Everyone must know by now about the Saudi couple in Colorado facing state and federal charges on various counts:

Mr. Homaidan Al-Turki, the alleged perpetrator of these crimes, is the owner of a book store called Al-Basheer Publications and Translations. Here is his “About” page:

By all means, drop him an email; he says your comments are welcome.

Meanwhile, there’s a spotlight special on the website this week.

	Do Women Really Know Their Rights?
	Format: 5 Audio CDs (English) By: Yasir Birjas
	Retail: $25.95 You Save: 10.02% Your Price: $23.35
	Weight: 1.00 Lbs.

You might want to hurry though. It says there are only four copies left. No doubt there were five before he gave a copy to the maid.

UPDATE: More specific details have been released about the Indonesian slave.

She was 17 in 1999 when she flew to Ridyadh to begin her sojourn with the Saudi slave masters. They moved to Colorado in 2000.

Promised $160.00 a month, she received $1.91 a day for a day that began at 6:00 a.m. preparing breakfast for the family which they ate while she waited in the basement. Eventually, in addition to laundry, cleaning and washing the family cars,her duties grew to include servicing the head of the house:

Shortly after arriving in the U.S., Al-Turki began making improper advances toward her, including watching her shower and touching her, she said. Gradually, his sexual overtures escalated until he was raping her, she told authorities.

If you were wondering how she escaped, the authorities were given “a tip” that the family was harboring an illegal alien. They got a search warrant in November, 2004 and discovered the slave. She was removed from the home and legal proceedings began.

One nice note: this couple has known since November that they were going to be indicted. That’s a lot of sleepless nights between November and June. Kind of gives you a warm feeling to dwell on their predicament.

If the benighted MSM doesn’t bury this story under toilet paper, it will be interesting to see how the trial goes and what the sentence is. Perhaps old Al-Turki should talk to Michael Jackson, see what the secret is.

The Next War

Many of the best and the brightest of Britain’s young men failed to return from the Great War, but they left their memorial in literature and poetry. After the war intellectual opinion turned to anger over what had happened. But while the war still raged, even after disillusionment had set in at the appalling and pointless slaughter, poems from the front tended to be doom-laden and fatalistic, as opposed to active protests.

Witness, for example, the remarkable quatrain by Edward Thomas, written in 1916:

As an indirect evocation of senseless loss, this verse is a thousand times more effective than a polemic against war. Thomas, like so many others, met his end on the battlefield, killed by an exploding shell at Arras in 1917.

But his poems and those of the other Great War poets had a profound effect on intellectual culture in Britain after the war. Literate opinion between the wars tended towards pacifism, and in the runup to the Second World War successive governments had to contend with widespread pacifistic sentiment, which made rearmament and preparation for the inevitable conflict with Hitler politically very difficult.

When the next war finally broke out, a new generation of war poets emerged, prepared for their poetic task by the example of the martyrs of 1914-18. Needless to say, youthful idealism and enthusiasm were much less likely to be found in 1940 than in 1914.

The following poem was written by Alun Lewis while still in Britain, before his deployment overseas.

Notice the deliberate invocation of Edward Thomas’ memory: the precedent from a generation earlier would forever change the way a young poet confronted the horrors of war. But, once again, the reaction does not take the form of protest; instead we are handed a bitter and poignant sorrow.

Alun Lewis also became a martyr to poetry: he was killed fighting in Burma in 1944.

 
The Khaleej Times reports:

Haaretz adds interesting details:

Note the sequence: Syria first, then Lebanon, Jordan, Saudia Arabia, Egypt, and Iraq. No mention of the Great Satan? Or the Little Satan? What’s wrong with these guys?

It seems that Boy Assad has not bought himself any protection by supplying refuge to terrorists and allowing Zarqawi’s fighters to use Syria for their Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Poppies That Were Ever Dropping

The first spring following the onset of the Great War saw a profusion of poppies growing in the fields of Flanders, both among the graves where the newly-buried soldiers lay, and in No-Man’s Land between the entrenched armies of the Allies and the Kaiser. The poppies became a symbol of the war, and are still used to mark Remembrance Day each year on the 11th of November.

The Canadian poet John McCrae popularized the symbol with his well-known poem:

Written in 1915, the poem still embodies the Victorian ideal of war. Idealism has not died; the patriotic fire still burns. Verdun and Ypres are over the horizon, and the awful, pointless carnage that will rage until 1918 has not yet become evident.

But by the following year, the English poet Isaac Rosenberg wrote about poppies in quite a different tone:

Notice that the Victorian voice has disappeared: here we have a thoroughly modern poetic style and sensibility. Just two years into the war, and the blazing youthful innocence is gone.

Neither of these poets was to survive the Great War. McCrae died of pneumonia in 1918, and Rosenberg was killed in battle the same year.

The First World War cut through the intellectual flower of the British Empire like a gigantic scythe. Educated and well-bred young men who rushed to volunteer in the idealistic autumn of 1914 were shot down, blown apart, gassed, and killed by fever in their thousands before the armistice came in 1918. Brilliant men, destined to be authors, poets, magazine editors, university dons — wiped out before their lives really began.

Even now, almost a century later, it is heartbreaking to contemplate the utterly pointless waste of youthful talent that was poured down the shell-holes of the Western Front.

It was this dreadful slaughter of the literate classes that turned elite opinion towards pacifism in the years after the war. The working-class victims in the trenches were mute; all they left were grieving widows and parents, and fatherless children. But the losses to English literature and poetry were felt in the highest reaches of the culture, and are reflected in the conventional wisdom even today.

Later posts will feature more of the Great War martyrs of English poetry.

 
In the Middle East the clamor for change is governmental. “How shall we live?” means “under which form of government?” Tyranny abounds; turning the ships of state toward democratic waters is a long, slow process. Think HMS Queen Mary.

In Europe, democracy is a fact. The problem is the number of Muslim immigrants who refuse to partake in the process. Europe, caught in the white water of PC thinking, has to find a way to include those who do not wish to be included. On the one hand, Europeans have to praise Tolerance, the über-virtue for all right-thinking (actually, left-thinking) intellectuals. On the other hand, how do you ‘tolerate’ casual gang-rapes, forced marriage, and the systemic misogyny of a sullen and suspicious Islam in your midst?

Bat Ye’or looks at this dismal picture and predicts dhimmitude as the final outcome for Europe. Based on the imperialism inherent in Koran, and the history of Islam’s bloody invasions and annihilation of whole cultures, she makes a good case for the eventual outcome: Eurabia. Backing this up is Europe’s (particularly France’s) willing cooperation with Arab states in her own undoing.

There are forces in play in Europe that have large consequences for the US and subsequently for the rest of the West. Do not be fooled: just because Europe appears to be on the decline does not mean that her going under would not affect the rest of us. Think HMS Queen Mary sinking. Think of those survivors floating nearby who would be sucked under with her.

Some European states have awakened to the danger, Denmark in particular. In 2002, despite the criticism of Muslims and the European intelligentsia, new laws on immigration were passed. The controversial legislation was designed in part to stop a particularly malign kind of influx: marriage partners for the under-aged and immigration of those who have an antipathy toward assimilation. Previous to the passage of these laws, Muslims returned to the old country to procure a spouse and then returned to Denmark to apply for entry to the country of their partner. We’re talking arranged marriages, usually involving underage girls and without their consent. Now, in order to bring in a spouse, both must be at least twenty-four years old and they have to prove that the marriage is consensual. They must have sufficient income and a separate residence which they own. They must also demonstrate that their primary allegiance is to Denmark. How non-PC can you get, demanding that immigrants learn your language?

These laws are working. Since their passage the number of people from outside the European Union who have come into Denmark has fallen by two thirds. There are EU restrictions also. And now immigrant parents are saying that the law has given their children more freedom. No longer fearful of being married off to strangers, of living in a parallel — separate and desperately unequal — society which crushes their freedom and opportunities, Muslim girls in Denmark have a chance to continue their education. Think HMS Queen Mary slowly righting herself.

Maybe the passengers won’t have to jump ship after all.

Meanwhile, here’s a barometer: let’s see what kind of reception George Bush gets when he travels to Denmark in July.

The high court in Lahore has ordered that the men who gang raped Mukhtar Mai in 2002 be released on Monday. In addition, the men on the village council who ordered her rape will also be freed.

Mai’s case is not unusual, except in one respect: after being raped for hours as retribution for her brother’s misbehavior (a charge cooked up to cover over the fact that he himself had been sodomized by members of a powerful clan in their village), Mai didn’t go home and conveniently kill herself. Instead, with the help of her imam and the support of her father and family, she fought back — all the way to the high court.

For three years now, since her young brother’s rape in June, 2002, this woman has lived with and managed to transcend a nightmare. Having been awarded compensation by the Pakistani courts she took the money home and started two schools in her village, one for boys, another for girls. Inspired by her courage, money came from around the world. In March, Canada donated a large sum to Mai for the continuation of her education projects in Punjab.

Mukhtar Mai has said that she thinks she will be killed eventually for her stand. And she may be right, Pakistan is a cruel place for women: it has been estimated that eighty per cent of the female population has been brutalized at one time or another.

At the moment,though, her website has crashed. That’s a good sign: it means everyone is watching.

hat tip: fjordman

Beyond Gethsemane

The Great War of 1914-18 created what we think of as “modern times”. The magnitude of the catastrophe, along with the resulting Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, irretrievably destroyed the world that went before and ushered in, for good or ill, the world we know now.

For Western Civilization the Great War altered the way that war itself is generally perceived. Before 1914, war was a grim but noble undertaking in which all that was good and heroic in men could manifest itself. After 1918, war was seen as senseless slaughter that could only debase those nations which practiced it.

The nature of English war poetry changed at the same time. Before 1914, and in the early stages of the war, the heroic model still prevailed: If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England. (Rupert Brooke) By the war’s end, the poetic sentiment could be summed up in these lines: I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,/Lurching to ragtime tunes and “Home, sweet Home”,/And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls/To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume. (Siegfried Sassoon)

A poet whose long career bridged the chasm between these two worlds was Rudyard Kipling. Kipling is well known as the unabashed booster of Empire, the poet of “Gunga Din” and “The White Man’s Burden”. More than any other poet he embodied the British Empire in its ideal form (for an informative and very readable study of Kipling, see this article by John Derbyshire in The New Criterion).

But the First World War dealt Kipling a tragic blow: his beloved son John was killed the first time he saw action, at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Kipling had pulled strings to get his boy, whose eyesight was deficient, into the Irish guards. The loss of his son brought a melancholy into Kipling’s work which had not been previously seen. The brief and poignant “Gethsemane” is an example of the result:

The reference, of course, is to Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion (Matthew 26:39): “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”

There, in succinct form, is the soldier’s lot: his fate is not his to will. The cup may or may not pass from him, but it does not lie under his control. After the Great War the image of the slaughter as a mass crucifixion of Christ-like soldiers became widespread, and the ideal of the soldier’s submission to his commander’s will was tarnished beyond repair.

From the trenches of the Western Front, poems celebrating the nobility of the warrior were superseded by poems of doom and resignation. In the years that followed the First World War, war poetry became antiwar poetry, and so it has remained.

Later posts will explore more on this topic.

Right Wing Nuthouse is this week’s council winner. Looking back at the turmoil and death of D-Day, he asks:

Those beaches at Normandy have been quiet for 61 years now. The men who gave the “last full measure of devotion,” whose young lives were snuffed out in a cause greater than themselves are still being mourned by the ever shrinking number of comrades who survived them. And as we look back and marvel at their sacrifice and courage, we do them honor by asking ourselves if placed in their boots, would we have done as well?

By an overwhelming majority,Winds of Change won the non-Council vote for his fisking of Amnesty International’s ignorant claim about America’s “gulag.” In a careful examination of the kinds of gulags Soviet Russia installed, Mr. Roggio flattens the malign absurdity of Irene Khan’s charges against America’s treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. He follows up with a description of life for the detainees (interesting in its own right) and leaves us with this:

No doubt there have been some abuses at the prison. The United States military, like any other organization, is not immune from criminal activities within its midst. But for Amnesty International to characterize Guantanamo Bay as being on par with one of the worst atrocities in human history while issuing a pass to North Korea effectively deflates the meaning of the word Gulag. It also cheapens the stature of Amnesty International, who should know the difference between directed mass murder and imprisonment, and problems inherent within all prison systems.

As he says, AI’s claims to be impartial are a “pathetic lie.”

Amen.

Check out the rest of the stories at the Watcher of Weasels. It’s a far more diverse and interesting round-up than anything you’re likely to encounter in the MSM.

 
In Jay Nordlinger’s NRO column yesterday, he reported on an email he received from a reader:

When I read this, I realized that I experience the same thing: I have liberal friends who forward email or links with the nastiest Bush-bashing material. They know our politics; they presumably know that we click the delete button as soon as we see the message subject. Yet they keep on sending them.

Neither Dymphna nor I ever send any politically fraught email unless we’re already sure the recipient has more or less the same opinions that we do. To me, it’s a part of normal email courtesy: I don’t send dirty jokes to people who don’t like dirty jokes, and I don’t send cute cat photos to people unless I know they’re cat people.

Anyone else have similar experiences? Go ahead and weigh in; maybe someone can explain why the forwarding of political email is such an asymmetrical phenomenon.

 
A story in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle:

A typical news story these days, right? More Islamic terrorists arrested. Ho. Hum. But an additional tidbit in the CNN article on the same incident made the whole thing more interesting:

So some of them are apparently learning to dissemble effectively. They don’t just shave their beards, wear Dolly Parton t-shirts, and say “Hey, Dude!” loudly to each other on the streets. They’re really learning the PC multi-culti song and dance.

They’re getting better at taqiyya.

Regular readers of Gates of Vienna know my predilection for re-examining well-known poetry while keeping the great issue of our time in mind. The following work, by the late British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, is particularly apropos.

In the elephant we see the America that used to be — ingenuous, open-handed, optimistic about human nature (or in the allegory, Hyena-nature), not freakish or melancholy.

But then came the Hyenas.

Already residing in their hells, obsessed with death, they took advantage of the innocence and openness of America. But we were not God, and did not correct the damned, and our dusty entrails were strewn across the streets of New York, while the infernal laughter of the Hyenas echoed through the streets of Ramallah and Cairo.

And then there was the Resurrection. Deadfall feet? Definitely; marching through the mountain passes of Afghanistan and across the deserts of Iraq. Toothproof body? Absolutely; ask the Marines in Fallujah. Bulldozing bones? Without a doubt; the same ones that knocked over the statues of Saddam.

But what about the completely altered brains?

This is where the analogy falters: our brains are not that different. When we feel compelled to apologize to our enemies for violating their arcane customs, then we acknowledge that our brains are unchanged. When we consider making deals with the Hyenas because they can win an election in Gaza, then we are neither wicked nor wise.

The Hyenas are sleepless, but we are beginning to doze off. When we do, they are ready to come in again and light their mouths for another round. They do what they do because it is all they have.

We need to be a walking sixth sense; the star of peace will simply have to wait.

Muslim women are simply enthralling. Why else would there have arisen such complicated and minute strictures regarding their behavior, dress and comportment? Despite their outwardly demure behavior and their shrouded presence, these women obviously have the power to cloud men’s minds.

Such is the power of these creatures that a Muslim man can be driven to rape or even to murder by the glimpse of a leg… or… even worse, actually gazing on the face of a female not related to him.

For the rest of us it is hard to fathom such spell-binding power.

Meanwhile Western women’s dress, appearance and appeal continue to decline (as does the Western birthrate; there may be a correlation here). Women’s clothing is often ripped and tattered. Their shirts, usually shrunken and ill-fitting, are way too short to allow their wearer to tuck them in. Thus women are forced to exhibit bulging sections of avoir dupois otherwise best left to the imagination. But it’s moot since these poor creatures couldn’t tuck in a shirt anyway. Driven by the dictates of the fashion police to drill holes into their navels and string them with protruding pieces of wire, the pain of having clothing abrade such a wound would be inhumane.

Lacking the protection of the burqa, Western women are unable to hide their facial disfigurement. Not so much riveting as riveted in cheek and chin, our women are forced to pierce their lips, nose, tongues and eyebrows. Some of them must be held down while collagen is injected into their lips, grotesquely enlarging them. Others are anesthesized, their breasts cut open and collagen forced into the area of their anatomy normally reserved solely for mammary ducts and glands.

These poor creatures bring to mind the old custom of marking slaves. Thus distinguished by their masters, any dash for freedom would futile. Today, the various hooks, loops and posts dangling from their faces is a dead give-away of their status, as are their puffy lips. Their deformed, heavy breasts would deter any attempt to run far. No, these women will never escape.

Captive rather than captivating, what are Western women to do? Perhaps their Muslim sisters could give lessons on how to drive men wild. It can be said with certainty that Muslim women have figured out how to be spell-binding. Even now, we witness Muslim men creating new and better ways to curb the power of these vixens. Mesmerizing creatures, they drive men to such frenzy that even the most upright of fellows cannot risk losing all control by being in the same room with any female who has reached puberty. And some who haven’t.

Now that is some kind of female allure.

____
Nota Bene: This is humor. ~D

 
Even when you’re dead and buried, Islam could still be after the grave in which you lie. Northern Virginiastan observes:

He uses a story in The Washington Times to illustrate his point. It seems there is a growing dispute over the Taj Mahal:

In other words, any geography that once belonged to Islam always belongs to Islam and it is the duty of every Muslim to reclaim its property? One could infer as much.

Note, however, that there is equal determination by some “hard-line” Hindus in India to lay claim to the Taj Mahal, putting forth the case that a Hindu temple was demolished to make room for the Taj. There is a long-locked basement under the monument and Hindus say it contains the “pillars and artifact of a temple.”

The story has a potential flash point since the Waqf Board has the legal right to summon witnesses and to decide on matters involving its interests. Thus it has called the Archaeological Survey of India to testify; should this body not agree with the Waqf Board belief that the Taj Mahal belongs to Islam, the dispute will head to court.

Of course, if things don’t get resolved there, it could get ugly. Mr. Usman recalled “another flashpoint” like the one in 1992, when thousands of Hindus demolished the Babri mosque, also in Uttar Pradesh. The Hindus claimed that the mosque had been built atop a previously destroyed Hindu temple. The ensuing conflict led to riots which killed at least two thousand people nationwide. Most of the dead were Muslims.

The Taj Mahal was completed in the 1650’s. They’re still fighting over it. And we complain because the rifts from our Civil War haven’t entirely healed? Things certainly are relative, aren’t they?

There’s a lesson in here somewhere. It many not be the same lesson that Northern Virginiastan finds, but theirs is worth consideration, especially if, in order to be prepared for them, you are drawn to worst-case scenarios:

Ah, they do indeed. And knowing one’s adversary is vital to staying inside his OODA loop.

 
The al Aqsa Mosque provides Jerusalem, or al Quds, the distinction of being the “third holiest city in Islam”. Built atop the ruins of Solomon’s Temple, its sacred status derives from the fact that the Prophet visited it in a dream. Mohammed never actually went to Jerusalem in the flesh, but his somnambulance was enough to establish its claim as a holy shrine of Islam. The Muslims did not have to destroy the infidel Jewish Temple themselves, since the Romans had already done it.

But the Muslim invaders of India had a more hands-on approach. During the same period that the Ottoman invaders were repeatedly besieging Vienna, the Muslims of the Mogul Empire were fighting the infidel Hindus on the Indian subcontinent. When Aurangzeb became emperor in 1658, he began a systematic campaign to destroy the infidel temples in Uttar Pradesh.

One of the most sacred shrines of the Hindus, roughly equivalent to Solomon’s Temple and the tomb of Christ all rolled into one, was the temple built on the site of the birthplace of Krishna at Mathura. If you read about the area in a travel guide, the description is dry and not particularly evocative of controversy:

A brief historical account hints at the strife that wracked the area:

But a deeper examination of the history of the period reveals the ruthlessness and brutality of the Mogul conquerors. According to Francois Gautier,

The Hindus themselves, even after three and a half centuries, have most emphatically not forgotten or forgiven the offenses committed against their sacred sites. The view of the Hindunet website:

Excavations have uncovered archaeological evidence of the original temple in the form of idols, statues, and decorations.

There is a movement afoot in India to desecularize the shrines and re-establish Hindu religious control over them. Various organizations aligned or associated with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party are planning to right the wrongs of the 17th century by removing the mosques and restoring the original temples. For them, the mosque at Ayodhya was only the beginning; they are simply biding their time until the birthplace of Lord Krishna is itself reborn.

The Great Islamic Jihad has many fronts, and one of them is in South Asia. Our troubles with Islamism in the West loom so large to us, yet there are more people in India than in the United States, Europe, and Russia combined. The subcontinent is a crucial theater in this conflict.

As I have said before, we are in the newest phase of a very old war.