It seems to take quite a lot for a spectacular state-failure catastrophe to attract the attention of the civilized world these days, what with U.S. President Barack Obama’s persistent and absurd reiterations of his administration’s fantasy that “the tide of war is receding” and everything.
But France is paying attention. Besides stepping up to the Islamist assault on Mali,
French Interior Minister Manuel Valls has said that a handful of radical imams will be expelled from the country in the coming days as part of ongoing efforts to deport foreign-born preachers who "refer to the need to fight against France".
Liberty, equality, fraternity. France: the country that keeps on giving.
At the Jaipur festival, in defiance of intimidation from the civil government, three courageous Indian writers began their literary presentations by publicly reading from The Satanic Verses. I chose to support Rushdie in a different way, by reading from my own ‘Words for Rushdie’, published in New Statesman at the time of the original fatwa – for that magazine was an honourable exception to the widespread fashion to blame the victim rather than the Muslim perpetrators of the outrage.
The organizers of the festival were placed in an impossibly difficult position. Let down as they were by the spineless Rajasthan government, who had eyes only for the Muslim vote in the current elections, they did their best. They were personally threatened by a baying mob of bearded youths who invaded the festival compound promising murder and mayhem if Rushdie was allowed so much as a video link (as Germaine Greer said at the time of the Danish cartoons row, “What these people really love and do best is
HRW’s analysis documents extensively the enforcement of Islamic law vis-à-vis women’s rights in Chechnya, as part of Chechen President Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov’s ‘Campaign for Female Virtue’. In fact, Kadyrov, who was first appointed president of the Chechen Republic by the Kremlin in February 2007, has never disguised his advocacy for Shari’a. Soon after becoming president, he defended polygamy as part of Chechen tradition, and in 2009, he praised the male relatives of seven young women, whom they shot in the head and dumped by a roadside as part of a series of honor killings. Speaking to journalists on a Friday afternoon outside a mosque in Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic, Kadyrov said that the women had ‘loose morals’, thereby deserving death, and that ‘no one can tell us not to be Muslims’. Even so, polygamy and honor killings...More >>
Political Islam as a potentially radicalizing ideology is not a new thing, though it is often presented as though it suddenly burst on to the scene on September 11, 2001, or perhaps even as far back as the Iranian revolution of 1979. In fact, many of the trends we see today, such as the Islamist call for a religious awakening across the lands of the old Caliphate to counter the humiliation of the West's cultural and technological progress - as compared with corruption, technological backwardness and political stagnation within the "Muslim" world - were present before what we would even call our modern age.
There has been for some years past, and there still is, a stir among the Muhammadan nations of the world. It is called "Pan-islamism" by Europeans: the word...More >>
Advocates of sharia law courts in the West would be well advised to examine how (in)justice is served in those countries where the system is most established. The latest outrage from Saudi Arabia:
A Saudi judge has asked several hospitals in the country whether they could damage a man's spinal cord as punishment after he was convicted of attacking another man with a cleaver and paralyzing him, local newspapers reported on Thursday...
"But it's hard to follow details of the Saudi justice system. People are sentenced in closed trials with no access to the public and no lawyers," he said.
According to Amnesty, in 2005, a convict in the kingdom had his teeth pulled out by a dentist because he had smashed another man's teeth out in a fight.
"We have also had cases of people sentenced to blindness because they have caused the blindness of another person," Chirouf said. "But never anything involving a spinal cord."
So much for human rights, the Hyppocratic Oath and the common decency of human beings towards each other....More >>
A recent report by
Political Islam as a potentially radicalizing ideology is not a new thing, though it is often presented as though it suddenly burst on to the scene on September 11, 2001, or perhaps even as far back as the Iranian revolution of 1979. In fact, many of the trends we see today, such as the Islamist call for a religious awakening across the lands of the old Caliphate to counter the humiliation of the West's cultural and technological progress - as compared with corruption, technological backwardness and political stagnation within the "Muslim" world - were present before what we would even call our modern age.
Advocates of sharia law courts in the West would be well advised to examine how (in)justice is served in those countries where the system is most established. The 
