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Day: February 11, 2011

Horrifying Violence From The Religion Of Peace

February 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Sickening and disturbing and not for viewing by children:

This is video of an event that took place in Indonesia on the 6th of February.

1,000 Muslims attacked a small group of members of the Ahmadiyah sect, destroying their home and beating them to death.

The last few minutes are especially horrifying. The murders are over by then, and then these men take out their mobile phones, get their souvenir photos of the mutilated bodies, and casually stroll back to their families.

The courage of the one policeman who tries to stop them is amazing.

The violence comes less than three months after US President Barack Obama visited Indonesia and praised its “spirit of religious tolerance” as an “example to the world”.

Update: The response from the Indonesian government is to blame the members of Ahmadiyah:

Imran Muchtar, a lawmaker from the Democratic Party, said he agreed with the solution offered by the minister. “First, Ahmadiyah members should repent, recognize their mistake and come back to the mainstream Islam,” he said.

“The second option they have is to leave Islam and declare a new religion. Otherwise the conflict will never end.”

Hazrul Azwar, a lawmaker from the Islam-based United Development Party (PPP), called for stronger action.

“The Ahmadiyah should be disbanded permanently, as long as the government is not strict enough the conflict is never going to end,” he said. “The fake prophet is a disgrace to my religion. Clerics in the whole world have banned Ahmadiyah, why is the government not doing the same thing?”

Sarkozy Joins Merkel and Cameron

February 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

President of France Nicolas Sarkozy has joined UK Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in declaring recent attempts to force multi-culturalism onto Western communities a failure.

“We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him,” he said in a television interview in which he declared the concept a “failure.”

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said something similar last year at the World Jewish Congress. Perhaps people were not ready to listen then. That seems to be changing.

Some parts of his speech were quite confronting. A sample:

… major parts of the West are suffering a kind of crisis of identity. Europe is a good example. With a declining population, increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants, many of them exposed to radical ideas, multiculturalism has imposed itself as the politically correct way to deal with the challenges of different cultures living together even if some of them do not want to be integrated or do not respect the other.

The problem becomes all the more acute when judeo-christian values are aggressively challenged every day and the 68-generation that dominates our current leadership does nothing to defend them.

Peacenik Europe has been fighting the West for too long, and because of that has been so hypercritical of Israel.

The US provides a different story. At least until very recently. President Obama has put in motion forces that, if unchecked, may redefine the nation and its place in the world in ways that, to me, may cause major problems to all of us.

From his inauguration he has sought a new relationship with the Muslim world even at the cost of undermining America’s best ally in the region, as he has done with Europe in seeking to “press the reset button” in relations with Moscow.

He seems to have devoted more time and energy in organizing today’s meeting in Washington and advancing a new peace plan than in trying to prevent the Iranian regime from building its bomb. He has projected an image of somebody who wants to escape from the problems of the world, from Iraq to Afghanistan, embracing many enemies of America while punishing its traditional allies.

I don’t think the growing attacks against Israel, and the general campaign of deligitimation are unrelated to the crisis of the West, and more particularly, the crisis of confidence that emanates from the White House today.

Same Old Bogeyman

February 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Ron Burgess at Business Spectator describes Australian uber-alarmist Flim Flannery as ‘Labor’s new bogeyman.

I am not sure in what sense Flannery or his message are new. He has been constantly, amusingly wrong, but at least he has been consistent.

Ron says he doubts that Australian politicians, even those most stridently in the AGW (warming) camp, really believe what they are employing Tim Flannery to tell us to believe.

After all, you can judge what people really believe by what they do. If politicians like Wong and Garrett and Gillard really believed that human activity was causing catastrophic global warming, they would stop doing climate warmy stuff like flying everywhere and living in huge houses, and they would be doing their best to convince everyone else to do the same. But they’re not.

There’s an opnion that despite what they say, leftist politicians don’t really believe this. After all there’s no evidence for AGW and never has been (not that reality is a major factor in leftist policy development). They only espouse global warming alarmism because it gives an opportunity for restrictions on industry, and greater government control over almost every aspect of the lives of ordinary citizens.

I disagree. I think that on this, Wong, Garrett, Gillard, Turnbull, etc really do believe what they say they believe. People’s actions are not always consistent with what they believe, even if those beliefs are deeply and sincerely held.

In the case of politicians, the need to get re-elected is pre-eminent. After all, having high ideals and believing the right things is important, but if you are not in power, you can’t change law or policy. So it’s better to stay in power and do what you can, even if you think that is not enough, than to be out of power and not be able to do anything.

Here is where Ron Burgess’ assessment of this appointment is spot on. He says Flannery’s real job is to ‘put the wind up Australians.’ For non Australian readers, that means to scare people.

On paper, the primary role of Tim Flannery’s new position is to ‘provide independent information for members of the community … on three areas in particular: firstly, the science of climate change and its impacts on this country…’

We all know he is not going to do that. Independent information on the science of climate change is the last thing Flannery is interested in. He has made huge amounts of money by ignoring climate science. What he is an expert in is scaring people. Good choice for a bogeyman.

Except that, as I noted above, his scary predictions have been consistently wrong.

The problem for the Labor government is that this fact, and this appointment, make it clear right from the beginning that there is no objectivity, no interest in a fair assessment of climate science, no commitment to truth.

People are not buying this. The bogeyman just isn’t scary anymore.

Update: Saturday – Andrew Bolt has a useful and extensive list of Flannery’s failed predictions, and the cost imposed on the community by those who believed them.

Vile and Incomprehensible

February 11, 2011 / / 1 Comment

The horrifying thing about Tania’s Staker’s treatment of her children is not just that a mother could be so appallingly, horrifyingly cruel. Sadly, for individuals to have no regard for the needs or feelings or humanity of others is not that uncommon.

What is horrifying is that the three men who lived in that house also participated in the daily routine of physical and emotional abuse.

The other 21 children who lived there can be excused. They were children. And perhaps terrified themselves. The adults cannot.

Tania Staker - Mother and Monster

A WOMAN who masterminded a cruel regime of starvation “beyond comprehension” and fuelled by jealousy has been jailed for 10 years.

Today, the Supreme Court jailed Tania Marie Staker, 36, for her role in the neglect of five children at a northern suburbs house between February and June 2008.

Three men – the children’s father Luke Armistead, 38, Michael Quinlivan, 27, and Robert Armistead, 41 – were each sentenced to nine years in prison.

In sentencing, Justice Kevin Duggan said each of the adults had inflicted a daily routine of punishment “beyond comprehension” on the five siblings.

“It reached a point where the children were made to stand against a wall without moving … they were made to stand in the same position from morning until night.”

Each of the children were beaten, starved, choked and fed only the scraps left over after the other 21 children in the house had eaten a share of hot chips or noodles.

Random Conversations

February 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

News of the latest violent incident at a detention centre for illegal immigrants brought to mind a couple of recent conversations with customers.

The first was with a woman who said she could understand people wanting to get away from places that were violent, or where they couldn’t get enough to eat. If she were in that situation she would do everything she could to get her family out too.

‘But,’ she said, ‘if things really are that bad, and they come over here, and we make sure they’re safe, we feed them, we give them medicine, we teach their chidren, and all this costs them nothing, why are they so angry?’

‘I know it would not be nice being in detention, but they must know that’s reasonable if they arrive with no ID, and that if they are patient, most of them will be accepted?’

‘So how can being in a safe comfortable place be something you would riot over, and cause harm to property and other people?’

The second was with another female customer. She too had read recent stories of violence among illegal immigrants. She too was sympathetic to a desire to get one’s family away from poverty and violence.

‘But,’ she said, ‘these people have stuffed up their own countries. Or they live in countries which have been stuffed up. And some of those countries could be very rich. And then these people come over here, and they demand to have the same rules that made their countries so horrible. So why don’t we just say no, you can’t do that, and if you want to live like that, go back where you came from?’

Ratepayers Victoria President Jack Davis agrees:

“People come to Australia because it’s a better place,” he said. “So then you should become Australian and abide by the customs of Australia, not change Australia to suit your customs from another country.”

A Religion Cannot Be Bad…

February 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Nor can a culture. We all just have to accept one another and learn from one another.

Yes. Lovely. Except that accepting this lovely idea means ignoring virtually the whole of world history.

Andrew McCarthy at the NRO notes a particularly egregious example of sharia in practice – a fourteen year old girl who had been raped by a forty year old neighbour was sentenced to 100 lashes for illicit sexual activity, but died after 80 lashes.

14 Year Old Hena Begum Died After Receiving 80 Lashes for Having Been Raped

Andrew notes:

When I catalogue the horrors of sharia, I frequently hear in response that I am oversimplifying it, that I am relying on incorrect interpretations (oddly said to be inaccurate because they construe Islamic doctrine “too literally”), or that I fail to appreciate the richness and nuances of sharia jurisprudence that have made it possible for moderate Muslims to evolve away from the law’s harshness. Some even claim sharia is not a concrete body of law, just a set of  aspirational guidelines — as if Sakineh Ashtiani, the woman sentenced by an Iranian court to death by stoning, will merely be having advice, rather than rocks, thrown at her …

 These criticisms miss the point … It should by now be undeniable that there is an interpretation of sharia that affirms all its atrocious elements, and that this interpretation is not a fringe construction. It is mainstream and backed by very influential scholars who know a hell of a lot more about Islam than we in the West do. That makes it extremely unlikely that this interpretation will be marginalized any time soon. There is no agreed-upon hierarchical authority in Islam that can authoritatively pronounce that various beliefs and practices are heretical. The closest thing Muslims have is the faculty at al-Azhar University in Egypt, and it is a big part of the problem. Whether this fundamentalist interpretation is accepted by only 20 or 30 percent of Muslims — or whether, as I believe, the percentage is higher, perhaps much higher — that still makes it the belief system of almost half a billion people worldwide. That’s not a fringe.

No it’s not. And, pretending it is means we are blind to the likely outcome of elections in Egypt – another hardline islamist state – and to the infuence of that outcome on the rest of the Middle East.

Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish makes the same point, but better:

59 percent of Egyptian Muslims want democracy and 95 percent want Islam to play a large part in politics. 84 percent believe apostates should face the death penalty. That is what Egyptian democracy will look like. A unanimous majority that wants an Islamic state and a bare majority that wants democracy. Which one do you think will win out? A democratic majority of the country supports murdering people in the name of Islam. Mubarak’s government does not execute apostates or adulterers. But a democratic Egypt will. Why? Because it’s the will of the people.

The cheerleaders shaking their pom poms for Egyptian democracy don’t seem to grasp that the outcome could be anything other than positive …

We fought to free Korea and Vietnam from Communism, but we lacked one basic thing. Ground level support from the people we were fighting to protect. Today South Koreans like Kim Jong Il more than they like us. We fought to free the tyrants of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein. As a reward, they financed the terrorists who have been killing us ever since. We fought to free Iraq from Saddam, and the entire country imploded into armed camps. Our “Victory in Iraq” came about because we cut a deal with the Baathists against the Shiites and Al Qaeda, essentially restoring a broken version of Saddam’s old status quo. We fought to liberate Afghanistan, and now we find ourselves allied with some Muslim warlords who abuse women and rape little boys– against the other Muslim warlords who abuse women and rape little boys.

Handing out democracy like candy does not fix existing cultural problems. It does not end bigotry, free women or stop murder in the name of Allah. Open elections are only as good as the people participating in them. And the 84 percent of Egyptians who want to murder apostates have issues that democracy will not solve. The problem with Egypt is not Mubarak– but the Egyptians.

Let’s take another example. In Jordan, the next target on the freedom tour, King Hussein passed a bill to criminalize the honor killings of women. And their democratically elected parliament voted 60 to 25 to strike the bill down. It took them only 3 minutes. That’s what democracy would mean for the Jordanian girls murdered by their husbands, brothers and fathers. The right of the people and their duly elected representatives to legalize the murder of women …

Egypt’s period of greatest liberalization was under British rule. Since then its cosmopolitan nightspots have been torched and it has drifted closer to Islamization. Even Egypt’s current level of human rights under Mubarak is above that of most of its neighbors. And the reason for that is Mubarak’s ties to America. The more democratic Egypt becomes, the more its civil rights will diminish. Its rulers will see social issues as an easy way to compromise with the Muslim Brotherhood. As Egypt’s cultural ties to the West diminish, so will its freedoms …

A people who do not believe in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will not be free no matter how many times they go to the polls. You can place voting booths outside every home and run elections every week, and it will still do no good. Freedom may be the birthright of every man, woman and child on earth– but it cannot be theirs until they claim it. As long as they believe in the right of the majority to oppress the minority, in the value of order over liberty, and the supremacy of the mosque over any and all civil and legal rights– then they will never be free. Never. Their elections will either give rise to chaos or tyranny. That is how it is in the Middle East. That is how it will always be until they claim their birthright by closing the Koran and opening their minds.

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