Peter Beinhart:
Yesterday, I wrote about what the “Ground Zero” mosque disaster reveals about the Republican Party. In short, it reveals that the Bush administration was a false dawn. Bush, for all his flaws, believed that the GOP should be a universalistic party based on traditional values, a big tent for “faith-based” conservatives of all races and creeds: Muslims, Hispanics, Mormons, African-Americans, whatever. Now it is clear that the post-Bush GOP is a far nastier creature: A party seething with hatred towards vulnerable religious and ethnic groups. Despite the pretense that the GOP’s anti-mosque crusade is based on what Imam Rauf and company believe, it has more to do with who they are. It’s telling that the people Republicans are turning to for their anti-mosque street cred are not “moderate, peace-loving” Muslims, since even Muslim Republicans are disgusted by their party’s actions. The GOP’s new heroes are former Muslims like Nonie Darwish and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That’s one way to escape the new Republican bigotry. Maybe the folks the GOP wants to harass in Arizona should try becoming former Hispanics.
This a great example of two forms of liberal writings. First is the one that everyone who’s been to college will remember is the “People who disagree with me are bigots” genre. Second is the “Why aren’t conservatives today as cuddly as the reasonable conservatives of yore” genre. What’s impressive is that Beinhart a.) weaves these two together so well, and b.) has already lumped W. into the “cuddly conservatives of yore that today’s conservatives can’t live up to” category. That was fast.
But more importantly, Beinhart faults Republicans for siding with Ayaan Hirsi Ali against “vulnerable religious minorities.” When your definition of a “vulnerable minority” excludes a woman who’s had to flee two continents because of violent threats by religious fanatics but includes those fanatics’ coreligionists, methinks the moral compass is a bit off.
Apollo posted this at 4:04 PM HKT on Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 as George Bush Rules!, I don't know--but it's a Tradition, Veiled Threats
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This speech from Jeff Sessions puts Elena Kagan’s expulsion of military recruiters from Harvard in a context I had not thought of:
Around the same time Ms. Kagan was campaigning to exclude military recruiters—citing what she saw as the evils of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell—Harvard University accepted $20 million from a member of the Saudi Royal family to establish a center for Islamic Studies in his honor.
A recent Obama State Department report concerning Saudi Arabia and Islamic Shari’a law noted that:
“Under Shari’a as interpreted in [Saudi Arabia] sexual activity between two persons of the same gender is punishable by death or flogging.”
Ms. Kagan was perfectly willing to obstruct the U.S. military—which has liberated countless Muslims from the hate and tyranny of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.
But it seems she sat on the sidelines as Harvard created an Islamic Studies Center funded by—and dedicated to—foreign leaders presiding over a legal system that violates what would appear to be her position.
Perhaps she would have let military recruiters on campus if they gave her $20 million?
Apollo posted this at 8:44 PM HKT on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Kulturkampf, Running with the antelope, Veiled Threats
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I’m sure there are some things in this world more monstrous than this, but I have a hard time thinking of one off the top of my head. That’s probably one of the many reasons I’m not a ruling cleric in Iran.
Apollo posted this at 12:44 PM HKT on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 as Veiled Threats
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Tunku Varadarajan writes about Taliban Justice:
Here, a man, sturdy and deliberate, is hitting a teenage girl repeatedly on the buttocks with a strap, as two men press her—face-down—to the ground. One immobilizes her by pinning down her shoulders, the other by binding her legs together in his grip. (We are told in news reports that the latter is the girl’s brother; his eyes are averted from the flogging, suggesting that he may have been coerced to participate in the punishment.)
The man hits, and hits, and hits. After the fourth strike, the girl starts to whine, then scream in pain and supplication. (It was at this point that my wife, the mother of a 17-year-old girl, left the room, unable to take it any more.) I made myself watch the clip about five times, so as to write about it as accurately as possible, and each time I watched it, I was flooded with queasy dread.
Look closely at the scene’s background and you will see a crowd ranged around the flogging. You do not see the faces of the crowd (just as you do not see the face of the hapless girl). You see only their legs, but you know intuitively that they are all men. They are immobilized too, transfixed by the spectacle and, perhaps, by fear and awe, as the blows rain down on the prone figure before them, her burka pulled above her waist to reveal her startlingly pink shalwar pants. Pink, in any land, however benighted, is a girlish color. The pink pants enhance the brutality. The pink pants make the flogging bully seem even more repulsive.
The Talib bully hits, and hits, and hits. He hits the girl 34 times. One senses, as one watches him wield his strap, that this is not just a demonstration of pitilessness. One senses, in fact, that the Talib is deriving pleasure—yes, sexual pleasure—from his beating of this girl, as he hits her hard on her buttocks, sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower, mapping his territory in a display of violent, misogynist cartography. His is as much a sexual act as an act of punishment. The Talib is getting satisfaction, a twisted, vile satisfaction derived from a twisted, vile social code.
Quite apart from the diabolical disproportion here of punishment (public flogging) to “crime” (adultery), it was never clearly established by any process of proof that the girl was, in truth, adulterous. The news reports say that the facts are murky, and that she may, in fact, have been falsely accused of adultery by a man whose proposal of marriage she–or her family–had rejected. It should also be pointed out that her flogging was preceded by a flogging of the man, an electrician, with whom she is alleged to have had improper relations. His plea that he had merely gone to the girl’s home to help fix an electrical fault was ignored. (There were, it is reported, other family members present in the house during his visit.) His punishment also included an order that he—a man already married—take the 17-year-old as his wife. (Yes, a chasm separates us from the Taliban, a gulf so vast that their doings make our jaws drop.)
The video can be seen here. I could only watch it once. But Varadarajan notes that the girl’s punishment probably isn’t over yet:
[I]t is very likely that someone will kill her before long, in the name of “honor.” There will be no happy ending to this story.
Hubbard posted this at 5:01 PM HKT on Monday, April 6th, 2009 as Veiled Threats
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Wearing a hijab puts women at risk for Vitamin D deficiency.
If the feminist argument or freedom argument or beheading argument doesn’t work, maybe a public health argument will?
Dorothy posted this at 12:25 AM HKT on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 as Veiled Threats
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It’s remarkable how college feminists will push for co-ed bathrooms (to smash the last bastions of patriarchy) while simultaneously coddling the delicate modesty of Muslim women by excluding men from the gym for hours at a time.
Harvard University has moved to make Muslim women more comfortable in the gym by instituting women-only access times six hours a week to accommodate religious customs that make it difficult for some students to work out in the presence of men.
Men have not been allowed to enter the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center during certain times since Jan. 28, after members of the Harvard Islamic Society and the Harvard Women’s Center petitioned the university for a more comfortable environment for women.
Harvard Islamic Society’s Islamic Knowledge Committee officer Ola Aljawhary, a junior, said the women-only hours are being tested on a trial basis. The special gym hours will be analyzed over Spring Break to determine if they will continue, she said.
Aljawhary said that she does not believe that the women-only gym hours discriminate against men.
Tom posted this at 1:04 PM HKT on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 as Veiled Threats
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Nice country. We’ll take it:
Hundreds of [Toronto Area] Muslim men in polygamous marriages — some with a harem of wives — are receiving welfare and social benefits for each of their spouses, thanks to the city and province, Muslim leaders say.
Mumtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, said wives in polygamous marriages are recognized as spouses under the Ontario Family Law Act, providing they were legally married under Muslim laws abroad.
“Polygamy is a regular part of life for many Muslims,” Ali said yesterday. “Ontario recognizes religious marriages for Muslims and others.”
He estimates “several hundred” GTA husbands in polygamous marriages are receiving benefits. Under Islamic law, a Muslim man is permitted to have up to four spouses.
However, city and provincial officials said legally a welfare applicant can claim only one spouse. Other adults living in the same household can apply for welfare independently.
The average recipient with a child can receive about $1,500 monthly, city officials said.
…
The British government recently admitted that nearly a thousand men are living legally with multiple wives in Britain. Although the families are entitled to claim social security for each wife, the department for work and pensions said it has not counted how many are on benefits.
In Canada, Ali said, the man and his main wife and children enter Canada as landed immigrants. The other spouses are sponsored or arrive as visitors to join their husband to share one home.
So not only will the West tolerate immigration from belligerent cultures with no interest in assimilating, we’ll subsidize it. Seriously al-Queda: why bother?
Tom posted this at 2:20 PM HKT on Monday, February 11th, 2008 as The Melting Pot Boils Over, Veiled Threats
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If you were wondering what life was like in a Saudi religious prison, you can get a glimpse here (H/T):
Her ordeal began with a routine visit to the new Riyadh offices of her finance company, where she is a managing partner.
The electricity temporarily cut out, so Yara and her colleagues — who are all men — went to a nearby Starbucks to use its wireless internet.
She sat in a curtained booth with her business partner in the café’s “family” area, the only seats where men and women are allowed to mix.
For Yara, it was a matter of convenience. But in Saudi Arabia, public contact between unrelated men and women is strictly prohibited.
“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?’. I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” recalled Yara, who wears an abaya and headscarf, like most Saudi women.
The men were from Saudi Arabia’s Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a police force of several thousand men charged with enforcing dress codes, sex segregation and the observance of prayers.
Yara, whose parents are Jordanian and grew up in Salt Lake City, once believed that life in Saudi Arabia was becoming more liberal. But on Monday the religious police took her mobile phone, pushed her into a cab and drove her to Malaz prison in Riyadh. She was interrogated, strip-searched and forced to sign and fingerprint a series of confessions pleading guilty to her “crime”.
“They took me into a filthy bathroom, full of water and dirt. They made me take off my clothes and squat and they threw my clothes in this slush and made me put them back on,” she said. Eventually she was taken before a judge.
“He said ‘You are sinful and you are going to burn in hell’. I told him I was sorry. I was very submissive. I had given up. I felt hopeless,” she said.
Yara’s husband, Hatim, used his political contacts in Jeddah to track her whereabouts. He was able to secure her release.
“I was lucky. I met other women in that prison who don’t have the connections I did,” she said. Her story has received rare coverage in Saudi Arabia, where the press has been sharply critical of the police.
It’s an evil regime that thinks so little of human rights.
Hubbard posted this at 11:08 AM HKT on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 as Veiled Threats
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First Ladies should not pose for press photos with women wearing full burkas, the physical embodiment of the worst kind of misogyny and endemic to the barbarians we’re supposed to be at war with.
Shame on you, Laura.
Tom posted this at 12:47 PM HKT on Monday, January 7th, 2008 as Veiled Threats
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Danielle Crittenden Frum has been running an experiment to see how people react to her in burka. The fourth, final, and most appalling part of the series is up today, and she recounts how she got through Reagan National Airport’s security:
Then the female guard, growing cautious again, asked if it was “culturally okay” for me to remove my face covering. “When women like you come through, we don’t know what’s ‘correct.’ Like if I want to see that your face matches your ID, can I ask you to show me your face?”
It’s a good thing I was wearing a mask so the guard could not see my astonishment. The security agents at the airport serving the nation’s capital—bare seconds of air distance from Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, the White House—did not feel entitled to check the identities of veiled women. Clearly, they hadn’t even received any special sort of instructions about it.
I assured the security agent that it was indeed okay for a woman officer to ask a veiled woman to show her face. More than okay! I stressed again and again: So long as only women saw my face I’d have no trouble removing my mask if you wanted to check my ID!! Really, it’s fine…!
The guard nodded. “Thank you—you’ve been so helpful,” she said, rising. “We don’t want to keep you. Hey, have a great time in New York!”
And so I passed through security without ever having to show my face.
Unbelievable. Read and weep.
Hubbard posted this at 12:25 PM HKT on Monday, December 10th, 2007 as Amer-I-Can!, Veiled Threats
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In North Vancouver, taxi cab drivers cannot refuse service to people accompanied by service dogs. Unless the cab driver is Muslim:
VANCOUVER – A North Vancouver taxi company has agreed to pay a blind Vancouver man $2,500 after one of its drivers refused to pick up the man because he was accompanied by his guide dog.North Shore Tax driver Behzad Saidy refused to take Bruce Gilmour and his dog from a West Vancouver coffee shop to Gilmour’s Vancouver home in January 2006, saying his Muslim religion prevented him from associating with dogs because they’re “unclean.”
Gilmour then filed a complaint with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.
In addition to paying Gilmour $2,500, the taxi company was required to implement a policy for transporting blind people and their guide dogs.
It’s against the law for cab drivers not to transport blind people with guide dogs, but a settlement agreement between Gilmour and the taxi company says an exception to that law would be a Muslim driver refusing to transport a dog because of religious beliefs.
But the policy says the driver has to call dispatch for the next available cab and stay with the blind person and guide dog until that cab arrives.
H/T: Mark Steyn
Tom posted this at 12:14 PM HKT on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 as Veiled Threats
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Dennis Prager knocks one out of the ballpark.
What do anti-Semitism, racism and Islamophobia have in common?
In fact, nothing.
But according to Islamist groups, Western media and the United Nations, they have everything in common. Anti-Semites hate all Jews, racists hate all members of another race, and Islamophobes hate all Muslim
Whoever coined the term “Islamophobia” was quite shrewd. Notice the intellectual sleight of hand here. The term is not “Muslim-phobia” or “anti-Muslimist,” it is Islam-ophobia — fear of Islam — yet fear of Islam is in no way the same as hatred of all Muslims. One can rightly or wrongly fear Islam, or more usually, aspects of Islam, and have absolutely no bias against all Muslims, let alone be a racist.
The equation of Islamophobia with racism is particularly dishonest. Muslims come in every racial group, and Islam has nothing to do with race. Nevertheless, mainstream Western media, Islamist groups calling themselves Muslim civil liberties groups and various Western organizations repeatedly declare that Islamophobia is racism.
…
Of course, some may argue that whereas conservatism and liberalism are ideas, Islam is a religion, and while one can attack ideas, one must not attack religions. It is, however, quite insulting to religions to deny that they are ideas. Religions are certainly more than ideas — they are theological belief systems — but they are also ideas about how society should be run just as much as liberalism and conservatism are. Therefore, Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism, or Buddhism should be just as subject to criticism as conservatism or liberalism.
However, the only religion the West permits criticism of is Christianity. People write books, give lectures and conduct seminars on the falsity of Christian claims, or on the immoral record of Christianity, and no one attacks them for racism or bigotry, let alone attacks them physically. The head of the Anti-Defamation League announces that conservative Christians are the greatest threat to America today, and no one charges him with racism or Christianophobia.
The statement may be an expression of hysteria and of ignorance, but not of racism. But if one says that Islam does not appear compatible with democracy or that the Islamic treatment of women is inferior to the West’s, he or she is labeled a racist Islamophobe…
We’re losing the War in Iraq. We’ve lost the War of Ideas.
Tom posted this at 8:50 AM HKT on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 as Global War on Terror, Veiled Threats
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Geoff, it seems as though being an Arab princess (or an Arab princess’s overbearing male companion) does not get you respect from the airlines. Also not getting respect on this flight were the rest of the passengers who were delayed for three hours by an utterly ridiculous situation. So perhaps you should exclude British Airways as well.
Though on reading this story my first thought was: “The Emir of Qatar only flies business class?” Mistreatment by airlines is a great democratizing force. It’s not that good to be the king anymore.
Apollo posted this at 7:34 PM HKT on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 as Those Wacky Foreigners, Veiled Threats
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Irshad Manji continues her one-woman attempt to enlighten Islam:
I’m offended that every year, there are more women killed in Pakistan for allegedly violating their family’s honour than there are detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Muslims have rightly denounced the mistreatment of Gitmo prisoners. But where’s our outrage over the murder of many more Muslims at the hands of our own?
I’m offended that in April, mullahs at an extreme mosque in Pakistan issued a fatwa against hugging.
The country’s female tourism minister had embraced – or, depending on the account you follow, accepted a congratulatory pat from – her skydiving instructor after she successfully jumped in a French fundraiser for the victims of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. Clerics announced her act of touching another man to be “a great sin” and demanded she be fired.
I’m offended by their fatwa proclaiming that women should stay at home and remain covered at all times.
I’m offended that they’ve bullied music store owners and video vendors into closing up shop.
I’m offended that the Government tiptoes around their craziness because these clerics threaten suicide attacks if confronted.
I’m offended that on Sunday, at least 35 Muslims in Kabul were blown to bits by other Muslims and on Tuesday, 80 more in Baghdad by Islamic “insurgents”, with no official statement from Pakistan to deplore these assaults on fellow believers.
I’m offended that amid the internecine carnage, a professed atheist named Salman Rushdie tops the to-do list.
From her lips to God’s ears.
Hubbard posted this at 9:14 AM HKT on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 as Another Great Victory For Jihad, Veiled Threats
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…21st century terrorists who go on about a plan to “shake the Roman throne”? I thought their obsession with the Crusades (aside from being chauvinistic and ahistorical) was stretching their causus belli, but this is ridiculous.
Apollo posted this at 11:16 AM HKT on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 as Veiled Threats
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