastises the poor and uneducated in the black community for mostly bringing their condition upon themselves and then playing the race card because it's the easy option. Racist! Oh, wait...

Ben

Remember that back in June Muhammad was second only to Jack as the most popular boys' name in Britain?

Well, looks like it's just about to take the top spot.

Eurabia here we come.

Ben

ISLAM OPPRESSES RELIGIOUS MINORITIES

“[T]he taker sits and the dhimmi stands with his head bowed and his back bent. The jizya is placed in the balance and the taker seizes his beard and hits his chin.”
(Jalaloddin As-Suyuti, 1445-1505 AD)

In my first series of articles, I made brief reference to the system of the dhimma, which institutionalises discrimination and oppression against non-Muslims in Muslim lands. But what does this entail in practice?

Dhimmis are non-Muslims (particularly the People of the Book: Jews and Christians) living under Islamic rule. Islamic law dictates that while dhimmis are free to practise their own religions in an Islamic state, they are only allowed to do so under severely restrictive conditions which emphasise their second-class status at every turn and are designed to make sure the dhimmis “feel themselves subdued”, as per Qur'an 9:29:

“[Dhimmis] are distinguished from Muslims in dress, wearing a wide cloth belt (zunnar); are not greeted with "as-Salamu 'alaykum" [the traditional Muslim greeting “peace be with you”]; must keep to the side of the street; may not build higher than or as high as the Muslims' buildings, though if they acquire a tall house, it is not razed; are forbidden to openly display wine or pork, [or] 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.” (Umdat al-Salik)

Furthermore, “If non-Muslim subjects of the Islamic state refuse to conform to the rules of Islam, or to pay the non-Muslim poll tax, then their agreement with the state has been violated.”

The “non-Muslim poll tax”, of course, is the jizya, also referred to in Qur'an 9:29. This was the cornerstone of the dhimmi system, and provided the main source of income for many Islamic empires throughout history. Some have erroneously compared the jizya to zakat, a Muslim charity tax, claiming that while dhimmis paid the jizya, Muslims paid zakat. Unfortunately for such apologists, though, the only similarity between the two is that they are both taxes. Zakat was usually 2.5% of a Muslim's annual earnings and was enforced loosely and with certain concessions available, with the money going to the poor and needy in the Muslim community. By contrast, the jizya was often set so high that dhimmis could not afford to pay it; it was collected by force and the funds went directly towards financing the Islamic state.

The jizya was also, historically, a good way of continuing the institutionalised humiliation of the dhimmis. It was often collected as part of a demeaning and belittling ceremony in which the Muslim tax official would hit the dhimmi over the head as he placed the money on the scales. The thirteenth-century jurist an-Nawawi directed that “the infidel who wishes to pay his poll tax must be treated with disdain by the collector; the collector remains seated and the infidel remains standing in front of him, his head bowed and his back bent. The infidel personally must place the money on the scales, while the collector holds him by the beard, and strikes him on both cheeks.”

Likewise, many Islamic scholars expressed the view that dhimmis should be made to feel inferior, with Ibn Kathir declaring that the dhimmis must be “disgraced, humiliated and belittled. Therefore, Muslims are not allowed to honor the people of Dhimmah or elevate them above Muslims, for they are miserable, disgraced and humiliated.”

It was largely because of the jizya that several prosperous non-Muslim populations were whittled down to tiny, despised minorities. Because of this unbearable tax, many dhimmis chose to convert to Islam in the hope that their lives would be improved. As a result, some religious demographics virtually vanished from the face of the Earth. For example, the Assyrian Christians, who were once all over Central Asia and the Middle East, are now largely confined to Iraq, where they face continuous persecution from Muslim radicals. Similarly Zoroastrianism, once the dominant religion in Persia, is now virtually non-existent except as a tiny minority in Iran.

Islamic apologists often point out that Islamic law forbids forced conversion, based on the Qur'an: “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (2:256). By mentioning this, they hope to make the case that early Islam's violent expansion was against the principles of the religion. But while this verse is in any case open to some interpretation, it is also beside the point. By and large, Islam did not spread by Muslims forcing non-Muslims to convert (although this did often happen). What spread by the sword was the hegemony of the Islamic legal system, which institutionalised discrimination against non-Muslims in the form of the dhimma. Subsequently, being a dhimmi was such an oppressive and horrible way to live that many dhimmis chose to convert. So the religion was not forced on them, but at the same time it was their only path to a livable existence.

Apologists have also been known to dredge up instances in which certain caliphs or Islamic rulers relaxed the dhimmi laws, or even cases where Jews and Christians achieved things of importance, or rose to levels of high authority, while living in Muslim lands. However, this hardly speaks volumes for Islamic tolerance. If the oppressions were sometimes lifted, it was not because Islam moved away from them. In fact, the dhimmi laws were still on the books, ready to be reinforced at any time, and often when they were relaxed Muslims would riot and rebel, complaining of a “breach of sharia”. Certainly, the dhimma was enforced by Muslim rulers throughout history more often than it was not.

Others even go as far as to suggest that even if non-Muslims were oppressed in the Middle Ages, this is nothing compared to how medieval Christians treated Jews. And it is true that Christianity has a history shamefully mired by anti-Semitism. Many popes forced oppressions on the Jews which were very similar to those inflicted on dhimmis. However, there is nothing in Christian tradition which mandates the subjugation of Jews, and many popes also relaxed or abolished these laws. There may have been much anti-Semitism in Christianity's past, but it is not as constant as in Islamic history. And in any case, Christian oppression of Jews was usually not as harsh as dhimmitude. For example, while the dhimma forbids Jews from publicly celebrating their religious festivals, Gregory X decreed in 1272 that Jews under his “protection” could do so, and he also opted for a form of fairness in not allowing Jews and Christians to testify against each other – whereas sharia law allows a Muslim to testify against a dhimmi, but a dhimmi cannot testify against a Muslim.

Modern jihadists are open and unreserved about their desire to see sharia law implemented in the West, and this would undoubtedly include the re-institution of the dhimma. Numerous clerics and scholars, such as Sheik Marzouq Salem al-Ghamdi in a sermon at a mosque in Mecca in 2002, have called for the dhimma to be re-instated. If the jihadists or their non-violent sympathisers were to get their way, non-Muslims would be discriminated against as part of judicial law. This is one reason why all non-Muslims, no matter their faith or lack thereof – and indeed, all Muslims of good will, also – should do their utmost to ensure that this intolerant system is never allowed to take root in the West.

Unfortunately, too many remain indifferent.

Next time: If you're a Muslim male, you're free from oppression under sharia, right? Wrong.

Ben

At the beginning of the week I posted a link to a new survey which found that anti-Arab racism has skyrocketed among Israeli Jews. I expressed my disappointment in the Israelis that this was the case.

Well, looks like I spoke too soon, for here is the response from Jewish Press, exposing the far-Left leanings and biases behind the group that carried out the survey, and the highly flawed findings of the report.

Good Jews!

Ben

Muslim peer Baroness Warsi has hit out at Muslim "hardliners and hotheads" who use Islam to argue against voting and equal rights for women.

It is good to see a Muslim who is actually speaking out against the hardliners, rather and continually against "Islamophobes" who point out that these hardliners exist. It's also good to see her saying that Muslims should stop trying to claim the victim status and become more active in society.

I have problems with a couple of her comments, though.

"I've got a clear message to the hardliners and hotheads who claim to speak for British Muslims. When you say that voting is un-Islamic, you're wrong."

If this is the case, then one wonders why Islamic-based societies have always been so stringently un-democratic.

"When you say that women should not have access to education or employment; that women's equality is un-Islamic; or that women should not adopt leadership positions like politics, you're wrong, wrong, wrong."

In that case, Miss Warsi needs to explain just what is meant by the Qur'anic passages that say women are inferior to men and must be ruled by them (4:34), that a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man's (2:282), that a daughter's inheritance is half that of a son's (4:11), and other such decrees which seem to deny women equality of rights with men. Would Warsi be willing to explain how hardliners have misunderstood these passages? If so, she needs to do so because plenty of Muslims around the world seem to take these passages quite seriously.

"Islam was "unambiguous" in its rejection of forced marriages,"

Depends what you mean by "forced marriages". Muhammad, the Perfect Man in Islamic theology, allowed his soldiers to take the widows of their opponents as war booty after various battles. The Prophet himself married a young girl whose husband he had just ordered beheaded after the siege of Khaybar. So obviously Islam isn't quite "unambiguous" on the matter at all.

On the other hand, there is one more beacon of hope:

"She called on all members of the Muslim community to help in the fight against terrorism.

"We must accept that we're in all in this together - but Muslims have an added responsibility to defeat extremism, because extremism is claimed in the name of Islam," Baroness Warsi said."

Islamophobe!

Seriously, it is nice to see a Muslim actually acknowledging that it may be the Muslim community's RESPONSIBILITY to eradicate radicalism from within their own ranks, just as I have been saying for ages now, much to the constant criticism of dhimmis everywhere, who unfathomably find this totally unreasonable. How Baroness Warsi plans to do this, she doesn't say, but it is more than we have heard other "moderate" Muslims in Britain say for years.

Ben

A new survey has found that a large number of Jews have prejudices against Arabs. In a report, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said expression of anti-Arab views had doubled, and racist incidents had increased by 26%. In another poll, almost 75% of Jewish youths said Arabs were less intelligent and less clean than Jews.

Given what has been done to the Jews by the Arabs over the centuries, one may say that they have a right to feel suspicious or uncomfortable with the Arabs. But there's no excuse for this. I'm disappointed; I thought the Israelis were better than this.

Ben

This is a strictly off-topic post...but in a way it is related to racism. The partner of political correctness and multi-culturalism is the Health And Safety Fascist Brigade. In many ways this mollycoddling nanny state attitude is very similar to racial political correctness, and is usually espoused by the same sorts of people.

And in the latest elf n' safety farce, we hear that pantomime performers have been banned from throwing sweets into the audience in case they hit children on the head.

As Richard Littlejohn is wont to say: You couldn't make it up.

Ben

I've recently had a couple of online debates with liberal apologists about Islam, and its status as NOT a Religion of Peace. And it's amazing how many different kinds of apologists there are. Sometimes, these dhimmis will actually regress through the various different stages of apologism as the debate progresses. I have noticed this pattern:

- They start out by insisting that Islam is a Religion of Peace
- When you show them, through passages from the Qur'an, sunna and fiqh, that it isn't, they begin making excuses for the material you present
- When they can no longer defend Islam, they switch to firing verses of the Bible at you and wittering on about the Crusades
- When you ask them to point out a passage in the Bible which calls on all Christians to wage war against non-believers, or to cite a case in which Christians have used specific Bible verses to justify massive holy war, they are unable to do so
- When you call them out on all of the above, they call you names and falsely accuse you of every hideous crime known to man

But what surprised me most about these debates was that so many people found the idea that Muslims should be responsible for preventing the jihad of their co-religionists to be completely unreasonable. I was accused of wanting to round all Muslims up in "re-education camps" until they say exactly what I want to hear, and of thinking that all Muslims are inherently "bad" until I come along and mould them to my desires. All of which is ridiculous, of course. I ask only that Muslims work out ways to convince other Muslims that Islam is a Religion of Peace - in the face of mountains of Islamic tradition and law which says the opposite - rather than expending all their efforts trying to tell ME that. This is my opinion on what I think could be done to end Islamic radicalism. And while I come up with these ideas, hopeless dhimmis slam them down for no reason, while not coming up with any solutions of their own. It's enough to make you want to scream.

And why are they so obstinate? The answer is simply multi-culturalism - the idea that if Whitey calls on Brownie Muslims to take responsibility for their own actions and the actions of the community, he is being arrogant, biased and bigoted. The desperation in these dhimmis' replies became increasingly clear as they backpeddled and moved the goalposts to suit their increasingly transparent worldviews. It would be sad if it wasn't so infuriating.

I also encountered several Muslims who stated flatly that Islam was a Religion of Peace without saying one single thing to contradict the evidence I presented to show that it wasn't. In the past one actually accused me of making violent Qur'an passages up. And yet the morally and intellectually snobbish leftists think that I should accept these people as true moderates. No mention is made by them of how plain denial by Muslims of what their religion teaches will prevent other Muslims from thinking it's telling them to be violent. No answers at all. Only blindness.

I finished my debate with them by saying, "I hope you enjoy paying the jizya." I really wish I was being sarcastic.

Ben

You're gonna love this one:

"The BBC funded a paintballing trip for men later accused of Islamic terrorism and failed to pass on information about the 21/7 bombers to police, a court was told yesterday.
Mohammed Hamid, who is charged with overseeing a two-year radicalisation programme to prepare London-based Muslim youths for jihad, was described as a “cockney comic” by a BBC producer.
The BBC paid for Mr Hamid and fellow defendants Muhammad al-Figari and Mousa Brown to go on a paintballing trip at the Delta Force centre in Tonbridge, Kent, in February 2005. The men, accused of terrorism training, were filmed for a BBC programme called Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, screened in June 2005."

Ben

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has enunciated the importance of fighting against racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, speaking to business people in Algiers on Monday.

And yet, if you listen to some liberals, Sarkozy actually embodies all of these things himself. This is based, most likely, on the fact that he's a conservative, so therefore he must be a bigot - that's liberal rationality and tolerance for ya.

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