Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Challenge of Radical Islam, You Tube, January 3, 2015
(It’s an hour and six minutes long but well worth watching. — DM)
Archive for the ‘Islamophobia’ category
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Challenge of Radical Islam
January 3, 2016Islamic Reformation and Ayaan Hirsi Ali
January 2, 2016Islamic Reformation and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dan Miller’s Blog, January 2, 2016
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
In Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes her execrable life as a devout Muslim girl in Somalia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia. She explains why she became an Infidel after experiencing freedom in the Netherlands. In Heretic, she seeks a reformation of Islam, with a focus on women’s rights but including tolerance and freedom of thought and speech for all. That will not happen soon, even though there are other current and former Muslims who want it and others who claim to want it.
From the first page of Heretic:
On ______, a group of ______ heavily armed, black-clad men burst into a ______ in ______, opening fire and killing a total of ______ people. The attackers were filmed shouting “Allahu akbar!”
Speaking at a press conference, President ______ said: “We condemn this criminal act by extremists. Their attempt to justify their violent acts in the name of a religion of peace will not, however, succeed. We also condemn with equal force those who would use this atrocity as a pretext for Islamophobic hate crimes.”
. . . .
Let me make my point in the simplest possible terms: Islam is not a religion of peace. For expressing the idea that Islamic violence is rooted not in social, economic, or political conditions— or even in theological error— but rather in the foundational texts of Islam itself, I have been denounced as a bigot and an “Islamophobe.” I have been silenced, shunned, and shamed. In effect, I have been deemed to be a heretic, not just by Muslims— for whom I am already an apostate— but by some Western liberals as well, whose multicultural sensibilities are offended by such “insensitive” pronouncements. [Emphasis added.]
_______________________
Heretic explores differences between political Islam and Islam as a religion. Hirsi Ali tells of some horrors of Islam as currently practiced in Islamic states, officially pursuant to Sharia law but also unofficially and with little or no intervention by those states to prevent or ameliorate it. Here is an example of the latter type of political Islam:
Political Islam is rooted in and, I think, inseparable from, religious Islam as commanded by the Qu’ran, the Hadith and Sharia law. An article titled The Lure of Fantasy Islam disparages hopeful reformers such as Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a self-described “devout Muslim,” as promoting “fantasy Islam” by obscuring the nature of Islam as it has developed over the centuries and as it now is.
Dr. Jasser advocates the separation of mosque and state. He
is the Founder and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) and is the author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith (Simon & Schuster, June 2012). On March 20, 2012, Dr. Jasser was appointed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) where he currently serves as a Commissioner.
That’s very good; but how can a “devout Muslim” call for the separation of mosque and state? He also appears to pretend that Islam today is something it is not: a peaceful, tolerant religion. Obama and organizations He supports do the same. He and they do not seek Islamic reformation but instead oppose it. Obama apparently believes that Islam is fine as it is. He is not stupid and must know what Islam is now and has long been.
Hirsi Ali does not pretend that today’s Islam is what it is not: she recognizes today’s Islam as a violent, intolerant and otherwise evil religion that seeks civilizational domination. She is the executive producer of, and appeared in, this Clarion Project Honor Diaries Video as well as others:
For producing the Honor Diaries videos, Hirsi Ali is deemed an “Islamophobe.” Although the suffix “phobia” in “Islamophobia” still invokes the notion of irrationality, that seems to have disappeared in current usage. Now, Islamophobia “(or anti-Muslim sentiment) is the prejudice against, hatred towards, or fear of the religion of Islam or Muslims” — regardless of the rationality of such prejudice, hatred or fear.
Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Azeezah Kanji — the featured speaker in the above video — has been very active in disparaging Honor Diaries. Like CAIR, she has ties to the Obama White House and was named a “Champion of Change” by the White House in 2011. What changes in Islam does Ms. Kanji champion? None, apparently, of those intrinsic to it.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the CAIR, condemned Ayaan Hirsi Ali as “one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America, not only in America but worldwide.”
Please see also my article titled Islam: Hate, Honor, Women’s Rights and Congress. Obama’s “Champion for Change” would most likely agree with the proponents of House Resolution 569 that “Islamophobia” is a hate crime.
What can we do to promote an Islamic reformation?
To a great extent, it’s up to the Muslims. However, Hirsi Ali suggests the following in Heretic:
There is probably no realistic chance that Muslims in countries such as Pakistan will agree to dispense with sharia. However, we in the West must insist that Muslims living in our societies abide by our rule of law. We must demand that Muslim citizens abjure sharia practices and punishments that conflict with fundamental human rights and Western legal codes. Moreover, under no circumstances should Western countries allow Muslims to form self-governing enclaves in which women and other supposedly second-class citizens can be treated in ways that belong in the seventh century. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
It is no longer plausible to argue that organizations such as Boko Haram— or, for that matter, Islamic State— have nothing to do with Islam. It is no longer credible to define “extremism” as some disembodied threat, meting out death without any ideological foundation, a problem to be dealt with by purely military methods, preferably drone strikes. We need to tackle the root problem of the violence that is plaguing our world today, and that must be the doctrine of Islam itself. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
[The] phenomenon of Christophobia (as opposed to the far more widely discussed “Islamophobia”) receives remarkably little coverage in the Western media. Part of this reticence may be due to fear of provoking additional violence. But part is clearly a result of the very effective efforts by lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading journalists and editors in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a deep-rooted Islamophobia. [Emphasis added.]
What does Islam need to reform?
Islam . . . . needs a Voltaire. But I have come to believe it is in dire need of a John Locke as well. It was, after all, Locke who gave us the notion of a “natural right” to the fundamentals of “life, liberty, and property.” But less well known is Locke’s powerful case for religious toleration. And religious toleration, however long it took to be established in practice, is one of the greatest achievements of the Western world.
. . . .
Most Americans, and indeed most Europeans, would much rather ignore the fundamental conflict between Islam and their own worldview. This is partly because they generally assume that “religion,” however defined, is a force for good and that any set of religious beliefs should be considered acceptable in a tolerant society. . . . [Emphasis added.]
But that does not mean we should be blind to the potential consequences of accommodating beliefs that are openly hostile to Western laws, traditions, and values. For it is not simply a religion we have to deal with. It is a political religion many of whose fundamental tenets are irreconcilably inimical to our way of life. We need to insist that it is not we in the West who must accommodate ourselves to Muslim sensitivities; it is Muslims who must accommodate themselves to Western liberal ideals. [Emphasis added.]
Unfortunately, not everyone gets this.
In the fall of 2014, Bill Maher, host of the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, held a discussion about Islam that featured the best-selling author Sam Harris, the actor Ben Affleck, and the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Harris and Maher raised the question of whether or not Western liberals were abandoning their principles by not confronting Islam about its treatment of women, promotion of jihad, and sharia-based punishments of stoning and death to apostates. To Affleck, this smacked of Islamophobia and he responded with an outburst of moralistic indignation. To applause from the audience, he heatedly accused Harris and Maher of being “gross” and “racist” and saying things no different from “saying ‘you’re a shifty Jew.’ ” Siding with Affleck, Kristof interjected that brave Muslims were risking their lives to promote human rights in the Muslim world. [Emphasis added.]
After the show, during a discussion in the greenroom, Sam Harris asked both Ben Affleck and Nick Kristof, “What do you think would happen if we had burned a copy of the Qur’an on tonight’s show?” Sam then answered his own question, “There would be riots in scores of countries. Embassies would fall. In response to our mistreating a book, millions of Muslims would take to the streets, and we would spend the rest of our lives fending off credible threats of murder. But when IS crucifies people, buries children alive, and rapes and tortures women by the thousands— all in the name of Islam— the response is a few small demonstrations in Europe and a hashtag [# NotInOurName].” [Emphasis added.]
Islam is apartheid and should be recognized as such.
Too often, when it comes to women’s rights (and human rights more generally) in the Muslim world, leading thinkers and opinion makers have, at best, gone dark. [Emphasis added.]
I cannot help contrasting this silence with the campaign to end apartheid, which united whites and blacks alike all over the world beginning in the 1960s. When the West finally stood up to the horrors of South African apartheid, it did so across a broad front. The campaign against apartheid reached down into classrooms and even sports stadiums; churches and synagogues stood united against it across the religious spectrum. South African sports teams were shunned, economic sanctions were imposed, and intense international pressure was brought to bear on the country to change its social and political system. American university students erected shantytowns on their campuses to symbolize their solidarity with those black South Africans confined to a life of degradation and impoverishment inside townships. [Emphasis added,]
Today, with radical Islam, we have a new and even more violent system of apartheid, where people are targeted not for their skin color but for their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, or, among Muslims, the form of their personal faith. [Emphasis added.]
. . . . As I have repeatedly said, the connection between violence and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to Muslims when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect. We need to ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Should it be blasphemy— punishable by death— to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Why, when I have made these arguments, have I received so little support and so much opprobrium from the very people in the West who call themselves feminists, who call themselves liberals? [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
A Unique Role for the West
Whenever I make the case for reform in the Muslim world, someone invariably says: “That is not our project— it is for Muslims only. We should stay out of it.” But I am not talking about the kind of military intervention that has got the West into so much trouble over the years. For years, we have spent trillions on waging wars against “terror” and “extremism” that would have been much better spent protecting Muslim dissidents and giving them the necessary platforms and resources to counter that vast network of Islamic centers, madrassas, and mosques which has been largely responsible for spreading the most noxious forms of Islamic fundamentalism. For years, we have treated the people financing that vast network— the Saudis, the Qataris, and the now repentant Emiratis— as our allies. In the midst of all our efforts at policing, surveillance, and even military action, we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it. [Emphasis added.]
Are you listening, President Obama? Not at all likely.
Why the Tide Is Turning
Three factors are combining today to enable real religious reform:
• The impact of new information technology in creating an unprecedented communication network across the Muslim world.
• The fundamental inability of Islamists to deliver when they come to power and the impact of Western norms on Muslim immigrants are creating a new and growing constituency for a Muslim Reformation.
• The emergence of a political constituency for religious reform emerging in key Middle Eastern states.
Together, I believe these three things will ultimately turn the tide against the Islamists, whose goal is, after all, a return to the time of the Prophet— a venture as foredoomed to failure as all attempts to reverse the direction of time’s arrow.
. . . .
In November 2014, an Egyptian doctor coined an Arabic hashtag that translates as “why we reject implementing sharia”; it was used five thousand times in the space of twenty-four hours, mostly by Saudis and Egyptians. In language that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, a young Moroccan named Brother Rachid last year called out President Obama on YouTube for claiming that Islamic State was “not Islamic.”[Emphasis added.]
Here is the referenced video: Please listen. It’s powerful and compelling, albeit “Islamophobic.”
. . . .
I agree with Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize– winning Pakistani schoolgirl whom the Taliban tried to kill:
The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them. That is why they are blasting schools every day— because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring to our society. They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school.
Here, surely, is the authentic voice of a Muslim Reformation.
Conclusions
Islamic reformation will take a long time. Until there is an Islamic reformation, those who cry “Islamophobe!” — a made-up word intended to box people to keep them “politically correct” — will have won. So will those who despise our freedoms and want to “fundamentally transform” America.
Until we, and our “leaders,” stop damning “Islamophobes” and helping such organizations as CAIR, there will be no significant reformation. If and when we and our “leaders” also begin to take the other steps Hirsi Ali suggests, there may eventually be a reformation that will benefit us as well as Muslims.
Merkel urges Germans to see refugee arrivals as ‘an opportunity’ in New Year address
December 31, 2015Merkel urges Germans to see refugee arrivals as ‘an opportunity’ in New Year address, The Guardian, December 31, 2015
Chancellor Angela Merkel delivers her New Year address in which she urges the German people to be ‘humanitarian’ and see the arrival of refugees as an opportunity. Photograph: Pool/Getty Images
Chancellor Angela Merkel in her New Year’s address on Thursday asked Germans to see refugee arrivals as “an opportunity for tomorrow” and urged doubters not to follow racist hate-mongers.
The past year – when the country took in more than a million migrants and refugees – had been unusually challenging, she said in a pre-released text of the speech, also bracing Germans for more hardships ahead.
But she stressed that in the end it would all be worth it because “countries have always benefited from successful immigration, both economically and socially”.
With a view to right-wing populists and xenophobic street rallies, she said “It’s important we don’t allow ourselves to be divided.”
“It is crucial not to follow those who, with coldness or even hatred in their hearts, lay a sole claim to what it means to be German and seek to exclude others.”
Merkel has earned both praise and criticism at home and abroad for her decision to open Germany to a record wave of refugees, about half from war-torn Syria.
Germany took in almost 1.1 million asylum seekers this year, five times 2014’s total, the Säechsische Zeitung regional daily reported on Wednesday citing unpublished official figures.
Merkel, faced with opposition in her conservative camp and popular concerns about the influx, has vowed steps to reduce numbers in 2016.
Her plan involves convincing other European Union members to take in more refugees, so far with little success, and an EU deal with gateway country Turkey to better protect its borders.
Merkel said “there has rarely been a year in which we were challenged so much to follow up our words with deeds”.
She thanked volunteers and police, soldiers and administrators for their “outstanding” accomplishments and “doing far, far more than their duty”.
Looking to 2016, she said: “There is no question that the influx of so many people will keep demanding much of us. It will take time, effort and money.”
But Merkel recalled that Germany had mastered past challenges such as reunification a quarter of a century ago and benefitted from a “robust and innovative” economy.
“I am convinced that, handled properly, today’s great task presented by the influx and the integration of so many people is an opportunity for tomorrow,” she said.
She urged Germans to be “self-confident and free, humanitarian and open to the world”.
Amid the world’s greatest refugee wave since the second world war, she said, “It goes without saying that we help and accommodate people who seek safe haven with us.”
The speech will be broadcast at 6.15pm GMT on ZDF public television and then online with English and Arabic subtitles on english.zdf.de and arabic.ZDF.de.
The Islamization of Britain in 2015
December 31, 2015The Islamization of Britain in 2015, Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, December 31, 2015
♦Hospitals across Britain are dealing with at least 15 new cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) every day. Although FGM has been illegal in Britain since 1984, there has not been a single conviction.
♦At least 1,400 children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013 in the town of Rotherham, mostly by Muslim gangs, but police and municipal officials failed to tackle the problem because they feared being branded “racist” or “Islamophobic.”
♦Reverend Giles Goddard, vicar of St John’s in Waterloo, central London, allowed a full Muslim prayer service to be held in his church. He also asked his congregation to praise “the God that we love, Allah.”
♦There has been a 60% increase in child sexual abuse reported to the police over the past four years, according to official figures.
♦British intelligence are monitoring more than 3,000 homegrown Islamist extremists willing to carry out attacks in Britain.
♦A Muslim worker at a nuclear power plant in West Kilbride, Scotland, was removed from the premises after he was caught studying bomb-making materials while on the job.
♦”We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist.” – Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic.
The Muslim population of Britain surpassed 3.5 million in 2015 to become around 5.5% of the overall population of 64 million, according to figures extrapolated from a recent study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe. In real terms, Britain has the third-largest Muslim population in the European Union, after France, then Germany.
Islam and Islam-related issues were omnipresent in Britain during 2015, and can be categorized into five broad themes: 1) Islamic extremism and the security implications of British jihadists in Syria and Iraq; 2) the continuing spread of Islamic Sharia law in Britain; 3) the sexual exploitation of British children by Muslim gangs; 4) Muslim integration into British society; and 5) the failures of British multiculturalism.
JANUARY 2015
January 7. The British-born Islamic extremist, Anjem Choudary defended the jihadist attacks on the offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. In an opinion article published byUSA Today, Choudary wrote:
“Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.
“In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Mohammed are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdoto continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?”
January 9. Muslim cleric Mizanur Rahman of Palmers Green, north London, also defended the attacks in Paris and declared that “Britain is the enemy of Islam.” Speaking to an audience in London — his speech was also streamed online to thousands of his followers — Rahman said the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were guilty of “insulting Islam” and therefore “they can’t expect a different result.” He added: “You know what happens when you insult Mohammed.”
January 14. Zack Davies, 25, attacked a 24-year-old Sikh named Sarandev Bhambra with a machete at a Tesco supermarket in Mold, north Wales. British newspapers initially portrayed the attack as a “racially-motivated attempt” by a right-wing extremist promoting “white power.” It later emerged that Davies is actually a Muslim convert who goes by the name Zack Ali. On the morning of the attack, Davies warned on his Facebook page of his impending assault, posting four verses from the Koran that call for violence against non-Muslims.
January 16. Rahin Aziz, an Islamist from Luton, was pictured in Syria brandishing an AK-47 rifle. In a tweet, Aziz, who also calls himself Abu Abdullah al-Britani, wrote: “Still deciding to what to do with my #british passport, could burn it, flush it down the toilet, I mean realistically it’s not worth spitting on.”
January 16. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles sent a letter to more than 1,000 imams across Britain asking for their help in fighting extremism and rooting out those who are preaching hatred. Muslim groups responded by accusing the British government of stoking “Islamophobia” and demanding an apology.
January 17. The Telegraph reported that a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist with close links to the jihadist attacks in Paris cannot be deported from Britain because it would breach his human rights. Baghdad Meziane, a 49-year-old British-Algerian, jailed for eleven years in 2003 for running a terror network recruiting jihadists and fundraising for al-Qaeda, was released from prison five years early and allowed to return to his family home in Leicester. Since then, Meziane has successfully thwarted attempts to deport him, despite the government’s repeated insistence that he constitutes “a danger to the United Kingdom.”
According to The Telegraph, a close associate of Meziane, Djamel Beghal, mentored at least two of the suspected gunmen responsible for the killings — Amedy Coulibaly and Chérif Kouachi — while they were together in prison. Beghal’s wife, a French citizen, is living in the UK, courtesy of British taxpayers. Sylvie Beghal lives rent-free in a four-bedroom house in Leicester. She came to Britain with her children in search of a more “Islamic environment,” after deciding that France was too anti-Muslim.
January 20. The former chief of MI6, Sir John Sawers, in what can be seen as a recommendation for self-censorship, warned Britons not to insult Islam if they want to avoid Islamic terrorists from striking inside the country. He said:
“If you show disrespect for others’ core values then you are going to provoke an angry response… There is a requirement for restraint from those of us in the West.”
January 25. Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic, the largest of the BBC’s non-English language news services, said that the term “terrorist” was too “loaded” to describe the actions of the men who killed 12 people in the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
January 26. It emerged that hospitals across Britain are dealing with at least 15 new cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) every day, and that the problem is especially acute in Birmingham. Although FGM has been illegal in Britain since 1984, there has not been a single conviction.
January 29. A Sky News investigation into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, a town in South Yorkshire, found that hundreds of new cases continue to emerge. In August 2014, the so-called Alexis Jay Report revealed that between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 children were sexually exploited, mostly by Muslim gangs, and that police and municipal officials failed to tackle the problem because of politically correct concerns over being branded as “racist” or “Islamophobic.”
FEBRUARY 2015
February 4. British police arrested 45 Muslim men on charges of child sex grooming. In Northumbria, 20 suspects appeared in court to face charges including rape, sexual assault and sex trafficking. The alleged offenses involved 12 victims, including one girl aged just 13. In Halifax, West Yorkshire, 25 men were charged with a number of child-related sex offenses.
February 4. The entire cabinet of Rotherham Council resigned after a report found that misplaced political correctness, combined with a culture of denial, allowed more than 1,400 girls to be routinely abused by gangs of Muslim men over a period of 15 years. Children as young as nine were groomed, trafficked and raped by members of the town’s Pakistani community, but fear of being labeled racist meant town councilors turned a blind eye to the abuse.
February 8. More than 1,000 British Muslims protested in central London against what they called “insulting depictions” of the Prophet Mohammed by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Crowds carrying placards with slogans such as “Stand Up For the Prophet” gathered near Prime Minister David Cameron’s office in London’s Whitehall government district. The event was organized by a group called Muslim Action Forum, which is launching a lobbying campaign as well as series of legal challenges in the English court system to establish that depictions of Mohammed are a “hate crime.”
February 25. Asif Masood, 40, an unlicensed drunk driver, apparently three times over the blood alcohol limit when he crashed his friend’s car into a fire hydrant in Nottingham, avoided a prison sentence after he persuaded a judge that he had just rediscovered his Muslim faith and had quit drinking.
February 27. A judge in Liverpool stopped a trial after he discovered that the defendant, Kerim Kurt, had sworn on the Bible and not the Koran. Judge Patrick Thompson of the Liverpool Crown Court said Kurt had taken “an oath to tell the truth which was sworn on the New Testament.” But it later emerged in cross-examination that he was a Muslim. Kurt insisted that he accepted taking the oath on the Bible because “he respected all holy books and wanted to swear on the holy book of the country in which he was residing.” But Judge Thompson said he “took the view that Mr Kurt should have sworn on the Koran as a Muslim.”
MARCH 2015
March 3. A government report found that nearly 400 British girls as young as eleven are believed to have been sexually exploited by Muslim rape gangs in Oxfordshire during the past 15 years. The report charged local officials with repeatedly ignoring the abuse due to a “culture of denial.”
March 7. A leading liberal clergyman, Reverend Giles Goddard, vicar of St John’s in Waterloo, central London, allowed a full Muslim prayer service to be held in his church. He also asked his congregation to praise “the God that we love, Allah.” It is thought to be the first time an entire Islamic service has been held by the Church of England.
March 11. Reverend Canon Gavin Ashenden, one of the Queen’s chaplains, expressed concern about more than 100 passages in the Koran that “invite people to violence.” He was responding to comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who claimed that young people are turning to jihad because mainstream religion is not “exciting” enough.
March 12. A delegation of prominent British-Egyptians called for the UK government to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood and ban its activities on British soil. The petition said: “Terror knows no borders, and the Muslim Brotherhood and its spin-offs know no mercy, their lust for power, quest for theocracy and desire for domination, make them all blood thirsty, and they will stop at nothing until they bring down civilization — West and East alike.”
March 15. The British government announced that it would not classify the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
March 20. Newly released figures showed that the population of Muslim inmates in Belmarsh prison — London’s de facto terrorist jail — has more than doubled in just four years. The number of Muslim inmates at the top-security “Category A” prison has jumped by 108% since March 2010, up from 127 to 265 in December 2014. Government data shows in spring 2010, Muslim prisoners made up just 14% of Belmarsh inmates, but fewer than five years later, that proportion had climbed to almost one-third. The proportion of Muslim prisoners in Pentonville prison jumped 40% while that in west London’s Wormwood Scrubs had increased by almost a sixth over the same period.
March 23. A report warned that Muslim women across Britain are being systematically oppressed, abused and discriminated against by Sharia law courts that treat women as second-class citizens. The 40-page report, “A Parallel World: Confronting the Abuse of Many Muslim Women in Britain Today,” was authored by Baroness Caroline Cox, a cross-bench member of the British House of Lords and one of the leading defenders of women’s rights in the UK. The report shows how the increasing influence of Sharia law in Britain today is undermining the fundamental principle that there must be equality for all British citizens under a single law of the land.
APRIL 2015
April 1. Police in Turkey detained nine British nationals from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, who were allegedly seeking to join the Islamic State in Syria. The nine — five adults and four children, including a one-year-old baby — were arrested in the Turkish city of Hatay.
One of those arrested was Waheed Ahmed, a student of politics at Manchester University. His father Shakil, a Labour Party councilor in Rochdale, said he thought his son was doing an internship in Birmingham:
“It’s a total mystery to me why he’s there, as I was under the impression he was on a work placement in Birmingham. My son is a good Muslim and his loyalties belong to Britain, so I don’t understand what he’s doing there. If I thought for a second that he was in danger of being radicalised I would have reported him to the authorities.”
April 5. Abase Hussen, the father of a runaway British jihadi schoolgirl, conceded that his daughter may have become radicalized after he took her to an extremist rally organized by the banned Islamist group, Al-Muhajiroun, run by Anjem Choudary, a British-born Muslim later remanded in custody, charged under section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
Amira, 15, was one of three girls from Bethnal Green Academy in East London who flew to Turkey in February to become “jihadi brides” in Syria. During a hearing at the Home Affairs Select Committee in March, Abase blamed British authorities for failing to stop his daughter from running off to Syria. Asked by Chairman Keith Vaz if Amira had been exposed to any extremism, Hussen replied: “Not at all. Nothing.” The police even issued an apology.
Abase, however, changed his story after a video emerged which unmasked him as an Islamic radical who had marched at an Islamist hate rally alongside Choudary and Michael Adebolajo, the killer of Lee Rigby. Abase, originally from Ethiopia, said he had come to Britain in 1999 “for democracy, for the freedom, for a better life for children, so they could learn English.”
April 5. Victoria Wasteney, 38, a Christian healthcare worker, launched an appeal against an employment tribunal which found she had “bullied” a Muslim colleague by praying for her and inviting her to church. Wasteney was suspended from her job as a senior occupational therapist at the John Howard Centre, a mental health facility in east London, after her colleague, Enya Nawaz, 25, accused Wasteney of trying to convert her to Christianity. Wasteney’s lawyers said that the tribunal broke the law by restricting her freedom of conscience and religion, enshrined in Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
April 5. In an interview with the Guardian, Nazir Afzal, Britain’s leading Muslim prosecutor,warned that more British children are at risk of “jihadimania” than previously thought because they see Islamic terrorists as “pop idols.” He said:
“The boys want to be like them and the girls want to be with them. That’s what they used to say about the Beatles and more recently One Direction and Justin Bieber. The propaganda the terrorists put out is akin to marketing, and too many of our teenagers are falling for the image.
“They see their own lives as poor by comparison, and don’t realize they are being used. The extremists treat them in a similar way to sexual groomers — they manipulate them, distance them from their friends and families, and then take them.
“Each one of them, if they go to Syria, is going to be more radicalised when they come back. And if they don’t go, they become a problem — a ticking time bomb — waiting to happen.”
Talha Asmal (left), a 17-year-old from Dewsbury, is believed to have become Britain’s youngest suicide bomber when he blew himself up at an Iraqi oil refinery. Friends described Asmal as an “ordinary Yorkshire lad.” Amira Abase (right) travelled from London to Syria in February, at the age of 15, to join the Islamic State as a “jihadi bride.”
April 8. The Guardian reported that there has been a 60% increase in child sexual abuse reported to the police over the past four years, according to official figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request which made public for the first time the scale of the problem in England and Wales.
April 8. The Leicester Crown Court jailed Jafar Adeli, an Afghan asylum seeker, for 27 months after he attempted to meet “Amy,” an underage girl, after grooming her online. Adeli, 32, who is married, arranged to meet the girl after engaging in sexual conversations online and sending an indecent image of himself. But he was duped by a pedophile vigilante group called Letzgo Hunting. “Amy” was in fact a vigilante named John who was pretending to be a young girl.
April 10. Abukar Jimale, a 46-year-old father of four who sought asylum in the UK after fleeing war-torn Somalia, avoided jail time for sexually assaulting a female passenger as he drove her across Bristol in his taxi. Although Jimale was found guilty of sexual assault, he had his two-year sentence suspended. The defending counsel said that the Somali-born Jimale was a hard-working father who had lost his job and good name as a result of his crime.
April 13. Mohammed Khubaib, a Pakistani-born father of five, was convicted of grooming girls as young as 12 with food, cash, cigarettes and alcohol. The 43-year-old married businessman, who lived in Peterborough with his wife and children, befriended girls in his restaurant and then “hooked” them with alcohol in an attempt to make them “compliant” to sexual advances.
April 14. The president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, Lord Neuberger, said in a speech that Muslim women should be allowed to wear veils in court. He added that in order to show fairness to those involved in trials, judges must have “an understanding of different cultural and social habits.” Neuberger’s comments came after a judge upheld a ruling allowing Rebekah Dawson, a 22-year-old convert to Islam, to stand trial wearing a niqab, a veil that only leaves the eyes visible.
April 20. A 14-year-old schoolboy from Blackburn, Lancashire, became Britain’s youngest terror suspect. He was arrested in connection with an ISIS-inspired terror plot in Melbourne, Australia. Police said messages found on his computer and mobile phone indicated a plan to attack the centenary celebrations of the Anzac landings at Gallipoli during the First World War. (Anzac Day — April 25 — marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War.)
April 20. Police in Turkey arrested a British couple and their four young children on suspicion of seeking to travel to a part of Syria controlled by the Islamic State. Asif Malik, his wife Sara, and the four children — aged between 11 months and 7 years — were detained at a hotel in Ankara. Turkish officials said the family had crossed into Turkey from Greece on April 16 and had been detained after a tip-off from the British police.
April 22. Four Muslim men were charged with child sex crimes in Rochdale. Hadi Jamel, 33, Mohammed Zahid, 54, and Raja Abid Khan, 38, and Abid Khan, 38, were each charged with one count of sexual activity with a girl who was under 16.
April 22. The Daily Mail published excerpts of a new book, “Girl for Sale,” which describes the shocking ordeal of Lara McDonnell, who became the victim of a Muslim pedophile gang when she was only 13 years old. She wrote:
“Mohammed was selling me for £250 to paedophiles from all over the country. They came in, sat down and started touching me. If I recoiled, Mohammed would feed me more crack so I could close my eyes and drift away. I was a husk, dead on the inside.
“Sometimes, I would be passed from one pervert to another. In Oxford, many of my abusers were of Asian origin; [in London] these men were Mediterranean, black or Arab.
“Then, at the start of 2012 [some five years after the abuse began], Thames Valley Police asked to see me. They had been conducting a long-overdue investigation into sexual exploitation of young girls and wanted a chat. I told them everything, and by the end of March, Mohammed and his gang were in custody. Unbeknown to me, five other girls were telling police the same story.
“Mohammed’s defense was laughable: he claimed I’d forced him to take drugs and have sex with me. His barrister, a woman, implied I was a racist because all the defendants were Muslim.
“Because the defendants were Muslim, the case had opened sensitive issues about race and religion. My view is clear: they behaved that way because of differences in how they viewed women.”
April 23. The Birmingham Crown Court sentenced Imran Uddin, 25, a student at the University of Birmingham, to four months in jail for hacking into the university computer system to improve his grades. Uddin used keyboard spying devices to steal staff passwords and then raised his grades on five exams. Uddin is believed to be the first British student ever to be jailed for cheating.
April 25. The Telegraph reported that British taxpayers are paying the monthly rent for Hani al-Sibai, the Islamist preacher who “mentored” Mohammed Emwazi (aka Jihadi John, the ISIS executioner). Al-Sibai, 54, a father of five, lives in a £1 million home in Hammer-smith, a district in West London.
April 27. Mohammed Kahar, 37, of Sunderland was arrested after disseminating extremist material, including documents such as, “The Explosive Course,” “44 Ways To Serve And Participate In Jihad,” “The Book Of Jihad,” and “This Is The Province Of Allah.”
April 28. An 18-year-old jihadist, Kazi Jawad Islam, was convicted of “terror grooming” for trying to “brainwash” his autistic friend, Harry Thomas, “a vulnerable young man with learning difficulties,” into attacking British soldiers with a meat cleaver.
April 28. Aftab Ahmed, 44, of Winchcombe Place, Heaton, was charged with threatening to behead David Robinson-Young, a candidate for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in Newcastle East.
MAY 2015
May 3. Bana Gora, chief executive of the Muslim Women’s Council, announced plans to create the country’s first mosque run by women, for women, in Bradford. She said:
“In the Prophet’s time the mosque was the center of community life and learning and we hope to replicate that model including women-led congregational prayers for women. Through the consultation process we intend to work with diverse groups, opinions and organizations including the Council for Mosques to create the ethos and spirit of the mosques during the Prophet’s time.”
May 7. A record of 13 Muslim MPs (up from 8 in 2010) were elected in the general elections in Britain. Eight of the Muslim MPs are women.
May 14. The BBC’s Home Affairs Editor, Mark Easton, drew criticism after he compared the British-born Islamist Anjem Choudary to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Tory MP Michael Ellis, a fellow member of the last home affairs select committee, said:
“The BBC seems obsessed with giving as much airtime as possible to hate preachers. To make a comparison between historic figures who campaigned for peaceful change and a hate preacher like Choudary is appalling, offensive and inflammatory.”
Choudary himself rejected the BBC’s comparisons:
“The comparisons with Mandela and Gandhi are false. They are kuffar [non-believers] going to hellfire whilst I am a Muslim. Alhamudililah [praise Allah].”
May 26. Abu Haleema, a radical preacher from London, who posted films online attacking British Armed Forces and vowing never to “submit” to democracy, was banned from using social media to promote his views. The ban prompted complaints from his supporters about the suppression of free speech.
JUNE 2015
June 1. Karim Kazane, a 23-year-old Muslim man, demanded that Zizzi, an Italian restaurant chain, pay him £5,000 (€7,000; $7,800) in compensation after he found a piece of pepperoni in a meal at their branch in Winchester. Kazane was halfway through a carne picante, advertised as containing beef and chicken, when he discovered the meat banned under Islam.
June 4. Mohammed Rehman, 24, from Reading and Sana Ahmed Khan, 23, from Wokingham, were charged with preparing for acts of terrorism in the UK. Both are accused of buying chemicals to manufacture explosive devices and of researching and downloading instructions for carrying out an attack, including a copy of the Al-Qaeda magazine Inspire containing an article titled, “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
June 9. Sara Khan, the head of the anti-radicalization group, Inspire, told The Guardian that British teachers are afraid to report suspected Islamist extremism among their students out of fear of being labelled “Islamophobic.”
June 10. A 34-year-old Muslim businessman from Cardiff was the first person in the UK to beprosecuted under forced marriage laws that entered into effect in June, 2014. The man was jailed for 16 years after admitting to making a 25-year-old woman marry him under duress. The man, who was already married, “systematically” raped his victim for months, threatened to go public with hidden camera footage of her in the shower unless she became his wife, and threatened to kill members of her family if she told anyone of the abuse.
June 11. A report warned that Britain is facing an “unprecedented” threat from hundreds of battle-hardened jihadists who have been trained in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It warned that more Britons are now trained in terrorism than at any point in recent memory.
June 11. Alaa Abdullah Esayed, a 22-year-old female refugee from Iraq living in Kennington, South London, was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for tweeting messages that encouraged terrorism. Esayed posted more than 45,000 tweets in Arabic on an open account to her 8,240 followers between June 2013 and May 2014, with many tweets encouraging violent jihad.
June 12. Tamanna Begum, a Muslim woman living in Ilford, Essex, lost a legal battle to wear an Islamic jilbab, a head-to-toe gown, at a nursery because it posed a “tripping hazard” for children and staff. Begum filed a claim for discrimination because of her “ethnic or cultural background.” Judge Daniel Serota upheld a previous ruling by the East London employment tribunal that the gown was “reasonably regarded as a tripping hazard.”
June 13. Talha Asmal, a 17-year-old from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, who ran away from home in April to join ISIS, is believed to have become Britain’s youngest suicide bomber when he blew himself up during an assault on an Iraqi oil refinery. Friends described Asmal as an “ordinary Yorkshire lad.” That may be true in more ways than one: Dewsbury, a quaint former mill town, has been linked to more than a dozen Islamic extremists, including Mohammad Sidique Khan, the organizer of the July 7, 2005 London bombings.
June 15. An anti-Sharia group called “One Law for All” issued a statement calling on Britain’s new government to abolish Islamic Sharia courts, which they described as “kangaroo courts that deliver highly discriminatory and second-rate forms of ‘justice.'” The statement said:
“Though the ‘Sharia courts’ have been touted as people’s right to religion, they are in fact, effective tools of the far-right Islamist movement whose main aim is to restrict and deny rights, particularly those of women and children.
“Opposing ‘Sharia courts’ is not racism or ‘Islamophobic’; it is a defense of the rights of all citizens, irrespective of their beliefs and background to be governed by democratic means under the principle of one law for all. What amounts to racism is the idea that minorities can be denied rights enjoyed by others through the endorsement of religious based ‘justice’ systems which operate according to divine law that is by its very nature immune from state scrutiny.”
June 19. A British judge ruled that a terrorism suspect did not have to wear an electronic tracker because it violates his human rights. The suspect, a 39-year-old Somali-born Islamic preacher who is accused of radicalizing young British Muslims, said he thought that MI5 had placed a bomb inside the bracelet, and that wearing the monitoring device was making him “delusional.” The judge, Mr. Justice Collins, ruled this amounted to a breach of Article 3 of the Human Rights Act, which is meant to prohibit torture.
June 24. It emerged that police in Birmingham knew that Muslim sex grooming gangs were targeting children outside the city’s schools but did not alert the public out of fears of being accused of “Islamophobia.” A confidential report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed that police were worried about “community tensions” if the abuse from predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs was made public.
JULY 2015
July 1. The director general of the BBC, Tony Hall, rejected demands from a cross-party group of MPs to stop the broadcasting corporation from using the term “Islamic State” to refer to the terrorist group. More than 100 MPs signed the letter calling on the broadcaster to begin using the term “Daesh” (the Arabic acronym for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) when referring to the Islamic State. The letter, which was drafted by Rehman Chishti, a Pakistani-born Conservative MP, stated:
“The use of the titles: Islamic State, ISIL and ISIS gives legitimacy to a terrorist organization that is not Islamic nor has it been recognized as a state and which a vast majority of Muslims around the world finds despicable and insulting to their peaceful religion.”
The MPs made their demand in a letter following criticism from Prime Minister David Cameron, who rebuked the BBC for referring to the Islamic State by its name. During an interview with BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program on June 29, Cameron said:
“I wish the BBC would stop calling it ‘Islamic State’ because it is not an Islamic state. What it is, is an appalling, barbarous regime. It is a perversion of the religion of Islam, and, you know, many Muslims listening to this program will recoil every time they hear the words ‘Islamic State.'”
Hall said that using Daesh would not preserve the BBC’s impartiality as it risked giving an impression of support for the group’s opponents. He said the term is used pejoratively by its enemies. Daesh is close to “Dahes,” Arabic for “one who sows discord.”
July 20. David Cameron outlined a new five-year plan to fight Islamic extremism in Britain. In a landmark speech in Birmingham, Cameron called the fight against Islamic extremism the “struggle of our generation.”
July 27. The Telegraph reported that the number of children and teenagers referred to counter-radicalization programs is set to double in just two years because of the growing allure of ISIS. Youngsters are being reported to the Channel Project, a government anti-radicalization program, at a rate of more than one a day amid fears many are at risk of becoming jihadists. In one case, a three-year-old child was referred to the scheme. Other instances have included schoolchildren who have drawn pictures of bombs or made Islamist threats.
AUGUST 2015
August 1. The Daily Mail reported that Shamima Begum, 15, who fled her East London home to become a jihadi bride in Syria, was radicalized at a women’s charity based at the East London Mosque, one of the biggest mosques in Britain. Islamic leaders and some of their family members initially blamed the Internet for grooming her, but the Mail discovered that Sharmeena was first radicalized inside the East London Mosque, allegedly by women from the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), a group with links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
August 5. Anjem Choudary, a British-born Islamic extremist, was remanded in custody, charged with the terrorism offense of encouraging people to join ISIS. Choudary, 48, and Mohammed Rahman, 32, appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court and were charged with repeatedly violating Section 12 of the Terrorism Act. Choudary said he is not afraid of going to prison, which he describes as a fertile ground for gaining more converts to Islam. “If they arrest me and put me in prison, I will carry on in prison,” he warned. “I will radicalize everyone in prison.”
August 18. A judge in London ordered a 16-year-old girl to be removed from her parents after they groomed her to become a jihadi bride. Police found her home filled with jihadist propaganda, including a book titled, “How to Survive in the West — A Mujahid’s Guide.” Mr. Justice Hayden said her “deceitful” mother and father had done as much harm to her as child molesters. Her flight to Syria was stopped by counter-terrorism officers who removed her from a Turkey-bound plane already taxiing on the runway at Heathrow Airport.
August 26. A 16-year-old schoolgirl pleaded guilty to two terror charges when she appeared at Manchester’s main youth court. She admitted the charges after bomb-making recipes were found on her phone, along with pictures of dead children, executions and ISIS propaganda.
SEPTEMBER 2015
September 17. An appeals court in London ruled that it was proper for Jamal Muhammed Raheem Ul Nasir, a child molester who abused two Muslim girls, to have been given a longer sentence than if his victims had been white — because Muslim sex crime victims suffer more due to shame. Lawyers for the pedophile argued that his original sentence was too harsh. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) said:
“British justice should operate on a level playing field and children need to be protected irrespective of cultural differences. Regardless of race, religion, or gender, every child deserves the right to be safe and protected from sexual abuse, and the courts must reflect this.”
September 18. The Times reported that British intelligence are monitoring more than 3,000 homegrown Islamist extremists willing to carry out attacks in Britain. According to the report, British men and women, many in their teens, are being radicalized within weeks to the point of violence.
September 26. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Margate, Kent, apologized to Air Force Sergeant Mark Prendeville after he was moved away from other patients because some members of the staff said his uniform might cause offense to Muslim patients.
Also in September, a London art exhibition celebrating freedom of expression banned anti-ISIS artwork after police raise security concerns. “ISIS Threaten Sylvania,” a series of seven satirical tableaux featuring the children’s toys Sylvanian Families, was removed from the Passion for Freedom exhibition after police raised concerns about the “potentially inflammatory content” of the work. The police informed the organizers that, if they went ahead with their plans to display it, they would have to pay £36,000 ($53,000) for security for the six-day show.
OCTOBER 2015
October 9. Channel 4 News reported that Muslim convert Jamal al-Harith, who was awarded a £1 million ($1.5 million) payout by the British government after being released from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, has fled to Syria and joined ISIS.
October 12. Nadir Syed, 21, Yousaf Syed, 19, and Haseeb Hamayoon, 27, appeared at Woolwich Crown Court for the opening day of their trial. Prosecutors say the trio planned, in the name if ISIS, to behead people on the streets of the streets of Britain. They had also allegedly planned to use a hunting knife to murder a police officer, soldier or member of the public on Remembrance Day, also known as Armistice Day, a national holiday commemorating the end of World War I. The court heard that the men seemed “unnaturally interested in murders and beheadings.”
October 25. It emerged that Abdulrahman Abunasir, an immigrant who sexually assaulted a woman within two weeks of arriving in Britain, is blocking attempts to deport him by claiming to be a Syrian refugee. Abunasir submitted a claim for asylum while serving an 18-month prison sentence for the sex attack. When immigration officials questioned him, however, they found he could not answer even simple questions about Syria. British officials say there is a “very high degree of certainty” that Abunasir is from Egypt, but due to European human rights laws, they cannot deport him because they cannot prove his nationality.
October 27. A Muslim worker at a nuclear power plant in West Kilbride, Scotland, was removedfrom the premises after he was caught studying bomb-making materials while on the job. A source at the plant said: “You can’t have people with access to a nuclear core having any sort of interest in explosives. No one knows what was going through his head, but it’s not what you want to see in a nuclear power plant.”
October 29. The British Muslim Youth, an Islamic group in Rotherham, called on Muslims to boycott the police because the investigation into child sexual exploitation in the town amounts to “marginalization and dehumanization” of Muslims. In a message posted online, the group ordered fellow Muslims to immediately cut all ties with law enforcement or face being made pariahs in their own neighborhoods.
October 30. Atiq Ahmed, 32, from Oldham, Greater Manchester, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for threatening to behead a police officer. Police found a stash of videos of executions and beheadings at his home. After watching the videos, Judge Michael Topolski QC said: “Many of them are deeply disturbing, truly horrifying and bear no relation whatsoever to the true practices and principles of the ancient venerable religion.”
NOVEMBER 2015
November 1. The Independent published an opinion article titled, “The Prophet Mohammed had British values — so the only way to combat extremism is to teach more Islam in schools.”
November 1. The Sunday Times revealed that government investigators found that non-Muslim inmates in several of Britain’s top security prisons are being forced to pay a “protection tax” to radical Muslim prisoners out of fear of facing violence. The “tax,” also known as “jizya,” is being imposed by gangs of Islamic extremists at Belmarsh, Long Lartin, Woodhill and Whitemoor prisons. Non-Muslim inmates said they have been bullied and threatened with violence unless they made payments with phone cards, food, tobacco or drugs. Some of the alleged victims said they were told to arrange for friends and family on the outside to transfer money to bank accounts controlled by Islamists.
November 3. Kasim Ali, 25, and his cousins Adeel Ali, 20, and Razi Khalid, 18, who were found guilty of an “honor attack” on the boyfriend of one of their sisters, were spared prison sentences. The three men, all from Blackburn, Lancashire, targeted Aquib Baig because their family did not approve of him seeing their sister. They rammed his car before chasing him into a store, where they kicked and beat him in front of horrified shoppers. The judge, Recorder Julian Shaw, said:
“There is no place for any religious or honor based violence. It’s abhorrent, it’s against your religion, and it’s unlawful. I hope you’re all truly ashamed to find yourselves standing in this court. Your families are no doubt scratching their heads thinking what did we do wrong? Here they are being humiliated and embarrassed as we watch you, a cowardly group, attack someone else. Go back to your community, your families and build your reputation again. Don’t ever come back to haunt this court with any honor-based violence.”
November 9. It emerged that Muslim teachers at Oldknow Academy, a school implicated in the “Trojan horse” scandal, an attempt to Islamize British schools, forced pupils to recite anti-Christian chants in assemblies. Former teachers Jahangir Akbar and Asif Khan allegedly led pupils by shouting, “We don’t believe in Christmas, do we?” and “Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem, was he?” Christopher Gillespie, the lawyer representing the National College for Teaching and Leadership, said, “An agreement was made to introduce an undue amount of religious influence into the education of Oldknow School. The distinction between a faith school and a state school was being blurred if not obliterated.”
November 12. British police arrested Bakr Hamad, Zana Abdul Rahman, Kadir Sharif and Awat Wahab Hamasalih as part of a European anti-terrorism operation linked to plots to recruit suicide bombers and kidnap Western diplomats. The four men, all believed to have been granted refugee status in Britain from Iraq, were part of an al-Qaeda splinter group using the Internet to recruit suicide bombers, establish “sleeper cells” inside Europe and attack targets overseas.
November 13. Yahya Rashid, 19, was convicted, in a trial at Woolwich Crown Court, on two counts of preparing to commit acts of terrorism. Rashid used his student loan to book flights to Turkey for himself and four others, with the intention of traveling on to Syria to join ISIS. Following pleas from his family to return home, Rashid eventually changed his mind and remained in Turkey. He was returned to London in March 2015, and arrested on his arrival.
November 17. Nissar Hussain, a 49-year-old father of six who converted to Christianity, was savagely attacked outside his home in St Paul’s Road, Manningham. A video of the attack, captured by Hussain’s home CCTV, shows two hooded men get out of a car parked in front of his house and strike him 13 times with a pickaxe. Police are treating the attack as a religious hate crime. Hussain said he and his family have endured a life of harassment, intimidation and fear at the hands of Muslim hardliners since 2008, when they appeared in a Channel 4 documentary about the mistreatment of Muslim converts.
DECEMBER 2015
December 9. Police officers corroborated a claim by US presidential candidate Donald Trump that parts of London are no-go areas for British police because of Muslim extremism. Trump’s claims were derided by Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson. Home Secretary Theresa May insisted, “The police in London are not afraid to go out and police the streets.” The Metropolitan Police issued a statement saying:
“We would not normally dignify such comments with a response, however, on this occasion we think it’s important to state to Londoners that Mr Trump could not be more wrong. Any candidate for the presidential election in the United States of America is welcome to receive a briefing from the Met police on the reality of policing London.”
But a Lancashire Police officer said: “There are Muslim areas of Preston that, if we wish to patrol, we have to contact local Muslim community leaders to get their permission.” Another policemansaid that he and other colleagues fear being terror targets and spoke of the “dire warning” from bosses not to wear a uniform “even in my own car.” Yet another officer said: “Islamification has and is occurring. Muslim areas are not new.”
An officer from Yorkshire wrote:
“In this instance he [Trump] isn’t wrong. Our political leaders are best either ill-informed or simply being disingenuous. He’s pointed out something that is plainly obvious, something which I think we aren’t as a nation willing to own up to — do you think a US police department would ban officers from wearing their uniforms…due to FEAR of their cops being killed by extremists?”
December 17. The British government published a long-awaited review on the Muslim Brotherhood. The so-called Jenkins Report concludes that the “Muslim Brotherhood has not been linked to terrorist-related activity in and against the UK.” But it also raises concerns over the “sometimes secretive, if not clandestine” way the Brotherhood has operated in the recent past to shape Muslim thinking through three groups: the Muslim Association of Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain and the Islamic Society of Britain.
December 17. The Waltham Forest Council of Mosques, which claims to represent 70,000 Muslims in London, vowed to boycott the government’s anti-terrorism Prevent program after accusing the policy of being a racist attack on the Islamic community. It was the first time a council of mosques issued such a boycott, and undermines the government’s attempt to involve religious communities in the fight against radicalization.
December 26. The Times reported that Muslims are boycotting the government’s anti-terrorism Prevent program; less than a tenth of extremism tip-offs are coming directly from the Muslim community. The revelation that there were fewer than 300 community tip-offs in six months will raise concern that the police are being denied information that might prevent terrorist attacks.
December 29. Mohammed Rehman, 25, and wife Sana Ahmed Khan, 24, were found guilty of planning an ISIS-inspired terror attack on a London shopping center or the London underground. Their plot was only foiled when Rehman, using the Twitter handle ‘SilentBomber,’ sent a tweet asking for advice on which was the best target. Officers then raided his home in Reading, Berkshire, where they found 10 kg (22 lbs.) of nitrate explosives. The prosecution said Rehman was just days away from completing the device, which would have caused many casualties if he had not been stopped by anti-terror police.
During the trial, the court heard that Khan had underlined passages in a copy of the Koran that read: “Slay them wherever you find them and drive them out from the places they drove you out… such is the reward of the unbelievers.” Another marked passage read: “Warfare if ordained for you though it is hateful for you. It may happen that you hate a thing that is good for you and that you love a thing that is bad for you.”
Houston Muslim Charged With Lighting His Own Mosque On Fire
December 30, 2015Houston Muslim Charged With Lighting His Own Mosque On Fire, Breitbart, John Nolte, December 30, 2015
Using surveillance video from other area businesses to identify the arsonist, Gary Nathaniel Moore, 37, was arrested and charged with starting the Christmas Day fire that devastated a Houston, Texas mosque. Moore is a devout Muslim who attended this same mosque for years, praying up to five times a day every day of the week.
Also up in smoke is the DC Media’s hoped-for anti-GOP Narrative. Before any facts were known, numerous DC Media outlets immediately exploited the tragedy to place the blame for the fire on Donald Trump.
Advocacy groups believe there has been a spike in anti-Muslim incidents across the United States in recent weeks that can be linked to the mass shooting in California and the inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates. And they say that Muslims are fearful the backlash could lead to further harassment and violence.
CNN:
The Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on authorities to investigate the fire for an anti-Muslim motive.
“Because of the recent spike in hate incidents targeting mosques nationwide, we urge law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for this fire,” Mustafaa Carroll, the chapter’s executive director, said in a statement.
The Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on authorities to investigate a possible bias motive in the case, citing what it called a “recent spike in hate incidents targeting mosques nationwide.
Now that a devout Muslim has been charged, the DC Media will forget all about the incident.
The media’s playbook is always to immediately use any disaster or crime as a means to make the GOP answer for it. Then, once the facts come out and point to a member of the Protected Class, the story is memory-holed and the accusation against the Republican lingers.
Founding Fathers’ Criticism of ‘Musselmen’ Sinks Suhail Khan’s Islam-Is-American P.R.
December 30, 2015Founding Fathers’ Criticism of ‘Musselmen’ Sinks Suhail Khan’s Islam-Is-American P.R., Breitbart, Jordan Schachtel, December 29, 2015
Suhail Khan, an official in the George W. Bush administration, is engaged in a media campaign that claims Islam is ingrained in the founding of the American republic.
In his Foreign Policy piece, titled “Islam is All-American,” (which would later be re-published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with the title “One Nation Under Allah“) Mr. Khan begins by insisting that American Muslims are under attack–a plea to perpetual victimization that seeks to immediately quash any legitimate debate.
Khan targets GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, insisting he has called for the “registration of all Muslim-Americans,” which is not true. As Breitbart News has shown, this was a media-created suggestion.
Khan claims that “5 million to 7 million” Muslims are living in the United States, without offering any evidence.
He tells us to look to former President George W. Bush for a more “unifying message,” and claims that “poll after poll” demonstrates support for “anti-Muslim sentiment,” without citing one such poll.
What Khan does here, whether purposely or not, is conflate criticism of Islam’s doctrines with “anti-Muslim sentiment” aimed at Muslim individuals. Unsurprisingly, he never addresses whether criticism of Islam is legitimate.
In many Islamic countries, majorities or large percentages of the population favor the death penalty for “apostates,” which includes people who criticize Islam, according to Pew Research. These countries say that the Koranic Sharia law demands they live by such methods.
Across the globe, critics of Islam are slaughtered (see Charlie Hebdo, Bangladesh secular bloggers, Saudi atheists) simply for discussing the “religion of peace.” The “lucky ones,” such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, and others, have mere fatwas placed on their head.
While many in the Islamic world react violently to criticism of their religion, others, such as Suhail Khan, seek to delegitimize these free voices as ones that make Muslims “feel singled out.” He insists that our enemy “makes no distinction about our race, ethnicity, or religion – attacking us only because we are Americans.”
Americans turn on their televisions and see hundreds-of-thousands of Muslim men fighting on behalf of Islam, engaged in a wholesale murder campaign against religious and ethnic minorities. The free-thinking American people are gravely concerned to see these deeply-religious Islamic groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, targeting people simply because they’re Jews. Or whether it’s Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, and the Islamic State hunting down Christians simply because they’re Christians.
Yet, Mr. Khan tells us that the conflict is our fault. This supposed “anti-Muslim sentiment” trend in America needs to stop, he demands. How dare we start “casting suspicion on an entire faith group,” he suggests.
And the founders of the republic supported Islam, he claims, because they made clear their views on religious freedom, and their assertion that a belief in a particular religion should not prevent a man from holding office.
But in reality, the founders had plenty to say about Islam’s doctrines.
John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1814, stating that Islam’s Muhammad was a “military fanatic” who “denies that laws were made for him” and “arrogates everything to himself by force of arms.”
Ben Franklin, another founding father, said of Islam:
“Nor can the Plundering of Infidels be in that sacred Book [the Quran] forbidden, since it is well known from it, that God has given the World, and all that it contains, to his faithful Mussulmen (Muslims), who are to enjoy it of Right as fast as they conquer it.”
Thomas Jefferson, who would later become engaged in a war against the Barbary pirates, observed that peace was not possible with Islamic zealots, stating in a letter to Secretary of State John Jay:
“The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
Our 6th president, John Quincy Adams, wrote that the Islamic Prophet Muhammad “spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth.”
“He declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind …The essence of his doctrine was violence and lust: to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature … As the essential principle of his faith is the subjugation of others by the sword; it is only by force, that his false doctrines can be dispelled, and his power annihilated.”
None of those critiques make their way into Khan’s piece, as he concludes, incoherently: “In this time of real danger, let’s not allow our zeal to defend our ideals destroy them.”
Progressive “Thought-Blockers”: Islamophobia
December 30, 2015Progressive “Thought-Blockers”: Islamophobia, Front Page Magazine, Bruce Thornton, December 30, 2015
(Although the suffix “phobia” in “Islamophobia” still invokes the notion of irrationality, that seems to have disappeared in current usage. Now, Islamophobia “(or anti-Muslim sentiment) is the prejudice against, hatred towards, or fear of the religion of Islam or Muslims” — regardless of the rationality of such prejudice, hatred or fear. — DM)
A few days before the San Bernardino shootings, President Obama reacted to Donald Trump’s proposal to bar Muslims entry into the U.S. by saying, “It is the responsibility of all Americans––of every faith––to reject discrimination. It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country . . . Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes.” Attorney General Loretta Lynch went even further. In an address at the Muslim Advocates dinner, she commented,
“Now obviously this is a country that is based on free speech, but when it edges towards violence, when we see the potential for someone . . . lifting that mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric, or, as we saw after 9/11, violence against individuals who may not even be Muslims but may be perceived to be Muslims . . . When we see that, we will take action”––or as she warns, “They will be prosecuted.”
How is that Muslims have become “snowflakes” like those pampered college students so traumatized by opposing points of view that they need “safe spaces” from speech they don’t like, and demand scrapping the First Amendment? For an answer, look to another progressive “thought-blocker,” “Islamophobia.”
This made-up thought-crime is not a response to an epidemic of Muslim persecution in America. Sixty percent of anti-religious hate crimes are directed at Jews, not Muslims. Nor is it penance for historical crimes committed by Christians and Jews against Muslims, whether those are imperialism, colonialism, or Israel’s defense of its nation against incessant violence. Islam’s record of slaughter, enslavement, and occupation far eclipses that of the West.
Rather, “Islamophobia” is the product of peculiarly modern bad ideas. It surfaced in 1997 in a report by a British think-tank, the Runnymede Trust. The purpose was to explain the social dysfunctions and problems of British Muslims, which were laid at the feet of “anti-Islamic bias” that encouraged discrimination, hate crimes against Muslims, and distortions of Islam in the media and popular culture. In 2004 the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia––notice how the name begs the question––concluded that England was “institutionally Islamophobic.” Facts of illiberal Muslim behavior such as its unequal treatment of women, intolerance of other faiths, and radical mosques preaching intolerance and jihad were ignored.
So where does “Islamophobia” come from? Start with the suffix “phobia,” from the Greek word for “fear.” This is a vaguely Freudian psychological idea referring to an irrational fear that reflects not reality but repression of unsavory or frightening impulses. After all, fearing a dangerous black widow spider is not irrational. Fearing a harmless brown recluse is. The suffix as used in other ideological smears like “homophobia” or “xenophobia” always implies that the fear is baseless, and has more to do with irrational neuroses and bigotry than genuine threats. “Islamophobia,” then, begs a huge question, for it is perfectly rational to fear a danger like terrorist violence justified by religious doctrine.
Thus the purveyors of this epithet have to downplay or minimize the very real threat of jihadist violence, reducing people’s reactions and demands for improved security to a mental problem. The president implied as much in his recent comments purged from a New York Times interview, when he said “he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino,” implying that people were reacting to ginned up scare-stories on Fox News rather than a real threat. He added to this analysis when on NPR he claimed ISIS was not an “existential threat,” and said its real danger is “making us forget who we are” and our “values,” which obviously means in part irrationally indulging in anti-Muslim bigotry and “Islamophobia” out of neurotic fears stoked by Donald Trump.
More important than two-bit Freudianism for the currency of “Islamophobia” has been the work of Edward Said, the main source of most of the malign ideas that poison our discourse on Islam with self-loathing and dismissal of reality. The colonial West, according to Said in Orientalism, invented the Muslim “other” as inferior and violent in order to justify Western dominance of the region, creating a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the orient.” In a later book Said argued that the Muslim terrorist was another “other” fabricated to create “both a peculiarly immediate sense of hostility and a coarse, on the whole unnuanced attitude toward Islam,” the purpose of which is to serve “national and corporate needs.” These needs created the “highly exaggerated stereotypes” of Muslims highjacking airplanes and blowing up buildings. As Lee Smith points out, Said set the terms of how journalists and intellectuals talked about Islam and Muslims––as the crude “other” invented to mask Western oppression and “Islamophobia.” The reflexive self-loathing and guilt that lie at the heart of “Islamophobia” found their most influential enabler in Said’s work.
The fear of being “Islamophobic” in part explains the whitewashing flattery of Islam that has characterized the government even before 9/11. In the late 90s, when Osama bin Laden was already waging war on America, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gushed that Islam is a “faith that honors consultation, cherishes peace, and has as one of its fundamental principles the inherent equality of all who embrace it.” George Bush said that Islam’s “teachings are good and peaceful” and that terrorists like bin Laden “blaspheme the name of Allah.” And of course Barack Obama has been the most fulsome and groveling in his praise of Islam. He carefully says “the Prophet Mohammed” and “Holy Koran,” while never saying “Our Lord Jesus Christ” or “Holy Bible.” He has leached traditional Islamic doctrines from the motives driving jihadists, and regularly condemns “Islamophobia” as a greater threat to America than Muslim terrorist violence. But the top prize for such myopic pandering to Muslims goes to ex-Army Chief of Staff George W. Casey, who responded to the 2009 Fort Hood jihadist attack that killed 13 by saying, “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”
The worst consequence of the “Islamophobia” phobia has been the distortion of our analyses of the jihadists’ motives. The specious psychology of the apologists holds that the insults or policies born of “Islamophobia” offend Muslims and create more terrorists. Or as Obama said of Trump’s proposal to screen Muslims entering the country, “plays into the hands of groups like ISIL,” for “when we travel down that road, we lose.” Hillary Clinton has played this same card, calling Donald Trump ISIS’ “greatest recruiter” and “recruitment poster,” and falsely claiming that Trump is used in ISIS recruitment videos. Thus her constant calls to cater to Muslims in America, who she sees as genuine, peaceful Muslims, and thus our natural allies against the “hijackers” like ISIS. “We must work more closely with Muslim-Americans,” Clinton said recently, “not demonize them” or make them “feel left out or marginalized” since they’re trying “to stop radicalization.” Of course she ignores the fact that CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the most influential Muslim lobby in America, continually apologizes and rationalizes jihadist terror, and encourages Muslims not to cooperate with the FBI.
“Islamophobia” is not just intellectually incoherent and loaded with cringing self-hatred. It is deadly. In order not to wound Muslim sensibilities and create a “backlash,” egregious rules of engagement are imposed on our warriors that sacrifice their lives by proscribing the destruction of mosques and dwellings harboring arsenals and snipers; common sense calls to limit Syrian economic immigrants are rejected; government security training documents are purged of references to Islamic jihadist doctrines; Guantanamo is demonized as a “recruiter” for terrorists from which actual terrorists must be released; Orwellian Newspeak is employed to “disappear” the precedents for terror in Islamic scripture and practice; and radical mosques and imams in America are given free rein to proselytize and recruit.
We’ve been at this tactic of flattery for decades, and there’s no evidence it works. America is no more liked among Middle Eastern Muslims today than when George Bush left office. Terrorist groups have multiplied and spread despite our anxious protestations of our admiration for their religion, even as we ignore the genocide of Christians in the Middle East. Jihadism is strong and growing, attracting thousands of Western Muslims to the fight against the infidel. And jihad, abetted by the anxiety over “Islamophobia,” is winning the hearts and minds of the youth demographic. As the Atlantic reports, globally jihad is “cool,” a false but glamorous promise of redeeming violence and transcendent meaning powerfully attractive in a Western world marked by anomic secularism and trivial hedonism.
“Islamophobia” blocks clear thinking. It ignores the traditional Islamic motives that drive jihadists, trivializing them into wayward teens who “act out” because their self-esteem has been damaged by insensitive adults, and who merely need their self-esteem boosted by recognition of how wonderful their religion and culture are. A foreign policy based on such pop-psychological superstitions is one doomed to fail.
Sweden: Rapes, Acquittals and Severed Heads
December 29, 2015Sweden: Rapes, Acquittals and Severed Heads -One Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Sweden: November 2015, Gatestone Institute, Ingrid Carlqvist, December 29, 2015
♦ Some 30 Muslim men thought that the woman was in violation of Islamic sharia law, by being in Sweden unaccompanied by a man. They thought that she should therefore be raped and her teenage son killed.
♦ Two Swedish citizens were convicted by a Gothenburg Court of joining an Islamist terror group in Syria and murdering two captives. Video evidence showed one victim being beheaded. “Every night when I have gone to bed, I have seen a head hanging in the air.” — Court Chairman Ralf G. Larsson.
♦ Sometime during the night, the victim was awakened by the Iraqi as he raped her. The woman managed to break free and locate a train attendant. At first, the woman did not want to call the police. “She felt sorry for him [the rapist] … and was afraid he would be deported back to Iraq.”
♦ One week after Sweden raised its terror alert level to the highest ever, the police raised another alarm — saying their weapons are simply not good enough to prevent a potential terror attack.
November 4: The Swedish Immigration Service sent out a press release, saying that it had hired close to a thousand additional employees since June. The Immigration Service now has over 7,000 employees, including hourly workers and consultants — double the 3,350 employees who worked there in 2012. Most of the new recruits work with the legal processing of asylum applications, but the units dealing with receiving migrants and filing their initial applications have also expanded considerably. As if the record influx of migrants this autumn were not crushing enough, the Immigration Service also had trouble retaining its staff. Employees complain about being badly treated: they are always expected to be on call, and possibly even work Christmas Eve.
November 4: Bobel Barqasho, a 31-year-old Syrian, was sentenced by Sweden’s Supreme Court to 14 years in prison. Before his case reached the Supreme Court, Barqasho had been sentenced by a lower court to 9 years in prison, then acquitted by the Court of Appeals. In February 2013, Barqasho threw his wife off a sixth-floor balcony. Against all odds, the woman survived the 13-meter (about 43 feet) fall, but was badly injured. When she woke up after five weeks in a coma, her head was held together by a helmet, her face felt loose, and her teeth were gone. In the Court of Appeals, the defense managed to plant reasonable doubt about the man’s guilt by claiming the woman was depressed and had jumped of her own free will] so the Court of Appeals set him free. By the time the Supreme Court pronounced its sentence of 14 years, Barqasho had disappeared. He is now being sought by Interpol.
November 6: The Grönkulla School in Alvesta closed after reports of a rape at the facility spread on social media. A Somali boy had apparently been sexually harassing a 12-year-old girl for some time. On October 17, he allegedly took his attentions a step farther, pulled the girl behind a bush and raped her. The girl’s father had been unsuccessful in trying to get the school to address the problem earlier, but even after the reported rape, the school’s management did not act. The boy was allowed to continue going to the school – just on a schedule different from the girl’s. Her distraught parents told the news website Fria Tider: “We are being spat on because we are Swedish.” In protest against the school’s management, many parents, viewing the school as having sided with the perpetrator, moved their children to other schools.
November 9: Social commentator and whistleblower Merit Wager revealed on her blog that administrators at the Immigration Service had all been ordered to “accept the claim that an applicant is a child, if he does not look as if he is over 40.” A staggering 32,180 “unaccompanied refugee children” had arrived during 2015 by December 1 — since then another 1,130 have come — and the government finally decided to take action. If its proposition is approved by Parliament, everyone who looks adult-aged will be forced to go through a medical age-determination procedure. One of the reasons Sweden stopped doing these in the first place, was that pediatricians refused to take part in them. They said the procedures were “unreliable.”
November 10: A 28-year-old Iraqi man was prosecuted for raping a woman on a night train between Finland and Sweden. The man had originally planned to seek asylum in Finland, but had found the living conditions there too harsh. He had therefore taken a train back to Sweden. In a couchette (sleeping car where men and women are together), the rapist and two other asylum seekers met one of the many Swedish women whose hearts go out to “new arrivals.” The woman bought sandwiches for the men; they drank vodka. When two of the men started groping the woman, she told them to stop, yet chose to lie down and go to sleep. Sometime during the night, she was awakened by the Iraqi as he raped her. The woman managed to break free and locate a train attendant. To the attendant’s surprise, the woman did not immediately want to press charges. The court documents state: “The train attendant asked if he should call the police. At first, the woman did not want him to do so, because she did not want to put N.N., an asylum seeker, in a tough spot. She felt sorry for him… and was afraid he would be deported back to Iraq.”
The man was given a sentence of one year in prison, payment of 85,000 kronor (about $10,000) in damages, and deportation — but will be allowed to come back to Sweden after five years.
November 10: An Algerian and a Syrian asylum seeker were indicted for raping a Swedish woman in Strängnäs. The men, 39-year-old from Algeria and 31-year-old from Syria, met the woman in a bar one night in August. When the woman left, one of the men followed her, pulled her to the ground, and assaulted her. Afterwards, the woman kept walking, and ran into two other men — the Syrian and another unidentified man — and was raped again. The Syrian reportedly also spit her in face and said, “I’m going to f–k you, little Swedish girl.” The men, who lived at the same asylum house, denied knowing each other when questioned by the police. The verdict was announced on December 1. Rapist number one was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison, 117,000 kronor (about $14,000) in damages, and deportation to Algeria. Rapist number two was convicted of aggravated rape and sentenced to four years in prison. He cannot be deported, however, because “there are currently hindrances towards enforcing deportations to Syria.” He was also ordered to pay the woman 167,000 kronor (about $20,000) in damages.
November 13: A trial began against eight Eritrean men, between the ages of 19 and 26, who according to the District Court, “crudely and ruthlessly” gang-raped a 45-year-old woman. She had been waiting in a stairwell for a friend when the men invited her into an apartment. Inside, she was thrown on the floor, held down, beaten and brutally raped. When questioned by the police, she said, “It felt as if there were hands and fingers everyplace. Fingers penetrated me, vaginally, anally. It hurt very much. I could feel the fingernails.” She said she could also hear the Eritreans laughing and speaking in their own language while they raped her. “They seemed to be enjoying themselves,” she said.
When two of the men started fighting over who should rape her next, she tried to flee, but one of the men hit her over the head; she fell unconscious. After coming to, she escaped out a window and was able to reach a neighbor.
The District Court of Falun established that several men had taken part in the attack, but the District Attorney was unable to prove who had done what. Therefore, only one man was convicted of aggravated rape, and sentenced to five years in prison. The others were sentenced to only 10 months in prison for helping to conceal a serious criminal offense. After serving their time, the men will be allowed to stay in Sweden.
November 14: The Swedish Security Service, Säpo, warned again of Muslim terrorists hiding among migrants. The number of individuals listed as potential security threats has tripled this year, and includes several hundred who may be ready to carry out “Paris-style” attacks. As the Immigration Service has a huge backlog in trying to register all 150,000 asylum seekers who have come to Sweden so far in 2015, there are probably also many migrants that would be considered potential security threats.
November 14: Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Margot Wallström, made yet another strange statement with diplomatic consequences. The day after the Paris attacks, in an interview with Swedish Public Television, Wallström was asked, “How worried are you about the radicalization of young people in Sweden who choose to fight for ISIS?” Wallström replied:
“Yes, of course we have
areason to be worried not only here in Sweden but around the world, because there are so many who are being radicalized. Here again, you come back to situations like that in the Middle East, where not least the Palestinians see that there isn’t any future for us [the Palestinians], we either have to accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”
Two days later, the Swedish ambassador to Israel, Carl Magnus Nesser, was called to a meeting at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Its spokesman, Emmanuel Nahshon, later told Reuters, “The Swedish Foreign Minister’s statements are appallingly impudent… [She] demonstrates genuine hostility when she points to a connection of any kind between the terror attacks in Paris and the complex situation between Israel and the Palestinians.”
In a formal statement, the Swedish Foreign Ministry denied that Margot Wallström’s remark had connected the Paris attacks with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Swedish Conservative (Moderaterna) Member of Parliament, Hanif Bali, sarcastically tweeted that it seemed the Foreign Minister is suffering from an “obvious case of Israel-Tourette’s.”
November 18: The Authority for Civil Protection and Contingency Planning (MSB) warned that the asylum situation was not only “very strained,” but that things keep getting worse — and that in some parts of Sweden, the authorities can only function until the end of December. Meanwhile, the Immigration Service calculated that another 13,000 beds are needed in so-called evacuation accommodations. “The problem cannot be fully solved even if the Armed Forces help provide more housing or if the MSB could arrange more tent accommodations,” the authority wrote.
The massive influx of asylum seekers has also led to native Swedes “being crowded out of the health care and social services systems,” according to the MSB. “It [the MSB] is so busy handling unaccompanied children and asylum seekers, that there simply is not enough time to tend to the everyday functions, such as healthcare and social services,” said Alexandra Nordlander, Chief of Operative Analysis at the MSB, to the daily tabloid, Aftonbladet.
November 19: A fire broke out at Lundsbrunn Spa, a few weeks after plans were announced to convert the historic building into the biggest asylum-seekers’ home in Sweden. According to the police, the fire was not an arson, but started in a wood-pellet stove.
Many hotels and spas have transforming themselves into asylum-seekers’ housing, in order to profit from lucrative deals offered by the Immigration Service. Lundsbrunn Spa, near a mineral spring, dates back to 1890; in 1817, a hospital was established on the grounds. The nearby village is home to fewer than 1,000 people, so when Lundsbrunn Spa decided to accept an offer from the Immigration Service, the village faced a doubling of its population. The owners of Lundsbrunn wrote on the Spa’s website that they see the transformation from spa to asylum-seekers’ home as a temporary measure.
November 20: Norwegian businessman Petter Stordalen, the billionaire owner of Nordic Choice Hotels, announced that the chain’s many properties in Scandinavia and the Baltic states would no longer serve their guests sausage and bacon for breakfast. The breakfast buffet of the Nordic Choice’s Clarion Hotel Post in Gothenburg was named earlier this year the best hotel breakfast in the world by the British newspaper, The Mirror. But apparently, this award did not matter. The cause for the hotel’s decision was cited as “health reasons.” The internet, however, was soon abuzz with speculation that the real reason was adaptation to Islamic dietary laws (halal). One week later, Stordalen backtracked. The reaction from hotel guests had been too strong. Many people vented their anger over the withheld bacon on Stordalen’s Facebook page. Stordalen commented: “The guests have spoken. Comfort Hotels are bringing back bacon.”
November 23: Hassan Mostafa Al-Mandlawi, 32, and Al Amin Sultan, 30, were indicted in the Gothenburg Municipal Court, suspected of having traveled to Syria in 2013 and murdering at least two people there. The charge was terrorist crimes, (alternatively crimes against international law) and murder. Chief Prosecutor Agnetha Hilding Qvarnström, of the National Unit for Security Cases, said: “The act [was] committed with the intent to harm the state of Syria and intimidate the people, thus the classification: terrorist crimes. The hard part is to clarify fully whether these men have been part of an armed group, and acted within the frames of the armed conflict, or not.”
The accused men came to Sweden, one from Iraq and one from Syria, as children, but grew up in Sweden and are Swedish citizens. They traveled to Syria in 2013, and joined one of the many Islamist terror groups there. According to the prosecution, they murdered two captured workers in an industrial area of Aleppo by slitting their throats. The prosecutor wrote that, “Al-Mandlawi and Sultan have both expressed delight at the deeds.”
During the trial, films of the executions were shown, but both men still denied having committed the crimes. Those present in court agreed that the films were among the most disturbing ever displayed in a Swedish court. First, they show a man having his throat slit, the blood gushing before he dies. Then, the other victim’s head is severed from his body, and the killer holds up the severed head to loud cheers from the others. The court’s chairman, Ralf G. Larsson, told the news agency, TT: “Every night when I have gone to bed, I have seen a head hanging in the air.”
The verdict was announced December 14: Both men were convicted of terrorist crimes and sentenced to life in prison. The verdict will be appealed, the defense lawyers said.
Two Swedish citizens were convicted by a Gothenburg Court of joining an Islamist terror group in Syria and murdering two captives. Video evidence (left) showed one victim being beheaded. When asked if she is worried about the radicalization of young people in Sweden who choose to fight for ISIS, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Margot Wallström (right), blamed Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
November 25: The municipality of Ängelholm proudly announced that it had managed to hire a world-famous star to sing at the 500-year anniversary of the city of Ängelholm. Mezzo-soprano Susanne Resmark, of La Scala in Milan and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, would now, for the first time, sing in her hometown. The denizens of Ängelholm would get to enjoy the Resmark, considered by many one of the best Mezzo-sopranos, in a free performance. Two days later, however, the local paper, Helsingborgs Dagblad, ran a story on how Resmark had posted on her Facebook page comments critical of Islam. This apparently sent representatives of the municipality into a panic; they cancelled the star’s performance. The journalist behind the story, Jan Andersson, admitted in an interview with Dispatch International that the paper’s reporters had gone over Resmark’s statements with a microscope, in an effort to force the municipality to cancel her appearance. “We did a damn fine job!” Andersson said.
November 27: One week after Sweden raised its terror alert level to the highest ever in the country (four on a five-point scale), the police raised another alarm — saying their weapons are simply not good enough to prevent a potential terror attack. “We are sent out without adequate weapons, only a nine millimeter service pistol. We are also told that there may not be enough protective vests and ballistic helmets. It feels like being sent out on a lion hunt with a pea-shooter and a jumpsuit made out of zebra meat,” wrote a police officer called “Christian,” in an internal incident report reviewed by the news agency, Siren.
His colleague, “Niklas,” wrote that he had to patrol, without a protective helmet, a location considered at risk of terror attacks, because none of the available helmets fit his head: “Without the right equipment, and with inadequate training in tactics and shooting, we still had to work as live targets without any kind of chance to defend ourselves or our [locations] against a potential attack.”
The police say they want to be able to use more powerful weapons, such as the HK MP5, a submachine gun that is popular with law enforcement agencies around the world. Few, however, have had the required training for it. Also, the existing MP5s are kept at police stations — not in patrol cars. Martin Lundin, of the Department of National Operations, conceded there was some merit to the criticism: “We will probably need more people who are able to handle that weapon in the future.”
November 28: A large mob at an asylum house in Nora tried to break into a room where a woman had barricaded herself along with her son. Some 30 Muslim men apparently thought the woman was in violation of Islamic sharia law, by being in Sweden unaccompanied by a man. They thought that she should therefore be raped and her teenage son killed. Asylum house staff called the police, who averted the plan.
Mosque Surveillance Debate – O’Reilly
December 29, 2015Mosque Surveillance Debate – O’Reilly, Fox News via You Tube, December 28, 2015
(The gentleman in the middle seems to prefer laughing and interrupting to responding otherwise to views with which he disagrees. — DM)
House Democrats Mover to Criminalize Criticism of Islam
December 29, 2015House Democrats Mover to Criminalize Criticism of Islam, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, December 29, 2015
(Please see also, Islam: Hate, Honor, Women’s Rights and Congress. — DM)
December 17, 2015 ought henceforth to be a date which will live in infamy, as that was the day that some of the leading Democrats in the House of Representatives came out in favor of the destruction of the First Amendment. Sponsored by among others, Muslim Congressmen Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, as well as Eleanor Holmes Norton, Loretta Sanchez, Charles Rangel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Kennedy, Al Green, Judy Chu, Debbie Dingell, Niki Tsongas, John Conyers, José Serrano, Hank Johnson, and many others, House Resolution 569 condemns “violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.” The Resolution has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
That’s right: “violence, bigotry and hateful rhetoric.” The implications of those five words will fly by most people who read them, and the mainstream media, of course, will do nothing to elucidate them. But what H. Res. 569 does is conflate violence — attacks on innocent civilians, which have no justification under any circumstances – with “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric,” which are identified on the basis of subjective judgments. The inclusion of condemnations of “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric” in this Resolution, while appearing to be high-minded, take on an ominous character when one recalls the fact that for years, Ellison, Carson, and his allies (including groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR) have been smearing any and all honest examination of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to incite hatred and violence as “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” This Resolution is using the specter of violence against Muslims to try to quash legitimate research into the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy us, which will have the effect of allowing the jihad to advance unimpeded and unopposed.
That’s not what this H. Res. 569 would do, you say? It’s just about condemning “hate speech,” not free speech? That kind of sloppy reasoning may pass for thought on most campuses today, but there is really no excuse for it. Take, for example, the wife of Paris jihad murderer Samy Amimour – please. It was recently revealed that she happily boasted about his role in the murder of 130 Paris infidels: “I encouraged my husband to leave in order to terrorize the people of France who have so much blood on their hands […] I’m so proud of my husband and to boast about his virtue, ah la la, I am so happy.” Proud wifey added: “As long as you continue to offend Islam and Muslims, you will be potential targets, and not just cops and Jews but everyone.”
Now Samy Amimour’s wife sounds as if she would be very happy with H. Res. 569, and its sponsors would no doubt gladly avow that we should stop offending Islam and Muslims – that is, cut out the “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” If we are going to be “potential targets” even if we’re not “cops” or “Jews,” as long as we “continue to offend Islam and Muslims,” then the obvious solution, according to the Western intelligentsia, is to stop doing anything that might offend Islam and Muslims – oh, and stop being cops and Jews. Barack “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” says it. Hillary “We’re going to have that filmmaker arrested” Clinton says it. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, certain that anyone who speaks honestly about Islam and jihad is a continuing danger to the Church, says it.
And it should be easy. What offends Islam and Muslims? It ought to be a simple matter to cross those things off our list, right? Making a few sacrifices for the sake of our future of glorious diversity should be a no-brainer for every millennial, and everyone of every age who is concerned about “hate,” right? So let’s see. Drawing Muhammad – that’s right out. And of course, Christmas celebrations, officially banned this year in three Muslim countries and frowned upon (at best) in many others, will have to go as well. Alcohol and pork? Not in public, at least. Conversion from Islam to Christianity? No more of that. Building churches? Come on, you’ve got to be more multicultural!
Everyone agrees. The leaders of free societies are eagerly lining up to relinquish those freedoms. The glorious diversity of our multicultural future demands it. And that future will be grand indeed, a gorgeous mosaic, as everyone assures us, once those horrible “Islamophobes” are forcibly silenced. Everyone will applaud that. Most won’t even remember, once the jihad agenda becomes clear and undeniable to everyone in the U.S. on a daily basis and no one is able to say a single thing about it, that there used to be some people around who tried to warn them.
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