Religion Of Peace Update

This just in to the C-SM Comparative Religions Desk:

BAGHDAD (AP)- The U.S. military announced the capture Saturday of an insurgent leader who was recruiting and training women, including his wife, to wrap themselves in explosives and blow themselves up — the latest sign that al-Qaida in Iraq plans to keep using women to carry out suicide attacks is unspeakably vile, thoroughly evil and on an express train bound for Hell.

As you recall, it was just a month ago that al-Qaida in Iraq strapped explosives to two mentally retarded women, sent them into a crowded marketplace, and blew them up by remote control, killing at least 73 Muslims guilty of the crime of shopping.

The AP article says it's not clear whether a-Q is using women because it is having trouble recruiting men, or because women are harder to detect since they walk around in tents. A third option was untouched: That Islam treats women so disgustingly badly that (1) it makes more sense to the Islamic mind to blow up a useless woman than it does to destroy a male, or (2) that forever-subjugated and belittled women are less likely to say no when some guy tells the to strap on C4 for Allah.

Whatever the reason, this is the unholy, committed, violent, dangerous enemy we are facing and killing in Iraq. In Iraq. Not Manhattan or Dubuque. The Left is still trying to figure out why that's a good thing.

The Religion Of Compassion

What is it? Stupidity? Brainwashing? Blind faith with the emphasis very much on blind?

When Western women convert to Islam, women like Yvonne Ridley, we often hear them say it is in part because Islam is so wonderful for them; as Ridley put it, the Koran is a Magna Carta for women. How do these poor lost sheep jibe that thinking with this:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - The Saudi judiciary on Tuesday defended a court verdict that sentenced a 19-year-old victim of a gang rape to six months in jail and 200 lashes because she was with an unrelated male when they were attacked.

The Shiite Muslim woman had initially been sentenced to 90 lashes after being convicted of violating Saudi Arabia's rigid Islamic law requiring segregation of the sexes. [Is Saudi as sectist as it is sexist? Would her punishment have been as harsh if she were a Sunni?]

But in considering her appeal of the verdict, the Saudi General Court increased the punishment. ... The ministry implied the victim's sentence was increased because she spoke out to the press.

One would think that being gang-raped would be punishment enough for the woman, but the courts were comfortable with reminding her that her religious sin was worthy of three months in jail and 100 brutal lashes, and her political sin of talking to the media was worthy of another three months and another 100 lashes.

So what do the women of Islam learn from this? They have no rights, they will receive no compassion, and they'd best not complain about their conditions.

Ever mindful of our complex and necessary relationship with the corrupt and vile House of Faud, our official reaction was muted. The State Department said the decision "causes a fair degree of surprise and astonishment."

I much preferred Canada's reaction: "Barbaric."

Ah, Those Liberated Muslims!

Islam's ongoing battle to keep women ignorant, cowed and underutilized continues. This time in our ally, Pakistan:

All throughout the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Pakistan's impoverished western border with Afghanistan, lie the ruins of barbershops and music and video stores – symbols of Western-oriented life that religious extremists have destroyed in a growing wave of violence.

Now Islamist militants have a new target, and if they are successful, observers say their campaign could be disastrous for Pakistan's future.

In what appears to be an escalating spree over the last year, extremists have bombed at least four girls' schools and circulated violent threats warning girls to stay at home. While no girls or school staff have been killed, girls in some areas have stopped attending classes – marking a direct blow to Pakistan's national enterprise of "enlightened moderation," which posits female education as a central pillar. ...

Pakistan has one of the highest rates of female illiteracy in South Asia, at about 60 percent, and the lowest rate of primary school enrollment for girls, at somewhere between 42 and 48 percent. Those shortcomings are particularly pronounced in the NWFP, which, as of 2004, had the lowest ratio of female enrollment of any province in Pakistan, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG). In areas like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the government's presence has historically been weakest, only 1 percent of women and girls are literate. (CBS)

Of course you can't keep women oppressed if you give them the confidence that comes with education. Of course you can't swagger around like the dish I saw once in a Thai restaurant -- it was called King Prick -- if women aren't given any option to stay with you.

The Pakistani government is pushing for reforms that would move the country up to ... oh ... the mid-1800s, especially in the NFWP, where 70 percent of the education development budget has been allocated to girls' schools, resulting in the opening of more than 300 primary and middle schools for girls in the region in the last three years.

And of course the Islamists, being the ones who are closer to the heart of Islam, respond with bombs.

You Think Our Lawyers Are Bad?

This is really a story about the foolish hanging-on of arranged marriages more than it is about bad lawyers (although it's about bad lawyers, too). It's from India, a land where many misogynistic traditions that should have died hang on tenaciously in the face of modernization.

LUCKNOW (Reuters) - Lawyers tied a young man to a tree and beat him outside a court in India for refusing to marry one of their relatives, an official said on Wednesday.

They rounded on the victim when he arrived at a court in the Taj Mahal town of Agra to settle a dispute over marrying the niece of one of the lawyers.

Indian TV channels showed the abusive lawyers tearing off the man's shirt, tying him to a tree trunk and cutting bald patches into his hair. The 22-year-old victim was then beaten up.

Now we know this story would have never made the international wire if the perpetrators hadn't been lawyers -- we love to laugh at/feel disgusted by lawyers. We have to wonder how many similar cases of violent outfall from planned marriages come and go without our notice.

The Hindus aren't the misogynists the Muslims are, but besides forced marriages, they abort or kill their pre-born/new-born daughters, burn widows with their husbands and subjugate women in many ways -- which you'll recognize the next time you see an Indian couple walking, the man several steps ahead of the woman.

This is just another example of the incredible energy and potential wasted by cultures that insist on keeping women from reaching their natural potential. I've read two outstanding thoughts on this topic today, thanks to the Watcher.

The first, linked above, is from Pat Santy (Dr. Sanity), writing broadly (please, no pun) on how Islam treats women:

We frequently joke about men's preoccupation with sex and female body parts in the West, but our fascination with "T&A" is nothing when you consider that the Muslim world is literally consumed by female sexuality and with their fear of it. It is ironic that both Muslim men and women are under the mistaken impression that Western society is oversexualized compared to them, when in fact, it is practically impossible to be more obsessed with sexual matters than they are in Muslim communities.

The second was from Kobayashi Maru, in a post about climate change; specifically, about a brilliant 15 year-old Australian girl who developed a model that accurately predicted the end of Australia's drought while at the same time disproving much global warming dogma:

In much of the Islamic world (to put it mildly), a 15-year-old female would not have access to the kind of intellectual cultivation, encouragement or freedom this young woman obviously has.

Wow. I've gone all the way from some Hindu planned marriages to Islam's fear of, hatred of and destruction of women. Sickness knows no bounds.

All European Women Should Wear Veils, Dutch Islamist Says

Men are pigs, so women should wear veils.

That's the backwards, reverse-assimilation thinking of all of Islam, of course, but also of Mostafa Chendid, one of the Danish Islamist leaders who toured the Islamic world with the Mohammed cartoons to instigate numerous Kartoonistan riots. Brussels Journal picks up the story:

According to Mostafa Chendid of the Danish Islamic Society (Islamisk Trossamfund), not only Muslim women but other women too should wear a veil. Why? Because five up to ten percent of all men can't control themselves when they see a woman without a veil. ...

According to him the veil also serves as a signal: women with a veil are "not for sale." Moreover, the veil protects against rapes, he says: in the US for example, every half minute a woman is raped, and according to him that's because women continuously tempt men by going onto the streets without a veil. Maybe not all men have a problem to control themselves when they see a woman without a veil, and perhaps there's only a problem with five to ten per cent of the men, but he says that's nevertheless enough for all women to wear the veil.

Methinks ol' Mostafa is projecting his own thoughts onto all men.

And he's not doing a particularly good job of it. Actually, the rape rate in the U.S. is more like one every six minutes, not every 30 seconds -- bad enough, but if you're going to criticize America, Islamo-bub, get your facts straight. And given that women who report rapes in whatever Sharia Hell-hole Mostafa fled from are shamed and outcast by family and society at best, or stoned or "honor killed" at worst, do you suppose rape just might be a tad unreported?

Let's crunch the numbers a bit more. If five to ten percent of the men can't control themselves when they see a woman with no veil, then in the U.S. that would be 750,000 to 1.5 million out of control men prowling about 365 days a year. Yet there are fewer than 90,000 reported rapes in the U.S. annually, so Mostafa's numbers are as screwed up as his sick, hateful religious beliefs.

He does have a point, though. When I see a woman in a veil, try as I might to think nice moderate Muslim thoughts, I think instead of 9/11. That sure kills the sex drive.

Besides, the Brussels Journal scribe Filip van Laenen points out, if the problem is men, why does Islam repress women? Why not keep their hang-dog men locked up in houses and hidden under veils? Why not let the women go un-escorted onto the street, but allow the men out only with an escort?

That makes more sense -- but what's sensible about radical Islam?

The Religion of "Piece"

Islam's backwardness has many measures, not the least of which is its treatment of women. Long before Mohammed, Christ set a guideline for greater respect of women -- his treatment of the adultress, the woman at the well and Mary Magdeline.

Unfortunately, Mohammed ignored Christ's revolutionary acceptance of women. For women, the Religion of Peace has become a religion that treats them like pieces of flesh, as evidenced (yet again!) in this story:

HYDERABAD (Reuters) - A teenage girl in southern Pakistan, whose late father lost her in a poker game when she was 2 years old, has asked authorities to save her from being handed over to a middle-aged relative.

Rasheeda, 17 (above), said she has filed applications with the police and a local councillor asking them to prevent Lal Haider, 45, from taking her to his home.

Her mother, Nooran said her husband racked up a debt of 10,000 rupees ($151) to Haider playing cards.

"My husband didn't have money to pay, and instead he told Lal Haider that he could take Rasheeda when she grows up," she said.

Yeah, so what? It's just a girl.

Pakistan is a supposed ally in our confrontation with terror, but women there are routinely terrorized by its culture, and the religion that fires the culture. If all that happens to Rasheeda is an unwanted and unloving marriage, she won't be doing too badly for a woman in an Islamic culture -- as long as she can avoid an honor killing, or worse, a failed honor killing.