RUTHFULLY YOURS

“If they arrest me and put me in prison, I will carry on in prison. I will radicalize everyone in prison.” — Anjem Choudary, quoted by the Daily Mail.

One of the most troubling factors is the vulnerability of fresh converts to radicalisation. Starting out with minimal knowledge of their new faith, converts are easily lured into adopting strict forms of Islam, guided by existing radicals and by the extremist literature freely available in prisons.

“Political correctness in prisons is allowing extremism to flourish because guards are too afraid of confronting Muslims. …staff fear of being labeled racist” — The Telegraph, citing a report by Ian Acheson, a former British prison governor.

Said al-Shihri, after his release from Guantanamo Bay in 2007, completed and passed the Saudi deradicalisation program, then became deputy leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen, orchestrating the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Sana’a in 2008.

A Labour MP, Khalid Mahmood, pointed out that many of the mentors who are supposed to guide young people away from becoming radicalized are themselves non-violent radicals.

Great Britain is not short of irritating, scoundrelous, extremist figures. One thinks of today’s Labour party leader, the Trotskyite Jeremy Corbyn, a ‘friend’ of Hamas and Hizbullah; the anti-Semitic far-left former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, recently suspended from the same party for anti-Jewish remarks; or George Galloway, who defended and lobbied for Saddam Hussein and called on the Iraqi leader to conquer Israel and retake Jerusalem. We have had more than our share of self-vaunting and holier-than-thou religious figures, too, notably the string of Muslim hate preachers who tour our universities and mosques, radicalizing students and a host of other impressionable and easily-angered young people.

Unfortunately, Afghanistan’s neighbors were not about to let a democratic government with Western influences flourish on their borders, so war broke out.

“[I]t was Massoud and his followers who struggled to uphold human rights, and his enemies who abused them.” — John Jennings, Associated Press.

In 1998, the same year Osama bin Laden released his Declaration of War Against Americans with its “ruling to kill the Americans,” Massoud wrote that Afghanistan had become “occupied by fanatics, extremists, terrorists, mercenaries, drug Mafias and professional murderers.” Citing a “duty to defend humanity against the scourge of intolerance, violence and fanaticism,” he pleaded for American assistance, to no avail.

In 2012, Afghanistan’s National Assembly declared September 9 “Massoud Day. It should be “Massoud Day” in America too.

Before the 15th commemoration of the 9/11 attacks this Sunday, America might also do well to pause on Friday, September 9, to reflect on the 15th anniversary of the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, an Afghan of Tajik ancestry from the Panshjir Valley, who was our best ally in the fight against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Massoud’s detractors say he was just another warlord, but this is not correct. True, the Lion of the Panjshir, as he was known, was a commander of forces. But in a land of warlords, he stood out as a humanist who by all accounts practiced a tolerant, egalitarian version of Islam. He played chess, read poetry, and traveled with hundreds of books. Some called him the “warrior monk.”

Massoud opposed forced marriages, child marriages, and other kinds of widely-approved abuses of women. He signed and promoted the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women. That alone makes him more than “just another warlord.”

The immediate reaction of those who fought and feared Brexit was entirely predictable: something much worse than the Seven Plagues of Egypt was about to descend. Wrong, as usual, all they succeeded in demonstrating was the habitual arrogance of the elites.
When we last spoke to each other, the struggling heroine was tied to the railway tracks, the bonds were holding firm, the locomotive was rushing towards her, and the end looked nigh. At the last minute, however, even as her obituaries were being written (“a sad end to a fine life with many great achievements to her credit”, but also “few will regret the demise of this imperious harridan” and “this is not so much a death as an absorption into a greater Oneness”), Britannia suddenly broke free from the bonds, leapt from the tracks, jumped nimbly onto the rushing locomotive, produced a small revolver hitherto secreted in her underwear, placed it against the temple of the surprised driver, and said: “Make straight for the open seas, Buster, and don’t tell me you don’t know the way.”

I refer, as you have guessed, to the decision of the British people by a 52-to-48 per cent referendum vote to leave the European Union and resume being an independent self-governing democracy. It is less than three months since the vote—and early judgments are always suspect—but the result looks today like a much bigger deal for Europe and the world as well as for Britain than even passionate Brexiteers like me guessed in advance. So far there have been three stages in reaction to it.

The first was an almost universal surprise, since it was a truism that Leavers were a tiny handful of fruitcakes. A defeat for Remain was thus unthinkable. In fact there had always been widespread opposition to the EU among voters at all social levels, even though political parties, the media, and most national institutions had treated the idea with contempt and its adherents as eccentric at best. Suddenly the referendum rules meant that Leavers were on television making the case for Brexit nightly and, contrary to their caricature, they seemed quite reasonable. They persuaded some voters to switch to Leave, and Leave voters to be more confident of their own opinions. As the campaign developed, the polls swung towards Leave and many late polls showed the two sides as neck-and-neck. A Leave victory, though by no means inevitable, should have been seen as pretty likely.

In fact the reaction that followed surprise was a set of variations on horror, outrage, indignation, anguish and a desire for revenge. That was on the Remain side; the Leave side was pleased but not extravagantly so. For a while it simply pocketed its unexpected success and watched, bemused, from the wings while Remainers rioted angrily stage-centre. They plainly wanted the referendum result annulled but they were never quite able to explain why. Obviously they couldn’t say simply that they wanted a different result. So they had to invent a series of specious reasons that in their eyes cast doubt on its validity—that the Leave campaign was xenophobic and racist, that its voters (though not Remain voters) had not understood what they were voting for, that it had “told lies” (uniquely so in political campaigns, apparently), and so on and so forth. But the argument advanced with most passion by Remainers and repeated most often in the left-wing press ran as follows: because old uneducated people supporting Leave had outvoted young people with degrees voting Remain, these miserable old geezers had “robbed the young of their future” and, well, it wasn’t right.

No, it wasn’t right—on any number of grounds. First, the argument assumes what has to be proved: if the future outside the EU turns out to be better than inside it, then those who voted Leave will have bequeathed the young a better future. You’re welcome. Second, neither young nor old people voted as blocs; large percentages of both groups deviated from their respective majorities; and because of differential turnout, more older people than younger voted to Remain! Third, the argument that young people with degrees in particular were outvoted by old uneducated ones is a piece of vulgar intellectual snobbery. Happily, it is also false because (a) it confuses education (and, by implication) intelligence with possession of a degree, and (b) it assumes that the value of a degree is stable over time. However, according to a House of Commons Library study of educational changes in Britain: “Overall participation in higher education increased from 3.4% in 1950, to 8.4% in 1970, 19.3% in 1990 and 33% in 2000.” It has hovered around the 50 per cent mark for the last few years.

The burkini is rather more than a peculiar bathing costume, being both a test of the Western freedom to dress as one wishes and part of the Islamic campaign to make the misogynist manifestations of sharia law both commonplace and unremarkable
Public nudity or near nudity and outrageously lewd behaviour on Main Street in the cold light of day might bring the constabulary into play. Of course all kinds of questions arise as to how nude or lewd you are allowed to be. These are questions that Western societies have wrestled with for a long time, and it is true to say that what you can get away with now would have shocked our forbears.

On the other side of the coin, I doubt whether in the history of mankind there has ever been a mandate to restrict the extent to which people can cover up when in purely public places. Widow’s weeds never caused a stir. And quite right too, you might concur. In the normal course of daily life the law has no business telling anybody to partially disrobe.

Here’s the rub. If society brings the law into play to restrict the extent to which people can cover up in public it has to be derivative of other broader laws put in place to protect society from serious harm. Overdress laws cannot pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Not in our tolerant and free Western societies they can’t. Thus Nice and other French towns which are attempting to ban the so-called burkini predictably find it tough going.

The argument is made that Muslim women must be protected from a medieval patriarchal oppression which forces them to cover up. Unfortunately, if asked, that Muslim woman on the beach in Nice, forced to partially disrobe by the police, would say that her choice of garb that day was hers and hers alone. Without the benefit of mind-reading how can we insist otherwise?

Of course oppression can be insidious, working its way into the minds of the oppressed so that they come to regard their subservient status as normal. We might believe that this has happened to many women in Islamic societies. If so, little can be done about it short of Muslim women rising up like latter-day suffragettes. There are already laws on the books preventing one person from harassing and threatening another.

By the way, the woman on the beach would also deny that she is a small part of the Islamic campaign to push sharia law; and, in this case, in the very place in July where 86 people were killed and many more injured in the name of Islam. It is shameful on its face, but she would deny having a political motive. Common sense tells us otherwise, but that doesn’t help.

BERLIN—Asylum seekers in Germany received nearly €5.3 billion ($5.91 billion) in welfare benefits last year, more than double the cost in 2014, statistics showed Monday, highlighting the scale of the country’s refugee challenge.

Some 975,000 asylum seekers received benefits last year, more than double the number in 2014, the Federal Statistical Office said. In total, Germany paid asylum seekers €5.27 billion in support, ranging from lodging to food and medical treatments, up from €2.4 billion in 2014.

This is just part of the total amount the German state spent on helping migrants last year since the statistics only include asylum seekers–including rejected applicants who cannot be deported–and not recognized refugees, most of whom are eligible for income support. Only a minute fraction of the roughly 1 million migrants who entered Germany last year have found work.

The statistics are a stark reminder of the financial burden Germany has taken on when it opened its borders to refugees from the Middle-East, Asia and Africa last year. Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended the country’s liberal refugee policy in the face of mounting discontent, particularly among conservative backers of her Christian Democratic Union.

On Sunday, the upstart anti-immigrant party beat Ms. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats for the first time in the latest sign of public disapproval of the chancellor’s refugee policy.

The majority of asylum seekers receiving benefits last year were from Asia, with 308,021 from Syria and 114,543 from Afghanistan, the data showed. Some 67% were men with an average age of 25 years, the statistics show. Some 30% of those receiving aid were minors. CONTINUE AT SITE