Time Immortal

Predictably, Shaukat Khawja is not pleased about this, and blames it all on “Zionist” media spin.

Like the US — the Zionist-contrlled mass-media in Britain also tells the public that Muslims are becoming a threat to the so-called “Western values”, refuse to integrate with local non-Muslim societies and don’t accept national practices of “liberalism” and “freedom of speech”.

That sounds about right. Shall we review?

First, there’s the issue of no-go areas, communities of predominantly Islamic immigrants into which non-Muslims venture at their own peril (Denmark has them too!). Then there’s the widespread support of things like Sharia law and legal disparity between men and women among younger Muslims in Britain (whose voices will be a part of what shapes what is to come for that country). The incitement to violent murder that is often preached in mosques in the United Kingdom is also concerning, as is the rampant and well-documented misogyny that accompanies Islam — and, in particular, Sharia law — wherever it spreads.

As to freedom of speech? Don’t. Get. Me. Started.

Not to be deterred by anything so inconvenient as the truth, however, Shaukat (a.k.a. Rehmat) continues:

Now, how idiotic these blames are, can be found from a speech given by professor Martin Amis of Manchester University — “Muslims are gaining on us demographically at huge rate. A quarter of humanity now, and by 2025, they will be third. ….Muslim community will has to suffer until it gets its house in order….I don’t hear from moderate Muslims, do you?….Strip searching Muslim people. Discreminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Muslim community and they start getting tough with their children.”

Now, just imagine someone make the same statement with replacing the world Muslim with “Jews” — and find out how much “freedom of speech” exist in UK or the US or in UE countries. Mind you, it was in Europe that Jewish communities were expelled from almost every country — England being on the top of the list — for 350 years!

This is called shooting yourself in the foot, methinks; to at once demand proof that one can’t say unkind things about Jews and then follow it up with the observation that Europe has a massive, lengthy history of anti-Jewish bigotry is a textbook case of a self-defeating statement.

Not that I would expect any less from my good friend in Pickering, Ontario.

Of course, what’s even more amusing is how the quote from Amis and follow-on “thought experiment” actually do nothing to prove “how idiotic these blames” that Shaukat highlights are. The dispute over whether the media in Britain is or is not reluctant to print unkind things about Jews is irrelevant to whether or not the fears of the British populace are warranted or “idiotic.” It may well be that every media outlet in Britain is controlled by the Zionists…but if Muslims in Britain are something worth fearing, then the rest of the British people are still right to fear them, aren’t they?

British folk see Muslims as a growing threat in their midst. Is this really the fault of the distorted lies propagated by the Zionist-controlled media? Could there possibly be a more tangible reason? Could people possibly have a very real, true-to-life reason to be uncomfortable with their new Muslim neighbours?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

You know, I wonder what Rehmat would have to say about this, when he’s not busily fantasizing about Ahmadinejad?

As mentioned earlier, the “Muslima.com” banner ads that I’m seeing spin up on the site here give me the jibblies…and this is a part of why. Dating sites are bad enough, “find-a-bride” sites immeasurably worse…and when one adds Islam to the mix, things just get ugly.

As in…”nine-year old girls being forced into marriages (often to much older men)” ugly.

And this isn’t just one or two isolated cases that is being talked about here.

Thousands of Britons — mainly young women from the Asian [read: Islamic -- Ken] communities — are thought to be victims of forced marriage each year, but concerns are increasingly focused on the plight of underage girls who are being offered for marriage to foreign men when they have barely left primary school.

No accurate figures exist for the scale of the problem, although the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit has helped rescue around 60 children aged 15 or under in the past four years — including 11 so far in 2008 — and experts fear that may represent only the tip of the iceberg.

Typically victims are taken overseas by their families on a false pretext and forced to marry. Extreme cases where women rebel against their family’s plans and try to run away have led to so-called ‘honour killings’ or suicides.

…

A report by Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee earlier this year said more than 2,000 pupils were unaccounted for in just 14 local council areas across England and Wales.

And lest the Reader think that this Islam is not very, very deeply tied up in this disgusting scenario, may I present the most disgusting sentence I’ve read in at least the last 30 days:

Plans to make forced marriage a specific crime were dropped by ministers in 2006 following a Muslim community backlash…

Britain’s government needs to grow its balls back, methinks. And when it does just that, it needs to take down the names of everyone who objects to legislation against child marriage and forced marriage, and offer them a choice: get in line, ’cause this crap is illegal in the United Kingdom, or move the heck back to Whereveristan, where it’s still legal to abuse your daughters in such a manner.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Jay Currie writes in with a comment about this article.

My born again virginity will come as a bit of a surprise to my three boys…

These guys can’t even be funny without being cliched.

Jay

That’s one other thing that I didn’t bother to mention in my article, but which is worth commenting on, because the comments of Scott Reid and Andrew Potter demonstrate that they — and much of the media, of which they are representative — are rather alarmingly out of touch with the concept of blogging, its fast pace, and its methods.

The dismissal of bloggers as basement-dwelling, laptop-wielding, mouth-breathing virgins is just a charicature, and then not a very accurate one. One recalls how Andrew Coyne live-blogged the Mark Steyn/Maclean’s “trial” in front of the BCHRT — at times from his BlackBerry (I also submit that Coyne is probably not a “mouth breather,” likely not a “basement dweller,” and almost assuredly not a “virgin”). My own blog, in like manner to Twitter, is set up to receive blog posts from my cell phone, just in case I’m on the road and have something to post. As yet, that hasn’t happened…but hey, I was a Scout: Be Prepared! (Shut up, Scar from The Lion King…)

Yes, many bloggers use their laptops, but not all of them do. As mentioned, I do about 90% of my blogging from a desktop PC (and then one that is not situated in a basement). Realistically, I do almost all of my blogging from whatever computer my USB key full of portable applications is plugged into, be that a laptop or a desktop.

Other bloggers I know use email to post messages to their sites (I do that at times as well), and it’s even possible to blog from one’s iPod these days, what with the advent of the Web-capable iPod Touch (the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The iPhone“). If one has a cell phone, one can blog, from anywhere one gets reception…and many people do just that. Hence mo-blogging plugins for e.g. Wordpress. Hence Twitter.

Speaking of iPods:

And then we get into the business side of things. Some bloggers can almost live off of the money they bring in due to advertising on their blogs (sadly, I do not fit into this category either), and many have at least turned their site into a source of supplemental revenue. That takes at least a measure of business savvy. Companies like Amazon.com add to a blogger’s ability to generate revenue, by offering “affiliate”-type programs which award revenue-generating links with a percentage commission of resultant sales.

In short, blogging is not the realm of pimply-faced basement dwellers; the most successful bloggers are, in many respects, the exact inverse of that sort of person. And more generally, bloggers are “everymen” (and “everywomen”). They are married…or single. They live alone…or with someone. That someone might be their parents, but is more likely a roommate, or a spouse. They might use a laptop…or they might use any other piece of Web-enabled technology. They might be funny…or serious. They might have kids…or not. They might be virgins…but most probably aren’t. They might be religious…or they might not be. If they met each other on the street, they’d probably strike each other as…normal people, going about their respective lives. They might hit it off and have a beer, or they might not ever notice each other at all.

I think it’s these last points that really terrify the media, that scare the likes of Reid and Potter. In their day, these men would have been the voices of national opinion, and would have been the people to whom others looked when attempting to form their own opinions. When all there was to spread the news was the print media, radio, and television (all fields which it is not easy to get into), such men as Potter and Reid would have been near-kings, and powerful to a certain extent.

Now?

Well…not so much. Now anybody who wants to can articulate his or her opinion and have that opinion read by people as far as half a world away. (Time Immortal’s top five visiting countries are, in order, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and Sweden.) And other people, who agree or disagree with that opinion, can respond, sharing their agreement or disagreement with the writer through the use of comments forms or contact pages. Massive, sweeping dialogues can occur, opinions can be formed, shared, dissected, and re-shaped, and real-world changes can occur…without anyone having to do anything so old-fashioned as picking up a newspaper, reading an article therein, and firing off a letter to the editor.

And that, I think, must just burn Andrew Potter’s ass.

But he doesn’t understand this “new media.” And when he tries to insult it, he comes off sounding…well…every bit as lame and as old-fashioned as many bloggers tend to think that the print media actually is.

Responding to this article, reader Bob Devine sends in his thoughts on my (very low) opinion of Britain’s implementation of Sharia courts.

Short and to the point. Except for Margaret Thatcher and a couple more (only a couple) the rest of those left wing kooks over there deserve exactly what they are doing to themselves.

I’m not so sure I’m ready to write off the United Kingdom just yet, but I will agree whole-heartedly that affording Islamic law any kind of legal recognition, especially binding legal authority can only lead to trouble, and then a lot of it. Britain stands upon the edge of a knife.

As I noted then: the Left has been having a spastic fit over Sarah Palin’s nomination as John McCain’s running mate, and more than a few commentators have said — apparently without irony — that the nomination of Palin will set women back X number of years or downgrade their social status to that of “uterus with feet.”

Meanwhile, over in Britain, the social status of women is now actively being degraded in just that way with the implementation of these sharia courts. And do you think Heather Mallick and her ilk have uttered so much as a peep about this issue?

[cue crickets chirping]

Anyhow, Bob also offers his comments on this article, concerning the cultural emasculation of men that has become so very prominent in many Western societies.

Feminism has affected more than the men in our society. Here is a link to ProWomanProLife that shows how it can affect women also. http://www.prowomanprolife.org/?p=654

I am glad I grew up in the time period I did (born 1939) I really do not care for the direction society today seems to be heading.

I find I agree. Modern feminism — as evidenced in the very harsh treatment the daughter of feminist icon Alice Walker received from her own mother, after deciding to marry and have a child — has parted ways with the ideals that began the feminist movement, which were genuinely concerned with equality and equitability. What remains is a truly horrifying thing indeed, infused as it is with eugenic and censurious sentiments.

The controversial U.S. Representative proposes to make it illegal for sharia courts to operate in the United States.

Amid disturbing revelations that the verdicts of Islamic Sharia courts are now legally binding in civil cases in the United Kingdom, U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo (R-Littleton) moved quickly today to introduce legislation designed to protect the United States from a similar fate.

…

Sharia law, favored by Muslim extremists around the world, often calls for brutal punishment — such as the stoning of women who are accused of adultery or have children out of wedlock, cutting off the hands of petty thieves and lashings for the casual consumption of alcohol. Under Sharia law, a woman is often required to provide numerous witnesses to prove rape allegations against an assailant — a near impossible task.

…

Tancredo’s bill, dubbed the “Jihad Prevention Act,” would bar the entry of foreign nationals who advocate Sharia law. In addition, the legislation would make the advocacy of Sharia law by radical Muslims already in the United States a deportable offense.

Hard not to like the idea, isn’t it? But he’ll probably be condemned as a sexist and a racist for suggesting it. Because that seems to way brains are wired on the Left.

Related (and also old news): I’ll give you a jihad…

John C. Wright speaks very slowly to an atheist who thinks that the Vatican’s recent annoumcement — that belief in the existence of aliens is not at variance with Christian faith — is merely a cover for some deeper conspiracy to save faith in the event that Earth is contacted by an extraterrestrial intelligence.

Not that the belief in non-human sapient beings is really a problem for Christians anyhow. As I noted previously, Christians already accept that two sapient, non-human species of creature already exist: angels and demons. Adding a third to the list doesn’t really change anything.

But some who follow the ways of atheism seem to have deluded themselves into thinking that the discovery that aliens do exist, should it ever happen, would change everything, and would strip away, once and for all, the human tendency to express religious belief. The assumption — an old assumption, mind you — is that the aliens would necessarily be secular beings who would laugh at the primitive “tribal god mentality” of humanity and then lead us away from Religion into a new, golden age of secular enlightenment.

Gene Roddenberry, and others before him, did a great disservice to the thought processes and categories of many, many people.

One final wry observation: Mr. [Tom Flynn] takes the time to quote with approval one Jill Tarter. She says this:

“If we get a message (from a superior culture) and it’s secular in nature, I think that says that they have no organized religion — that they’ve outgrown it.”

This type of casual arrogance is typical of the Brights.

Speaking as someone who outgrew his own atheism, and as someone who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the adolescent belief-system called Communism collapsed under its own logical absurdities, and as someone who saw the flourishing of religion in Poland, as that nation grew, developed and evolved out of the backward barbarism of the primitive Communist thinking and into the civilized and ecumenical thinking characterized by Christianity, I have the most sincere doubts, nay, I meet with gales of laughter, the idea that signals from the Morlocks of Outer Space will show that evolution and progress always points in the direction of increasing spiritual ignorance.

The Morlocks, for those of you who do not catch the reference, in the romance of H. G. Wells, are the cannibal troglodytes of A.D. 802701. The vile beasties have the honor of being evolved from the descendants of modern man, the peak of progress. The are the posthumans; the supermen. Nietzsche and Marx and every other believer that human evolution necessarily means progress rather than regress or retardation, is well advised to read Darwin and to contemplate the hungry Morlock.

By no coincidence, I wrote an article for the Catholic Herald of the United Kingdom, prompted by my own thoughts and speculations about Father Jose Gabriel Funes comment (speculations no more grounded than reality than Mr. Flynn’s, I suspect; but then again, I am a science fiction writer, so I am allowed).

If we receive a message from aliens that is secular in nature, that doesn’t tell us that much about their religious viewpoints, if they have any. It may mean that they are secular, or it may mean that they are hesitant about approaching us on a religious level. “Hi there,” is a secular message, in that it is a simple greeting which makes no specific mention of any metaphysical concept…but it is nevertheless used by the religious and irreligious alike.

Besides, it is equally possible that the first alien we meet might step out of his spacecraft and say: “We have come to bring him homage, the great Illuvatar, whose star we observed at its rising over two thousand of your years ago. Tell us of how you welcomed him, and of his teachings to you!”

I believe it was Mark Shea who noted that in the event that we are greeted thusly, we would do well to hope that the alien weapons are not sufficiently powerful as to scour all life off the surface of the Earth.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Update 2 - The Chronicles of Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!