Saudi Arabia postponed Raif’s next 50 lashes yesterday, but on Monday they beheaded a woman in public, without anesthetic and taking three blows to do it.
Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, a Burmese woman who resided in Saudi Arabia, was executed by sword on Monday after being dragged through the street and held down by four police officers.
She was convicted of the sexual abuse and murder of her seven-year-old step-daughter. [Read more…]
Yes really: sausage outrage. No, not the sausage=penis kind of outrage, the other kind.
Reham Khan, the former BBC presenter who recently married ex-cricketer and politician Imran Khan, has sparked a backlash in Pakistan after footage emerged of her cooking and selling pork sausages.
There they go again – she “sparked outrage.”
The 41-year-old TV star, who is herself of British-Pakistani decent, can purportedly be seen frying the religiously restricted meat at a country fair in West Sussex for the BBC South Today show in 2011, The Times reports. [Read more…]
Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, writing in Pakistan’s Friday Times, calls it deceitful to claim that the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and other murderous outbursts “have nothing to do with Islam or Muslims.”
The barefaced deceit gets the backing of the liberal left of the West, that gets extra brownie points for speaking up about the self-inflicted ‘marginalisation of Muslims’, most of whom continue to avoid befriending ‘Jews and Christians’ because their scripture ostensibly prohibits it.
And so when the Charlie Hebdo office was attacked in Paris last week, everything from France’s occupation of Algeria over half a century ago to the economic disparity between Muslims and non-Muslims in the country was touted as the raison d’etre. Fingers have been pointed everywhere except at the awkward truth that the majority of Muslims around the world, and their version of Islam, endorse killing ‘blasphemers’.
I don’t know if it’s actually the majority, but the number is clearly not small enough.
It is the same version that is practised, among many other Muslim countries, in Saudi Arabia, where Islam originated and where the entire Muslim world goes to offer pilgrimage. The same country, facing which all Muslims offer salat; where Raif Badawi, a liberal blogger, has been punished with 1,000 lashes for ‘insulting Islam’ – the same ‘crime’ that Charlie Hebdo’s satirists committed. The same crime that is officially punishable by death in 13 countries – all Muslim states.
If there were a worldwide survey about the punishment that Charlie Hebdo journalists deserved for drawing and promoting those cartoons, the answer of the majority of the Muslim world is common knowledge, should we prefer being honest about it. And when the majority of the Muslims and almost all of the Islamic clergy are ‘misinterpreting’ the text identically, obviously the intelligibility of the scriptures comes under scrutiny.
That’s why holy books are such poison. It’s because the belief that there is such a thing as a “holy book” is such poison.
By that logic all Muslims and their scriptures would be ‘asking to be’ attacked by orthodox Christians for refusing to acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the son of God, or for the ubiquitous bile being spewed against Hinduism, especially in Pakistan.
Would the apologists be consistent in their argument if Hindu or Christian extremists started butchering Muslims because they disrespected their God? What about the nonreligious folk – the nonbelievers that have eternal hellfire sanctioned for them by almost every religious scripture? Should they retaliate with violence after taking offence at the fact that the deity absolutely despises them?
All religions are offensive to every other religion.
And that’s why secularism is needed.
You know all that kakk about the new pope being a kinder gentler pope? It was kakk all along. I knew that.
He’s back to telling us teh gayz will ruin everything. Of course he is.
Francis arrived in the Philippines on Friday for a five day trip and spoke to thousands in the heart of Manila, the country’s capital city. While speaking on the issue of same sex marriage on Jan. 16, Francis went into attack mode. “The family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage,” Francis told the crowd. “These realities are increasingly under attack from powerful forces, which threaten to disfigure God’s plan for creation.”
Yup – because when it’s two women or two men, what becomes of the hierarchy? It goes poof. Very very threatening, this idea of marriage between equals.
Or not. It’s just threatening to an antiquated and illiberal idea of marriage – and that’s a good thing.
But of course no pope is going to think so. You don’t get to be pope that way.
Wonderful. There was a protest against Charlie Hebdo in Niger today – at which four people were killed. That’s a fabulous reason to die.
At least four people have been killed in violent protests against French magazine Charlie Hebdo in Niger’s second city of Zinder, officials say.
A number of churches and the French cultural centre were among several buildings raided and set alight. [Read more…]
The Telegraph reports that IS have apparently taken literally the injunction to throw the children of Lot (you know what they got up to, nudge) off a high place. There are photos.
Photographs have emerged that appear to show members of the Islamic State group in Iraq throwing a man from a building in punishment for being gay.
The graphic images, seemingly taken in the northern Isil controlled city of Mosul, show a man being pushed to his death before a large crowd that had gathered in the main square below.
One photograph, taken from the top of the building, shows the man from behind, blindfolded and with his hands tied across his back, being pushed to the ledge by his executioner.
In another photo, a jihadist, his face covered with a balaclava, is shown reading out the apparent sentence that was ruled in the extremists’ “Sharia court”.
There’s that stupid word again – “extremists.” They’re not “extremists,” they’re murderers, criminals, fascist murdering theocrats. Calling them “extremists” is euphemistic.
A caption for another photo says the man had been convicted of the practices of the “people of lot”, a euphemism for sodomy.
I suppose they also say “thank you for flying with us” right before they cut off people’s heads.
Originally a public Facebook post by Lama Abu-Odeh on January 13, published here by permission.
Ok let’s do these legally. Supposing you pass a rule in France that says any humorous depiction of prophet Mohamad is banned. Based on the idea that life for French “Muslims” is hard because of French racism and any such depiction of the prophet is in itself racist and will only make the effects of the racism worse. You want to make life easier for them so you ban it. What have you achieved? Let’s think of the winners and losers of such a ban.
One primary winner of course are the religious within the “Muslim” camp who find such depictions offensive. Great victory for them and a great concession from the Secular French. The French lose, they win. The French press will have to be self-conscious about its representation of Muslim religious icon, self-censure or face the consequences.
Ok, now think harder, who else loses? Well, the secularists, skeptics, agnostics, atheists within the Muslim community itself. [Read more…]
And here is Christiane Amanpour talking to Sarah Khan of Inspire about whether or not Muslims have to be “offended” by images of the prophet.
(Spoiler: no, they don’t.)
Imagine my surprise and delight yesterday to turn on Fresh Air (the NPR interview show) and find that the guest was Maajid Nawaz. It’s a terrific interview, in which he covers a lot of ground and says valuable things. That’s one thing about Fresh Air – it gives people a lot of time.
At age 16, Nawaz was transformed from a disaffected British teenager to an Islamist recruiter when he joined the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Nawaz continued his college studies and spent a year abroad in Egypt, where he continued his recruiting. As a result, he was imprisoned for four years, starting in 2002.
It was while in prison, surrounded by several prominent jihadist leaders, that Nawaz realized he wanted to take a different path. He was reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm and came to a new understanding of “what happens when somebody tries to create a utopia.” [Read more…]
Here’s a marvelous, blistering piece by Zineb El-Rhazoui in reply to the December 2013 one by former Charlie Hebdo editor Olivier Cyran saying CH was racist. Seth Ackerman at Jacobin translated it. Zineb el-Rhazoui is religion editor of CH.
She learned from Cyran’s piece that she’s a racist.
Being of French citizenship, I was anxious to identify, before the malady could advance any further, which races were likely to activate my white-woman antibodies.
She flips sarcastically through many possibilities, then zeroes in on the real one.
I didn’t have to make it far into the piece to be reassured that his diagnosis was more precise: my racism, thank God (that idiot), is only aimed at Muslims, and I contracted this dangerous syndrome from the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. [Read more…]