Happy Halloween!
Illinois: only state in Midwest in which food-stamp enrollment outpaces job creation since recession ended pic.twitter.com/yKyIdoOHMv
— Corey Brooks (@CoreyBBrooks) October 24, 2014
Happy Halloween!
Illinois: only state in Midwest in which food-stamp enrollment outpaces job creation since recession ended pic.twitter.com/yKyIdoOHMv
— Corey Brooks (@CoreyBBrooks) October 24, 2014
So how the hell did this ever get past the editors at Salon?
As they rampage and behead their way through Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters know they have the Koran on their side – a book they believe to be inerrant and immutable, the final Word of God, and not at all “malleable.” Their holy book backs up jihad, suicide attacks (“martyrdom”), beheadings, even taking captive women as sex slaves. This is not surprising; after all, the prophet Muhammad was a warrior who spread Islam by the sword in a dark, turbulent time in history. (Christianity’s propagation had, in contrast, much to do with the Roman emperor Constantine’s fourth-century conversion and subsequent decriminalization of the faith.)
Moreover, the razor-happy butchers of little girls’ clitorises and labia majora, the righteous wife-beaters, the stoners of adulterers, the shariah clerics denying women’s petitions for divorce from abusive husbands and awarding sons twice the inheritance allowed for daughters, all act with sanction from Islamic holy writ. It matters not a whit to the bloodied and battered victims of such savagery which lines from the Hadith or what verses from the Koran ordain the violence and injustice perpetrated against them, but one thing they do know: texts and belief in them have real-life consequences. And we should never forget that ISIS henchmen and executioners explicitly cite their faith in Islam as their motive.
To be sure, writer Jeffrey Tayler couches his critique (which focuses on Islamist apologist Reza Aslan) in the usual “look at the violence in the Bible” rhetoric, and in a general defense of atheism. Still, it’s quite remarkable for Salon to be catching up with what conservatives have been saying for more than a decade.
Who are you and what have you done with the actual Salon staff?
(Hat tip: Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, who notes “Has Bill Maher made it safe for Leftists to admit that there is a problem with how jihadis and supremacists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and oppression?”)
Pat Condell offers some pungent thoughts on the connection between mass Muslim immigration and rising rape statistics in Sweden:
Is Sweden the rape capital of Europe? Indeed, this BBC report confirms it, though they claim that it’s an artifact of how the statistics are kept.
However, I’m finding a hard time finding official statistics to verify what percentage of rapes are committed by immigrants or by the children of immigrants. (I have seen these statistics referred to in some discussions, but have not been able to locate them directly.) There does seem to be evidence that immigrants are “five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes.” But that’s from 2005. Are Muslims committing the majority of rapes in Sweden? It seems entirely possible, but I don’t want to fall prey to my own confirmation bias.
Of course, since Sweden has fined Michael Hess for making a connection between Islam and rape, one can understand why published statistics could be hard to come by. Especially since “the question of whether Michael Hess’s statement is true, or at least for Michael Hess appeared to be true, is irrelevant to the proceedings.”
Anyone have any better sources?
That’s the headline on this Hisham Melhem piece on the comprehensive failure of the entire Arab world.
The jihadists of the Islamic State, in other words, did not emerge from nowhere. They climbed out of a rotting, empty hulk—what was left of a broken-down civilization. They are a gruesome manifestation of a deeper malady afflicting Arab political culture, which was stagnant, repressive and patriarchal after the decades of authoritarian rule that led to the disastrous defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. That defeat sounded the death knell of Arab nationalism and the resurgence of political Islam, which projected itself as the alternative to the more secular ideologies that had dominated the Arab republics since the Second World War. If Arab decline was the problem, then “Islam is the solution,” the Islamists said—and they believed it.
At their core, both political currents—Arab nationalism and Islamism—are driven by atavistic impulses and a regressive outlook on life that is grounded in a mostly mythologized past. Many Islamists, including Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (the wellspring of such groups)—whether they say it explicitly or hint at it—are still on a ceaseless quest to resurrect the old Ottoman Caliphate. Still more radical types—the Salafists—yearn for a return to the puritanical days of Prophet Muhammad and his companions. For most Islamists, democracy means only majoritarian rule, and the rule of sharia law, which codifies gender inequality and discrimination against non-Muslims.
And let’s face the grim truth: There is no evidence whatever that Islam in its various political forms is compatible with modern democracy.
A few pieces of Melhem’s piece are erroneous: “As terrorist organizations, al Qaeda and Islamic State are different from the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative movement that renounced violence years ago, although it did dabble with violence in the past.” That’s only because the Egypt’s military forced them to refrain from large-scale violence on pain of death. We saw how quickly this restraint was cast aside when Morsi assumed power. The only differences between al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are of degree, tactical choice, and certain Islamic Eschatological doctrinal differences as to exactly what sort of oppressive Islamic theocracy imposing Sharia law are the ideal end-state.
But those flaws aside, it’s still an admirably clear-eyed distillation of the horrific, bloody, dysfunctional nature of the Arab world. Read the whole thing.
So I keep try to pen a coherent essay on the Rotherham child rape scandal, and I keep getting too angry and/or disgusted to write about it.
Pat Condell has no such problem.
“If your 11 year-old daughter is regularly raped by organized gangs of Pakistani Muslim men, should you be concerned?”
“This is how we roll in multicultural England, a green and pleasant land of tolerance, diversity, and Pakistani Muslim child rape gangs.”
The reason these rapes were deliberately ignored year after year is because they were carried out by Pakistani Muslims, and because the police and social services in Rotherham are run by a bunch of cowardly ‘progressive’ cultural self-haters and racists who are so morbidly terrified of being called racist they will willingly sacrifice 1400 children to sexual predators, and then try to silence anyone who draws attention to it.
View the whole thing.
A Monday LinKSwarm to kick off your week with:
“Obama says what he has to say to make reporters stop asking about it.”
#ExplainAFilmPlotBadly Respected archaeology professor has secret life where he indulges his taste for wearing leather and using whips.
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) September 6, 2014
Another beheading in the UK, this time in Edmonton, north London, by what his neighbors claim is a convert to Islam, but “detectives said they had ruled out terrorism as a motive for the killing.”
Well, isn’t that special. Funny how you can rule something out without apparently doing any investigation. It seems the spirit of multicultural political correctness is still alive and well in the UK.
Racking my brain, I can’t seem to recall a single instance in my lifetime of beheading by a convert to Catholicism or Judaism…
In addition to not having a clue, when it comes to ISIS, Obama says that “we don’t have a strategy yet.” I’m sure if someone asked Franklin Roosevelt in early 1942 what his plans were for dealing with Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, he would have had a strategy. Then again, FDR’s polio probably severely curtailed his golfing…
The two things ISIS seems to be most successful at are butchery and rape. Since there have been plenty of media reports of the former, let’s look at the latter:
“Muhammad Karim, one of the soldiers, said that when they arrived at the first abandoned militant checkpoint, they discovered a woman, naked and bound, who had been repeatedly raped. Farther into the neighborhood, the Iraqi forces discovered another woman in the same state.”
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident
Yezidi Kurds women are pleading for other people to kill them after barbaric rape conducted by the ISIS.”
A mother painfully spoke of her daughters’ predicament following barbaric and savage rape conducted by the ISIS.
She said that three of her daughters were abducted by the ISIS and were raped savagely, but were eventually freed to come back to their family.
When her daughters came back, they were pleading for people to kill them.
“My daughters were calling on people to kill them, but no one wanted to do that. So they jumped from the mountain and ended their bitter life,”
But surely these are extremists, and mainstream Islam doesn’t condone sexual slavery, does it?
Don’t be so sure. From Islamqa.info:
Islam allows a man to have intercourse with his slave woman, whether he has a wife or wives or he is not married.
A slave woman with whom a man has intercourse is known as a sariyyah (concubine) from the word sirr, which means marriage.
This is indicated by the Qur’aan and Sunnah, and this was done by the Prophets. Ibraaheem (peace be upon him) took Haajar as a concubine and she bore him Ismaa’eel (may peace be upon them all).
Our Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) also did that, as did the Sahaabah, the righteous and the scholars. The scholars are unanimously agreed on that and it is not permissible for anyone to regard it as haraam or to forbid it. Whoever regards that as haraam is a sinner who is going against the consensus of the scholars.
Robert Spencer of JihadWatch elaborates on the issue:
Take, for example, the recent revelation that, according to the UN News Centre, “some 1,500 Yazidi and Christian persons may have been forced into sexual slavery.” A similar kidnapping by Islamic jihadists in Nigeria recently horrified the world, but much overlooked was the fact that such behavior is sanctioned by the Qur’an. According to Islamic law, Muslim men can take “captives of the right hand” (Qur’an 4:3, 4:24, 33:50). The Qur’an says: “O Prophet! Lo! We have made lawful unto thee thy wives unto whom thou hast paid their dowries, and those whom thy right hand possesseth of those whom Allah hath given thee as spoils of war” (33:50). 4:3 and 4:24 extend this privilege to Muslim men in general, as does this passage. “Certainly will the believers have succeeded: They who are during their prayer humbly submissive, and they who turn away from ill speech, and they who are observant of zakah, and they who guard their private parts except from their wives or those their right hands possess, for indeed, they will not be blamed” (Qur’an 23:1-6).
These passages have not gone unnoticed. The Egyptian Sheikh Abu-Ishaq al-Huwayni declared in May 2011 that “we are in the era of jihad,” and that meant Muslims would take slaves. In a subsequent interview he elaborated:
Jihad is only between Muslims and infidels. Spoils, slaves, and prisoners are only to be taken in war between Muslims and infidels. Muslims in the past conquered, invaded, and took over countries. This is agreed to by all scholars—there is no disagreement on this from any of them, from the smallest to the largest, on the issue of taking spoils and prisoners. The prisoners and spoils are distributed among the fighters, which includes men, women, children, wealth, and so on.
When a slave market is erected, which is a market in which are sold slaves and sex-slaves, which are called in the Qur’an by the name milk al-yamin, “that which your right hands possess” [Koran 4:24]. This is a verse from the Qur’an which is still in force, and has not been abrogated. The milk al-yamin are the sex-slaves. You go to the market, look at the sex-slave, and buy her. She becomes like your wife, (but) she doesn’t need a (marriage) contract or a divorce like a free woman, nor does she need a wali. All scholars agree on this point—there is no disagreement from any of them. […] When I want a sex slave, I just go to the market and choose the woman I like and purchase her.
There is a real “War on Women” going on, but it has nothing to do with forcing American employers to subsidize abortifacients…
Enjoy your complimentary Friday LinkSwarm, and be sure to tip your waitress!