Courageous anti-dhimmitude, cutting through all the routine Islamic deflections of responsibility, in "If You're a Muslim - It's Your Problem," from The Stevens Plan in News of the World:
WHEN will the Muslims of Britain stand up to be counted?When will they declare, loud and clear, with no qualifications or quibbles about Britain's foreign policy, that Islamic terrorism is WRONG?
Most of all, when will the Muslim community in this country accept an absolute, undeniable, total truth: that Islamic terrorism is THEIR problem? THEY own it. And it is THEIR duty to face it and eradicate it.
To stop the denial, endless fudging and constant wailing that somehow it is everyone else's problem and, if Islamic terrorism exists at all, they are somehow the main victims.
Because until that happens the problem will never be resolved. And there will be more 7/7s and, sometime in the future, another airplane plot will succeed with horrific loss of innocent life.
Equally important, those British politicians who have seemed obsessed with pandering to, and even encouraging, this state of denial, must throw off their politically-correct blinkers and recognise the same truth—that Muslim terrorism in Britain is the direct responsibility of British Muslims.
Read it all.
Last August 2005 in the North East of England at the Mosques there was a whip round for donations to help the families of the Suicide Bombers.
Imagine that, a whip round for THEM !
Apparrently the families of the suicide bombers knew of their impending martyrdom and held a special party for them etc..
Imagine that, they knew and encouraged/helped the suicide bombers !
These families are 'or course' on state benifits and are viewed as the families of HERO's within their community.
We are all soft touches in the UK. We should have seized all of thier assetts and deported off of thier families and closed down every Mosque they are known to have attended and deported the Imams
Dear Robert,
This is exactly our point from the start. The muslims must be responsible collectively. If they cant take care of their little band of thugs, then we all should.
2. Unlike the jews (in contrast) & other religions, they mandated that the community bares the responsiblity of the fault of one. Hence, the community takes care of issues hence prevents it from happening.
3. Muslims are religioulsly illiterate. They have no idea what they believe. Only less than 1% of the muslims I know finished reading the koran. And not one knows the texts properlly/ understoods the text. Ask 2 people from around the world & you will get 2 intepretations.
4. The muslims anger is fabricated right from the begining. The islamic theology is to get others to fight & die for them in the name of Allah. The smart focuses on brainwashing the illiterate & feeding them hatred against people they have not met. For eg. I asked a group of muslim demostrators on anti-israel in malaysia & london, None of the ones in Malaysia met a Jew or an Israeli for the matter. The protest in london was a fund raiser! They know the cameras will be there.
5. The right way to get peace on the way is to spread the truth. Many many people are uninformed of whats really going on in the middle east. Many more just relay the hatred. Ask a fisherman that only has a mobile handphone & no other electrical equiptment about hezbullah & he says he supports them, & for what reason, because they are defending their country & women & children are dying.
6. I think its time we have Koran lessons for beginers, pin point the facts & myths & the phrases used by people to manipulate. Give them the right to think & decide for themselves.
7. Seriously, I am with the many people think that not all muslims are guilty of this. Its just the few that instigates them & because the community is illiterate, they cant defend themself against extream ideas & buy into it as part of the weekly programming effort.
They will never be totally accountable of or acknoledge their problem.
8. This is worse when the goverment is religiouly impaired. Take Malaysia for Example; They banned the Bible in Malay Language.
I remember when I was young that the local mosque used to say; '..touching a bible is a sin, for such reasons..'. So, instead of giving the people a chance to think & decide, they shut of all possiblity of ideas not islam.
I think it is very undignified of us to keep begging the Muslims to apologize. It is pathetic. "Please please say you're sorry! Can you please do that just once? Just say it, you dont even have to mean it!" To be vulgar about it, Muslims made us their bitches.
Editorializing like this article is welcome and helpful, but I do not think there will be much success until the entire Muslim community suffers for the actions of the Jihadis. The hysteria they express at being lumped in with the Jihadis, and the veiled threats they make when talking about it, point to infidels the best way forward. Make their worst fears realized.
What an impressive article.
Here is one sentence from it:
"My heart sank this week as I saw and read the knee-jerk reaction of friends and neighbours of those arrested in this latest incident, insisting it was all a mistake and the anti-terrorist squad had the wrong people."
Now, in order to savor the full impact of that sentence, read this thread (from icWales) at today's JihadWatch:
Welsh Muslims say aircraft bomb plot 'a fake'
I believe that both Mr. Stevens' article, as enclosure 1, and the icWales article, as enclosure 2, should be mailed, return receipt requested, to the primary imam of every mosque in Great Britain.
Better yet, a full page ad in a major UK newspaper.
Good essay.
But:
"Equally important, those British politicians who have seemed obsessed with pandering to, and even encouraging, this state of denial, must throw off their politically-correct blinkers and recognise the same truth—that Muslim terrorism in Britain is the direct responsibility of British Muslims."
It's not just British politicians. It's the majority of everybody in the West, who is pandering to and even encouraging this state of denial.
It's part of the deeply engrained template of PC multiculturalism, which dominates the modern Western worldview, by which any problems or signs of pathology in non-Western non-white cultures is not their problem, they do not own it, but must be the problem of either impersonal economic forces, or the fault of the evil post-Colonial "Globalist" West.
Unfortunately its our problem as well...we suffer the consequences of terror plots , pay the dss benifits these people abuse..Bakri et al. Listen to their slurs and acusations that we are all racist and Phobic.
Its time we all stood up to the liberal PC brigade and demanded our rulers start to rule and discrimate in the majorities favour.
Time for the Muslim communities to return the values of the society that provides succour and a lifestyle unknown in most Muslim Countries.
Start to root out all your dissidents and expose the radicals and then we may believe you wish to live and prosper among us and not at our expense.
Then again ?
The writer of the article makes the excruciatingly sensible observation that "...the truth is Islamic terrorism in the West has been universally carried out by young Muslim men, usually of ethnic appearance, almost always travelling alone or in very small groups."
But profiling in public hubs such as airports continues to be hampered by the PC multiculturalist template, by which, as the writer complains, "I'm a white 62-year-old 6ft 4ins suit-wearing ex-cop—I fly often, but do I really fit the profile of suicide bomber? Does the young mum with three tots? The gay couple, the rugby team, the middle-aged businessman? No. But they are all getting exactly the same amount and devouring huge resources for no logical reason whatsoever."
Lest anyone with a spasm of a knee jerk object to the implicit racialism ("usually of ethnic appearance") in the writer's sensible observations, I would invite them to look for a more in-depth analysis of the problem of Islam and profiling, in my essays "Racial Profiling and the Problem of Islam" (Parts One and Two, dated 7/05/06 and 7/06/06) on my blog at
http://hesperado.blogspot.com/
The muslim community won't turn on its worst offenders until it pays consistent and terrible costs for its complicity. That day will come if the trends in place do not change. The 'hypocrites' and soft ones among them will help the infidel root out the jihadis when the price becomes too high. Eventually and sadly.
One small point.
In the title of this post, Lord Stevens is referred to as 'The Stevens Plan'.
If I'm not mistaken, Lord Stevens is the former commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police.
I have repetedly maintained that 'Islamic terror is an Islamic problem. But with Dubya holding Wahabi hands, letting Bin LAdens to safety and hiring Karen Hughes to suck-up to muslims, my voice pretty much got lost. While I am glad that some people are recognizing the reality.. I am disappointed it is not Dubya or Condi, but given their IQ and ignorance about Islam, am not surprised.
Plague.....Sadly I think you are right.
The message that could be dictated NOW by our government; I mean, - the suggestion, that severe vengeance is a likely response.
No longer should deference be shown for the rights of those Muslims who loftily state that they have no ownership of Islamic violence whilst tacitly supporting the terrorists within their communities - you know those "nice, quiet, pious, very religious boys".
If and when some outrage happens again those very same - ALL of 'em - will be getting it back and much worse.
Of course this could not be described as a threat only as a deterrent. Speak the double speak of the Mohammedan’s, it's what they understand.
Even if millions of Muslims did stand up and announce to the world that terrorism is wrong, I am not sure any non-Muslims COULD believe them even if they wanted to.
Sure, we admire the likes of the occasional Irshad Manji and other noted Muslims who have taken the courage to make a public (and sincere)stand against Islamic violence and terrorism.
But the fact remains that taqiyya is built into the Islamic 'faith.' "War is deception," says Muhammed in the all-important "Glorious Kuran". And to many Muslims it always will be so; and, of course, the same applies to the many Kuranic verses mandating Islamic believers commit violence in the name of al-lah.
Therefore, how is it possible for non-Muslims to seriously believe those Muslims taking a stand against violence? I mean, how could we believe them when they have been commanded by al-lah to lie to us? And, especially when their 'religion' demands deception AND violence--as commanded by their 'god' whom is believed to be quoted by Muhammed in the Kuran--(commanding them to commit the SAME violence they are supposed to be denouncing to the rest of the world)? And especially when Islamic violence and terrorism have not only become the norm within Islamic societies but show not the slightest signs of abating in them?
Therefore, how is it possible for non-Muslims to seriously believe those Muslims taking a stand against violence? I mean, how could we believe them when they have been commanded by al-lah to lie to us? And, especially when their 'religion' demands deception AND violence--as commanded by their 'god' whom is believed to be quoted by Muhammed in the Kuran--(commanding them to commit the SAME violence they are supposed to be denouncing to the rest of the world)? And especially when Islamic violence and terrorism have not only become the norm within Islamic societies but show not the slightest signs of abating in them?
Posted by: pythagoras at August 14, 2006 02:28 PM
Excellent point, pythagoras! the 'war is deciet' clause in Islam, puts everything they say, to scrutiny of deciet, thanks to their own doctorine. Add to that the concepts of 'Kitman' and 'Al-taquiya' and non-muslims are left hopelessly vulnetable to Islamic lies and deception. And all one has to do is look at the record of muslims. Oslo agreement was deceptively used by Palestinians to arm themselves for the second Intefada. Everytime Arafat denounced violence, it was a signal to Marwan Bharghouti to step up violence. Every time Saddam opened his sites to UN inspectors, he blocked them the next day. Infact, the track record is more consistent with the 'war is deciet' strategy so, like you ask: how is it possible for non-Muslims to seriously believe those Muslims taking a stand against violence?
I've noticed several articles and editorials recently (even left-wing newspapers) in England which are beginning to call a spade a spade, and expressing refreshingly un-PC views about the brazenness of Muslim apologists. For example, in The Times today there were five letters about the outrageous Muslim open letter, all condemning it. And see the leader in the Observer on Sunday:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1843538,00.html
Scotland as well JFGR.
Muriel Gray writes for the Sunday Herald.
Passport photograph of girl's bare shoulders rejected 'as it may offend' By Paul Stokes
(Filed: 14/08/2006)
The first politician who calls this problem what it is and runs with it will do very well.
Muslims blame British foreign policy for causing terrorism.
I totally agree, time for Britain and the U.S. to stop supporting the buildup of Bosnia, Kosovar Albanians, supporting Turkey's admission into the EU, pull aid and troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and cut off all funding of any type to the mid-east. Cut ties with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and do not send any more financial aid to these areas when they are struck by catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis.
This has obviously been making these people mad at the west, so let's change our foreign policies I'm totally for that.
Niv
Mellow: "The Stevens Plan," for reasons best known to the editors, is the title of Lord Stevens' column in the (very trashy) Sunday newspaper The News of the World. Lord Stevens got his peerage after resigning as head of the Metropolitan (Greater London) Police. As Britain has no national police force, the head of the Met, as it is called, is generally regarded as the most senior policeman in the country, and is regularly knighted on taking office. Lord Stevens was regarded as having done a particularly fine job, so he was made a peer afterwards. He is universally regarded as a cop's cop, having made his way up from the beat and being keenly aware of the problems and issues of ordinary policemen (unlike his successor Ian Blair, a more PC-influenced mind), and he was credited for the recovery in morale and prestige of what had been, till his accession, a divided and demoralized force. He has genuine moral authority, and his words may well be noticed.
Thanks Paolo.
Damn! It looks like I need to follow JW/DW even more regularly than I already do, in order to keep up with the in-house lingo ;-)
DP111 -
"A five-year-old girl's passport application was rejected because her photograph showed her bare shoulders. "
If you read to the end of the original article mate, you'll find that the post office and passport office were questioned over that matter. Their reply was that they had a policy as to what was acceptable regarding passport photos and that bare shoulders had no part of it. They also said they were going to take it up with the person/s that had rejected the photo. I got the feeling that they weren't too happy about it. Let's see if they do follow up on it and publish an explanation.
DP111
A five-year-old girl's passport application was rejected because her photograph showed her bare shoulders.
I think it would be more likely to excite than offend, remember old mo had a 6year old wife.
Quijybo said
I agree with you, and the way you said it. I won't say that we should collectively hold Islam accountable for the actions of the jihadists, because that would not be PC, and it would be a subjective moral opinion.
But I will say that until we do collectively hold Islam accountable for the actions of the jihadists, I think the jihadists will continue their violence. That is a matter of fact, one that we have a fair number of data points on.
We can continue to make excuses for the jihadists, and claim that religion has no part in their motivation. We can continue to distort the teachings of the Religion of Peace&rm;, and say that it teaches peace and tolerance. That's certainly one strategy (the one followed by the politicians of the day). But the result has been, and will be, the continuance of the jihad.
It's our choice really, how long this will go on. So far we've not had enough.
So far we've not had enough.
Posted by: special_guest
True but everyday we get closer to it.
And if you're a Shiite in south Beirut, it's your problem. You support them you die with them. Shame on Dubya and Condi for not letting the IDF empty south Lebanon of all persons. The only solution to islam is removal of Moslems; otherwise you live at death's door.
I'm sorry. I meant to type "removal of moslems." This lower case thing is gonna take a while.
Except when they start killing "infidels" and using jihad to spread their "religion", then it becomes everybody's problem.
Spilling infidel blood seems to be fertilizer for Islam, a way to rejuvenate and empower militant Muslims. The holy books serve as guides for warfare. Sure there will be peace when every infidel is dead or a convert to Islam. The Islamic empire was one of the largest reaching empires in human history, crossing over Africa, Asia, Europe, etc, and they want it restored.
There is chatter about the American Hiroshima jihad plot. After the breakup of the USSR, black market nukes were purchased by al-Qaida in the 1990’s, and forwarded to the US. The plan is to simultaneously blow up seven or more cities. This plot may include Rome, Italy.
The President of Iran is hinting; the US will get hit with something if Iran’s nuclear weapons program is attacked, and is already targeting Americans in Iraq, and anyone in Israel, via his proxy militant groups.
Model Behavior of the Prophet (Sunnah)
Book 40, Number 4735:
We went out with the Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) accompanying the bier of a man of the Ansar. When we reached his grave, it was not yet dug. So the Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) sat down and we also sat down around him as if birds were over our heads. He had in his hand a stick with which he was scratching the ground.
He then raised his head and said: Seek refuge with Allah from the punishment in the grave. He said it twice or thrice.
The version of Jabir adds here: He hears the beat of their sandals when they go back, and at that moment he is asked: O so and so! Who is your Lord, what is your religion, and who is your Prophet?
Hannad's version says: Two angels will come to him, make him sit up and ask him: Who is your Lord?
He will reply: My Lord is Allah. They will ask him: What is your religion? He will reply: My religion is Islam. They will ask him: What is your opinion about the man who was sent on a mission among you? He will reply: He is the Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him). They will ask: Who made you aware of this? He will reply: I read Allah's Book, believed in it, and considered it true; which is verified by Allah's words: "Allah's Book, believed in it, and considered it true, which is verified by Allah's words: "Allah establishes those who believe with the word that stands firm in this world and the next."
The agreed version reads: Then a crier will call from Heaven: My servant has spoken the truth, so spread a bed for him from Paradise, clothe him from Paradise, and open a door for him into Paradise. So some of its air and perfume will come to him, and a space will be made for him as far as the eye can see.
He also mentioned the death of the infidel, saying: His spirit will be restored to his body, two angels will come to him, make him sit up and ask him: Who is your Lord?
He will reply: Alas, alas! I do not know. They will ask him: What is your religion? He will reply: Alas, alas! I do not know. They will ask: Who was the man who was sent on a mission among you? He will reply: Alas, alas! I do not know. Then a crier will call from Heaven: He has lied, so spread a bed for him from Hell, clothe him from Hell, and open for him a door into Hell. Then some of its heat and pestilential wind will come to him, and his grave will be compressed, so that his ribs will be crushed together.
Jabir's version adds: One who is blind and dumb will then be placed in charge of him, having a sledge-hammer such that if a mountain were struck with it, it would become dust. He will give him a blow with it which will be heard by everything between the east and the west except by men and jinn, and he will become dust. Then his spirit will be restored to him.
There is no choice. Iran must be attacked now. But to do so is unthinkable. So this is the quandary. Bad medicine, vey bad medicine, is coming down the pike from Persia, and it will be an unholy mess, as only can be contrived by Moslems. Fasten your seatbelts. One can only wish that Ronald Reagan were still president, cuz this tiresome pussy George W. Bush will surely flinch.
From the Sunday Times
More Pennies are dropping
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2309812,00.html
Wimmin at War
It is 25 years since the Greenham Common protests began. Sarah Baxter was there, but now asks why feminist ideals have become twisted into support for groups like Hezbollah
When Ann Pettitt, the mother of two young children, and her friends set off in August 25 years ago on a 120-mile trek from Cardiff to the little known American air base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, they gave themselves the ambitious name of “Women for Life on Earth”. Their numbers were tiny but the stakes, they felt, were dauntingly high.
The cold war world was bristling with Soviet and American nuclear weapons, posing the threat of mutual assured destruction (Mad). In a dramatic escalation of the arms race between the superpowers, shiny new cruise missiles were due to be delivered to Greenham, placing Britain’s green and pleasant land in the bull’s eye for targeting by the Soviet Union.
The modest peace march was largely ignored by the media, so on arrival at the base the women decided to borrow the eye-catching tactics of the suffragette movement. They chained themselves to the gates of Greenham and dared the police to remove them. Sympathisers began to turn up bearing makeshift tents, clothing and pots and pans. Many came and went but others stayed. Thus was the women’s peace camp born a quarter of a century ago this month and a new chapter in the history of feminism opened.
“I was motivated by fear and terror,” Pettitt recalled last week. “I was the mother of a two-year-old and a four-year-old and weapons of mass destruction were the ultimate denial of the fact that I’d created life. There was such brinkmanship, I really thought that nuclear weapons might be used.”
Mercifully, they weren’t. President Ronald Reagan once blurted out in front of a live microphone that the bombing of Russia was going to begin in 15 minutes, but it was nothing more than a tasteless joke. In hindsight Reagan’s hardline negotiating stance helped to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1980s the Berlin Wall was down and the velvet revolutions in eastern Europe were under way.
The peace movement lost a foe in Reagan but has gone on to find new friends in today’s Stop the War movement. Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now” and Muslim extremists chanting “Oh Jew, the army of Muhammad will return.”
For Linda Grant, the novelist, who says that “feminism” is the one “ism” she has not given up on, it was a shocking sight: “What you’re seeing is an alliance of what used to be the far left with various Muslim groups and that poses real problems. Saturday’s march was not a peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it’s a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the wrong side is winning.”
As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews.
On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of “I am woman, hear me roar”, there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush — “the world’s number one terrorist” as the marchers would have it.
Women are perfectly entitled to oppose the war in Iraq or to feel that Israel is brutally overreacting to Hezbollah’s provocation. But where is the parallel, equally vital debate about how to combat Islamic fundamentalism? And why don’t more peace-loving feminists regard it as a threat? Kira Cochrane, 29, is the new editor of The Guardian women’s page, the bible of the Greenham years, where so many women writers made their names by staking out positions on the peace movement. She has noticed that today’s feminists are inclined to keep quiet about the march of radical Islam. “There’s a great fear of tackling the subject because of cultural relativism. People are scared of being called racist,” Cochrane observes.
Whatever the merits of unilateral nuclear disarmament, women were a lot braver a quarter of a century ago. Pettitt remembers how “we tried to crash the top table at Greenham. You had to be rude to interrupt because you’re never going to be invited to speak”.
I had just left university in the early 1980s when I got swept up in the peace movement. My Saturday afternoons were often spent marching from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square and on the day when cruise missiles arrived in Britain, I rushed to a protest outside the Houses of Parliament, was arrested by the police, dragged into a black maria van and shoved overnight into a south London police cell. It was nothing compared to what the women of Greenham Common endured, but I felt like a heroine when the next day my male boss at Penguin Books, where I worked as a junior copywriter, paid my fine.
I was a bit sniffy about the all-women’s peace camp because I was partial to men and disliked much of the mumbo-jumbo surrounding it. In her forthcoming memoir, Walking to Greenham (published by Honno), Pettitt writes about the “delightful irony” of liberated women using “emblems of conformist democracy” such as knitting needles and wool to protest against war, but I used to see the ghastly spider webs and children’s mittens tied to the razor wire on the perimeter fence and shudder.
Nevertheless, I attended several “embrace the base” demonstrations in support of the women who had put the issue of nuclear disarmament so defiantly on the map. I went on to get a job at Virago, the feminist publisher, and marvelled at the way the “peace wimmin” had energised the brand new field of women’s studies, sparking lively debates on the virtues and vices of separatism from men and the extent to which nuclear weapons were “boys’ toys” (a tricky one in the age of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister).
Later, as a journalist, I broke into the base with a group of Greenham women, stood somewhat pointlessly on top of the silos where the cruise missiles were stored and went on to become friends with one of the peace campers, who had been abused as a child and had found comfort in the new “family” she had made living in the rough and ready “benders” constructed of branches and plastic sheeting.
It is now largely forgotten that Greenham inspired many women to free themselves from the narrow world in which they had been brought up to live instead in ways which we take for granted today.
Looking back I think I was wrong about Reagan and too sympathetic towards the Soviet Union. There were plenty of fellow travellers in the peace movement who were cheering on the Soviet Union under their breath. I can remember making a lot of silly excuses about it myself. But the fear of mutual assured destruction was genuine enough. As long as it worked, Mad was a plausible strategy. Were it to fail, the results would be catastrophic. As President Dwight Eisenhower said after the testing of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s: “Atomic war will destroy civilisation.” If war came, “you might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself”.
The situation today is very different. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, Bernard Lewis, the noted scholar of Islam, pointed out that Iran’s messianic rulers are not constrained by such fears. According to their theology, the day of judgment will be glorious. “At the end of time there will be general destruction anyway,” Lewis writes. “What matters will be the final destination of the dead — hell for the infidels and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, Mad is not a constraint, it is an inducement.”
Hassan Nasrallah, the Shi’ite cleric who leads Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, regularly issues bloodcurdling threats against the Jews. “If they (the Jews all gather in Israel,” he has said, “it will save us the trouble of going after them on a worldwide basis.”
For some on the left such words are merely understandable hyperbole, provoked by decades of Israeli ill-treatment of the Palestinians, but I prefer to take Islamic fundamentalists at their word when they spout insults about Jews being the descendants of “pigs and apes” and launch their chillingly apocalyptic tirades.
Why? Because they not only talk centuries-old nonsense about the place of women in society, but they also purposely oppress the female sex whenever they are given the chance. As regards their treatment of women, there is no discernible difference between their acts and their words.
In my own life I have been lucky enough not to experience a great deal of sexism. The 1980s and 1990s were decades of progress for western career women and working mothers. But I felt how it was to be invisible when I interviewed Hamas militants and clerics many years ago in Gaza. They were very courteous and helpful and I tried to be respectful by covering my hair with a black scarf. But they never looked me in the eye or addressed me directly. I would ask the questions; they would answer the male photographer who accompanied me.
Phyllis Chesler, 65, the writer and a founder feminist in the 1960s, has experienced some of the more disturbing aspects of Muslim patriarchy at first hand.
In the summer of 1961 Chesler married Ali, her western-educated college sweetheart, and went to live with him in Afghanistan. Nothing had prepared her for the restrictions and humiliations which Muslim women endured there, nor the gradual personality change that her husband underwent. The worst of it, she discovered, was “nothing unique happened to me”. It was the way of the world.
“The Afghanistan I knew was a prison, a police state, a feudal monarchy, a theocracy rank with fear and paranoia,” Chesler recalls in The Death of Feminism, published last year. “Afghanistan had never been colonised. My Afghan relatives were very proud of this fact. ‘Not even the British could occupy us’, they told me, not once but many times.
“I was ultimately forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism, tyranny and misogyny were entirely of their own making and not attributable to colonialism or imperialism. It is what they themselves would say.”
Six months later, travelling on false papers obtained by a sympathetic German-born friend, Chesler secretly fled the country. The ardent feminism that she embraced on her return to America was forged in Afghanistan, she told me last week. She has not recanted her support for women’s rights, she insists, but she has seen the views of others morph in alarming new directions.
“The compassion for people of colour has been translated into feminists standing with terrorists who are terrorising their own women,” she says. In the week when a massive bomb plot against civilians was uncovered in Britain, Chesler’s critique of women’s complacency in her book is prophetic. “The Islamists who are beheading Jews and American civilians, stoning Muslim women to death, jailing Muslim dissidents and bombing civilians on every continent are now moving among us both in the East and in the West,” she writes.
“I fear that the ‘peace and love’ crowd in the West refuses to understand how Islamism endangers our values and our lives, beginning with our commitment to women’s rights and human rights.” Women’s studies programmes should have been the first to sound the alarm, she points out: “They did not.”
Chesler has fallen out with many old friends in the women’s movement. They have in effect excommunicated her for writing in right-wing publications in America, but she has found it impossible to get published on the left. There are whispers that she has become paranoid, mad, bonkers, a charge frequently levelled against the handful of women writers who are brave enough to tackle the same theme.
In Britain there is the polemicist Julie Burchill, who has written incisively about the desire of terrorists to commit acts “not so that innocents may have the right to live freely on the West Bank, but so that they might have the right to throw acid in the face of innocent, unveiled women”. Well, the outrageous Julie has always been bonkers, hasn’t she.
Then there is “mad” Melanie Phillips, the Cassandra of our age, banging on that “if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around”. Of course she would say that, wouldn’t she. She’s Jewish, and anyway didn’t you know that she is crazy enough to believe in two-parent families? In America the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin died last year virtually unmourned by women on the left in part, as her friend Christopher Hitchens remembered, because “she wasn’t neutral against a jihadist threat that wanted, and wants, to enslave and torture females.
“That she could be denounced as a ‘conservative’,” he concluded, “says much about the left to which she used to belong.”
In Italy Oriana Fallaci, the 77-year-old journalist famous for interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini, recently went on trial accused of defaming Muslims. It is true that many of her comments about Islam — “a pool that never purifies” — are undeniably offensive, but no more so than comments routinely made by Muslim extremists about “the Jews”. In her cancer-stricken twilight years, the once glamorous Fallaci has been written off as a deranged old bat.
Fallaci has grown accustomed in recent years to living with death threats, as have the formidable Muslim women critics of Islamic extremism such as Irshad Manji, the Canadian feminist, Taslima Nasreen, the exiled Bangladeshi writer (and critic of the Iraq war), and Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose film Submission resulted in the murder by Islamic militants of Theo van Gogh, the gay Dutch film director.
Hirsi, after enjoying a brief succès d’estime, has been virtually hounded out of the liberal Netherlands and is due to arrive in America next month, where she has been offered a perch at the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank. It is too easy to say she has sold out to the right. Where, one might ask, are her friends on the left? Something has gone badly wrong with a politically correct feminism that prefers to take aim at the United States, a haven of free speech and relative sexual equality, than to tackle the threat posed to women by Islamic fundamentalism. Just as the existence of Thatcher, the Iron Lady, at the helm of British government in the 1980s failed to impress the women’s peace movement, so the presence of Condoleezza Rice, a black woman who grew up in segregated Alabama, as US secretary of state has not dimmed the cries against American “racism”.
For this the 1980s peace movement must take some of the blame with its overbearing emphasis on the evil Reagan empire and soft-pedalling of the Soviet Union. But I am surprised, all the same, by the persistence of the ideological blind spot that has led women who are so quick to condemn the failings of the West to make transparent excuses for the behaviour of some of the world’s most anti-feminist regimes.
Recently Kate Hudson, chairwoman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, wrote a breathtaking apologia for the Iranian nuclear energy programme, which took at face value Ahmadinejad’s claims to be developing it for “strictly peaceful” purposes. (Since when, by the way, has CND regarded Britain’s nuclear power plants so benignly?) Never mind the preposterous dancing with enriched uranium around the doves of peace nor the missiles marked “Tel Aviv” paraded in the streets.
It is fair to say that Pettitt, the original Greenham woman, has wrestled with some of these problems. She is passionately against America’s “wars of revenge” for September 11, but makes it clear in her memoir that she is no pacifist: “I didn’t regard myself as being in a peace movement, I was in a movement against nuclear weapons. There are enormously hard decisions for which there are sometimes only military solutions.”
Pettitt’s mother, Solange, was a teenager in northern France when it was occupied by the Nazis and her family sheltered a British soldier for six months.
Pettitt’s father was a communist in the 1930s who was unsettled by Stalin’s pact with Hitler. At home after the war, Pettitt remembers hearing the stories of friends of her parents who had escaped the Holocaust.
“I can understand where Israel is coming from,” she says. “I’m not a fan of Hezbollah. It worries me a lot.” But like so many Stop the War protesters, she says that Bush and Blair have opened a “Pandora’s box”, as if the birth of Islamic extremism began only with the invasion of Iraq.
It is certainly plausible, as Pettitt claims, that Bush’s actions have “accelerated the radicalisation of the Islamic world tremendously”, although this popular view conveniently downplays the growing Islamic fundamentalist movement before the September 11 attacks and the huge psychological boost that it received from Al-Qaeda’s strike on America.
Let us assume that what Pettitt says is true. I can remember when the women’s movement was told that its persistent demands for equality were leading to a “backlash”. Susan Faludi wrote a feminist bestseller of that name, based on the premise that men were fighting back tooth and nail in the gender wars.
I have just got the book down from my shelves. It says on the back cover: “The backlash against women is real. This is the book we need to understand it, to struggle through the battle fatigue and to keep going.” There was no question of slinking away out of fear that men were being emboldened to find new ways of oppressing women.
The Middle East is engaged in a titanic struggle between modernity and theocracy. Whatever one’s views about the Iraq war or the conflict in Lebanon, it deserves more than slogans about “We are all Hezbollah now” and fury against Bush and Blair.
I don’t agree with Chesler that we are witnessing the death of feminism, but for now it is MIA: missing in action.
We are all soft touches in the UK. We should have seized all of thier assetts and deported off of thier families and closed down every Mosque they are known to have attended and deported the Imams
Posted by: Churchill1938 at August 14, 2006 10:37 AM
For good measure, I'd add that the same should be true, along with major longterm incarcerations, and permanent conditions of impoverishment upon release, for those born in the West.
"To stop the denial, endless fudging and constant wailing that somehow it is everyone else's problem and, if Islamic terrorism exists at all, they are somehow the main victims".
They appear to be the main victims - with the exception of the dhimmi minorities in Islamic countries - and they - or "the few" as tjwork calls them (assuming that's really all it is) - are also the sole perpetrators.
I know of no other group in history that has ever produced this kind of long-term campaign of terrorism against innocent third parties, despite the fact that many other groups have had major grievances against third party governments. One could use as an example (just one out of many) the repression and warsin Central America, at its worst in the 1980s. The insurgencies in those countries confined their hostilities to the governments they were trying to defeat and the military forces of those governments. They never attacked Washington or New York, or blew up planes or busses. Other examples are the holocaust and the Armenian genocide. The Jews never carried out a terrorist campaign against Germany, nor the Armenians against Turkey. This stuff only comes out of Islam. Why? Because at present the Koran and its interpretation and everything that comes out of it is a closed, rigid system of circular reasoning, totally sufficient with itself.
"I think its time we have Koran lessons for beginers, pin point the facts & myths & the phrases used by people to manipulate. Give them the right to think & decide for themselves".
Posted by: tjwork at August 14, 2006 10:43 AM
I agree, but I take it a step further. Recent research suggests very strongly that the original Koran is actually an ancient Christian document written in Syriac which Arab theologians and jurists subsequently mistranslated and distorted when they translated it into Arabic and enlarged it.
This information has to be made available and studied in the Islamic community. Islam will likely not be able to reform itself if the Koran is not subject to the same critical analysis and standards of scholarship that the Bible has been, but Islamic theology can be expected to resist this as blasphemous, possibly with violent results. That being the case, it may be that the only solution, in the long run, may be for governments in the Western world to begin instituting repressive measures against Islam.
Lets hope for the best, but start preparing for the worst.
Here are a few of the things our western governments need to do on our behalf. I'd welcome anyone's feedback or suggestions for changes or deletions:
1. Change the very bad laws that allow aggressive Muslims into western countries, and start an aggressive program of deportation of these immigrants whenever there's any serious reason to suspect them of plotting something, of aggressive attitudes, or even of just being too difficult as individuals to integrate into our societies and imbue with our values.
2. Pass restrictions in law against anyone with clear extremist tendencies from holding any public office or position of trust in any profession.
3. Set up sections within the interior or security ministries (such as the Department of Homeland in the U.S. and the Ministry of Public Security in Canada) that are empowered to supervise and surveil every single Islamic institution and community setting, and declare illegal any written propagation or, public proclamation, instruction or teaching of anything that directly counsels or even excuses or tolerates Islamic violence (this means domestic violence as well such as "honour killings" and all violence against their fellow Muslims), including even obscure points of Islamic theology if need be, and likewise for any action, ritual or behaviour that does the same, even if it means in practice that the whole Islamic faith and practice of same is, in effect, banned in the Western World. (This kind of minding of the Islamic religion by government is common in the Middle East, so the religous liberty can rest assured that its perfectly sound, not discriminatory at all, just necesary).
4. Cease to rely on oil imported from the Saudi Arabia or any other Muslim country that is known to sponsor terrorism or has a poor human rights rights record, including any unfair treatment of ethnic, racial or religious minorities. (This may be something individuals can do on their own as well).
5. Build good relations and favorable trading arrangements with any Islamic country that is peaceful, moderate, tolerant, inclusive and sensible (there may not be a great many at this point, but Mali is one, and there are apparently areas of India where the Moslems have their heads on straight, and I can offer leads to anyone interested about where to find information about these).
6. Make sure that the measure I recommend in #5 above is tied to all human rights issues, including complete academic freedome in schools and universities for academics and students to discuss, promote and explore without fear of attack, threat or prosecution, any and all new interpretations of Islam, including some of the more recent and startling theories about the surprizing historical origins of the Koran (about which, again, I can provide leads for anyone wanting info).
7. Prepare the military for the war that may (its important to stress MAY here) come in any event, by careful study and development of the tactics of dessert warfare, and development and acquisition of appropriate equipment, and the building of production infrastructure that can quickly be retooled to the war effort when or if hostilities break out.
8. Choke off the supply of terrorist funds and resources. THIS HAS SCARCELY BEEN DONE AT ALL - consider Saudi Arabia and its role in the financing and indoctrination of the Taliban, still fighting in Afghanistan).
An Italian Archbishop recently stated. ENOUGH of this turning the other cheek already! OUR DUTY IS TO DEFEND OURSELVES!!!
He's right. Now lets start getting the rest of the public and our governments on board, because its not happening quickly enough.
Mali a moderate islamic country? they still practice slavery full scale!
Posted by: gorniak at August 15, 2006 12:02 PM
I was unaware of this. The source of my information may be inaccurate. If you can provide me with a source for yours I'll check it. Thanks.
I've done a quick search for sites on Mali and slavery. There's quite a lot of them there and I haven't had time yet to do the reading, but at first glance, it looks like a lot of this has to do with the Chocolate industry. I've heard of this before, and it seems to be an especially big problem in Africa. It's an issue, that's for sure, but I'm not sure at this point just how closely it's tied to the question of Islam per se or whether its a problem unique to Islamic countries. Anyone who can enlighten me, I'd appreciate it. In any case, there's a lot of us in the West who eat chocolate, so ... we have a big problem either way.
Senegal is muslim and you never hear (for now) about terrorist plot by Senegalese, all the hateful imams you read about are not from senegal, but you see the situation in senegal and they are 98% muslim. It's the same old story, how the "minorities" are treated?
Posted by: gorniak at August 15, 2006 06:58 PM
And it may be that Mali is only "moderate" in this sense. I'm no expert on it, that's for sure, and the one source in which I'd read anything about it did not mention anything about slavery, only that the various religions get along quite well there, without any conflict. We could set the issue aside and still conduct relations with places like that following a "choose your fights" mentality, but this strikes me as extremely cynical, because slavery is so cruel and exploitive.
Perhaps the best thing to do is cease all trading relations with Islamic states, and refuse to reinstate them until such practices are stopped, but this sometimes creates difficulties in an atmosphere of growing globalization.
The struggle against Islam, like all human rights struggles, has its costs, economic or otherwise, and the West has to be prepared to accept this, swallow it, and engage the struggle in spite of it. If we don't succeed in it we will likely perish.
apostate_islam: Interesting update on the women’s movement.
Some Muslim families do respect female education and success in career. I personally know female Muslim doctors and executives. But compared to the larger Muslim community, female professionals are a minority. This is the 21st century, serious reform in Islam will require addressing women’s rights, and at least measuring up to these standards, and perhaps many more:
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women:
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/
Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women:
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/21.htm