Author: Ophelia Benson

And then there’s Karzai – he says he’ll ‘review’ the new law that says women can’t leave the house without a damn good reason. But his idea of ‘reviewing’ is not quite that of, say, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Western media have either mistranslated or taken incorrect information and then published it. If there is anything in contradiction with our Constitution or Shariah, or freedoms granted by the Constitution, we will take action in close consultation with the clerics of the country.”

Ah. So the law will stay as it is then. There won’t be anything ‘in contradiction with’ Shariah, and close consultation with the clerics of the country will of course issue in warm approval of the Shariah-compliant law, not in pesky changes that would leave women with a few shaky ghosts of rights to move around freely and say no to sex with their husbands even when not deathly ill. Shariah and the clerics of the country are the way to get woman-subordinating theocratic laws, not rights-respecting secular universal laws. So much for that.

Tarek Fatah pointed out (at Facebook) a speech by a Kuwaiti professor daydreaming about an anthrax attack in the US that would kill 300,000 people in a few minutes. I did some googling, and found a MEMRI follow-up item quoting ‘a number of prominent liberals: Kuwait University professor Ahmad Al-Baghdadi and columnist Ahmad Al-Sarraf, both of whom are Kuwaiti, and the Jordanian-American author Shaker Al-Nabulsi.’ They all think Professor Anthrax’s views are disgusting.

The guy is actually Dr. ‘Abdallah Al-Nafisi, a prominent Islamist. Depressingly, his doctorate is from Cambridge. Salman Rushdie is another alumnus of Cambridge. They seem to have taken away different things.

Kuwait University professor Ahmad Al-Baghdadi had this to say:

Frankly, I am very happy with Dr. Al-Nafisi’s lecture, since it makes clear to all the terrorist orientation of the [Islamist] religious organizations, and affirms what I and other liberals have written about this terrorism, and which everyone says is an exaggeration. Here is their ‘Dr.,’ publicly and without fear delivering threats about killing Americans…It is clear that membership in an [Islamist] religious organization leads to the continual deepening of the abyss of hatred for others – even if this member holds 50 doctorates.

That’s exactly it you know. That’s why the thugs in Swat (and the thugs in Somalia and the thugs in Iraq and so on and so on) are so horrible to contemplate – it’s this wallowing in hatred. It’s this enthusiastic embrace of hatred, and its consequent luxuriation in violence. If there’s anything we know about human beings, it’s that – that hatred and a love of violence are the worst thing, and are not to be embraced. That is not what we hope for from reformist or moral or inspirational people. It is the very opposite of what we hope for.

Thought for the day, from Niall Shanks in God, the Devil, and Darwin: a Critique of Intelligent Design Theory.

[T]he dark side of the wedge strategy, lurking at the fat end of the wedge, lies in the way that it is intelligently designed to close minds to critical, rational scrutiny of the world we live in. The wedge strategy describes very well the very process whereby, beginning with mild intellectual sedatives, religion becomes the true opiate of the masses. As [Philip] Johnson makes clear, once the wedge is driven home, even the rules of reasoning and logic will have to be adjusted to sit on theological foundations. In this way, critical thinking and opposition will not just be hard but literally unthinkable.

Just so. And that’s why Mr Framing is so entirely wrong.

Shiraz Maher gets it – much better than Robert Lambert does. This could be because (or notwithstanding or both) he was once in Hizb ut-Tahrir.

The British state has traditionally predicated its policy on the premise that ostensibly nonviolent Islamists can be part of the solution to al Qaeda violence…The practical effect of this has been to engage and empower nonviolent exponents of Islamism who, while expressing opposition to the terrorism of Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, hold values and views that are antithetical to mainstream British society. This has often meant turning a blind eye to preachers who advocate the killing of homosexuals, the oppression of women and the subjugation of nonbelievers.

Precisely; I’ve been carping at them about this for years; I’ve also been carping at people like Ian Buruma (and at Ian Buruma) for making the same stupid mistake.

This tendency is exemplified by the term “Preventing Violent Extremism,” the banner under which the government’s flagship counterterrorism strategy continues to operate…The result is that Islamists have routinely been enlisted as official, public partners in the hope that their cooperation might reduce the terrorist threat…[I]s it right that liberal societies should endorse those whose values we would otherwise find abhorrent?

No it damn well is not right, which is why I’ve been carping (and why other people have too).

[W]hen government now talks about ideology, it does so in only the narrowest possible terms: the bloodcurdling doctrine of al Qaeda. By refusing to cast the net further, groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its sprawling network of “front groups” continue unchallenged. Yet the Brotherhood is a movement whose views, including its desire to establish a pan-Islamic theocracy, are fundamentally irreconcilable with those of a liberal society.

In exactly the same way that the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam is fundamentally irreconcilable with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Who are the real bulwarks against radicalization and who are the bogus ones? And by what criteria should those partners be chosen? For starters, the state should draw a line against any group or individual opposed to those inalienable and nonnegotiable values – such as not discriminating on the basis of religion, race, sexual orientation or gender – which define the British public sphere in the 21st century. These values are universal and applicable to all communities. Government should use them to create a robust, values-led initiative that makes clear exactly what the state stands for.

Hear hear. Out of the mouths of repentant Islamists…

And then there are the reactionary Orthodox newspapers in Israel which can’t stand to show any of those harlot women in positions of power, so they just erase them and replace them with men.

Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver were grouped with the rest of the 30-member cabinet for their inaugural photo. But Yated Neeman newspaper digitally changed the picture by replacing them with two men. The Shaa Tova newspaper blacked the women out.

Couldn’t they just have put little digital bags over their heads? Wouldn’t that do the job?

So here’s how it went down in Swat.

The burka-clad [girl] is heard crying throughout the two-minute flogging and at one point swears on her father that she will not do it again. Relatives of the man involved in the incident told the BBC he had gone to the house of the girl in the village of Kala Kalay to do repairs as an electrician, but militants accused him of having a relationship with her. They dragged him from the house and flogged him before punishing the girl, his relatives said. The Taleban made the girl’s brother hold her down during the flogging, they said. After the incident, the Taleban forced the couple to marry and instructed the man not to divorce his wife.

The Taleban forced ‘the couple’ to marry – except that there was no couple, there was an electrician doing some work in a house and a girl who happened to live there. Now there are three people stuck in a revolting nightmare, with (no doubt) the Taleban balefully peering at them all the time so that they can’t escape. Allah is wise, merciful.