timeimmortal

Islamist blogger (and Pickering, Ontario nuclear power plant worker) Shaukat Khawja — also known as Rehmat, owner/operator of the Rehmatpedia blog — has had some very…interesting things to say in the past, but I’ve a feeling that this latest offering of his (put not on his blog but in the IslamUnity.net forums) might just take the cake. If nothing else, it at least confirms a suspicion that I’ve had about the guy for a while: underneath any pretense he might have established about being committed to peace and mercy (the name “Rehmat”, if memory serves, means “mercy” or “kind”), he’s just your typical anti-Jewish bigot.

Choice samples from his latest include:

Jew elites always played a major part in great wars and reactionary movements. They’re known for tricking the both parties in a conflict. For example, Jews funded most of Crusades against Muslims and Jews; Jew sided on both sides of American Civil War; they were behind French Revolution and Communist Revolution in Russia – and they declared war on Nazi Germany, while 150,000 German Jews were serving Nazi Army and some Zionist terrorist groups were having honeymoon with Hitler and Mussolini regimes.

Jew elites, eh? You mean, like this?

Okay, Photoshoppery aside, Shaukat is here saying more or less the same thing that got Mel Gibson into trouble a couple years back: “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”. Now, to be fair, I’m sure that Jews probably did fight in e.g. the American Civil War, and then on both sides. But that is because such conflicts transcend religious considerations — neither the Civil War, nor the French or Russian revolutions or World War II were about religion, and did not have any real religious significance. Even the Crusades were more about politics and territory than they were about religion. And in such conflicts, people of the same religious stripe might well end up on opposite sides of the field of battle.

Case in point: there currently Muslims serving with e.g. NATO forces in Afghanistan, and who do battle with the Muslims in the Taliban.

Shaukat claims that he doesn’t need to prove this — or any other — statement made in the list of his that I have linked to, and yet the claim made above is hardly sufficiently self-evident to be able to stand on its own. Where is the evidence of Jewish funding of e.g. the Crusades against their own people?

Nazis never killed six million Jews. It’s 20th century’s biggest hoax – which has only flourished under government protection in several western countries.

Nazis are known for killing several million of Gypsies, Christians and Jews under their rule – but the largest victims were Gypsies. Even Auschwitz museum in Poland now have reduced the figure of Jewish killed by Nazis as 2.5 million.

Ah, Holocaust denial — pretty much a staple of Islamic discourse, unfortunately.

The problem with it is: the Nazis themselves were reasonably good book-keepers; we know from their own documentation that approximately 6 million Jews were murdered in various ways in the 1930s and 1940s. The figure of 2.5 million Jews that Shaukat gives is reflective of the number of Jews killed in Poland alone. And again, many of these deaths were documented and/or witnessed; the figures are not baseless.

Holocaust denial is ostensibly a punishable offence in Canada (not something I agree with, but that’s another matter). Strangely, however, I very much doubt that Shaukat is going to be charged with anything over this utterance.

September 11, 2001 attack on WTC and Pentagon was an inside terrorist job – conceived by Israeli Mossad, CIA and pro-Israel politicians and government officials.

Ah, the World Trade Center conspiracy. Another canard, and again a common staple of Islamic discourse.

There’s other stuff, some of it laugh-out-loud wrong, but these are some of the highlights. I think there’s room for one more, and that’s good…because of all the things Shaukat has asserted about Jews in his latest post, here’s my personal favourite:

Jews have the most powerful Jewish Lobby (AIPAC, ADL, AJC, etc.) in the US - which works for the interests of Zionist Israel instead of the US.

Here I had thought that the Hindu Jewish lobby was the most powerful. It appears, O Reader, that I have been grossly misinformed about the size thereof.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Islamist blogger Shaukat Khawja really, really doesn’t like Jews — so much so, in fact, that he would rather that Theodor Herzl’s proposal that all Jews convert (or be converted) to Christianity had gone through back in its day.

Got that? A radical Muslim so hates the Jews that he would rather they had all been converted into infidel Christians, instead of being allowed to remain Jews.

And why?

Speaks Shaukat:

The history of the world would have been so peacefully different if the propsed mass Baptism of European Jewry had gone through.

Because clearly, Jews are responsible for all the wars of the world, right?

How much more true would Shaukat’s statement be, I wonder, were it modified to allow for the possibility that Muhammad had been killed in a tribal skirmish just prior to his first “visitation” from whatever demonic entity decided to temporarily assume the identity of Gabriel?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Update - the Meltdown: I seem to have touched a nerve, as Shaukat has now done two things. He had begun by demonstrating the maturity I have come to expect from him now, on par with that of a twelve-year-old casting angry aspersions from atop a playground. But following that up, he says a couple of…well, to be honest, his statements are gems in their own right.

For example:

Without going into Biblical treatment of Jews, which quotes contempt coming from Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul - I wonder why Jews were expelled from almost every European country — England topping the list — expulsion of Jews for almost 350 years. Could it be interpreted as a sign of Christians’ love or hatred towards Jews - and for what reasons???

Poor grammar aside, it is interesting that Shaukat chose to mention Moses — the man who, arguably, was the instrument by which God established the foundations of Judaism — as an example of one who has only demonstrated “contempt” for Jews. I suppose a narrow reading of, for example, the Book of Exodus could lead one to think that, since Moses does spend quite a bit of time castigating the Hebrew people for their sinfulness.

But then, the Hebrew people did sinful things in the desert, not the least of which was to build a golden calf and worship it. Humanity as a whole regularly sins, and periodically needs to be corrected, sometimes harshly. Certainly, Jesus and St. Paul both give example of this, as did Moses in his day.

Following Shaukat’s odd statement, though, is a list of dates in history that supposedly demonstrate Christian persecution of Jews. And, to be fair, many of the dates he lists do in fact accurately mention instances of persecution of Jews by Christian religious authorities. Other dates he lists, however, do not belong on the list.
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…you know, for the hopefully small number of people left in Canada who can’t understand what a grave threat to our freedoms and rights the human rights commissions are.

Isn’t it obvious that in the case of Adolf Hitler, “hateful words” led to “unspeakable crimes”? This argument is offered routinely: if only there’d been “reasonable limits on the expression of hatred” 70 years ago, the Holocaust might have been prevented.

There’s just one teensy-weensy problem with it: pre-Nazi Germany had such “reasonable limits.” Indeed, the Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia. As Alan Borovoy, Canada’s leading civil libertarian, put it:

“Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.”

…

The problem the Jews found themselves up against in Germany and elsewhere was not the lack of hate-speech laws but the lack of protection of the common or garden laws — against vandalism and property appropriation and suchlike. One notes, by the way, that property rights are absent from Canada’s modish Charter of Rights. The reductio ad Hitlerum is the laziest form of argument, so it’s no surprise to find the defenders of the ever-more-intrusive “human rights” enforcers taking refuge in it. But it stands history on its head. Most of us have a vague understanding that Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag in February 1933 as a pretext to “seize” dictatorial powers. But, in fact, he didn’t “seize” anything because he didn’t need to. He merely invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Republic’s constitution, allowing the state, in the interests of the greater good, to set ? what’s the phrase? — “reasonable limits” on freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom from unlawful search and seizure and surveillance of postal and electronic communications. The Nazis didn’t invent a dictatorship out of whole cloth. They merely took advantage of the illiberal provisions of a supposedly liberal constitution.

Oh, and by the way, almost all those powers the Nazis “seized” the morning after the Reichstag fire, the “human rights” commissions already have. In the name of cracking down on “hate,” Canada’s “human rights” apparatchiks can enter your premises without a warrant and remove any relevant “document or thing” (as the relevant Ontario legislation puts it) for as long as they want it. And without anybody burning the House of Commons or even the Senate.

…

Happily, beginning on July 1, under Ontario’s “human rights” reforms, Commissar Hall will have far greater powers to initiate prosecutions against all and sundry. Under the new proposals, ” ‘hate incident’ means any act or omission, whether criminal or not, that expresses bias, prejudice, bigotry or contempt toward a vulnerable or disadvantaged community or its members.” “Act or omission”? Of course. The act of not acting in an insufficiently non-hateful way can itself be hateful. Whether or not the incident is a non-incident is incidental. I quote from “Concepts Of Race And Racism And Implications For OHRC Policy” as published on the OHRC website:

“The denial of racism used by so many whites in positions of authority ranging from the supervisor in a work place to the chief of Police and ministers of government must be understood for what it is: an example of White hegemonic power over those considered ‘other.’ “

Got that? Your denial of racism merely confirms your racism — because simply by being a “White hegemon” (like Barbara Hall or Jennifer Lynch) you wield racist power. The author, Frances Henry, cites the thinking of “modern neo-Marxist theorists” as if these are serious views that persons of influence in Canada’s “human rights” establishment ought to be taking into account, rather than just the latest variant of an ideology that’s led to the deaths of millions in Russia, China and everywhere else it’s been put into practice. Yet, underneath the blather about “omissions” and “denial” of racism is the bleak acknowledgement that, alas, Canadians just aren’t hateful enough to justify the cozy sinecure of taxpayer-funded hate police. “I would say that for a province as large and as diverse as Ontario, to have 2,500 formal complaints a year, that that’s a very low level,” Commissar Hall said. C’mon, you Ontario deadbeats, can’t you hate a little more?

Some feel that free speech in Canada is dead already, and perhaps it is. Perhaps, in due time, this and every other blog that articulates a dissenting opinion against the received wisdom of our progressive “betters” will be shut down for the greater good of society. Perhaps, in due time, people like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant will not be allowed to publish articles within, if not from within, the Great White North that articulate the same sort of dissenting opinions.

Then, too, perhaps in due time Sharia will become the law of the land. Once one’s freedoms have died, does it really matter whom one’s restrictions and privileges are bestowed by? Is there that much difference between a human rights commissar who can fine you into homelessness and bankruptcy for saying something anti-Islamic, and a pseudo-caliph or imam who can exhort “the faithful” to burn your house to the ground for doing same?

Myself, I remain somewhat hopeful that freedom will prevail, and I am not alone in thinking so. But at the same time, I think pretty much everyone on the “freespeecher” side of the debate can recognize that there’s still a tough slog ahead.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

In addition to making you an advocate for censorship, that is.

The York University Federation of Students — yes, the same York University group that denied pro-life students at York the right of freedom of expression — recently condemned McMaster University for censoring an anti-Israel poster which contained violent imagery and the phrase “Israel Apartheid.”

Just so we’re clear, here’s the apparent policy on freedom of speech at York University:

• pro-life students showing pictures depicting graphic, bloody images of aborted babies = not allowed
• anti-Israel students showing pictures depicting graphic, bloody images of Palestinians killed by Israeli weapons = must be allowed
• pro-life students comparing abortion to other notable historical injustices such as the Holocaust = not allowed
• anti-Israel students comparing the current situation in Gaza to other notable historical injustices such as South African apartheid = must be allowed

Or, to put it more succinctly:

• forbidding pro-life students from holding events or displaying materials = not Censorship
• forbidding anti-Israel students from holding events or displaying materials = censorship

Look, there’s a lot of evidence coming out now that details the drastic, devastating effects of birth control and other drugs on aquatic ecosystems (when you pee it out, ladies and gents, it has to go somewhere!). We know it affects animal life, and we know that current water treatment schemes don’t filter all of it out. We know that these drugs are getting into our Food chains and water supplies.

I swear…that has to be the explanation for why the York Federation of Students has absolutely no ability to understand why its banning of a widely publicized, multi-student-group event would be seen as an act of censorship, and for why the same student federation (apparently without a trace of irony) then has the temerity to criticize a different educational institution for an act of censorship. It’s got to be something in the water. I hope it’s something in the water.

The alternative? My God but progressives are dense!

Update: Welcome, Steynians! BCF also has some information pertaining to YFS hypocrisy.

York University graduate student “did not mean to spark a debate on freedom of expression” when she helped stop (read: censor) an abortion debate on the university’s campus.

With all (un?)due respect to Kelly Holloway: what did you expect, Missy? Precisely how could this young woman have thought that her support of an act of Censorship wouldn’t lead to a debate over the right to speak freely that all people, according to the UN, ostensibly enjoy? Perhaps she thought that the pro-lifers would simply do as they were told and meekly obey the order to keep silent?

“I actually don’t think this is very controversial,” the graduate student at York University said of the decision to cancel a Feb. 28 event that would have shown graphic images of abortion and asked participants whether the procedure should be criminalized.

If the event wasn’t so controversial, why was it cancelled? If the abortion debate isn’t very controversial, why was a debate about abortion not allowed to take place on the campus of York University? If this isn’t that big of a deal, why did Kelly Holloway and others advocate for the cancellation of the event and, by extension, censorship of the pro-life opinion?

“Most people understand that every woman has the right to choose what she does with her own body and that moral considerations about abortion are a very personal matter for individuals to decide,” said Holloway, who helped make the decision as vice-chair of the student centre where the debate was scheduled to be held.

It would be easier to accept the pro-choice talking points if they weren’t so mired in ignorance, half-truths, and outright lies. The fact of the matter is, abortion is not about what a woman does with her own body, because it is not the woman’s body that gets chopped up and vacuumed out of the womb. The fact of the matter is, there is another human being — yes, one that resides, for the time being, within the woman’s body, but nevertheless one which is distinct from the woman at a genetic level and which is, by any metric one might care to employ in a rational and objective way, a distinct being with its own body.

If for no other reason than that abortion involves a minimum of two people — the woman and the unborn child — the question of the Morality of abortion cannot be relegated to the realm of individual choice, because the outcome of the moral decision impacts more than one person (and, indeed, a wholly different human being than the one making the moral decision will be the one to pay with its life if the “right to choose” is exercised). This is to say nothing of the way our post-modern society’s permissive attitudes to abortion have diminished the birthrate to such a low level that only a massive program of Immigration can keep the population at its present level. Abortion may be an individual choice, but the implications and ramifications of the choice affect the lives of others, and impact on society as a whole. For those reasons, the moral issues surrounding abortion cannot be left in the hands of individuals to decide.

“The legal precedent in Canada is that abortion and those women who choose to have the medical procedure will not be criminalized,” said Holloway, who is also president of the York University Graduate Students’ Association. “So every York student has the right to make up their own mind and there is no need for an event, organized by anti-choice campaigners, that is disguised as a debate.”

Except that it was actually going to be a debate — Jose Ruba against a pro-choice student named Michael Payton chosen from the ranks of the Freethinkers, Skeptics, and Atheists at York (a student group). Yes, it was being put on in part by the pro-life group at York, but it was also being put on by the other group as well. Both pro-life and pro-choice people were, in other words, putting on the event.

God forbid, though, that pro-lifers ever get to speak their minds, eh, O Reader? Even in an ecumenical setting, it would be dangerous to let “anti-choice” types speak. Kelly Holloway: censor.

Holloway said banning discussions of the pros and cons of abortion was never the point. Her beef was with inviting the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, (CCBR) a Calgary-based pro-life group that compares abortion to genocide and pushes to make it illegal.

Holloway remembers the display the group brought to University of Toronto a few years ago when she was an undergraduate bioethics student there and active in the student union.

“They erected huge signs in full colour of fabricated fetuses alongside people dying in the Holocaust and also pictures of people being lynched,” she said. “So we set up a table outside of that display as the student union to encourage students to tell us what their reactions were so we could understand the effect it was having on students. We collected hundreds of statements from students who said they were upset, they were appalled, they were traumatized and they were worried about the fact that the student union hadn’t taken responsibility to actually interfere in the matter.”

Maybe people should be upset about abortion. Maybe people should be confronted with the reality that the unborn child is a human being, and that it is alive. Maybe people should be confronted with the reality that more often than not, what is “aborted” is not an indistinct clump of cells, but something that is very obviously a somewhat smaller version of a human infant. Maybe people should be shown that abortion doesn’t just excise a growth from the uterus, but that it in fact does rip a tiny human being into pieces to be discarded with the trash.

And maybe people should be disgusted by what they see, and disgusted by the practice of abortion, and by the realization that something so brutal is considered both legal and moral by many in Canada (and around the world).

God forbid people should see both sides of the story — even if one side is very traumatizing to behold — and be allowed to decide for themselves what is and is not moral.

She was not about to let that happen again.

Kelly Holloway: censor. Thanks, Ms. Holloway, for violating the right to freedom of expression of pro-life students at York University. How does it feel, Missy, to know that you’ve now contravened the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

When the student centre executive learned about the event — billed as a debate on abortion rights between Jose Ruba from CCBR and Michael Payton from a student group called Freethinkers, Skeptics and Atheists at York — they held an emergency meeting and voted unanimously to cancel it.

Because it’s too dangerous to let students make their own choices after all, isn’t it!

I tend not to believe the label “pro-choice,” because too many self-professed pro-choicers — Kelly Holloway included — actually don’t care about people having the right to exercise “choice” freely. Such people are more accurately described as being pro-abortion, because their concern is that abortion remain legal in Canada. They then dress their opinion up in the pretty language of individual choice, but it’s just a lie.

It is a lie because those same people who call themselves pro-choice don’t believe in allowing other people the freedom to make their choices in a free and open way. Certainly, Kelly Holloway did not respect the right of the pro-life student group to choose to associate themselves with the CCBR, or the choice that both the pro-life students and the Freethinkers. She didn’t think twice about respecting the choices these groups had made to hold a debate. Instead, when she was informed of their decision to hold the event, she acted swiftly and decisively to deny them their right to choose, to deny them the right to hold the debate, and to deny them their right to freedom of expression.

And now she’s shocked that people called her on the carpet for being a censor.

How stupid does one have to be to be a “pro-choicer,” anyhow? I guess, in the specific case of Kelly Holloway, being a Marxist gets you most of the way there.

Update: Welcome, Blazing Cat Fur readers!

Blazing Cat Fur writes in a brief note regarding this post and Warren Kinsella’s response to the article I quote therein.

I see Kinsella tried to debunk the citizen article

I think the operative word, O Reader, is “tried” — you can read Kinsella’s piece for yourself, but here are the meaty and relevant parts, I think.

Gardner’s column is worth reading, but - in my world - quantitative data will always trump a census statistic and a few anecdotes. If it wasn’t out of print, then, I would recommend that you all pick up a copy of Hate on Trial: the Zundel Affair, the Media, and Public Opinion in Canada, published in 1986 by my friend Professor Conrad Winn. Conrad, who is a polling expert at Carleton University, sampled public opinion during the 1985 trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. He found the trial not only alerted people to the fact of the Holocaust, it turned them against Zundel in droves.

In a poll of 1,054 respondents taken right after Zundel’s trial, Canadians proved the media libertarians wrong, as they often do. Half (47 per cent) said their feelings toward Jews were unchanged by the trial, while one quarter (24 per cent) said they became more sympathetic toward Jews, and only 2 per cent reported less sympathy.

Kinsella would seem to be attempting to state, based on the above, that it was because Ernst Zundel was tried that public opinion shifted still further against his anti-Semitic rantings. This is a dangerous conclusion to draw, because it can lead one to think, erroneously, that it is through acts of censorship perpetrated by government agencies and courts that “the people” can be made to think “correctly.” And indeed, that would seem to be the conclusion that Kinsella, a self-confessed censor and an advocate for the existence of the HRCs, draws.

That would mean, O Reader, that Canadians either did not change their opinion of Jews or became more sympathetic toward Jews out of fear of government reprisal.

This would seem, then, to fly in the face of Dan Gardener’s observations about how allowing Fred Phelps to speak his hate openly has, in the end, only served to inspire Kansans (not exactly known for being of a progressive bent) to side not with Phelps, but with those Phelps denigrates.

But in fact, Kinsella’s story does not quite mean what he thinks it means, nor does it actually fly in the face of what Dan Gardener says — in fact, it affirms it. Zundel was a nobody with a small audience to begin with — few Canadians had even heard of him, and hardly anyone gave him the time of day. When he was put on trial, more and more people were able to become aware of his views. And in an analog to the case of Phelps and Westboro in Kansas, it was in hearing discussion about Zundel’s opinions that inspired nearly 25% of Canadians to become even more sympathetic to persons of Jewish descent than they already were. The fact that it took a trial for Zundel to gain a wide enough audience is an interesting little factoid of history, but also irrelevant.

The Zundel trial and its ouctomes, at least as regards public opinion toward Jews, proves the freespeecher arguments valid — given the chance, Canadians will tend to make the right decisions when they hear someone uttering hateful speech. So why not give people the opportunity to be as open in their hatred as they can possibly be? As was the case with Zundel, many of the haters won’t even find a wide enough audience to have any impact on public opinion (and thus will not be a threat). And the ones that do will, for the most part, either make people shrug their shoulders in dismissal or inspire people to move their own opinions away from those of the haters.

That’s the beauty of the “marketplace of ideas.”

I wonder how Kinsella missed that? And I wonder if it was his intent to argue in favour of government coercion of citizen opinion?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

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 Britain: “Asian youths” throw rocks at Holocaust 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 Jews 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 Clive Bettington, 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 London(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 honour killings as crimes, for fear of being branded as racist by Muslim spokesmen or hauled in front of a human rights tribunal (yes, England 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.

Rahni Binjie of the Roshni Asian Women’s Aid, a refuge in Nottingham, 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 Middle Eastern, African, or Indian 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 (HRCs). We are fighting for true freedom of expression in Canada, 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”, Richard Warman 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 Sharia 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 Israeli town of Dimona. 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 Islamic Jihad is claiming responsibility, but Kateland wonders how this smaller group came up with the resources to carry out the attack. She wonders if perhaps Hamas 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 MRSA and Clostridium difficile, 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 Religion.

“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. Mark Enright, professor of microbiology at Imperial College London 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 Islamic Medical Association, 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 bigamy is illegal in Britain, as long as the wedding took place in a nation that treats polygamy as legal the additional benefits can and will be granted.

Item #6: speaking of suicide bombers, did you hear the one about the Islamic 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 Darwinism 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 “no-go areas” (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 non-Muslims 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!

The left-wing Canadian Jewish Congress, the special-interest lobby group most responsible for criminalizing speech in Canada, is obviously feeling some political heat because of what they have wrought. Their figurehead co-presidents, Rabbi Reuven Bulka and Sylvain Abitbol, wrote a muddled column called “Some human rights complaints are frivolous”. That’s actually less mealy-mouthed than it sounds, given that the commissions have a 100% conviction rate for thought crime hearings. But what is the standard for acquittal that the CJC proposes?

“Human rights commissions must constantly recalibrate where the balance lies between free expression and its abridgement, but the determination of where to place the fulcrum must always be based on the statutory standard that such expression is �likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.”

and

“the appropriate application of statutory criteria is our best defence against those who would eliminate the law to protect their interests, and against those who would use the law to promote a narrow political agenda.”

In other words, the concept of a “pre-crime” is still fine by them. No-one has to be exposed to hatred or contempt for someone to be found guilty. It just has to be “likely” that could happen. And hatred or contempt — emotional feelings — are enough. The CJC doesn’t even think that a discriminatory act is necessary for a conviction. They support the notion of thought crimes.

If the human rights commissions apply the standards in this fuzzy-headed op-ed, Mark Steyn and I will still be convicted.

What an embarrassment the CJC has become. Essentially they are pleading for Steyn and I as special cases. Is it because I’m a Jew and Steyn sounds like he might be, too? Is it because we’re being sued by Muslim fanatics? Or is it because the CJC is taking some political heat for their support of these illiberal, anti-intellectual commissions, and the CJC’s alliance with Richard Warman, the serial human rights complainant and foul-mouthed, anti-Black, misogynist bigot?

The CJC’s op-ed will be seen as nothing but more proof for anti-Semites and neo-Nazis who claim — with historical and statistical validity — that the hate speech provisions are a tool used mainly by secular, leftist Jews to punish their anti-Semitic critics. But now that those same precedents are being used against Jews and philo-Semites by Islamic fascists, the CJC wants to change the rules.

As disgusting a thing as Holocaust denial is, we began the slide down this slippery slope of censorship, and the attendant denial of the legitimate right to that every human being is theoretically entitled to, when we made it illegal to say that the Holocaust was just a hoax. And anyone who says that Levant is innocent, but then turns around and says that the likes of Ernst Zundel are guilty, is just a hypocrite.

Freedom of expressions means that even those opinions we personally consider distasteful have a right to be said aloud, or it means nothing at all.