I’ve Moved!

November 20, 2008

So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:

I AM NO LONGER BLOGGING HERE

In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here.

That said, this is not the end of . My wife has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.

Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.

Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.

Posted by Kenneth Filed in News

Your daily “Something is Wrong in the World of Islam” post

February 4, 2008

One tends to find so many examples on a daily basis that it is becoming prudent to just lump them all together in one glorious catch-all posting. Or, at least, it saves me some time, which I like.

First, from : “Asian youths” throw rocks at Memorial participants. This is the British press, so we need to translate: “Asian youths” overwhelmingly means teenaged-to-twentysomething young men of Arabic or Indian sub-continental extract. Oh, I’ll grant that it could mean, you know, what we usually tend to think the term “Asian” means. But the anti-Jewish angle is significant: how many incidences of violence against have been recorded where persons of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean extract are the perpetrators?

Here’s the money quote from the article, though:

The tour was organised by leading local historian , who was later asked by police if he wanted officers to accompany him in future, but declined.

“That would be admitting there are ‘no go’ areas,” he said.

(…)

“I looked over the fence and saw four Asian youths throwing stones. They were laughing, then ran away.”

Just some aspiring young jihadists out having a laugh and throwing some rocks at the Jooooooos. Another typical day in (istan). Interestingly, the issue of “no-go areas” (i.e. areas where Muslims have effectively taken over and rendered it unsafe for non-Muslims to travel through or past) rears its head again, although in typical Brit PC fashion, the man who organized the tour to the Holocaust memorial is too afraid of being labeled a racist* to acknowledge the existence of a very real problem.

Which brings us to item #2.

Apparently, it is also becoming increasingly common in Britain for teachers, police, and others in positions of authority to refuse to report s as crimes, for fear of being branded as racist by Muslim spokesmen or hauled in front of a human rights tribunal (yes, has them too).

The authors said families withdraw teenage daughters from school because they fear men will be unwilling to marry them if they are educated.

Many men brought up here want “freshies” - women “uncontaminated” by ideas of independence.

of the Roshni Asian Women’s Aid, a refuge in , said: “We’ve had women who have disappeared from the education system. We don’t know if they’ve been taken abroad or killed or anything.”

Activists say there are particular problems with taxi firms who return women fleeing from abuse.

It’s those damnable cab drivers again!

I wonder if there wouldn’t be a noticeable drop in the number of honour killings in Western nations if a comprehensive ban prohibiting persons of ern, n, or n sub-continental extract from driving cabs?

More seriously, though, the above is illustrative of just why more and more people are making noise about the human rights commissions (s). We are fighting for true freedom of expression in , a right that we, as Canadian citizens, are supposedly ensured by the anyhow, but which increasingly seems to be under threat from our self-styled “betters”, in particular.

And a part of that freedom of expression is the freedom to call a spade a spade. If we let the HRCs’ powers take us to the point where police can be hauled before them for the “crime” of being “anti-Muslim” simply because they made the attempt to investigate a possible honour killing, and if we let the HRCs’ powers take us to the point where teachers can be hauled before them for the “crime” of being “anti-Muslim” simply because they made the attempt to intervene in a case of obvious abuse of a female Muslim child by her male relatives in accordance with law, then we — all of us: every Canadian citizen who values his or her rights and freedoms, and who kind of likes what Canada is — have lost. We will, at that point, have turned over the keys to the country to the barbarians and the savages.

Item #3 is yet another suicide bombing, this time in the i town of . One person was killed, and another ten injured. One suicide bomber managed to self-detonate, while the other was shot dead by an Israeli policeman.

The terrorist organization is claiming responsibility, but Kateland wonders how this smaller group came up with the resources to carry out the attack. She wonders if perhaps is employing the use of fronts.

Item #4 is another page from our “if you can’t obey the rules, don’t work there” file: Muslim women workers in Britain’s health system are committing hygeine violations in order to conform with Sharia law’s unreasonable standards of modesty.

female workers are ignoring Britain’s Department of Health rules requiring medics to be “bare below the elbow” because they consider showing any skin — outside the hands and face — immodest.

The guidelines were put into place to stave off the spread of infectious killer bugs like and , which have been implicated in the deaths of hundreds of hospital patients, according to the paper.

Hygiene experts said the standard should hold for all workers — even if it goes against their .

“I don’t think it would be right to make an exemption for people on any grounds. The policy of bare below the elbows has to be applied universally,” Dr. , professor of microbiology at told the Telegraph.

Some fear the enforcing the rules will open the door to lawsuits charging discrimination against female Muslims working within the medical professions.

The , for one, has issued a statement that “no practicing Muslim woman — doctor, medical student, nurse or patient — should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow,” according to paper.

I’ve worked in kitchens before, and the hygeine standards at those restaurants were pretty strict. I wasn’t married at the time, but had I been, not even the fact that it was my wedding ring would have prevented my managed from objecting to the gold band on my left ring finger. Rings are actually very unsafe things to wear in a kitchen, because they trap all sorts of bacteria. And the danger isn’t just to the customers, but to the cook himself even after he goes home; nothing says “bad Tuesday” like accidentally contaminating one’s breakfast with bacteria from the five chicken pizzas one made during the course of Monday evening.

I love what my ring stands for, and wear it to signify the highest devotion possible to my wife. If I felt that it would be improper of me to take the ring off in order to work in a kitchen, I would turn in my apron and find a different job. Either that, or I would put the ring on a chain and keep it safely tucked inside my shirt while I worked.

The point is, I’d either meet the requirements of my employer, or I’d leave the job behind.

This is not me being hard on modesty; I’m a huge fan of modesty. But this is me being hard on unreasonable standards of modesty that know no flexibility even when the lives of others are potentially at stake. Showing the forearms is not unreasonable by any measure — they’re just forearms, after all — and if the choice has to be made between rolling up one’s sleeves and potentially giving a patient a septic infection, then the choice should be obvious: roll up your damn sleeves. If for some reason you feel you are unable to do this, you are welcome to seek employment in a career that does not require your sleeves to be rolled up.

Just don’t expect that the entire British medical system should roll over for you, and don’t expect that you’ll be given the “right” to potentially endanger the health and lives of patients by becoming a transmission vector for superbugs simply because it is more important, in your mind, that Britain adapt to your barbaric code of law.

Item #5: Husbands in the U.K. with multiple wives will be allowed to claim additional welfare benefits for said additional brides. Even though is illegal in Britain, as long as the wedding took place in a nation that treats as legal the additional benefits can and will be granted.

Item #6: speaking of suicide bombers, did you hear the one about the ic terrorists who strapped bombs to women with and then remote-detonated them when people stopped to render aid?

Yes, O Reader, that is the sort of vermin that the West is up against. Just in case there wasn’t enough evidence already pointing out what flavour of evil these people are.

And proving that both stupidity and slavish devotion to are alive and well among the progressive left:

For the record, assuming it’s true, I think it’s just horrible that whoever was behind this latest disaster used Down’s women to perpetrate the bombings but I don’t see it as a sign of desperation. I see it as a sign of adaptation and a brilliant one at that.

The above sort of thinking is another example of why I continue to hammer on atheism as being the gravest threat to human liberty that humanity has ever concocted for itself. Not only is it just disgustingly wrong, but it actually serves to justify, in a weird sort of way, the actions of the jihadists. Oh, I know that he “think[s] it’s just horrible” that these women were used in this way, but all that pretending at disgust fades by the last sentence, which openly praises the ingenuity and adaptation that the terrorists displayed in employing this latest murder tactic. How brilliant of them!

Item #7: that British bishop who warned about “” (see link, above) is now under police protection, in fear of his life. How did Britain’s Muslims respond to the claim that Muslim immigrants had created several communities into which it was unsafe for to wander?

Death threats.

Gee, thanks, guys…don’t try and do anything now to dispel the public’s already negative image of you!

As I’ve said before, and will say again now, I really want to have a higher opinion of Islam and of the people who practice that religion. The problem, for me at any rate, is that there are too many examples — from too many different places around the world! — that make it so very difficult to look at Islam, and at the Islamic world, with anything but disgust.

* are we still caught up in this idiocy? It is not, by definition, racist to criticize Islam, because Islam is not a race!

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Posted by Kenneth Filed in Islam, Politics, Religion, Terrorism, World News
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