Kathy, still making me laugh

Apparently, some US proddies are burning the Koran.

...burning a book -- any book -- is a fascist and destructive.

Admittedly, this distinction may be too subtle and artsy for Reverend Stereotype to figure out, since he probably thought "WWJD?" was as "deep" as stuff gets.

...

Let Muslims retain their reputation as the ones doing the burning.

That's the trouble with so many "conservative" critiques of the Ground Zero mosque; you're saying the same thing as the anti-Mo-toon people said. We can't pretend to suddenly care about "sensitivity" or forget about the Constitution.

The critiques of the Ground Zero mosque are being too subtle for their, and our, own good.

Building the mosque is wrong because they're the bad guys and we can't let the bad guys **** with us.

That used to be a good enough reason for pretty much anything, until men stopped being men and started becoming lawyers instead.

As I said below. I wish there were more men.



~

Nice religion you got there, Abdul.

In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called "dancing boys" a "widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape."

So, why are American and NATO forces fighting and dying to defend tens of thousands of proud pedophiles, certainly more per capita than any other place on Earth? And how did Afghanistan become the pedophilia capital of Asia?

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are "unclean" and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli's team "how his wife could become pregnant," her report said. When that was explained, he "reacted with disgust" and asked, "How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?"

Very nice.

One boy, in tow of a man he called "my lord," told the Reuters reporter: "Once I grow up, I will be an owner, and I will have my own boys."

~

If this is a newsworthy headline

then there's something seriously wrong with your religion.

First Friday prayers of Ramadan end peacefully in Jerusalem

Or, as Kathy likes to put it, "Lourdes marks 54,827th riot free day"



~

The Locus of Control

~

A Danish psychologist who has worked with young criminals for many years, offers some observations on the cultural differences between Westerners (those raised in a culturally Christian millieu) and Muslims.

Aggression: or, why do the shrieking Islams on TV all look mildly idiotic, no matter how threatening they are? Why do we instinctively ridicule them? Why has this man become a figure of fun on blogs across the 'sphere?

In the eyes of most Westerners it looks immature and childish when people try to use threatening behavior, to mark their dislikes...

To us, aggressive behavior is a clear sign of weakness. It is a sign of not being in control of oneself and lacking ability to handle a situation.

...

The Islamic expression of “holy anger” is therefore completely contradictory to any Western understanding. Those two words in the same sentence sound contradictory to us. The terror-threatening and violent reaction of Muslims to the Danish Mohammed cartoons showing their prophet as a man willing to use violence to spread his message, is seen from our Western eyes as ironic. Muslims’ aggressive reaction to a picture showing their prophet as aggressive, completely confirms the truth of the statement made by Kurt Westergaard in his satiric drawing.

Expressions of anger and threats are probably the quickest way to lose one’s face in Western culture. In discussions, those who lose their temper have automatically lost, and I guess most people have observed the feeling of shame and loss of social status following expressions of aggression at one’s work place or at home. In the Muslim culture, aggressive behavior, especially threats, are generally seen to be accepted, and even expected as a way of handling conflicts and social discrepancies.

If a Muslim does not respond in a threatening way to insults or social irritation, he... is seen as weak, as someone who cannot be depended upon and loses face.

In the eyes of most Westerners it looks immature and childish when people try to use threatening behavior, to mark their dislikes.

Who's in control?

There is another strong difference between the people of Western and Muslim cultures; their locus of control. Locus of control is a psychological term describing whether people experience their life influenced mainly, by internal or external factors. It is clear from a psychological point of view that Westerners feel that their lives are mainly influenced by inner forces – ourselves.

...

Our phone books have columns of addresses for psychologists, coaches and therapists. All these things are aimed at helping us to help ourselves create the life that we want. Some might argue that all this introspectiveness is too much and that just doing what is useful for oneself and others here-and-now would be more constructive, but this is how our culture is.

All these things do not exist in Muslim culture and countries.

...

If we are raised in a culture where we learn that “…I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul,” as William Ernest Henley wrote in his famous poem Invictus in 1875; we will, in case of personal problems, look at ourselves and ask: “…What did I do wrong?” and “…What can I do to change the situation?” People who have been taught throughout their entire lives that outer rules and traditions are more important than individual freedom and self reflection, will ask: “Who did this to me?” and “Who has to do something for me?”

Thus, the locus of control is central to the individual’s understanding of freedom and responsibility. Even though our Christian based societies may, in certain situations, give too much emphasis on feelings of guilt; it also strengthens the individual’s sense of being able to take responsibility for, and change one’s own life.

In societies shaped under Islamic and Qu’ranic influence there may be fewer feelings of guilt and thus, more freedom to demand the surroundings to adapt to one’s own wishes and desires. This may include demands to wear Islamic costumes which can result in more Muslim demands for Islamization of our Western societies, but it is also a powerful source of victim mentality and leads to endless demands on one’s surroundings. In a very concrete way this cultural tendency, shows itself in therapy, as a lack of remorse.

The standard answer from violent Muslims was always: “…It is his own fault that I beat him up. He provoked me.” Such excuses show that people experience their own reactions as caused by external factors and not by their own emotions, motivation and free will. Even though one’s own feelings, when experiencing an insult, can be moderated by one’s own point of view, this kind of self reflection does not happen to the same degree among Muslims as it does among Westerners.

It only takes one person to beat up another: the guy who is doing the hitting. It also only takes one person to feel insulted. Being beaten and feeling insulted are thus strictly different social events. The latter depends on ones self, while the former is solely caused by outer circumstances. Unfortunately, this fact is not considered in Muslim culture and apparently also not by the supporters of laws on hate speech, racism and defamation.

So, you're saying they're a culture entirely composed of sulky, spoiled six year-olds.

Six year-olds with guns.

He concludes with a rather important observation, and a question.

If integration just consists of learning the language and finding a job, it is not so difficult. But if integration also includes developing mental habits of equally respecting non-Muslims it is simply impossible for most Muslims. They see themselves as special, will always try to live together, create their own Muslim/Islamic parallel societies, feel separated and have less respect towards non-Muslims. True integration doesn’t have to, necessarily, imply religious conversion. However, for Muslims it certainly presupposes cultural conversion. Clearly, very few Muslims have the will, social freedom and strength of personality to go through such a psychologically demanding process.

So, this is THE question. Will integration of Muslims happen, satisfactorily, to the extent necessary? If you think yes, then on what basis do you make the assumption? If no, then what will you expect the consequences to be?

~

Where do we begin?

~

So, it turns out that the Party That Must Never Be Named was right. Muslim Asian men in Manchester and other places in the north are in fact "grooming" young teenage white girls for use as prostitutes.

Why?

Well, Labour MP Ann Cryer is ready with the correct spin an answer.

It's all the fault of traditional Muslim Asian culture and their arranged marriages, see.

Because these men are all from "traditional" "conservative" Islamic families, they have their marriages arranged for them. This means that they can't sleep around when they're young like normal people, so, naturally, they turn to kidnapping, drugging and raping 14 year old girls, and forcing them into prostitution...

as you do.

"I am merely pointing out fact in saying that all the victims of these terrible crimes are white girls and all the alleged perpetrators are Asian men," she said.

"That is a significant fact and needs to be addressed."

In her view, young Asian men in traditional communities were unable to pursue casual relationships in the manner of their white peers because they were tied to arranged marriages.

Caught between two cultures, a small number were tempted to target vulnerable young girls, she said.

She was criticised by Muslim community activists, and a subsequent Channel 4 documentary focusing on the problem was pulled amid fears that it would hand political ammunition to the BNP Party that Must Never be Named.

~

Interesting choice of words

"Islam is a religion that has always been revitalized by its migration," he wrote. "America is a nation that has been constantly rejuvenated by immigrants. There is now a critical mass of Muslims in America."

Does that mean it's gonna esplode?



~

From our bulging "Aren't we sick of these people yet?" files...

Religion of Pieces threatens to kill ... again complains of discrimination by Everyone Draw Mohammed Day creators.

The creator of a now-defunct "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" page on Facebook fears she may be targeted for death now that the cartoonist who launched the online campaign has been placed on an execution list by a radical Yemeni-American cleric.

The 27-year-old Facebook page creator -- a Canadian woman who asked not to be identified due to fears of reprisal -- told FoxNews.com that she was visited at her home last week by Royal Canadian Mounted Police officials who advised her to remove her page and not to talk to reporters.

"I'm scared," she said. "I'm scared that somebody might kill me."

Same war, different century...



~

A thought experiment

"This is a protest against parading in a Muslim area. We love death the way you love life."

Hey, remember that whole thing about the Japanese in the US and Canada being interned during the war because they were thought to belong to a nation that we were at war with?

Remember how everyone was really embarrassed about it afterwards because the Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians were actually law-abiding citizens who had businesses, sent their kids to the normal schools and generally had completely integrated (as best one could in the 1940s)? Remember how the Canadian govt' went through one of their periodic spasms of guilt and started offering pay-outs to the families, even though it was 60 years later and all the people who had actually done it and had it done to them were more or less dead?

We felt bad about it, and did all that apologising and paying-out because the ethnically Japanese in our midst (a bunch of whom fought for their country - ie: Canada and America) were not actually any threat. None whatever. They had been there for generations and had genuine patriotic loyalty to the US and Canada. They weren't enemies. They were us.

But just for a second, imagine if they weren't.

Imagine for a moment, if there really were a huge group of people living in your country, and I mean millions, who were from a country your country was at war with.

And what if these people really hated your country and everything it stood for and was about, even though they were living in it and enjoying its protections and a great deal of financial support. Who worked night and day to destroy it. Who protested every time your country won a victory over their place of origin. Who advocated and sometimes committed horrible acts of violence against your people.

And who, moreover, got into the newspapers as often as they could and told you that your country is no good. And who would show up at public events with placards that read "We will destroy you". And who have some extremely unsavoury family practices.

What if these people were well organised and being funded by some very rich foreign countries to do everything possible to overthrow your entire culture, your way of life, your way of thinking, your civilisation.

What if, in other words they really were a proven deadly threat?


~

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

The Great Steyn hath spoken

I initially had mixed feelings about Everybody Draws Mohammed Day. Provocation for its own sake is one of the dreariest features of contemporary culture, but that's not what this is about. Nick Gillespie's post reminds us that the three most offensive of the "Danish cartoons" - including the one showing Mohammed as a pig - were not by any Jyllands-Posten cartoonists but were actually faked by Scandinavian imams for the purposes of stirring up outrage among Muslims...

But, that aside, the clerics' action underlines what's going on: the real provocateurs are the perpetually aggrieved and ever more aggressive Islamic bullies - emboldened by the silence of "moderate Muslims" and the pre-emptive capitulation of western media.

causa finita.


But it's not just the western media.

Just finished this amusing and highly illustrative exchange on a facebook page where a friend of mine had posted a traditional Bomb Turban cartoon of old Mo in honour of the day. FB, whose profile made it clear that she is a white westerner, whould be a shoo-in for a job with the CBC multicultural relations department. Or maybe the CHRC.

FB:
I'm all for freedom of speech but that does not give people the right to say and do anything that they want. ps I am catholic (if you didn't already know and I go to church).

Hilary Jane Margaret White:
So, you like freedom of speech, as long as its not, you know, free.

FB:
Hilary I don't know you but if i started insulting you would that be ok??? You know free speech and all.


Hilary Jane Margaret White:
It should be legal. That's what free speech means. It means that if you insult me and I get mad, I can't have you thrown in prison.


Hilary Jane Margaret White
...or have your head cut off, or blow up your embassy, or shoot your priest, or kidnap and murder your journalists, or...

get it now?


FB
Interesting theory you have got going there. Don't suppose you are American by any chance?


Hilary Jane Margaret White
Nope. Just rational.


FB
Rational? If you say so..that's your free speech!


A,
so logically, from the point of Hilary, people who blow up embessies [sic] are offended by freedom of speech!!!cuz it is not legal?

FB
A, we could be friends but im getting the hell off facebook bc people do think they have the right to say and do anything they want.


Hilary Jane Margaret White
A, do you just put words into a bag and shake them up when you read things? So sentences are kind of like Scrabble pieces for you then...


FB:
A, don't be offended by Hilary. When people don't have anything to say they resort to comments like this.

Hilary Jane Margaret White
Ready to be arrested now, 'cause, you know, free speech should only be free when no one is offended...

Right?

Dante

William Blake


Unknown


Gustave Doré


Salvador Dali


Mattheus van Beveren


Giovanni da Modena



A cask by losing centre-piece or cant
Was never shattered so, as I saw one
Rent from the chin to where one breaketh wind.

Between his legs were hanging down his entrails;
His heart was visible, and the dismal sack
That maketh excrement of what is eaten.

While I was all absorbed in seeing him,
He looked at me, and opened with his hands
His bosom, saying: "See now how I rend me;

How mutilated, see, is Mahomet;
In front of me doth Ali weeping go,
Cleft in the face from forelock unto chin;

And all the others whom thou here beholdest,
Disseminators of scandal and of schism
While living were, and therefore are cleft thus.

A devil is behind here, who doth cleave us
Thus cruelly, unto the falchion's edge
Putting again each one of all this ream,

When we have gone around the doleful road;
By reason that our wounds are closed again
Ere any one in front of him repass.

- Dante's Inferno, Canto 28

Come back Spanish Inquisition... all is forgiven

It's not the Chef's Sweden any more...

All hail the Great Steyn

still making me laugh, while Civilisation burns...

last week, the head of Canada's intelligence service testified to the House of Commons about hundreds of "second- or third-generation Canadians" who are "relatively well integrated" "economically and socially" but who have become so "very very disenchanted" with "the way we want to structure our society" that they have developed "strong links to homelands" that are "in distress."

Homelands such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Hmm. If you're wondering what those countries might have in common, keep wondering. No words beginning with "I-" and ending with "-slam" passed the director's lips.

~

"-ophobia"

This is pretty funny, so maybe some commentary might be in order after all.

The Grauniad's Jenny Kleeman moves from interviewing Mr. Singh to insulting him without missing a beat:

His 'message' is simple and depressingly familiar: he fears that Britain is becoming an Islamic republic, and Islam is dangerous. 'Most of them behave very nicely, but suddenly when they get together in the mosque and listen to the preaching, they acquire a collective identity that is formidable. It's the collective being that frightens me.'

Islamophobia is not uncommon among Hindu and Sikh immigrants..."

I imagine not.

I suppose he's really the wrong kind of darkie for the Guardian readership. One who does not require the white liberal establishment to defend him. He's probably irrationally afraid of snakes too.

When I was a child, I was told lots of stories by my aunts about life in India. Islam didn't really come up in any of them, but snakes certainly did.

Auntie Frances was terrified of snakes all her life. She said she remembered in her childhood in India that at a certain time of year, when the family retired from the heat of Delhi to their country house, that if you got up early enough you would see the lawns and garden paths littered with snake skins. Cobras, you see, moulted that time of year.

She loved to tell the story of the time when she and her sister, my Auntie Pat, were being taken for a walk in the garden with their Ayah. Suddenly, as Pat was about to step over a flagstone in the path, the Ayah scooped her up and started screaming, "Krait!" She ran with the two little girls into the house still screaming.

A krait is one of the world's deadliest snakes, described as one of the "big four" poisonous snakes of India.

Another favourite family story is of the time Pat, then only about four, came running around the veranda where the family were having their tea saying that she had seen a pussy cat in the nursery. Everyone froze. Pat had been born abroad and had never seen a cat.

What was in the nursery?

Sure enough, a cobra, attracted by the smell of milk, was discovered coiled up and napping in the child's bed.

Interestingly, the procedure of the servants was to have the Hindoo house boy coax the monster out with a bowl of warm milk in his hand, into the garden where the muslim gardener was standing by to chop its head of with a spade. Hindoos could not kill cobras, according to their religion. Muslims? No worries mate.

I can see no reason why Auntie Frances should have retained her fear of snakes as an adult. Do you?

I'm flying to Washington, via New York, in a couple of weeks

and I've heard that the stepping up of "security measures" at US airports will include absolutely no racial or religious profiling whatever...

So, as a white, English speaking, Anglo-Irish-Canadian Catholic woman over age 35, I shall be sure to wear clean undergarments in anticipation of not being part of the target group.

Seeds of the Church

No matter where you stand on the whole Muzzie thing, one thing is for sure. There is going to be no shortage of opportunities for the quick ticket in the near future.


Update:

Doh! He was an Orthodox. So, being a member of the wrong church, couldn't be saved.

"...so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their almsgivings, their other works of Christian piety and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving be as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the Name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church." (Pope Eugene IV, the Bull Cantate Domino, 1441.)

Heh.

They really hate that.

Religion of Pervs

I think Shea calls it the "religion-that-can't-grow-up".

And I'm starting to see why.

There is no "nice" Islam

You know if Shea's saying it, it must finally be filtering down into the mainstream of socially acceptable US "conservative" Catholicism.

So, you know, it must be, like, true now. Or something.

It was a spectacular display of deliberate willed stupidity by a media culture that demonstrates repeatedly it does not want to acknowledge that Islam tends to breed such acts of terror with startling frequency.
Meanwhile, the Religion That Can't Grow Up beholds the carnage wrought by another Son of the Prophet and naturally blames . . . somebody else, while feeling sorry for itself:

"When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal," said Victor Benjamin II, 30, a former member of the Army. "But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad."

Um, no. When the Muslim calls it jihad, we call it jihad, just as when a Christian used to call it a crusade, we call it a crusade.

But We're evil because ...we don't ordain women....

Have I got it right Mr. Mainstreammedia?

A Saudi court of cassation upheld a ruling to behead and crucify a 22-year-old man convicted of raping five children and leaving one of them to die in the desert, newspapers reported on Tuesday.

Political, economic, social and environmental problems...

A UN report by more than 100 independent intellectuals and scholars from Arab countries blames political, economic, social and environmental problems for undermining the lives and freedom of Arabs

One asks, “Why have obstacles to human development in the region proved so stubborn?”

I just can't imagine.

The list included

A lack of representative government coupled with human rights violations and sweeping powers for security agencies;

No security for many people outside the mainstream including abused and subordinated women, trafficking victims, child soldiers, refugees and the internally displaced;

I wonder if it is possible ... if there is any chance at all ... that there might be some ... err...other unifying factor involved in the problems described.

Something...it's on the tip of my brain...

Could it be...

Nah.

The Poor Darlings

And this week's bomb-turban t-shirt goes to...

the Islamic blogger who whines writes about how those poor poor Islams are just misunderstood, calumniated and slandered by Christians.

for 1300 years.

“The West, whether Christian or dechristianised, has never really known Islam. Ever since they watched it appear on the world stage, Christians never ceased to insult and slander it in order to find justification for waging war on it. It has been subjected to grotesque distortions the traces of which still endure in the European mind. Even today there are many Westerners for whom Islam can be reduced to three ideas:

fanaticism, fatalism and polygamy.

Actually, I think what we've got a bigger problem with is the blowing-stuff-up, the cutting-people's-heads-off and the institutionalized-gang-raping.

But if you give me a minute, I'm sure I can come up with a few more.