Thursday, July 23, 2009

Knives, Bricks, and Sulphuric Acid

Cultural Enrichment News

There has been another attempted “honor killing” in the UK, but it’s not particularly Islamic. No, not at all. Nothing to do with the Religion of Peace. We are enjoined to keep in mind the fact that all religions engage in the same type of behavior:

“…But this type of horrible crime is not exclusive just to Muslims, there have been cases in other religions.”

Yes, this is essence of what might be called the “Tu Quoque Thesis”. But if you collect reports of all such incidents and tabulate them, how many were actually committed by non-Muslims?

The “hijab martyr” who was murdered recently in a German courtroom received such wide publicity because she was so unusual. If the murderer had been a Muslim, the incident would scarcely have merited a line or two in the back pages of the regional dailies.

Here’s a video from Sky News about the latest incident in East London:


In the BBC version, only the Danish nationality of the victim is mentioned. If you relied on the Beeb, you’d have no idea that this was more than some weird Viking berserker incident:

Two men are due to appear in court charged with trying to kill a man by pouring sulphuric acid down his throat.

The 24-year-old victim, who is believed to be Danish, was also stabbed twice in the back in Leytonstone, east London, on 2 July.

But the The Daily Mail has somewhat more detail:

Cheating Wife Could Face ‘Honour Killing’ After Acid is Poured Down Her Lover’s Throat

A married Muslim woman has been warned by police that she could be murdered after her lover was attacked with sulphuric acid.

The 24-year-old Muslim man had the acid poured down his throat and was stabbed and beaten with bricks by four men.

He is not expected to live after suffering 90 per cent burns in the London attack, which blinded him and left his tongue destroyed.

The Danish victim, who is of Asian origin, is said to have ‘insulted’ her strictly religious relatives, which includes women who wear the hijab.
- - - - - - - - -
Detectives believe the family feared being shamed in the community.

Police are said to be discussing how best to protect the woman.

Her lover was attacked at about 2am on July 2 in Leytonstone close to a room he had rented to be near his married lover. She also lives in East London.

One witness saw the attack from her window. She told the Evening Standard: ‘I saw four men lashing out and kicking him on the ground. I shouted and they ran off, then one went back and started on him again.

‘The poor man got up and ran straight into a tree, then staggered back to his house, tugging at his burning clothes and banging on doors shouting for water.’

Another witness, Kay Dice, 52, added: ‘He was screaming and screaming, but he spoke little English and some people thought he may have just had too much to drink.

‘I thought he had a huge cross on his back, but it was where his skin had peeled away.’

The man had moved into a bedsit nearby a few weeks before but residents said they did not know his name.

Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford where the victim is being treated. He is not expected to live after suffering 90 per cent burns in the attack, which blinded him and left his tongue destroyed

Community leader Imtiaz Qadir, of the Active Change Foundation, said: ‘Honour crime happens a lot in our community, especially the Pakistani community, but we do try to educate the people.

‘It’s a cultural thing from back home. But this type of horrible crime is not exclusive just to Muslims, there have been cases in other religions.’

The man was on life support in Broomfield Hospital, Chelmsford, today where his condition is thought to have worsened.

Some Muslim women are at risk of honour killings for ‘shaming’ their family’s reputation (file picture)

A teenager and a 25-year-old were due to appear in court today charged with trying to kill him by pouring acid down his throat.

The two suspects, who cannot be named for legal reasons, will face Waltham Forest Magistrates this afternoon after being charged with attempted murder, Scotland Yard said.

Police have arrested seven young men in total in relation to the enquiry. Five have been freed on bail.

Honour killings have been recorded among Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Christian communities but occur predominantly in immigrant families from south Asia and the Middle East.

The perceived ‘dishonour’ is normally down to ‘unacceptable’ dress codes or engaging in certain sexual acts or adulterous behaviour.

The killings result from the perception that the defence of honour justifies the death of a person whose behaviour dishonours their clan or family.

A Home Office and police study found thousands more honour crimes including an estimated 400 forced marriages each year.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, the annual worldwide total of honour killing victims may be as high as 5,000.

Notice that the woman has been given an “Osman warning”, the same official notification that Lionheart recently received. In essence, the police tell you that your life is in danger from a specific person or persons, but that they can do nothing to help you. You’re on your own, and for practical purposes your choices are to flee the country as quickly as possible, or to change your appearance via plastic surgery and live under an assumed name.

“Diversity is Strength.”


For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.

Hat tips: Gaia and Vlad Tepes.

26 comments:

James Higham said...

After some time, the cloven foot pops out.

Zenster said...

Community leader Imtiaz Qadir, of the Active Change Foundation, said: ... ‘It’s a cultural thing from back home. But this type of horrible crime is not exclusive just to Muslims, there have been cases in other religions.

The usual tu quoque (or, "you too") sort of bullcrap arguments Muslims are so fond of. Our recent participant Solkhar simply cannot stop using similar methods as he attempts to deflect away examinations of why Islam alone is responsible for so much of this world's violence.

I urge all GoV participants to read Lawrence Auster's 2005 article on why the continued hope for "moderate" Muslims is just that, a hope without any rational basis for actual belief in it.

The Search for Moderate Islam

Read all four pages of this excellent work. I have not seen a better article that details why the "moderate" Muslim remains a chimera and poses a serious threat to Western efforts at survival. It may well be Auster's finest work ever.

Chechar said...

Ditto, Zenster. Although the article is long, it's must reading: Auster convincingly demolishes the myth of moderate Islam.

Anonymous said...

Zenster
Or this

Strategies of Denial by Hugh Fitzgerald

Henrik R Clausen said...

'Asian' in this context means, with some 95% certainty, 'Pakistani', I guess. Remarkable how the Thais, Vietnamese or Tibetans never do evil stuff like this...

The mandatory moral equivalence concerning the 'Honour killing' ("Family execution" is really a better term anyway) is inserted to prevent justified ourtage and to keep normal people from getting upset and demanding appropriate reactions.

As for appropriate reaction, I recommend this one:

All Islamic scholars, muftis in particular, should actively condemn any such attacks, and participation therein, as utterly un-Islamic. And issue fatwas to the effect that anyone implicated will no longer be considered to be Muslims, but rather apostates - with the obvious implication that has.

I think we should raise this obviously peaceful and tolerant demand whenever Muslims do stupid things in the name of their religion. My guess, of course, is that the muftis will do the equally stupid thing of ignoring the matter, thus embarrassing themselves with a degree of complicity in the crimes.

Anonymous said...

Attacks using acids have been used regularly in Kashmir agaoinst girls who wish to go to school or university.

Then we have this

Acid attacks scar 13 Christians as 600 Muslims firebomb their village..


All of this, from the time of Mohammed, is Jihad, ie the permanent struggle to bring the world under the sway of Islam.

Anonymous said...

In Auster's article, he quotes Pipes, that identifying the moderate Muslim from the fundamental one, is a very difficult task.

It is going to get much harder as time goes by. Not only will the fundamenatlist Muslim speak English or Danish with the same degree of fluency as a native, but that the funadmentalist Muslim will adopt mannerisms and attitudes, that will beguile any attempt to unmask him. The other thing to note is that the moderate Muslim can, at a moments notice, become a fundamentalist.

In this context, an article in Canadian National Post.The writer is despondent, as in here

Pathetic? Sicko? By offering the views of Wahhabist Islam on homosexuals in words she borrowed directly from our culture, Ms. N was demonstrating that acculturation, a much-touted remedy for the risk of fragmentation in immigrant societies, isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

Jihad rules! Jews suck!

Yup.

Chechar said...

DP111: Thanks for that article, “Strategies of Denial”, by Hugh Fitzgerald. It explains the basic etiology of today’s anti-racist hysteria (today “racist” is the equivalent word to “heretic” of other times). Here I quote Fitzgerald’s article:

“In Europe, the failure to recognize the reality, the meaning, the menace, really, of Islam, can be attributed to a variety of developments. After World War II, anything that smacked of “racism” was to be deplored. That, sixty years later, the realization then of the terrible crimes that had been committed against the Jews, and the revulsion – though not so often guilt – felt by many Europeans, and all of the institutions that had been created, such as the U.N., in a determined spirit of making sure that such things as genocide would not be repeated, and all the brave declarations made, and treaties signed, and committees set up – all this has now been exploited not to rescue the victims of antisemitism, but to rescue those who, at present, are the major carriers and spreaders of antisemitism – Muslims in the Middle East and, now, in Western Europe.

How did it happen?

Let’s start with the movement of peoples, the contemporary Volkswanderung. The British, in the late 1940s or early 1950s, passed an act which allowed entry into Great Britain of people who arrived from countries that once formed part of the British Empire. It was not contemplated that so many would come, just as it could hardly have been foreseen that the generous welfare state set up by the Labor Party of Attlee and Aneurin Bevan would find that many of those most adept at taking advantage of that welfare state would turn out to be, not British taxpayers, but people who were not British but had simply managed to come to, to settle deep within, Great Britain, from distant and different places. And among those who came in the greatest numbers, starting in the 1950s …”


Was this before what Bat Ye’or calls Eurabia?

There was, after World War II, the second self-inflicted wound in Western Europe within little more than a quarter-century, a loss of civilizational morale. There was hatred of, and fear of being accused of, anything that might smack of “racism.” There was a noticeable decline in the quality of the elites, and indeed, the very idea of a civilizational or cultural elite, that would lay down the law. This was replaced by cultural egalitarianism, by a belief, all over the West, that everything had value, and the word “culture” itself lost its earlier significance, of “high culture” to become the “culture” we have today, a word which merely describes what is going on, from Brad and Angelina, to hip-hop, or their equivalents in every European country….”

So Europe died in Auschwitz?

laine said...

The Auster article is from 2005 (first class analysis) and in the intervening time, the West has gone precisely along the path he predicted would lead to our doom. Namely, we waste energy and resources on a wild goose chase for mythical moderate Islam and moderate Muslims who are a mostly a takiya construct helped along by self-deluding liberals who just cannot accept over a billion people not liking them to the point of wishing them and their culture dead or under the Muslim heel.

As a result, we weaken ourselves by talking as one of our contributors pointed out "Islam and Muslims all the time", much of it liberals BUILDING THEM UP while our own civilization is neglected or denigrated.

Muslims take up way more oxygen than they are entitled to by their numbers in the west and their accomplishments world wide. What a bunch of non-achievers collectively for all their huge numbers and billions in unearned oil wealth. Not a single country out of 57 they dominate is a success by the standard of equal human rights for all citizens, education and reasonable average standard of living. No wonder the traffic is all one way from Muslim to non-Muslim countries.
They seek what they cannot themselves create but want to own it without working for it as the caliphate was built on the knowledge of subjugated peoples.

It's time to take off the kid gloves (literally when handling Korans in Guantanamo) and go on the verbal offensive. Merely telling the truth about Islam and its practices both historic and contemporary is damning enough. It's time to reintroduce some words into discussions with Muslims like hypocrisy and reciprocity and how what they call honor is shameful by western standards.

The fact that Muslims hate any truthful discussion about Islam's hostile and inhumane practices and start calling people names is no reason to stop. That's Solkhar's sole purpose here, to dangle himself as the elusive moderate Muslim and try to misdirect as many discussions as he can. He's a terrible actor though.

Anyone who's read real moderate Muslims knows a) they're vanishingly rare b) they are painfully ashamed by what's being done by their co-religionists in the name of Islam c) they direct their efforts toward curbing the jihadis often risking harm from the Muslim main stream community and d) they do not patronize or harangue non-Muslims but agree that their recoil from Islam's acts is justified.

However, as Auster pointed out the Muslim individuals who are moderate are disorganized, have no significant following in the umma, have to be propped up by western military might in Iraq and Afghanistan and any concessions given to them are concessions available to the much more numerous and powerful jihadi Muslims and their followers.

Henrik R Clausen said...

So Europe died in Auschwitz?

Fields of Flanders, I'd suggest. WWII was a follow-up of unsettled scores, and a slug-fest between various brands of socialism, with France and Britain a bit on the sidelines. WWI had the first modern-day genocides (Armenian, Assyrian), from which the Germans learned a *lot*. The 21 years between those two wars read, to the trained eye, like a bundle of threads leading from one disaster to the next.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Auster quotes Pipes "Moderate Muslims who wish to live modern lives, unencumbered by burqas, fatwas, and violent visions of jihad, are on the defensive and atomized. They must be helped: celebrated by governments, publicized in the media, given grants by foundations".

Auster quite rightly regards this process as a sham, as it means that the West will have to create, encourage and protect, an artificial moderate Islam. I can see vast amounts of money being thrown at self-proclaimed Moderate Muslim organisations(Guess - It is already happening in the UK). It is of course worse then that. What Auster misses is that in creating and encouraging moderate Muslim institutions, we will be setting up Islamic institutions, that in the future will be used against us. A future generation of Muslims will thank the past "moderates" for being really smart.

Chechar said...

* "What Auster misses is that..."

You mean "What Pipes misses..."?

laine: I agree about the importance of Auster’s article and what you say about our learned commenter from Morocco. Time is precious and GoV readers must consider spending it intelligently; for example, by reading articles like Auster’s on “moderate” Islam, instead of feeding moderate trolls. Enough is enough.

Zenster said...

DP111: Strategies of Denial by Hugh Fitzgerald.

The usual top quality work from Fitzgerald but not so precisely tuned as Auster's.

Auster's use of Daniel Pipes as a foil is pure genius and his counterarguments are devastating.

A most telling aspect of his refutations lies in noting how often liberal visions regarding any moderation of Islam supposedly lie in what we must, can or should do.

The absurd notion that Islam can somehow be saved from itself would be laughable were it not the current poster child of liberal and neoconservative causes alike.

We owe Islam precisely nothing.

Islam's continued survival isn't about what we must, can or should do, it is about what Islam has to do in order to coexist with a far more well-armed world that will simply put Muslims down like rabid dogs if they continue to prey upon our culture.

Chechar said...

Auster's piece is 10,000 words, but it merits close study. It contains irrefutable arguments we could use against those who still believe in the existence of a moderate Islam.

The refutation is so overwhelming that recently I saw a video in which Pipes himself recognizes that the concept of moderate Islam is, presently, a figment in the imagination of some scholars.

Anonymous said...

Chechar

No. Auster regards the whole process as a sham, and leaves it at that. I regard it as creating a creature that will eventually bite us.

Anonymous said...

While on the topic of killings that salvage honour where there is none.

Canada Honor Killing

Canada Honor Killings

As Robert Spencer notes, ""Afghani culture." Not "Islamic culture." Certainly not "Islamic law." And never will you see a story that says that polygamy is "sanctioned by the Qur'an."

Zenster said...

DP111: Auster regards the whole process as a sham, and leaves it at that. I regard it as creating a creature that will eventually bite us.

I do believe Auster makes that same observation as well. Propping up so-called "moderate" Muslims only breathes life into an animal that will attack us later.

Chechar said...

I’ve found the video cited in my above post. Last year Pipes acknowledged:

“…moderate Islam by and large is an hypothesis. It doesn’t really exist yet. It exists in the minds of a few people… at this point it’s barely there.”

Anonymous said...

Zenster

I did not pick that up, but if he says so, fair enough.

Zenster said...

DP111: While on the topic of killings that salvage honour where there is none.

Callous as it may sound, I might eventually get over Muslims chlorinating their own gene pool except you know damn well that once they've killed all of their "unclean" family members, they'll come after our own to while away their spare time.

Pack them all off back to their respective Islamic utopias and let them kill each other with the typical abandon so common among Muslims.

Anonymous said...

Zenster

"Salvage" is an appropriate word, as Steyn reports another 3 Muslim women "drowning" in a pool in Canada.

Steyn:

Police say 14-year-old Kinza Kaianad died Monday evening at Kingston General Hospital as a result of injuries she sustained Saturday in a hotel pool in Gananoque, roughly 30 kilometres east of Kingston.

Her mother, 43-year-old Naila Yasmin, died in hospital on Sunday.

Yasmin, Kaianad and another daughter, age 11, were found unconscious in the indoor hotel pool just before 9 a.m. Saturday.

There would seem to be a statistically improbable number of multiple drownings of female members of Muslim families in Kingston this summer. If you're a young female Muslim, and you have any say in the matter, you might want to vacation elsewhere.

Watery Graves

----------------------------------
Muslim populations are increasing rapidly, and the pressure on their governments to provide jobs and maoney is intense. So far they have managed to export that pressure to Europe and the West. As a consequence, Muslims and Muslim countries, have not had to face the consequences of Islam.

If Muslim immigration was stopped, and Muslims repatriated back, using the good reason that their presence could lead to civil unrest and unnecessary casualties, then Muslim nations will have to face the truth of Islam. Only severe trauma will lead to an examination of the tenets of Islam, and hopefully, their eventual moderation. If it happens, then we will all be very happy. If it does not, then they will be far way from us.

Though it is harsh and against the principles of compassion, I have to agree with you. I fear serious civil unrest, maybe leading to civil war otherwise.

Zenster said...

DP111: Muslim populations are increasing rapidly, and the pressure on their governments to provide jobs and maoney is intense. So far they have managed to export that pressure to Europe and the West. As a consequence, Muslims and Muslim countries, have not had to face the consequences of Islam. [emphasis added]

While we are most probably in raucous, violent agreement, I must still argue that Muslims and Muslim countries have had to "face the consequences of Islam".

Islam is the precise reason why these Muslim utopias are the tyrannous cesspits that they continue to be.

It is the elitist nature of Islam―embodied in the practice of Dhimmitude―that has overly concentrated wealth and power in a tiny proportion of regional clerics, scholars, financiers and political leaders.

Only because these power brokers have flourished so much to the total detriment of the average Muslim is there any reason why they have maintained for so long any power or status. Muslim preference for a "strong man" style of leadership plays no small part in the perpetuation of this detrimental practice.

While Islam sluffs off its discontented, just as Mexico does with its unsuccessful male population in the USA, none of this alters how both regions suffer from a stifling degree of autocratic and elitist control which retards all societal progress.

Anonymous said...

Zenster: Islam is the precise reason why these Muslim utopias are the tyrannous cesspits that they continue to be.

That has never been a problem in Muslim countries for Muslims - they are used to totalitarian rule; liberal democratic states are quite unsuited to the Muslim mind, as we are daily reminded in the West.

It is difficult to say if Muslim nations have really had to face the consequences of Islamic tenets, as the consequences have been masked by exporting Muslims to the West, aid from the West, or the lucky find of oil.

Then again, Sudan faced real hardship, starvation, and yet became more fundmentalist. It is the same story elsewhere. The deleterious consequences of Islam is taken as a lesson that islam is not being followed rigorously enough. So "No win" here. But I hope that that it may be different sometime.

In any case, if they moderate or not, "Pack them all off back to their respective Islamic utopias and let them kill each other with the typical abandon so common among Muslims", is a safe strategy.

Henrik R Clausen said...

You mean "What Pipes misses..."?

Yes...

Pipes bet on a moderate strain of Islam to emerge and settle the issues. For a long time he thought that Turkey would be the place for that to happen, but Pipes abandoned (publicly) that position several years ago. He made a wrong bet and made appropriate losses in academic prestige. A shame, for he's generally brilliant.

No major hub for any 'moderate' Islam seems to exist, anywhere.

thll said...

But that's their culture, and what right have we to criticise it?