This post is a reply to a guest post over at Pommygranate’s blog, by Kizzie, a Sudanese Muslim woman, who currently resides in Cairo. In her post Kizzie tries to show that Female Genital Mutilation is not an Islamic practice, but rather a cultural one, partly basing her argument on the premise that the two are mutually exclusive. However, although FGM is a certainly a cultural practice that predates Islam, it is also an Islamic practice, which is what I am going to show below.

The reason that a Sudanese Muslim woman came to be guest-blogging on Pommygranate’s site, by the way, is the debate that has raged this week across the Australian blogosphere in the wake of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s visit here last week. Ironically Ali barely mentioned FGM when she spoke on Sunday night.
The first bone in the debate was thrown by Kim at Larvatus Prodeo. Tim Blair then pulled her up on her smug insensitivity , while in the meantime the fireworks really started flying in the comments to Kim’s post. Blair followed up and Kim attempted to fire back, only to get blasted to pieces by Blair (see the Update in last TB link). Far back along the way FGM became the focus of the debate, as it rippled out through the blogosphere and finally here we are. Phew.

Now to answering Kizzie’s post. She starts off explaining where FGM is practiced (many African countries and some Arab countries in the Middle East, like, you may be surprised to learn, in Kurdistan, where most women are “circumcised”) and describes the four classifications of FGM, which disfigure the female genitalia to various degrees. No argument so far. Except the part where she uses the term Female Genital Circumcision, but than refers to it as FGM thereafter, which actually stands for Female Genital Mutilation. A telling manifestation of double-think right there, I’d say.

Kizzie’s argument is divided into two parts and in the first she attempts to argue that FGM is not an Islamic practice, giving three arguments to support her view. Looking at them one by one:

1. FGM predates both Christianity and Islam since it is believed to date back to time of the Pharaohs.

Well, noone is going to argue with that. A lot of Islamic practices predate Islam, and some predate Christianity also. Thats hardly an argument that all those practices are not Islamic. The Islamic practice of not eating pork was a Judaic one before Islam, the Islamic practice of five prayers a day was practices by Zoroastrians before Islam, the Islamic symbol of star and crescent was a symbol of a number of Moon-Gods before Islam, and so on and so forth. The covering of the female body, polygamy, the washing of extremities before prayer and meals, fasting, all these have been cultural practices somewhere before becoming Islamic ones.
Here’s how Sheikh Muhammad Al-Mussayar from Al-Azhar University put it (full quote and source further down):

”Female circumcision is no less valid just because it was practiced in Pharaonic times and in the Jahiliya. Islam accepted some customs, which were harmonious with human nature, and rejected others, which contradicted human nature.”

Anyway, what is important is how a person justifies their actions – is it because “thats just how we do things round here” (ie. a cultural practice, like shaking hands in the West or rubbing noses amongst the Eskimos), or is it because the practice is made compulsory or recommended by their religious belief system? I’ll get to the Islamic justifications (and recommendations) for FGM shortly.

2. FGM is found in non-Muslim societies example: Christians in Ghana and other non-Muslim societies in India and South America.

See my answer to one. If every Islamic practice was disowned because it was practiced by adherents of other religions there wouldn’t be much left thats Islamic. The question is does Islam give justification for the practice? When I get to the scriptural and scholarly references below it should be clear that it does. The distinction of Islam being a “complete way of life”, rather than merely a religion, as Muslims like to point out, gives extra weight to this argument, as virtually any act can be determined to be allowed, disallowed, recommended etc from the Sunnah (the tradition and example of the Prophet and his companions as recorded in the Hadiths). For the Islamic Ummah the lines between culture and religion are virtually non-existent, with an overriding Islamic culture superseding any local one. Anyhow, are there any Christian priests in Ghana giving religious justification for FGM or does it exist despite the opposition of the Church? Because there most certainly are plenty of Muslim Sheikhs giving religious justification for FGM.

3. If FGM was obligatory in Islam then Muslim scholars from all over the world wouldn’t be working together to ban its practice.

Here Kizzie tries to confuse the issue by using the word “obligatory”. FGM is certainly “obligatory” in most schools of Islam. In most schools it is seen as “noble”, “honorable” and “recommended”, but not obligatory. The distinction is much the same as that between the wearing of the hijab and the wearing of the niqab (which covers the face) in most Islamic schools. The niqab is deemed obligatory only in the more severe Islamic schools (the Wahhabi, Deobandi etc), by others it is viewed as kind “going the extra mile” to please Allah, a noble act of piety. Is wearing the niqab not an Islamic practice because most schools do not deem it “obligatory”?

Anyhow, Kizzie sites three example here, two of conferences and one of a “meeting” of Muslim scholars where FGM was denounced. Note that all three events are from the last 2 years. One conference was organized by a German human rights group and held in Cairo and involved scholars from Al-Azhar. The “meeting” was also held in Cairo’s Al Azhar university. The other conference was held in Nigeria and news reports again feature quotes from scholars from Al Azhar, which is the foremost Sunni institution in the world, so certainly has authority. It does appear that the issue has been seriously debated at Al-Azhar (links below). I do wonder though whether these denouncement draw a distinction between “female circumcision” and FGM, by which some Muslims only refer to infibulation.

I also wonder why it took 14 centuries for these denouncements to come out. Where are the Fatwas banning the practice, other than those against Infibulation, the most severe of the four forms, prior to the the 21st century? Why did the scholars not try to rid of the Islamic world of this barbaric practice before Western influence shamed them into doing so? Why was a German human rights group needed to start the conference in the first place?

As for “Muslim scholars from all over the world [..] working together to ban its practice” (I am only seeing scholars from Al-Azhar), well, what about all the Muslim scholars all over the world encouraging it and using the Sunnah to justify it? They certainly seem to have the superior numbers.

Before I start quoting some of these scholars, here are some quotations from the Hadiths that are commonly used to justify the practice:

Although there is no mention of it in the Quran itself, there are several hadiths, where Female Genital Mutilation is encouraged by Mohammad.

The first hadith is from Abu Dawud (Book 41, Number 5251): Um ‘Atiyyah is reported as an exciser of female slaves who had immigrated with Mohammad.
On one occasion Mohammad allegedly asked her if she kept practicing her profession, to which she responded in the affirmative. Then she added: “unless it is forbidden and you order me to stop doing it.” Mohammad replied: “yes, it is allowed.”
Mohammad then gave Um ‘Atiyyah specific instructions on the methodology for female circumcision (Aldeeb, 1994, p. 6), explaining to her that his method of “female circumcision” would bring radiance to the face of the woman.
This hadith is also quoted by al-Hakim and al-Baihaqi on the authority of al-Dhaahhak ibn Qais (al-Sabbagh, 1998, p. 17).

Another well-known hadith is that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. He relates in his Musnad (5:75) from Abu al-Malih ibn, Usama’s father, that Mohammad said:
“Circumcision is sunna (tradition) for men and an honorable quality for women”

A third hadith states: “If the two circumcision organs (khitanan) meet, ritual ablution (gusl), becomes obligatory.” This is cited in Malik, Muslim, al-Tirmithi and Ibn Majah in their respective hadith collections and can also be found in other collections (al-Sabbagh, 1998, p. 38).

There are many documented justifications by Islamic scholars through the ages, based on these Hadiths. And many of them, coincidentally, are from the same aforementioned Al-Azhar university. Possibly because Egypt is pretty much FGM-central, with 97% of women there having been subjected to it. You’d think if the practice contradicted Sharia it would have become less prevalent, if not stamped out by now. Islamic countries don’t seem to have much trouble minimising alcohol consumption, for example. Anyway, lets hear from the Sheikhs:

In Reliance of the Traveler, a classical manual of Islamic law, endorsed by Al-Azhar in 1991 as conforming ‘to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community,’ we find the following, with notes from several scholars and the translator:

e4.3 Circumcision is obligatory (commentary of Sheikh ‘Umar Barakat: “for both men and women”). For men it consists of removing the prepuce from the penis, and for women, removing the prepuce (Arabic: Bazr) of the clitoris (remark by the translator: “not the clitoris itself, as some mistakenly assert”). (comment by Sheikh ‘Abd al-Wakil Durubi: Hanbalis hold that circumcision of women is not obligatory but sunna, while Hanafis consider it a mere courtesy to the husband.)”

A look at the original Arabic show the text to actually say:

Circumcision is obligatory (for every male and female)
by cutting off the piece of skin on the glans of the penis of the male,
but circumcision of the female is by cutting out the clitoris
(this is called HufaaD).

Further commentary (from a non-Muslim):

The deceptive translation by Nuh Hah Mim Keller, made for Western consumption, obscures the Shafi’i law, given by ‘Umdat al-Salik, that circumcision of girls by excision of the clitoris is mandatory. This particular form of female circumcision is widely practiced in Egypt, where the Shafi’i school of Sunni law is followed.

Some years ago Pamela Bone asked Sheik Fehmi al-Imam of the Preston Mosque about FGM and his reply was “You probably don’t need it but women in hot countries do”. (The Age, 21/7/01 p7) (same link)

In 1981 the Great Sheikh of the same aforementioned Al-Azhar University “stated that parents must follow the lessons of Mohammed and not listen to medical authorities because the latter often change their minds. Parents must do their duty and have their daughters circumcised.”. (same link)

How things have changed after 20 years of Western influence!

Again from the same link:

Sheikh Yussef Al-Qaradhawi, one of Sunni Islam’s most influential clerics and a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood favors partial circumcision for women as a moderate, just, and reasonable solution best suited to reality. In a Fatwa on this issue, he wrote, “Anyone who thinks that circumcision is the best way to protect his daughters should do it. I support this, particularly in the period in which we live.”

And still more the learned men of Al-Azhar:

On 12/2/2007 Al-Arabiya TV aired ‘Al-Azhar University Scholars Argue over the Legitimacy of Female Circumcision Practiced in Egypt.’ The debate was between Egyptian Al-Azhar University scholars Sheikh Muhammad Al-Mussayar and Sheikh Mahmoud Ashur.

Muhammad Al-Mussayar: notes “All the jurisprudents, since the advent of Islam and for 14 centuries or more, are in consensus that female circumcision is permitted by Islam. But they were divided with regard to its status in shari’a. Some said that female circumcision is required by shari’a, just like male circumcision. Some said this is the mainstream practice, while others said it is a noble act. But throughout the history of Islam, nobody has ever said that performing female circumcision is a crime. There has been a religious ruling on this for 14 centuries.” “First of all, there are reliable hadiths in Al-Bukhari and Al-Muslim which support female circumcision. The Prophet Muhammad said: ‘If a circumcised woman and man have intercourse, they must undergo ablution.’ Unreliable hadiths do not cancel out the reliable ones. We have unreliable hadiths regarding prayer, fasting, charity, and pilgrimage. Should we abolish prayer and charity just because some hadiths are unreliable?..”Female circumcision is no less valid just because it was practiced in Pharaonic times and in the Jahiliya. Islam accepted some customs, which were harmonious with human nature, and rejected others, which contradicted human nature.” (reported by MEMRI.org 27/2/2007 and http://fgmnetwork.org) (same link)

So for 1400 years the scholars have been divided on whether it is an obligation (the Shafi’i school), sunna (the Hanbali school) or a “noble act”, an “honorable quality”, while in the Hanafi school it is apparently “a mere courtesy to the husband”. All a sudden in the last 3 years the final word comes out declaring the the practice neither obligatory or sunna, but suddenly Unislamic? Give me a break.

For more evidence still, see also this fascinating and shocking recent debate (and it is at least good to see they have plenty of those) involving a male lecturer from, once again, Al-Azhar university, debating a female lecturer (not sure from which institution) on the subject of FGM. The male sheikh again argues that milder forms of FGM are sunna, while total removal of the clitoris is forbidden, while the female lecturer argues against all forms of FGM. Dr. Muhammad Wahdan concludes:

In Egypt we have four and a half million spinsters. The definition of a spinster is a woman who has reached 30, without ever receiving a marriage proposal. We have a spinster problem in the Arab world, and the last thing we want is for them to be sexually aroused. Circumcision of the girls who need it makes them chaste, dignified, and pure.

But back to Kizzie’s post, and in part two of her essay, having apparently show FGM is not an Islamic practice, she tries to show that FGM is actually a social/cultural practice. Firstly Kizzie states that the less severe forms are practiced in Indonesia. I would have thought that only goes to prove my point? Then she goes on to point out some age-old cultural justifications for the ancient FGM tradition in Africa, which only serves to moot the waters, as ancient cultural reasoning does not trump modern Islamic reasoning, so I’ll simply leave that part alone. But as Indonesia has been brought up, I will follow up with that example. It is true that the type of FGM practiced in Indonesia is almost always not as severe as that of North Africa. And here I can agree that we are seeing “cultural differences”. FGM is a part of Islamic culture, it is an Islamic practice, which came to Indonesia with Islam and did not exist there prior. However the differences between how it is done there as opposed to say Egypt, can be put down to “cultural practice”. Lets not be confused by that distinction, however.

Here are some extracts from an article that appeared in The Age, in 2004 about FGM in Indonesia:

The practice of female circumcision in Indonesia has moved into hospitals. Greater genital mutilation is the likely result. Matthew Moore and Karuni Rompies report.

Hospitals across Indonesia are offering new parents a one-price surgical package for their just-born girls — as well as piercing their ears, they’ll circumcise them.

At Jakarta’s Hermina Hospital the price for the two procedures is 95,000 rupiah (about $A16), at IDI hospital in Surabaya in East Java it’s only 15,000 rupiah, while in Makassar’s Khadijah Hospital in Sulawesi, hospital staff quote 25,000 to 30,000 rupiah.

[..] While hospitals might be more hygienic, health care experts are worried by strong evidence that the move has led to more of the child’s genital tissue being cut because medical practitioners use different implements and techniques.

Village-based midwives and traditional healers have been circumcising girls in Indonesia for centuries, although the extent and details of the practice are only now emerging.

[..]

In an attempt to find out more about female circumcision, the US AID-funded study by the Population Council surveyed 1694 households in eight separate regions and found all the boys and 97.5 per cent of girls had been circumcised.

[..]

The concern now relates to changes due to circumcisions in hospitals, where health care professionals use scissors in more than 75 per cent of cases, which invariably means cutting flesh.

[..]
It’s not only babies who are circumcised, with one-third of those surveyed circumcised between the ages of five and nine, and some even older.

Several hours out of Jakarta in Bandung, the Assalaam Foundation has been holding free mass circumcisions for males and females for almost 50 years, with as many as 400 people turning up at a time. Syarief Hamid, treasurer with the foundation, which runs several schools, said the circumcisions were timed to honor the Prophet’s birthday, and were growing in popularity each year.

While religion is the main reason for circumcising girls, he says there are also health reasons. “I understand that a girl who is not circumcised would not have clean genitals after she urinates and sometimes that can cause cervical cancer,” he says. “The religious view is, if you are not circumcised you won’t have clean genitals after urinating. If then you pray, your prayer won’t be legal.”

[..]

Religion was the reason cited by 55 per cent of mothers surveyed for circumcising their daughters, although none could identify parts of the Koran or the Prophet Muhammad’s guidance, called Hadith, where it is stipulated. While 32 per cent nominated health and hygiene as the perceived benefit, 9 per cent said they did not know what benefit it would bring.

Masitoh Chusnan, from the women’s wing of Muhammadiyah, one of Indonesia’s two biggest Muslim organizations, says circumcision of girls is regarded in Islam as an honorable practice.

“The Hadith did not say it’s obligatory, but it is recommended to have it done,” she says. “There is the Prophet’s words saying girls must be circumcised, but you should not cut too much.”

[..] current practice shows no signs of a decline in popularity, with more than 90 per cent of mothers questioned supporting the practice continuing.

And one in five mothers even suggested social sanctions should be imposed on girls who were uncircumcised.

The above dove-tails perfectly with what the religious arguments above – it is not an obligation, but an “honourable practice”. But far disturbing still are stories about the hundreds, if not thousands of Christian women from Indonesia’s Molucca Islands who were forcibly converted to Islam and in the process forcibly circumcised:

Christian woman recalls horror of forced conversion to Islam

Posted on May 1, 2001 | by Brittany Jarvis

AMBON, Indonesia (BP)–”My scar healed quite fast, but the sad, humiliated feeling stayed. I feel like I’m no longer complete, both as a person and a woman.”

That is the testimony of Christina Sagat, a 32-year-old Christian from Kasiui, Indonesia, who was forcibly circumcised by her Muslim neighbors. Unfortunately, as traumatic as her story sounds, hundreds of women have endured similar oppression.

“My niece, Cecilia, who at that time was eight months pregnant, was also circumcised,” Sagat said. “My mother, who was in her 70s, was also circumcised. Teenagers, and even infants, were circumcised. I don’t understand these people.”

[..]

More details on whats been happening on Ambon Island and other Molucca Islands, where thousands of people have been killed, and hundreds of thousands displaced here. Hundreds of Christian families have been given the choice – convert or die. The women and children are then separated from the men and “converted”. Men and children are circumcised using the same dirty razor blade and then told to go and wash in the sea to disinfect the heavily bleeding wounds. Many of the ‘holy warriors’ perpetrating these crimes are members of Laskar Jihad, a Salafi-Jihadist group whose leader studied in Pakistan and considers himself more “fundamentalist” than Osama bin Laden, who he says is ignorant of true Islam. That doesn’t seem to stop his followers from wearing Osama t-shirts though. Laskar Jihad has between 3000 and 10000 fighters, who have been receiving training and assistance from the Indonesian Army. Strange that having studying in some madrassah in Pakistan this douche-bag has decided that circumcising women should go hand-in-hand with their conversion to Islam. This may be a somewhat extreme example, but it goes to show that there is at least a significant number of Muslims, even in Pakistan and Indonesia, who believe in the religious justification for FGM as a very Islamic practice indeed.

Kizzie says resents that when a Muslim kills a Christian man, in a post-9/11 world, his religion is invariably mentioned, whereas when, say, a Christian kills a Christian religion is not mentioned. Well, Kizzie, in a post-9/11 world Westerners have begun to take greater note of the fact that many Muslims use religion as justification for murder. Perhaps if the common occurence was that a Muslim and a Christian fought to the death over a donkey in the marketplace there would be no need to mention religion. However when the Muslim shouts ‘God is Great!’ in the act of murder and kills in the process of waging Jihad on the Kuffar, there most certainly is reason to mention his religion, because clearly religion was at least in part a motivating factor. Likewise when a child’s sexual organs are disfigured because it is supposed to be a “noble” act in the eyes of Allah, you bet we are going to take notice of the religious motivation behind the act. Because take away the religious justification, without a doubt the incidence of the practice would decrease and be easier to eradicate, when only the cultural motivations are left, no longer multiplied by the powerful force of religiosity.

Kizzie concludes by voicing her resentment that FGM has begun to be viewed in a religious rather than a cultural context and continues to assert the mutual exclusivity between the description of the practice of FGM as either cultural or religious. But clearly, as shown above, it is a cultural practice, that many Muslims view as religious and observe for religious reasons, thus it is a religious Islamic practice also. There is clear justification for that viewpoint in Islamic scripture, with there merely being a disagreement between various schools and scholars on whether the practice is obligatory or merely a “noble” or “honorable” act. And only in recent years certain Islamic scholars, mainly from Egypt, have began voicing an opinion that all forms of FGM are haram, ie forbidden, but this view goes against 1400 years of Islamic jurisprudence.

Ultimately, according to some Islamic schools FGM is obligatory (a minority position), and according to most others it is “noble”/”honourable” or sunna (tradition), which clearly serves as a powerful motivator based on religion. In both cases it can thus be described as an Islamic practice and will continue to be so until Muslims stop practicing it, Skeikhs stop using the Sunnah to justify it and its practitioners stop citing the Islamic religion as a motivating factor.

UPDATE (10/6): Kizzie has posted a reply. Not much there I disagree with, really, and don’t have time to comment further just now. Perhaps on Tuesday. Thank you for the debate, Kizzie.

Is there an evil global warming did not cause?

Global warming oppresses the poor:

Mrs Beckett quoted a remark made by the President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, that global warming was “an act of aggression by the rich against the poor”.

People do not cause Darfur genocide, global warming does:

British diplomats said the intention of Tuesday’s session was to lift climate change to the top of the international agenda. Britain has pointed to the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan as an example of conflict partly caused by land degradation.

Global warming causes Al Qaeda:

Last November, the Stern report suggested that 200 million people could be displaced by rising sea levels and drought by 2050. It said the global economy could shrink by one-fifth. Even Osama bin Laden accused the US in 2002 of harming nature “more than any nation in history”.

Seriously. What the fuck kind of paragraph is that. Who the fuck is writing this shit? Looking at you, Andrew Clark in New York. STFU, n00b.

And tucked at the end of the story, China don’t take no shit from no rising temperatures:

■ China has created artificial snow in Tibet after experts warned of melting glaciers in the Himalayas. The Tibetan meteorological station had created a fall of 2.2 millimetres, which accumulated to one centimetre, last week, about 4000 metres above sea level in northern Tibet, the Xinhua news agency said yesterday.

Nice one. Or maybe not.

The Chinese Communist Party – its a force of nature. They’d be pissing away deserts and drinking away rising sea levels if it’d keep that economy chugging up and away.

Meanwhile someone somewhere has pioneered the Abstract Expressionist school of journalism and the world didn’t even notice.

A great three part essay on slavery in the Islamic world, entitled “Should The Islamic World Apologize For Slavery?” has been posted at Western Resistance. Extract:

[..] Modern Western nations’ involvement in the black slave trade lasted little more than 350 years, yet Islam has been involved in the black slave trade for more than 14 centuries, from the time of its founder. Mohammed owned black slaves, and in countries like the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the black slave trade continues. According to Murray Gordon, the amount of black slaves taken by Muslims amounted to 11 million, though this figure is probably an underestimate. While white (and Arab) slave merchants bought and sold black people from the west coast of Africa, Muslim slavers in north Africa also engaged in a trade of white Christians, a trade that politically correct history books conveniently ignore. [TOD: some two million European Christians were enslaved by some accounts]

[..]
According to Bernard Lewis, author of Race and Slavery in the Middle East: “Black slaves were brought into the Islamic world by a number of routes – from West Africa across the Sahara to Morocco and Tunisia, from Chad across the desert to Libya, from East Africa down the Nile to Egypt, and across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Turkish slaves from the steppe-lands were marketed in Samarkand and other Muslim Central Asian cities and from there exported to Iran, the Fertile Crescent, and beyond. Caucasians, of increasing importance in the later centuries, were brought from the land bridge between the Black Sea and the Caspian and were marketed mainly in Aleppo and Mosul.”

Slavery is advocated in the Koran. Though Mohammed states that freeing slaves gains merit, he made no prohibitions against acquiring slaves. Women and girl slaves could be gained as “booty” in raids. Sura 33, verse 50 states: “Prophet, we have made lawful for you…. the slave-girls whom God has given you as booty.” These could be raped at will by Muslims who in no way contradicted the Koran – Suras 23:1 and 70:22 state that it is lawful to have sex with slave girls. The Hadiths are filled with references to slaves owned by Mohammed and his associates. In one Hadith Mohammed intervened to reverse one man’s emancipation of six slaves. By casting lots, Mohammed denied freedom to four of them.

[..] According to Bernard Lewis (page 38) the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332 – 1406) wrote: “The only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and their proximity to the animal stage.”

Such attitudes still exist in Mauritania and also Sudan, where Arab elites enslave black people from the Dinka and the Shilluk tribes who live in southern Sudan. Since 1983 when the northern government of Simon Deng had been a Shilluk child slave, abducted to live in northern Sudan by an Arab. In May 2006 he went on a fact-finding mission to southern Sudan. He said that “villages are still being burnt, women are still being raped, and people are being sold into slavery.” Mr Deng now lives as a US citizen in New York.

Another Sudanese-born black man who is now a US citizen is Francis Bok. He came from a Catholic family in a Dinka village. In 1986, when aged seven, he was abducted by Arabs from the north who decapitated adults at a local market and stole the children. For ten years Mr Bok was a slave in a Muslim household – forced to convert to Islam – until he ran away. Some Dinka slaves who do not convert to Islam have had their Achilles tendons cut.

In 2000, a UNICEF representative estimated that 5,000 to 10,000 children were still slaves in Sudan. The Dinka Committee in 2001 claimed that 14,000 children have been abducted since 1983. In Sudan, as elsewhere, child slaves are subjected to cruel punishments.

[..] In 2003, it was revealed that a Saudi Sheik, Saleh Al-Fawzan, said: “Slavery is a part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam.”

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.

If you only read one part, read the third, which describes how slavery continues to this day in some Muslim cultures.

“A Mauritanian woman and child stand inside a makeshift shelter in the Keube slum in the capital Nouakchott in this March 13, 2007 file picture. Herding camels or goats out in the sun-blasted dunes of the Sahara, or serving hot mint tea to guests in the richly carpeted villas of Nouakchott, Mauritanian slaves serve their masters and are passed on as family chattels from generation to generation. Reuters correspondent Ed Stoddard reports that U.S. evangelical Christians are united behind a new campaign to end modern slavery around the world. (Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters)”

But there is a bit of surprisingly good news coming out of Mauritania – their recent elections have been deemed free and fair by observers, showing promise of a real transition to democracy, following a military coup in 2005. Also the UN Economic Commission for Africa has just released a report ranking Mauritania as the best economically performing country in Africa in 2006.

Some extracts from Eric Reeves’ latest analysis of the situation in Darfur:

Failing to establish any urgent time-frame or meaningful benchmarks for a Darfur security force, the international community simply watches as genocidal violence spreads uncontrollably, threatening the entire region

By Eric Reeves

November 26, 2006 — Darfur and eastern Chad are now in the throes of uncontrolled, cataclysmic violence. Anarchic conditions are expanding with terrifying speed, even as the international community gives no evidence that it is prepared to act in any meaningful fashion to stabilize the crisis or to halt rapidly accelerating, ethnically-targeted human destruction. Humanitarian relief efforts are daily more deeply imperiled by intolerable levels of insecurity; and as UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland has very recently reported to the Security Council, Khartoum’s grim war of attrition against humanitarian operations in Darfur is relentlessly more successful. Moreover, the possible collapse of the Chadian government of Idriss Deby before growing military pressure from Chadian rebel groups, supported by Khartoum, could have potentially catastrophic implications for humanitarian operations in eastern Chad.

The events of recent weeks—in Addis Ababa, Tripoli, Khartoum, Beijing, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington—make all too clear that diplomatic paralysis has set in, and that the genocidal quo will prevail for months.

[..]

In assessing Darfur’s realities, we do have at least one source of relentless, searing honesty—that of retiring UN aid chief Jan Egeland, who this week made his last report on Darfur to the UN Security Council (September 22, 2006). The report, and its accompanying document (“Fact Sheet on Access Restrictions in Darfur and Other Areas of Sudan”), make clear how far genocidal destruction is from ending, and how little the international community is doing to halt the violence or provide security for the humanitarian organizations that struggle heroically, amidst intolerable levels of insecurity and harassment by Khartoum.

Egeland begins his report with the most fundamental truth about Darfur:

“I just concluded my 4th and final mission as Emergency Relief Coordinator to Darfur. I return with a plea from beleaguered Darfurians for immediate action to finally stop the atrocities against them. For more than a thousand days and a thousand nights, the defenseless civilians of Darfur have been living in fear for their lives, and the lives of their children. The Government’s failure to protect its own citizens, even in areas where there are no rebels, has been shameful, and continues. So does our own failure, more than a year after world leaders in this very building pledged their own responsibility to protect civilians where the government manifestly fails to do so.”

Egeland also adumbrated a shameful chronology of Khartoum-sponsored civilian destruction:

“When I went to Darfur on my first visit in late June 2004, accompanying the Secretary-General, we saw a civilian population under attack, prompting the displacement of one million people. When I returned to Darfur last week, four million people, two-thirds of Darfur’s population, were in need of emergency assistance. The number of internally displaced has risen to an unprecedented two million. The attacks on villages and the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians continue, reaching the horrific levels of early 2004.”

To this figure of 4 million must be added some 400,000 conflict-affected civilians in eastern Chad: Darfuri refugees (220,000); Chadian internally displaced persons (90,000 according to the latest figures from the UN High Commission for Refugees); and approaching 100,000 Chadian civilians affected in other ways by the conflict that continues its massive spill-over into eastern Chad.

And there is also the ghastly death toll to date: some 500,000 people have already died from violence, disease, malnutrition, and despair since the outbreak of major conflict in February 2003 (the most recent mortality assessment by this writer, surveying all extant global morality data, is April/May 2006 at http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article102.html; no additional global mortality data have been published since the UN World Health Organization study of mortality rates in spring 2005).

Egeland rightly focuses specific attention on the atrocities recently committed in the village of Sirba (West Darfur), a now notorious and unusually well-investigated attack by Khartoum and its Janjaweed militia allies on innocent civilians:

“Villages, camps and communities outside the urban centers of Darfur are again being burnt and looted. Women and children are abused, raped and killed with impunity. Just ten days ago the village of Sirba saw three attacks by government forces and Arab militia that resulted in innocent civilians, mainly women and children, killed and injured. I met some of the victims in the hospital of El Geneina. A mother told me how she held her two-year-old daughter in her arms as the child was willfully shot in the neck by an armed man, despite her repeated begging to spare her daughter. The wounded child did, as I could see, miraculously survive and now recovers in the good care of the Sudanese local doctors. Neither the Government [of Sudan] nor the African Union was able or willing to show presence or deploy proactively in Sirba before the massacre, despite repeated warnings by villagers and aid workers of the impending attacks.”

The refusal of the African Union to deploy to Sirba, despite the clearly impending, ethnically-motivated attack on its residents, highlights the issue of what mandate will guide any force that is to change the security dynamic in Darfur.

[..]

Egeland continued his unsparing narrative to the Security Council (November 22, 2006):

“Just as I left Sudan this Saturday [November 18, 2006], two massive military operations started in the Jebel Marra and Birmaza area in North Darfur. A dozen villages were attacked and looted, driving more than 8,000 more innocent men, women and children from their homes, and leaving many killed and injured. In the Birmaza area, huge amounts of livestock were stolen and houses burnt, deliberately depriving the population of their means of survival. In the Jebel Marra, up in the mountains, where the nights are freezing at this time of year, the attackers systematically looted food, clothing, and blankets. This means that babies and small children who survived the attacks might now freeze to death. Let us be clear: these acts are crimes of the most despicable kind. They are an affront to humanity.”

The refusal of the international community to be moved sufficiently by this “affront” is the obverse moral failure.

The violence has now spread to Chad (from the same report):

Khartoum-supported rebel groups captured the key eastern Chadian town of Abeche on November 25, 2006. This prompted the French to close down its air base outside Abeche, including to humanitarian flights. There is extreme concern within the humanitarian community about the ability to provide relief for hundreds of thousands of people in this remote and bereft region. The situation on the ground is far from clear, but wire dispatches today (November 26, 2006) suggest that Chadian government troops have re-captured Abeche. On the other hand, Reuters reports that,

“A Chadian rebel column rumbled westwards towards the capital N’Djamena on Sunday [November 26, 2006] just hours after the army retook the eastern town of Abeche, a French diplomat said. The diplomat confirmed the French embassy in N’Djamena had issued a message informing its citizens that a rebel convoy was moving towards the city through Batha province—which would put the convoy at least 250 km (150 miles) from N’Djamena. ‘It’s difficult to tell how many (vehicles)…it could be anything from 10 to 60 to 80,’ the diplomat said.” (Reuters [dateline: N’Djamena], November 26, 2006)

Voice of America (dateline: Geneva) reports on the most immediate concern:

“UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres is warning that humanitarian aid for hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees from Darfur and displaced Chadians could be jeopardized by a fresh outbreak of fighting in remote eastern Chad. [ ] The UN refugee agency has its local headquarters in Abeche. Its staff of 300 cares for more than 200,000 refugees from Darfur, sheltered in 12 camps. It also assists many of the 90,000 Chadians who were displaced by unrest over the past year.”

[..]

The character of the violence in eastern Chad was captured in a recent (November 15, 2006) report from Human Rights Watch (“Chad/Sudan: End Militia Attacks on Civilians: UN-AU Summit Must Strengthen International Force in Darfur and Chad”):

“Since late October [2006], Human Rights Watch has documented several incidents of indiscriminate aerial bombing of civilians in northwestern Darfur and Chad by Sudanese government forces.”

Such cross-border military attacks by Khartoum’s Antonov aircraft are consistent with the cross-border attacks on civilians involving the regime’s bombers and helicopter gunships, documented by Human Rights Watch in February 2006 (and based on a “Human Rights Watch research mission to eastern Chad in January-February 2006”):

“The government of Sudan is actively exporting the Darfur crisis to its neighbor by providing material support to Janjaweed militias [ ], by backing Chadian rebel groups that it allows to operate from bases in Darfur, and by deploying its own armed forces across the border into Chad. [ ] Attacks on Chadian civilians accelerated dramatically in the wake of a December 2005 assault on Adré, in eastern Chad, by Chadian rebels with bases in Darfur and supported by the government of Sudan.” [ ]

“On some occasions, the Janjaweed attacks [in Chad] appear to be coordinated with those of the Chadian rebels. On other occasions, Janjaweed militias have carried out attacks inside Chad accompanied by Sudanese army troops with helicopter gunship support.” (Human Rights Watch, “Darfur Bleeds: Recent Cross-Border Violence in Chad,” February 2006, page 2).

[..]
A sense of the scale of recent destruction is also offered in the recent Human Rights Watch report:

“Chadian militia groups have attacked dozens of villages in southeastern Chad over the last 10 days, killing several hundred civilians, injuring scores of people and driving at least 10,000 people from their homes. In a wave of violence that is sweeping through rural areas, villagers are defending themselves with spears and poisoned arrows against militia groups of Arab nomads armed with automatic weapons. A clear pattern has emerged in which Chadian Arab militia groups are targeting non-Arab villages in southeastern Chad.”

“Militia groups attacked as many as 60 Chadian villages separated by several hundred kilometers of rugged terrain on November 4-5 [2006] and in the week that followed. The militias then loot the villages that have been cleared of civilians. In some instances, villages are attacked or destroyed but not looted, suggesting the motive is not robbery, and the level of brutality is rising. Human Rights Watch documented several attacks where militia members mutilated men in their custody and deliberately burned women to death.”

[..] And the ethnic violence that has defined conflict in Darfur has the potential to move even further west in Chad. Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times reported from Djedidah, Chad (October 31, 2006):

“Arab men on horseback rode into her village, shouting racial epithets over the rat-tat-tat of Kalashnikov gunfire. ‘They shouted “zurga,”’ [Halima Sherif] said, an Arabic word for black [*and also a derogatory racial epithet---ER*]. ‘They told us they would take our land. They shot many people and burned our houses. We all ran away.’ Scenes like this one have been unfolding in the war-ravaged Darfur region of western Sudan for more than three years, and since the beginning of this year Sudanese Arabs have also been attacking Chadian villages just across Sudan’s porous border.”

[..] “The violence in Darfur has been spilling over into Chad since at least early this year [but] the violence around one of the other interior villages that was attacked, Kou Kou, is different and ominous, aid workers and analysts say. It appears to have been done by Chadian Arabs against non-Arab villages in Chad, and was apparently inspired by similar campaigns of violence by Sudanese Arab militias in Sudan.”

[..]“If the racial and ethnic conflict that has infected Darfur is being copied by Chad’s Arabs, then the violence spreading beyond Darfur’s borders could presage even further regional conflict, said David Buchbinder, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who specializes in Chad. ‘The racial ideology is spreading, and that is very dangerous,’ Buchbinder said.”

(via The Passion of the Present)

And this from an AFP report:

Deby’s government spokesman, Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor, accused Saudi Arabia as well as neighbouring Sudan, which denies accusations of backing rebels in Chad, of mounting “a large scale operation to destabilise it”.

“This operation bears the hand of Sudan and Saudi Arabia,” said Doumgor, who is also communications minister. “It’s Sudan and Saudi Arabia that are equipping and training mercenaries, and providing them with the necessary logistics to attack Chad today on several fronts in the east.”

Doumgor said “the international community must be aware” that Chad faced “the kind of war for the promotion of militant Islam preached by Al-Qaeda of Bin Laden, which won’t spare any country in the region.”

He alleged that “60 percent” of Nouri’s men are “young Wahabites between 13 and 17 years old … recruited in the madrassas (Koranic schools) of Jeddah, Mecca and Riyadh”.

General Mahamat Nouri leads the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD) rebel group, which had taken control of Abeche.

Any statements coming from Deby’s government of the world’s most corrupt state are to be looked at with the highest degree of skepticism, as he is a desperate crackpot who recently fabricated reports that the United States was helping him negotiate changes to conditions imposed on Chad by the World Bank on how it can spend oil revenue (most of it must be spent on education, health, poverty reduction and a future-generations fund – notably missing are weapons, which Deby went and bought anyway). And the above sounds like a ploy to rally some international counterjihadist allies to his side. Unquestionably Sudan is supporting rebel groups in Chad – much like Chad is supporting rebel groups in Darfur. Obviously more questionable is the direct involvement of Saudi Arabia and the claim that 60% of Nouri’s men are Wahhabis recruited there. And at least some of the rebel groups are certainly not Islamist – Deby has made many enemies and there are calls for his removal from many Chadian factions, including some in his government and military. On the other hand the Chadian Arab militias described above are clearly Arab Supremacist Jihadists, much like the ones carrying out genocide in Darfur.

The Khartoum-fed cancer has spread to another country.

The Meat Sheik shake down continues.

Mona Eltahawy in the Daily Star, Nov 4: “In appreciation of the radical imams of the West” (***)

Let us appreciate the radical imams of the West. As a liberal Muslim woman I am generally loathe to express gratitude to conservative men, but the more these imams perfect the ability to say something stupid – often in Arabic, thinking that no one will find out – the more attainable they make my goal: to show that these men do not represent all Muslims.

[..] Because these radical imams, who have failed to integrate in the West, have unilaterally appointed themselves as our spokesmen – and are so readily accepted as such by the media – their shortcomings are easily projected onto the community as a whole.

[..]The imams who are sent from Arab countries usually only speak Arabic and arrive with a suitcase full of stale ideas that are woefully out of touch with the concerns of the congregations they have been sent to tend to and even more out of sync with the culture and mores of their new homes.

Take Sheikh Taj al-Din Hamid Hilaly, Australia’s top Muslim cleric who recently asked for an indefinite leave of absence from his duties after he was barred from preaching for three months over having blamed women for rape. The Egyptian-born cleric is but the latest imam whose talent for placing his foot far into his mouth has ironically done the Australian Muslim community a huge favor.

Hilaly’s outrageous words – at one point in a sermon he described women who did not dress modestly as “uncovered meat” – earned him the wrath not just of mainstream Australian society, but more importantly, of many within the Muslim community itself, including the board of the Sydney mosque where he preaches. The board should have fired him. But short of that, the three-month suspension was a clear message that many Muslims in Hilaly’s congregation refuse to condone such a hatefully misogynistic attitude.

Some Australian Muslims defended Hilaly. While I cannot understand how anyone could defend such views, I can only welcome disagreement among Muslims. What a relief to have our differences so openly aired after years of lazy stereotyping that has portrayed Muslims as a homogenous lump.

You see why I have to thank Hilaly?

[..]To further appreciate the positive consequences of the blunders of imams, take the case of Ahmed Abu Laban, the Copenhagen cleric who helped organize a trip to Egypt and Lebanon last year to rally support among Muslim leaders for protests against the Prophet drawings in Jyllands-Posten.

His claims that he spoke on behalf of all Danish Muslims did wonders for the community. For one, it motivated Naser Khader, the first Muslim member of the Danish Parliament, to launch the moderate group Democratic Muslims. More poignantly, the sight of Abu Laban saying one thing to a Danish television crew and then almost in the same breath saying the complete opposite to an Arabic TV crew inspired many to join Khader’s group.

I have spent two of the past six months in Denmark researching the lives of Muslims there. Many told me that Abu Laban’s duplicity was pivotal in inspiring them to step forward and identify themselves as Muslims who disagreed with the imam. Danish journalists have told me they do not immediately turn to Abu Laban anymore to speak for Muslims. It looks like Muslims in Denmark are slowly being allowed the differences enjoyed by other groups.

So once again, let us appreciate the radical imams of the West.

The Stern Review.

Bjorn Lomborg in the Wall Street Journal, Nov 6: “Stern scare blunted by the figures: On the dodgy economic modelling behind the latest warming beat-up”

THE report on climate change by Nicholas Stern and the British Government has sparked publicity and scary headlines across the world. Much attention has been devoted to Stern’s core argument that the price of inaction would be extraordinary and the cost of action modest.

Unfortunately, this claim falls apart when one reads the 700-page tome. Despite using many good references, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is selective and its conclusion flawed. Its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalised, which is ultimately only likely to make the world worse off.

The review correctly points out that climate change is a real problem and that it is caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions. Little else is right, however, and the report seems hastily put together, with many sloppy errors. As an example, the cost of hurricanes in the US is said to be both 0.13 per cent of US gross domestic product and 10 times that figure.

The review is also one-sided, focusing almost exclusively on carbon-emission cuts as the solution to the problem of climate change. Stern sees increasing hurricane damage in the US as a powerful argument for carbon controls. However, hurricane damage is increasing predominantly because there are more people with more goods to be damaged, settling in more risky habitats. Even if global warming does significantly increase the power of hurricanes, it is estimated that 95 per cent to 98 per cent of the increased damage will be due to demographics. The review acknowledges that simple initiatives such as bracing and securing roof trusses and walls can cheaply reduce damage by more than 80 per cent; yet its policy recommendations on expensive carbon reductions promise to cut the damage by 1 per cent to 2per cent at best. That is a bad deal.

The Darfur Genocide.

Nat Hentoff in the Washington Times, Nov 6: “Darfur genocide continues”

Investments are pouring into Lt. Gen. Omar Bashir’s Sudan from the United Arab Emirates (even though all the corpses in Darfur are of black Muslims), China, India, Malaysia and Kuwait. And a Coca-Cola factory is thriving in Khartoum. Meanwhile, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights “is urging the government of Sudan to order an independent investigation into recent military attacks.”

Gee, maybe Sudan’s dictator, Gen. Bashir, will invite Jacob to testify as to what he saw as his 4-year-old brother was murdered by the Janjaweed before he ever went to school.

And the world’s civilized nations, including ours, refuse to combine forces to go into those killing fields lest they disrespect the august murderous sovereignty of Gen. Bashir.

I’ve been asked to post about a couple of sites campaigning to draw attention to, and push for action on the Darfur crisis.

The Italian Blogs for Darfur team are campaigning Italian TV stations to give more airtime to the Darfur problem. According to Italian blogger Mauro Italian TV devoted only a single hour to Darfur in the whole of 2005. Italy will take up a seat on the UN Security Council for 2007 and 2008. You can read and sign an English or an Italian version of their appeal.

Yesterday I posted about a documentary in which David Aaronovitch noted there are no “mass demonstrations by thousands of slogan chanting protesters” about the Darfur genocide, which has, by some estimates, claimed 300,000 lives in three years, while there have been plenty of marches for other “trendier” causes. One man who’s been trying to redress the balance is Jay McGinley, who has been hunger striking and holding vigil outside the White House, until he along with 29 others were arrested there a month ago. Now he has started another fast and is working relentlessly to spread the word. If there is any cause in the world worth protesting about, surely this is it. Head over to Jay’s “Darfur Dying for Heroes” site.

You can get more info about whats happening in the Sudan at Sudan Watch and the Passion of the Present sites.

See also my previous posts on Darfur:

Charles Moore: This is why there is slaughter in Darfur (recommended)
Lest We Forget Darfur

Yep, even later than usual this week. We had a long weekend down here in Ozland and I’ve been busy with other posts.

First and foremost: Michelle Malkin has the two op-eds that were banned in Egypt and for which at least one of the two authors, Robert Redeker, has had to go into hiding in France following death threats and fatwas against him. His piece was published in Le Figaro, which was consequently banned in several Islamic countries. The op-eds were translated by readers of Michelle’s blog.

Here’s the beginning of the piece by the German Professor Egon Flaig:

“For we want the flag of Islam to fly over those lands again, who were lucky enough, to be ruled by Islam for a time, and hear the call of the muezzin praise God. Then the light of Islam died out and they returned to disbelief. Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, Southern Italy and the Greek islands are all Islamic colonies which have to return to Islam’s lap. The Mediterranean and the Red Sea have to become internal seas of Islam, as they used to be”.

These are not the words of Al Qaeda, they were taken from the programme formulated by the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al Banna, in a speech. The Brotherhood today has millions of adherents and spread out far beyond Egypt. Its intellectuals are working in Europe and the United States; they count as “moderates” and are treated accordingly by the media. Re-conquest of “lost” territory according to plan is part of the agenda of states, that is political communities, fighting about territorial power. How can it be part of a religion’s programme? Is Islam a religion like any other?

Since the beginning of the classical period between the ninth and the eleventh century Islamic jurists have divided the world into two parts, namely the “House of Islam” and the “House of War”. This dichotomy is independent of where Muslims live in large numbers, or even form the majority, but depends on where Islam rules supreme – by applying Shariah – or where it does not rule. So, this dichotomy is not religious in nature, but political. Between these two parts of the world naturally exists a state of war, until the House of War is no more and Islam rules the world (Sura 8, 39 and 9, 41). Thus, according to classical teaching, for the Muslim community there is a duty to wage war against the disbelievers, until those either convert, or submit. This war is called jihad.

Read both op-ed in full on Michelle Malkin’s site. You can also sign a petition of support for Robert Redeker.

Also check out Robert Spencer’s piece on this latest saga, in which he puts forth a defence of what Redeker had written in his op-ed that caused so much ‘outrage’. “The Philosopher and the Fatwa”.

Read the rest of this entry »

A no-nonsense explanation of the situation in Darfur and why it occured, in the Telegraph:

[..]

The death in Darfur is the result of a policy.

The policy is that of the Sudan government, which is now, in effect, the government of northern Sudan. That government is Islamist and Arab. It used to harbour Osama bin Laden until bombed by Bill Clinton. Even before the Islamists came to power in 1989, the north imposed sharia everywhere.

In 1990, it declared jihad against the south. It seeks to dispossess Christians and to assert Arab dominance of the north over the black population of the whole country. In Darfur, it destroys black villages through the Janjaweed and other militias.

As with Slobodan Milosevic’s Greater Serbia, Khartoum’s power grab is presented in the guise of restoring national unity. In reality, Khartoum wants to kill or expel as many blacks as possible while the rest of the world wonders what to do.

[..]
Last week, I was in southern Sudan. Although desperately poor, with 95 per cent illiteracy, and some armed groups still roaming the bush, the place is more or less at peace.

This is because, at the start of last year, international pressure forced a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between north and south. The largely Christian south now has a great measure of self-rule, and will be allowed to vote, in 2011, as to whether it wants to secede from the Sudan. It is certain, if it ever gets its promised chance, that it will vote to break away.

A UN force of 7,000 is in the south, trying to see that the CPA becomes a reality. The north drags its feet on key provisions – most notably the settling of the borders.

It knows that if the borders are agreed, this will show clearly that most of the oilfields which earn the country large amounts of hard currency are in the south.

The north is supposed to give half of the revenue from the southern oilfields to the southern government, but there is no independent audit of what that revenue is, so the south is being short-changed. This suits China, which is in the country, helping itself to Sudanese oil at good rates.

The leaders of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement who run the south, told me that half their budget is spent on the army, and that this is what people want. They think the way to avoid war is to be strong enough to fight it.

Southern Sudan is all but unique in the modern world in having recently overthrown sharia rule. After years of officially imposed Islam, in schools, the civil service and preferences for jobs, Christians no longer have to live in daily fear. I visited towns where mosques and churches now coexist peacefully.

Yet one Anglican prelate I met, who said that he survived 20 years of persecution because “it is not so easy to kill a bishop”, told me that “the Arab Muslim is not a giving-up sort of person”.

The blow to Arab pride if the south became independent would be tremendous. The threat to the south is, therefore, huge. “We are the wall to the penetration of the Islamic religion to the whole of Africa,” Bishop Micah said.

What occurs in Darfur concerns not only the fate of its refugee, raped, hungry, dispossessed people. The outcome will also tell the north whether it can get away with what it wants. If it discovers that it can, it will start again on the much bigger prize of the south.
[..]

Here’s a reminder of just how revoltingly brutal and inhumane the Arab Supremacism of the Sudanese Islamists is (The Guardian, July 20, 1004):

While African women in Darfur were being raped by the Janjaweed militiamen, Arab women stood nearby and sang for joy, according to an Amnesty International report published yesterday. The songs of the Hakama, or the “Janjaweed women” as the refugees call them, encouraged the atrocities committed by the militiamen.

The women singers stirred up racial hatred against black civilians during attacks on villages in Darfur and celebrated the humiliation of their enemies, the human rights group said.

[..]

During an attack on the village of Disa in June last year, Arab women accompanied the attackers and sang songs praising the government and scorning the black villagers.

According to an African chief quoted in the report, the singers said: “The blood of the blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. The power of [Sudanese president Omer Hassan] al-Bashir belongs to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end, you blacks, we have killed your God.”

The chief said that the Arab women also racially insulted women from the village: “You are gorillas, you are black, and you are badly dressed.”

The Janjaweed have abducted women for use as sex slaves, in some cases breaking their limbs to prevent them escaping, as well as carrying out rapes in their home villages, the report said.

The militiamen “are happy when they rape. They sing when they rape and they tell that we are just slaves and that they can do with us how they wish”, a 37-year-old victim, identified as A, is quoted as saying in the report, which was based onmore than 100 testimonies from women in the refugee camps in neighbouring Chad.

What the report does not mention is that according to the Sunnah women taken captive during Jihad can be taken as slaves and the Koran permits the rape of female slaves.

Robert Spencer explains:

“Each of us was raped by between three and six men….One woman refused to have sex with them, so they split her head into pieces with an axe in front of us.”

This happened in Darfur, from which Sudanese military personnel actually airlifted women to Khartoum to serve as sex slaves.

Meanwhile, Indira Dzetskelova, the mother of one of the child hostages in Beslan, Russia, reports that “several 15-year-old girls were raped by terrorists.” Her daughter “heard their terrible cries and screams when those monsters took them away.”
[..]

What does rape, then, have to do with these religious conflicts? Unfortunately, everything. The Islamic legal manual ‘Umdat al-Salik, which carries the endorsement of Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” Why? So that they are free to become the concubines of their captors. The Qur’an permits Muslim men to have intercourse with their wives and their slave girls: “Forbidden to you are … married women, except those whom you own as slaves” (Sura 4:23-24).

After one successful battle, Muhammad tells his men, “Go and take any slave girl.” He took one for himself also. After the notorious massacre of the Jewish Qurayzah tribe, he did it again. According to his earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad “went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for [the men of Banu Qurayza] and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches.” After killing “600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900,” the Prophet of Islam took one of the widows he had just made, Rayhana bint Amr, as another concubine.

Seems that while sleeping off a hangover I missed a Crusade. Oh well, I’m sure there’ll be another one next week. In the meantime here’s what everyone said about it.

But first things first. The great Oriana Fallaci passed away on Friday. This first series of links marks her departure. And from me a humble THANK YOU.

• Mark Steyn: Farewell, La Fallaci
• Michelle Malkin “Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P., and the Religion of Perpetual Outrage”
• Amy K. Rosenthal: “Oriana Fallaci: Champion of civilization”
• Gates of Vienna: Part 1 and “Part 2: Dissidence in the pew”
• Jihad Watch” (Robert Spencer)
• Protein Wisdom (Dan Collins)
• Hot Air.

And now, as they say “Durkah, Durkah, Muhammad, Jihad!”

• Father Raymond J. de Souza in Canada’s National Post: “Rioters’ madness shames Muslim world” Reactions of some fanatics does not help open dialogue
  

  The eruption of rage in some quarters of the Islamic world against Pope Benedict XVI requires that several tough things be said.

  Painful though it may be, speaking frankly is necessary if there is to be honest and open dialogue between the Abrahamic faiths. Given the reaction to Benedict’s address, though, one wonders if that dialogue is even possible.

• Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times: “You’ve said sorry, Holy Father – now demand a price”
  

  You can bet your life that by the time you read this, some Catholic priest toiling away in a godforsaken, dusty hellhole — Sudan, perhaps, or Turkey — will have been smacked about a bit, or had his church burnt down or been arrested without charge. The Pope should have been aware that Islam always reacts to western allegations that it is not a peaceful religion by mass outbreaks of vituperation, denunciation and acts of jihadic violence.

  That this is a paradox seems not to be even remotely recognised by many Muslims. Commenting on the Pope’s speech, Tasnim Aslam, a spokeswoman for the Pakistani foreign ministry, came out with this little piece of doublethink beauty: “Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.”

• Claus Christian Malzahn in De Spiegel: “Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, the Pope — Who’s Next?” The pope has apologized for the outrage amongst Muslims sparked by his recent comments. But the episode proves once again that criticizing Islam is dangerous.
  

  That so many in the Muslim world joined the protests against the pope merely show just how influential Islamist extremist groups have become. The political goal of the Islamists is clear: any dispute between Christianity and Islam must obey the rules handed down by political Islamism.

  Bending to this demand would be a mistake — indeed it would be tantamount to turning one’s back on freedom of expression and opinion. What will come next?

• Christopher Orlet in The American Spectator: Come Together
  

  There will be those who wish the Pope had gone further. Count me among them. Rather than relying on some emperor of seven centuries past, I wish Benedict had said that holy war was an oxymoron like “tax return.” I wish he’d reminded Muslims that this is the 21st, not the 7th century, that the Age of Reason began three centuries ago, and that the days of vilifying Jews and seeking their extermination should be ended.
  ..

  I suspect that the Pope was hoping to make the point that unless the West comes together, heals its divisions, and faces the threat of radical Islam together, it may face a similar fate as the Roman-Byzantine Empire. Naturally Benedict couldn’t come right and make such a bald statement — just as Benedict’s predecessor Pope Pius XII had to be similarly circumspect during Nazi rule — so he couched his remark in an obscure reference by a forgotten historical figure. The pope knew that he would have to apologize later for his statement, still he believed it important enough to risk it.

  For the first time since the mid-14th century Manuel II has returned to the world’s consciousness. It’s as though he’s been waiting, nearly 700 years, for just this occasion. On his behalf I’d like to say one thing: “Apologize, hell. I mean what I said, and I said what I mean.”
  (via Tim Blair)

• William Rees-Mogg, in The Times: “Why the Pope was right” Benedict did give offence — but no great religion should be immune from difficult questions
  

  The question is not whether the quotation from the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus is offensive: it is.

  The question is whether the emperor is justified in what he said. His main thrust was at least partly justified. There is a real problem about the teaching of the Koran on violence against the infidel. That existed in the 14th century, and was demonstrated on 9/11, 2001. There is every reason to discuss it. I am more afraid of silence than offence.

• Editorial in the Telegraph: “Islam, like Christianity, is not above criticism”
• David Warren in the the Ottawa Citizen: “Apologize for what?”
  

  The BBC appears to have been quickest off the mark, to send around the world in many languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, and Malay, word that the Pope had insulted the Prophet of Islam, during an address in Bavaria.

  He had not, of course.

• Andrew Bostom in The American Thinker: “The Pope, Jihad, and “Dialogue”
  

  The most important address commemorating 9/11/01 was delivered on 9/12/06, a day after the fifth anniversary of this cataclysmic act of jihad terrorism. It was not delivered by President Bush, and was not even pronounced in the United States. On September 12, 2006 at the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture (“adding some allusions of the moment”) entitled, “Faith, Reason and the University”.

• Douglas Farah, “The Islamist Reponse to the Pope’s Comments”:
  

  In this war, the enemy will use denial and deception, propaganda, front groups ready to react with public outrage at even preceived minor grievances to portray everything that happens as an anti-Muslim crusade. So we don’t mention what Islam really teaches, or what many in Islam teach as Islam-we believe in free speech and freedom of religion, so we don’t want to get involved with what is generally deemed to be protected speech.

  And that has vast merit. But it does not mean we cannot point out, and very publicly, the great hypocracy of these groups. It is not all of Islam, but the premediated response by some is designed to broaden the appeal of the Islamists in the Islamic community. We cannot stand by and allow them to define the entire terms of every debate.

• Anne Applebaum on Slate.com: “A Sorry Situation” It’s time to stop apologizing and start defending freedom of speech.
  

  Already, angry Palestinian militants have assaulted at least seven West Bank and Gaza churches, destroying two of them. In Somalia, gunmen shot dead an elderly Italian nun. Radical clerics from Qatar to Qum have called, variously, for a “day of anger” or for worshippers to “hunt down” the pope and his followers. From Turkey to Malaysia, Muslim politicians have condemned the pope and his apology as “insufficient.” And all of this because Benedict XVI, speaking at the University of Regensburg, quoted a Byzantine emperor who, more than 600 years ago, called Islam a faith “spread by the sword.”

  We’ve been here before, of course.

• Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail: “The jihad against the Pope”
  

  In fact, the Pope’s real crime surely lay in speaking a truth that is denied by the many who claim that Islam is a religion of peace. On the contrary, Islam does indeed have a long history of imposing its faith on the world by the sword. The Emperor whose remarks sparked this furore had spoken in despair when his empire was under siege from the Ottomans.

  It is that religious tradition of holy war which is precisely what is driving the global Islamic terrorism that currently threatens us all. Which is why the Pope’s observations were a contribution to a crucial worldwide debate which must be had.

• Jules Crittenden in the Boston Herald: “Pope blinks in struggle with Islam?”
  

  The pope blinked.

  He picked a fight with Islam. Then he gave Islam a victory.

• Daniel Johnson: “Understanding Benedict”:
  

  Günter Grass, in his memoirs, recalls an encounter with the young Joseph Ratzinger while both were held in an American prisoner-of-war camp in 1945. The young Grass, a Nazi who had been proud to serve in the Waffen-SS, was taken aback by this soft-spoken, gentle young Catholic. Unlike God, the future pope played dice, quoting St. Augustine in the original while he did so; he even dreamt in Latin. His only desire was to return to the seminary from which he had been drafted. “I said, there are many truths,” wrote Grass. “He said, there is only one.”

  Sixty years later, just before the conclave that elected him pope, Ratzinger proved that he had never changed. The then prefect of the Congregation of the Faith — in effect, the church’s theological backstop — preached a sermon to the assembled cardinals in which he denounced the “dictatorship of relativism.” From that moment on, there was no other serious candidate.

• Swapan Dasgupta: “Pope is right on Islam”
• And finally here’s the Pope’s full speech. And the Vatican’s version, with a slight difference.

In other Counterjihadi developments:

• Sam Harris in the LA Times: “Head-in-the-Sand Liberals”. Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
  

  TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, “The End of Faith.” In it, I argued that the world’s major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.

  …my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

  On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

• Ralph R. Reiland in the Pittsburg Tribune-Review: Children as bombs
  

  As if things weren’t crazy enough in the Middle East, here’s the officially sanctioned message in sixth-grade Palestinian textbooks for 11- and 12-year-old kids: “The noble soul has two goals ” death and the desire for it.”

  The goal isn’t to build magnificent skyscrapers or write brilliant novels or to work on cures for the world’s most lethal diseases. The noble goal for the noble soul is as simple as strapping on a dynamite belt and blowing oneself into a million pieces in an Israeli pizza shop.

• Doug Patton: “Political Correctness Now Precludes U.S. Winning a War” (via IRIS)
• Mary Laney in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Peaceful Muslims should turn their anger toward Islamofascists”
  

  We are at war. Islamofascists have declared war on the United States and stated that they intend to kill all Americans. And they’ve shown us that they mean business.

  We’ve just passed the anniversary of the worst attack on America in history, 9/11, when Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 innocent men, women and children as they turned passenger planes into missiles. Yet the news is filled with stories of Muslims — not loudly condemning the Muslim murderers — but complaining of their treatment here and demanding Americans change their attitudes.

  We Americans should change our attitudes?

• Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post: “The Tehran Calculus”
  

  In his televised Sept. 11 address, President Bush said that we must not “leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.” There’s only one such current candidate: Iran.

• Emmett Tyrrell in the NY Sun: “Alone at the heart of Liberalism”
  

  In a thoughtful and timely Wall Street Journal column Bret Stephens offers this, “Here’s a puzzle: Why is it so frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when Islamism gains — namely liberals — are typically the most reluctant to fight?” They have also been the first to bug out of Iraq, which one would think does not put liberals in a good light.

  Mr. Stephens advances several reasons, none of which diminishes the irony of his point. He offers the liberals’ “instinct for pacifism,” their moral relativism, their weakness for appeasement and their confusion of Islamism with opposition to materialism and to the corporate world.

  But I have an additional explanation….

• Bernard Lewis: “Bring Them Freedom, Or They Destroy Us” adapted from a lecture delivered by Bernard Lewis on July 16, 2006, on board the Crystal Serenity, during a Hillsdale College cruise in the British Isles.
  

  By common consent among historians, the modern history of the Middle East begins in the year 1798, when the French Revolution arrived in Egypt in the form of a small expeditionary force led by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte–who conquered and then ruled it for a while with appalling ease..

• Robert R. Reilly on MercatorNet.com “9/11: a chance for the West to rediscover itself”
  Winning the battle of ideas with radical Islam calls for moral coherence. Are we up to the challenge?

• Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Coverage of 9/11 anniversary was too wimpy”

And the Rest:

• Charles A. Radin in The Boston Globe: “Muslims from Israel bring fresh views to Hub”
  

  Al Qasemi College , which was founded in 1989 as the first institute of Islamic higher education in Israel, is trying to export revolutionary openness and liberalism to the wider Islamic world, leaders of the faculty told educators, Jewish leaders, and local Muslims during a four-day visit to the Boston area that ended yesterday.

• Michael Petrou: “Tyrants of the Caribbean” The virulently anti-Western Non-Aligned Movement is having its coming-out party in Havana this week
• Carolyn O’Hara at Foreign Policy (links in original): “Darfur Delusions”:
  

  What happens if you organize and arm janjaweed militias who rape, kill, and pillage for years, displacing millions from their homes and leaving at least 200,000 dead? And what happens if you recently imprisoned an American journalist, his translator, and driver, kept the U.S. president’s envoy waiting for three days – despite her offer of a one-on-one meeting with Bush – because you are “too busy” to meet, and then rejected all international calls for U.N. troops to be deployed in your country, despite demonstrations around the world over the weekend demanding just that? Well, if you’re Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, you get a nice package of economic incentives offered to you – think debt relief, increased trade, and more aid. Is this how the international community hopes to address the worsening violence in Darfur? By so richly rewarding one of the men responsible?

• Letter to Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Richard Corwin from Bethel Park:
  

  If you liked Srebrenica, if you liked Rwanda, if you are looking forward to the African Union troops leaving Dufar [sic], you’ll love the results if the U.S. quickly leaves Iraq.

Phew. I feel another hangover coming on.

Guess this country.

It’s army, under the command of the ruling regime, is engaging in a campaign of genocide against racial and religious minorities, often beheading, raping and torturing its victims, but it is not the Sudan.

Children as young as 12 are being forcefully recruited into this army, but this is not the Taliban in Afghanistan or “Saddam’s Lion Cubs” in Hussein’s Iraq.

The military regime is busily building bunkers in a strongpoint defence matrix, allegedly in anticipation of a US attack, but it is not Iran.

This country is removing any crosses or other Christian symbols from public spaces, bit it is not Algeria.

This country has the world’s largest narcotics-trafficking militia operating on its territory, but it is not Columbia.

This country has a health crisis worse than the poorest areas of Africa, with more children dying before age 5 in some areas, than the Congo, but it is not Afghanistan.

This country has recently agreed to allow Russia to share in exploitation of its oil fields, in exchange for weapons shipments, but it is not Venezuela.

This country, while shunned by the West, counts China as its main political and economic ally, but it is not North Korea.

While the world’s attention is focused on several noisy ideologically and religiously driven nutjob regimes, one old backyard hussler is slowly but surely losing touch with reality, seemingly by way of good old fashioned drug-induced psychosis. That twitchy little battler is Burma.

“The side road the soldiers have blocked off is 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of the city of Pyinmana in the central Burmese plains. The jungle stretches for more than 400 kilometers (249 miles), like some vast, green carpet, toward a line of jagged peaks on the distant horizon marking the Golden Triangle bordering Laos and Thailand. The only destination worth seeing in this rural stretch of Burma is its tropical rainforest research institute.

But Burma’s ruling generals recently declared the region a restricted military zone, making the trip to the institute off-limits to outsiders. The Junta is having its new capital built somewhere at the end of this 20-foot-wide highway. The central government’s officials were already required to move there last November.

..

Burma’s leadership apparently plans to barricade itself into its remote new capital, from which it expects to control the country in the future. The nearest major city, Mandalay, is a 250-kilometer (155-mile) journey away on a deeply potholed road, and the trip to Rangoon takes about eight hours. Naypyidaw, or “Royal Country,” is the name Than Shwe, the junta’s 73-year-old leader, has personally selected for his government’s secretive new headquarters. According to official instructions to be followed in the event of a foreign attack, “Naypyidaw is our war bunker, where we will wait, during an American attack, until the Chinese hurry to our aid.”

Sounds like a brilliant plan. Although, considering the pace of events in Iraq and throwing in some generous estimates for the actions against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Trans-dnestr my estimated date of invasion is somewhere around hmmm.. how does 2090 sound? By which date you won’t need to wait long for China to help, because you’ll be a part of it.

So what the hell is going here? Well, I did mention drug-induced psychosis, didn’t I?

“Beheadings by troops are common. So too are beatings, the use of forced labour and rape. Growing use of amphetamines among Burma’s 400,000-strong army is fuelling this violence.

A narcotics expert from the Australian National University who is based in Thailand, David Matheson, said researchers had concluded that many troops went into battle high on amphetamines. “When they come across dead Burmese soldiers, they find methamphetamine tablets on most of them if not all of them, particularly in the Shan state.”

The brutality of the attacks is evident in video footage, taken by members of the evangelical Christian missionary group the Free Burma Rangers, of the burning of villages. The video shows young men, armed with AK-47 rifles, setting fire to bamboo homes as residents flee in terror.”

Lets put two and 400,000 together here. “Most if not all” of the military is marching to the rhythm of an ICE binge, and its leadership is barricading itself away from the world in the middle of the jungle, declaring their new place of residence “Royal County”. Add the delusion and paranoia up with the erratic acts of violence, and this is obviously one hell of a tweak out. And it is sure to be followed by one hell of a come down, yet oddly enough “Royal County” just doesn’t sound like a rehab centre to me.

But I propose a solution. Send in the bicycles. That should keep them busy for at least a couple of decades. Heck, maybe after that we can arrange for them to sort through the world’s garbage for recycling, and get on top of that global warming biznit too. Hey, its far more likely to have an effect than another UN Resolution.