We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
According to the SMCCDI, the Iranian government is strengthening gender apartheid in that country.
The Islamic republic regime is to apply more discriminatory measures against Iranian women in days ahead. Based on some official reports, the Gender Apartheid policy is to be strengthen and Sexual Segregation to increase in Iran.
The theocratic regime is basing the application of such policy on the strict interpretation of Islamic rules which are dating from 14 centuries ago in the tribal Saudi Arabia which became the cradle of Islam.
Already since three weeks ago, clerics have increased their anti-woman speeches and are using the Fridays’ collective prayers in order to mobilize their followers in what has been qualified as “making respect the values of Islam and morality”. Members of the brutal Bassij paramilitary force and the feared Islamist Moral Squad have been deployed beside the regular police force and reports of harassment of women, sometimes brutally, are increasing.
It is also apparent many Iranian women will put their lives on the line before accepting their Mullah designated social role as bare-foot and pregnant pleasure machines.
Many Iranian women have burned their mandatory veils in some demos in order to attract the world’s attention to their case. They’re believed to be the force that will bring down, a day, the Islamic regime and would impact the entire Middle-east.
When the excrement finally does impact the Iranian rotational air moving appliance, I expect the lasses will ensure these ‘religious’ authority figures wear their testicles about their windpipes rather than their original lower coordinates.
The fact that the leaders of the Sunni minority oppose a federal structure for Iraq, and have the ability to torpedo the new constitution, does not change the reality on the ground that Iraq is already in effect three nations.
The Kurds in particular have both an effective local administration and by far the best militias to call on if needed. The Kurdish situation is also helped by the fact that it was really the Peshmerga who moved into the vacuum and liberated the Kurdish region whilst US and British forces smashed Saddam’s armies in the south.
Eventually if the Kurds do not get the autonomy they desire, it is just a matter of time before they simply secede and I rather doubt the US had either the stomach or the inclination to use force to prevent what is a purely internal matter for the Iraqis and Kurds. Any in any case, so what if Iraq breaks up? The obsession with ‘stability’ and countering Iran is what lead the West to unwisely back Saddam Hussain for so many years and look where that got everyone in the end.
An independent Kurdish Northern Iraq may give the Turks cause to fret (unfortunate but them’s the breaks) and give Iran acute dyspepsia (which has to be a good thing) because Kurdish success in Iraq will no doubt give the Kurdish minorities elsewhere ideas above their station. However I fail to see how thwarting long standing Kurdish aspirations is in the interests of the US and UK, particularly as the Kurds have been quite amenable to US interests as of late and have shown themselves to be the sharpest operators.
Of course the prospect of a Shi’ite Islamic Republic of Southern Iraq is not very agreeable but it at least has the virtue of allowing more tailored pressures to be put on the three constituent parts of ‘Iraq’ rather than a probably futile one-size-fits-all constitution which in any case may fall apart as soon as western forces pull out.
An Iraq of highly autonomous cantons is probably the best that Iraq’s Sunni politicos have any right to expect because the alternative is never going to be a return to the ‘good old days’ of Sunni dominance and centralised rule from Baghdad, it is going to be splitting the county in three independent parts. And there is something to be said for that anyway. To hell with ‘nation building’… sometimes the cause of liberty (and probably long term stability too) may be served by a bit of ‘nation wrecking’.
I had never heard the word blogger until May 25 . But now I know them well because of all the amazing coverage they had of the protests. My friends overseas all followed what happened through the blogs, because they have more credibility than the mainstream media.
– Rabab al-Mahdi, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo, and an opposition activist.
I am sure many of you have heard the joke: An Arab meets one of the screenwriters from Star Trek and says “Hey, how come there are no Muslims on the Starship Enterprise?” The screenwriter replies “Because the story is set in the future.”
But many of the most puritanical and intolerant Muslims have their eyes very much on the future. Over on the Social Affairs Unit‘s blog, William Ridgeway has writen an interesting piece called “Those Drunken, Whoring Saudis: Desert Islam’s problem with women”:
Encroaching modernity has resulted in an increase in the place and power of Desert Islam in everyday society. Contrary to widespread Western beliefs about the trajectory of the Middle East as a hesitant but inevitable climb to liberal democracy, the region is actually going the other way – fast. Academics call this “Islamicisation”, the spread of radical Shi’a and Wahhabi beliefs and practices throughout the region. Because of this trend, the Middle East one sees nowadays is nothing like it was, say, fifty years ago. Around the 1950s, about the time oil was being discovered in the Gulf, many Muslim nations were relatively liberal by today’s standards. Alcohol flowed freely, women went uncovered and there was lively public debate about “Ataturk’s way”, the separation of Islam and state, modernisation, and dialogue with the West. The Middle East seemed to be going in the right direction.
Saudi oil changed all that.
I still think in the long run secular western civilisation will crush radical Islam under its sheer weight but it is an interesting article. Read the whole thing.
The Independent (or ‘Al-Independent’ as some of us like to call that bastion of Islamo-fascist apologists) has an article predicting nothing less than a full blown domestic Islamic insurgency in Britain.
Whilst clearly we have a problem, I really do not buy The Independent’s scenario as presented, implying that the 100,000 or so “totally militarised” Muslims in Britain from various hotspots are just raring and ready to make large parts of the country into no-go areas. However I guess we will know who is correct soon enough.
Peak Talk has the perfect summation of the tragic affair of the murder of Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic.
Robert Alderson writes about what Islam really needs and has an interesting idea how to nudge things along
In some ways Islam is at the stage that Christianity was centuries ago. Religious texts and debates are in classical Arabic, a language which most Muslims can not understand – just like medieval European peasants could not understand Latin but were still expected to live by the Latin version of the bible.
I have not read the Koran or the Bible but from excerpts and quotations I have seen it would be perfectly possible to justify anything you wanted with selective quotations from either work; suicide bombings, slavery, non-tolerance of homosexuality, wearing a veil, whatever. The Christian Bible has at least been translated into most European languages and interested parties can refer to the source text and argue things out. The Koran has, by and large, not been translated into local Arabic languages and is therefore beyond the practical understanding of the ‘Arab Street’ The interpreters of the Koran are those scholars who have taken the time to learn classical Arabic and therefore may tend to have a different outlook on life than people who have to earn the money that pays for them.
The other point is that Koranic scholarship still regards the Koran as the literal word of God, no metaphors, no allusions – straight word of God no dispute allowed. This type of fundamental literalism was abandoned by mainstream Christian theologians a long time ago.
The West could do worse than translate the Koran into local dialects and publish it on the Internet or even drop it from airplanes! We need an Islamic Martin Luther to open up the religion.
Let us listen to what Dr. Azzam Tamimi of the Muslim Association of Britain is saying:
Senior Muslims have warned the Government that it needed to revise British foreign policy if it wants to put an end to the violence. Dr Azzam Tamimi, from the Muslim Association of Britain, said the country was in real danger and that this would continue so long as British forces remained in Iraq. He described the July 7 bombings and the attempted attacks in London on Thursday as “horrifying” but said it was not enough to simply unite in condemnation of the bombers.
People reading this blog may or may not share my enthusiasm for the war in Iraq, but even if you were an ‘anti’, make no mistake, what these ‘senior Muslims’ are demanding is nothing less that capitulation to terrorism. Dr. Tamimi is quite unequivocal: change your foreign policy or these people will continue to blow you up.
And when Massoud Shadjareh, chairman the Islamic Human Rights Commission, says:
we know this wasn’t a one-off, we need to look at ways of addressing the underlying factors that created it. I feel it’s urgent to start addressing these before there is further loss of life.
He had better think deeply before making such statements again or an increasing number of British people may start concluding that the ‘underlying factor’ that needs the most urgent action is the existence of his community in Britain. I look forward to the large body of ‘moderate’ Muslim leaders that is allegedly out there to unequivocally damn Al Qaeda and all their works (and that means not a single use of the word ‘but…’). It is becoming increasingly urgent that this occurs soon and over a sustained period.
Until that happens, I suspect the majority of British people who do not live in Islington will see people like Azzam Tamimi and Massoud Shadjareh as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
A figure from the youth wing of the Tory Party, no less, claims that the powers that be need to talk to Muslim extremists in order to bring them into the mainstream political process, otherwise the poor diddums, obviously so sensitive about their plight, might go beserk again and start interrupting our peaceful existence as happened on July 7.
You have got to hand it to the Conservatives. We tend to think of the party as being the party of Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Robert Peel. It is also, as this moron demonstrates, the party of Neville Chamberlain.
As I said in a rather angry comment the other day: Britain is a country, not a hotel.
The Mirror may not be the most august of newspapers but if half of what they are saying is true, this could be very interesting indeed and puts the whole psychological makeup of the ‘suicide’ bombers in question. Maybe it was not suicide at all!
The evidence is compelling: The terrorists bought return rail tickets, and pay and display car park tickets, before boarding _ a train at Luton for London. None of the men was heard to cry “Allah Akhbar!” – “God is great” – usually screamed by suicide bombers as they detonate their bomb.
Their devices were in large rucksacks which could be easily dumped instead of being strapped to their bodies. They carried wallets containing their driving licences, bank cards and other personal items. Suicide bombers normally strip themselves of identifying material.
So perhaps it was all done with timers and those little terrorist shits were told a porky about exactly when they were going to blow up. If this is true then the more widely this is known, the less likely it will be that non-suicidal Muslim terrorist supporters might not be quite so willing to act as couriers or bomb planters for ‘the cause’. Maybe the whole deranged ‘Shaheed’ thing has rather less resonance with the UK Islamic fringe than we thought. If the facts are correct, it is a pretty compelling interpretation.
Whilst watching the BBC news’ report about the horrific terrorist attacks against Shi’ite civilians in Iraq, I was astonished to hear the following uttered:
Ominously, there are increasing calls for locals to take up arms and defend their communities.
Excuse me? These poor people have just had the centre of their community blown out and many people killed but the desire to defend themselves is denounced by the BBC as… ominous? It might tell you something about what is happening in Iraq but it also tells you quite a lot about the mindset at the BBC.
It seems to me that locals taking up arms to defend themselves against terrorism directly are exactly what the USA should be encouraging whole heartedly. The fact is that people will start doing so regardless of the wishes of the USA if the security situation continues to deteriorate, so not only would it be pointless to try and stop them, why not make a virtue of necessity and show that the occupying powers welcome Iraqis becoming more self-reliant and willing to confront these murdering bastards themselves?
Iraqi territorial para-militaries could be quite an asset fighting the insurgency precisely because they are not going to be centrally directed, at least to some extent. Counter-insurgency by its nature relies on more than just firepower, which the US has in abundance. It also relies on local knowledge and a willingness to be ruthless, something pissed-off locals could certainly provide. The idea that Al Qaeda can only be fought in Iraq ‘top down’ (i.e. directed from Washington using US and Iraqi government forces) is probably a mistake, so arming the people who are taking the brunt of the attacks seems a pretty sensible way to go.
Sky News and its sister television channel Fox is reporting, along with Channel 4 News, that the bombers last Thursday may heve been killed in the act of detonation. I am watching a police press conference as I write. A number of police raids are going on in Yorkshire, northern England.
I don’t believe in the existence of Hell, but if there is such a place, may the mass murderers of last Thursday spend much time in it.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
