Ghost of Raihana

Peace activist and Green Party candidate assaults romantic rival, puts him in coma

2006-07-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

New Zealander Christiaan Briggs sounds like a dedicated peace activist. He served as one of Saddam's human shields in Iraq. He ran for office in England under the Green Party.
But the 30-year-old pacifist wasn't very peaceful to 19-year-old rock singer Billy Leeson when the punched the teenager to the ground and put him in a coma after hassling the young man's girlfriend on the bus. And running off laughing.
I will point out that Briggs turned himself in after police broadcast an appeal, to his credit. But I will add several thoughts:
Obviously, for a pacifist to resort to violence is hypocritical.
You can find his blog by googling his name (he's verbose and all over the internet). His blog expresses a lot of hatred for America and Israel, for the CIA and Homeland Security. He seems to hate power, powerful institutions, winners. Yet he doesn't mind winning in a personal encounter by using force. He seemed to think it was funny.
And then he turns around and shows his respect for institutions after all by going ahead and turning himself in to the police. His blog calls the CIA cowards, but he has respect for the law after all, as long as he gets to whine about it. Wonder if Saddam would have let him do that.

"I cannot hand over my girls like goats"

2005-11-22T08:02:00.000-08:00

Imagine you are a college girl from a small town when you get news that you must return home to be married to a stranger or be abducted and raped or killed, and it's your town's leaders who have ordered this.

A village council in Pakistan has decreed that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed for refusing to honour childhood "marriages".
The women, who are cousins, were married in absentia by a mullah in their Punjabi village to illiterate sons of their family's enemies in 1996, when they were aged from six to 13.
Amna Niazi, the eldest of the five at 22, is taking a degree in English literature, while both her sisters want to attend university.

The barbaric tradition of handing over women to resolve disputes is called vani in Pakistan.

The Daily Telegraph was granted access to the young women, despite Mr Niazi's fear that the village will further condemn him for being "un-Islamic" by allowing his daughters to be photographed, albeit with their faces covered by veils.

Amna, who hopes to become an English lecturer, said: "We are proud of our father. Despite having little money, he has educated us and shown us that we must stand up in society and demand our rights."

She is studying at a college affiliated to the university of Lahore, while her sister Abida, 18, is applying to study medicine, and Sajida, 15, is still at secondary school.

The other girls, Assia, 20, and Fatima, 16, are the daughters of Mr Niazi's brothers.

Mauritanian girls brutally force-fed

2005-09-23T11:04:00.000-07:00

NOUAKCHOTT (Reuters) - Mariem Sow was a little girl when her sister Zeinabou choked to death in front of her while being force-fed camel's milk by a family slave.

Beaten if she refused to swallow the rich diet of sweetened milk and millet porridge, Zeinabou was one of many Mauritanian girls fattened up because of an ancient belief that corpulent women make more desirable wives.

"As soon as my older sister was 12 they started force-feeding her so she would be plump by 15. They wanted to prepare her for marriage," said Mariem, now 42, wrapped in white robes and reclining on cushions in her Nouakchott home.

The traditions of the desert are very much alive in Mauritania, an Islamic republic on the western edge of the Sahara whose people were still almost entirely nomadic when the country gained independence from France in 1960.

Wealthier families who have settled in the capital Nouakchott often keep a "khaima" -- a nomadic tent -- in the courtyard of their homes. Men and women walk the sandswept streets in flowing robes and headscarves.

Having a voluptuous wife and daughters -- well fed to survive the rigors of a desert lifestyle -- was long a visible sign of wealth and power among the country's light-skinned Moors. It is still seen by many as a canon of beauty.

But with Lebanese satellite television broadcasting images of flat-stomached girls cavorting on beaches, and more Mauritanians traveling abroad, the vogue is starting to change.

Many Mauritanians believe it is unseemly for women to be seen engaging in any strenuous activity, but as dusk falls, chubby ladies shuffle self-consciously around the stadium in Nouakchott, their tracksuit trousers hidden under flowing "malhafa" robes.

"Sometimes I walk, sometimes I run. We come after dusk when the men have gone home," said Fatimatou, a breathless 31-year old, force-fed as a child but now trying to get down to 60 kg (132 lb).

"It's no longer the modern fashion to be overweight. Women have evolved. Now they work in offices and they have to be fit."

BIG IS BEAUTIFUL

More than one in five women in Mauritania, which straddles black and Arab Africa, were force-fed as young girls, according to a government survey from 2001, the latest available.

"Our society has this vision that a woman has to be fat to be beautiful. It is a canon of beauty," said Marienne Baba Sy, head of a government commission that deals with women's issues.

"If you're a thin woman, people assume your family don't look after you," she told Reuters.

The force-feeding technique known as "gavage" -- a French word more closely associated with fattening up geese to produce foie gras -- is less widely practised than it used to be after the government launched campaigns to highlight the health risks.

But the cult of fatness has deep roots.

"My husband says he wants me to lose weight but he looks at fat women and I think he prefers going to bed with them," said Nene Drame, 47, a writer working on a novel about force-feeding.

"The Mauritanian man is savage by nature. He likes something he can get his hands on," she said.

"Gavage" left some women struggling to walk, not just because of their weight -- which often tops 90 kg (198 lb) -- but because they were tortured as they were force-fed.

Some had their fingers or toes broken so the pain would distract them from having to swallow the milk and porridge. Others had their feet crushed by a "zayar" -- a wooden vice which would only be loosened once they ate.

"Above all it causes cardiac problems, problems during childbirth. Even from the point of view of work, obese women are less productive," said Baba Sy.

"They get tired very quickly, out of breath. Psychologically it is very damaging. You can't do the same things as other women -- you can't even pray properly," she added.

Some children were tied down while being fed and were forced to eat whatever they vomited up during the ordeal, Baba Sy said. The force-feeding often lasted years.

Naturally these girls aren't just tempted with goodies and encouraged to eat a lot. Noooooo, they have to be brutally force-fed like geese making foie gras, beaten and broken to make them comply. Because they're just females, lower than animals.

Indira Ghandi, Muslima

2005-07-31T05:32:00.000-07:00

Peregrinations across the web led me this morning to discussions of Indira Ghandi's muslim husband and possible/probable conversion to Islam herself on the occasion of her marriage. This is believable when you find out that the government of Saudi Arabia invited her to visit the Kaaba. Non-muslims are not allowed into Mecca much less into the presence of the holy black stone. (Not that the Saud family was too religious to ask French troops to take care of that nasty rebellion for them in 1979.)

Indira was very much in love with Feroze Khan, son of Nawab Khan, the Moslem family grocer. Feroze sympathized with Indira who too had been practically abandoned by the aunts; the mother was eternally sick, and the widowed father was always chasing all kinds of women, breeding bastards. Her education was neglected. She was admitted in Oxford but driven out from there for non-performance. She was then admitted in Tagore's Shantiniketan but was chased out from there too for bad conduct. She had no proper education and was brought up almost as an orphan.

Indira was fully conscious of her half-Islamic parentage. Against Kamala's wishes, she married Feroze, whose own mother was a converted Parsi woman married to Nawab Khan. As soon as they got married in England, the old crow, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ordered Jawahar to force the bride and the bridegroom to change the name Khan, by an affidavit, to Ghandy, a Parsi sounding name. But the not so intelligent grocer's boy got the name changed to Gandhi instead; since then India had in its destiny a half-mussalmani to become its PM for many years under a false name and to promote the cause of Islam.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about this swordoftruth website. I'm just presenting this as a matter of interest.
Sonia Gandhi (now I'm confused about where to put the h) was born in Italy and it is said her husband Rajiv converted to Catholicism when he married her. Their daughter Priyanka/Bianca seems to be Catholic as well.

Priyanka's wedding itself was one of the biggest exercises in fooling the public. Her husband Robert Vadhra is a baptized devout Catholic, the son of Rajinder and Maureen Vadhra who are both confirmed Catholics. This detail can be attested from the fact that the Delhi archdiocese had made a big ruckus about the fact that Priyanka was not baptized when they sought permission to get married in a Catholic ceremony at the Sacred Heart Cathedral of Delhi. Robert had to produce his Baptism papers and Priyanka had to produce proof of her conversion to Christianity, before they could be married in the Catholic ceremony at Sacred Heart Cathedral at 10.30 am on February 5, 1997. This was hastily followed by a publicity exercise where the already married couple was shown being wedded in "traditional Hindu style" on February 18, 1997 at Sonia's Bungalow on 10 Janpath.

This is Indian secularism. Hindu nationalists don't trust it one bit because they see secularism as seeking to undermine and destroy the great Hindu tradition of tolerance and substitute for it a hypocritical multiple-standard "separate-but-equal" approach to cultural diversity.
The Nehru-Ghandi dynasty is the ruling family of Indian secularism. They seem to convert to whatever religion is convenient for them, which is fine -- perhaps they consider themselves Hindus in a sense that lets them "add on" a religion without forsaking their own gods. So why do they seek to hide their Muslim and Christian ties? Wouldn't they want to be a shining example of diversity?
More inportantly, there is a huge distinction between Hindu Dharma and Islam. The Indian Supreme Court has formally included tolerance and acceptance of many paths as part of the very definition of Hindu Dharma. Islam, on the other hand, considers itself the One True Religion which all must eventually acknowledge, with a fair amount of scripturally justified and mandated violence and intolerance. If Indira Ghandi ever believed, or was compelled to act as an agent for any entity that believes in the Islamic view, then her actions must be looked at in the light of new information on her motivations.

Humiliation-avoidance: the engine that drives public policy?

2005-06-28T06:38:00.000-07:00

"I was publicly humiliated," Abdul said in her closing statement. "That is why with an open heart and a selfless agenda, I implore you to pass this bill."

That was the closing statement in entertainer Paula Abdul's testimony before the California Senate Business and Professions Committee on the subject of unsanitary nail salons.
Seems she got the mother of all nail infections and that, along with her celebrity, gave her standing to testify on this subject with which probably a lot of people have had experience.
What I found remarkable is that in her final appeal, she used humiliation of all things as the reason to regulate nail salons. Not health or hygiene, either her own or that of future nail salon customers. And then she called that a selfless agenda. I couldn't imagine a more selfish agenda.
How these things usually play out is: someone in the spotlight says something boneheaded and because words do mean something, someone else points out to them what they just said. Then we get protestations of "I was taken out of context" because the speaker cannot seem to grasp that words do mean things.
Anyhow, most of us care more about the pain of a wicked nail infection than the pain of public humiliation, which is why we have so little sympathy for a terrorist with panties on his head.

Bono's world turned upside down

2005-06-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

5/06/2005

U2 frontman Bono was horrified during a visit to Ethiopia, when he saw local women pelting a breast-feeding aid worker with stones.

The American woman was oblivious of the offence she was causing, and had to escape the angry onslaught from female Muslims who had no qualms about injuring her or her baby.

Bono recalls: "I remember one vision of the people who are with World Vision, which is an American aid agency.

"One of the women was breast-feeding a child on the horse. She was so comfortable. She didn't mean to be insensitive.

"But the Muslim women did not like this and came out and started throwing stones at her because she was showing her breasts."

But but but! Breasfeeding is natural. It's what tribal womyn do. How could these Muslim womyn intend to cause harm to a fellow womyn and her baby just for breastfeeding?
Could it be... the Islam, stupid?

An anectode from the mullahs' sadistic regime

2005-05-29T06:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a single mullah serves as judge, jury and executioner. Hadji Rezai is the mullah judge of the small city of Neka. When Atefeh Rajabi, a young and psychologically unstable girl, refused to be his "temporary" wife, Rezai framed her with the blessings of the high court in Tehran. Allegations of sexual misconduct were fabricated against her, so that she could be brought to “justice” according to the scorned Rezai, who personally hung the noose around Atefeh’s neck. Rezai’s last words to the dying young girl: “This will teach you to disobey!”

Under the global caliphate envisioned by the Salafists/Caliphists, this is completely permissible. Even if there were a passage in the Koran against such abuse of power, and even if it were unabrogated by a later verse and even if it did not have its meaning watered down by a hadith, who would enforce mercy for women, children and the infirm?
Every story like this, and there are millions of them, clearly illustrates that Islamic states have no checks and balances against the worst of human nature, no protection for its weaker members. To think that a global caliphate would be any different is magical thinking.
I have friends who may be typical of many liberal people in America. They respect Islam as they do all religions, because they value freedom of religion. They respect and value people of other races. They care for the environment and they care for women's rights. They haven't looked deeper into Islam, and why should they have? (Aside from 9/11, there is no reason for them to have examined it. Why they have become deeply involved and learned about the logging issue but not the Islam issue is a good question but I'll save it for another time.)
A short conversation with some of my friends revealed to me that they apparently believe that either Muslims or Arabs (I did not quite get which they meant but am leaning towards Arabs) are an agricultural people who live in harmony with the environment. From which they jumped to the conclusion that under this ideal agricultural society, women would have equal rights and children would be cherished.
There are so many fallacies in this line of reasoning, it alarms me. Suffice it to say, I document these grisly scenes to refute the idea that there is any reason to prefer the Islamic society over the perfectly good one we have right now.

Women's empowerment and the reconstruction of Sudan

2005-04-06T12:39:00.000-07:00

Southern Sudanese women -- of the oppressed, rebelling Christian South of Sudan -- will be going to Oslo to ask donors to focus on women's empowerment.

Next week's meeting, set for Monday and Tuesday, will gather some 60 delegates including UN chief Kofi Annan, Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha, SPLM/A leader John Garang and ministers from bilateral and multilateral donors like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
They will be looking at an assessment that says Sudan needs nearly eight billion dollars (six billion euros) for reconstruction and development over the next two years to recover from the north-south civil war.
The international community is being asked to fund about 2.6 billion of that with the rest coming from Sudan's own resources, particularly oil revenue, according to the assessment which was released in early March.

I have avoided using the term "women's rights" because I am beginning to examine the idea that women's empowerment is a right. In my mind a right is something natural that simply exists without your reaching out and making it happen. But it could be my personal definition of a right that is ... wrong. The term certainly gets misused a lot by people who want to wrap themselves in the victim mantle, and so I am becoming allergic to it.

Pray for Hanifan

2005-02-08T15:42:00.000-08:00

Hanifan Bibi is a 55-year old Christian mother who worked as a servant in a Muslim home.

On the 12th of January, 2005, Sharing Life Ministry Pakistan found out that some Christians had been taken to the hospital with serious injuries. They went to the hospital and talked to Hanifan's family.

Seems she and her family had been kidnapped and tortured by her Muslim employer and some of his gangster friends because Hanifan wouldn't provide Christian girls as sex slaves for them.

Aslam Masih told “Hanifan bibi had been working in Saeedan Batni’s house in Iqbal town as a maid servant. On 10th Jan. 2005, Saeedan Batni with Mohammad Baber, Mohammad Amjaad, Mohammad Rashid in car # LRB-5259 and other car was without # plate came to Hanifan’s house. They broke the door of Hanifan Bibi’s house and took Hanifan Bibi, Pervaiz Masih, Kashif Masih and Kala Masih to an unknown place.
There were empty wine bottles in a large number. Some heavy physique gangsters were present there. Moreover, 16,17 young girls were also sitting over there. I came to know later that four/five girls were Christians”. Kashif told that “ my clothes were taken off, they hanged me by tying my feet with cord and turned my body upside down on the ceiling. Those cruel people started beating me with hot iron pipe. While Pervaiz and Kala were beaten with sticks, pipe and bats. They kicked us very brutally and cruelly.”
Kashif told SLMP team “when they were beating Hanifan bibi, they were continuously saying that she did not bring Christian girls so this was her punishment.

Read the whole thing, won't you. The language is a little hard to follow but you'll get the gist about the 16 or 17 young girls, the attempted extortion, the humiliation, the chili peppers up the anus, the threats to frame an old Christian woman for theft, the impossibility of getting justice from a police force that has the Muslim thugs in for tea.
This is life in Pakistan for Christians.
As a poster said on the Pim Fortuyn forums, "Pakistan is a Muslim country, this is how they treat their minorities. Look how they treat you now, don't forget how bad it can get."

Barbarians of Fallujah

2004-11-15T07:56:00.000-08:00

Marines found the butchered body of a foreign woman in the street. Arms and legs hacked off, disemboweled, her throat slashed, and decomposing. And it seems the barbarians hauled out her decomposing body just in order to throw it into the street for the Marines to find.

In the south of the city, where insurgents regrouped over the weekend, the butchered body of a blonde-haired Caucasian woman was found Sunday lying on a street.

"It is a female ... missing all four appendages, with a slashed throat and disemboweled, she has been dead for a while but only in this location for a day or two," said a Navy Corps hospital apprentice who had inspected the body.

Two foreign women have been abducted in Iraq and remain missing: Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole, has blonde hair, and British aid worker Margaret Hassan, 59, has chestnut-coloured hair.

Mubarak eulogizes Arafat

2004-11-11T10:05:00.000-08:00

At dawn, we lost President Yasser Arafat, who we knew as a defender of justice, as a man who strove towards peace, and resisted occupation, and as a man who looked for international legitimacy.
History will judge him as a brave man who defended his people.

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak
Holy Effin' Crap! No he was not!
He was a blood-sucking terrorist who ruined his people's future. Jesus Christ, Mubarak. Defender of justice???? and this is a country that supposedly has a peace treaty with Israel. Feh.

Yahoo UK disrespecting President Bush

2004-11-08T08:16:00.000-08:00

This was on the front page of yahoo.co.uk today. I find it disrespectful. Do we make jokes about the resemblance of the name of the president of Indonesia to that of a Flintstones character?
Does Yahoo UK intend to mock the overwhelmingly ugly face of the old terrorist Yasser Arafat?
If not then why not? Oh I get it -- because Bush is eeeeeevilllll.

Europe seethes

2004-11-03T07:53:00.000-08:00

Some choice comments from the BBC News site:

The voice of America indeed - but which America? How so many people voted for Bush is mind-boggling. An absolute disaster. This is a tragic day for our planet and for all of us, wherever we live.
Raymond Perrez, Toulouse, France

If Bush wins, as it seems now, we will have more problems. For the world it's a sad day. The conflicts with Europe will widen. And the hatred against the US will also widen. Just hope for 2008 and Hillary Clinton.
Peter, Gothenburg, Sweden

It is "almost" unbelievable that the American people have once again chosen to allow Bush control of power for another four years. I feel as though they have turned their back on the international community, that they have forgotten that the world is small place, where America's actions affect us all.
Jennifer, Canadian living in Munich, Germany

I am not a US voter but my wife is. It is unbelievable how many Americans voted for Bush again regardless their experiences from the last 4 years. If Bush wins again that is bad news for the rest of the world.
Christoph Thuemmler, Edinburgh, Scotland

I just woke up to find Bush in the lead. I feel physically sick. I wish I could go back to bed and get up in another four years.
Sarah, Brussels

Well it looks like we have to put up with another four years of Bush. I think that in a country like America, it was naive to believe that Bush would lose elections. I think most Americans approve of the arrogance that Bush portrays to the world. Today, I wish Soviet Union never disintegrated and there would have been some balance still in this world.
Let's hope Bush learns from the mistakes made in the first term and we get a more peaceful and balanced world in the next four years. Maybe just like Reagan, Bush would be less radical in the next term. What's funny, except for America, Kerry would certainly have won an election anywhere else in the world.
HA Qureshi, Islamabad, Pakistan

UN ignores its own resolution on war rape while some UN "peacekeepers" use their position to get themselves some tender young ass

2004-10-29T13:12:00.000-07:00

It's irritating to even have to point out yet againg how corrupt and amoral the UN is.
Some of the salient points from the report:
Thoraya Obaid, head of the U.N. Population Fund, scolded the UN for not enforcing their own resolution on protecting women in conflict zones.

"From Afghanistan to Liberia, from Colombia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from Burundi to Darfur — the list goes on and on — women and girls, and even men and boys, are being subject to sexual violence, torture and slavery that defy the imagination and bring into sharp focus the cruelty that human beings can inflict on each other," Obaid said.

Obaid noted that in Rwanda, two-thirds of the women who were raped during the 1994 genocide were infected with the HIV virus "and they are dying slow painful deaths from AIDS."

"It is truly sad, and terribly angering, to see the tremendous needs. But it is even more shocking to witness the response so far, which remains completely inadequate," she added.

Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, urged the Security Council "to use all its influence to generate the political will, as well as the financial support, to protect women's rights and ensure women's access to justice."

Many speakers lamented that the resolution's call for countries in conflict to give women a major voice at peace talks has gone largely unheeded — as has its call for the United Nations to give women top jobs in conflict resolution.

Sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers and humanitarian personnel is also far too widespread, he said, citing about 70 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse against U.N. peacekeeping personnel this year just in the Congolese city of Bunia.

Classrooms in grip of red terror

2004-09-28T16:25:00.000-07:00

NAMITA CHOURASIA
Dhanbad, Sept. 28:

Students are fleeing government-run schools in extremism-ravaged Topchanchi and Baghmara blocks.

Almost all the 20 education institutions — both primary and middle-level — in the area have witnessed nil attendance over the past fortnight following reports that Naxalites have demanded 10 children from each school to join the underground outfits.

The two blocks are in the grip of fear ever since rumours that the extremists have sent notices to the schools to hand over 10 children started doing the rounds.

The rumours surfaced a fortnight ago when some students of Rajganj Middle School in the area claimed that the school walls were splashed with extremist slogans demanding children from each school.

Villagers alleged that “suspected” rebels had tried to abduct two children last week.

Thirteen-year-old Swapna Kumari, a Class VII student of Bokathan Middle School, nearly 25 km from the district headquarters in Dhanbad, refused to go to school after a “stranger” tried to drag her away at 10 am from near her school. “I was walking to my school when a fierce-looking man with a bushy moustache and beard tried to take me away after threatening me with dire consequences if I raised an alarm. But I managed to escape. I don’t want to go school again as dubious people are waiting to abduct us,” Swapna said. The child, according to her parents, is still in a state of shock.

Kamli Devi, the mother of a school-going boy in neighbouring Banspahar village, said the Naxalites have sent the villagers a message. “But we don’t want to comply,’’ she added. Christina Tudu, principal of Rajganj Middle School, which controls eight other schools in the villages, attributes the poor attendance rate to examination phobia.

But after persistent queries, she admitted that the students were probably scared by reports that Naxalites were planning to abduct students.

“The students are not coming as they fear abduction by Naxalites. Of the 450 students registered in the school, nobody turned up on Saturday. Today 40 students attended school after their guardians were convinced,” Tudu said.

Six teachers of the school today cycled to the remote villagers to speak to the guardians individually and virtually ferried 40 students.

“I am going to the nearby villages almost every day to allay their fears, but the villagers refuse are reluctant. I feel the rumours are the handiwork of mischief-mongers,” said Ram Ratan Pathak, a Rajganj middle school teacher.

Officer in-charge of Rajganj police station Ram Lalla Paswan said he has not received any complaints.

Who are the Naxalites?

Rather historical

2004-09-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase the Dead Parrot Society, because Ryan puts it so well:
CBS has been arrogant, diversionary, misleading, bullheaded, dismissive, shameless, narcissistic, secretive and unethical. Good Lord, the press is supposed to illuminate that kind of behavior, not illustrate it.
CBS has screwed all of journalists over -- both with the way it ran the story and with the way it's handled the backlash. The network's behavior has confirmed every single nasty thing that everybody believes about the media, and it's not like the media has a nice fat reserve of goodwill to squander right now.
And a commenter adds:

An interesting question: how much of the media reporting of the 20th century was based on fraud and forgery, which couldn't, prior to the development of the internet, be exposed?

History marches on. I tend to agree with those who think this changes the nature of journalism forever. No one I have spoken to in person or on the internet fails to grasp what the main issue of the Dan Rather/faked Guard documents story is.

Nigerian transvestite lives among Muslim women for seven years

2004-08-26T08:23:00.000-07:00

According to a story by freelance Agence France Press reporter Aminu Abubakar out of Kano in northern Nigeria, a teenage boy who had been living as a girl was recently exposed.

Abubakar Hamza lived as "Kawajo, a young woman who sold magical charms and potions to the married women of Kano" after he ran away at age 12. "When my fathers disapproval of my dressing like a girl became unbearable I left home and lived with a family in a nomadic settlement, dressing and behaving like other girls in the family," he said.

Now 19, he has lived ever since among married women in purdah -- the practice of screening women from men or strangers by means of a curtain or all-enveloping clothes.

He even attracted unsuspecting suitors among the young men of the city of Kano, all the while struggling to conceal the attraction he felt towards his female hosts.

But his life fell apart on April 22, when a visitor from his home village recognised him at a naming ceremony held by one of the families which had been taken in by his winning performance.

He was forced to strip and the tissue paper padding his bra was discovered.

That must have been an embarrassing scene. Worthy of a summer comedy, perhaps.
"Kawajo? But but but... my daughters have been sharing a room with you! Saaay what's going on here?" Benny Hill type chase ensues.

Kawajo had such a fetching manner under her burqa that she attracted suitors who gave her gifts and money.

Abdullahi Ahmad, a 35-year-old man who asked for Hamza's hand in marriage, said: "There was no way one would differentiate Kawajo from any girl in the neighbourhood.

"She walked and talked like a girl and I could not resist making advances to her, although I knew she had rebuffed many such offers," he added.

"The competition between two friends in this neighbourhood over Kawajo degenerated into a quarrel and they stopped talking to each other for weeks.

"But when it became known that Kawajo is a man and not a woman they just laughed over it and resumed their friendship," Ahmad smiled.

Kawajo made a livelihood by accepting gifts from smitten suitors and by working her mojo for the women (and not in the dirty way you are thinking)

"I get my inspiration on medicine from spirits who work in collaboration with me to assist people. Their intention is just to help women," he said.

"I lived with my women hosts, cooked with them, ate with them. I slept on the same bed with them and plaited their hair," he said.

"They would change their dress in my presence, exposing their nakedness since they thought I was a woman. But I dared not sleep with any of them for fear that my true identity could be exposed," he explained.

"And whenever I sensed my disguise was threatened or I found my sexual need for my host becoming hard to control, I would leave because any attempt to make love to my host would blow my cover," he said.

According to one of his unsuspecting hosts, his self-control did not fail.

"She lived in my house for four years and never showed any trace of manhood and none of my three daughters who shared bed with her ever complained of any funny behaviour," Muhammad, a grocer, told the court.

After "she" was found out, a poster with her likeness was even printed up and is selling for 100 naira (70 cents). Since "she" faces a 10,000 naira (70 dollar) fine or a year in jail, she just has to sell, what? 100 posters to pay her fine off. Shoot, I'd buy one of those.
Which brings me to my final point.
A young man was caught disguising himself in order to get into the women's quarters, deceive them, see them naked, and sleep in the same bed with them. And he faces a fine or a year in jail according to the Sharia court.
A woman who was inappropriately close to a member of the opposite sex, with no deception on her part -- let us say she was forcibly raped -- faces death at the hands of her family.
If this cute little transvestite had managed to seduce anyone in the harem, do you think any woman would be stupid enough to admit it?

What kind of a "women's rights activist" works to marry a rape victim off to her rapist?

2004-08-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

Rape victim marries jailed attacker to avoid Muslim shun
Shaikh Azizur Rahman In Calcutta

On the order of the court in Berhampur, Ahammad Shaikh, 30, tied the knot with Sabina Khatoon, 18, inside the local prison where he is serving his sentence.

Shaikh kidnapped Khatoon - the daughter of a daily wage labourer - from her village and raped her in a nearby forest in March this year.

Then, with permission from the court, an activist carrying out work among rural women, approached Shaikh inside the jail and informed him of the woman’s miseries after being ‘tainted’ by his rape.

The women’s rights activist suggested that Shaikh marry Khatoon.

Khatoon, who looked very happy after the marriage, said: "For that act [of rape] I hated him. Sometimes I felt like I wanted to tear him to pieces.

"But I have a different feeling for him now. I have forgiven him because he has chosen me as his wife. I have to love him now."

In recent weeks, at the order of the courts, at least three such marriages between rapists and their victims have taken place inside jails in eastern India.

Sigh.

How Biblical. This is just what it says to do in the Old Testament. Why don't American courts enforce this?

What kind of women's rights activist works to get a rape victim married off to her rapist? Does the international activist community know what this person is up to?

The poor girl was delivered into the hands of her rapist by her very own parents. The man admitted "I took advantage of her weakness and assaulted her while she was alone." So now she gets to sit at her new in-laws' house waiting for the man has already taken advantage of her weakness once to come get her again. And the father who initially appeared to be on her side is the one that handed her over.

Abu Sayyaf: Good Muslims, unless the women captives are wearing something enticing

2004-08-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

A former American hostage who returned to the Philippines to testify in court revealed that her Muslim extremist captors violated their own "code of honor" and abused women hostages, court documents showed Tuesday.

Missionary Gracia Burnham, from Rose Hill, Kan._near Wichita_testified in a local court last Thursday, but for security reasons journalists were not allowed to witness her testimony on her year-long nightmare in the jungles of the southern Philippines. The court released an official transcript Tuesday.

Burnham, 45, was abducted by Abu Sayyaf rebels with her husband, Martin, and 18 other people from a Philippine resort on May 27, 2001. She was wounded but was rescued during an army operation on June 7, 2002. Her husband and a Filipino captive were killed in the crossfire during the rescue and a number of hostages, including another American, were beheaded during the captivity.

"They were not true to their word," Mrs. Burnham told a prosecution lawyer. "One of the first things they told us on the speedboat was they were talking about their code of honor, how outstanding Muslim men they were."

She quoted one of the Abu Sayyaf leaders, Abu Solaiman, as saying: "Could we ever touch your women? Of course not, the Koran forbids that."

"They lied many times," she added, without giving details.

Burnham was invited to testify under a mutual legal assistance treaty between Washington and Manila. The trial is part of the Philippines' quest to impose justice on suspected Muslim militants from the Abu Sayyaf group accused of mass kidnappings, deadly bombings and beheadings.

The hostage crisis prompted Washington to provide counterterrorism training for Philippine forces against the al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf.

Twenty Years Old in the Middle East

2004-08-02T20:29:00.000-07:00

This documentary by Lebanese-borm filmmaker Amal Moghaizel is on TV right now. It interviews a number of young Arabs and Persians in their early 20s about what they want and expect out of life. They feel powerless although they go on with their lives as best they can.
They are so conflicted about America. They hate it and yet they love it. They love being Arabs and yet they wish they were anything but Arabs. They express disappointment in and distrust of America -- as their speech is peppered with American phrases such as "family and kids", "country of peace". One group of friends sat around a table with the Sudanese girl enumerating all the substitutes for American items she found. They break into laughter at how Zam-Zam Cola tastes like cough syrup and profess they don't miss Coke and got used to the Zam-Zam. The other girl's father works at Pepsi and she opines that they don't think of McDonalds and Pepsi as being American things anymore because they employ Arabs and provide benefits in their lives. A waiter brings burgers. The boy finally speaks up to say -- perhaps the burger buns made him think of it -- that they can't afford to boycott American wheat, but they do have a valuable commodity in oil at least.
Fascinating how American culture is so woven into the fabric of the lives of these Arab kids. The Syrian medical student insists that Americans are rich and ill-educated (not saying she's wrong) and that all the achievements of America can be attributed to immigrants (well yeah! we're all immigrants and it has enriched our nation in so may tangible and intangible ways. Maybe that's why we don't try too hard to keep people out. It has been a win-win situation for so long, we don't want that to end).
The Lebanese boy whose whole family speaks French at home goes to Sabra-Chatila to teach kids to draw. He says it's another window for the kids, a way to create opportunity. What a good young man, I think. I want to go help right now. I want to send a massive peace corps of helpful American twenty-somethings.
These are good kids in a difficult situation. They are not angels. They drink some of the kool-aid -- a few experiences and a few dark nights of the soul could send most of them down the path taken by Hamas and Hizbollah, but they are not nearly there yet. They want to be proud of who they are. They want better leadership. They do some of their own thinking. They are just people.

When 20 Years Old in the Middle East was over, I switched to CSPAN and caught Dr. Rice talking about the government's plan for outreach to the Muslim world to try to improve the economic situation, the situation of women, and so forth.
Rice said there is no greater outreach than to say that there is a future in freedom for Arabs built on democratic values and economic opportunity.
Governments have a way of accomplishing approximately a quarter of what they announce they are going to do, usually with ambiguous results. So this "outreach" isn't going to amount to much. The people, united, could do a whole lot more.
It saddens me that these fanatical jihadi freaks with their attacks and these corrupt Arab politicians with their tribal mentality create an atmosphere that is stifling ordinary Arabs. Arabs should be proud of their strength that they can survive all that.
It's too bad they don't see that their allegiances don't have to be along ethnic or religious lines, that America the country of immigrants is the model for helping them free themselves of that. Here, no one expects you to tolerate ill treatment or poor leadership from someone just because they share an ethnic identity with you. Here, American values of tolerance would actually allow more religious freedom for Muslims than the fundamentalists could ever bear. We would stand up for one's right to practice Islam however one sees fit, the fanatics exert pressure to make everyone's Islam the same extremist type.
Anyway. It was a decent film.

Sarasota principal defends Bush from "Fahrenheit 9/11" portrayal

2004-07-18T22:15:00.000-07:00

By Associated Press
June 24, 2004
SARASOTA — Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11" criticizes President Bush for listening to Sarasota second-graders read a story for nearly seven minutes after learning the nation was under attack on Sept. 11, 2001.
But Gwendolyn Tose'-Rigell, the principal at Emma E. Booker Elementary School, says Bush handled himself properly.
"I don't think anyone could have handled it better," Tose'-Rigell told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in a story published Wednesday. "What would it have served if he had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the room?"
Tose'-Rigell, who was at Bush's side, did not hear what White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered when he squeezed past her to tell the president of the attacks, but "I knew it was something serious."
"The president bit his lip and clenched his jaw," she said. "I didn't know what happened, whether it was something with his wife or children or something with the nation. I remember praying that God would watch over our school and protect our children."

Islam is wonderful, but I can't stand the Muslims

2004-06-27T12:04:00.000-07:00

By British convert to Islam, Michael A. Malik.
There was a white face in the mosque. You don't see very many, so I went over and asked if he was a Muslim, “I used to be, but not any more.” he said, “I thought Islam was wonderful, but I couldn't stand the Muslims”. What could I say except “I know how you feel”;. Most converts do.
Why is it that a trip to the mosque so often leaves me closer to despair than hope? Why do I so rarely feel enlightened and uplifted after conversation with my fellow Muslims, yet so often offended by their behaviour, frustrated by their mindless approach to truth, and enraged by the inadequacy of the Islam they expect me to accept?
“Brother, let me tell you the most important thing in Islam”, said the stranger who had cornered me in a Lahore coffee bar. Far from agog, I waited to hear what it might be, though experience had taught me that it was unlikely to include any of the five pillars, truth or tolerance, or the like. “The most important thing in Islam” he said “is that your wife covers her head”, a view of Islam which I had heard often from many Muslim men. In other words the most important thing in the practice of Islam is to get your wife to do it, or your children, or your grandfather, or anybody but yourself!

Back in Britain I listened to the Muslim wails. “We are losing our children! By the time they leave school they are strangers, lost to us and to Islam! What can we do?” My usual response was often faced with dismay – “I can say what I think you should do, but it's unlikely that you will do it, because it involves changing yourselves. It involves changing the way you understand your Islam”. This is not suggesting wholesale innovation, as it might seem to imply, but quite the reverse. “It is necessary to revive that Muslim community which is buried under the debris of the manmade traditions of several generations, and which is crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not remotely related to Islamic teachings, and which, in spite of all this, calls itself the ‘world of Islam’” (Qutb - Milestones).

The History of Jihad from the Christian Expositor

2004-06-26T20:27:00.000-07:00

A brief overview of jihad from a Christian perspective.

To claim that the crusades were the origin of the conflict between Islam and Christianity is historically inaccurate, for the first crusade was in 1096 AD whereas jihad had already been the major force for Islamic expansion for 500 years before this date.
The Crusades were undertaken between 1096 AD until 1270 AD and were an attempt to retake the former Christian area of Palestine. In contrast, the jihad has been underway for 1,300 years and was a clear attempt to occupy Europe, Asia and Africa, and convert these peoples to Islam by the threat of conversion or death! Why do we not hear of the Muslim capture of Jerusalem from the Christians in 638 AD, or of the capture of Spain about 70 years later, or of the subsequent 800 year occupation? It was the inroads caused by jihad against Europe that triggered Pope Urban II to call for the first Crusade in 1095 AD.
Those who bleat about past 'Colonialism' - and still throw the same charge at the USA - forget that this was never exclusively Western. Muslims colonized much of Europe in the 7th -19th centuries, and the two colonized each other in the 19th century.
In fact, Europe colonized Muslim lands mainly in the period between 1830-1960 - a period of only 130 years. [Is a colony the same as ruling a conquered land, such as Spain? You could argue it's different.]
Terror was an effective weapon used by Muhammad and caused many people to become loyal - the alternative was death. There are many examples of Muhammad's cruelty. Those whose cities and lands he invaded were tortured to reveal their hidden treasures, and tribesmen to whom he feigned hospitality were robbed and then vilely killed (by cutting off their hands and feet so they bled to death slowly). Kihouna, the Jewish chief at Khaybar, was tortured by Muhammad in order to reveal the whereabouts of his gold and, when he was dead, Muhammad married his 17 year old widow, Safiya, on the same day. The Jewish Beni Quraiza tribe were decimated, all the men being slain (~800) and their wives and children sold as slaves. The Muslim soldiers responsible received large amounts of booty but Muhammad took a fifth for himself! The Koran (Sura 33:25) praises God for the killings because they caused Muhammad to be feared. This kind of murder and intrigue, feigning peace treaties which they renége on, is typical of today's Muslim ruler.
630 AD marked the first battle outside of Arabia - against the Byzantines - in Jordan. Muhammad had set the example of aggression and ordered two campaigns just before his death in which Usama led troops to the north while Khalid captured Baghdad and, later, proved to be a very effective general of the Umayyads. Jerusalem, Damascus (635 AD) and Antioch (636 AD) fell in turn as this satanic army began to march against the world to conquer for their Moon god, Allah.
Muawiyya was active in the campaign against Syria and was declared the governor of Syria by Umar in 640 AD. By 641 AD much of Egypt and Persia had also fallen. There followed campaigns to capture the islands of Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete (649-668 AD) under the leadership of Muawiyya who launched a sea invasion during Uthman's rule, attacking Cyprus in 649, first from Saida (Lebanon) and then from Alexandria. The first major Arab naval enterprise brought great booty and the Muslims only left when the island promised to pay tribute.
Crete was raided in 653 AD and Rhodes in 653. The 'Saracens' remained there for 5 years, stripping the island bare, and melting down the giant bronze colossus (one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world). You may have thought the Taliban's desecration of the giant Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan was a novel event! Sicily was likewise raided in 668 AD.
The dream of conquering Constantinople, the greatest city of the east, began in 668 with an amphibious assault.
Legend has it that King Rodrigo of Spain seduced the daughter of Count Julian of Morocco and, in retaliation, Julian sided with the Emir Musa, Muslim ruler of North Africa, who was based in Tunisia. Musa's dream was to invade further through Spain and France and meet Muslims invading from the east, so that Islam would surround the Mediterranean. The Caliph al-Walid authorized the invasion of Spain (710-711 AD), so Musa and his commander, Tarik, with the Count Julian as advisor, crossed from Tangier to Gibralter (then called Jabil Tarik). Spain was an oppressed land in which the peasants were heavily oppressed by the aristocracy. Internal dissension was rife with many pogroms against the Jews. Under the rule of the Visigoths, who were complacent and corrupt, the lack of moral fibre showed. The first battle, on the banks of the Guadelete river, was a decisive victory for Islam. King Rodrigo was killed and his head sent back to Damascus. The Muslims renamed Iberia 'al-Andalus' and immediately began the campaign to take it all and head on for France.
The inhabitants fled and the cities and booty were taken without a fight. Musa arrived with reinforcements in 712 AD, en route to Toledo. He captured several other cities: Carmona, Medina, Sidonia, and Seville. Not surprisingly, some Jews helped the Muslims thinking they were liberators. They soon learned the folly of this belief. By 715 AD nearly all of Spain was under Muslim occupation. [I disagree. Things probably were much better in Al-Andalus for the Jews, although Muslims had the right under Sharia to oppress them and the Jews would have had no legal recourse. As the author later proves:] In 11th century Seville, Jews were not to be met with the greeting, 'Peace be unto you,' because they were not supposed to have any peace! On December 30, 1066, Joseph HaNagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada, Spain, was crucified by an Arab mob that proceeded to raze the Jewish quarter of the city and slaughter its 5,000 inhabitants. [This from that fabled land of tolerance, Andalusia.]
Muslim rulers were not anxious to convert Dhimmis (Jews and Christians living under Islamic rule) as they paid tribute and were the slave labour. They were also easy to conquer as they could not carry weapons, ride horses, wear shoes, ring church bells, wear anything green, or fight back against a Muslim assault! The word dhimmi (Arabic for 'protected person') became historically significant in 628 A.D., when Muhammad's forces defeated a Jewish tribe that lived at the oasis of Khaybar and made with them a treaty known as the dhimma. The treaty allowed Jews to continue cultivating their oasis, as long as they gave Muhammad half of their produce. [Think of the grasshoppers in A Bug's Life.] Crucially, Muhammad reserved the right to break the deal and expel the Jews whenever he wished, a ploy that Islam has worked ever since!
For orthodox Muslims, the world is divided into the dar al-Harb, land controlled by non-Muslims that forms the 'territory of war,' and the dar al-Islam, the land where Islamic law prevails. Historically, a peace is not a peace and a time of peace longer than a decade is occasion not for relaxation but for feeling inadequate and fidgety. Infidels should never be allowed to rest on their laurels, famed 14th century Muslim jurist Ibn Taymiyya asserted, for any land they possess is held illegitimately.
Faced with the knowledge of the fate that awaits those who fall under Islamic rule, Spain began the attempt to reclaim their land (the 'Reconquista') in 718 AD, but it took until 1492 AD to finally overthrow the invader! As with most resistance the fight began in a small way with Pelayo, who ruled a tiny territory and ran guerrilla raids against the Muslims. But the Islamic invasion also had other irons in the fire and began moving north towards France (718-732 AD). Al-Semak led the first invasion across the Pyrenees in 721, establishing a base at Norbonne. He was succeeded by Abderaman, who moved up the Rhône as far as Lyon and Dijon, following Muhammad's creed of especially targeting churches and monasteries, before moving on to Bordeaux. Between Poitiers and Tours, there was a clash between Abduraman and the army of Charles Martel.
In the battle of Poitiers (or Tours) Martel turned back Abderaman's advance, but heavy fighting continued in the south of France, to the west in Langredoc under ibd-al-Malik, and up the Rhône river again, then east to Piedmont in Italy. The Muslims, helped by some apostate 'Christian' allies, began quarrelling with each other and, in 737 AD, Martel recaptured Avignon and continued to recapture Muslim strongholds until he reached Marseilles (739 AD). Martel died in 741 A.D., after succeeding in driving Islam from France.
The conquest of Sicily began in 827 AD, though there had been earlier raids. The conquest took place when Admiral Euphemius of the Byzantine navy rebelled against disciplinary action taken after he married a nun! He joined up with the emir of Tunisia and a slow and bloody campaign began, replete with many massacres. From Sicily the aided Islamic army took other islands (Corsica, Malta, Sardinia, Pantellerva), and then marched on to Italy, reaching Rome and pillaging the churches of St. Peter's and St. Paul's in 846 AD. In Sicily the Arab occupation lasted 264 years, but France continued to repel the Islamic hordes until, in 1091 AD, the Normans defeated the Saracens. Muslim sailors landed at St. Tropez and began a disjointed pattern of conquest throughout the French Riviera (in the periods 898-973 AD), and in the Alps, cutting off France from Italy. There was some inter-marriage which helped turn the tide and weaken the Muslim resolve, but the influence of Rome and the spineless behaviour of other 'Christian groups' also weakened and divided Christendom.
In 961 the Byzantines had retaken Crete from the Muslims. In 1035 the Byzantine general, Giorgios Maniakes, assisted by the Viking, Harold Hadrada, invaded Sicily.
The Reconquista took hundreds of years of bitter struggle to finally rid Spain of the colonial invaders in stages:
Stage I: 710-1080 - retake about a third of Iberia;
Stage II: 1080-1210 - retake another third of Iberia, including Portugal;
Stage III: 1210-1250 - retake final third (except Grenada).
The most important battles were at Simancas, Zalaca, Alarcos, and Las Navos de Tolosa and key 'Christian' leaders were Fernando III of Castile, and Jaime I of Aragon. Most of the 'Christian' soldiers were knights of military orders (un-Scriptural sects) while the Muslims helped to destroy themselves through in-fighting.
The Mongols had been sweeping across central Asia and, in 1258, Hulagu (grandson of Ghengis Khan) took Baghdad. After the adoption of Islam the Turkish advanced their holy war on Europe and, in a short time, they became the most feared threat to Eastern Europe, twice nearly reaching Vienna.
During their over-running of central Asia the Mongols [a.k.a. Tatars] had no formal religion, practising a vague form of shamanism but, after conquering Muslim lands, they adopted Islam (mid-13th century).
1491 brought the final battle of the Mongols in Europe at Zasalvi in Poldavia, where a Polish army defeated a mixed Tatar-Turkish force. At about this time, Orkhan I, the son of Muslim ruler Othman, created the Janissary force which was originally drawn from Christian slaves removed from their families as children. They were raised to be an elite fighting corps, loyal to the sultan alone, and for the next 300 years they were the best fighting force in Europe. These Janissaries were generally 'converted' to Islam, sometimes by force, sometimes 'willingly'.
1371 saw the first major Eastern European response to jihad although the 'Christian' forces were stopped by Muslims at Cenomen. This was the first conflict between Janissaries and their 'Christian' relations, also between Turks and the Serbs. Murad cleverly intervened in the Byzantine civil war between the rival 'Johns', supporting now one, then the other. The sons of John V and Murad began having an affair and also planned to overthrow their fathers, but the coup was halted and Murad enthusiastically launched a new invasion of Europe causing Sofia to fall in 1385 and Salonika in 1387.
In 1453 Constantinople fell, unaided by any European ally except a few hundred troops from Genoa. Beset by internal quarrels, the European states did not take action until it was too late and, before they woke up, Turkey was the most powerful state in Europe. At this time Suleiman the Magnificent was far more powerful than his contemporaries, Elizabeth of England, Charles V of Austria, or Francois I of France. Europe feared the Turks for centuries and the main concern of all the European nations, and every European man and woman, was the terror of the Turks. If you wonder why so many Turks hate Europeans so much it is because they were top dogs for so many centuries and knew that Europe feared the Muslim Turks much more than they ever feared the Nazi Germans or the Communist Russians, and for a greater period of history. While the Nazi peril lasted only 10 years and Soviet imperialism lasted 70 years, the Turkish threat lasted 500 years!
On the night of 28 October the remaining citizens crowded into St. Sophia's Cathedral for a final service. The next day the city was overwhelmed, the soldiers slaughtered, the civilians enslaved, and the women raped (beginning with the convent). St. Sophia was transformed into a mosque, as it has remained to this day.
After the fall of Constantinople, Mahomet II set his sights on Rome and turned his army north toward the Balkans. In the next few years he conquered 12 kingdoms and 200 cities, first Peloponnese, the remaining part of Greece, then Bosnia. At its surrender the king and heir were promised their lives, but shortly afterwards they were executed as the Grand Mufti, in behaviour originated by the 'prophet' Muhammad, argued that agreements with unbelievers were invalid. The population generally converted to Islam so as to avoid the same fate, a crime for which the Serbs, who remained Orthodox, have never forgiven them. Serbia fell next but, for a time, Albania held out under the leadership of John Castriot (a.k.a. Skanderbeg) until 1468. Hungary, still with Janos Hunyadi at the head of the army, stood firm and called for a crusade to protect Belgrade resulting in Hunyadi's victory which proved a major setback to the Ottomans. [Janos Hunyadi had the father of Vlad the Impaler assassinated for disloyalty for sending boys into the Janissary corps of the Sultan. Vlad the Impaler and a brother were hostages to the Turks as boys and Vlad was supported by the Sultan in regaining his throne. I tell you this because as a teen I was fascinated by Dracula and so knew all about Janos Hunyadi already. It's interesting seeing him from a different perspective now.]
The Muslim fishermen of Grenada established a thriving piracy business from bases in North Africa where the chief commodity was Christian slaves from Spain and Italy. The pirates considered their actions to be jihad, citing Sura IX: 5-6: 'kill those who join other gods with God wherever ye shall find them; and seize them, besiege them, and lay wait for them with every type of ambush.'
The pirate Barbarossa, based in Algiers, brought the territory he controlled into the Ottoman Empire and then became head of Suleiman's navy.
In 1571 A.D., Pope Pius V founded 'the Holy League' in an attempt to unite Europe against the Muslim invaders. Commander-in-Chief was 25-year- old Don John of Austria (who was actually a Spaniard) and, in 1572, the league sent out a navy of 316 ships which met the Ottoman navy at Lepanto where a mammoth battle took place. The result was a 'Christian' victory that annihilated the Muslim fleet, but bad weather prevented a follow up attack on Istanbul.
In 1683 the Ottoman army, led by Kara Mustafa, besieged Vienna. Anxious not to damage the city he intended to rule, Kara Mustafa decided to starve out the inhabitants and Leopold I of Austria fled, issuing appeals for help from all over Europe. The Pope, who had sent murdering 'Crusaders' when his cult was threatened, sent prayers. The French promised not to attack Austria, but King John III of Poland (the same John Sobieski who defeated the Turks in four battles in four days a decade earlier) brought an army and, eventually, 3,000 Polish cavalry and 18,000 Polish and German infantry set out to meet 500,000 Turks. Incredibly, the Ottoman encampment was lazy and ill-planned, and the Polish force routed them in a single charge.
1699 brought the treaty of Karlowitz as the Turks sued for peace - the first time in the history of the Ottoman Empire that it had been forced to send envoys abroad to make treatise with its foes. This was the turning point and, from now on, the Turks were on the defensive.
The French occupation of Egypt commenced under Napoleon, who was unable to ally the Egyptians and this resulted, instead, in its Muslim inhabitants fiercely opposing him and calling for jihad.
Napoleon's attack on Egypt was an attempt to strike against the British in India so, when the British threatened Istanbul, the French joined the Turks, bringing weapons and modern training to the fray. The Americans also clashed with the Muslims, first over the Barbary pirates who attacked US merchants, and then after they were embarrassed by pirates capturing a frigate and holding the sailors hostage. A variety of skirmishes took place, ending with a treaty between the US and Algeria in 1815. In 1816 the British navy bombarded Algiers over its refusal to stop the practice of enslaving Christians and, in 1830, an exchange of insults between the French and Algerians deteriorated into warfare resulting in a French victory and the beginning of the French occupation of Algeria for the next 132 years. Then, in the 1880s, the French took Tunisia. All this was a disorienting change for the Muslims, for whom the natural order of things for centuries had been Muslim rulers and Christian slaves. So the shock of suddenly finding themselves underdog, as the European fighting technology outstripped that of Muslim countries, has remained with Muslims despite the situation remaining essentially unchanged for nearly 200 years.
Following the revolt of Greece the Ottoman empire plunged into a series of wars to try and regain its position of dominance:
Russo-Turkish War (1828-29)
Crimean War (1853-56)
Russo-Turkish War (1877-78)
Balkan Wars (1912-13)
World War I (1914-18)
Russia was Turkey's greatest enemy, and the Balkan states generally gained their independence because of their relationship with Russia. This growing power intimidated Britain and France enough to join the Ottomans against Russia in the Crimea. The wars were conceived almost exclusively as political struggles by the 'Christian' nations, but the rhetoric of jihad still dominated Ottoman propaganda until the mid-19th century and, in the face of revolts in Egypt, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria, and the Russian advance to Edirne (~50 miles from Istanbul), belated military reforms and savage reprisals against rebels could not keep the empire together. In India, in 1877, a gathering of Muslim clerics decided that, for their part, jihad against Britain was unnecessary, as long as she permitted the practice of Islam to her subjects. This was very 'kind' of them but, of course, they had no intention of reciprocating throughout the Muslim world.
The new Balkan states created in the first few decades of the 20th century had no experience at self-government. Their only model of government for the last few centuries had been Ottoman corruption and ruthlessness. The new borders were not drawn with intelligible divisions of ethnicity or language.
Turkey entered WW1 on the side of Germany when the sultan/caliph declared universal jihad against the enemy nations. But in general the call failed and few Muslims in these countries rebelled. The British persuaded the Arabs in turn to declare a jihad against the Ottomans and various rival factions declared jihad on one another which further weakened the empire. The remnants of Muslim power still had one last chance to reveal the legacy of Muhammad's Satanic 'gospel' in 1915, which saw one of the world's great atrocities which is still unrecognised by many so-called civilised nations. The effective massacre of one million Christian Armenians, while being deported from Turkey to Syria, was caused mainly by deprivation of food, water and clothing along the way - e.g. in one group of 18,000 Armenians, only 150 survived to reach Aleppo.
Elsewhere in Europe, 100,000 Christian Greeks were massacred by Turks at Smyrna in 1922. With the destruction of the Ottoman empire, after the last orgy of violence in Smyrna, the caliphate and the rhetoric of jihad temporarily disappeared. In fact, the new leader of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal (Attaturk) detested Islam but, during World War II, the first hints of the return of jihad appeared in Bosnia, unrecognised by most of the world as such until the Serbian-Bosnian atrocities of the 1990's led the media to re-visit the historical records to find the reason for the resumption of atrocities. In the midst of inter-ethnic violence in this region, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, everybody appeared to be killing everyone else and Muslims began banding together, forming religiously defined defence groups.
As an example of the far-reaching influences of Islamic anti-Semitism, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini (who was the uncle of another infamous anti-Semite, Yasser Arafat) travelled to Yugoslavia to preach jihad against the Jews and other enemies of Islam, taking the side of Nazi Germany because they promised a 'final solution to the Jewish problem.' The Nazi S.S. leader, Heinrich Himmler, explained that 'solution': 'The Jewish race is in the process of being exterminated ... that is our program.. .a splendid page in our history.' Himmler cabled Haj Amin the welcome news: 'The National Socialist Party has inscribed on its flag 'the extermination of world Jewry.'' Our party sympathizes with the fight of the Arabs.. .against the foreign Jew.' On Radio Berlin, March 1, 1944, the Mufti, Arafat's uncle, issued the following call: 'Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them.
Islam itself is the major obstacle to peace in the Middle East. The reason is simple: hatred of Israel is central to Islam and is preached in every mosque. The Koran falsely claims that God promised the land of Palestine not to the Jews but to the Arabs. Thus Israel's very existence contradicts Islam and must be dealt with in the manner which the Koran decrees for all non-Muslims ('infidels'): death!

Outside the scope of this author's history is the long Hindu struggle against Islamic conquest. The author also mentions no details of the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of Hamas and Al Quaeda. Both these are subjects for other posts.
Does it help to see that jihad began with Muhammad and never ceased in all of history? Does it open your eyes to the seriousness of the threat we face now?
I think we're an ahistorical people. Basically it doesn't matter much to us what happened in the past. Ok, I'm not condemning that.
But we should be concerned about what happens in the future because that's what's going to happen to us. And the past can give us an indicatin of what might happen in the future. So if Muslims have been in a neverending struggle to subdue the world for Islam, suppose we take them at their word when they say that is still their goal?
I don't know about you but I just don't want that. They destroyed the Colossus of Rhodes and the Buddhas in Afghanistan. What will happen in 20 to 40 years to the *naked* Venus de Milo, when the population of France is majority Muslim? Does the Louvre ship her for safekeeping to the United States or just surrender her to Muslim fundamentalists for destruction? Can French farmers afford to pay the dhimmi tax?
Change is good if there is a hope of something better but a Muslim takeover is not for the better. Muslim countries are shitty little countries full of corruption and unhappiness, nothing like the great democratic experiment we are conducting here in the west. We may not be perfect but what we have is better than what they have. We just need enough unity to see that and fight for it.

Three including two women killed for honour

2004-01-10T04:41:00.000-08:00

LAHORE: The second incident of honour killing of 2004 on Saturday claimed three more lives including two women in the Manga Mandi police precincts.
Muhammad Labha from Sandha had allegedly developed illicit relations with Shakura Bibi, wife of Ishfaq, a landlord of Loharanwala Khu in Sunder.
Shakura's husband became furious on seeing his wife with another man in a compromising position in a room in the neighbourhood. He picked up his rifle and opened fire on them, as a result both died instantly. After hearing the gunshots, neighbour Kubra tried to overpower Mr Ishfaq but he also shot her dead and escaped.
The bodies were removed to the city mortuary for an autopsy. Police has registered a case on the complaint of Kubra's brother Mushtaq.
The first honour killing took place in the Burki police precincts in which a youth stabbed his elder sister Shabana, 17, suspecting that she had developed illicit relations with a neighbour.
Muhammad Imran of Village Tera stabbed her to death after exchanging hot words with her."

Malaysian city rules on women

2004-01-05T22:43:00.000-08:00

By Jonathan Kent
BBC in Kuala Lumpur
The Islamic government in the Malaysian city of Kuala Terengganu has laid down strict new laws about what non-Muslim women can wear to work.
The rules, which ban even moderately revealing clothing, are an unprecedented attempt to impose the party's values on the personal lives of non-believers in Malaysia.
Malaysia's opposition Islamic party, PAS, has been trying to convince the country's non-Muslims that it will respect their way of life in those areas where it holds power.
But new rules from the PAS-controlled city council in Kuala Terengganu governing how women should dress for work will undermine that claim.
Even non-Muslims will be banned from wearing short sleeved blouses, tight jeans, skirts with slits, or skirts cut above the knee.
Muslim women will have to wear a tudong, a headscarf drawn tightly about the face.
The traditional loosely draped Malay headscarf will be banned and the rules will apply to all work places.
With an election on the horizon, this move will be leapt on by the national government as proof that PAS will trample on the freedoms of non-Muslim Malaysians who make up almost half the population.
PAS has proposed a two-tier system, where Islamic hudud laws will be imposed only on Muslims in states where they are in a large majority.
However recent moves in Terengganu - one of two states controlled by PAS - point to a more conservative agenda.
The state government has decided to close down karaoke lounges and snooker halls and to bar Muslims from all premises where liquor is sold.
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I never find a need to comment on any of these news.

Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam

2004-01-05T22:28:00.000-08:00

excerpts from Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam
By Koenraad Elst
Published By The Voice Of India
New Delhi, India
Negation of the Historical role of Muslims in India
Since about 1920 an effort has been going on in India to rewrite history and to deny the millennium-long attack of Islam on Hinduism. Today, most politicians and English-writing intellectuals in India will go out of their way to condemn any public reference to this long and painful conflict in the strongest terms. They will go to any length to create the illusion of a history of communal amity between Hindus and Muslims.
no one has yet made the effort of tabulating the reported massacres and proposing a reasonable estimate of how many millions exactly must have died in the course of the Islamic campaign against Hinduism (such research is taboo). On top of these there is a similar number of abductions and deportations to harems and slave-markets, as well as centuries of political oppression and cultural destruction.
The American historian Will Durant summed it up like this:"The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within."
The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for the Hindus a pure struggle of life and death. Entire cities were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers deported as slaves. Every new invader made (often literally) his hills of Hindus skulls. Thus, the conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter. The Bahmani sultans (1347-1480) in central India made it a rule to kill 100,000 captives in a single day, and many more on other occasions. The conquest of the Vijayanagar empire in 1564 left the capital plus large areas of Karnataka depopulated. And so on.
But the Indian Pagans were far too numerous and never fully surrendered. What some call the Muslim period in Indian history, was in reality a continuous war of occupiers against resisters, in which the Muslim rulers were finally defeated in the 18th century. Against these rebellious Pagans the Muslim rulers preferred to avoid total confrontation, and to accept the compromise which the (in India dominant) Hanifite school of Islamic law made possible. Alone among the four Islamic law schools, the school of Hanifa gave Muslim rulers the right not to offer the Pagans the sole choice between death and conversion, but to allow them toleration as zimmis (protected ones) living under 20 humiliating conditions, and to collect the jizya (toleration tax) from them.
It is because of Hanifite law that many Muslim rulers in India considered themselves exempted from the duty to continue the genocide on the Hindus (self-exemption for which they were persistently reprimanded by their mullahs). Moreover, the Turkish and Afghan invaders also fought each other, so they often had to ally themselves with accursed unbelievers against fellow Muslims. After the conquests, Islamic occupation gradually lost its character of a total campaign to destroy the Pagans. Many Muslim rulers preferred to enjoy the revenue from stable and prosperous kingdoms, and were content to extract the jizya tax, and to limit their conversion effort to material incentives and support to the missionary campaigns of sufis and mullahs (in fact, for less zealous rulers, the jizya was an incentive to discourage conversions, as these would mean a loss of revenue). The Moghul dynasty (from 1526 onwards) in effect limited its ambition to enjoying the zimma system, similar to the treatment of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman empire. Muslim violence would thenceforth be limited to some slave-taking, crushing the numerous rebellions, destruction of temples and killing or humiliation of Brahmins, and occasional acts of terror by small bands of raiders. A left-over from this period is the North-Indian custom of celebrating weddings at midnight: this was a safety measure against the Islamic sport of bride-catching.
Modern India
There is a strange alliance between the Indian Communist parties and the Muslim fanatics. In the forties the Communists gave intellectual muscle and political support to the Muslim League's plan to partition India and create an Islamic state. After independence, they successfully combined (with the tacit support of Prime minister Nehru) to sabotage the implementation of the constitutional provision that Hindi be adopted as national language, and to force India into the Soviet-Arab front against Israel.
Under Nehru's rule these Marxists acquired control of most of the educational and research institutes and policies.
Moreover, they had an enormous mental impact on the Congress apparatus: even those who formally rejected the Soviet system, thought completely in Marxist categories.
After postulating that conflicts between Hindus and Muslims as such were non-existent before the modern period, the negationists are faced with the need to explain how this type of conflict was born after centuries of a misunderstood non-existence. The Marxist explanation is a conspiracy theory: the separate communal identity of Hindus and Muslims is an invention of the sly British colonialists. They carried on a divide and rule policy, and therefore they incited the communal separateness. As the example par excellence, prof. R.S. Sharma mentions the 19th-century 8-volume work by Elliott and Dowson, The History of India as Told by its own Historians. This work does indeed paint a very grim picture of Muslim hordes who attack the Pagans with merciless cruelty. But this picture was not a concoction by the British historians: as the title of their work says, they had it all from indigenous historiographers, most of them Muslims.
Yet, the negationist belief that the British newly created the Hindu-Muslim divide has become an article of faith with everyone in India who calls himself a secularist.

A girl is like a glass plate

2004-01-04T20:32:00.000-08:00

Sirhan Abdulla's 16-year-old sister Yasmine was a victim of rape. This brought unbearable shame to the family.

Am I the only one who cannot even begin to grasp how a girl's rape would shame a family? Maybe they are ashamed that she was inadequately protected. Maybe they feel horrible that they were not there for her and desperately want to become stronger to protect their remaining daughters. But nooooooo

'We were in hell,' recalled Abdulla. 'It was like we were being turned on a spit. My father got diabetes from the stress. My mother got diabetes from the stress. It was all because of this problem.' As news spread through the community, Yasmine knew she faced certain death. With no safe place to go, police placed her into protective custody. And nearly a month later, she was released to her father. But only after he signed a written guarantee that no harm would come to her.
How soon after her release was Yasmine murdered, her brother was asked? 'After 15 minutes I shot her,' said brother Sirhan Abdulla, adding that he shot her four times in the head. Abdulla served just six months for killing his sister Yasmine. When asked if that was a fair sentence, Abdulla replied no. 'I shouldn't have been in prison for a minute.'
In 2000, a bill was introduced in the Jordanian parliament that would toughen the punishment for honor crimes. It was soundly defeated. 'You have to put limits to the society,' said parliament member Salameh Hiyari, who voted against the bill. Abdulla said he doesn't think about his sister. 'A girl is like a glass plate. Take a glass plate and throw it on the floor and it breaks. Would it be any use anymore or not? A girl is just like that. If she has been violated, she's finished.'"

Bollywood Star's Act Makes Her a Hero, and Possible Target

2004-01-03T21:54:00.000-08:00

By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 23, 2003; Page A16

BOMBAY -- With her dimpled smile and wholesome good looks, Preity Zinta has danced and lip-synced her way into the top ranks of Bollywood stardom. But nothing prepared the 28-year-old daughter of an Indian army officer for the critical acclaim that greeted her latest performance, on the witness stand in a Bombay courtroom.
"Bravo Preity," exclaimed the headline on an editorial in the Indian Express. "Bollywood's Only Real Hero," agreed the Hindustan Times.
The outpouring of praise was prompted by Zinta's willingness to do what no other Bollywood star has until now had the nerve to do: offer evidence about the pervasive influence of organized crime in the increasingly profitable and global Indian film industry.
In a closed court session this month, the details of which were promptly leaked to the press, Preity testified that she had been the target of an extortion threat two years ago by a man claiming to represent Chota Shakeel, a Pakistan-based gangster. Her testimony came in the high-profile trial of Bharat Shah, a leading Bombay diamond merchant and film financier, on charges involving links to the underworld.
Before Zinta's appearance, the prosecution had called a dozen other film personalities to testify, but all had turned uncooperative on the stand, recanting earlier statements or suddenly going fuzzy on key details -- evidence, police say, of the underworld's power to intimidate even the most macho and highly paid stars.
So what prompted India's "Preity Hero," as one headline writer dubbed her, to break the code of silence on the nexus between Bollywood and the mob?
In her first interview since testifying, Zinta owned up to a mixture of motives, from an altruistic desire to "do the right thing" to more pragmatic considerations, such as wanting to "get out of the court" quickly and fearing the legal consequences of contradicting her taped statement to police.
Asked whether she felt her testimony had put her safety at risk, she replied, "for sure," lashing out angrily at law enforcement officials who she believes leaked the details of the supposedly secret court proceeding.
"It was a huge risk I was taking in there, and I expected to be protected," she said, sitting in her office in a Bombay suburb near several of the major studios. "I felt extremely betrayed."
Zinta said she had no wish to launch a personal crusade against underworld influence in Bollywood -- "I wouldn't want it to be made into a big deal, because it's just going to create lots of problems for me in the future" -- and defended fellow stars who have been accused of cultivating chummy relationships with mob bosses based in Karachi, Pakistan, and Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
"If you meet someone and he comes and says hello, you can't just tell him to take a walk -- you say hello back," she said in her precise, convent-school English. "You think, maybe if I say hello I can leave. Do you know what I'm trying to say? It's a Catch-22 situation. It's not as black and white as we put it. It's not just, 'If you keep away from them you're good, and if you mix with them you're bad.' "
Zinta's ambivalence, to say nothing of her fears, reflects what police officials contend is a high degree of collusion -- some of it voluntary -- between mob figures and some of the biggest names in Bollywood.
As in the Hollywood of an earlier time, crime bosses have long cultivated social ties to the Indian film industry, basking in the reflected glory of its glamorous stars. In the mid-1990s, however, crime syndicates began looking for new sources of revenue following the collapse of the Bombay real estate market, which had provided them with money through extortion and other means, according to police officials here.
Bollywood was an obvious target. Churning out roughly 900 feature films a year, the industry's three-hour song-and-dance epics command huge audiences both in India and around the world, especially since the advent of new technologies such as satellite television and DVDs. At the same time, Indian filmmakers have had difficulty financing their projects by conventional means because India's government-owned banks had refused to lend them money until 2000, when the government changed its policy.
Crime syndicates were only too happy to step into the breach, offering loans to producers at rates of up to 36 percent, police say. "Anyone who has money could enter into Bollywood and start a movie," said D. Sivanandhan, an Indian Eliot Ness who investigated organized crime in the movie industry as a joint police commissioner, a job he has since left. "There were no qualifications, no entry fees. It was a wide-open field."
One of the most important mob financiers is alleged to be Shakeel, whose name turns up repeatedly in the Shah case and who is thought to be living in Karachi. Based on transcripts of telephone conversations that were secretly recorded by police and leaked to the Indian press last summer, Shakeel appears to be on good terms with a number of India's top producers, directors and stars, with whom he discusses financing arrangements and sometimes even creative issues.
"Be careful during mixing when you cut scenes," he tells one prominent director, who replies, "Yes sir. Yes sir."
Shakeel also chats amiably with Sanjay Dutt, a top Bollywood star who is facing criminal charges for alleged links to Pakistan-based gangsters blamed for a series of bomb blasts that killed 257 people here in 1993. When Dutt complains about another actor's habit of showing up late on the set, according to the transcript, Shakeel laughs and tells him not to worry: "He will be punctual in our project."
Crime bosses have also regarded Bollywood personalities as ripe targets for extortion, and those who don't cooperate can play a heavy price. A top music executive was killed by mob hit men in 1997. And in 2000, armed assailants shot and wounded Rakesh Roshan, a director and the father of heartthrob actor Hrithik Roshan. The director was allegedly targeted for refusing a gangster's demand to line up Hrithik's services for a movie he was backing.
Such episodes have contributed to an atmosphere of fear among Bollywood's glitterati, some of whom are under full-time police protection. (Zinta said she was offered protection after her testimony but declined for the sake of her privacy.)
For law enforcement officials, nothing so captures the corrosive influence of organized crime in Bollywood as the case against Shah, the diamond merchant-turned-movie mogul who owns a fleet of BMWs and reportedly paid 300,000 rupees, about $6,250, for an autographed pillowcase used by Michael Jackson during a stay at Bombay's Oberoi Hotel. The court case turns on allegations that Shah helped an associate of Shakeel's -- another Karachi-based crime boss named Dawood Ibrahim -- in an extortion scheme. Shah, who is currently free on bail, has denied any wrongdoing.
The case has also brought to light allegations of mob involvement in the making of "Chori Chori, Chupke Chupke," in which Zinta played a leading role. During the shooting of the film, Zinta received a phone call from a man who claimed to be an associate of Shakeel's, ordering her to pay 5 million rupees, about $104,000, or "face consequences," according to details of her testimony that were leaked.
Zinta declined to discuss the specifics of her testimony but confirmed the essential thrust of the reports. In the transcript of his phone conversation with Dutt, Shakeel denies threatening Zinta, telling the actor, "I will never demand money from the female species."
Zinta is in some respects an unlikely star. The daughter of an Indian army colonel who has since died, she was raised on military bases and attended a convent boarding school. She holds an English degree from Delhi University and pursued advanced studies in criminal psychology. One brother is a major in an armored unit currently stationed near the hostile frontier dividing Indian and Pakistani forces in Kashmir; another brother sells cars in Petaluma, Calif.
In person, Zinta projects a high degree of confidence, greeting a visitor with a direct gaze and a hearty handshake. Demurely pretty in a pink sweater and flowered skirt, she said she stumbled into acting largely by accident, though she seems to have adapted comfortably to the role. She lives in a luxury high-rise, tools around town in a black Lexus sport-utility vehicle and vacations in places such as Cannes and Sydney. The details of her romantic life, including a recent breakup with a top model, are breathlessly chronicled in the Indian press; she is currently dating a Danish engineer named Lars.
While Zinta's testimony is at best peripheral to the Shah case, police say she deserves credit for helping to shine a light on the extent of mob influence in Bollywood -- an important step in cleaning up the industry.
Perhaps because the job has yet to be completed, Zinta isn't exactly welcoming the attention. "I had a lot of people telling me I was very stupid," she said. "One thing everyone told me is, 'Preity, one person can't change the system.' "
The most telling reaction may have come at a television awards ceremony a few days after her court appearance. "I met this guy who walked up to me and said, 'Congratulations, you're the only crazy person in this industry.' "

Rocks have been lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred are slithering free.

2003-11-24T19:41:00.000-08:00

An important email going around.
In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling him "a dirty Jew."
Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a third, in Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapon fire.
In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack.
Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza "should be shot dead."
A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a London bus.
"Anti-Semitism", wrote a columnist in The Spectator, "has become respectable ... at London dinner tables." She quoted one member of the House of Lords: "The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last."
In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, "Surely they don't want to kill me again?"
In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulcher. The caption: "Non resurrexit."
In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a synagogue in the western town of Herford: "Six million were not enough."
In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows of Kiev's main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.
In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Loannina and vandals hurled paint at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica.
In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of Hitler, and chants of "Sieg Heil" and "Jews into the sea."
In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed.
But nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France:
In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words "Dirty Jew" were painted.
In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.
According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming "Jews to the gas chambers" and "Death to the Jews."
The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them to preserve "family honor."
The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked – and did not apologize - when it was learned that he had told guests at a London dinner that the world's troubles were the fault of "...that shitty little country, Israel."
"At the start of the 21st century," writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a well-known social scientist, in a new book, "we are discovering that Jews are once again select targets of violence ... Hatred of the Jews has returned to France." But of course, it never left. Not France; not Europe.
Anti-Semitism, the oldest bigotry known to man, has been a part of European society since time immemorial. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, open Jew-hatred became unfashionable; but fashions change, and Europe is reverting to type.
To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the reemergence of Jew-hatred all over their continent. But the more common reaction has been complacency.
"Stop saying that there is anti-Semitism in France," President Jacques Chirac scolded a Jewish editor in January. "There is no anti-Semitism in France."
The European media have been vicious in condemning Israel's self-defense against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank; they have been far less agitated about anti-Jewish terror in their own backyard.
They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and vitriol are aimed at the Jews, tomorrow they will be aimed at the Christians. A timeless lesson of history is that it rarely ends with the Jews.
Militant Islamist extremists were attacking and killing Jews long before they attacked and killed Americans on Sept. 11.
The Nazis first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was ablaze Jews, it is often said, are the canary in the coalmine of civilization. When they become the objects of savagery and hate, it means the air has been poisoned and an explosion is soon to come. If Europeans don't rise up and turn against the Jew-haters, it is only a matter of time until the Jew-haters rise up and turn against them.
French Anti-Semitism Finally and long overdue, your people, oppressed and disgraced by hatred and maliciousness, have achieved justice: now you enjoy full citizen's rights, but you'll remain Jews nonetheless." Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Austrian author.
A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher's shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France; a Jewish couple in their 20s were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne, France. The woman was pregnant; a Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles, France. This was in the past week.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, from September 9, 2000, at the start of the intifada, through November 20, 2001, there were some 330 acts of anti-Semitism just in and around Paris. In addition to literally scores of firebombing of synagogues, just before Rosh Hashanah, 200 Arabs attacked Jews on the Champs Elysees. The pace has only picked up since then:
In December, a French cinema in Paris refused to allow a Hanukah showing of Harry Potter to 800 Jewish children because of French-Palestinian threats (the threats were confirmed by French police who then went on to do nothing, not even giving details). It was one incident in an eventful month when synagogues continued to be firebombed and a Jewish kindergarten was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti and set ablaze.
We can understand anti-Semitism among the French people. There is nothing the French love like their traditions and, on the question of hating Jews they certainly have tradition galore. What, however, can explain the sometimes muted, sometimes defensively outraged reaction of French officials?
Simple. There are approximately 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 Muslims presently living in France and many more arrive daily. There are only about 600,000 Jews still living in France. Moreover, France is the number one European exporter to Iraq, totaling over two billion dollars per year in exports since 2000. To those who are at a loss to explain why French elected officials seem "helpless" to stem the tide of anti-Semitism, I say that something smells awfully Vichy around here.
You already know that Israel is at war against a fearsome enemy, which has brought the fight to its streets. Much of the civilized world (well, at least on this side of the Atlantic) finally understands this fact.
What is not being acknowledged, however, is that this is not a war against Israel, or as propagandists and demagogues worldwide would have it, occupiers.
This is a war against each and every individual, Israeli or not, religious or not, Zionist or not, right, left or center, who identifies himself or herself as Jewish. Israel is only the publicized front line and if you are not in Israel, and the fight has not arrived at your front yard, just wait. Or, perhaps, we shouldn't wait. Perhaps history has finally taught us, of all people, that waiting and hoping for succor and sympathy from the nations of the world will lead only to more burned synagogues, pogroms, and, down the road, grim-faced dignitaries mouthing "never again" while dedicating yet another memorial museum. We cannot wait inactively and hope to have security or peace for our children or ourselves. We dare not privately rail against irrational, virulent hatred while letting the world believe that we remain disinterested, accepting our lot with equanimity or, worse, resignation. We can and must do more than simply grieve.
So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity, to do, at least, these three simple things:
First, care enough to stay informed. Don't ever let yourself become deluded into thinking that this is not your fight.
Second, boycott France. Only the Arab countries are more toxically anti-Semitic and, unlike them, France exports more than just oil and hatred. So boycott their wines and their perfumes. Boycott their clothes and their foodstuffs. Boycott their movies. Definitely boycott their shores. If we are resolved we can exert amazing pressure and, whatever else we may know about the French, we most certainly know that they are as a cobweb in a hurricane in the face of well-directed pressure.
Third, send this along to your family, your friends, and your coworkers. Think of all of the people of good conscience that you know and let them know that you and the people that you care about need their help.
The number one best selling book in France is "September 11: The Frightening Fraud," which argues that no plane ever hit the Pentagon.
Our only strength is the strength of our community and there can be no community without communication.
This is really scary stuff, Read it very carefully and thoroughly. We cannot allow this to continue. You MUST pass it on to as many people as you know, so we can curb this hideous anti-Semitic wave and squelch it ... before it grows and engulfs us all.

'Honor' Killings in Turkey - the story of Cemse Allak

2003-11-24T14:50:00.000-08:00

For seven months after her stoning, Ms. Allak lay semi-conscious, her skull crushed, unable to move or speak. Still, according to the people who watched over her, Ms. Allak was capable of expressing a wide range of emotions with her eyes.
Relatives visited once, in the beginning, to tell the hospital staff that they could not pay for her care. The fetus inside Ms. Allak died six weeks after the attack.

'Honor' Killings in Turkey
New York Times
15/07/2003 Dexter FILKINS
(Yaylim) - Last month a woman named Cemse Allak was buried in a corner of a municipal cemetery here. Ms. Allak, unmarried and pregnant, had died from a stoning.
Villagers and local lawyers said Ms. Allak - as well as the man who had made her pregnant - had been killed to restore the honor of their families.
For seven months after her stoning, Ms. Allak lay semi-conscious, her skull crushed, unable to move or speak. Still, according to the people who watched over her, Ms. Allak was capable of expressing a wide range of emotions with her eyes.
Relatives visited once, in the beginning, to tell the hospital staff that they could not pay for her care. The fetus inside Ms. Allak died six weeks after the attack.
When Ms. Allak died on June 7, no one from her family claimed her body, and none of her relatives attended the funeral.
Just two days before Ms. Allak's funeral, the elected Parliament of this predominantly Muslim nation approved a sweeping human rights law that, among other things, abolished a provision that often reduced the prison terms for murders committed in the name of "family honor."
The legislation is part of a broader effort to secure Turkey's long-hoped-for admission to the European Union and, more profoundly, to answer the centuries-old question of Turkey's place in the world: whether in Europe or the Middle East. The death of Ms. Allak, 35, underscores the distance between legislative pronouncements emanating from Ankara, Turkey's modern capital, and the sometimes grim, medieval realities of everyday life in other parts of the country.
"Honor is not a trivial thing," shouted Celilie Allak, Ms. Allak's sister-in-law, explaining the deaths. "What else were we supposed to do?"
Much of Cemse Allak's story has been lost in a whirl of conflicting versions of her death. By most accounts, Ms. Allak fell victim to the age-old honor code that survives in the villages of southeastern Turkey, a system so unforgiving that some villagers here said they were relieved to learn of Ms. Allak's death. If she had survived, the villagers said, the family of the man who had been killed with her would have been obliged to take revenge on Ms. Allak's family, since it was Ms. Allak's brother who was suspected of his murder.
"When the girl Cemse died, the matter was closed," said Shelalettin Cakar, a local farmer. "In such cases, if one dies and the other lives, it is not equal. So it was better for both of them to die."
Ms. Allak's brother, Mehmet, as well as four other relatives, have been charged in the murder of the man, Hila Acil, who was stoned to death at the same time in a field outside town. Despite last month's legislative changes, Mr. Allak's lawyer, Salih Demirkesen, said he was confident the local judges would understand.
Nearly everyone in this hardscrabble village agrees that Ms. Allak's problems began with Mr. Acil, age 55 and the father of 11, who was known as a man who could never take his eyes off the local women.
"He is my friend, but he was like this since the day he was born," said a pistachio farmer, who would not give his name. "He had very wide eyes."
According to accounts from Ms. Allak's family and other people in Yaylim, the incident began when Mr. Acil dropped Ms. Allak's father off at work, and then returned to the Allak house where he apparently found Ms. Allak alone. What happened next is unclear, but Ms. Allak, whom neighbors described as a quiet and unassuming woman, became pregnant.
Some members of Ms. Allak's family said she had been raped; others in the town suggested that the two had engaged in consensual sex. Conversations with villagers and family members made clear that many saw little difference between the two. Villagers who conceded that Ms. Allak might have been raped said that she had still brought shame upon her family.
"Rape is wrong in every case," said Baki Allak, a cousin,as he stood at the top of the gorge where the two people were stoned. Nonetheless, he added, "the family was dishonored."
In an interview, Mr. Demirkesen, Mehmet Allak's lawyer, said his client had killed Mr. Acil and Ms. Allak. He said Mr. Allak had not followed the couple into the gorge with murder on his mind, but he said the two men got into a physical confrontation when Mr. Acil insulted his sister. Ms. Allak, according to Mr. Demirkesen, stepped in front of one of the stones that Mr. Allak threw at Mr. Acil. "It was an accident," he said.

Dr. Adnan Ceviz, a neurosurgeon who treated Ms. Allak, dismissed the notion that her skull had been crushed unintentionally. The side of her head, he said, had been struck over and over in the same place.
"She was thrown to the ground," Dr. Ceviz said in an interview. "This was not an accident."
The stoning of Mr. Acil and Ms. Allak appeared to follow in the tradition of recm, which is, according to villagers here, the religiously sanctioned trial and stoning of a dishonored woman or man by an entire village.
For years, men - and only occasionally women - accused of killing their spouses or family members could invoke Article 462 of the Turkish criminal code. That gave judges the discretion to reduce a murder defendant's potential sentence by more than 80 percent.
Emin Sirin, a member of Parliament who supported repealing the law, said he hoped the legislation would quickly bring the medieval practice to an end.
"To kill a girl because she falls in love with another man is no longer acceptable," Mr. Sirin said. "Murder is murder."
But abolishing the more pernicious traditions of village and town will take a much longer time, and require far more effort, than merely passing laws.
Mr. Demirkesen, the lawyer for Mr. Allak, wondered why Ms.Allak's case had generated such publicity.
"There are a lot more interesting honor killings than this one," he said, and then proceeded to tell of four other such killings that he knew of in recent years in the area.
In the months that Ms. Allak lay in the hospital, her neighbors in the village said they grew concerned that her survival would set off a vendetta between the Allaks and the Acils. If Mr. Allak had indeed killed Mr. Acil, and if Ms. Allak survived, then the Acil family would be obliged under local tradition to take vengeance.
In February, the Allak and Acil families met for a "peace dinner" to try to obviate the need for a revenge killing. A picture of the families eating together appeared in the Independent Agenda, a local newspaper. The headline read, "Peace Established in Honor Killing."
"We were trying to make sure that the incident caused no further harm," said Mehmet Itok, a cousin.
Hence the relief expressed by villagers when Ms. Allak finally died.
"If both of them did not die, the vendetta would have gone on for years," the pistachio farmer said.
Though Ms. Allak's family did not visit her in the hospital, many women did. Over the months several women from Kamer, a women's association in Diyarbakir, where Ms.Allak was hospitalized, brought her medicine, helped wash her and pushed her wheelchair around the hospital grounds.
One of the women, Hayriye Ascioglu, said that Ms. Allak's face would brighten as soon as she entered the room, and that Ms. Allak's eyes would follow her as she walked around. When nurses trimmed Ms. Allak's fingernails, she would pull back her hands in pain.
"I would say to her, `If you hear me, blink,' " said Ms. Ascioglu. "And she would blink."
Under Turkish law, a deceased person must remain unburied for up to two weeks to give a family time to claim the body. Ms. Allak's death appeared in the papers; still, no one from the family came to get her body.
Kamer, the women's association, saw to it that Ms. Allak had a coffin. The group's members flouted Islamic tradition by carrying the coffin into the municipal cemetery themselves.
In another snub to the old way, the women - and not the men, as custom dictated - stepped up to throw the first handfuls of soil over Ms. Allak's coffin. About 100 women came in all, and the scenes from Ms. Allak's funeral made the front page of the Diyarbakir Event, a newspaper.
In the days since the funeral, some of the women who cared for Ms. Allak have been reflecting on her trial. For Meral Bestas, a local lawyer who attended the funeral, Ms.Allak's story seemed to offer equal measures of hope and despair.
"These traditions do not die easily," Ms. Bestas said in an interview in her office. "But they will die, I'm certain of that. Turkey is changing very fast."

Another 'honor' victim: Daughter, raped by brothers, killed by mother

2003-11-22T19:28:00.000-08:00

ABU QASH, West Bank - Rofayda Qaoud - raped by her brothers and impregnated - refused to commit suicide, her mother recalls, even after she bought the unwed teenager a razor with which to slit her wrists. So Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud says she did what she believes any good Palestinian parent would. Killing her sixth-born child took 20 minutes, Qaoud tells a visitor through a stream of tears and cigarettes that she smokes in rapid succession. "She killed me before I killed her," says the 43-year-old mother of nine. "I had to protect my children. This is the only way I could protect my family's honor."
According to court records, Rofayda was raped by her brothers, Fahdi, 22, and Ali, 20, in a bedroom they shared in the family's three-room house. On Nov. 26, 2002, doctors at a nearby hospital who were treating Rofayda for an injured leg discovered she was eight months pregnant.
No trace of Rofayda or her brothers remains in the family home. Qaoud says she ripped up all of their photographs and burned their clothes. The bedroom in which she killed her daughter is now a storeroom.
Erasing the memories is harder, she admits. She eases her pain by doting on her three children still living at home, especially the youngest, Fatima, 9, whom she lavishes with kisses. The children say they've forgiven Qaoud and return her affection.
"My mother did this because she does not want us to be punished by people," Fatima explains with a shy smile. Leaning into Qaoud's arms, the little girl adds: "I love my mother much more now than before."

The Brownshirts of Our Time

2003-11-22T16:13:00.000-08:00

By Phyllis Chesler
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 19, 2003
On Saturday evening, November 8, 2003, the eve of Kristallnacht, I addressed a woman's "networking" conference of mainly African-American and Hispanic-American womanists and feminists at Barnard College. The conference was described as a grassroots, multi-cultural, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary organization for women in the arts. Indeed, the women seemed to range in age from 20-65 and were dressed in corporate business suits, ever-colorful African/ethnic attire, youthful jeans.

Booths were arranged in a semi-circle--it was as if the panels and performances were taking place in an African marketplace. Scented candles, beaded drums, sleek handbags, photographs, Citi-banking for women consultants, African skirts, all vied for my attention. In addition to my son, who had driven me there, and myself, there were a handful of white people, including a photographer from whom I bought two prints and a psychologist who identified herself to me as an admirer and as someone who had suffered a brain injury in an car accident.

The conference was closed to men--but one of the organizers made a split second decision to allow my adult son in and seated him by himself at the very back of the room on a chair set apart. Growing up in a feminist household, he was used to this. Privately, we both sighed and wondered when feminist men would finally be welcome at a feminist conference.

I doubt that the organizers of this conference knew anything of my background but they were more than welcoming. They had real class and great soul. For example, when I'd explained that I was just in the midst of both a major move into Manhattan and a book tour, one organizer said: "We understand what it's like when a woman is jammed up doing too much. We'll love you anyway. You can let us know at the last minute." She was so damn upbeat and understanding that I decided I'd come no matter what.

In retrospect, I realized that I should have known what was coming; perhaps I chose not to know.

A few days before the conference I had the following conversation with one of the organizers. She asked me what my most recent book was and I told her it was The New Anti-Semitism. I explained that Jew-hatred was a form of racism--only it was not being treated as such by anti-racist "politically correct" people. The organizer did not say: "I don't agree with you" nor did she say: "This won't play well to our constituency." She only said: "We need you to explain the ways in which women sabotage each other and remain divided so that we can understand and overcome it in order to come together. We need you to talk about your book Woman's Inhumanity to Woman. Your speech will precede our big Unity panel."
When I arrived, performers were rapping and singing and dancing and the energy was fabulous. They were running late and I waited patiently and happily. I whispered to my son: "There's still a whole world out there. And in ways, it's quite wonderful. Perhaps I have become too obsessed with The Jewish Cause, with Israel. Maybe I need to remember that I am also connected to more than one issue."

I had been asked to talk about what women can do, psychologically and ethically, in order to enact sisterhood and to work in productive, even radical ways. As I spoke, the women in the audience sighed, cheered, applauded, nodded in agreement, laughed, groaned, nudged each other--it was a half hour of good vibes.

And then my first questioner blew it all to Hell. All it took was The Question and it only required one Questioner. I could not see who was speaking. A disembodied voice demanded to know where I stood on the question of the women of Palestine. Her tone was forceful, hostile, relentless, and prepared. I could have said: "The organizers have specifically asked me not to address such questions." I did not say that. I could also have said: "I am concerned with the women of Palestine but I am also concerned with the women of Rwanda, Bosnia, Guatemala, who have all been gang-raped by soldiers who used rape as a weapon of war; I am concerned with the poverty and homelessness of women right here in America; I am concerned with the women of Israel who are being blown up in buses, at cafes, in their own bedrooms." I did not say this.

Instead, I took a deep breath and said that I did not respect people who hijacked airplanes or hijacked conferences or who, at this very moment, were trying to hijack this lecture. I pointed out that the subject of my talk was not Israel or Palestine. I did not want us to lose our focus. She grew even more hostile and demanding. "Tell this audience what you said on WBAI. I heard you on that program." Clearly, she wanted to "unmask" me before this audience as a Jew-lover and an Israel-defender.

I took the question head-on. "If you're really asking about apartheid, let me talk about it. Contrary to myth and propaganda, Israel is not an apartheid state. The largest practioner of apartheid in the world is Islam which practices both gender and religious apartheid. In terms of gender apartheid, Palestinian women--and all women who live under Islam--are oppressed by "honor" killings, in which girls and women who are raped are then killed by family members for the sake of restoring the family "honor;" forced veiling, segregation, stonings to death for alleged adultery, seclusion/sequestration, female genital mutilation, polygamy, outright slavery, sexual slavery. Women have few civil, legal, or human rights under Islam."

I continued; "Islam also specializes in religious apartheid as well. All non-Muslims (Christians, including Maronites and Melkites, Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants, Jews, Assyrians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, animists) have historically been viewed and treated as subhumans who must either convert to Islam or be mercilessly taxed, beaten, jailed, murdered, or exiled. The latest al-Queda attack in Saudi Arabia was primarily directed against Lebanese Christians and Americans."

I continued. "Today, the entire Middle East is judenrein, there are no Jews left in 22 Arab countries. And, the Arab leadership has backed the PLO strategy in which the 23rd state remains under constant and perilous siege. Historically in general, but specifically since 1948-1956, Arab Jews were forced to flee Arab Islamic lands. Most are living in Israel, the only Middle Eastern state in which Jews are allowed to live. Jews cannot become citizens of Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, for example and yet no one accuses those nations of apartheid.
I said that Israel was not an apartheid state. I talked about real gender and religious Apartheid, as practiced by Muslims. I told the truth. Clearly, they had not heard it before. The audience collectively gasped. Then, people went a little crazy.
Someone muttered darkly, coarsely, in a near-growl: "What about the checkpoints? What about the fence?" As if checkpoints and fences are the same as being killed by your brother or father or, most recently, in Ramallah, in the Rofayda Qaoud case, by your mother (!) for the crime of having been raped--in the Qaoud case, both raped and impregnated by your mother's two sons. I asked the audience if they thought that being detained at a checkpoint was really the same as having your clitoris sliced off, the same as being stoned to death for alleged adultery. The only response I got was from the first questioner who demanded that I denounce Ariel Sharon--but not Yasir Arafat--as a murderer.

I absolutely refused to do so.

The lightning rod of "Palestine" was enough to turn a very friendly audience quite hostile and a bit unhinged. Two or three women proceeded to ask aggressive questions in which they tried to get me to say that I had somehow "disrespected" poor women in my remarks; I had said nothing of the sort.

As I left the podium, a young African-American woman stopped me to say that I'd "hurt" her by how I had "disrespected" a "brown" woman. "What brown woman?" I asked. "Your first questioner was a brown woman" she said "and so are Palestinian women." I said: "Jewish women, especially in Israel also come in many colors including brown and black." She stopped me. "But you're a white Jew." As if this was proof of a crime.
I did not bother to tell her that without my glasses I could not see the face or color of a questioner so far away, that my answer to the question would have been the same no matter what color the questioner happened to be.

As I was trying to leave, one woman, who said her name was "Lupe," (she was dressed in a button-festooned serape, and had a cross tattooed between her eyebrows) loped after me and continued to demand that I deal with the Palestine question. She kept trying to get at me physically. One of the organizers kept putting her own body between Lupe and me. Lupe behaved like a trained operative, her rage was legitimized, empowered, by her politics.

The three young African-American women who had invited me were VERY supportive of me, they hugged me and thanked me for coming and looked rather embarrassed about what had happened.
What's important is this: Not one of them tried to stop what was happening, not one stood up and said: "Something good has just turned ugly and we must not permit this to happen." Thus, the "good" people did nothing to disperse the hostility or to address the issues. Perhaps they were simply unprepared on the issues; perhaps they agreed with the view that Israel is an apartheid state and that anyone who would dare defend it was supposed to be treated as a traitor and enemy. Perhaps they simply lacked the courage to stand up to the fundamentalists in their midst.

Afterwards, my son told me that he was on his feet the minute The Questioner spoke and although I could not see him either, I was glad to know that he was in the room. Things could easily have turned much uglier. (By the way: Talk about gender apartheid! The conference confined him to his men-only single chair section).
It seemed that The Questioner had at least one, and possibly two henchwoman with her. Clearly, she wanted to "get" the pro-Israel white Jew.

I couldn't help reflecting on my life's work against racism. For example, in 1963, I joined The Northern Student Movement and tutored Harlem students. This was the Northern branch of the civil rights movement. In the late 1960s, I was involved with both the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. I marched outside the Women's House of Detention when they jailed Angela Davis. I was involved in the Inez Garcia case and have written extensively about the cases of both Joanne
Little and Yvonne Wanrow, two women of color who, like Garcia, had killed (white) men in self-defense. In the mid-70s, I interviewed Jews from India, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Africa, and Jews who had fled Arab lands about "cultural" or "ethnic" racism in Israel. By the early 1970s, I also began organizing against Jew-hatred on the left and among feminists in America. Over the years, I have lectured on the complexities of both racism and sexism in the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, and in Japan.

For nearly 30 years, I taught working-class and students of color at a public university. I admired and loved them and was sometimes able to help them in ways that changed their views and their lives.
Here's what's sad. Clearly, my speech touched hearts and minds; there was room for common ground and for civilized discourse. But not once the word "Palestine" was uttered, not when "Palestine" is seen as a symbol for every downtrodden group of color who are "resisting" the racist-imperialist American and Zionist Empires. Once the "Palestine" litmus test of political respectability was raised, everyone responded on cue, as if programmed and brainwashed. It immediately became a "white" versus "brown" thing, an "oppressed" versus an "oppressor" thing.

These are the Brownshirts of our time. The fact that they are women of color, womanists/feminists is all the more chilling and tragic. And unbelievable. And to me: Practically unbearable.
Afterwards, my son, ever-wise, said: "Well mom, you have your answer. The Jew-haters will never allow you into their wider, wonderful world. You can't go back."

Fundamentalism is not accidental but essential to Islam

2003-01-03T20:12:00.000-08:00

A lady poet of Medina, Asma, daughter of Marwan, wrote a poem where she warned the tribes of Medina against the Prophet.
'Do you expect good from him after the killing of your chiefs/Like a hungry man waiting for a cook's broth?' she wrote.
When the Prophet heard this, he said to his followers: 'Who will rid me of Marwan's daughter?'
A follower named Umayr, eager to prove his loyalty to Islam, offered to assassinate her. This he did that very night while the victim was asleep with her youngest baby on her breast. The Prophet thanked him and told him: 'You have helped Allah and his apostle.'
We are told by Muslim traditionalists that the message went home and the people of the husband of Asma instead of resorting to retaliation, the customary tribal custom, 'became Muslims because they saw the power of Islam.'

Have none of these people ever heard of standing up against a bully?