April 1st, 2008, Brussels Journal:
The Austrian authorities have indicted politician Susanne Winter on charges of incitement and degradation of religious symbols and religious agitation. This offence carries a maximum sentence of two years. Last January, Ms Winter said that the prophet Muhammad was “a child molester” because he had married a six-year-old girl. She also said he was “a warlord” who had written the Koran during “epileptic fits.”Lawrence Auster:
The politician, a member of the Austrian Freedom Party FPÖ, an anti-immigration party which is in opposition, added that Islam is “a totalitarian system of domination that should be cast back to its birthplace on the other side of the Mediterranean.” She also warned for “a Muslim immigration tsunami,” saying that “in 20 or 30 years, half the population of Austria will be Muslim” if the present immigration policies continue.Following her remarks, Muslim extremists threatened to kill Susanne Winter and she was placed under police protection. Today, the Justice Department in Vienna announced that Ms Winter will be charged with “incitement and degradation of religious symbols” (Verhetzung und Herabwürdigung religiöser Symbole). If convicted she may have to serve up to two years in jail for her opinions.
However, Alfred Hrdlicka, the Austrian “artist” who depicted Jesus and his apostles engaging in homosexual acts of sodomy during the Last Supper, has not been indicted. Nor will he be. Depicting Jesus sodomizing his apostles is not considered to be a “degradation of religious symbols” in Austria, but referring to the historic fact that Muhammad married a six-year old girl is “incitement to racial hatred.” ...
How many people in online discussions and letters to the editor over the last six years have described the prophet Muhammad as a "child molester," because of his marriage to the nine year old Aisha (who, by the way, became his favorite wife and a close advisor)? Thousands and thousands, right? (I haven't. That's not my style. But many have.) Well, all those thousands of people would now be liable to be sentenced to prison for two years in Austria. That's what has just happened to Susanne Winter, a politician in Austria's right-wing Freedom Party, according to a report by Thomas Landen at Brussels Journal.Robert Spencer, The Truth About Muhammad:
A system of laws that imprisons people for calling Muhammad a child-molester--for stating an arguable historical fact about a man who lived 1,400 years ago--has gone Beyond the Fringe. It will collapse of its own absurdity.
Robert Spencer, Jan 2008:The Qur'an and Islamic tradition are clear that the Prophet is the supreme example of behavior Muslims are to follow. His importance to hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide is rooted in the Qur'an, the Muslim holy book. In brief, he is "an excellent model of conduct" (Qur'an 33:21). He demonstrates "an exalted standard of character" (68:4) ...
... to place Muhammad and Islam beyond criticism and even beyond lampooning ... would be death for a free society ...
Pedophile Prophet?
In 2002, Jerry Vines, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention said: "Christianity was founded by the virgin-born Jesus Christ. Islam was founded by Mohammed, a demon-possessed pedophile who had twelve wives, and his last one was a nine-year-old girl". Vines's words stirred immense controversy, most of which centered around his alleged "Islamophobia," without examining the factual basis for his words. The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on President Bush and religious leaders to denounce Vines's "reckless, Islamophobic statements."
Yet of these facts there can be little doubt. According to ahadith reported by Bukhari, the Prophet of Islam "married Aisha when she was a girl of six years of age, and he consumed [i.e., consummated] that marriage when she was nine years old." He was at this time in his early fifties. Many Islamic apologists claim - in the teeth of this evidence - that Aisha was actually older ... contrary to ... the Muslim historian quotes Aisha thusly: "The Messenger of God married me when I was seven; my marriage was consummated when I was nine".
However, other Muslim spokesman acknowledge what the records say. Islamic scholar Muhammad Ali Al-Hanooti said that Muhammad's marriage to Aisha was the will of Allah, and "... Aisha got married when she was nine, when the Prophet (SAAWS) died, she was nineteen.... What is wrong in her marriage of six or nine or whatsoever?"
Child marriages were common in seventh-century Arabia. It is noteworthy that there is no record in the Qur'an or Hadith of Muhammad having to defend his marraige to Aisha - in sharp contrast to his obvious defensiveness over his marriage to his former daughter-in-law, Zaynab bint Jahsh. Moreover, the Qur'an describes a culture in which child marriage is taken for granted ... Allah envisions a scenario in which a prepubescent woman is not only married, but also divorced by her husband.So was Muhammad a pedophile? The concept of pedophilia as a manifestation of deviant sexuality did not exist in the seventh century. In marrying Aisha, Muhammad was doing no more and no less than what was done by many men of his time, and no one thought twice about the matter until much later. From this perspective, Vine's charge is a bit anachronistic. However, in light of Muhammad's status for Muslims as the supreme example of human behavior, his marriage to Aisha becomes more important. Problems arise when an action like this is forcibly removed from its historical context and proposed as a paradigm for human beings of all times and places. Yet this is exactly what has happened in the umma. Imitating the Prophet of Islam, many Muslims even in modern times have taken child brides ... the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine ...
The Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl "a divine blessing," and advised the faithful: "Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house." ...
In Iran ... The law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them ... The onset of puberty is considered an appropriate time for a marriage to be consummated ...
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports that over half of the girls in Afghanistan and Bangladesh are married before they reach the age of eighteen. In early 2002, researchers in refugee camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan found half the girls married by age thirteen ...
This is the price that women have paid throughout Islamic history, and continue to pay, for Muhammad's status as "an excellent example of conduct" (Qur'an 33:21).
I wonder if, regarding Muhammad's marriage to a nine-year-old and its value as an example for Muslim men and Islamic jurists, truth and accuracy could be a defense. And I also wonder if she would be facing similar prosecution for insulting Jesus and Christianity. What do you think?Hugh Fitzgerald, May 2007:
... For Muhammad is the great figure of Islam, the Perfect Model of Behavior, the Perfect Man in Every Respect, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. Whatever he did, was right. Whatever he said was right, is right. Whatever behavior he exhibited, is model behavior.No, this is not an April Fools Day joke.
Most of us are by now familiar with his marriage to nine-year-old Aisha. He first spotted her, and was "betrothed" to her, when she was six. And yet if one brings this up with Muslims, many of them attempt to deny her age. They will claim such things as "oh, she was actually nineteen" or "oh, no one knows her exact age" or "the texts are unclear." ... They attempt to distract attention -- the Tu-Quoque part of the Taqiyya-and-Tu-Quoque, which long ago was alliteratively offered as a summary of Muslim propaganda techniques. Or they attempt to express amazement and surprise, and feign uncertainty ("I'll have to check on that"). If, however, you are sure of yourself and you hold your ground, and even dare to quote from the texts (quoting, say, the part about the little girl playing with her toys), if you adduce the evidence, then that embarrassed attempt at evasion becomes, suddenly, the fury it always was. Your Muslim interlocutor will reveal, under the smiles and wiles, quite soon and quite often, a hysterical rage.
And then you will be told, as well, that you are bringing this up for no good reason, you are merely interested in attacking Islam. And then there is the one final attempt to undo you: you are told that the parts about little Aisha are, in fact, being "taken out of context." ... We are told that "in the context of the time" Muhammad's marriage to the nine-year-old Aisha conforms to generally accepted mating principles.... when it is implied that "that was then, and this is now," then one has two replies to give. The first is that Muhammad is the Perfect Man. He is above criticism. What he did with Aisha is not merely for that time and that place. And second, Muslims now alive, or at least the truest of True Believers, have demonstrated this view most vividly. For when the learned Shi'a theologian Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, virtually his first act was to make sure the marriageable age of girls in Iran was lowered to nine years -- the very age of Aisha. Khomeini himself had been married to a ten-year-old, long ago, before the Shah had raised the age -- and he was determined to put it back in conformance with the practice of Muhammad.
The story of Aisha naturally sticks in minds, Muslim and non-Muslim. But there are so many other events in Muhammad's life. There is the decapitation of the hundreds of bound and helpless prisoners of the Banu Qurayza. There is the attack on the innocent and inoffensive Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis, attacked purely for the loot -- property and women -- that the attacking followers of Muhammad could help themselves to. There is the assassination of ... many dozens of examples.
And the scholars of Islam, that is those who wrote and studied before the great Curtain of Correctness Descended, knew all this and wrote about it. But the Thoughtcrime laws now being instituted in Europe and considered in America would make sure that the Curtain surrounded us on all sides, that we were enveloped in a Universal Darkness, unable to see things clearly, unable to fight for our own civilizational legacy. This would be a suicidal imposition of self-censorship that would go even farther than the voluntary self-censorship born of fear and confusion and a mistaken belief as to how to deal with what, some now realize, is a hideous problem created, quite unnecessarily, all over the Western world. For the political elites and the media, whose duty it is to instruct and to protect the populace, have instead been careless, almost criminally negligent -- in France, in Great Britain, in Germany, in Spain, in Sweden, in Norway, in Denmark, in the Netherlands, in Canada, in the United States, everywhere. They have neglected and refused to investigate the nature of Islam, and have instead relied on pieties and Articles of Faith. The piety, in an impious age, is that Islam Is A Religion Like Any Other ... everyone is too polite to notice that their behavior, in too many places, over too many centuries, has been too remarkably similar, from Spain to East Asia, over 1300 years, not to be based on the same promptings and ruled by the same laws -- laws about Jihad, and the subsequent subjugation and mistreatment of all non-Muslims ...
The Jihad will not be weakened if, all over the Western world, thoughtcrime legislation is permitted to pass. It must not.
More:
- Book Review - The Truth About Muhammad
- Austrian Politician Calls Prophet Muhammad a 'Child Molester'
- Books by Robert Spencer
- New York Times: Child Brides
Please Note: whilst this blog also deals at times with the issue of race, Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch hold the view that the anti-jihad resistance is not about race.
1 comment:
The ligislation will be brought in but it will be ignored!
We've had enough...No joke a lady was arrested in a KFC she asked for a burger but not a spicy one..it went no further after much stress for her.
Labour is malignant, not incompetent
By Simon Heffer
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 02/04/2008
The problem with accusing a government, or any institution or person, of incompetence is that it seems to excuse its motives.
Read more from Simon Heffer
Three Line Whip: Gordon Brown's immigration defence
When we say, as we should often feel the temptation to do, that the Labour administration that has governed us for the past 11 years is incompetent, we should be aware also that we are saying the following: that, but for its administrative and technical failings, it would have done well.
I do not believe this to be true. Despite the sheen of reason that Gordon Brown and, before him, Tony Blair and their chums have sought to put on all they do, this Government has had dark motives from the start.
It has followed policies deliberately that have enabled it to pursue its own political agenda - and this has always been a deeply politically motivated government in the way that Lady Thatcher's was, and that John Major's wasn't - and irrespective of some of the dire consequences that might flow from those policies.
The element of deliberation and deliberateness in what Labour has done makes an accusation of incompetence, or carelessness, seem wide of the mark. Things were meant to be this way.
Labour has pursued policies, be they social or economic, for ideological reasons: and when they fail, as so many have, it has not been because of slipshod administration. It is because that was how things were always going to work out.
advertisementI mention this in the specific context of the House of Lords report on the benefits - or lack of them - of mass immigration. The theory applies, however, to much else, immediate or not. Some feel that mass immigration happened by accident; or that Labour's economic miracle was, indeed, so miraculous that it required hecatombs of foreigners to come here and undertake it.
The second contention was paraded in an interview yesterday by the immigration minister, Liam Byrne, on Radio 4's Today programme. With one and a half million unemployed, perhaps the same again on nebulous "training schemes", and about three million on incapacity benefit - many of whom would, if asked, be fit for non-manual work - the idea that we have so small a pool of labour here that we must borrow from abroad is simply preposterous.
That does not stop Mr Byrne from saying the opposite. He must. He has to cover up for the deliberate decision taken at the time when Jack Straw was Home Secretary, and maintained (though he often protested to the contrary) by his successor, David Blunkett, that immigration controls should not be enforced.
Why was this decision taken? It was because of a doctrinally driven determination by the new Government in 1997 to destroy our national identity and to advance multiculturalism.
How funny it is now that we should have a Prime Minister - who as a member of the government at the time no doubt was busy when such decisions were made - who bangs on about "Britishness", amid the sound of the slamming of stable doors.
How amusing, too, that in the aftermath of four young British men blowing up themselves, and 52 other people, on public transport in London in 2005, many old Leftists should now decide that multiculturalism wasn't so great after all.
Mr Byrne well understands his political duty to try to minimise harmful perceptions of the awful consequences of this policy, and he sought, not especially successfully, to do that too in his interview. This process of denial is long-standing.
When eventually an immigration officer, Steve Moxon, had the courage to put his head above the parapet in 2004 and expose the lack of enforcement of controls, he was promptly sacked (as indeed was the then immigration minister, Beverley Hughes).
The Government had blithely ignored torrents of stories in the press about the inflow of "asylum seekers", who, in the days before the former Soviet bloc entered the EU, came here purely for economic reasons, and not because of any fear of persecution. Ministers - Mr Blunkett was especially good at this - started to talk about the impending mass deportation of illegal immigrants, but it never happened.
It was hard enough to find the political will to throw out those inciting terrorism and racial hatred against the indigenous Christian community, never mind removing those who were comparatively harmless.
So now, confronted with hard evidence that immigrants add a matter of pence each to our economic growth, while putting impossible strains on housing, transport and social services (and particularly in the south-east of England), Labour has to find excuses.
Mr Byrne's seemed to be that what happened was all very successful, so successful that it might have to stop. You will not hear him admit that it was a plan by Labour ideologues to shake up society, and to pursue the movement's traditional internationalism, in a cynical and determined way.
When one applies the doctrine on non-incompetence more widely, one hears other echoes. We have lived beyond our means not because economic growth has not, or will not, live up to its earlier billing, but because Mr Brown's priority was to create a client state of feather-bedded Labour voters.
Knowing it would harm economic stability, he set about printing money and borrowing excessively to put people on the public payroll, and to cushion hordes of the undeserving, Labour-voting poor with welfare benefits. This was not incompetent, however it might look: it was deliberate and stunning in its calculation.
So, too, for a further example, was education policy. A Marxist-driven philosophy of anti-elitism forced down standards: but if the level of attainment required to pass a public examination is forced down too, then, voilà! we all look much cleverer than we used to be.
The results of this only become apparent when the halfwits produced go out and try to run something, such as getting our railways repaired on time, or even Terminal 5.
Mr Brown also had a policy of making fathers redundant in families, by downgrading the state's respect for marriage, and providing a career structure for single mothers that included state-provided childcare.
Coupled with the Blairite policy of turning the police into a weapon of social engineering from one of crime fighting, he has presented us with today's under-achieving, feral youth, with its knives and guns, going around killing each other and making our cities seem like the dirtier suburbs of Los Angeles.
I know it is tempting to call these terrible things the results of government incompetence. They really are not. Mr Blair and Mr Brown between them chose to do these things, or allowed ministers and officials to do them.
They were all part of the plan for "change" (oh, how we love that word) after 18 years of Tory misrule.
We need to reflect more, indeed hourly, on how well those plans have turned out; and what should happen to those still in office who remain responsible for inflicting their bigotries and stupidities on the rest of us, under the guise of "progress".
Many replies were in support of the BNP.
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