I mean this seems more serious to me than alleged Koran abuse:

Troops to shoot on sight after deadly Kashmir unrest

Govt holds crisis talks as Kashmir death toll rises

More on Kashmir around middle of this post, see “Joe Klein”.

Koran-related Update: Good stuff from Damian Penny:

How free speech beat hate speech

…I fear many Americans learned precisely the opposite lesson – that less free speech, not more, is needed to combat acts of intolerance (especially where one belief system in particular is involved).

What do think the Canadian view might be?  Say at the Crvena zvezda?

Mark
Ottawa

Further to this post,

Muslims: Victims or…extortionists?

and to the Update thought here,

Haroon the Magnificent and “homegrown” terrorism, Take 2/”true allegiance” Update thought

it seems to me quite a few Muslims indeed want many types of “offensive” actions regarding Islam effectively to be banned in non-Muslim countries–regardless of the legality of those actions.

Yet do Christians world-wide raise the prospect of retaliatory murder and mayhem when their co-religionists are actually killed by Muslims (see here too)?  There once was a Church militant; there still appear to be mosques militant.

Mark
Ottawa

Terry Glavin ain’t best pleased with the left wing doofus (or the “right-wing” geezer):

Remember these things the next time you find yourself confronted by some doofus who wants you to join him in instructing Barack Obama or Stephen Harper to “stop the war.”..

It might also be useful to remember all those Muslims who would be the first to defend democracy and freedom, but they can’t, because they are dead…

Related, with another slash at Incorrigible Koring of the Globe (Update and Upperdate):

Afghan news you may not have seen/Especially in para 11 Update/Globe agenda Upperdate

More on Incorrigible Koring.

Mark
Ottawa

Barbara Kay noted that reality in this National Post piece.  Now we read in the NY Times:

In India, Castes, Honor and Killings Intertwine

A candlelight vigil in New Delhi in May, where supporters of Nirupama Pathak, a 22-year-old Hindu woman from eastern India, called for her death to be prosecuted as an honor killing.…

Whilst the Times of India asks this question of the country’s judicial system:

Should honour killing be dealt as murder?

Just expanding your cultural consciousness.

Mark
Ottawa

The headline is provocative and shocking:

Women in Canada seeking controversial ‘virginity’ surgery

Virginity surgery? Why on earth would any Canadian woman want to have surgery to restore their virginity? It doesn’t seem to make any sense, you think to yourself.

And you’d be right. It doesn’t make any sense, whatsoever, until you read on in the article:

Everything was at stake — her future marriage, her place in her conservative community, her life.

The 23-year-old Muslim woman from the Middle East desperately wanted to appear to be a virgin.

And then it all becomes clear.

It isn’t “Canadian women” who are suddenly craving to become virgins again, but Muslim and South Asian women, who are still afflicted by their antique customs imported from a different era, who want to fool prospective husbands.

And it isn’t that I’m saying that Muslims and South Asian women can’t be Canadian women. But it’s extremely important to make such a distinction in a headline, for clarity’s sake.

For instance, in some South Asian cultures a male child is seen as being preferable to a female one. Because of this, many people of these cultures will abort a female fetus if they learn the sex early enough in the pregnancy. China has a gender imbalance that is nearly the population of Canada mainly for this very reason.

In British Columbia, there are now strict rules about learning the sex of the fetus, and it remains illegal to tell parents in the first trimester. But why? Are Canadian parents prone to aborting female fetuses? No. But Canadian parents of South Asian origin are.

Similarly, this new sexual surgery that restores the appearance of having never been touched, is based almost entirely upon the immigrant demographic from South Asia and the Middle East:

The procedure is so controversial that most doctors contacted refused to speak about it. Dr. “Sam,” a doctor in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, only spoke on the condition that his identity be protected for his safety.

“There are some people who would not look at this surgery rationally,” said Sam, who is concerned about retaliation from potentially duped husbands.

“The fact is that most of my patients are Muslim … and I’m Jewish and a male.”

Sam said he performs the surgery on average twice a month for about $3,500 per procedure, usually on women of Middle Eastern background. One of his clients was preparing for an “arranged marriage” in Oman when she approached him, he said.

Canada is a sexually liberal country, and it isn’t unusual to marry someone who has had multiple sexual partners beforehand. But the new kind of immigrants coming to Canada are arriving with an entirely different mindset altogether, and it’s one that most certainly is not reflective of “Canadian women.”

Let’s be clear here, so we fully understand what the topic is at hand. This isn’t just some quaint custom arriving from afar, like a new kind of quilting, or a special kind of soup. This is all part of the vile control of women in Muslim and other patriarchal societies, where the loss of one’s virginity can lead to social alienation, expulsion from the community, or in the most extreme cases, murder.

Honour killings are a natural correlation to the “virginity surgery”, since in Muslim culture it can be literally fatal to have sex outside of marriage. Hence, family honour and virginity are inextricably linked. They are also alien to Canadian culture and customs.

So let’s leave “Canadian women” out of this and talk frankly about what this kind of surgery really means. This is a cosmetic surgery that fills a market for Muslim women who don’t want to be murdered by their husbands on their wedding night. And that’s about as unCanadian as it can possibly get.

I’ve been waiting to rant about this all day because it really had me worked up this morning. Although I’ve calmed down quite a bit, I still want to get it off my chest.

I use the social networking tool, Twitter, and this morning I received a message saying that a person had “unfollowed” me. That’s usually no big deal, since the nature of Twitter is to see people come and go often. But this one bothered me, mainly because I had been half expecting it to happen. Before I go on, let me back up a bit first.

A few months ago I started conversing back and forth with a relatively pleasant woman who appeared on my Twitter feed. Whether I added her or she added me, I can’t recall. What I do remember is that everything was very cordial, friendly, and respectful. We even exchanged smiley face emoticons.

Then one day I shared a link about a Muslim woman who refused to go through the airport security body scanner because she said it was “against her religion.” I, naturally, shared the opinion that it was ridiculous for a Muslim to reject the airport scanner on religious grounds, when it was on religious grounds that the things became necessary in the first place.

My little friend didn’t take too kindly to that comment. As it turns out, she’s Muslim, and she proceeded to explain that many kinds of people are terrorists. Not just Muslims.

I replied to her that although that is technically true, the Muslims are far and away leading the terrorism scorecard. By a really large margin. The notion of there being Christian terrorists, and Sikh and Buddhist and Hindu terrorists, is all well and good. But the fact is that the strip search airport scanner machine exists primarily because of Islamic terrorism.

She didn’t like that one bit. So after the conversation was over, she unfollowed me and blocked me from ever conversing with her again. As far as she was concerned, my statistical evidence that nearly 100% of terrorist attacks are perpetrated by Muslims, is merely reflective of my inherent dislike for the religion.

Fast-forward to last night. I shared a link about the proposed mosque that Muslims want to built at ground zero in New York [oh you didn't know? Yeah, a mosque at ground zero], and a woman [with whom I had had several very pleasant conversations with as well] took strong exception to it. She didn’t see a problem with building a mosque at ground zero.

I asked whether she might be in the least sensitive to the idea that building a shrine to the very religion responsible for murdering 2,752 people was going to be very near to the graveyard. She tried to explain that the suicide bombers who flew the planes into the World Trade Center weren’t “real Muslims” and that all religions are capable of terrorism.

It’s sad, because when somebody is prepared to ignore hard evidence in favour of clinging to some politically correct delusion, there’s not much you can say to make them see otherwise. You can lead a camel to water, but you can’t make him drink.

The woman then revealed that her father is Muslim, and it all made sense to me. She didn’t want to think that the religion to which her father is a follower, could possibly be associated to a mentality that has become murderously infectious in some parts of the world. Rather than accept the irrefutable fact that the most dangerous terrorism on the face of the planet right now is based on the radical interpretation of the Muslim religion, she decided to unfollow and block me. Out of sight, out of mind.

Until things go boom, that is.

I have come to the conclusion that these two women are part of the problem with radical Islam. If both of them had stepped forward, admitted there are serious, dangerous issues with Islam that lead to mass murder, I strongly doubt that the religion would be in the kind of trouble it is today. If the “silent peaceful majority” were less silent, and more vocal about admitting the violent, intolerant, misogynistic, racist, ignorant aspects of their religion, it’s less likely that these things would be so clearly associated with it.

The above clip is from South Park’s 200th episode, which has reprised the role of the Prophet Muhammad, in a political parody of the fact that every religion can be made fun of without riots breaking out except for Islam.

In the episode, the children meet Tom Cruise at a chocolate factory where he is packing bundles of fudge into boxes. They ask him why he’s “packing fudge”, which angers Cruise and leads him to bring a lawsuit against South Park. The only way that Cruise will drop the suit is if the town brings the Prophet Muhammad to South Park.

The whole point of the show is to lampoon the double standards applied to Islam and other religions in the media. There is a scene involving the “Super Best Friends”, that features every religious figure acting as super heroes, including Buddha, who does lines of cocaine on a table as Jesus is speaking. For the scenes of Muhammad, the image is blacked out by a large “censored” graphic.

Eventually, Muhammad agrees to appear in South Park in a bear mascot costume so as not to offend Muslims. But this, apparently, still managed to upset Muslims. Despite the point of the cartoon being a farcical exaggeration of Islamic intolerance, reality managed to disprove that it was an exaggeration at all.

An Islamic group posted a video on YouTube today condemning the South Park episode, and calling for attacks on the creators. They posted images of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, followed with images of others who have dared to insult Islam, including a picture of the murdered Theo Van Gogh with a knife sticking out of his chest. In the video the speaker said that whosoever insults Islam shall be met with the sword, and that once the followers of Islam have taken up the sword against someone, there shall be no negotiation that causes them to change their mind.

This could properly be termed an official “fatwa” against the creators of South Park.

“We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh for airing this show,” the group said on its website. “This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality that will likely happen to them.”

South Park has managed to illustrate that not only does Islam not have a funny bone, but that it is a dangerously violent and extremist faith that is so intolerant that it actually manages to chill something as unserious as a cartoon notorious for portraying Satan as being in a homosexual relationship with Saddam Hussein.

CNN asks rhetorically whether South Park has gone “too far” this time. But, of course, it hasn’t gone far enough. The fact remains that we allow our fear of radical Islam to keep us from publishing portrayals of the prophet in the media, lest we inflame the delicate sensibilities of people for whom the concept of humour seems to have been surgically removed at birth.

No one has questioned the freedom of Muslims to believe that the Prophet Muhammad cannot be depicted, but to impose that view on the rest of the world isn’t an opinion any longer. It’s tyranny. South Park cleverly illustrates just how far that tyranny has spread, when a cartoon about a bear representing the prophet can compel Muslims to threaten murder.

Translation: “There never was a crisis. It was a media invention.”

The atrocities of stoning, burning and genital mutilation of women were officially banned in the provincial town of Herouxville in 2007 through the creation of a municipal charter that spawned a national debate. Critics said that the move was unnecessary and essentially xenophobic since such practices didn’t have the remotest chance of being committed in Herouxville, writes Marian Scott of the Montreal Gazette, not “then, now or ever.”

I might agree that the prospect of mutilating or stoning women is rather unlikely today, but who’s to say what the future holds? Perhaps Ms.Scott forgets the paradoxical adage, “never say never.” The uncertainty of a future of immigrants with variably different beliefs, customs, and convictions as ours, presents a very real challenge in our country. Herouxville’s André Drouin was merely one of the first to articulate that challenge, and spawn a debate on it.

One might say that Mr.Drouin has since been rewarded for his efforts, as the broader debate on reasonable accommodation and integration in Canada come to a head in Quebec, with women being expelled from government-funded integration courses for, ironically, failing to properly integrate.

In a classic miscalculation, the government tried to force “tolerance” down the throat of Quebeckers by implementing the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, displaying just how out of touch the political class is with the common Canadian witnessing the rapid demographic shift.

For each Canadian community trying to absorb new immigrants, there is invariably a clash of cultures, but the proponents of diversity claim that these clashes create a harmonizing blend of a new kind of Canadian. One that is enriched by the new thoughts, ideas, and beliefs of the incoming culture.

Idealistically, this sounds wonderfully beneficial to a society. The concept of a new culture arriving in the homogenized “white bread” communities of Canada and positively changing it for the better, has spawned the kind of feel-good “Dances with Wolves” distortions of reality present in television shows like the facile and painfully fictitious CBC show “Little Mosque on the Prairie.”

The fact is that if “Little Mosque” represented the true integration efforts of the Muslim minorities who settle in Montreal, Toronto, and Mississauga, the Herouxville charter could be condemned as xenophobic rubbish and be widely backed up by public opinion polls that agreed. Instead, what public opinion polls consistently show is that Canadians by and large have limitations on how far they’re willing to go with the accommodation of religious freedoms in this country.

One of the main problems with the niqab is that it is isolationist and segregationist by the very nature of what it represents. Radical Islamic doctrine on niqabs keeps women segregated not just from men, but from the prospect of friendly interaction with other Canadians, because we are not accustomed to approaching people who decide to cover their faces to this degree. The message that the niqab sends is quite simple, in a blatant and almost offensive sort of way: do not approach me.

The biggest problem with immigration in Canada isn’t how many immigrants there are, but their level of interaction in their new country. We’ve seen in Europe that some Islamic communities tend to isolate themselves, segregate from mainstream society, and impose their own cultural preferences on their adopted land, some of which are even entirely contradictory to the most deeply felt principles of the host inhabitants.

Even if it’s not realistic that inhabitants of Herouxville will ever act out the kind of barbaric and cruel events banned in the municipal charter, it was a means of opening a discussion in Canada about the kinds of people now immigrating to the country, and the beliefs and cultures they bring with them. If anyone is “out of touch with reality”, it is those who claim that a discussion on these issues will never have to take place at all.

Aislin/Montreal Gazette

A cartoon referred to as “controversial”, and the Islamic faith, are both back in the news together today, after the Montreal Gazette ran an editorial cartoon on the Muslim woman expelled from school for refusing to remove her niqab in class.

The cartoonist, Terry Mosher, who draws under the name Aislin, crafted a picture of a common niqab, but with prison bars and lock where the eyes would go. As far as cartoons go, it’s not particularly original, or offensive. A simple google images search for the word “burqa” turns up the niqab instead, with a digitally edited photograph of a woman looking through a veil of prison bars. The photo was commissioned by the International Society for Human Rights, which opposes third world gender apartheid for women.

The Egyptian-born immigrant, Naïma Atef Amed, has now twice been removed from provincially funded French language and integration classes for new immigrants after refusing to remove her niqab. The province has backed the wishes of school instructors who said that the niqab was making interaction impractical.

Ms.Amed has since spawned the obligatory provincial human rights complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission, an ironic move not lost on many women who say that religious freedom should not be used as an excuse to wear the symbols of gender oppression.

Several Islamic lobby groups and organizations expressed disapproval of the political cartoon today, saying that many women wear the Niqab because they believe it to be the truest expression of their faith. Islamic scholar and author, Tarek Fatah, is not convinced.

“You are free to support these ninjas and I will continue to expose this hideous symbol of Islamofascism,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

“The niqab is a symbol of the Muslim Brotherhood doctrine best expressed by the Saudis where an entire population is identified by their attire just as the red guards were under Mao’s China.”

Many people, like Mr.Fatah, believe that the burqa and niqab aren’t expressions of religiosity, but rather political symbols of political Islam. Indeed, he has written that the burqa is an imported and modern compulsion of Saudi Arabia’s strict Wahabbist interpretation of Islam. It is an interpretation that has been widely condemned by human rights observers the world over.

There’s nothing wrong with the editorial cartoon, which accurately symbolizes the voluntary imprisonment of individuality behind a black curtain of religious dogma. But if I were Mr.Mosher, I would purchase a panic room forthwith.

Photo: NYPD Aviation Unit

Ottawa lawyer Amir Attaran recently said that if he were Muslim, he’d be “quite terrified of travelling”. Not because he’s afraid of Islamic fundamentalists blowing the plane sky high, like failed plane bomber Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab. No, it’s because he says that the government is selective with protecting Canadian rights, which means that it may not step up to assist Muslim-Canadians who run into trouble. Like young Omar Khadr, who wound up fighting American soldiers in an abandoned Soviet airbase in Khost, Afghanistan, after taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

The Toronto Star ran a story today about racial profiling at our border by our security personnel. And this, for some shocking reason, is seen as a bad thing.

Part of the problem with dealing with terrorism is in our failure to address the most likely threat to our safety. What we’re looking for when we scour the undergarments of little old white-haired grannies, shouldn’t just be bombs and weapons, but clues that the person could be an Islamic fundamentalist. Part of the way of figuring out that clue is by accepting that a vast majority of Islamic fundamentalists aren’t, contrary to popular opinion, old white-haired grannies, but rather dark-skinned men of middle eastern or north African descent.

Is that racist? To point that out? Hm. Well, that depends. Is it racist to ask the police to be out the look out for a six-foot black male who just knocked off the local bank? I mean, even though it narrows down the field of probability to black males who are six feet tall, isn’t it racist to scrutinize all of those innocent six foot tall black males that day who didn’t knock off a bank?

The answer is no. No it isn’t. You would think that’s obvious, but apparently that isn’t so for so-called “civil liberties” organizations.

“There is a huge amount of stigma to being labelled a security risk,” Micheal Vonn, policy director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said Wednesday.

Well, as they say, the truth often hurts. The thing is, when terrorism becomes a multicultural and diverse activity, I’ll be the first person to volunteer for “random security checks” on behalf of my demographic.

Unfortunately, even though the fact that we’re hearing about racial profiling is actually a good thing, most security is still far too politically correct. For evidence of this, you only have to look at the fact that they’re bringing in these $200,000 security machines that can play virtual peek-a-boo with your bits and pieces. And while the security of our airports probably haven’t improved since 2001, we’re all going to pay a whole lot more for it.

Canadians are understandably upset. After all, every time a Muslim tries to blow up an airplane, fortunately an infrequent event in North American airspace, the security apparatus goes overboard. Even though the percent of non-Muslims trying to blow up airplanes remains at a fixed percentage, we all have to go through the same useless security theatre.

And while you’re busy taking your belt and shoes off, and raising your arms in the air for the airport gestapo for crimes you never committed, you have a group of “Islamic scholars” claiming that the new scanners go “against the teachings of Islam”.

Well, maybe you should have thought about that before the “teachings of Islam” sent 19 lunatics into the World Trade Center 8 years ago, taking 2,973 people with them. In fact, maybe a revision of the “teachings of Islam” is in order when you open a newspaper every day and find suicide bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The words “Islamic” and “bomber” are such a common part of the 24 hour news cycle, as to be redundant to use both.

So let’s stop beating around the bush about what needs to be done in fear we’ll offend Muslims. We are at war with fundamentalist Islam. That is a fact. The people who aim to blow up western airplanes are therefore fundamentalist Muslims. Let’s focus our security efforts there, and stop this pointless charade.