November 10, 2010
October 10, 2010
Amsterdam failing to protect its gay population from attack
Ezra Levant looks at the worsening situation in Amsterdam for gay and lesbian residents:
If you think Amsterdam is the gay capital of Europe, you’re half-right, but 10 years out of date. Today it’s the gay-bashing capital of Europe.
Because Amsterdam isn’t just gay. Now it’s Muslim, too. A million Moroccans and Turks have immigrated to the Netherlands, and sharia law rules the streets.
If you doubt it, then you haven’t been paying attention. Actually, that’s not fair. Gay-bashing is front-page news only when it’s committed by a straight, white male.
The media is terribly uncomfortable writing about gay-bashing by minorities. It’s the same reason why Canadian feminists are so eerily quiet about honour killings of Muslim girls.
According to an “offender study” by the University of Amsterdam, there were 201 reports of anti-gay violence in that city in 2007 and researchers believe for every reported case there are as many as 25 unreported ones. Two thirds of the predators are Muslim youths.
The violence couldn’t be more brazen. It’s not in the back alleys in the dark, it’s in the heart of the city, often in broad daylight. It’s a direct dare to the Dutch government to show who rules the streets.
We’ve already seen how wary the Dutch government has been about protecting freedom of speech (when the speech offended Muslim sensibilities). Now we’re starting to see how little protection from violence the police can offer. The Netherlands have had a reputation for tolerance for decades, but it won’t last much longer if the authorities don’t start cracking down on this kind of flagrant criminality.
September 15, 2010
The real results of Turkey’s referendum
Austin Bay is still hopeful for a secular Turkish government, but the results of the recent referendum don’t encourage quite as much hope:
Turkey’s leading political organizations both portray the choice between them as “either us or darkness.” This rhetorical demonization is typical of successful democracies. Ataturk deserves credit for establishing a democratic structure that survived his death in 1938 by 72 years.
Turkey’s actual circumstances, however, are much more complex and murky. Start with the referendum’s irony. The constitution had many undemocratic articles and was in fact imposed by the military after a coup in 1980. The European Union ruled that many of these elements did not meet EU membership standards. Thus the ironic situation of an Islamist political party promoting constitutional changes in order to meet Western European democratic standards. Aligning Turkey with Europe was one of Kemal Ataturk’s long-term goals.
Yet the judicial reforms approved this week may be an anti-democratic trap door, for they give the AKP the ability to limit systemic checks and balances on executive power. The AKP can pack the courts. The judiciary has protected the Turkish military. The AKP distrusts the military because it fears a coup, and with good reason. The military sees itself as the protector of the secular state and a bulwark against Muslim fundamentalist usurpation.
September 8, 2010
When the guys who do Monster Truck ads meet religious fanatics
H/T to BoingBoing.
September 7, 2010
A different kind of “outreach”
Looks like Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center got exactly the level of attention he was looking for:
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said the planned burning of Qurans on Sept. 11 by a small Florida church could put the lives of American troops in danger and damage the war effort.
Gen. David Petraeus said the Taliban would exploit the demonstration for propaganda purposes, drumming up anger toward the U.S. and making it harder for allied troops to carry out their mission of protecting Afghan civilians.
“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort,” Gen. Petraeus said in an interview. “It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”
Over at Fark.com, they have a highly appropriate term for people like Mr. Jones: they call them “attention whores”. Seems to fit.
On the other hand, wouldn’t an appropriate counter-protest involve a small mosque in Kabul burning some Christian bibles? I wonder why nobody’s doing that instead of the mass protests being threatened? It should probably be noted that this church has fifty members: hardly the mainstream of American religious belief.
September 6, 2010
When “informers” become “enablers”
Stephan Salisbury writes that many “foiled” terror plots could never have become actual threats . . . without government assistance:
Informers have by now become our first line of defense in our battles with the evildoers, the go-to guys in the never-ending domestic war on terror. They regularly do the dirty work — suggesting and encouraging the plots, laboring as bag men to move the money, fashioning the bombs, and eliciting the flamboyant dialogue, even while following the scripts of their handlers to the letter. They have attended to all the little details that make for the successful and now familiar arrests, criminal complaints, trials, and (for the most part) convictions in the ever-distracting war against . . . what? Al-Qaeda? Terror? Muslims? The inept? The poor?
The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four — each has had their fear-filled day in the sun. None of these plots ever came close to happening. How could they? All were bogus from the get-go: money to buy missiles or cell phones or shoes and fancy duds — provided by the authorities; plans for how to use the missiles and bombs and cell phones — provided by authorities; cars for transport and demolition — issued by the authorities; facilities for carrying out the transactions — leased by those same authorities. Played out on landscapes manufactured by federal imagineers, the climax of each drama was foreordained. The failure of the plots would then be touted as the success of the investigations and prosecutions.
It’s often been observed that war is the health of the state. Can we now also say that the war on terror is the health of the intelligence agency?
H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.
September 2, 2010
“How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face?”
Along with the manifold military problems facing the troops in Afghanistan, there are some social issues that tend to boggle the minds of the western soldiers:
Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy’s father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to “touch and fondle them,” military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. “The soldiers didn’t understand.”
[. . .]
Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can’t even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.
“How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face,” 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. “We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful.”
Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: “Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are “unclean” and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli’s team “how his wife could become pregnant,” her report said. When that was explained, he “reacted with disgust” and asked, “How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?”
It’s a telling point that western troops were committed to Afghanistan without being fully briefed on the social customs of the people for whom and among whom they’d be doing their jobs. Ignorance isn’t a solid basis for any kind of trust, and without gaining the trust of locals, the troops will always be at a severe informational disadvantage.
September 1, 2010
QotD: Tolerance Does Not Require Approval
Why does the First Amendment enshrine both speech and religion as things the state shall not legislate against or establish an approved version thereof? To formalize “tolerance” without requiring “approval.”
In this wise, it is possible to form a society of individuals with vastly different ideas and religions in which the liberty of all is respected by all. In essence we agree that I tolerate your worship of a moon god and you tolerate my worship of a tree. It’s “live and let live” at the most basic level. If, on the other hand, you decide that I have to make continuous noises of “approval” of the moon god in order for you to grant me the right to worship the tree god in peace, we are headed towards an argument that ends in guns.
At its most basic the American tradition is that I don’t require approval of my beliefs from you and you don’t insist on my approval of your beliefs. Regardless of what we may do, we tacitly agree not to do things which exacerbate a state of mutual disrespect. We mutually agree not to get in each others faces about these issues with acts like, oh I don’t know, building a temple to the moon god so that it casts a shadow across my cemetery. Doing so starts a process of disrespect that also tends, if history is any guide, to end in guns and fire.
“Toleration does not require approval.” It really is the simplest of social compacts and like all great and simple ideas bringing in nuance and qualifiers doesn’t strengthen our common bonds as society but weakens it. This is well-known to those that seek to create a climate of continual upheaval in the mistaken belief that, in the end, the fire will not consume them. Civil war consumes all.
Gerard Vanderleun, “Tolerance Does Not Require Approval”, American Digest, 2010-08-27
August 7, 2010
July 7, 2010
Recycled propaganda still doing its job
Strategy Page points out that even recycled propaganda can be effective:
Palestinian media, both Fatah and Hamas controlled, have undertaken a media campaign to arouse popular anger against Israeli plans to destroy the al Aqsa mosque. The problem here is that there are no Israeli plans to destroy al Aqsa. This complex is built on the site of two Jewish temples. The last one was destroyed by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago. Israel has always provided security for al Aqsa, but the Palestinians find it convenient to keep alive unfounded fears that Israel will, at any moment, destroy al Aqsa and rebuild their temple. This is what some religious extremists (Jewish and Christian) want, and one reason for the tight Israeli security around al Aqsa (which is otherwise controlled by Moslem religious authorities.) This fear mongering is a big deal among the Palestinians, but generally ignored, or simply unknown, outside Israel.
The numerous al Aqsa scare stories in the Palestinian media (replete with cartoons straight out of similar 1930s Nazi propaganda) are rarely recognized as a reason why Israel and the Palestinians cannot negotiate a peace deal. Arab and Western nations are again trying to organize peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis, with the goal of achieving a peace deal, and an independent Palestinian state. The “al Aqsa threatened by the Jews” propaganda campaign is one reason why these peace talks tend to go nowhere. The Palestinian strategy, which they make no secret of, is to keep harassing Israel until, as many Palestinians believe, the Jews will flee the Middle East and Israel will disappear. On Palestinian maps, it already has.
July 6, 2010
June 4, 2010
Turkey’s media-distorted view of the world
A couple of pieces came to my attention today, discussing the Turkish view of the rest of the world. What used to be the most secular Muslim-majority middle eastern country appears to be shifting in some unfortunate directions. First, Claire Berlinski reports from Istanbul (where she lives) on what is actually known about the Mavi Marmara incident:
Here is what we don’t know. We don’t know why the Turkish government allowed the Mavi Marmara to sail. While it’s clear that some indeterminate proportion of the passengers were Islamist thugs, it’s also clear that many of the passengers were naive civilians. (You cannot argue that a one-year-old child is anything but a naive civilian.) We don’t yet know whether there was an active plot, among the thugs, to provoke this confrontation, or whether they decided to attack the Israeli commandos in an access of spontaneous enthusiasm. If the former, we don’t know whether the AKP government was aware of the organizers’ intentions or whether it never seriously considered the possibility. We can speculate, based on known connections between the İnsan Hak ve Hürriyetleri İnsani Yardım Vakfı, which organized the expedition, and well-known extremist groups, that this was a trap, set deliberately. We can speculate that the Turkish government conceived of the trap or lent it tacit support. But thus far we have no evidence.
Why might the Turkish government have permitted a Turkish boat packed with women, children, stupid people, and Islamic extremists to sail into the world’s most volatile military conflict zone? Why, especially, did they permit this while knowing that the Israeli government had made explicit its intention to stop that boat, by force if necessary? It’s tempting to think that the Turkish government anticipated or desired this outcome, all the more so if one looks at this conflict through a certain prism, to wit: one in which Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is an Islamist nut intent upon establishing Turkish hegemony over the Islamic world by becoming the populist champion of the Palestinians, even at the risk of provoking an all-out regional war. I don’t dismiss that possibility.
But in fact, bad decisions can be made in infinitely many human ways. It’s also possible that Erdoğan sincerely believed that the boats had been properly inspected and were free of any weapons, and therefore no serious conflict could occur. It’s possible that he spoke to the organizers of the flotilla and came away with assurances about their intentions; or that he simply thought the Israelis were bluffing; or that his mind was on other things.
And Robert Pollock looks at how the media has portrayed events since Prime Minister Erdoğan came to power:
To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don’t speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn’t really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States.
For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about “Who lost Turkey?” when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. “organ market.”
The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.
I had no idea that the media in Turkey were so . . . what’s the best way to describe it? Rabid? Insane? Unbalanced? Every country (with a free-ish press) has some news outlets that have an uneven relationship with reality, but it sounds like most of the media in Turkey would qualify as detached from the mundane world.
May 18, 2010
Posts of interest
A few links you may find worth your attention:
- Publius explains that it’s no surprise that the Conservatives don’t want to support Toronto’s Pride Parade. I’m not at all against the parade, I just don’t think it’s a valid use of federal tax money.
- The creative staffers at Reason offer some help to the Environmental Protection Agency — three propaganda contest entries.
- Test your Facebook privacy settings. (Disclaimer: I haven’t tried this myself, so I can’t speak for how well it works).
- And on the topic of privacy, the EFF warns that the next big thing in privacy breaches: your web browser leaves identifiable “fingerprints” when you surf.
- Do you have a digital executor? If you’re reading this, you probably should.
- Everyone Draw Mohammed Day
March 26, 2010
Confusion over Quebec’s anti-burkha moves
Even in the same newspaper, the conclusions are drawn based on the observer’s preferred worldview, rather than the facts of the case. In the National Post, here’s Barbara Kay’s ringing endorsement for a pro-equality outcome:
Chapeau, le Québec! That means, “Hats off to you, Quebec.”
With the announcement of Bill 94, barring the niqab in publicly funded spaces, Quebec has dared to tread where the other provinces, feet bolted to the floor in politically correct anguish, cannot bring themselves to go.
The new bill will proscribe face cover by anyone employed by the state, or anyone receiving services from the state. That covers all government departments and Crown corporations, and as well hospitals, schools, universities and daycares receiving provincial funding.
I can’t remember a time when Quebecers were more unified on a government initiative.
Also in the National Post, here’s Chris Selley doing his best Inigo Montoya imitation:
I’m not quite sure what Quebec’s new Bill 94 means, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean what Premier Jean Charest and Immigration Minister Yolande James are saying it means.
Here’s Ms. James: “To work in the Quebec public service or to receive the services of the Quebec state, your face has to be uncovered.”
Here’s Mr. Charest: “Two words: Uncovered face. The principle is clear.”
And here’s Bill 94: “The general practice holds that a member of the staff of the administration of government . . . and a person to whom services are being rendered . . . will have their faces uncovered during the rendering of services.”
Huh? General practice? Oh: “When an accommodation involves a change to this practice, it must be refused if motives related to security, communication or identification justify it.”
So there will be accommodations, then? You sure wouldn’t have known it from Wednesday’s news conference.
All that being said, I can’t disagree with the sentiment later in Barbara Kay’s column:
Some of these women may, as in France, have adopted the niqab for ideological purposes (a serious problem in itself), but most niqab-wearing women are virtual prisoners, who have never known, and would be afraid (with reason) to exercise their “freedom of choice.”
For those confused liberals who instinctively hate the niqab but feel guilty about banning it, it will help them if they understand that the burka and niqab are not “worn,” but “borne.” The niqab is not an article of clothing; it is a tent-like piece of cloth supplemental to clothing. Full cover is worn as a reminder to the “bearer” that she is not free, and to remind the observer that the bearer is a possession, something less than a full human being.
Update: The National Post editorial board comes out against the Quebec bill:
Gender equality — a stated goal of Bill 94 — is a noble goal. But the law would go too far, using the state’s power to leverage a campaign of social engineering. As conservatives, we oppose such encroachments on individual liberties. But liberals, too, should understand the stakes at play here: The principle that government has no role in our wardrobes is the same one that excludes it from our bedrooms.
In the short term, the better approach is the one recently embarked upon by several Quebec schools, where administrators have common-sensically resolved the issue of what constitutes “reasonable accommodation” on a case-by-case basis. In the long term, moreover, we are convinced that legislation won’t be necessary at all: Muslim groups themselves increasingly are joining the chorus against the niqab, a welcome development that puts the lie to the notion that Canadian Muslims are uniformly backward in their attitudes toward women.
It would benefit women, Muslims, inter-faith relations and Canadian values alike if this unfortunate practice were extinguished voluntarily by the affected community itself rather than by heavy-handed state edict.
March 23, 2010
Even parliamentarians have to watch what they say
A British member of parliament was investigated by the police after a complaint from a would-be British equivalent to one of our infamous Human Rights Commissions, for an ill-advised comparison of a burkha to a paper bag:
A race equality council was “outrageous” for complaining to police about criticism of the burka in a political debate, an MP said today.
Tory Philip Hollobone said he faced a police investigation after he dubbed the burka “the religious equivalent of going around with a paper bag over your head with two holes for the eyes”.
Northamptonshire Race Equality Council contacted police after the comment made during a parliamentary debate last month.
[. . .]
“There will be those who agree and those who disagree, and that is fine. What we cannot have in this country are MPs being threatened when they speak out on contentious issues.
“The judgment of the Northamptonshire Race Equality Council is quite wrong in speaking to police as they haven’t tried to engage in any debate.
“I have no criticism of the police — the police have behaved impeccably. But I do have huge criticisms of the Northamptonshire Race Equality Council, which is a taxpayer-funded organisation and should not be spending time trying to prosecute members of parliament. Their behaviour is outrageous.”
The fact that he’s an MP only makes this story more news-worthy, but it does illustrate just how circumscribed freedom of speech has become.
