Way past time to pay attention.
Way past time to pay attention.
Around the world, more than 200 million infants and girls are mutilated by female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). Most are cut between infancy and age 15, but women up to age 49 have been thus mutilated. The World Health Organization defines four categories of (FGM/C): 1. clitirodectomy alone; 2. excision (of a considerably wide variation of female genital tissue); 3. infibulation—literally a form of “sealing” (excising the entire clitoris and labia and stitching together the edges of the vulva to prevent sexual intercourse).
The fourth category is for those FGM/C victims who are mutilated beyond even the above classifications.
There were some instances of taxi drivers in Vancouver, BC and also poisonings of dogs in Dearborn, Michigan. It's a religious/cultural thing from long ago but still highly emotional. Many Muslims react with fear and repulsion to the sight of a dog.
Muhammad, considered the perfect man, ordered dogs to be killed.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Nice calm article -- read the whole thing.
Too many feminists in the West are reluctant to condemn cultural practices that clearly harm women.
The problems being protested against Wednesday—inequality,
vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment, and job insecurity—are all too real for many disadvantaged women, but the legal protections for them are in place here in the United States. Women who are unfairly treated at work or discriminated against can stand up, speak out, protest in the streets, and take legal action...
Too many feminists in the West are reluctant to condemn cultural practices that clearly harm women—female genital mutilation, polygamy, child marriage, marital rape, and honor violence, particularly in non-Western societies. Women’s rights are universal, and such practices cannot be accepted.
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To ask the question is to answer it.
The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, even today. Both Sunni and Shi’ite. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most renowned and prominent Muslim cleric in the world, has stated
The Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished, yet they differ as to determining the kind of punishment to be inflicted upon them. The majority of them, including the four main schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali) as well as the other four schools of jurisprudence (the four Shiite schools of Az-Zaidiyyah, Al-Ithna-‘ashriyyah, Al-Ja’fariyyah, and Az-Zaheriyyah) agree that apostates must be executed.
Qaradawi also once famously said:If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment, Islam wouldn’t exist today.
But it does, in Toronto and all over. Canada and the U.S. government officials in both countries would do well to consider very carefully Sandra Solomon’s question at the Toronto mosque:Can I criticize Islam without fearing for my life?
Below the break is Robert Spencer's account of Ms. Solomon's question at the Toronto mosque.
Continue reading "'Can I Criticize Islam Without Fearing for My Life?'" »
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He has been compared to Donald Trump and indeed addresses existing fear and concern about national borders as establishment politicians continue to whistle through the graveyard.
Geert Wilders -- voice of Dutch who worry that the large number of immigrants attracted to the Netherlands generous welfare benefits are not assimilating but are causing social disruption. He has lived in secret locations for years under armed protection -- "reclusive provocateur" -- maybe. Provocateur yes, reclusive not entirely through his volition since he has had death threats. Recently one of his own guards has been removed and charged with leaking his location.
“In this country there is an underestimation of the number of people who are afraid of Islam”.
Reasonably evenhanded article from the NY Times, written with a tinge of cluelessness and alarm.
I went looking for a better photo of Mr. Wilders and found that Breitbart ("Islam is not a religion, it's a totalitarian ideology") and Reuters video "Could Anti-Islam, Anti-EU Geert Wilders Win the Dutch Election?") The Fiscal Times had stories about him up today. He is leading in the polls.
A few years ago he spoke in Nashville, "A Warning to America". I can't find a video without doomsday music and inflammatory photos. The information if alarming enough without that. So I have put the full text of the speech below the break. If somebody can find just him speaking, please let me know. Text copied from the always excellent "Gates of Vienna".
Well documented, good resource to begin discussion. Read the whole thing.
In the 1970s Sweden was a stable and wealthy country that was admired by many outsiders. It had international pop artists such as ABBA, sports stars like Björn Borg and Ingemar Stenmark as well as Volvo cars. Some outsiders still maintain this rosy image. In 2016, Sweden was still ranked as the world’s “ goodest “ country.[1]
Unfortunately, being “good” in the Western world today seems to mean being suicidal.
In just two generations, Sweden has become an increasingly dysfunctional and crime-ridden country. The main cause of this negative transformation is non-European mass immigration.
I have been chronicling Sweden’s decline for many years. My reports were falsely dismissed as fantasies made by an alleged “right-wing extremist.” This denial is no longer possible.
Many alternative media and independent websites are now describing these issues. Major media in Britain, Germany, the USA and even in Russia have also finally discovered Sweden’s Multicultural problems. This is causing huge embarrassment to the ruling elites in Sweden. They are used to being admired. They are not accustomed to international ridicule, or being viewed as an example of what not to do.
All former Swedish governments since the 1970s, including those led by Mr. Bildt and Mr. Löfven, have directly contributed to the massive problems Sweden is currently facing.
Carl Bildt served as Prime Minister of Sweden from 1991 to 1994. He was in charge of a center-right coalition government by Swedish standards. Bildt served as Minister for Foreign Affairs between 2006 and 2014 in the center-right coalition of PM Fredrik Reinfeldt. These governments also continued mass immigration, just as the Socialist Prime Ministers Olof Palme, Ingvar Carlsson, Göran Persson and Stefan Löfven did.
The Swedish author Astrid Lindgren published the first stories about Pippi Longstocking in the 1940s. If they were updated for today, perhaps Pippi would have to flee from the suburbs of a Swedish city after having been gang raped by immigrant boys. Alternatively, she might have been a radical Feminist who donned the Islamic veil in order to express her solidarity with the Muslims who are colonizing her country.
The Swedish mass media and political elites are very careful not to suggest any connection between rapes and mass immigration from Third World countries. Yet there is every reason to suspect that such a connection exists. We know from other Western European countries that immigrants from certain regions and cultures, particularly from the Islamic world and Africa, are disproportionately represented as perpetrators in rape cases.
I have admired Bruce Bawer for a long time. During my autodidactic quest to understand Islam and its history his "While Europe Slept" was an eye opening account of what I now know to be hizrah. He was born in America but lives in Norway.
With apology to Mr. Bawer I am reproducing the article below because it is hard to find pieces to excerpt, and it is not to be hoped that any of you will actually go and read the whole thing. You should, so I'm helping out.
GAYS IN THE ERA OF TRUMP Is a seismic shift in the offing?
In early January, Vincent Tolliver, a candidate for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, wrote in an e-mail to The Hill that fellow candidate Keith Ellison, the first known Muslim to sit in Congress, should not be party chairman because of Islamic attitudes toward gays. “Islamic law is clear on the subject,” wrote Tolliver, “and being gay is a direct violation of it. In some Muslim countries, being gay is a crime punishable by death.” Tolliver added that he was “shocked” that the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group with close ties to the Democratic Party, had been “silent on the issue.” (In fact, the HRC has enthusiastically endorsed Ellison, notwithstanding his past links to Louis Farrakhan and his current involvement with CAIR, the Muslim American Society, and the Islamic Society of North America.)The DNC was quick to act on Tolliver's complaint: it promptly removed him from consideration for the party chairmanship. “The Democratic Party welcomes all Americans from all backgrounds,” declared interim chairwoman Donna Brazile (famous for passing debate questions to Hillary and then lying about it). “What we do not welcome is people discriminating against others based on who they are or how they worship.” Brazile, an open lesbian, called Tolliver’s remarks about Islam “disgusting” and stated that because of those comments, he was “no longer a candidate for DNC Chair.”
Brazile's statement was a timely reminder that on the progressive left, where facts and ethical principles take a back seat to identity politics, Muslims are now the top-ranking victim group, and gays – gay men, anyway – are at the very bottom, below blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, women, transsexuals, disabled Americans, weight-challenged Americans, etc. Never mind that what Tolliver said about Islamic attitudes toward gays is entirely correct: on the progressive left, acknowledging such uncomfortable truths is verboten.
Why are gays no longer the darlings of the left? Part of the reason is the mainstreaming of the academic concept known as intersection: if you're a gay white male, yes, you're gay, all right, but you're also the two worst things you can be in the eyes of the left: white and male. Which means that on balance, according to the leftist calculus, you're more privileged than you are oppressed. That's especially true, of course, now that same-sex marriage is the law of the land. Indeed, although the left celebrated the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges well into the night, when the sun rose the next day gay people suddenly looked very unsexy. Is it mere coincidence that at almost the exact same moment when the gay-rights movement won its big victory, the transsexual movement appeared as if from out of nowhere to take its place on the progressive agenda? Suddenly we're being asked to memorize dozens of new pronouns to cover gender categories nobody had ever heard of a year or two ago. Only yesterday, gay marriage felt exotic; now being gay – just plain gay – feels downright square.
Some gays still think the left has their back. When Obama left office, gays flooded You Tube and Twitter with messages thanking him for gay marriage – which he'd had absolutely nothing to do with (and which he, like Hillary, had in fact opposed for most of his administration). On November 8, gay Americans, buying into the entirely baseless premise that Hillary gives a damn about them, voted overwhelmingly for her – a woman whose family foundation has banked millions from Oman, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates, all of which imprison gays, and Saudi Arabia, which executes them. Meanwhile the same gay voters jeered at Trump, who in 2005 publicly congratulated Elton John and David Furnish on their marriage; who, according to one local, “changed...Palm Beach” by admitting gay couples as members of Mar-a-Lago; who actually waved a rainbow flag at one of his campaign rallies; who's been praised eloquently by one of the smartest gays in the country, billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel; who reacted with an un-Obama-like rage and candor to the jihadist massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando; and who, upon accepting the Republican nomination, promised to “do everything in my power” to protect gay Americans “from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”Certainly, given what Islamic immigration has meant for gay people in Europe, you'd think that every half-aware gay American would have cheered Trump's executive order temporarily blocking entry into the U.S. by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries. In three of those nations, Syria, Somalia, and Libya, being gay is punishable by imprisonment; in three others, Yemen, Sudan, and Iran, it's a capital offense. (In the seventh, Iraq, homosexuality is technically legal, thanks to the U.S. influence over its post-Saddam constitution, although it's still not exactly the ideal spot for a gay honeymoon.) And yet on February 4, thousands of gays rallied outside the Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village – where the modern gay-rights movement is generally viewed as having begun – to protest the visa ban. These protesters (like the gay idiots of the BDS movement who march in “solidarity” with Palestine) haven't just been fed lies about Islam; they've failed to grasp – yet – that they're being used by the left to whitewash a “victim group” many of whose members, if given the power, would toss them to their deaths from the tops of buildings.
But this will change. Across Europe, gays have been deserting the left in growing numbers for the so-called “far-right” parties that are standing up to Islam – and they're making that move because they've seen enough of Islam to know that it represents a threat to their very lives. With Islam continuing its dread incursion into the U.S., with President Trump pronouncing the question of same-sex marriage “settled,” and (not least) with the staggeringly popular, flagrantly gay, and passionately pro-Trump Milo Yiannopoulos out there providing young audiences with desperately needed reality checks about Islam and the left, it only makes sense that gay Americans, like their European counterparts, will over time be increasingly suspicious of Islam's apologists – and increasingly receptive to Trump's blunt truth-telling about the Religion of Peace.
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Merkel offers cash handouts worth millions of pounds for migrants to return home in an embarrassing U-turn
The German chancellor agreed measures to speed up deportation
An estimated 450,000 rejected migrants are set to be sent home
Scheme includes £76million of cash incentives to leave voluntarily
Many will see the move as a desperate attempt for Miss Merkel to claw back support ahead of her challenging re-election bid in September.
Criticism of her decision to leave Germany’s borders open and welcome all refugees during Europe’s migration crisis in 2015 has led to a surge in support for anti-immigrant parties.
Yep. Hard to imagine.