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Olde Tyme Religion

Steyn : Franchising terror, mosque by mosque

2006-11-17

Communists had 'deep sleepers' who had to be controlled in a hierarchical chain. But with Islam, who needs that? Mark Steyn National Post Islam is not just a religion. Those lefties who bemoan what America is doing to provoke "the Muslim world" would go bananas if any Western politician started referring to "the Christian world." When such sensitive guardians of the separation of church and state endorse the first formulation but not the second, they implicitly accept that Islam has a political sovereignty too. There is an "Organization of the Islamic Conference": It's like the EU and the Commonwealth and the G8 -- that is, an organization of nation states whose heads of government hold regular meetings. Imagine if someone proposed an "Organization of the Christian Conference" that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and presidents and voted as a bloc in transnational bodies. So it's not merely that there's a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project -- and, in fact, an imperial project -- in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are not. Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat bloodthirsty faith in which whatever's your bag violence-wise can almost certainly be justified. And, yes, Christianity has had its blood-drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, which remains a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year. So we have a global terrorist movement insulated within a global political project insulated within a severely self-segregating religion whose adherents are the fastest-growing demographic in the developed world. The jihad thus has a very potent brand inside a highly dispersed and very decentralized network much more efficient than anything the CIA can muster. And these fellows can hide in plain sight. As the Times of London reported in 2006: "An American al-Qaeda operative who was a close associate of the leader of the July 7 [2005] bombers was recruited at a New York mosque that British militants helped to run. British radicals regularly travelled to the Masjid Fatima Islamic Centre, in Queens, to organize sending American volunteers to jihadi training camps in Pakistan. Investigators reportedly found that Mohammad Sidique Khan had made calls to the mosque last year in the months before he led the terrorist attack on London that killed 52 innocent people. Mohammad Junaid Babar, one recruit from the Masjid Fatima Islamic Centre, has told U.S. intelligence officials that he met Khan in a jihadi training camp in Pakistan in July 2003. He claims that the pair became friends as they studied how to assemble explosive devices. Babar, 31, a computer programmer, says that it was at the Masjid Fatima centre that he became a radical." And so it goes. The mosques are recruiters for the jihad and play an important role in ideological subordination and cell discipline. In globalization terms, that's a perfect model. Unlike the Soviets, it's a franchise business rather than owner-operated; the Commies had "deep sleepers" who had to be "controlled" in a very hierarchical chain. But who needs that with Islam? Not long after Sept. 11, I said, just as an aside, that these days whenever something goofy turns up on the news, chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammed. It was a throwaway line, but if you want to compile chapter and verse, you can add to the list every week. - A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammed Atta. - A sniper starts killing gas station customers around Washington, D.C.? John Allen Muhammed. - A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri. - A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet. - A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed. - A British subject self-detonates in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. - A terrorist cell bombs the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed. - A gang rapist preys on the women of Sydney? Mohammed Skaf. - A Canadian terror cell is arrested for plotting to bomb Ottawa and behead the prime minister? Mohammed Dirie, Amin Mohamed Durrani and Yasim Abdi Mohamed. These last three represent a "broad strata" of Canadian society, according to Mike McDonnell, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a man who must have aced sensitivity training class. To the casual observer, the broad strata would seem to be a very singular stratum: In their first appearance in court, 12 men arrested in that Ontario plot requested the Koran. When I made my observation about multiple Mohammeds in the news, Merle Ricklefs, a professor at the National University of Singapore and South-East Asian editor of the 16-volume Encyclopedia of Islam, remarked sarcastically, "Deep thinking, indeed." Well, gosh, maybe it's not terribly sophisticated. But then again, when you're dealing with fellows who decapitate female aid workers in Iraq and engage in mass slaughter of Russian schoolchildren, maybe sophistication isn't always helpful. Particularly when sophistication seems mostly to be a form of obfuscation by experts wedded to the notion that Islam is something that simply can't be understood unless you've read all 16 volumes of their Encyclopedia, or, better yet, written them. For those of us who aren't professors of Islamic studies, the obvious course is to step back and try to work from first principles: What's happening? Who's doing it? The five-thousand-guys-named-Mo routine meets the "reasonable man" test: It's the first thing an averagely well-informed person who's not a multiculti apologist notices -- here's the evening news and here comes another Mohammed. - From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn. Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright (Copyright) 2006 by Mark Steyn.

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Down Under

Bilal Skaf sentenced to 31 yrs Jail for gang rape

2006-07-28

NOTORIOUS gang rapist Bilal Skaf has been jailed for a maximum 31 years over the August 2000 attack on a teenage girl in Sydney's west. Skaf's brother, Mohammed Skaf, who can now be named, has been sentenced to a maximum 15 years over the same pack rape of a 16-year-old girl at Greenacre's Gosling Park. Be gone with both of them. Bilal Skaf will not be eligible for parole until February 11, 2033, while his brother must remain in jail until at least July 1, 2019. Not long enough. Bilal sat quietly as Acting Justice Jane Mathews told the court he was the leader of a group of men who attacked the girl in the park on August 12, 2000. Bilal had dragged the girl into the park and raped her as his friends were “standing around, laughing and talking in their own language”, Justice Mathews said. The 24-year-old, who was already serving a maximum of 28 years for other sex offences, smiled briefly as Justice Mathews sentenced him to the 31 years, part of which will be served concurrently. Mohammed, Bilal's younger brother, who is also in jail for other sex offences, was sentenced to a minimum of seven-and-a-half years for his role in the attack. The then 17-year-old knew the rape victim and drove her to the park, Justice Mathews said. “His involvement in the evening's activities was an absolutely crucial one,” she said. “Without him, the offences would not have been committed at all.” Outside the court, the victim's mother said she was happy with today's sentence and hoped it would give her daughter some closure. “She'll never forget it but hopefully she'll be able to talk about it,” she said. Both men were convicted in April this year over the pack rape, which allegedly involved up to 14 men. Bilal Skaf was convicted of two counts of aggravated sexual intercourse without consent in company, while Mohammed was found guilty of being an accessary before the fact. It was the second time the two were found guilty, after their initial conviction was quashed in 2004 when it was revealed two jurors conducted their own investigations at the rape scene. The actions of the jurors in the original trial prompted the New South Wales Government to make it illegal for any juror to conduct private investigations outside court. It also led to a law allowing sexual victims to avoid giving evidence at retrials, instead testifying via transcript or video. In what was believed to be the first time the new evidence laws were used, the gang rape victim was not required to be in court for the Skaf retrial, and her transcript evidence from the previous trial was re-enacted for the jurors.

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Europe

Steyn: Toon-deaf Europe is taking the wrong stand

2006-02-12

From Europe's biggest-selling newspaper, the Sun: ''Furious Muslims have blasted adult shop [i.e., sex shop] Ann Summers for selling a blowup male doll called Mustafa Shag." Not literally "blasted" in the Danish Embassy sense, or at least not yet. Quite how Britain's Muslim Association found out about Mustafa Shag in order to be offended by him is not clear. It may be that there was some confusion: given that "blowup males" are one of Islam's leading exports, perhaps some believers went along expecting to find Ahmed and Walid modeling the new line of Semtex belts. Instead, they were confronted by just another filthy infidel sex gag. The Muslim Association's complaint, needless to say, is that the sex toy "insults the Prophet Muhammad -- who also has the title al-Mustapha.'' In a world in which Danish cartoons insult the prophet and Disney Piglet mugs insult the prophet and Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirl designs insult the prophet, maybe it would just be easier to make a list of things that don't insult him. Nonetheless, the Muslim Association wrote to the Ann Summers sex-shop chain, "We are asking you to have our Most Revered Prophet's name 'Mustafa' and the afflicted word 'shag' removed." If I were a Muslim, I'd be "hurt" and "humiliated" that the revered prophet's name is given not to latex blowup males but to so many real blowup males: The leader of the 9/11 plotters? Mohammed Atta. The British Muslim who self-detonated in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. The gunman who shot up the El Al counter at LAX? Heshamed Mohamed Hedayet. The former U.S. Army sergeant who masterminded the slaughter at the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed. The murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Mohammed Bouyeri. The notorious Sydney gang rapist? Mohammed Skaf. The Washington sniper? John Allen Muhammed. If I were a Muslim, I would be deeply offended that the prophet's name is the preferred appellation of so many killers and suicide bombers on every corner of the earth. But apparently that's not as big a deal as Mustafa Shag. When Samuel Huntington formulated his famous "clash of civilizations" thesis, I'm sure he hoped it would play out as something nobler than shaggers vs. nutters. But in a sense that's the core British value these days. If it's inherent in Muslim culture to take umbrage at everything, it's inherent in English culture to turn everything into a lame sex gag. The "Mustafa" template is one of the most revered in the English music-hall tradition: "I've been reading the latest scholarly monograph -- 'Sexual Practices of the Middle East by Mustapha Camel.'" If they wanted to appease the surging Muslim demographic, the British could conceivably withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan but it's hard to imagine they could withdraw from vulgar sex jokes and still be recognizably British. They are, in the Muslim Association's choice of words, "afflicted" with shag fever. In theory, this should have been the perfect moment for Albert Brooks to release his new film ''Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World.'' Instead, life is effortlessly outpacing art. Brooks had an excellent premise and, somewhere between studio equivocation and his sense of self-preservation, it all got watered down, beginning with the decision to focus the plot on a trip to India. Which is a, er, mostly Hindu country. But the Arab world refused to let Brooks film there, and, even if they had, he'd have been lucky to get out alive. Needless to say, the movie doesn't mention that. So a film whose title flaunts a bold disdain for political correctness is, in the end, merely another concession to it. You can't blame Brooks, not in a world of surreal headlines like "Cartoon Death Toll Up to Nine" (the Sunday Times of Australia). Instead of ''Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,'' the Muslim world's come looking for comedy in the West and doesn't like what it's found. If memory serves, it was NBC who back in the '70s used to have every sitcom joke about homosexuality vetted by a gay dentist in New Jersey. Apprised of this at a conference on censorship, the producer of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" remarked, "You mean there really is a tooth fairy?" Alas, the Islamist Advisory Commission on Quran-Compatible Humor will be made of sterner stuff, and likely far more devastating to the sitcom biz. And the good news is that that body's already on its way. The European Union's Justice and Security Commissioner, Franco Frattini, said on Thursday that the EU would set up a "media code" to encourage "prudence" in the way they cover, ah, certain sensitive subjects. As Signor Frattini explained it to the Daily Telegraph, "The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression. . . . We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right." "Prudence"? "Self-regulate our free expression"? No, I'm afraid that's just giving the Muslim world the message: You've won, I surrender, please stop kicking me. But they never do. Because, to use the Arabic proverb with which Robert Ferrigno opens his new novel, Prayers for the Assassin, set in an Islamic Republic of America, "A falling camel attracts many knives." In Denmark and France and the Netherlands and Britain, Islam senses the camel is falling and this is no time to stop knifing him. The issue is not "freedom of speech" or "the responsibilities of the press" or "sensitivity to certain cultures." The issue, as it has been in all these loony tune controversies going back to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, is the point at which a free society musters the will to stand up to thugs. British Muslims march through the streets waving placards reading "BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM." If they mean that, bring it on. As my columnar confrere John O'Sullivan argued, we might as well fight in the first ditch as the last. But then it's patiently explained to us for the umpteenth time that they're not representative, that there are many many "moderate Muslims.'' I believe that. I've met plenty of "moderate Muslims" in Jordan and Iraq and the Gulf states. But, as a reader wrote to me a year or two back, in Europe and North America they aren't so much "moderate Muslims" as quiescent Muslims. The few who do speak out wind up living in hiding or under 24-hour armed guard, like Dutch MP Ayaab Hirsi Ali. So when the EU and the BBC and the New York Times say that we too need to be more "sensitive" to those fellows with "Behead the enemies of Islam" banners, they should look in the mirror: They're turning into "moderate Muslims," and likely to wind up as cowed and silenced and invisible.

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Down Under

Steyn: Racism is bad - so is self-delusion

2005-12-20

Tipper, posting from sunny Guandgong, China What's the deal with these riots in Sydney? You switch on the television and there's scenes of urban conflagration and you think, "Hang on, I saw this story last month." But no. They were French riots. These are Australian riots. Entirely different. The French riots were perpetrated by - what's the word? - "youths". The Australian riots were perpetrated by "white youths". Same age cohort, but adjectivally enhanced. And, being "white youths", they thus offered "a chilling glimpse into the darker corners of Australian society", as Nick Squires put it last week, "with thousands of white youths rampaging through a well-known beach suburb, attacking people of Middle Eastern background. They were egged on by white supremacists and neo-Nazis." Gotcha. White youths egged on by white supremacists. You can't make a racist omelette without egged whites. Cate Blanchett also subscribes to the Squires line and, no disrespect to our man down under, she does it rather more fetchingly. I'm goo-goo for Miss Blanchett in just about every movie she's made and I'd cut her an awful lot of slack. But on Friday she toddled along to Dolphin Point on Coogee Beach wearing a white T-shirt showing the outline of Australia with the single word "THINK" inside and stood in front of a banner calling for "a wave of tolerance" to sweep the country (which sounds more like a tsunami of tolerance). And, even as I was still drooling like a schoolboy, I could feel myself starting to roll my eyes. At that point, Miss Blanchett unburdened herself of this great insight: "It's actually very clear and simple. Violence and racism are bad." Thank God somebody had the courage to say it, eh? But isn't the problem, in Australia and elsewhere, that it's not quite that "clear and simple"? Take "tolerance", for example. Wave-of-tolerance-wise, Australia for years has looked like New Orleans the day after Katrina hit. The broader Blanchett-Squires culture has been tolerant to a fault. In Sydney in 2002, the leader of a group of Lebanese-Australian Muslim gang-rapists was sentenced to 55 years (halved on appeal). The lads liked to tell the lucky lady that she was about to be "fucked Leb-style" and that she deserved it because she was an "Australian pig". It was the sentence that was "controversial". As Monroe Reimers wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald: "As terrible as the crime was, we must not confuse justice with revenge. Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it's time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion practised with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions." After 9/11, a friend in London said to me she couldn't stand all the America-needs-to-ask-itself-what-it-did-to-provoke-this-anger stuff because she used to work at a rape crisis centre and she'd heard this blame-the-victim routine far too often: the Great Satan, like the dolly bird in the low-cut top and mini-skirt, was asking for it. Even so, it's still a surprise to hear the multiculti apologists apply the argument to actual rape victims. So suppose we do as Mr Reimers suggests and "take a good hard look" at "racism by exclusion". As Monday's Australian reported: "Sydney's western suburbs remained quiet yesterday after a call for a full day's curfew by Lebanese community leaders. Mohammed Elriche, 19, said he and his friends would have enjoyed nothing more than their regular swim at Cronulla Beach, but their parents had asked him to stay at home. "His parents, Eddy and Samira, who have lived in Australia since 1972, said their five children would be allowed to go to the beach again only when the 'conflict is resolved and peace is restored' in the Sutherland shire region. 'If there's no more conflict, I will let him go,' Samira, 42, told the Australian in Arabic." In Arabic? Let's suppose that Cate Blanchett got her wish and a tidal wave of tolerance washed into all those "dark corners of Australian society" taking the chill off the chilling glimpse Squires got. How are even the most impeccably diverse multicultural types supposed to welcome into the bosom of their boundlessly tolerant family a woman who prefers to speak the language of the land she left at nine? When it comes to "racism by exclusion", who's excluding whom? There are no doubt "white racists" down under, but, as an explanation of what's going on, it's almost quaintly absurd. "People of Middle Eastern background" have prospered in Australia. The governor of New South Wales, Marie Bashir, is Lebanese, as is her husband, Sir Nicholas Shehadie, as is the premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks. Likewise, in my own state of New Hampshire, one of the least racially diverse jurisdictions in North America, the last Senate race was nevertheless fought between a Republican, John Sununu, and a Democrat, Jeanne Shaheen, both from Lebanese families. All these successful politicians are of Lebanese Christian stock: that's to say, after a third of a century in their new countries, they weren't conversing with reporters in Arabic. It's not racial, it's cultural. And the cries of "Racist!" are intended to make any discussion of that cultural problem beyond the pale. In that sense, Sydney's beach riots are a logical sequel to what happened in France. From opposite ends of the planet, there are nevertheless many similarities: non-Muslim women are hectored and insulted in the streets of both Clichy-sous-Bois and Brighton-le-Sands. The only difference is that, in Oz, the "white youths" decided to have a go back. These days, whenever something goofy turns up on the news, chances are it involves a fellow called Mohammed. A plane flies into the World Trade Centre? Mohammed Atta. A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet. A sniper starts killing petrol station customers around Washington, DC? John Allen Muhammed. A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri. A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed. A gang-rapist in Sydney? Mohammed Skaf. Maybe all these Mohammeds are victims of Australian white racists and American white racists and Dutch white racists and Balinese white racists and Beslan schoolgirl white racists. But the eagerness of the Aussie and British and Canadian and European media, week in, week out, to attribute each outbreak of an apparently universal phenomenon to strictly local factors is starting to look pathological. "Violence and racism are bad", but so is self-delusion.

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