Where Did You Get That Hijab?

No, everyone does not, Ms Wells.

Pictured swathed in Burberry-patterned headgear a fortnight ago is Annie Wells MSP, Conservative and Unionist member of the Scottish legislature for the Glasgow district.

Ms Wells's choice of garment was not to protect herself against the February chills in her northerly part of the world, but to demonstrate her solidarity with women who wear the hijab.  For this Burberry number is indeed a hijab and she was marking "World Hijab Day" (1 February), now in its fifth year.

See some more Scottish politicians' reactions here; that from John Mason is nauseating.

It goes without saying that nobody should be insulted, much less assaulted, for wearing the hijab, but when western women are actively encouraged to wear it, and by the British Foreign Office too, then a step too far has surely been reached.

A London newspaper, the Evening Standard,  reported:

'The Foreign Office handed out free headscarves to staff and encouraged them to learn why Muslim women wear the garment as part of its World Hijab Day celebrations. The Government department, headed up by Boris Johnson, offered all employees the chance to wear a hijab for part of their day to mark the worldwide event on February 1. In an internal memo, the Foreign Office said that the headscarf is worn by some women who see it as representing “liberation, respect and security”.

According to reports, an email sent to staff said:  

“Would you like to try on a hijab or learn why Muslim women wear the headscarf? Come along to our walk-in event.Free scarves for all those that choose to wear it for the day or part of the day. Muslim women, along with followers of many other religions, choose to wear the hijab. Many find liberation, respect and security through wearing it. #StrongInHijab. Join us for #WorldHijabDay.”

A Foreign Office spokesman confirmed that the event was for staff at its London office who wanted to learn more about other cultures.'  [Emphasis added, here and below]

For the sake of pandering to the Islamic world at home and abroad the Foreign Office believes it appropriate for non-Muslim females to cover their heads in a scarf that many Muslim women themselves regard as a symbol of female subservience and which began as an indication of which women (the covered ones) were not to be considered fair game for sexual violence by Muslim men.

Having the right not to wear the hijab is the real issue.  

Just ask all those Iranian women who recently, in a brave act of defiance, have allowed their locks to blow freely in the wind as nature intended.

Let's look at that Foreign Office memo again:

“Would you like to try on a hijab or learn why Muslim women wear the headscarf? Come along to our walk-in event.

“Free scarves for all those that choose to wear it for the day or part of the day."

Methinks I sense Da'awa at work there.  This photo (above, left) from the Evening Standard would seem to confirm that view.

Reports the Daily Mail:

'The event was ... just days before Britain marked the 100th anniversary of women [aged 30 and above, plus university graduates aged 21-30] being given the vote.

Maajid Nawaz, who heads the counter-extremism think-tank the Quilliam Foundation, criticised the department for ‘supporting World Hijab Day and the institutional oppression of women through modesty culture, while brave Iranian women risk all to remove hijab tyranny’.

Anti-hijab activist Masih Alinejad told Reuters: ‘We are fighting against the most visible symbol of oppression. These women are saying, “It is enough – it is the 21st century and we want to be our true selves.”’ 

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘I’d like to know whose bright idea this was. It is ridiculous, a complete waste of taxpayers’ money and not the business of a Government department.‘I can’t see the Foreign Office promoting Christianity or the handing out of crosses.’

No demonstrative Foreign Office stunts on behalf of the Islam-persecuted Christians of the Near and Middle East, then.

And I don't see the Foreign Office holding a demonstration of solidarity with Jews in the "new" Europe, who feel increasingly unsafe when wearing symbols of Judaism in public places.

World Kippa Day, anyone?

More Travels in Eurabia (videos)

More of what Canadian broadcaster Ezra Levant found in Eurabia recently:

Top video:
'Meet “the hero of Cologne” — and other immigrants who love Europe's culture of freedom.'

Bottom video:
'Political dissidents across Europe are fighting back in the midst of the mass Muslim migration that is threatening to change their continent. I'll show you what they said, and tell you why it matters.'

A Traveller in Eurabia (videos)

Canadian broadcaster Ezra Levant recently went to some of those countries of northern Europe that are rapidly becoming hell-holes for Jews (as well as for women and girls), thanks to "cultural enrichment".

Look, if you can bear to, at what he found.

 In Malmo:

 In Cologne:

Hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog

More here

"Jews Are The New Jews"

In Old London Town

By the philosemitic British journalist Julie Burchill, a gutsy piece refuting the fashionable leftist and Muslim canard that "Muslims are the new Jews":
Here's a taster:

'.... How are Muslims not the New Jews? Let me count the ways. 

For a start, there seems to be no sign of any sort of Kindertransport in action - rather, the modus operandi would appear to be "women and children last" judging by the huge groups of able-bodied young men who have found their way to the West.... I don't recall any accounts of marauding bands of Jewish youths mob-handedly molesting gentile women on the streets of countries which gave them refuge....

[T]here is only one tiny Jewish majority country, which did not exist until 1948, and so the Jews fleeing persecution throughout the centuries had no place of assured safety until recently; yet another reason why supporters of Israel such as myself are so passionate about its survival. The Jews who came to Britain as refugees came to a very different country, with no welfare state, also speaking no English and with little money....

Likewise

Jewish refugees left the virulently antisemitic countries of Eastern Europe for the moderately antisemitic countries of Western Europe and considered it a good exchange, grasping the new freedom that came their way and running with it. Certain sections of the Muslim community, on the other hand, seem to veer between rather hysterical extremes of victorhood and victimhood....

Somewhat embarrassingly, a recent Freedom of Information request by a Sikh organisation found that of 400 anti-Muslim "hate crimes" recorded in the first half of last year, 28 per cent were not on Muslims at all.

But I don't mind the stats which tell us how many Muslims were attacked so long as we also get the stats on how many Muslims attacked people, including their own people in so-called "honour crimes", which are actually hate crimes of the most cowardly kind, usually committed on defenceless young girls by one or more fully-grown men. 

Meanwhile, antisemitic attacks continue to rise - and the Jewish Community Security Trust doesn't need to add attacks on Christians to bulk up the numbers....

 Muslims are not the new Jews - Jews are the new Jews and sadly Muslims now number greatly among their chief tormentors.

But there is a greater issue at stake here, far beyond the different standards of behaviour displayed by Jewish refugees in the past and Muslim refugees now. Wherever the Jews have gone, they have enriched and opened up the host culture far beyond the extent even to which they have enriched and opened up themselves....'

Read all of the article here

Blarney, BDS & Blood Libels (includes video)

At the weekend, Martin O'Quigley, head of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, explains why he's out on the streets of Dublin demonstrating against the proposed foundation of an Irish branch of the anti-islamisation organisation PEGIDA, dubbed by most of the press a "far right" organisation  (a label rejected by worried English feminist Anne-Marie Waters of UK Mothers against Sharia and the other founders of the British branch).

For O'Quigley the demo's something about being anti-Zionist and opposing all forms of racism, apparently, as well as dutifully opposing fascism.

The fact that fascism, which Europe defeated during the Second World War (a conflict in which the Irish Republic stood neutral, incidentally, even spitefully denying British ships port facilities during that life or death conflict with evil), is busily importing a new kind of fascism, is of course not part of the mindset of the Irish anti-"Islamophobia" crowd and more than it is of their British and Continental counterparts.

I hold no brief for PEGIDA.   But how strange it is that the fears of Ms Waters and other true feminists for the future of girls and women in a Europe of rapidly changing demographics are apparently not shared by the guys and gals of the "far left".

As reported here, among those joining in the Irish anti-PEGIDA protests are such far leftists as Sinn Féin, People Before Profit, the Workers Solidarity Movement.

Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan said “we are standing shoulder to shoulder in solidarity to show that there is no place in Ireland today for racism and Islamophobia. There is no place for hate.” 
Ms Boylan is a veteran of the anti-Israel movement: see, for instance, here  and here and here

"There is no place for hate" on the Irish Left, it seems, except where Israel is concerned.

President Higgins and friends

I have blogged several times about the anti-Israel cause in Ireland and how vicious seem its sentiments.

Here's another example,  these disgraceful assertions by Anna O'Leary, an Irish Israel-hater, telling Iran's Press TV that Israel is "a place that does not observe human rights".

Listen to her vile blood libels against Israel and her laughable remarks about "our values" (the "our" encompasses Iran, too, presumably!)

 That O'Leary thinks it appropriate to give an interview to the satellite propaganda channel of one of the world's most notorious actual violators of the human rights of women and children, and indeed of males when they are gays or dissidents, while accusing Israel of the heinous things she does in the way she does speaks volumes about the nature and purpose of O'Leary in particular and the Irish BDS movement in general.

Oh, and as for Anne-Marie Waters, here she is in Copenhagen last month, castigating the pro-Islam lefty sisterhood heckling her there:

The Ugly Face of Wallström's Sweden

Here are a trio of recent videos that illustrate the ugly face of the once beautiful, now ruined, land of Sweden, whose female Foreign Minister, the frightful Margot Wallström, demonises Israel every chance she gets.

That's the same Margot Wallström mentioned here (she held that position from 2010-14):

First, a video that needs no translation, featuring a man from a "very conservative culture" (to use BBC-speak for misogynistic Middle Eastern/North African societies).  Watch this wretch try to rob an elderly woman, and then spit at and whack a younger woman who's wise to what he's up to.

Second, a fine brave candid look at rape statistics in Sweden (and the "politically correct psychosis" regarding them):

Third, a distressing example of the despicable absurdity of Sweden's penal system:

O, Leftist Feminism, what hypocrisy you foster!

O, Eurabian Multiculturalism! What crimes against women are committed in your name!

Blaming Eau de Cologne

Well, what a surprise.  A Salafist imam in Cologne has demonstrated his creed's odious attitude to women by blaming the plight of the Cologne rape victims on themselves:

'Speaking to major Russian channel REN TV, Imam Sami Abu-Yusuf’s remarks came during a 12 minute segment bringing Russians up to date with the latest developments in the migrant invasion of Europe.

 Sandwiched between eyewitness-footage of migrant rampages in Cologne, women being sexually assaulted by apparently Arab gangs, and a segment on a surge of interest in self defence courses in Germany the Imam told the interviewer: “we need to react properly, and not to add fuel to the fire”.

Explaining in the view of Salafist Islam why hundreds of women found themselves groped, sexually assaulted and in some cases raped by gangs of migrant men in cities across Germany the Imam said: “the events of New Year’s Eve were the girls own fault, because they were half naked and wearing perfume. It is not surprising the men wanted to attack them. [Dressing like that] is like adding fuel to the fire”.

The tone of the report was telling, expressing no surprise that Muslim mass migration would result in violence and gang-rape. The narrator of the report told viewers that after the events of New Year’s Eve it was becoming difficult to tell who’s country Germany was, one belonging to Muslims or to Germans. Also expressed was the opinion that the sex attacks were no more than a dress rehearsal for something much bigger to come...'

 Read more on this stinker here

Meanwhile,  there's at least one leftist German women's rights activist who, enraging some of the perverse elements in the sisterhood, has dared to lay the blame for the multiple sexual assaults on women in her own home town and elsewhere on New Year's Eve where it resides.

It's reported that Alice Schwarzer 'became a lightning rod for feminist [shouldn't that read "feminist"] and anti-racist anger after New Year’s Eve when she condemned the attacks on women as a “gang bang” designed to terrorize women.'

But she's unrepentant, as indeed she should be:

“Many feminists have remained silent from the outset regarding the problem of Islamist agitation, out of fear they will be accused of racism. It’s the old hierarchy of victims, that we already knew in [the student protests of] 1968. Then it was called class struggle before the battle of the sexes. Today it is called anti-racism against feminism.

It is unfortunately a fact that many of the so called ‘post-feminist’ Internet feminists who are for pornography and prostitution are in favor of the head scarf and even the burqa. They say this is all about the free choice of women...

[T]he crime scene on New Year’s Eve seems very strange, because in Germany we have never seen this before: mass sexual violence in public with a powerless police looking on. This is a whole new dimension.

I think this explosion of sexual violence on the same night in five countries and in a dozen cities is no coincidence. This is organized." 

She went on:

“I’m not talking about Muslims, or Islam as a faith. I’m talking about the politicization of Islam, the right-wing Islamism, whose banner is the veiling of women. This started in Iran in 1979 with Khomeini, and (elsewhere) it has been financed by Saudi Arabia. The Islamists firmly established themselves in Afghanistan and Chechnya (with introduction of Sharia law in 1994), Algeria (200,000 dead in the 1990s) and are now are arriving triumphant in the heart of Europe.

The Islamists have not only stirred up misogyny among young Muslim men towards women over recent years and decades, but I am also convinced the sexual violence of New Year’s Eve was provoked [by them]. There were a few hundred willing followers.”

Read more about the feminist/"feminist" response to Cologne in an interesting piece here

And in the Netherlands, disquiet in the wake of Cologne:

The War on Western Women (video)

Here's one guy who won't be intimidated by the thought police of the Left in saying what needs to be said.

Good onya, sirrah!

Again, The BBC Shows Its Bias & Its Bankruptcy

Donnison makes light of real concerns

What a wretched leftist propaganda machine the BBC is. 

Notice how it has reported the not unreasonable view of former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott that Islam needs a reform movement.

Mr Abbott writes, inter alia, in the Sydney Daily Telegraph and sister papers today:

'Round  the world, terrorists screaming out Allah-u-Akbar are killing decent people going about their daily lives....

Dealing with terrorism and the Islamist fanaticism that inspires it is the great challenge of our time.

Obviously there needs to be a very strong security response at home and abroad....

The security response is necessary but it’s not sufficient. There also needs to be a concerted “hearts and minds” campaign against the versions of Islam that make excuses for terrorists.

Although most Muslims utterly reject terrorism, some are all too ready to justify “death to the infidel”....

Demonising Islam generally or all Muslims could bring on the “clash of civilisations” that academic Samuel Huntington feared two decades back and make “Islam’s bloody borders” even more dangerous. But we can’t remain in denial about the massive problem within Islam.

Islam never had its own version of the Reformation and the Enlightenment or a consequent acceptance of pluralism and the separation of church and state.

Fortunately there are numerous Muslim leaders who think their faith needs to modernise from the kill-or-be-killed milieu of the Prophet Mohammed.

It’s also time Australians stopped being apologetic about the values that have made our country as free, fair and prosperous as any on Earth....

Islam needs to delegitimise the urge to “behead all those who insult the Prophet” but only Muslims can do this. That’s why everyone interested in a safer world should be reaching out to “live and let live” Muslims and encouraging them to reclaim their faith from the zealots.

In Australia that means talking to decent people who happen to be Muslim as well as to “official” Muslims inclined to see “Islamophobia” in any criticism....

It’s also time Australians stopped being apologetic about the values that have made our country as free, fair and prosperous as any on Earth.

Where hate preaching is not illegal it should at least be thoroughly answered point-by-point with a very robust defence of human rights and responsibilities.

It’s not culturally insensitive to demand loyalty to Australia and respect for Western civilisation. Cultures are not all equal. We should be ready to proclaim the clear superiority of our culture to one that justifies killing people in the name of God.'

Not offensive or over-the-top, is it?  At least, not to rational people.

But look at the BBC's report. That item is less a report on what Mr Abbott has said as what lefty and Muslim critics have declared in response to what he has said.  It's reminiscent of BBC reports on and from the Middle East, when the Israeli case ("Israel says") is put last, after the views of Palestinian Arab spokespeople and any UN official/leftwing activist who might happen to be on hand.

Then there are the snide, derogatory references to Mr Abbott's "letter" (in fact, it's an op-ed article) having appeared  "in News Corps tabloids" (that's the Murdoch stable, which also happens to carry the syndicated column of Australia's most-read columnist, the conservative Andrew Bolt, who is of course anathema to the Left, for lots of reasons including his pro-Israel stance.)

"Tabloids".  That's a way of saying that the newspapers in question are populist pieces of trash fit only to wrap fish 'n chips, not the highbrow newspapers (The Guardian, Ha'aretz, the Israel-bashing Fairfax press) that Al Beeb reporters and intellectuals of the left choose as their daily fare.  (Yes, I'm being sarcastic when I say "intellectuals"; after all, that term hardly describes the Bowens and the Donnisons and the Knells, does it?)

Note, too, the gratuitous reference to Mr Abbott having once been intended for the Roman Catholic priesthood.  The BBC, like its Aussie counterpart the ABC, which it resembles so much in pet causes and ideology, rarely wastes an opportunity to depict the Roman Catholic Church in a bad light (allegations of priests behaving badly are, as it were, a godsend to it).  I suspect that the gratuitous reference to Mr Abbott's religion is a snide way of implying that he's some kind of Christian fanatic and that when it comes to having a go at Islam, well, he would, wouldn't he? For of course religion is there to be poked fun at by the Left, unless that religion is, well, the one that needs reforming.

There's no byline given for the report, but presumably it's by the BBC's snide and snotty Jon Donnison, who when he can be bothered to tear himself away from tweeting schoolboyish semi-smut and other trivia, does occasionally report from the Land Down Under, though rarely with any degree of profundity.  He seems to have left his reporting hat in the West Bank or Gaza, when all is said and done, and coming to the Antipodes is all a bit of a (no pun intended) come down.  At least, that's how his characteristically superficial reports strike me.

How utterly loathsome, too, is Australia's embattled Opposition leader Bill Shorten in implying that Islam is above criticism.  Why, in its attitude to women alone it proves itself culturally inferior to and at odds with Western values.

Bill should look at this video, of a secular Iranian woman being disrespectfully treated at a talk she is giving at a constituent college of London University, to see just how contemptuous of women Western Islamists are.

Better still, he and his fellow Lefties (those decrying Abbott's article is Greens leader Richard Di Natale) should read Professor Phyllis Chesler's latest article here

How desperately Shorten, who's doing very badly in opinion polls, must need the "Muslim vote".

How utterly hypocritical the Greens are.

But Malcolm Turnbull's not much better.

Incidentally, concerning Australian politicians and Islam, readers may be interested in my latest Elder of Ziyon article (which illuminates the reference in the image above to the Mufti) here

Europe: The Big Issue

The Big Issue, which draws attention to homelessness, unemployment, and related social issues, is a social initiative magazine in the UK that's sold on busy street corners and other well-populated hotspots up and down the country by and on behalf of "homeless and other socially vulnerable people".

In a small town in the UK that I livd in prior to returning to Australia, (drum roll: politically incorrect statements coming up) the magazine's sturdy young vendor, stationed a couple of days a week outside the local bank, was the very same  chap with the dyed yellow ponytail who'd often sit in the bank's doorway asking everyone who passed to spare him some change.  (Funnily enough, he always had money for hair bleach, liquor, and cigarettes.) 

Anyway, not long after the admission of Romania into the European Community, a member of that country's Roma community, obviously newly arrived in Britain, muscled in his patch.

Within weeks the pony-tailed vendor was gone altogether, and then there were two Roma vendors, and finally three, two male and one female (well, two time-sharing females actually, the elder in an advanced state of pregnancy), stationed at key points in the High Street repeating mantra-like in fractured English: "Big Issue please".

Just round the corner, on the narrow pavement of  the street leading directly from the railway station, was the elderly matriarch of the group: partially blocking a shop window, she sat on a folding chair with a rug over her knees and a begging bowl at her feet, wishing everyone who passed an obviously insincere "Good morning."

Now, hawking a magazine critical of the socio-economic policy of a host country known for its generous welfare system as soon as you've reached its shores (and been granted accommodation in one of its council houses to boot) struck me as the height of chutzpah.  And the intimidating, intrusive presence of three Big Issue sellers where one had sufficed struck me as decidedly dodgy.

It evidently struck someone in authority as dodgy too, for one fine day all of them, plus their beggarly mother, were not in their accustomed spots, and were never seen again.

Still, I have nothing against the magazine itself, which undoubtedly performs a valuable social service, and whose contents are not without interest.  Indeed, one of its recent articles is very interesting indeed.   Written by Samira Ahmed, it observes inter alia:

'Polling here shows a large number of Britons, the majority even, are at best cautious about taking in refugees from Syria because of the fear of conservative Islamic attitudes. Some readers might want to dismiss this as a cover for racism, just as in the 1930s the Daily Mail warned of the “threat” of so many Jews coming from Hitler’s Germany.

But ... looking at gender opens up a legitimate question about how you build a strong and stable society. Where are all the women refugees? According to the latest UNHCR figures, 72 per cent of the numbers arriving in western Europe so far in 2015 are men, 15 per cent children and only 13 per cent women. A BBC World Service reporter a few days ago described on air the unease he and female colleagues felt when they tried to interview women refugees, only to be uniformly refused permission by their men.

So where ARE the women refugees? Some men will have planned to establish themselves and then bring families over safely. But talking to lawyers dealing with the influx of young male Afghan migrants here a decade earlier, it seems in many cases families spend money on the people they value most. And that’s not the women.

When we talk of compassion and doing the right thing in these humanitarian crises, perhaps we ignore gender at our peril.'

As the website Biased BBC points out, Ms Ahmed is a Muslim and a BBC broadcaster, yet the issues she raises do not appear to have been ventilated on the BBC.

This issue of gender is indeed a core one, but not the only example of the incompatibility of Islam with the essential core values of Western society, the values that make Europe what it is, values that, as this video shows, are scorned and spurned by a worrying part of the Islamic community in Germany.

In this video we meet Muslims who are in Germany but not of it, young Muslims who place sharia law above the German constitution.  We meet the school principal (Beate Altmann) who is exasperated with the situation, including the antisemitism voiced by Muslim children at her school.

There are children who justify the Charlie Hebdo murders, unapologetic upholders of male supremacy and the "honour" killings of women, youngsters of both sexes who cling to the Islamic belief that women are inferior to men, the property of their husbands, and obligated to obey the dictates of male family members..

We meet a third generation immigrant of Lebanese background who administers sharia law.  We meet followers of his who prefer his intervention in disputes to that of the police.

We meet a Christian refugee from Syria who has been threatened by Muslims in the very land in which he sought refuge and who is disgusted by the casual contempt for women shown.  And so on.

We meet a rabbi who despairs of Islamic antisemitism and, having experienced hate crime personally, as has his daughter, advises Jews in their best interests not to identify in public as such. 

Non-assimilation and all that it entails.    This is the big issue confronting the entire West. To whet your appetite, this post is peppered with screengrabs I've taken from it.

Update: Here's Douglas Murray, speaking in Copenhagen on an aspect of Europe's Big Issue:

And Pat Condell, pointing out that Europe's ghastly bureaucratic elites are utterly failing women (and Jews) with the current Muslim invasion, and declaring that it's time the people of Europe claimed asylum from the EU:

In Britain, Leftwing Hypocrites Betray Gender Equality In Pursuit Of Muslim Votes

At a secular political meeting in Birmingham addressed by Labour Party heavies including Jack Dromey, husband of ex-Cabinet Minister Harriet Harman who is an ultra-feminist if ever there was one, women are seated on the left of their menfolk, who by contrast are seated on the right, befitting their superior status.

Yes, this is an audience of Muslims, and, even though the occasion is a civic one, not a religious one, they've insisted on gender apartheid.

When such a thing happened some years ago at the insistence of a Muslim mayor in the East End of London, there was much indignation, and at least one Muslim councillor of the inferior sex was among those doing the grumbling.

Hey, but there's a General Election on, and the speakers from the Labour Party, Jack Dromey and the rest of the gang, show that when it comes to catching votes they're fully prepared to sell modern British values down the river.

Emmeline Pankhurst, Emmeline Fawcett and their cohorts must be spinning in their graves.

Read the entire squalid story on the influential Guido Fawkes blog here and here and also see The Spectator here

Gift Of The Gab(rielle)

I must confess I'm not familiar with the denomination of which this voluble lady, the pro-Israel Gabrielle Crofts, is a bishop, namely the "Old Catholic Church".

But here she is at the "Reclaim Australia" rally in Perth, Western Australia, explaining why she fears mass Islamic immigration into Australia.

At least she can't be accused of being a western feminist who closes her eyes to the second-class status of women in Islam (such as that seen in my previous post):

The Swedish Disease

Significant elements in several Western countries – especially the United States, Great Britain, and Israel – believe their own governments to be repositories of evil, and see terrorism as just punishment for past sins. This "we have met the enemy and he is us" attitude replaces an effective response with appeasement, including a readiness to give up traditions and achievements.... 

Self-hating Westerners have an out-sized importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the media, religious institutions, and the arts. They serve as the Islamists' auxiliary mujahideen.

So observed Daniel Pipes in 2006.

How the contagion continues to spread.  In Sweden, for example,

'Many former Marxists have become passionate Multiculturalists, so much so that we need to analyze what these doctrines have in common. How come so many white Marxists are aggressively hostile to their own civilization and almost seem to derive pleasure from the idea of wiping out their own people? Is Globalist Multiculturalism on some level a replacement Communism or is it in fact a direct continuation of Communism? In traditional Communism the “oppressive class” should be forced out of power, stripped of their assets and perhaps physically eliminated. If we assume that whites, and by that I mean people of European stock, are seen collectively as the “global oppressive class” who uphold the capitalist system and prevent a just world order, breaking down whites becomes the road to implement equality. Perhaps if traditional Communism put its emphasis on economic differences, this new form of Communism puts emphasis on breaking down cultural and genetic differences in order to achieve global equality. It could thus be thought of as cultural and genetic Communism.

If we assume that the ideology of Globalist Multiculturalism has totalitarian tendencies, we should remember that totalitarian ideologies usually have a Villain Class, a group of evil oppressors that can be blamed for all the ills of society. If the ruling ideology falls somewhat short of producing the Perfect Society it has promised, this will be followed by even more passionate attacks on the Villain Class, be that the Jews, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, etc. The Villain Class of Multiculturalism seems to be European culture and persons who happen to be born with a white skin. Any problems will automatically be blamed on “white racism.” One of the hallmarks of a Villain Class is that its members can be verbally or even physically abused with impunity. The Villain Class is subject to public scorn and has de facto or de jure less legal protection than other groups.

The radical feminist Joanna Rytel wrote an article called “I Will Never Give Birth to a White Man,” for the Swedish daily Aftonbladet, stating things such as “no white men, please… I just puke on them.” After receiving a complaint because of this, Swedish state prosecutor Göran Lambertz explained why this didn’t qualify as racism: “The purpose behind the law against incitement of ethnic hatred was to ensure legal protection for minority groups of different compositions and followers of different religions. Cases where people express themselves in a critical or derogatory way about men of ethnic Swedish background were not intended to be included in this law.”

In 2006, Chancellor of Justice Göran Lambertz discontinued his preliminary investigation regarding anti-Semitism at the great mosque in Stockholm. He wrote that “the lecture at hand contains statements that are strongly degrading to Jews, among other things, they are throughout called brothers of apes and pigs.” Furthermore a curse is expressed over the Jews and “Jihad is called for, to kill the Jews, whereby suicide bombers — celebrated as martyrs — are the most effective weapon.” Lambertz thought that the “recently mentioned statements in spite of their contents are not to be considered incitement against an ethnic group according to Swedish law.” His conclusions were that the preliminary investigation should be discontinued because this incitement against Jews could be said to originate from the Middle East conflict.

It is illegal to suggest that certain groups are worse than others. If you criticize oppression of women, you should be careful to state that all men are equally bad and that Western men are at least as bad as Muslim men. The Marxist politician (from the “reformed” Communists) Gudrun Schyman in a 2002 speech posited that Swedish men were just like the extremely brutal Islamic Taliban regime. A male columnist in newspaper Aftonbladet immediately agreed with her: Yes, Western men are like the Taliban.

http://www.meforum.org/5141/palestinian-sister-wives

A note to Ms. Schyman: A feminist culture will eventually be squashed because the men have either become too demoralized and weakened to protect their women, or because they have become fed-up with incessant ridicule. If Western men are pigs and “just like the Taliban” no matter what we do, why bother? Western women will then be squashed by more aggressive men from other cultures (whom women often voted to let in because of their “kind and compassionate” Socialist sympathies), which is exactly what is happening in Western Europe now. The irony is that when women launched the Second Wave of Feminism in the 1960s and 70s, they were reasonably safe and, in my view, not very oppressed. When the long-term effects of feminism finally set in, Western women may very well end up being genuinely oppressed under the boot of Islam. Radical feminism thus leads to oppression of women.

In 2005, a TV program which caused some stir quoted Irene von Wachenfeldt, chairwoman of ROKS, The National Organization for Women’s Shelters, as saying: “…when war breaks out, it is fully ok to use violence openly. I sometimes say that we are involved in a civil world war, a gender war. Men are animals.” In the organization’s magazine, the extreme feminist Valeria Solana was hailed in a review. She writes in her manifesto: “To call a man an animal is to flatter him: He is a machine, a walking dildo, a biological mishap.” In the TV documentary, Irene von Wachenfelt was asked whether she agreed with Solana, and she did. ROKS has received millions in public funding.

In Sweden, you cannot say that certain ethnic groups are more involved in crime than others. That’s hateful and banned by law. But you can say that all men are animals, and you will get state support for doing so. You can also belittle the traditional culture of the natives. This is not just allowed but encouraged. As mentioned before, the “conservative” Prime Minister Reinfeldt has stated that the native culture was merely barbarism and that everything good has been imported from abroad. Had a public figure said something similar about the culture of an immigrant group, he or she would have had to resign immediately and most likely would have faced a trial for hate speech and racism.

Jonathan Friedman, an American Jew living in Sweden, mentions that the so-called Integration Act from 1997, two years after Sweden joined the European Union, proclaimed that “Sweden is a Multicultural society.” The Act implicitly states that Sweden doesn’t have a history, only the various ethnic groups that live there now. Native Swedes have formally been reduced to just another ethnic group, with no more claims to the country than the Iraqis who arrived there last Thursday. As Friedman puts it, “it’s almost as if the state has sided with the immigrants against the Swedish working class.”

“Exit Folkhemssverige - En samhällsmodells sönderfall“ (Exit the People’s Home of Sweden — The Downfall of a Model of Society) is a book from 2005 about immigration and the welfare state model called “the people’s home,” written by Jonathan Friedman, Ingrid Björkman, Jan Elfverson and Åke Wedin. According to them, the Multicultural elites see themselves first of all as citizens of the world. In order to emphasize and accentuate “diversity,” everything associated with the native culture is deliberately disparaged. Opposition to this is considered racism: “The dominant ideology in Sweden, which has been made dominant by powerful methods of silencing and repression, is a totalitarian ideology, where the elites oppose the national aspect of the nation state. The problem is that the ethnic group that are described as Swedes implicitly are considered to be nationalists, and thereby are viewed as racists.”

Jens Orback, Minister for Democracy, Metropolitan Affairs, Integration and Gender Equality from the Social Democratic Party said during a debate in Swedish radio in 2004 that “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.”

This was a government which knew perfectly well that their people risked becoming a minority in their own country, yet did nothing to stop this. ...'

 Read much much more here

A European Imam: "A Woman Should Be Confined To The Home & Is Not Allowed To Refuse Sex With Her Husband Even When Menstruating"

A repellent rant against women and wives by an imam in Berlin, a city with an unfortunate history of repellent ranters.  Such monstrous misogyny, in a country whose head of state is a woman!

I wonder how the anti-Israel leftist feminists who are strangely shtum regarding Islamic misogyny equate this with the absurd leftist myth that all cultures are created equal.

Video by the estimable Memri.org (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQvtJihSVwk):

Hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog

O, The Irony! The ABurqaC of it

"There are signs that anti-Muslim bigotry is now contaminating community harmony at large. This week Sikh Australians have said they are becoming targets of racial abuse. As happened following the attacks of September 11, innocent Sikh Australians are being mistaken for radical extremists because people are linking turbans to terrorism."

So observes Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, in the wake of the recent terror raids on a number of Muslim homes in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and the presence of around sixty Australian Muslims among ISIS fighters.

Of course, such attacks are to be deplored, but the failure to distinguish Sikhs from Muslims is not restricted to racist rednecks, as the observation implies.  This Facebook page created by Aussie leftists at the end of last month has, a less-than-impressed Sikh commenter points out, mistaken an historic  photograph of a Sikh camel-driver in the Australian outback for a Muslim:

 O, the irony!

But I digress.

The question of whether or not to ban the burqa is a hot topic (or perhaps more accurately put a hot potato of a topic) in Australia at the moment.  The central question has hinged on whether or not to ban burqa-clad would-be visitors to Parliament House in Canberra on the grounds that it constitutes a security risk, though there are some politicians who are calling for a general ban on the burqa in public places.

To quote from an ABC News report of today:

'A decision to force Muslim women who cover their faces to sit in a separate glass-enclosed public gallery in Federal Parliament has been slammed by Australia's Human Rights Commissioner.

Speaker Bronwyn Bishop and Senate President Stephen Parry have approved new interim rules at Parliament House applying to anyone wearing "facial coverings".

The Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS) said: "Persons with facial coverings entering the galleries of the House of Representatives and Senate will be seated in the enclosed galleries. This will ensure that persons with facial coverings can continue to enter the Chamber galleries, without needing to be identifiable."

The enclosed galleries are usually used by visiting school parties.

Senate President Stephen Parry told parliament that it was a "management measure in relation to .. control of the public galleries".

"If there is an incident or someone is interjecting from the gallery, which as senators would know happens from time to time, they need to be identified quickly and easily so they can be removed from that interjection," he said.

"Or if they are asked to be removed from the gallery - and we need to know who that person is so they cannot return to the gallery, disguised or otherwise."....

The new security controls also stipulate that anyone receiving a pass to enter the private areas of Parliament House will have to show photo ID.

"Procedures are in place to ensure that DPS Security manage any cultural or religious issues relating to this in a sensitive and appropriate manner," DPS said.

Senator Parry said "if people have a cultural or religious sensitivity in relation to this they will be given the privacy and sensitivity that is required in relation to that identification"....'

A burqa in Oz: ABC News photo

The report continued:

'Labor Senator Penny Wong [one of the top women in the ALP parliamentary Opposition] asked why senators had not been consulted, and Greens leader Christine Milne said it was "appalling"

 They will be relegated to an area of the parliament which is usually reserved for schoolchildren - behind glass, where parliamentarians don't have to see or hear them," she said.'

But not being seen by men – and after all the majority of members of Parliament are men – is the whole point of burqa-wearing, isn't it, Christine?

 (O, the irony!)

I heard Christine Milne declare on Channel Nine News that in Australia nobody should be discriminated against: she was referring not to the misogynistic burqa but to that glass partition!

 (O, the irony!)

To return to the ABC report:

 'Independent MP Andrew Wilkie likened the rule to "religious apartheid" and said it was "deeply wrong".

 "The decision by the Government to isolate, in their own rooms, burqa-wearers observing the Parliament has no security merit at all," he said in a statement.

"Religious apartheid"?   Of those whose garments already symbolise religious apartheid from the kuffar?

(O, the irony!)

Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, who had been interviewed on ABC24 about the burqa earlier in the day by an accommodating anchor,  tweeted:

("No one should be treated like a second-class citizen ..."  O, the irony!

To quote Herald-Sun columnist Susie O'Brien:

'Face-obscuring Muslim burqas have no place in Australian society....

 Experiencing the world from behind a piece of mesh is no way for any woman to live....

 What does the burqa say about the women who wear them? I just don’t buy the line that they should be free to choose this form of clothing.

It’s not freedom for a woman to be totally covered up in public at the behest of a man, or a religion dominated by men.

It’s not freedom for her to be prohibited from freely interacting from those in the community around her.

We didn’t fight so hard for gender equality in our country over the past two centuries to have people turn up at the eleventh hour and make women feel bad about themselves all over again.

I know that some defend the burqa as a symbol of religious freedom.

But this completely ignores the fact that the clothing itself is a symbol of the subjugation of Muslim women at the hands of Muslim men.

Let’s be very clear about this – the burqa is not a religious symbol mandated by the Muslim faith. If you don’t believe me, read the Koran. Rather, the burqa is a cultural symbol, rejected by many muslims.

We need to speak out about what the burqa represents.

But I don’t think a ban is the best way to do this.

A burqa ban would be extreme and would risk turning those who objected to the law into matyrs.

In Australia there are better ways to promote the genuine rights of Muslim women, and helping them find ways to become better integrated into our Western society is the place to start....

Besides, it’s not the women who should be singled out and punished. If anyone should be punished, it’s the fathers and husbands who force or coerce women into wearing burqas in the first place....

We don’t need to ban the burqa in Australia.

But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t speak out against it and everything that it stands for.'

Fellow Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, who terms these grotesque dehumanising misogynistic garments "shrouds of oppression", also abhors what they represent: male supremacy and the notion of women as sexual beings and as chattels of their husbands, but similarly opposes a ban.

Professor Phyllis Chesler, an American with first-hand experience of Islamic misogyny, has written a scholarly and absorbing account of the meaning behind the burqa, and (o, the irony!) attempts in the Islamic world itself to ban it, which makes a very powerful case for proscription and should be read and reflected upon by policy-makers and public alike.

She concludes:

'The same Islamists who subordinate women also publicly whip, cross-amputate, hang, stone, and behead human beings. Iran continues to execute women and men by stoning for adultery. The burqa reminds us of such practices. Many Westerners, including Muslims, ex-Muslims, and Christians, Jews, and Hindus who have fled Muslim lands, may feel haunted or followed when they see burqas on Western streets. Does their presence herald the arrival of Islamist supremacism?

Many Muslim governments know something that their Western counterparts are just learning. Covered women signify Islamist designs on state power and control of political, military, social, personal, and family life. Were these designs to be extended to the West, it will spell out the end of modernity, human rights, and the separation of state and church, among other things; in short, the end of liberal democracy and freedoms as now practiced.

Apart from being an Islamist act of assertion that involves clear security dangers and creating mental and physical health hazards, the burqa is a flagrant violation of women's most basic human rights. However, were the government to attempt to ban the burqa in the United States, a team of constitutional legal scholars would have to decide whether to follow the French ethnicity- and religion-neutral approach of no "face coverings," "face masks," etc., or whether to ban outright the public disappearance of women's faces and their subordination in the name of Islam as a violation of their civil rights.

It is impossible for Western governments and international organizations to prevent the acid attacks or honor killings of women in Muslim countries who refuse to cover their faces, but why tie society's hands on Western soil? Why would Western countries prize the subordination of women and protect it as a religious right at a time when many Muslim states refuse to do so? When it is understood that the burqa is not a religious requirement but rather a political statement—at best merely an ethnic and misogynistic custom—there is no reason whatsoever for Western traditions of religious tolerance to misconstrue the covering of women as a religious duty at a time when the vast majority of Muslims do not see it as such.'

The analyst and commentator Daniel Greenfield has also written such an article, giving five reasons why the burqa should be banned.

1. The Burqa Covers Up Abuse

Countries where the Burqa is commonly worn also have higher rates of domestic violence.  In Afghanistan 87 percent of women reported experiencing domestic violence. In Pakistan that number goes as high as 90 percent. Domestic violence is also a major problem in Saudi Arabia.

In cases of domestic abuse, the Burqa doesn’t just isolate the woman, it also covers up evidence of the abuse. It gives the abuser the freedom to brutalize his partner without worrying that anyone will even notice.....

2.  The Burqa Justifies Sexual Assault on Women Who Don’t Wear It

n response to a gang rape, the Chief Mufti of Australia said, “If she was in her room, in her home, in her Hijab, no problem would have occurred.” By wearing the Burqa or Hijab, women participate in a narrative that gives rapists a pass for sexual assaults on women who don’t dress the way the Mufti or Imam says they should....

Banning the Burqa protects women who choose not to wear it from being assaulted because of their perceived immodesty.

3.  Civic Participation

The essence of a modern society is that it extends civic participation to everyone. Deliberately preventing an entire gender from participating in society as identifiable individuals is an assault on the democratic character of the state....

The Burqa is designed to impede interaction outside the home. The failure to be recognized as an individual is dehumanizing and deprives women of their role in civic life.

Countries where the Burqa is in wide use, have low rates of female civic participation....

4. Segregation is Discrimination

Purdah segregates women at homes and the Burqa segregates them in public. While the authorities cannot interfere with what people choose to do in their own homes—the public wearing of the Burqa is a statement that women are unequal and must be segregated.

Such an attitude is an assault on the legal place of women in society. It imposes the norms of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on the streets of Paris and London....

If radicals are prevented from making public statements about the inferiority of races, why should they be permitted to assert the inferiority of a gender.

“Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other,” the Koran asserts. Replace ‘women’ with any race or religion, and a public assertion of such a thing would be cause for criminal proceedings.

Imposing the segregation of the Burqa on women in an assertion of a bigoted creed that dehumanizes an entire gender. While Muslims are free to believe what they do, a public display that dehumanizes women as a gender by treating their faces as obscene, is an intolerant violation of the norms of civil society.

5.  The Wearing of the Burqa is Enforced Through Violence

....In 2003 a French survey found that 77 percent of girls who wore the Hijab did so because of threats. Women in the Muslim world have been punished by having acid thrown in their faces for not complying with similar demands. There is no way to break through this climate of coercion except by giving women and girls immunity from such demands by banning the source of it. The Burqa.

The Burqa also exposes women to blackmail and intimidation when they deviate from the standard of full body covering. There is a rising number of cases in which women and girls who posted Facebook pictures of themselves in normal clothes have been blackmailed and threatened for it.

As long as the Burqa remains a threat hanging over the heads of Muslim and non-Muslim women alike, no woman in Europe can truly be free from its implied threat to her person and her political freedoms.'

There is also another argument in favour of banning a garment that is an affront to women, an argument that does not relate to the equality of the sexes or to the value and dignity of women, but to the health of the burqa-wearer's unborn children, owing to insufficient sunlight being absorbed through the covered mother's skin, with the consequent deprivation of sufficient quantities of vitamin D to ensure that her infants are rickets-free.

In Australia, More "Progressive" Flirtation With Islamic Misogyny

The St James Ethics Centre in Sydney, a non-religious body established in 1989, describes itself as

"a unique centre for applied ethics, the only one its kind globally" ....Working both in Australia and abroad for over twenty years, we’re an independent not-for-profit organisation that provides an open forum for the promotion and exploration of ethical questions. We provide practical support to individuals and organisations to help them to deal with the complex ethical questions that are part of everyday life....

Our Purpose

To serve as a catalyst and enabler for society to think, debate and act in good conscience, particularly in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Our Vision

A better world where people have the capacity to do the right thing.

Our Mission

To encourage and assist individuals and organisations to include the ethical dimension of their daily lives."

It also notes that it has

"worked to take ethical concepts into the wider community, by encouraging a healthy public debate through our events including the celebrated Intelligence Squared (IQ2) live debate series and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, held annually in partnership with the Sydney Opera House".

And what did it schedule for inclusion in the "Festival of Dangerous Ideas" this year?

Why, an address by Sydney-based Islamic extremist Uthman Badar, from the Caliphate-pursuing Hizb ut-Tahrir organisation, on the monstrous topic "Honour Killings are morally justified".

To quote Sydney journalist Miranda Devine:

 "If anything gives Islam a bad name in Australia, it’s extremist outfits like Hizb ut-Tahrir, which wants to use the upcoming Festival of Dangerous Ideas to justify honour killings.

Uthman Badar, the group’s spokesman, was invited to the prestigious Sydney Opera House event in August to deliver a speech titled: “Honour killings are morally justified.”

Seriously. Murdering women is not a dangerous idea – it’s a crime....

There simply is no justification for the murder of women by relatives who feel she has dishonoured the family, by, say, being raped.

Some ideas in the world really are dangerous, and you only have to look at the horrors unfolding in Syria and Iraq to know that radical Islam is as bad as they come.

But to Festival organizers, it was all a game. By inviting Hizb Ut Tahrir to join the rest of the luvvies on stage they made Islamist extremism fashionable.

We have trouble enough on that score.

Take jihad, which has become so cool in Australia that we are the leading supplier, per capita, of Western fighters in Syria and now Iraq.

You can hear Australian accents on recruitment videos posted online by the brutal ISIS terrorist group, which has recently moved from the war in Syria to Iraq where it now controls large parts of the country....

The 150 Australian jihadists who have joined ISIS and other terrorist groups are a disproportionate number, compared to an estimated 50 from the US, and 400 from the UK, out of 1000 from all Europe....

One reason ISIS has been successful here is that it is a Sunni group, one of the two main branches of Islam. Sydney has the largest population of Lebanese Sunnis outside of Lebanon, a product of immigration in the 1970s and 1980s during that country’s civil war.

But it is the Australian-born children and grandchildren of those migrants, who don’t speak Arabic and have never read the Koran, who have been recruited to jihad across the world...."

From (Sydney) Daily Telegraph (see link in text)

Having gone into more detail on the phenomenon of Australian jihadism, she asks pertinently:

"But what hope is there when Sydney’s fashionable left-wing establishment fetes extremism, as if it is just another dinner party conversation starter."

As she states:

After pressure from the NSW government, the Opera House last night cancelled the speech, claiming “a line has been crossed”.'

Indeed, as shown at right, in an extract from the Daily Telegraph, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and her Opposition counterpart Tanya Plibersek spoke out in condemnation of the  topic.

Still, we are all entitled to ask, along with Ms Devine:

"But why did it [the Sydney Opera House] and Festival partner, the St James Ethics Centre, offer a platform to Islamist extremists at all?"

So, Melbourne's Temple Beth Israel, is not the only "progressive" Australian institution this month prepared blithely to have Islamic misogyny expressed on its premises.

What a sad reflection on those who should be upholding enlightened values and championing women's rights.

Read more here (Andrew Bolt's terrific column; h/t Marvin) and here