Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies reports that a union in Tennessee has replaced Labor Day with the Muslim Eid al Fitr as a holiday.
The union at Tyson's Shelbyville, Tenn., chicken plant has negotiated a new contract that adds Eid al Fitr as a paid holiday for all employees, and drops Labor Day. A few observations: First, just complaining about illegal immigration won't do — this change was made to accommodate Somali and other Muslim (legally admitted) refugees, sought out by Tyson (and other meatpackers) as an alternative to illegal Hispanic workers.
Second, this is just another example of the conflict between mass immigration and modern society, specifically in this case, modern elites' unwillingness to require newcomers to conform to our ways, and instead conforming to theirs. And finally, the irony of a labor union dispensing with Labor Day just underlines my contention that the unspoken motto of the Left is immigration uber alles — there's no interest or constituency that the Left won't abandon if it conflicts with open borders.
Are we ruled by wimps, pussies, and fools? It sometimes seems that way. An earlier era America wouldn't have put up with this b.s.
Our problem with immigration is not just restricted to illegal immigration. Legal immigration can be just as destructive as illegal immigration. But most destructive of all: the beliefs that make this sort of nonsense possible.
It is not too late to turn back the clock. Spain is now paying some immigrants to leave.
In Spain, where legal immigrants alone make up nearly 9 percent of the population, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero surprised many at the start of his second term this spring by directing an about-face of his administration's previously lenient immigration policies.
In June, just three years after authorizing a mass legalization of 750,000 undocumented workers, Mr. Zapatero expressed support for the EU's Return Directive – a policy that allows member states to hold undocumented migrants, including minors, for up to 18 months, and, if deported, bans them from returning.
Faced with a 10.7 percent unemployment rate, Zapatero's new labor minister has announced a plan that would pay jobless immigrants to return to their home countries.
A French high court decided that at least some forms of Islam are incompatible with French citizenship. Political correctness prevents US courts from seeing this obvious truth.
“I would never have imagined that they would turn me down because of what I choose to wear,” Ms. Silmi said, her hazel eyes looking out of the narrow slit in her niqab, an Islamic facial veil that is among three flowing layers of turquoise, blue and black that cover her body from head to toe.
But last month, France’s highest administrative court upheld a decision to deny citizenship to Ms. Silmi, 32, on the ground that her “radical” practice of Islam was incompatible with French values like equality of the sexes.
It was the first time that a French court had judged someone’s capacity to be assimilated into France based on private religious practice, taking laïcité — the country’s strict concept of secularism — from the public sphere into the home.
Faiza Salmi's wearing of burqa figured largely in the decision to deny her citizenship.
A Muslim member of the French Government has attacked the head-to-toe Islamic dress as a prison, applauding a court decision to deny citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wore it.
“The burka is a prison, a strait-jacket,” Fadela Amara, the Minister for Urban Affairs and a longstanding women's rights campaigner, said yesterday. “It is not religious. It is the insignia of a totalitarian political project for sexual inequality.”
Not all cultures are compatible with each other.
Seoul South Korea-based journalist Shim Jae Hoon argues the burqa is a sign of cultural exclusivity.
Wearing a burqa, however, is a different matter. As a religious practice, it represents an extreme form of discrimination against women, even a hint of sexual bondage, as a burqa is mainly intended to keep its wearers from the gaze of males. It's more than a simple matter of religious practice or ethnic custom. In Malaysia once, I was startled by the sight of an Arab woman whose black figure in a burqa dispelled many people. Some Muslim friends told me a woman in a burqa would be the best way to keep their own women from accepting the fundamentalist form of Islam. Cultural diversity is today taken for granted in many countries, but fundamentalist Islam in the form of burqas -- we have seen what it did in Afghanistan under the Taliban -- is a sign of cultural exclusivity, not accommodation.
This woman and her husband follow the Salafi form of Islam.
Now the Conseil d’Etat has rejected her appeal on the ground that she “adopted a radical practice of her religion, incompatible with the essential values of the French community, and particularly with the principle of sexual equality.” This is the first time the court has refused nationality on the grounds of religious expression. The court heard that the couple followed salafism, a radical form of Islam. The woman adopted the burqa at her husband’s request in France, where she “lives in total submission to the men in her family”.
One French Muslim leader claims religion is personal as if that makes it unpolitical. But religion - especially Islam - is very political.
M'hammed Henniche of the Union of Muslim Associations in the Seine-Saint-Denis district north of Paris, fears that the ruling may open the door to what he considers ever more arbitrary interpretations of what constitutes "radical" Islam.
"What is it going to be tomorrow? The annual pilgrimage to Mecca? The daily prayer?" said Henniche. "This sets a dangerous precedent.
Religion, so far as it is personal, should be kept out of these decisions."
Islamic countries are politically just that: Islamic. They enforce laws about many aspects of life that are considered abhorrent in the West.
A 2004 poll of Muslims in Britain shows substantial support for very unBritish Sharia law courts. Doesn't sound personal to me.
A special Guardian/ICM poll based on a survey of 500 British Muslims found that a clear majority want Islamic law introduced into this country in civil cases relating to their own community. Some 61% wanted Islamic courts - operating on sharia principles - "so long as the penalties did not contravene British law".
Many civil cases in this country deal with family disputes such as divorce, custody and inheritance.
A 2007 poll of Muslims in Britain found stronger support for Sharia law among the young.
In the survey of 1,003 Muslims by the polling company Populus through internet and telephone questionnaires, nearly 60% said they would prefer to live under British law, while 37% of 16 to 24-year-olds said they would prefer sharia law, against 17% of those over 55. Eighty-six per cent said their religion was the most important thing in their lives.
Nearly a third of 16 to 24-year-olds believed that those converting to another religion should be executed, while less than a fifth of those over 55 believed the same.
A 2006 poll found that a fifth of Muslims in Britain sympathized with the Muslims who carried out bombing attacks in Britain on July 7, 2006.
Forty per cent of the British Muslims surveyed said they backed introducing sharia in parts of Britain, while 41 per cent opposed it. Twenty per cent felt sympathy with the July 7 bombers' motives, and 75 per cent did not. One per cent felt the attacks were "right".
We should not let people into our countries who will resent us and seek to impose a repressive religion on us.
David Pryce-Jones points to another European country where local attitudes toward Islam are not submissive. In Geneva Switzerland the City Fathers rejected a request to build a second mosque.
A mosque already existed in Geneva, but when the Muslim community sought to have a second mosque, the City Fathers replied that this would be possible when the Christians were allowed a church in Saudi Arabia. There is no record that outraged Arabs consequently withdrew their petro-dollar millions held in the local banks.
The Swiss are going to hold a referendum on whether to ban mosque minarets.
The Swiss Peoples' Party (SVP) has raised a storm by collecting more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for a ban on minarets in the country. Minarets, according to the SVP, are "symbols of political-religious imperialism." A spokesman for the party pointed out that, "Many women, even socialists, signed this petition because not one Swiss woman can tolerate the way that Muslim men treat their wives." By law, a national referendum is now obligatory.
Hispanics are unhappy about the majority's opposition to illegal aliens.
After a year of stepped-up enforcement against illegal immigration and polarized debate on the issue, about half of the Hispanics in the United States now fear that they or a relative or close friend could be deported, a report released Thursday by the Pew Hispanic Center found.
That means a large fraction of Hispanics in the US are either illegals or related to illegals and see a vested interest in supporting law breaking. So law breaking breeds the conditions for further law breaking. What to do about it? Totally crack down and enforce immigration laws. Do some big deportations. The illegals will mostly then self deport.
A quarter of Hispanics are illegal aliens. So the poll result is totally unsurprising.
Hispanics are the nation's largest minority group, numbering 47 million (about 15.5% of the total U.S. population). About a quarter of Hispanic adults are unauthorized immigrants, most of them arriving as part of a heavy wave of immigration that began gathering force in the 1970s. Twice in the past two years, the U.S. Congress tried but failed to pass comprehensive legislation to deal with the problem of illegal immigration. However, federal, state and local governments have pressed forward with hundreds of new enforcement bills, regulations and procedures--including stepped up deportations, more workplace raids, and restrictions on access to driver's licenses and other government services and benefits.
Those two failures by Congress to pass "comprehensive" immigration legislation were both attempts to grant massive amnesties and keep up with business as usual. Popular anger stopped those attempts. The masses triumphed in two battles with the elites. Though the outcome of the war is still far from certain. Steve Sailer says we are in a demographic death spiral. Sure looks that way.
The LAPD wants to watch Muslims in LA more carefully.
A plan by the counterterrorism bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department to create a map detailing the Muslim communities in that city, an effort described as a step toward thwarting radicalization, has angered civil rights groups, which say it is no better than racial profiling.
At least three major Muslim groups and the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter yesterday to top city officials raising concerns about the plan.
These Muslim groups ought to stop and think about what happens when Muslims in America carry out terrorist attacks. Do they become worse off when everyone looks at them with more suspicion? Might they be better of getting watched by police now if that watching prevents attacks that make all Muslims much less trusted than they are now?
Some Muslims in America really are on the side of the Jihadists.
Unlike Mr. bin Laden, the blogger was not operating from a remote location. It turns out he is a 21-year-old American named Samir Khan who produces his blog from his parents’ home in North Carolina, where he serves as a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups.
In recent days, he has featured “glad tidings” from a North African militant leader whose group killed 31 Algerian troops. He posted a scholarly treatise arguing for violent jihad, translated into English. He listed hundreds of links to secret sites from which his readers could obtain the latest blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq.
His neatly organized site also includes a file called “United States of Losers,” which showcased a recent news broadcast about a firefight in Afghanistan with this added commentary from Mr. Khan: “You can even see an American soldier hiding during the ambush like a baby!! AllahuAkbar! AllahuAkbar!”
Immigration brings an inherently hostile religion into our midst. Why inflict that on ourselves?
If Western countries adopted separationism then we'd face less risk from the jihadists and their supporters.
This is nature's way of telling you that you have a problem with immigration.
But the fight raging over an abandoned lot in London’s East End is of an altogether grander scale. A large and secretive Islamic sect proposed building what would have been the largest mosque in Europe, smack at the gateway to the 2012 Olympic Games, and within sight of London’s financial district.
A fundamentalist Muslim group is behind the mosque and Western law enforcement officials say the group is a recruiting ground for terrorists.
In Newham, the borough where the mosque would stand, Alan Craig, the leader of the Christian Peoples Alliance Party in the East End, started a one-man campaign against the mosque a year ago that has grown and gained national prominence.
He began by emphasizing the size of the mosque. But now he focuses on its sponsor, Tablighi Jamaat, a worldwide evangelical Islamic group based in Pakistan with millions of followers that professes to encourage Muslims to be more loyal to their faith.
American and European law enforcement officials say Tablighi Jamaat’s simple message masks a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists. Two of the suicide bombers who attacked the London transit system in July 2005 had attended Tablighi Jamaat gatherings, British security officials said.
Consider the erroneous assumption behind the use of the term "mask" in the sentence I bolded above. A simple Muslim fundamentalist message does not mask the nature of a Muslim organization. The only masking going on is in the minds of those Westerners who refuse to see Islam for what it is: an aggressive dominating religion that was founded by a warrior ruler. Islam is radically different than Christianity which was founded by a guy who never led soldiers into battle and who did not seek to overthrow existing secular authority ("Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's").
Alan Craig argues that Tablighi Jamaat’s officially stated renunciation of violence to spread Islam is a matter of pragmatics and not of principle. Since they so closely try to live as Muhammad lived and since Mohammad used violence and warfare to spread Islam they see the spread of Islam at the point of a spear, the barrel of a gun, or via improvised explosive devices as morally acceptable as long as violent tactics can work. Check out Alan Craig's video on this at YouTube.
Also see Alan Craig's YouTube home page.
There's a solution for this problem: Separationism.
While I'm at it, I like Brussels Journal and think Europeans shouldn't have to face a growing list of no-go zones and battles by Turks and Moroccans. Read more on Turkish nationalism in Brussels. I think it is very wrong for the European Union to outlaw speech against the Islamization of Europe. I agree with Diane West that those who see Nazis everywhere are fighting the last war and ignoring real threats in the process.
Audacious Epigone reports on the ethnic cleansing of blacks from areas of Los Angeles by Hispanic gangs.
Perhaps La Raza and the NAACP should see this as a priority, more urgent than the fabricated 'hate crimes' of various MinuteMen chapters:
A south Los Angeles Latino street gang targeted African-American gang rivals and other blacks in a campaign of neighborhood "cleansing," federal prosecutors say. Alleged leaders and foot soldiers in the Hispanic gang Florencia 13, also called F13, are being arraigned this week on charges stemming from a pair of federal indictments that allege that the gang kept a tight grip on its turf by shooting members of a rival gang—and sometimes random black civilians. The "most disturbing aspect" of the federal charges was that "innocent citizens … ended up being shot simply because of the color of their skin," U.S. Attorney Thomas O'Brien told reporters in announcing the indictments.Thought tribalism had died out in the West? Like tuberculosis, it's returning. Half of all Los Angelenos are Hispanic, and their numbers are growing. Only 11% are black. It's a losing proposition for the old Crips and Bloods (I've heard from multiple people that the two rival gangs are uniting in some cities, but I've not seen anything definitive. If anyone has, please make it known in the comments).
The web site BlackAmericaWeb.com reports Los Angeles has no-go areas for blacks.
There’s no physical sign, barrier or even a chalk line that marks the zone where a black can’t enter at the risk of grave harm. But the zone is there, and blacks know that if they enter it they can be beat, shot at or killed. The twist is that the forbidden zone is not in a redneck, backwoods town in a Southern state during the rigid and violent Jim Crow segregation era. The bigger twist is that the Klan, Neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and bikers didn’t establish the racially restrictive zone. Purported Latino gang members established it. The forbidden zone is in a small, mixed ethnic bedroom community in Los Angeles. The year is 2007, not 1947.
A black family that recently fled the community in fear for their lives bluntly told a reporter that they left because blacks there are scared to death. In the past year, the hate terror escalated to the point where blacks tell tormenting tales of being harried when they leave their homes, or their children walk to school. They say that they are forbidden to go into a park, and a convenience store.
We need maps on the internet that show ethnic no-go areas with some style of coding the areas so you can know how great the risks are and how the risks vary by time of day. That way you could avoid accidentally going somewhere that could lead to harm against you.
The left-leaning web site Alternet confirms LA gangs enforce color lines.
"The way I hear these knuckleheads tell it, they don't want their neighborhoods infested with blacks, as if it's an infestation," says respected Los Angeles gang expert Tony Rafael, who interviewed several Latino street gang leaders for an upcoming book on the Mexican Mafia, the dominant Latino gang in Southern California. "It's pure racial animosity that manifests itself in a policy of a major criminal organization."
"There's absolutely no motive absent the color of their skin," adds former Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Michael Camacho. Before he became a judge, in 2003, Camacho successfully prosecuted a Latino gang member for the random shootings of three black men in Pomona, Calif.
"They generally don't like African Americans," Pomona gang unit officer Marcus Perez testified in that case. "If an African American enters their neighborhood, they're likely to be injured or killed."
Imagine whites were doing this sort of thing. The media would be extremely outraged. But curiously Hispanics are held to a different standard. This gets reported, but not a lot. Why is that? I can think of a number of reasons. But I'm not sure which reason is most important. My guess is that liberal white reporters are far more keen to score status points against poorly behaving whites than they are to score points against Hispanics. In a sense they are secretly racist and actually think they get a bigger boost by showing themselves morally superior to another white than to a black or Hispanic.
Where do these ethnic purger Hispanic gang members come from? Heather Mac Donald says most are illegal aliens and yet police are forced to turn a blind eye on their illegal status.
Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some examples:
• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.
• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.
• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.
I say deport all the illegal aliens since our population is too high. That'll cut the size of the gangs by more than half. That will also cut out future supply of gang members.
Scotland is the land of Scots. Scotland, you might think, exists for the Scottish who, btw, are overwhelmingly not Muslim. But the West has its internal enemies who want nothing better than to impose on us for the benefit of all the other cultures, religions, and ethnicities of the world. Scotland, a place whose rules used to be designed to be suitable for the Scottish, is starting to become hostile to the ways of the Scottish just like, for example, Rotterdam is becoming hostile to Dutch. Why? Islamic immigration made it possible for our enemies from within to use immigrant enemies to shaft us in ways petty and substantial. That immigration brings Muslims who expect non-Muslims to behave like Dhimmis. The Muslim immigrants serve as useful tools for Western leftist multiculturalist intellectuals who like nothing better than to screw over Western peoples. In Scotland medical workers aren't allowed to eat at their desks during the Ramadan holiday month of Islam.
TWO Scottish NHS trusts have decided all their staff should be banned from eating at their desks during next month's Ramadan when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk.
They will also be removing the vending machines and lunch trollies from their hospitals during the 30-day period.
That is just plain incredible. I eat at my desk to save time since I usually have too much to do. Surely like of Scottish NHS workers do the same. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?
Mary Scanlon, Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing in the Scottish Parliament said the move was a “step too far” for political correctness and unnecessary. “Scotland is a very tolerant, sensitive and welcoming country” but she added, “I don’t see it’s necessary for Ramadan to affect the lives of people of other beliefs,” she told Times Online, “It would be like saying Protestants shouldn’t eat meat next to Catholics who want to eat fish on a Friday.”
As we said, this is not an isolated case. While the Scottish NHS grovels before Islam, across the North Sea in Belgium the mayor of Brussels is refusing to let a group demonstrate on Sept. 11 — remember that date? — against the introduction of Sharia laws in Europe.
This is not Nazis marching on Skokie, Ill., but Europeans from Great Britain, Germany and Denmark who are alarmed by the Islamization of their homelands. They want to take their protest through the streets of Brussels to the European Parliament, where they will stop and honor the 9/11 victims with a moment of silence.
The West's politicians and intellectuals are mostly our enemies.
Pauline Hanson says enough is enough.
RIGHT-wing firebrand Pauline Hanson says she will run on similar policies to those that won her international notoriety a decade ago when she vies for a Queensland Senate seat at the upcoming election.
The main difference will be that this time the former fish and chip shop owner, who claims credit for forcing the Howard Government to adopt a harder line on immigration controls, will target Muslims.
"We need to have a look at our immigration levels and I'd like to have a look at putting a moratorium on any more Muslims coming into Australia," she said today.
She doesn't see a need to tolerate the intolerant.
"I want a moratorium put on the number of Muslims coming into Australia," Ms Hanson told the Nine network.
"People have a right to be very concerned about this because of the terrorist attacks that have happened throughout the world.
"I'm sick of these people coming out here and saying that our girls are like the meat market and the bible that is urinated on ... am I supposed to be tolerant?"
By contrast, a Roman Catholic bishop in the Netherlands wants us all to be submissive dhimmis.
A proposal by a Roman Catholic bishop in the Netherlands that people of all faiths refer to God as "Allah" is not sitting well with the Catholic community.
Tiny Muskens, an outgoing bishop who is retiring in a few weeks from the southern diocese of Breda, said God doesn't care what he is called.
"Allah is a very beautiful word for God. Shouldn't we all say that from now on we will name God Allah? ... What does God care what we call him? It is our problem," Muskens told Dutch television.
Tiny Muskens. Not exactly an intellectual giant.
Western countries need to take moves to slow or reverse the growth of the terrorism by Muslims living in the West who are learning terrorism on web sites.
"The Internet is the new Afghanistan," New York police chief Raymond Kelly said, as he released a New York Police Department (NYPD) report on the home-grown threat of attacks by Islamist extremists. "It is the de facto training ground. It's an area of concern."
The report found that the challenge for Western authorities was to identify, pre-empt and prevent home-grown threats, which was difficult because many of those who might undertake an attack often commit no crimes along the path to extremism.
This report from the NYPD is on the web: Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat (PDF format).
While the threat from overseas remains, many of the terrorist attacks or thwarted plots against cities in Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States have been conceptualized and planned by local residents/citizens who sought to attack their country of residence. The majority of these individuals began as “unremarkable” - they had “unremarkable” jobs, had lived “unremarkable” lives and had little, if any criminal history. The recently thwarted plot by homegrown jihadists, in May 2007, against Fort Dix in New Jersey, only underscores the seriousness of this emerging threat.
Understanding this trend and the radicalization process in the West that drives “unremarkable” people to become terrorists is vital for developing effective counter- strategies. This realization has special importance for the NYPD and the City of New York. As one of the country’s iconic symbols and the target of numerous terrorist plots since the 1990’s, New York City continues to be the one of the top targets of terrorists worldwide. Consequently, the NYPD places a priority on understanding what drives and defines the radicalization process.
The aim of this report is to assist policymakers and law enforcement officials, both in Washington and throughout the country, by providing a thorough understanding of the kind of threat we face domestically. It also seeks to contribute to the debate among intelligence and law enforcement agencies on how best to counter this emerging threat by better understanding what constitutes the radicalization process.
We should halt Muslim immigration, deport non-citizen Muslims, and offer citizen Muslims money to give up their citizenship and leave.
Londonistan calling from the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle come down.
The British branch of a world-wide radical Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, held a conference London on Saturday, in which speakers called for the overthrow of Muslim governments and their replacement with a single Islamic state, known as the caliphate. According to Hizb ut-Tahrir's website, "thousands" of people attended the conference.
Hizb ut-Tahrir - the Liberation Party in English - is active in dozens of countries, but has been banned in several Arab states, as well as European countries such as Germany and Russia. It is also illegal in China. In Britain, the organization is still legal, despite instances of the group's members and websites being found to promote anti-Semitic incitement to violence and calls for suicide bombings. In Australia, the organization is facing the prospect of a ban.
David Davis, writing in the Times of London (or should I say the Times of Londonistan?) says Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT) is an enemy of Western democracies.
The British suicide bombers who attacked Mike’s Place in Tel Aviv in 2003 had Hizb ut-Tahrir contacts. Terrorist fixer Mohammed Babar (who turned and testified against the Crevice July 7 bombers) was a member. Shoe-bomber Richard Reid was influenced by HuT preachers. And Omar Bakri Mohammed, a former Hizb ut-Tahrir leader – now deported to Lebanon – believes that 7/7 was the fault of the British people and describes the 9/11 bombers as the “magnificent 19”.
And that is just in this country.
Across Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia, HuT preaches a virulent brand of Islamic extremism. Senior Al-Qaeda leaders, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were members of HuT. Its UK website boasts that it is a “global party”, directly associating itself with the acts of its branches abroad.
In response to the recent attempted attacks in London and Glasgow, HuT confined itself to this general legalistic comment: “We reiterate our position that Islam does not allow the harming of innocent civilians.”
So were those targeted at Glasgow airport and the Haymarket “innocent” or “guilty” civilians? This deliberate ambiguity is telling.
How about deporting these people? Isn't their statements like nature's way of telling you that you face a threat to your lives and ought to take appropriate actions? Hello? The non-citizen Muslims could all be told to leave pronto. Then the citizen Muslims could be offered a buyback of their citizenship. This problem is solvable with sufficient will to solve it. Or do the British prefer "getting hit on the head lessons"?
Members of a radical Muslim group that Tony Blair promised to ban after the July 7 bombings have set up two schools in Britain to educate primary age children.
The Islamic Shaksiyah Foundation, a registered charity that runs private schools in Haringey, north London, and in Slough in Berkshire, was established two years ago by female members of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
HuT is big on doctors and engineers. Do I need to mention that engineers could make more effective bombs?
Yesterday Attorney-General Philip Ruddock signalled that authorities were looking at the Hizb ut-Tahrir group, which is currently legal in the UK and Australia.
Mr Ruddock was speaking after a Hizb ut-Tahrir defector from the UK, Ed Husain, warned Australian authorities to look at the group and said its leadership included a large number of doctors and engineers.
Ed Husain thinks there's a difference between Islam and Islamism. By contrast, ParaPundit thinks there's a difference between people who embrace the core beliefs of Islam and those who believe in watered down and impure variants of Islam. It is the believers in the diluted versions of Islam that do not want to dominate or kill non-Muslims.
If Londonistan radicals were all deported they would become more circumspect under the watchful eye of Middle Eastern rulers.
TRIPOLI, Lebanon: There was a time when Omar Bakri Mohammed embodied every stereotype of the jihadi extremist. From his perch in London, he threw around words like "kafir" - infidel - to describe Christians and Jews and openly praised the bombers of Sept. 11, 2001.
But sitting recently in his new library overlooking Mount Lebanon in this northern city, with a bloody battle raging between the Lebanese Army and the Qaeda-inspired Fatah al Islam at a Palestinian refugee camp a few kilometers away, Bakri presented himself as a changed man. Whether the shift is as meaningful as he asserts is an open question.
He speaks of peace, decrying the unnecessary use of violence and emphasizing the sanctity of life.
I decry the unnecessary tolerance of Muslim violence in Western countries by Western rulers.
A father who ordered the killing of his daughter after finding out she had a boyfriend has been jailed for life.
Banaz Mahmod, 20, was raped and tortured before being strangled and buried in a suitcase in Birmingham.
Her Iraqi Kurd father Mahmod Mahmod, 52, of Mitcham, south London, will serve at least 20 years.
Her uncle Ari Mahmod, 50, who helped arrange the murder, and killer Mohammed Hama, 30, got life terms and will serve at least 23 and 17 years respectively.
They laughed while raping her.
A series of secret prison recordings showed that Banaz Mahmod’s killers had laughed as they raped and tortured her, before Mohamad Hama, a hired thug, stamped on her neck while strangling her with a ligature to “force out her soul”.
At least two of the killers got away by fleeing Britain.
At least two of the gang of killers have since fled to Iraq.
An older sister who is now hiding for the family was in the house while her sister was killed.
Ari Mahmod, 51, recruited a gang of thugs who tortured, raped and strangled his niece Banaz Mahmod, 20, before cramming her body into a suitcase and burying it in a pit, where it lay for three months. The brothers had decided Ms Mahmod was to be killed because she had fallen in love with a man they felt was unsuitable.
Ms Mahmod's father, Mahmod Mahmod, 54, left his home in Mitcham, south-west London, on the morning of the murder so that she could be killed there. An older sister was in the house at the time.
An associate of Ari's, Mohamad Hama, 31, who was recorded in prison boasting of kicking and stamping on Ms Mahmod's neck "to get her soul out", was also sentenced to life yesterday. He pleaded guilty to murder.
The minimum sentences ranged only from 17 to 23 years. Why should these men ever be given the chance to walk free again?
The older sister wore a burkah while testifying. She's afraid to show her face.
She was put into an arranged marriage at age 16 but fled Kurdistan to get out of it.
She was kept away from Western influences, entered an arranged marriage at the age of 16 with a member of her clan and was expected to fulfill the role of subservient wife and mother.
Thanks to immigration honor crimes are rising in Britain.
Ms Sood, who specialises in Asian family cases, told BBC Radio Five Live "honour crimes of some sort" whether or not they resulted in death, were becoming more common in the UK.
"But certainly honour crimes are being perpetrated in the hundreds every year," she said.
I reject multiculturalism. We should kick the Muslims out of the West. Pay the legal residents to leave and round up all the illegals.
Ziel at Lying Eyes provides evidence that Barack Obama favors an immigration policy that effectively puts extended family loyalty over what is best for America.
On the Senate floor yesterday, Obama condemned the one feature of the proposed immigration bill that actually makes sense: de-emphasizing family ties and using a point system based on skills in selecting who gets to immigrate. The "family reunification" policy is, of course, insane, as there is no benefit to America whatsoever of allowing someone to live in the country merely because a relative is already living here, and any immigration policy that is not based on what is good for America is insane.
Obama wants to place a high value on extended family ties.
"The point system does not reflect how much Americans value the family ties that bind people to their brothers and sisters or to their parents," he said. "How many of our forefathers would have measured up under this point system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?"
Barack Obama has very curious family ties. His Kenyan father was a bigamist and when his father married his white Christian mother from Kansas Barack Sr. was already married to a woman in Kenya (and his father went on to do more bigamy). One wonders whether Senator Obama thinks that reunification should include members of of an extended family from Africa born to a succession of wives.
When Americans think of family they think of the nuclear family first and foremost. We are able to have government which is less corrupt and inefficient than those in places like Iraq and Kenya in large part because each civil servant does not feel obligated to get jobs for every brother and cousin they have.
Obligations to extended family (as seen with the practice of cousin marriage in Muslim countries) come at the expense of obligations to the larger society. Extended family loyalty is the enemy of a modern free society and should be recognized as such.
To appreciate how extended family immigration creates problems see my post Over Half Of Pakistanis In Britain Married To First Cousins Also see Christopher Caldwell's article in the New York Times Magazine entitled Where Every Generation Is First-Generation
Marriage is not just an aspect of the immigration problem in Germany; to a growing extent, it is the immigration problem.
...
This leaves open only one avenue for non-European men and women who want to enter Germany legally: marriage to someone with legal residency in the country. Fortunately for would-be immigrants, young ethnic Turks in Germany have a strong tendency to marry people from the home country. Exact statistics are hard to come by, but it is possible that as many as 50 percent of Turks (a word that in common parlance often includes even those with German citizenship) seek their spouses abroad, according to Schäuble, the interior minister. For most of the past decade, according to the ministry, between 21,000 and 27,000 people a year have successfully applied at German consulates in Turkey to form families in Germany. (Just under two-thirds of the newcomers are women.) That means roughly half a million spouses since the mid-1980s, which in turn means hundreds of thousands of new families in which the children’s first language is as likely to be Turkish as German.
Binational marriage alarms many Germans for two reasons. First, it allows the Turkish community to grow fast at a time when support for immigration is low. The Turkish population in Germany multiplies not once in a life cycle but twice — at childbirth and at marriage. Second, such marriages retard assimilation even for those Turks long established in Germany. You frequently hear stories from schoolteachers about a child of guest workers who was a star pupil three decades ago but whose own children, although born in Germany, struggle to learn German in grade school. After half a century of immigration, every new generation of Turks is still, to a large extent, a first generation.
Extended families and chain immigration of families create parallel societies in which family loyalties trump and replace loyalties to fellow citizens and in which women have little freedom.
Why does all this matter? The US Senate is debating a bill, S.1348, that will provide a legal amnesty to 12 million illegal aliens and also help some of their family members immigrate as well. It is time to speak up against their proposal and tell your elected representatives you oppose massive immigration. Make a call to tell them. Here is the US Senate contact list. Here is the US House of Representatives contact list. Also, check out this combined directory and Senate and House contact numbers that includes both district office numbers and Washington DC office numbers. You can also call the U.S. Senate switchboard: 202-224-3121. Plus, you can call the U.S. House switchboard: 202-225-3121.
Islamic supporters of six Muslims arrested in London earlier this week today staged a rowdy demonstration outside the top security police station where they are being held.
Dozens of angry demonstrators branded Tony Blair a "terrorist" while carrying banners stating "Sharia Law - the future, free our Muslim brothers" and "Crusade against Islam"
More than 100 Muslim men, women and children gathered outside Paddington Green Police Station in west London where the six suspected Islamic extremists - including firebrand Abu Izzadeen - are beiMuslims Stage Demo Outside Police Stationng detained on suspicion of inciting terrorism and raising funds for terrorism.
Muslim fundamentalists want Sharia law for all because that's what the base texts of their religion tell them to demand.
Mr Islam said: "We definitely want to see Sharia law in place here. We want to see it implemented for everyone. Only then will there be harmony and there will be peace and justice amongst mankind."
The Muslim fundamentalists are not extremists within Islam. They are the orthodox. They follow the base texts and teachings of their religion. The so-called moderate Muslims are really Muslims who believe a watered down version of Islam or who don't want to personally be troubled to follow all the instructions of Islam.
If the Europeans do not want to live in increasingly Islamicized societies they could pay their legally present Muslims to leave and deport their illegal Muslims.
Americans should fear that the Iraq debacle will lead to left-liberal and neoconservative liberal demands to let in more Iraqi immigrants. That's already happening to Sweden and they didn't even support the war. The Swedes are harming their own society with a foolish immigration policy.
Many of the thousands of Iraqis fleeing their homeland want to go to Europe, and Stockholm is their port of entry. Now Sweden wants other European countries to share the burden. EU ministers are meeting this week to discuss how to cope with increasing numbers of Iraqi refugees.
Clue for the Swedes: What makes Sweden so desirable for non-Swedes? The Swedes. You make your society function well. You do not commit a lot of crimes. You are smart enough to maintain an industrial society. You have qualities that make Sweden function well. But here's your problem: The more non-Swedes you people let in the less desirable the place will become for you and the less you'll be able to make the place work well.
Any Iraqis who make it to Sweden can stay and join the welfare state.
Ridha, like thousands of his fellow Iraqis, has found a new life in northern Europe. Sweden, because of its liberal visa requirements, guarantees Iraqi expatriates the right of residence in the country. Last year Sweden welcomed more than 9,000 Iraqis, which was close to 50 percent of all Iraqi refugees arriving in Europe in 2006 and four times as many as in the previous year. Eight hundred Iraqis fled to Switzerland, and almost 2,000 Iraqis applied for asylum in Germany in 2006 (although only 1.1 percent of those applications were approved). The United States, which launched its crusade against the "Axis of Evil" by invading Iraq, accepted less than 600 refugees from Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.
Are the Swedes masochistic?
Blogger Fjordman reports gangs from immigrant families prey on Swedes.
The wave of robberies the city of Malmö has witnessed during this past year is part of a “war against Swedes.” This is the explanation given by young robbers with immigrant background on why they are only robbing native Swedes, in interviews with Petra Åkesson for her thesis in Sociology. “I read a report about young robbers in Stockholm and Malmö and wanted to know why they are robbing other youths. It usually doesn’t involve a lot of money,” she says. She interviewed boys between 15 and 17 years old, both individually and in groups.
Almost 90% of all robberies that are reported to the police were committed by gangs, not individuals. “When we are in the city and robbing, we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explain, laughingly, that “there is a thrilling sensation in your body when you’re robbing, you feel satisfied and happy, it feels as if you’ve succeeded, it simply feels good.” “It’s so easy to rob Swedes, so easy.” “We rob every single day, as much as we want to, whenever we want to.” The immigrant youth view Swedes as stupid and cowardly: “The Swedes don’t do anything, they just give us the stuff. They’re so wimpy.” The young robbers don’t plan their crimes: “No, we just see some Swedes that look rich or have nice mobile phones and then we rob them.”
These robbers are serving a pedagogical purpose. By robbing the Swedes they are teaching the Swedes that their immigration policy is suicidal. Will the Swedes wake up before Muslims become a large fraction of the population of Sweden?
Fjordman says Sweden's multicultural elites hate Sweden and see everything Swedish as racist.
“Exit Folkhemssverige - En samhällsmodells sönderfall” (Exit the People's Home of Sweden - The Downfall of a Model of Society) is a book from 2005 about immigration and the Swedish welfare state model dubbed “the people's home,” written by Jonathan Friedman, Ingrid Björkman, Jan Elfverson and Åke Wedin. According to them, the Swedish Multicultural elites see themselves first of all as citizens of the world. In order to emphasize and accentuate diversity, everything Swedish is deliberately disparaged. Opposition to this policy is considered a form of racism:
“The dominant ideology in Sweden, which has been made dominant by powerful methods of silencing and repression, is a totalitarian ideology, where the elites oppose the national aspect of the nation state. The problem is that the ethnic group that are described as Swedes implicitly are considered to be nationalists, and thereby are viewed as racists.”
The authors fear that the handling of the immigration policies has seriously eroded democracy because the citizens lose their loyalty towards a state they no longer consider their own. “Instead of increasing the active participation of citizens, the government has placed clear restrictions on freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of congregation.”
I've noted this loss of loyalty to the state in myself. Why feel loyalty to something that is obviously not loyal to you?
Can Muslim husbands castigate their wives by beating them?
The case seems simply too strange to be true. A 26-year-old mother of two wanted to free herself from what had become a miserable and abusive marriage. The police had even been called to their apartment to separate the two -- both of Moroccan origin -- after her husband got violent in May 2006. The husband was forced to move out, but the terror continued: Even after they separated, the spurned husband threatened to kill his wife.
A quick divorce seemed to be the only solution -- the 26-year-old was unwilling to wait the year between separation and divorce mandated by German law. She hoped that as soon as they were no longer married, her husband would leave her alone. Her lawyer, Barbara Becker-Rojczyk agreed and she filed for immediate divorce with a Frankfurt court last October. They both felt that the domestic violence and death threats easily fulfilled the "hardship" criteria necessary for such an accelerated split.
In January, though, a letter arrived from the judge adjudicating the case. The judge rejected the application for a speedy divorce by referring to a passage in the Koran that some have controversially interpreted to mean that a husband can beat his wife. It's a supposed right which is the subject of intense debate among Muslim scholars and clerics alike."The exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565 (of German federal law)," the daily Frankfurter Rundschau quoted the judge's letter as saying. It must be taken into account, the judge argued, that both man and wife have Moroccan backgrounds.
Some Westerners are definitely enemies of the West. Take this judge for example.
Thanks to Dragon Horse for bringing this story to my attention.
Islam is already causing enough oppression of people in Germany without help from judges. A group of out-of-the-closet former Muslims is getting death threats from current Muslims
A group of former Muslims in Germany who formed a non-religious society have been sent threatening letters, pronouncing them "fit for death."
Mina Ahadi, an Iranian-born woman, founded the society in Cologne with 10 sympathizers several weeks ago and called it the National Council of Ex-Muslims. At the end of February she called a news conference in Berlin to publicly pronounce herself non-Islamic.
The police have assigned plainclothes bodyguards to protect her ever since.
"I'm a target," said Ahadi, 50. She said members of her society had received letters telling them they would be shot in the back. When she went online with a fierce attack on Islamic organizations, somebody circulated a statement suggesting she was fit to be killed, she said.
Islam does not recognize a right to leave the religion. In many Muslim countries leaving Islam is against the law.
Believed to be the first test of its kind in Europe, the southern state of Baden-Württemberg has created the two-hour oral exam to test the loyalty of Muslims towards Germany.
...
But now they will be quizzed on their attitudes to homosexuality and western clothing for young women, and whether husbands should be allowed to beat their wives.
Other questions covering topics such as bigamy and whether parents should allow their children to participate in school sports have been called "trick questions", meant to catch people off guard.
The state interior ministry said the test would be used to filter out Muslims who were unsuited for life in Germany. Those who answered "correctly" but later acted against expected behaviour, such as wife-beating, could have their citizenship removed.
Want a more effective alternative for Germany and Europe? Separationism. Keep out a religion that is incompatible with Western societies. Pay Muslims to leave Europe.
Andrea Brandt and Cordula Meyer of the German magazine Der Spiegel report on the development of a Muslim parallel society in Germany.
Germany's Muslim population is becoming more religious and more conservative. Islamic associations are fostering the trend, particularly through their work with the young -- accelerating the drift towards a parallel Muslim society.
The article explains how German judges are instrumental in allowing Muslims to separate themselves in schools and other venues. My take: If separate parallel societies within borders are acceptable in this supposed universal world of liberal secular market capitalism and globalism why not put the separate societies on different sides of borders? Why do we need to construct separate parallel societies at close quarters in neighborhoods? How does this benefit us? It seems to only cost us and inflict strife, hostility, and conflicts right where we live.
Surveys in the country have charted a significant increase in fundamentalist attitudes, particularly among younger Muslims. The experiences of Ekin Deligöz, a member of the German parliament representing the Green Party, underscore the potential dangers. Having called on Muslim women to remove their headscarves, Deligöz faced death threats and now receives police protection.
This is a long article with lots of descriptions of Islamic residential homes for adolescents where the kids are basically taught to separate themselves from non-Islamic society. Click through and read the whole thing if you have any doubts about the scope of the problem.
The Muslims in Germany are becoming more Islamic and more separate from German society.
According to Faruk Süen, director of the Center for Turkish Studies, the boys and girls are increasingly defining themselves by reference to their faith. In his view, this is another consequence of 9/11. After the terror attacks, Islam was stigmatized by the world at large, he explains, sparking a counterreaction among Muslims. In 2000 Süen's center conducted a survey. The results showed that 8 percent of immigrants of Turkish extraction said they were "very religious." In 2005, the figure had climbed to 28 percent.
The survey's findings on headscarves are also striking. While only 27 percent had thought Muslim women should cover their hair in 2000, the number had almost doubled to 47 percent five years later. A similar pattern emerged on the topics of dual-sex sports classes and participation in coeducational school trips. Rejected by 19 percent in 2000, by last year the proportion had risen to 30 percent.
Women and young men are startlingly conservative: 59 percent of 18- to 30-year olds favored Muslim women wearing headscarves, as did almost 62 percent of female respondents. Members of mosque associations took particularly orthodox positions, including - and above all - the VIKZ members.
Why force your kids into environments where they are not tolerated? Why allow your society to change into a hostile alien one by letting in incompatible immigrants? Why force Western Christians into the same hostile conditions seen in Muslim countries? I realize that George W. Bush calls Islam a religion of peace. But why not challenge this ridiculous lie?
A teacher at Richard Elementary in the same district gave disturbing evidence last year to the school committee: German children "weren't really being tolerated," and "Christian" was often used as a term of contempt. The teachers were doing their best to set things straight during class "but, sadly, with very little success," she said.
This sort of report always remind me of Monty Python's Argument skit and the "Being Hit On The Head lessons". Yes, it is a stupid concept. But it is a concept which the West's elites have taught its masses they have to accept.
What should we do about Islam? Keep the Muslims out of the West. Lawrence Auster calls this strategy separationism. Mr. Auster brings to my attention an Investors Business Daily editorial calling for the separation of Islam from the West.
Global Jihad: A new Gallup poll finds that richer, better-educated Muslims are more likely to be radicalized. This explodes the myth of the poor, dumb terrorist.
Since 9/11, the politically correct elite have mau-maued Americans into thinking the terrorists have hijacked a peaceful religion out of ignorance and poverty. Or that they've been brainwashed by Osama bin Laden.
But Gallup found the opposite to hold true: The most radical among Muslims — those who support jihad — earn more and stay in school longer. These are the smart ones, not the rubes.
As the IBD editors point out, the behavior of Muslims contradicts liberal dogma on education. Modern liberal dogma holds education as universal cure for most of what ails society. We are constantly told by high church liberals that if only we spent more on education and improved our ability to educate then everything from crime to racial differences in achievement to terrorism would go down.
In an amazing conclusion the IBD editors become perhaps the first editors of a major American newspaper to advocate the separation of Islam from the West.
Gallup's survey of Muslims, the largest conducted, puts to rest theories that radicals attack us because they're poor and alienated from society. Or because they're dim and easily misled.
Radical Muslims have an education and an economic future, yet they still hate. They're literate enough to interpret their holy books, yet they still embrace jihad against infidels.
Perhaps the only sane course in this war is to separate the West from Islam.
As Lawrence Auster points out, IBD's editors are unusual in the press because they follow the evidence to a logical conclusion.
Now, IBD’s editors are not the first people to note the connection between modernization and jihad. Intellectuals such Olivier Roy and Francis Fukuyama have said the same. But those intellectuals never follow through to the logical conclusions of this factual observation. Instead they suggest bandaids, such as easing the radicalization of Western Muslims via greater efforts at assimilation. IBD—and this is what is amazing—does follow through to the logical conclusion. If education and wealth, and thus by implication modernization, spur jihadism, then every additional contact of the West with Islam, whether through the export of our culture, technology, and political ideas to the Islamic world, or the import of Muslims to the West, leads to greater jihadism.
To dismiss the evidence one has to make an argument along the lines that moderate doses of Western exposure cause Jihadism but that if only we could make the doses of Western culture big enough then the Muslims would turn away from hostility toward non-Muslims.
Is this argument right? Sure, but only if we used methods that are anathema to liberals. What would work? If we took their babies away and raised the babies in Christian homes then the kids would grow up non-Muslim and hence wouldn't have the Muslim hostility to the West. We can hope that if the kids get to watch MTV that'd turn them away from Islam. But when we look at Muslims in Western countries such as Britain and Germany we can plainly see that the daily exposure of the larger societies is not enough to turn Muslims away from their hostility and their own construction of parallel cultures.
I criticize the war in Iraq because it does not protect us at home. We should stop Muslim immigration and pay Muslims to leave. For the cost of the Iraq war we could have greatly reduced our risk of Muslim terrorism by putting well defended national borders and thousands and miles between us and them.
In France the Muslim youths in the banlieue suburbs keep police out of some areas.
Radical Muslims in France's housing estates are waging an undeclared "intifada" against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day.
As the interior ministry said that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were "in a state of civil war" with Muslims in the most depressed "banlieue" estates which are heavily populated by unemployed youths of north African origin.
It said the situation was so grave that it had asked the government to provide police with armoured cars to protect officers in the estates, which are becoming no-go zones.
I say deport the illegals, stop granting citizenship to Muslims, buy back the citizenship from those Muslims who are citizens, and deport them all. If they are terrorists or criminals revoke their citizenship without compensation.
Another report about the French police union:
Muslims now try to kill French police and burn police cars.
"Michel Thoomis, the secretary general of the hardline Action Police trade union, demands that officers be given armored cars in the most dangerous areas.
“He said yesterday: ‘We are in a state of war, orchestrated by radical Islamists. This is not a question of urban violence any more, it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails. You no longer see two or three youths confronting police, you see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their “comrades” free when they are arrested.’”
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has also used the term "intifada" to refer the Muslims in the housing estates.
Will the Muslims start using IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) of the sort seen in Iraq? My guess (perhaps over-optimistically) is that such a move would backfire. I'm thinking the higher and faster the Muslims escalate the better for the West. The sooner they reveal their ultimate intentions the sooner steps can be taken against them before it is too late. On this point see my post Muslims Criticize Al Qaeda For Waking Up Westerners To Muslim Immigration.
Also see my previous posts Muslims Said To Make Up 70% Of Prisoners In France, Most Prisoners In France Are Muslim, Headscarves And Islam In France And Turkey, Houellebecq could do French jail term for insulting Islam, and Theodore Dalrymple on French Ghettoes.
All this was about a year ago. It was not the first time I had conducted an interview with someone in a full veil, but this particular encounter, though very polite and respectful on both sides, got me thinking. In part, this was because of the apparent incongruity between the signals which indicate common bonds - the entirely English accent, the couple's education (wholly in the UK) - and the fact of the veil. Above all, it was because I felt uncomfortable about talking to someone "face-to-face" who I could not see.
So I decided that I wouldn't just sit there the next time a lady turned up to see me in a full veil, and I haven't.
Now, I always ensure that a female member of my staff is with me. I explain that this is a country built on freedoms. I defend absolutely the right of any woman to wear a headscarf. As for the full veil, wearing it breaks no laws.
I go on to say that I think, however, that the conversation would be of greater value if the lady took the covering from her face. Indeed, the value of a meeting, as opposed to a letter or phone call, is so that you can - almost literally - see what the other person means, and not just hear what they say. So many of the judgments we all make about other people come from seeing their faces.
I thought it may be hard going when I made my request for face-to-face interviews in these circumstances. However, I can't recall a single occasion when the lady concerned refused to lift her veil; and most I ask seem relieved I have done so.
Straw's essay and subsequent statements (see below) shows just how much further along the British and Europeans have moved in their thinking about Muslim immigrants as compared to political elites in America. America's political elites are still stuck inside the narrow intellectual confines of the bundle of lies which the Left has built for them.
Some Muslims are predictably unhappy about Straw's position.
Shaykh Ibrahim, who trained as an imam, said: "I have a beard and I wear a traditional long shirt. Sometimes I wear a turban and a hat. Am I going to be his next subject of concern?" He said he welcomed a debate but Muslims "would want ownership of the outcome of that debate".
Dr Reefat Drabu, the chairman of the social and family affairs committee of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, said: "If Mr Straw thinks this is going to break down barriers, it isn't. If anything, it is going to alienate Muslim women and be a catalyst for more of them to wear the veil and prove a point."
She added: "If you are trying to build bridges, you need to listen to what Muslims are saying. The problems that alienate women are to do with foreign policy and no one seems to take any notice of that. This country is supposed to celebrate diversity. That is the wonderful thing about this country: that it accepts, that it is tolerant. Women who wear the veil are making the statement that they are separate from society and that is why they wear it."
I do listen very carefully to what Muslims are saying. As a result I've come to the conclusion that Islam is not compatible with Western society and we should provide economic incentives to get Muslims to leave. I find Pope Benedict's view that Islam is incompatible with Western societies to be spot on.
Straw wants the Muslim women to totally discard the veils.
Jack Straw has inflamed the controversy over Muslim women wearing veils by saying that he would prefer them to stop wearing the garments altogether. The former Foreign Secretary provoked widespread anger, both among Muslim groups and in his Blackburn constituency, when he disclosed that he asked female constituents to uncover their faces in meetings.
Undaunted by a wave of criticism, including condemnation from the one of the Church of England's most senior bishops, Mr Straw waded further into the row yesterday. Asked if he would rather the veils be discarded completely, he said: "Yes. It needs to be made clear I am not talking about being prescriptive but with all the caveats, yes, I would rather."
The Leader of the Commons told Radio 4's Today programme: "You cannot force people where they live, that's a matter of choice and economics, but you can be concerned about the implications of separateness."
Physical proximity does not prevent the construction of parallel separated societies. High levels of immigration enable the development of greater separation and prevents assimilation. TO get a sense of just how deep this problem runs in Britain see my post Over Half Of Pakistanis In Britain Married To First Cousins.
Getting them to unveil won't solve the problem. Islam is not compatible with Western societies. Wrap your minds around that. Islam is the problem.
Mr Straw explained the impact he thought veils could have in a society where watching facial expressions was important for contact between different people.
"Communities are bound together partly by informal chance relations between strangers - people being able to acknowledge each other in the street or being able pass the time of day," he said.
"That's made more difficult if people are wearing a veil. That's just a fact of life.
"I understand the concerns but I hope, however, there can be a mature debate about this.
"I come to this out of a profound commitment to equal rights for Muslim communities and an equal concern about adverse development about parallel communities."
He is right of course. Facial expressions provide a wealth of information about what people really mean. Misunderstandings and distrust will rise to the extent that people become less able to read each others' facial expressions.
Update II: Straw is not getting shouted down by his own party.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said yesterday that opposition to the veil was not government policy, but that Tony Blair “believes it is right that people should be able to have a discussion and express their personal views on issues such as this”.
...
But some Muslim representatives were more sympathetic, and there was support from other sources. Daud Abdullah, of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “This [veil] does cause some discomfort to non-Muslims. One can understand this.”
The Labour peer Baroness Uddin told GMTV yesterday that there was a need for debate, declaring: “It is about human rights on both sides — Jack’s right to say and the women’s right to wear what they please.” The Right Rev Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, said: “I can understand why he has said it.”
The enforcers of political correctness would probably attack an American politician who made similar comments.
Writing for the left-leaning Guardian Martin Kettle sees the veil as a form of rejection of the larger culture.
There is, of course, a wider issue here. Straw himself refers directly to it in his article. The veil is an explicit statement of separation and distance, as he puts it. It literally comes between its wearer and other people. It is impossible not to see it as a barrier dividing the individual inside from the world outside. Whether the veil is also a form of self-protection or separatism is harder to say. Not all cases will be the same. Many of us fear the latter, perhaps wrongly, although in the hoodie era it is hardly the only form of dress in modern Britain that can be read that way.
But the veil is a much more loaded statement than even a hoodie, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. It is not merely a badge of religious or cultural identity like a turban, a yarmulke or even a baseball cap. It says something not just about the wearer but about the non-wearer too. It says, or seems to say, I do not wish to engage with you. It is at some level a rejection. And since that statement of rejection comes from within Islamic cultures, some of whose willingness to integrate is explicitly at issue in more serious ways, it is hardly surprising that it should be challenged.
Muslims do not want to integrate because they see Muslims as above non-Muslims and they see the proper order of society as one where Muslims rule over non-Muslims.
A paratrooper wounded in Afghanistan was threatened by a Muslim visitor to the British hospital where he is recovering.
Seriously wounded soldiers have complained that they are worried about their safety after being left on wards that are open to the public at Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham.
...
Soldiers on operations say they would rather receive a more serious injury and go to the top American military hospital in Ramstein, Germany, than end up in a NHS hospital.
They now half jokingly refer to getting "a Boche rather than a Blighty" in reference to the wounds that would send them home. Ramstein has an outstanding unit for brain surgery, and neurological intensive care beds in Britain are in short supply. "The blokes see it that if you are unlucky you get wounded and go to the UK at the mercy of the NHS, but if you get a head wound you get sent to Ramstein in Germany where the US has an outstanding medical facility," said an officer serving in Afghanistan.
The British Muslims see fellow Muslims in Afghanistan as part of their group and fellow British citizens as not part of their group.
Writing for the Washington Post Geneive Abdo reports on what she found talking to Muslims in America. They are turning away from assimilation.
If only the Muslims in Europe -- with their hearts focused on the Islamic world and their carry-on liquids poised for destruction in the West -- could behave like the well-educated, secular and Americanizing Muslims in the United States, no one would have to worry. So runs the comforting media narrative that has developed around the approximately 6 million Muslims in the United States, who are often portrayed as well-assimilated and willing to leave their religion and culture behind in pursuit of American values and lifestyle. But over the past two years, I have traveled the country, visiting mosques, interviewing Muslim leaders and speaking to Muslim youths in universities and Islamic centers from New York to Michigan to California -- and I have encountered a different truth. I found few signs of London-style radicalism among Muslims in the United States. At the same time, the real story of American Muslims is one of accelerating alienation from the mainstream of U.S. life, with Muslims in this country choosing their Islamic identity over their American one.
The basic tenets of Islam are incompatible with assimilation. Therefore Muslims who come to Western countries are settlers, not immigrants. They do not come to join our societies. They come to recreate their own societies side-by-side with ours. British Muslims when polled put their Muslim identities and loyalties ahead of their British ones. Abdo reports on the same process happening in supposed melting pot America. So much for the neoconservative claim of the mythical uniqueness of America that supposedly makes us immune to the problems of Old Europe.
A Muslim woman proudly proclaims her right to not assimilate to American culture.
Ismahan recalled similar experiences. In elementary school, she had tried to fit in. As an adult, though, "I know I don't have to fit in," she said. "I don't think Muslims have to assimilate. We are not treated like Americans. At work, I get up from my desk and go to pray. I thought I would face opposition from my boss. Even before I realized he didn't mind, I thought, 'I have a right to be a Muslim, and I don't have to assimilate.' "
We are going to have an alien nation, a balkanized nation. Why do this to ourselves?
Also see my post Over Half Of Pakistanis In Britain Married To First Cousins. Also see Larry Auster's posts Muslim Miss England Turns On England and From "peaceful" conversion to jihadist mass destruction, Islam is a single continuum.
Twelve girls sat in rows at the front of the community room in Silver Spring's Muslim Community Center, calming their nerves with giggles and girl talk. In their sweaty hands, they held prepared speeches. On their heads, they wore scarves in a rainbow of colors: pink, brown, gold, white and lavender.
The seventh- and eighth-graders were competing in a debate on this question: Is a segregated, all-Islamic upbringing key to protecting your Muslim identity?
Eight of the dozen argued yes, using variants of the theme offered by Fatimah Waseem. Young Muslims "join with the non-Muslims, copy them and look up to them. This is hurting our identity. . . . Sometimes, we turn way from Islam," she said. "In conclusion, . . . we cannot sway in the wind and become weak. We need to be protected . . . by segregation."
The kids want to segregate.
If Western culture is alien to Muslims values then doesn't Muslim immigration bring in people whose values are incompatible with Western values?
Dar-us-Salaam, whose Friday prayer services draw 500 to 700 worshipers, describes on its Web site its plan to create an Islamic enclave as a way to sustain its members' Muslim identity and spread Islam by example. Besides a mosque and school, "such an Islamic environment would include . . . businesses and shops for employment and basic needs, housing, medical and financial institutions."
This dream reflects the strict Salafi approach of Saudi-trained Safi Khan, Dar-us-Salaam's imam, who believes that Muslims in this country need close-knit communities to cope with pressures from law enforcement officials and a Western culture alien to Islamic values.
All cultures and religions do not promote the same values or beliefs. All cultures and religions are not compatible. We ignore these basic facts at our peril.
Jon Snow of the Times of London toured around Britain and found that Muslims increasingly live as a separate community. The Muslims hold very unliberal beliefs such as that free speech rights should not extend fully to religious matters. Immigration of Muslims to Britain has created growing separate, deluded, and hostile society.
A sizeable number of British Muslims to whom I talked were convinced that Princess Diana was killed because of her relationship with a Muslim, a view reflected in our survey of 1,000 Muslims — not just angry young men, but the elderly, women, the poor and wealthy businessmen. Half of those polled believe 9/11 was a conspiracy by the US and Israel, while one in four think Diana was murdered to stop her marrying a Muslim.
The evidence that integration has stopped comes from comparing our survey with previous studies, most notably one conducted in 1993 by Tariq Modood, professor of sociology at Bristol University, who says political identification with Islam has grown disproportionately among the young since then.
It is generally assumed potential radicals come only from deprived areas, but Modood confirms that the well-off and educated are drawing away just as much. Many youngsters from Bradford are going to university and in a sense having it both ways — benefiting from this country’s facilities but taking with them core beliefs that sometimes lead to separateness.
Indeed, a 19-year-old Muslim studying biomedicine at a London university explained that the very fact of his education had led him to think the way he does. At one point I asked him and his two friends: “You’d like me to become a Muslim, wouldn’t you?” They said I’d be much better for it, and talked about the positive aspects of converting.An overwhelming number of British Muslims believe free speech should not extend to insulting their religion, and one-third would rather live under sharia law, as laid down by the Koran. A 29-year-old of Turkish Cypriot origin told me: “I feel that democracy altogether isn’t working as a system. I believe that man-made laws aren’t really the answer.”
But the liberal chattering classes still attempt (quite successfully) to convince the natives that Muslims pose little threat to their way of life.
At Audacious Epigone crush41 reports on a Pew Global Attitudes Survey which found most surveyed Europeans still think immigration from the Middle East and North Africa is a good thing.
A couple of the findings are bemusing. The percentage of people in the following countries who think continued immigration from the Middle East and North Africa is a good thing: Spain - 62%, France - 58%, Great Britain - 57%, Germany - 34%. This even though an overwhelming majority of people in each country are concerned about rising Islamic extremism. And more people in each of these countries believe an Islamic identity distinct from a national identity is growing: Spain - 46% (compared to 36% holding a contrary view), France - 68%, Britain - 69%, Germany - 72%. The public in these places that feel a Muslim identity is growing firmly believe that this trend is a bad thing: Spain - 82%, France - 87%, Britain - 59%, Germany - 83%.
So at least 38% of the Spanish, 59% of the French, 41% of the British, and 60% of the Germans feel that what is happening in the Muslim community in their home countries is a bad thing (assuming, likely in error, that all respondents ambivalent toward or disagreeing with the assertion that Islamic identity is growing at home approve of the way the Muslim community conducts itself in their home countries). Why the French anomaly? A majority feels continued Islamic immigration is good but a similar majority believes what is happening in the French Islamic community is bad.
It says something about the intellectual decline of the West that so many Europeans are intent upon taking being-hit-on-the-head lessons in the form of mass Muslim immigration. Yet the Germans have seen through it and turned back from the multicultural diversity folly. Well good for them!
Human minds tend to underestimate just how differently other people think. I see an element of "surely the Muslims can't honestly mean what they are saying" in the reaction of the general public of Western nations toward what the Muslims in their midst actually say. But media talking heads and editors make this problem worse by underreporting the extremists and going out of their way to find seeming moderates who will mouth the proper liberal pieties while claiming to represent the vast majority of their ethnic and religious brethren.
Modern Tribalist links to a report about Muslim attitudes toward Western societies and Western attitudes toward Muslims.
The poll found that 63% of all Britons had a favourable opinion of Muslims, down slightly from 67% in 2004, suggesting last year's London bombings did not trigger a significant rise in prejudice. Attitudes in Britain were more positive than in the US, Germany and Spain (where the popularity of Muslims has plummeted to 29%), and about the same as in France.
Less than a third of British non-Muslims said they viewed Muslims as violent, significantly fewer than non-Muslims in Spain (60%), Germany (52%), the US (45%) and France (41%).
By contrast, the poll found that British Muslims represented a "notable exception" in Europe, with far more negative views of westerners than Islamic minorities elsewhere on the continent. A significant majority viewed western populations as selfish, arrogant, greedy and immoral. Just over half said westerners were violent. While the overwhelming majority of European Muslims said westerners were respectful of women, fewer than half British Muslims agreed. Another startling result found that only 32% of Muslims in Britain had a favourable opinion of Jews, compared with 71% of French Muslims.
Across the board, Muslim attitudes in Britain more resembled public opinion in Islamic countries in the Middle East and Asia than elsewhere in Europe. And on the whole, British Muslims were more pessimistic than those in Germany, France and Spain about the feasibility of living in a modern society while remaining devout.
The Pew poll found that British Muslims are far more likely than their European counterparts to harbour conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks. Only 17% believed that Arabs were involved, compared with 48% in France.
My theory to explain these results: If your society goes out of its way to show Muslims respect and approval then they will interpret this as appeasement by a timid and unconfident majority. They will respond by demanding more and telling each other they have every right to anger at the non-Muslims who are illegitimate as rulers.
By contrast, a society whos