Veena Malik - unlikely champion for women's liberties in Pakistan

I picked up on this news item in my news aggregator (Google Reader), last night.
This YouTube video clip from Memri TV was very interesting:

This is Veena Malik - the sort of dominatrix hostess in the TV show "Big Boss" - the Indian version of "Big Brother". 
What impressed me about this Pakistani actress was her apparently unrehearsed and highly articulate self defence and then counter-attack on her mullah critic - and the media in general - for the "trial by television" that she saw herself as being subjected to in that televised interview.
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Assuming that this was not a carefully-planed publicity stunt, I thought that she really stood up for herself well and showed herself to be  a good spokeswoman for all downtrodden and suppressed Pakistani women. The interview gives us further reminder (if any were needed) of the sorry lot of the millions of women living under the heel of the Fascist jackboot of the religeo-political Islamic regime in Pakistan.
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The Indian so-called "reality" TV show referred to is shockingly bad, IMHO - I watched a few clips of it before making a post about it in Dec. 2010 - "How can she slap?" - something unpleasant on Indian TV .

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After seeing the clips of that show, I had relegated the "actress" in question to the category of "rubbish" in my mind. However, I am now a fan of hers, after watching her stout defence in this latest clip.

International "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" (20th May)

Since 20th May is the first international annual "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" ("Be there or be dhimmi"), I was going to draw a cartoon or something, but instead I have dug up a perfectly good cartoon representing Mohammed, drawn by an Israeli girl in 1997. Here it is:

Mohammed as a pig, standing on the Koran whilst he writes in it.

I got this cartoon from THE PIG AND THE PRINCESS.

Israeli girl Tatiana Soskin:
Drew the "illegal" cartoon of Mohammed as a pig.

The pig, of course was the depiction of Mohammed. The princess was Tatiana Soskin (pictured right).
Seems like this simple young Russian/Jewish girl living in Hebron in 1997 became, perhaps understandably, pissed off at the Arabs/Palestinians continually bombing and shooting into her home town. As a sign of protest, she drew a cartoon depicting Mohammed as a pig, standing on the Koran whilst he writes in it. This could seem like fair comment to most people.

It's not clear from the post in THE PIG AND THE PRINCESS as to what crime she was believed to have committed, but In 1998 she was apparently given 2 years' prison sentence for committing what the presiding judge considered to be some kind of racist act or atrocity akin to (wait for it) - what the Nazis did during the Holocaust. Amazing.

The mind boggles that the Jewish authorities and legislature could have been such dhimmis, but there we are - and bugger the principle of "freedom of speech", I suppose.

I must admit, until I read this, I had always thought the actions of the Israelis demonstrated them to be a pretty hard-headed and rational bunch, with a strong sense of moral integrity/justice, but this one - if true - has me at a complete loss. I wonder, under what circumstances could it be justifiable and make sense?

As for the annual international "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day", this cartoon from DayByDay Cartoons is priceless (click on the link if this copy below is too small to read):

Long live plastic bottles!

Someone sent me a link to this item about the "Eco Bottle" - there is a picture of this 650ml bottle to the right. There was room for comments after the item, but it was limited to a max. of 400 words, and so I have posted my thoughts on the matter below.

Essentially, "Charlie's" brand has decided to sell water in a kind of plastic that is apparently made from plant matter as opposed to crude (fossil) oil. Greenies would lurve this, of course - you can almost feel the planet cooling - hence the post is on a website for something called "The sustainable greenlist directory". Everything has to be "sustainable" and "recyclable" nowadays it seems, except people of course - although that earliest of great recyclers, Adolf Hitler, apparently effectively demonstrated that even people did not need to be wasted and were recyclable by having his henchmen render the body fats from several millions of  innocent Jews to produce a kind of soap and used the ashes of their burned bodies to make road asphalt to build into roads. Some people have remarked that there is no limit to the fertile imagination of the mind of Man. I remember my mother telling me about this Hitler and what he had his German people do, as I listened to her in wonder as a child, and I recall years later the truth hitting home when I studied the history of the Nazi regime.

Anyway, as my old colleague Malcolm would say - did say, actually - "That's all water under the bridge now. Why can't we just forget about it? We must move on". Only trouble is, I can't move for all these historical corpses lying around and for knowing that there are currently an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet who are brought up to believe that they should start up again where Hitler left off and make a proper job of it this time.

But I digress. I would suggest that this "Eco bottle" could be a frivolous and cynical marketing exercise intended to make money out of gullible people.

In memoriam: Atefeh Rajabi - murdered by the Iranian judiciary

(Most of this is borrowed from the Telegraph article  Death and the maiden in Iran, July 2004.)
Atefeh Rajabi appears to have been a fairly normal 16-year-old, but with an unfortunately bad family background. She was probably sulky, disobedient, and eager to have sex. In London, those attributes could earn lectures from parents and teachers on the importance of acting responsibly and not being offensive.
In the city of Neka in Iran, where Atefeh Rajabi came from, they got her hauled up in front of a judge, where she was charged and found guilty of "acts incompatible with chastity". The judge in the Islamic Sharia court ruled that the appropriate penalty was death. Her sentence was confirmed by Iran's Supreme Court.
The justice machine of Iran having thus run its proper course, on 15th August, 2004, the girl was hung from a crane in the main square of Neka, in full public view, in order to keep "society safe from acts against public morality", and her young, insignificant life was snuffed out.

Girl, Interrupted - in memory of Aqsa Parvez, plot #774

On December 10, 2007, a 16-year old girl Aqsa Parvez was murdered - by her Pakistani immigrant Muslim father, Muhammad Parvez, and her brother, Waqas Parvez, in what is euphemistically termed an Islamic "honour killing".  The cause of death was strangulation.

Sweet 16: more than 20 Facebook pages devoted to
Aqsa Parvez were created within days of her death.Image credit: Facebook.

But this didn't happen in Pakistan, it happened in Mississauga, Toronto (Canada), where the population has tripled in the past 30 years - there are currently more than 700,000 people living in this, the country’s sixth largest city, and half of them are visible minorities.

Provocation for the father to murder his daughter must have been profound - he had sworn to kill her - because she had abandoned the use of her hijab (headscarf) - which is apparently a sin according to the Koran (and under Islamic Sharia law).

The otherwise unmarked grave of Aqsa Parvez, in Plot #774.

The details and the background to the murder of this child (she was aged 16) are adequately described in a factual and unemotional  4-page article by Toronto Life (click on link).


As if the murder wasn't bad enough, there is an article on 22 January, 2009 in Jihad Watch, that describes how Aqsa was buried without a headstone - she was laid in an unmarked grave, in plot #774 in Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton, Ontario. One Pamela Geller took up a collection to raise funds for a headstone, and a group of infidels contributed sufficient to make it a goer. But there was a problem, according to Pamela Geller in the article:

Mickey Mouse teaching the Palestinian children to hate

I sent my old school-mate and friend Harold (he's Jewish) the following photo of two Israeli girls signing artillery shells, noting that the Americans used to sign "To Adolf with love" on bombs, or similar, during WW2.


I often wondered what this practice of signing warplanes or bombs said about the Yanks, when I saw pictures of this practice in photos from WW2. I feel sure the US probably repeated the practice in wars over Kuwait/Afghanistan/Iraq.

Harold reckoned that the two girls would not have easy access to an Air Force base, and that self-propelled artillery pieces could have been parked on these kids' doorsteps - many Israeli towns and villages being quite close to various borders. He thought that this photo dated from the last Lebanese War with Hizbullah, as the name of the gentleman to whom the kids are sending regards is/was a Hizbullah leader. The kids up north were showered with hundreds of missiles in a few short days and spent long hours cooped up in bomb shelters.

Not having a name for it, I called the practice "hate-signing". It was - and probably still is - a useful practice for soldiers, because it accelerates a necessary military conditioning process - the process of abstraction and dehumanisation of the enemy. The more one can separate any feeling of common identity with the enemy as fellow human beings, the more one can engage in abstraction, and thus the easier it is to dissociate from the enemy, and the easier it is to kill them without compunction - they are not really "human" after all. That is one reason why the current form of automated warfare is so effective. Pressing a button and seeing the ensuing destruction of night-vision blobs on a computer screen is easy - a bit like a computer game - and not at all like standing face-to-face with, and killing a fellow human being by your own direct and deliberate action.

I think hate-signing must do something inside the heads of those children, and I suspect that it may not necessarily be a good something. My mother would probably have reckoned that this sort of thing was stooping to the level of an unworthy opponent - which, as she pointed out to me as a child, intrinsically detracts from one's own self-integrity and higher principles. We know that Muslims condition their children from as early as the age of 6 to learn by rote to hate "unbelievers" - especially Jews - as being less than human in Allah's eye. Is that any good reason for emulating the enemy by conditioning one's own children similarly?
Even if it were "necessary", I would still have real concerns about it - it goes against the principle of respect for life.

Harold didn't disagree, with me. He reckoned that this was probably one way some misguided adults were trying to relieve the tension for these kids. He did not condone this behaviour, but - probably to give it some balance - he thought it was a little less insidious than the Hamas videos of 3 year-olds being conditioned to want to be suicide bombers, and Mickey Mouse characters on Palestinian pre-school TV programmes encouraging them to do so, as the heartwarming YouTube video clip below shows:

An incredible breath of fresh air for Palestine

H.G.Wells once wrote about our state of being "prisoned from the cradle to the grave", in the story "The History of Mr.Polly":

But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless, perhaps, they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment, at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution. I give these things as facts and information, and with no moral intimations. And Mr. Polly lying awake at nights, with a renewed indigestion, with Miriam sleeping sonorously beside him and a general air of inevitableness about his situation, saw through it, understood there was no inevitable any more, and escaped his former despair.

So, now read this:
To my Arab brothers: The War with Israel Is Over - and they won. Now let's finally move forward
By Youssef M. Ibrahim
From: JewishWorldReview.com
With Israel entering its fourth week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks. The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:

Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:
The war with Israel is over.

You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.
We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel.

Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.

At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.
You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.

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	Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". HUNDREDS of columnists and cartoonists regularly appear. Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day.

What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world's have-nots?

We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.

Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.

Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.

Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods — more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives — while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.

The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former New York Times Middle East Correspondent and Wall Street Journal Energy Editor for 25 years, is a freelance writer based in New York City and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Comment by clicking here.

Open Season

I do not like angry, pissed-off, violent, hard or pure noise music - typically "metal" or "heavy metal" stuff, for example, like Metallica, or Motorhead (except as a joke, as in the track "Killed by Death") - and I really detest rap (especially gangsta rap).
However, I have to give a thumbs-up (respect!) to the group Stuck Mojo, and their album, "Southern Born Killers" - in particular a vid track called "Open Season" (lyrics). I have seen that track described as a kind of nu-metal rap piece of music, and it also seems to have gangsta overtones. As such, I really shouldn't like it at all, and, as music, I reckon it stinks, but I find I do like it nontheless because:
(a) It would have to be one of the most intelligent pieces of prose put to music/rap that I have ever come across.
(b) It seems to be a real in-your-face voice of the times - potentially offensive to some (tough luck), and probably controversial, but also something which could well resonate with millions of the silent majority around the world today who may be getting increasingly pissed off with being told how to lead their lives and think, by fascists.
The fact that this piece of music has come out of America and not some other part of the Western world has surprised me - you see, I thought the US had gone soft. Now I wonder if this track mightn't indicate that our transatlantic cousins are made of culturally and morally sterner stuff than the rest of us - except maybe the Danish and the Dutch.

"If you step in my hood,
It's understood,
It's open season."

This stuff is absolutely classic. It is sooo good that I wouldn't be surprised if it were subsequently revealed that the American secret services have been taking lessons from the British secret services in market communications and propaganda. Either way, it could mark the beginnings of a genuine societal backlash to the imposition of ideological conformism and fascism in America. Time will tell.
Check out Stuck Mojo's track "Open Season" here.
Check out Stuck Mojo's related track "I'm American" here.
Peace, bro.

UN call for Saudi women's rights

(see BBC News item here.)
Women in Saudi Arabia should be allowed more basic freedoms, according to a UN anti-discrimination committee report, which includes recommendations that:

• the practice of needing a man's permission to marry, work, travel or be educated should end.
• there should be more laws offering protection to women.

Overall the report is very critical of Saudi Arabia's approach to women's rights. It even expresses concern about the Saudi state's understanding of the idea of equality - saying similar rights for men and women is not the same as equal rights.

Womens' rights is a tricky subject for the Saudi and other non-secular Muslim dominated countries, since they know full well that all women in their society are treated as well as they should be.
The thing for them is that the Koran indicates explicitly and quite categorically (in numerous verses, for example including 4:10, 4:34, 4:54, 43:13, 43:64) that women are inferior for a multitude of reasons - women are chattels for men (as are slaves); they are economically dependent on men; they are worth half of what a man is worth; they are silly and given to frippery; God made them inferior in nature and made men superior in nature; men are entitled to beat them; Paradise is apparently mainly for men, but women can get in if they are married or "chaste virgins" - in the latter case, they are given to the spirits of (presumably unmarried) men and martyrs for their "delight"; because they induce lust in the hearts of men, women are the guilty party in their own rape, which is why women may be punished for their own rape and stoned to death for fornication/infidelity - but men get off (at the worst) with just a few lashes - whether rapist or adulterer.

If Muslims - males especially - have this kind of toxic misogynistic drivel (never mind the exhortations to kill all infidels) being continuously pumped into their heads from the age of at least 6, then it would seem no small wonder that things are as they are in sunny Saudi and other Islamic societies. It sets their paradigms rock-solid. This is successful religious indoctrination on a grand scale - probably far surpassing what the Roman Catholic Church historically tried to achieve - and it is how you control poorly-educated and even well-educated people. It thrives on and encourages stupidity, bigotry and ignorance.

"But look here where it says so in the Koran!" must seem almost as compelling an argument as the sound of a loaded pistol being cocked behind your ear. Even given the reputed retraction (by Mohammed) of "The Satanic Verses" (per Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel) from the Koran, what's left in the Koran looks pretty scary.

Perhaps unsurprisingly therefore, the Saudi government, in submissions before the aforementioned report was published, said that there was no discrimination against women. Last month a Saudi delegation told the UN body - the committee on the elimination of discrimination against women - that human rights in the kingdom were based on Sharia law. The delegation said Saudi society was still largely a tribal one where new ideas took time to be accepted.

Oh well, that explains it then - or does it?
One has to ask: How much time do they need to accept new ideas? Surely 600 years is long enough?*

What could the cause of this societally laggard behaviour be? Just maybe, it could be that they cannot change, simply because they are a non-secular society, straightjacketed by the paradigms - including the dogma and ideology - of their main religion, the Islamic faith.

*Explanation: In my blog post Mohammed the teddy-bear, I wrote "The thing is, Muslim-dominated states - e.g., including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan - have already had about 600 years to climb out of this type of state barbarism, and yet they have apparently been unable to successfully complete the exercise, despite a veneer of civilisation."

Mentally Retarded Women Used in Bombings

This AP (Associated Press) report from Baghdad, dated February 1, 2008, in Guardian Unlimited says that "Two mentally retarded women [Note: subsequent reports suggest that they were in fact not retarded, but of "sound mind".] strapped with remote-control explosives - and possibly used as unwitting suicide bombers - brought carnage Friday to two pet bazaars, killing at (sic) 91 people in the deadliest day since Washington flooded the capital with extra troops last spring."

Whatever we do, whether it is our gradual conquering of our environment, and now outer space - or something arguably even more impressive - e.g., the systematic genocide of 6 million Jews by the Nazis (ably abetted and encouraged by the Muslims' Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini) during WWII - it is truly amazing what we human beings are capable of. Certainly it would probably seem axiomatic to the man on the Clapham omnibus, that only someone who was either permanently or temporarily retarded or deranged in some way would be likely to use themselves, or permit themselves to be used by others, as a human bomb - an act which the more perspicacious amongst us would realise would almost certainly lead to one's own death. A more accurate word to use here might be "defective", rather than "retarded" or "deranged". Some might call such an act "evil".

One of the singer Freddie Mercury's swansongs was the beautiful Heaven for Everyone, in which he sang "This could be Heaven for everyone". It probably could be too, were it not for things such as, for example, our fellow human beings commtting horrendous crimes against us.
The thing is, we are doing this to ourselves. Crimes like this, where possibly otherwise innocent (if not retarded/deranged) people are encouraged or used as (possibly unwitting), sacrificial carriers for remotely-detonated bombs - are caused/committed by people who would seem, quite literally, to be hellbent on ensuring that this world will not "...be Heaven for everyone" - or anyone, for that matter.

May God forgive them.

Lest we forget - a footnote about Haj Amin el-Husseini:

• He was the Grand Mufti for Jerusalem. A Mufti is an expert in the Islamic Shari'ah (law) who gives legal judgments called fatwas. In 1921, Haj Amin el-Husseini first began to organize small groups of suicide squads - fedayeen - to terrorize Jews. Haj Amin hoped to duplicate the success of Kemal Atatürk in Turkey by driving the Jews out of Palestine just as Kemal had driven the invading Greeks from his country.
• In 1941, as Grand Mufti and as a prominent Arab representative, he met with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and other Nazi leaders. He wanted to persuade them to extend the Nazis’ anti-Jewish program to the Arab world. Haj Amin sent Hitler 15 drafts of declarations he wanted Germany and Italy to make concerning the Middle East.
• One draft called on the two countries to declare the illegality of the Jewish home in Palestine. Furthermore, “they accord to Palestine and to other Arab countries the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries, in accordance with the interest of the Arabs and, by the same method, that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries.”

If this sounds bad, it gets worse. Clearly the British had dirty - if not bloody - hands. See here - The Mufti's Mayhem - where it says:

• The British encouraged the Palestinians to attack the Jews. According to Meinertzhagen, Col. Waters Taylor (financial adviser to the Military Administration in Palestine 1919-23) met with Haj Amin a few days before Easter, in 1920, and told him “he had a great opportunity at Easter to show the world...that Zionism was unpopular not only with the Palestine Administration but in Whitehall and if disturbances of sufficient violence occurred in Jerusalem at Easter, both General Bols [Chief Administrator in Palestine, 1919-20] and General Allenby [Commander of Egyptian Force, 1917-19, then High Commissioner of Egypt] would advocate the abandonment of the Jewish Home. Waters-Taylor explained that freedom could only be attained through violence.”
  

Refer The Mufti and the Führer and Haj Amin al-Husseini.

Don't touch that dial, dhimmi: Thai satellite company begins broadcasting Hizbullah's Al-Manar channel

Fascinating. Read the Jan. 10 2008 blog post (click on this link) about how THAICOM, a private satellite company in Thailand, has begun airing the broadcasts of Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV. The satellite covers Asia, Australia, Africa, the Middle East, and most of Europe. (Over the last few years, US and European satellites stopped airing Al-Manar, so the station could only be seen via two Arab satellites: Nilesat and Arabsat. The former is an Egyptian-owned satellite, which broadcasts to the Middle East, North Africa, and a few countries in southern Europe. The latter is a pan-Arab satellite, with approximately the same reach.)

Apparently THAICOM has done this:

• "as a purely business decision" (i.e., presumably, "for profit"), and not for political reasons.
• Considering Al-Manar programming to be "news and entertainment". (Go figure.)
• Without regard to the facts that:
  (a) Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV is Hizbullah's main communication tool, through which it spreads anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, and anti-American incitement (spreading Hizbullah and Iranian values of radical Islam) - i.e., it is an Islamic (Muslim) fundamentalist propaganda medum.
  (b) Other satellites have stopped airing Al-Manar because of this. e.g., the US Department of State decided in December 2004 to add Al-Manar to its Terrorist Exclusion List, and subsequently the European satellites Hispasat and Eutelsat have ceased airing the station's broadcasts. (Thus THAICOM have enabled Al-Manar to get around this blockage.)
  

As the blog post says, "Didn't anyone think it might be a bad idea to pipe jihadist propaganda straight into a region already dealing with its own jihadist problem? And Thailand isn't the only country whose viewers will have access to this programming."
(Ed: I do wish these writers would learn English grammar and not use conjunctions at the start of a sentence.)

Some people might say - but I couldn't possibly agree - that THAICOM may have a further really good business idea up their sleeves - to make even bigger profits, and more efficiently too, by following up the demand they will have created with the broadcasts and diversify into armaments and selling armaments/bombs directly to the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in these regions.
(Now that Al-Manar can be seen in south-east Asia, it means that Indonesia and Malaysia, two countries with large Muslim populations, are able to receive what civilised nations apparently consider to be messages of hatred.)

"My mum is a real blast!" - Islamic education for children in the UK?

Wow. I had just made the post about Mohammed the teddy-bear when I stumbled upon an article from the Daily Mail, dated 18th Dec. 2007: British children targeted with terror sing-along DVD for would-be suicide bombers.

(The caption on the picture above reads:"She blows herself up - and her daughter later sings: 'I will follow my mother's steps' ")

Now this is really worrying. At first I thought it had to be a bad joke - but it's not April 1st. It is about what would be teaching and encouraging innocent children and their ignorant mothers to commit evil. Read the link. It is part of the new reality for UK residents.

The question is, when will the same standard of education be available for the children in NZ society? Enquiring minds need to know. Maybe we should ask New Zealand MP Ashraf Choudhary?

Mohammed the teddy-bear

In an earlier post, I mentioned the superb "own goal" that the Sudanese government had made over the amazingly stupid Muhammad-teddy-bear-naming-insult saga, making a laughing-stock of themselves.

A friend sent me this picture the other day, which pokes fun at the situation the Sudanese created. The caption on the picture says, "I recently purchased a teddy bear for 10 pounds, named it Mohammed, then I sold it for 20 pounds. My question is, have I made a prophet?"

On the face of it, this could seem amusing, but it could also be disturbing and amazing that the innocent act of children naming their class teddy-bear Mohammed could be so twisted into something horrible by religious bigots holding positions of state power. Those bigots were considering imposing a barbaric punishment on the hapless class teacher, who had presumably previously thought herself to be living and working within a normal, civilised society.

History shows us that Western civilisations can give thanks for at least two factors which have enabled/allowed civilisation to climb out of a barbaric state:

1. The Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, which had its roots further back in time. The problem then was the Roman Catholic church, which had a lot to answer for then, and which - some say - still has a lot to answer for today.
   
   
2. The separation of church and state (state secularism) - essentially freedom from the government imposition of religion upon the people, within a state that is neutral on matters of belief, and which provides no religion with state privileges or subsidies. This has its roots throughout history, in society's pursuit of "free thought".
   

The SRI (Stanford Research Institute) 1982 report entitled The Changing Images of Man gives some hope that, in theory, even though a society may seem to be stuck in an awful condition - e.g., in state-controlled barbarism (such as, for example Nazi Germany, the Cambodian Pol Pot regime) - the pressure from what is in the minds of people in that society - minds which see a higher potential purpose for mankind - will eventually cause change to the state for the better.

The thing is, Muslim-dominated states - e.g., including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan - have already had about 600 years to climb out of this type of state barbarism, and yet they have apparently been unable to successfully complete the exercise, despite a veneer of civilisation. Many people (e.g., including my Iranian neighbours) have fled the terrible dogma and strictures of such states in order to lead more-or-less humane existences as peaceful immigrants to the Western world.

Unfortunately, some migrate, but feel obliged to take their learned toxic dogma/ideology with them, and they establish footholds in a new host society - footholds from which they seek to implement and spread the toxic dogma and strictures afresh - i.e., attempting to enforce their old paradigms and strictures as a straitjacket for the new host society (witness what has happened in the UK - esp. Leeds - and elsewhere in Europe). In the latter case, the process of acculturation - taking on the new culture of a host society - would seem to be unlikely, if not impossible under such circumstances, as would full cultural integration. This is part of "The trouble with Islam Today" (refer Irshad Manji's book) and which has been commented on in various books and interviews by many critics - faithful Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

So, is the theory discussed in the SRI report sound? How are things to be improved?

I would not deem to challenge the theory, but neither can I see how things might be improved. I have read and re-read the Quran (AKA "Koran") over the last several years in an attempt to understand the Islamic faith and to reconcile what practitioners of the faith say and do. However, these things do not reconcile easily. There seem to be few, if any, indications that we can be sanguine about things. Here are just three (there are more) contra-indications:

1. Dogmatic paradigms cannot shift: For example, on July 5th 2005, the New Zealand Herald ran an article Some stoning okay says Choudhary, where the New Zealand MP Ashraf Choudhary, when asked, "Are you saying the Koran is wrong to recommend that gays in certain circumstances be stoned to death?", replied " No, no. Certainly what the Koran says is correct.", and then added, "In those societies, not here in New Zealand."
   
   
2. There is a New-Age form of anti-Semitism that may affect us all: There is what has generally been recognised as a new and more sinister form of anti-Semitism. Whereas classic anti-Semitism was about having a world free of Jews, the new form of anti-Semitism is about having a world free of a Jewish state - e.g. as per the quotes of the Iranian President. This new form could be, potentially, ultimately deadly for all those who are not followers of Islam. This is suggested by the demographic spread of Islam and because the Quran is interpreted/taught as obliging Muslims to consider all infidels as the enemy. Islam draws a clear distincton between the world of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the world of heresy (Dar al-Harb) - they are antithetical. (Refer a superb, but chilling pictorial summary of the concepts here.)
   
   
3. Islam as a fascist ideology: To quote a post from Ashley:
   "It is time that the politicians and PC elite understood and respected the inescapable fact that Islam is a totalitarian, anti-humanitarian, political ideology that uses religion to give divine sanction to fascism and in particular to fascist regimes. It is an outdated, failed ideology which has been tried and tested in the laboratory of time and has failed to make its way from the 7th to the 21st century. They can do with it what they may, lie about it, pray about it, roar, sue, spit, threaten, start a jihad, burn a flag, bomb an embassy, shoot an elderly nun in the back, whatever, but the facts remain. It is time they stopped, stopped the deception, be it self deception or otherwise, but it has to stop."

Video clips that amuse and make me laugh

I have been checking out some YouTube clips. These two are rather witty songs by The Richter Scales - a clever name for a singing group. See their blog. (Both of these preceding links seem to be having connection problems at the time of writing though.)
Check it:

• Stockholm Syndrome
• Here Comes Another Bubble

If, however, you might like something more provocative, then you could do worse than check out some of the 30 (and counting) vid clips from this articulate and prolific YouTube user - an English guy called Pat Condell. He takes to task the Americans, the Muslims, the Christians, and more. He's a very witty iconoclast, and I think he displays some good critical thinking skills too. We could probably all learn from this guy to be a little more reflective regarding our own beliefs and bias.
Amongst my favourites are:

• Laugh at Sudan (for scoring a superb "own goal" over the amazingly stupid Muhammad-teddy-bear-naming-insult saga)
• The trouble with Islam
• United States of Jesus
• Catholic morality
  

- and this one is very good, imho: A word to Islamofascists (look out all Islamofascists and white supremacists).