Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/20/2011

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/20/2011We had a bit of a scare today right here in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Early this morning a commercial crabber encountered a lone man lying in an inflatable boat on the James River, just off the Surry nuclear plant. The fellow had a black box attached to a chain around his neck, and told the crabber to go away when asked if he needed any help.

Given his proximity to the Surry plant and Fort Eustis, the authorities were quite concerned that the man might be a terrorist. They handled the recumbent boater gingerly, towing him to a remote boat ramp before examining the contents of the black box.

It turned out that the fellow was a local, and drunk, and his black box contained nothing more than wet sand. He is now in custody.

In other news, the European Union is delighted to support President Obama’s call for Israel to return to its 1967 borders. Lady Catherine Ashton, speaking on behalf of her fellow Eurocrats, welcomed the president’s “important statement”.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to AC, C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, Diana West, Fjordman, heroyalwhyness, Insubria, JD, Kitman, LAW Wells, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Serenity: The Reavers

2011 Spring Quarterly Fundraiser, Day 6

Given that we’ve been asking our readers to part with their hard-earned cash all week, it’s only fair that we explain what we intend to do with it.

“I suppose I can spare a few bob for you, Baron,” you say, “but what’s it all in aid of?”

Ah, yes… Well… That’s a good question.

I could say, “We’ll continue to do what we’ve been doing, and maybe a little bit more, if we’re lucky.” But that’s not an adequate prospectus.

Tip jarThe problem is, Dymphna and I never set out to do what we’re doing now. We didn’t sit down back in October 2004 and say, “Hey! What say we take up a line of work that requires us to work fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, and pays virtually nothing? Wouldn’t that be keen?”

If we’d been in our right minds, we’d never have undertaken this. But we weren’t, and we did, so here we are.

Looking back on the past three or four years, I realize that we’ve accomplished some of the main goals I had in mind in those early days. The first couple of attempts at Rosetta Stone projects were very difficult — we could find quite a few translators, but we didn’t have an assembly line for video subtitles. Then Vlad Tepes and Kitman joined the team, and our capabilities increased. The difficult tasks became routinized.

Our efforts have tended to create positive feedback loops — as more and more worthy projects materialized in this space, more and more people volunteered to be transcribers, translators, and correspondents. Gates of Vienna gradually snowballed into what it is now: a group effort that depends on the dedicated and tireless work of dozens (maybe hundreds; it’s hard to count) of unpaid volunteers.

My goal is to continue applying the above model, and to improve on it. Exactly what form the improvements will take is hard to say, just as Dymphna and I had no idea in 2004 or 2006 or 2009 where we would be today.

Obviously, this project is more than a blog. It involves planning and coordinating with Counterjihad activist networks in North America, Europe, and Australia. Gates of Vienna is just the reporting mechanism.

A few months ago someone wrote to me and said, “Gates of Vienna acts as the trade journal for the European Counterjihad.” I like that description. Yes, I’d prefer to do more in the American and Australian theaters, but it’s still a good thumbnail of what we’re up to.

So it’s hard to tell what lies ahead — we’ll just take it as it comes.

This time next year Gates of Vienna may have some snazzy new features. Or I may be working at Burger King.

It’s difficult to make predictions.

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Obama to Israel: “Drop Dead”

Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, appeared on Fox News to explain why President Obama’s speech regarding a “return to 1967 borders” would leave Israel at the mercy of the enemies who surround her.



Last month, Dore was part of a team from Israel appearing before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. Here is part of their prepared statement [my emphases — D]:

Israel is entering an extremely dangerous period in the year ahead. It is not facing an imminent military attack, but rather is confronting a new diplomatic assault that could well strip it of the territorial defenses in the West Bank that have provided for its security for over forty years. This applies particularly to its formidable eastern barrier in the Jordan Valley, which, if lost, would leave Israel eight or nine miles wide and in a very precarious position against the threats that are likely to emerge to its east, in the years ahead.

Traditional U.S. policy indeed recognized that Israel is not expected to withdraw from all the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. This was enshrined in the language of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was the basis of successive peace treaties between Israel and the Arab states. This key element of Resolution 242 also appeared in repeated letters of assurance to Israel by U.S. secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher. In 1988, Secretary of State George Shultz reiterated: “Israel will never negotiate from, or return to the lines of partition or to the 1967 borders.

More recently, the April 14, 2004, presidential letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon also spoke explicitly about Israel’s right to “defensible borders” and to the need of it being able to defend itself by itself. The latter point implicitly acknowledged Israel’s doctrine of self-reliance, by which the Israel Defense Forces were to guarantee Israel’s survival and not international troops or even NATO.

Two months later, that letter was confirmed by massive bipartisan majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Significantly, it also ruled out the notion that Israel would be expected to withdraw in the West Bank to the 1967 lines, which were only armistice lines, and not internationally recognized borders.

Here we are, just six weeks out from Israeli officials’ appearance in front of House Committee on Foreign Affairs. And now comes Obama. He steps up to the plate and…smashes his America’s friends with a wickedly aimed curve ball.

Let’s guess at the President’s motivations, shall we?

For starters, every American president since 1948 wanted (some more than others) to be the True Peacemaker in the Middle East. Each had his own ideas on how to “bring them to the table”. Bill Clinton wanted that Nobel Peace Prize so badly that he laid himself across an unfathomable chasm, as though he could be the bridge history would remember. He still says it was his biggest failure (I’ve got news for you, Bill…)

Obama is no different. He really does think he can talk and talk and talk and somehow make things better. Born to natter on and so sure that the Light Worker will succeed where others have failed.

But while he talks, he bashes his friends in the most unexpected ways (hey, I’m still alarmed at his early behavior toward Britain, displaying manners which conveyed a gob-smacking combination of rude, arrogant, and clueless). This latest speech is stupefying in its implications.

Yesterday, Wretchard analyzed it this way, and it was obvious he was recalling strategy during his own days in the underground against Marcos :

The Bush plan would be to throw Khamenei and Assad to the crowds first. But that appears to be off the table, because he wants to talk to them, so in the Obama variation the alternative appears to be giving only America’s allies in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel, the heave-ho. When it is too hard to ditch your enemies, ditch those who trusted you.

It’s a potential recipe for disaster, not in the least because it can backfire on the president. In a region where losing means winding up on the end of the hangman’s rope, you can bet your bottom dollar that regimes will fight for survival….

…President Obama’s words are not just speeches. They communicate policy. They set wheels in motion, if not in American bureaucracies, then elsewhere in the world where listeners react to them and make plans of their own. They can create a momentum that must either be seen through or lead to bust. He may be gone from office in several years, but the consequences of his words will outlive his term. Will there be a new Middle East, with all its minorities and confessions living in relative harmony? Or will it be bust?

I think the president believes he can achieve a nuanced outcome by taking both sides of history in the Middle East; to preserve U.S. security interests while spreading democracy — all largely achieved by the State Department. Maybe he will succeed. But the worst case scenario is that this will lead to a complete unraveling of the U.S. position in the region coupled with an unwillingness and inability to defend any red line whatsoever. Consider: if Plan A fails, what on earth is Plan B?

W. says “Obama’s words are not just speeches”…but I propose that the entirety of Obama is simply that: “just speeches”. Look how many times he’s back-tracked on his own words, on his own promises and Executive Orders. He is Obama-in-Wonderland, the Red Queen.

The Red Queen and Alice


In differentiating her (from the Queen of Hearts in his first story), Lewis Carroll says:

…The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm — she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses.

Ah, yes, Obama has a large strain of Nanny blood running through his vision of governance. Nanny Government knows better than you what you need. And the Nanny State Department, headed by Matriarch Clinton, is supposed to make mortal enemies play nice. This isn’t policy; it’s blundering obliviousness. Every time you think, “he can’t get any worse”, he proceeds to rub out those words.

Today, Wretchard is grimly quoting Jennifer Rubin:

Rubin argues that what President Obama did was pre-concede — to all intents and purposes — Israel’s territorial cards while requiring nothing of the Palestinian side.

The right of return therefore should be understood as the extermination of a Jewish state. Berkowitz explains: “The question of refugees, moreover, is much more than, as the president described it in his State Department speech, a ‘wrenching’ issue. Palestinian dedication to a right, with no precedent under international law, inhering in seven million Palestinians to establish residence in the state of Israel has been and remains the overriding obstacle to a secure and lasting peace.”

So what did Obama do? He delinked the right of return and return of territories. Israel’s bargaining power is eliminated because Obama gave it to Abbas despite his stated intention this week to continue war against the Jewish state.

He also explains how Obama’s words have the approval of the Quartet, as noted in Haaretz:

The Quartet of Middle East peace negotiators — the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — also stood behind the U.S. president’s speech Friday, voicing “strong support” for U.S. Obama’s vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace.

This Unholy Alliance is out for Israel’s blood. It is literally sickening to read, as though one were returning to the 1930s. But beyond what his “allies” think, in the end Obama does not play well with others, nor do the others give a fig for his future. As Wretchard puts it [my emphases — D]:

Watching his engagement policy verge on becoming road kill in the Middle East, President Obama is confronted by the political necessity of appearing to lead and the practical requirement of recovering influence in the region. He wants to become the towering figure of Cairo 2009 again, when people listened to him. Watching his allies being swept away, he seeks urgently to establish his bona fides with the incoming leaders. The best way to get back his street cred is to buy his way out of the corner at Israel’s expense. But President Obama will get precious little gratitude from the Arab world for throwing Israel under the bus. They will pocket what he offers with a quick flip of the wrist and hold out their hand for more.

Yep. That’s how they play it in the Middle East. If you don’t grok the tribal mentality there — and Obama doesn’t because he’s the quintessential lone wolf — then you’ll likely die of thirst after they drop you off in the trackless desert.

Pastor Manning had it right when he predicted in 2008 what Obama would do to Israel:



One bright moment comes from the New English Review’s Iconoclast which has Representative Allen West’s statement regarding the idea of returning to the 1967 borders. Here is part of what he said (and note that he thinks like a military man in explaining precisely what geography will be in play with Obama’s “1967 borders”):

Today’s endorsement by President Barack Obama of the creation of a Hamas-led Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders, signals the most egregious foreign policy decision his administration has made to date, and could be the beginning of the end as we know it for the Jewish state.

From the moment the modern day state of Israel declared statehood in 1948, to the end of the 1967 Six Day War, Jews were forbidden access to their holiest site, the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, controlled by Jordan’s Arab army.

The pre-1967 borders endorsed by President Obama would deny millions of the world’s Jews access to their holiest site and force Israel to return the strategically important Golan Heights to Syria, a known state-sponsor of terrorism.

Resorting to the pre-1967 borders would mean a full withdrawal by the Israelis from the West Bank and the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Make no mistake, there has always been a Nation of Israel and Jerusalem has been and must always be recognized as its rightful capital.

In short, the Hamas-run Palestinian state envisioned by President Obama would be devastating to Israel and the world’s 13.3 million Jews. It would be a Pavlovian style reward to a declared Islamic terrorist organization, and an unacceptable policy initiative.

America should never negotiate with the Palestinian Authority- which has aligned itself with Hamas. Palestine is a region, not a people or a modern state. Based upon Roman Emperor Hadrian’s declaration in 135 CE, the original Palestinian people are the Jewish people.

[…]

Congressman West poses several questions for President Obama in his statement. They are the same questions many of us are asking. Want to bet on the likelihood of the Hon. West — or the rest of us — receiving any answers in our lifetime? He finishes his statement with this:

The President should focus on the real obstacle to security- the Palestinian leadership and its ultimate goal to eliminate Israel and the Jewish people.

Be sure to see read the whole statement and watch the video at NER of West’s speech about Israel back in December 2010.

Another hopeful piece — and there are very few on the board right now — is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response:

“Peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle East reality,” an unsmiling Netanyahu said as Obama listened intently beside him in the Oval Office.



I just noticed something about this report: it features a black President, a black Congressman, a black pastor, and an expatriate Filipino living in Oz with a cameo part played by Israel’s PM. Hmmm…obviously a conspiracy is afoot. Or a hand…maybe the Black Hand? Stay tuned…



Hat tip for the Fox video:Vlad Tepes
Hat tip for Pastor Manning’s video: M. Simon
Hat tip for Netanyahu: JD

The Intrusion of Sharia into American Justice, Part 3

Constitution Shahada


This is the third in a series of posts on the implementation of sharia in American jurisprudence, as described in a recent report from the Center for Security Policy (see “Shariah Law and American State Courts” and the paper itself, Shariah Law and American State Courts: An Assessment of State Appellate Court Cases [pdf]).



As a case study in the application of sharia in American courts, consider Joohi Q. Hosain (fka Malik) V. Anwar Malik, which was brought before a Maryland court of appeals in 1996. Since the judgment of the court applied only to a Pakistani national legally resident in the United States, and not an American citizen, the decision may not seem all that alarming to most Americans. However, a close look at the legal reasoning of the majority is instructive.

A summary of the case may be found on page 29 of the CSP report:

2. Hosain v. Malik, 671 A. 2d 988 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 1996).

Hosain (wife) and Malik (husband) lived in Pakistan as a married couple for approximately eight years before Hosain fled to the United States with the couple’s daughter. Malik filed for custody of their daughter in a Pakistani court. Hosain did not appear before the Pakistani court because she would have been arrested in Pakistan for adultery because she lived with a man after she fled to the United States. The Pakistani court granted custody to Malik. Malik requested that American courts recognize and enforce the Pakistani custody order via a mechanism known as comity. A Maryland trial court granted comity to the Pakistani custody order. On appeal, the Maryland appellate court affirmed the trial court and granted comity to the Pakistani custody order holding that the Pakistani court considered the best interests of the child in granting custody to Malik. However, the minority opinion disagreed that the Pakistani court considered the child’s best interest and instead focused on factors outside of the “best interests of the child” analysis. These other factors included that the child would live in an “un-Islamic” society if it were allowed to remain with Hosain in the United States.

Anyone familiar with Islamic culture in Pakistan knows that the wife would have risked her freedom and well-being — and probably her life — if she had returned to Pakistan to argue her case. The blatant reality of the status of women under sharia should have informed the court to place no weight on her failure to appear in court in her homeland.

But the majority decided to take the legal superstructure of Pakistan at face value — recognizing the legacy of British colonial law as if it were a legal reality, instead of a thin veneer covering the practice of sharia — and judge the mother accordingly.

The majority opinion, as detailed on pages 282 ff., focused on whether the Pakistani court used the “best interest of the child” as primary criterion for making a judgment:

Turning to the heart of this appeal, appellant argues that the circuit court erred in determining that appellant failed to prove that Pakistani law was not in substantial conformity with Maryland law. In this regard, appellant’s argument is two-pronged: first, appellant maintains that the Pakistani court did not apply the “best interest of the child” standard to the case at hand, although the standard exists in Pakistan; and second, even if the Pakistani court did apply the best interest of the child standard, the rules of law and procedure that the Pakistani courts followed were contrary to Maryland’s public policy. Before addressing these arguments, we feel constrained to make certain critical observations.

Devotees of our national sports pastime agree that what is most important for a batter is to keep his or her eye on the ball. So too must we be guided in our review herein. Lest there be any confusion about our assigned task on this appeal from the limited remand hearing below, we must bear in mind what this case is not about. This case is not a review of legal determinations of the circuit court. Neither is this case about whether a Pakistani trial judge or a Maryland trial judge reached the “right” decision, for both judges are entitled to deference as to their factual findings; in other words, they have the right to “call them as they see them.” Significantly, this case is not about this Court undertaking the task of acting as a fact finder in place of the circuit court or substituting its judgment for that of the Pakistani court. And, this case is not about whether Pakistani religion, culture, or legal system is personally offensive to us or whether we share all of the same values, mores and customs, but rather whether the Pakistani courts applied a rule of law, evidence, or procedure so contradictory to Maryland public policy as to undermine the confidence in the trial.

More specifically, the resolution of this case is about our limited and focused task as derived from the very narrow and specific function of the circuit court on remand from Malik.

Having issued that very limited mandate, it is crystal clear that the task of the circuit court on remand was straightforward and simple. Thus, the circuit court was obliged to hold an evidentiary hearing to determine (1) whether the Pakistani courts applied the “best interest of the child” standard or its equivalent, and (2) whether the procedural and substantive rights applied to the litigants before the Pakistani courts were such that confidence in the outcome there was undermined. Accordingly, faithfully adhering to our mandate and following Malik‘s simple road map, the circuit court conducted an evidentiary hearing wherein two experts testified — Dr. Malik for appellant and Justice Dogar for appellee. Based on their testimony, the circuit court concluded that the testimony presented by Justice Dogar supported a finding that appellant failed to meet her burden of proof on the two matters that she was required to prove under Malik.

The circuit court having made that determination — a factual determination — we cannot now reverse the judgment of the circuit court unless we find the circuit court’s determination to be “clearly erroneous.”

[…]

The evidence was overwhelming that, as a general principle, Pakistan follows the best interest of the child test in making child custody decisions. Both experts testified that the Guardians & Wards Act of 1890 applies to child custody disputes. Section 7 of the Act authorizes a court to appoint a guardian for a child where “the Court is satisfied that it is for the welfare of a minor…”

[…]

Appellant, however, argues that, under this Court’s mandate in Malik, it is not enough that Pakistani law merely recognizes that the best interest of the child standard controls matters of child custody. Rather, appellant maintains that Malik required the circuit court to determine whether the Pakistani courts in this case actually applied that standard, and that the circuit court “erred in finding that the Pakistani court applied the best interest of the child standard” because the decisions of the Pakistani courts were “based solely on the mother’s failure to appear in the Pakistani proceedings.”

We agree with appellant that the first part of our mandate in Malik required the circuit court to deny comity to the Pakistani order if appellant could prove that the Pakistani court did not apply the best interest standard to this case. Malik, […] In other words, appellant is correct that it was not enough under our mandate for the circuit court to merely find that the best interest of the child standard is the law in Pakistan in child custody disputes. We are persuaded, however, that substantial evidence before the circuit court indicated that the Pakistani courts in fact applied the best interest of the child standard.

Preliminarily, we shall address appellant’s argument that the Pakistani courts’ sole reliance on appellee’s evidence because of appellant’s absence from the Pakistani proceedings rendered it impossible for the Pakistani courts to have actually applied the best interest of the child standard. A fair reading of the record reveals that the courts in Pakistan considered appellee’s evidence, including appellee’s denial of appellant’s allegations, and concomitantly refused to accord weight to those allegations. Appellee’s expert testified that, as a matter of practice, the only way the Pakistani court would have considered appellant’s allegations is if she had appeared in person to substantiate them. Since she did not, according to appellee’s expert, the Pakistani court did not consider those allegations.

This, however, does not mean that the first prong of our mandate in Malik was not satisfied. That the Pakistani court may have considered only appellee’s evidence and refused to give credence to appellant’s allegations in making the best interest of the child determination does not render that determination defective for purposes of granting comity to the Pakistani order under our mandate in Malik.

The judge went on to explain that a custody determination “in the best interests of the child” could be made in a Maryland court in the absence of one of the parties to the dispute, provided that it could be demonstrated that the missing party had been given ample notice and the opportunity to appear.

The Pakistani justice system is thus assumed to be essentially equivalent to its American counterpart:

Thus, in Maryland a court will proceed with a child custody determination in the absence of one of the parents. Moreover, appellee denied appellant’s allegations during the Pakistani proceeding.

We do not find, therefore, that the best interest of the child test was not applied in Pakistan because of appellant’s failure to put on a case. Justice Dogar testified that a natural presumption is drawn from one’s failure to present evidence. This is not unique to the courts of Pakistan.

[…]

Indeed, had this case originated in Maryland, and had appellee been the one who failed to appear to testify or present evidence through other persons, after having received proper notice, our circuit court would be obliged to proceed on the evidence before it. This would not mean, however, as appellant suggests, that the circuit court would not have applied the best interest test. Quite to the contrary, this simply would mean that the circuit court applied the test using the evidence before it.

In this regard, the Pakistani court proceeded in virtually the same manner in which a Maryland court would have proceeded had a parent failed to appear. Under these circumstances, therefore, we shall not condemn the Pakistani court for doing substantially that which a Maryland circuit court would have done.

Our view is bolstered by the uncontroverted fact that appellant had notice and an opportunity to present her side in Pakistan, but decided against doing so.

[…]

In sum, therefore, the fact that the Pakistani courts relied exclusively on appellee’s evidence, without consideration of appellant’s evidence in support of allegations, did not, of itself, make it legally impossible for the Pakistani courts to have applied the best interest of the child test.

It gets worse. Despite the assumed “sameness” of the two venues, the appellate court determined that the conditions providing for “best interest of the child” in Pakistan might be different from those in Maryland, and that a Maryland court could and should not try to determine compliance with those standards.

Cultural relativism rules in Maryland!

We now address whether substantial competent evidence existed from which the circuit court could have determined that the best interest of the child standard was in fact applied in Pakistan. Preliminarily, we believe it beyond cavil that a Pakistani court could only determine the best interest of a Pakistani child by an analysis utilizing the customs, culture, religion, and mores of the community and country of which the child and — in this case — her parents were a part, i.e., Pakistan. Furthermore, the Pakistani court could only apply the best interest standard as of the point in time when the evidence is being presented, not in futuro, the Court having no way of predicting that the child would be spirited away to a foreign culture…

Based on a plain reading of the Pakistani court orders, we hold that the trial judge was not clearly erroneous in finding that the Pakistani courts applied the best interest of the child standard to this case.

[…]

After reciting the facts of both sides of the dispute, the court set out to determine specifically “[w]ith whom the welfare of the minor [l]ies.” In so doing, the court set forth the testimony of appellee. Appellee testified that appellant is living a “sin life” with her lover in the U.S., and that his daughter is not being properly cared for by appellant. In addition, appellee testified that when his child lived in Pakistan he paid for her to attend the St. Joseph School where she received an Islamic education, but that the child is not now receiving an Islamic education in the U.S. Moreover, appellee testified that appellant is controlling the child through fear, and that appellant lacks moral character. Appellee also informed the court of appellant’s failure to comply with a Pakistani court order. Appellee further stated that the man with whom appellant was living was a stranger to the child. In sum, appellee’s testimony before the Pakistani court was that the welfare of the child will suffer in the hands of appellant and her lover.

The Pakistani court then noted that appellant did not challenge or rebut appellee’s testimony, “though she was given full chance for the same purpose.” In addition, the court observed that appellant’s counsel “also failed to argue the matter.” Based on this uncontradicted evidence on the record, i.e., appellee’s testimony, the Pakistani court reasoned that custody should be awarded to appellee in the interest of “the welfare and well being” of the child…

We believe it is pellucid that these orders unambiguously indicate that the Pakistani courts did in fact apply the welfare of the child test in awarding custody to appellee. [emphasis added]

The judge failed to acknowledge the elephant in the room: a Pakistani court can only apply the “welfare of the child” as understood under Islamic law.

An Islamic court passing judgment under Islamic law can never recognize any legal principles except those provided by the sharia, which are manifestly deficient with respect to the rights of women and children, as such rights are commonly understood in the West.

But cultural relativism trumps everything, even in a Maryland appellate court:

To be sure, were we standing in the shoes of the Pakistani judge, we might have given greater or lesser weight to the various factors at issue, thereby reaching a different conclusion. Moreover, we would certainly give great weight, as a Pakistani judge, to the impact tearing a child away from his/her cultural and religious moorings would have on the child’s best interest. On this appeal, however, it is not our function to consider how we would have applied the best interest of the child standard, nor is it that of a Pakistani appellate court reviewing the merits of the Pakistani lower court’s determination.

[…]

We reject appellant’s argument that the Pakistani court applied a rule of law so “contrary to Maryland’s public policy as to undermine confidence in the outcome of the trial,” when it allegedly based its child custody order only on evidence that appellee presented. Initially, we observe that we are not called upon here to pass judgment on a trial by fire, trial by ordeal, or a system rooted in superstition, or witchcraft.

That is, the judge made the astounding assertion that the validity of a trial by fire is not something on which a Maryland court may render a legal opinion.

In other words, two core principles of Politically Correct Multiculturalism have been applied by the judge in this case:

1.   “All cultures are equal, and merit equal treatment”, and
2.   “Who are we to judge?”

As we all know, when a PC MC savant denies he has the authority to “judge”, he invariably comes down on the side of the customs practiced by “brown people”, especially when those brown people are Muslims.

The principle of “cultural equivalence” becomes quite blatant a little farther on in the judge’s opinion:

On the record before us, we cannot determine whether Pakistani law lacks conformity with Maryland law. We can, however, resolve the narrow issue of whether the Pakistani order should be denied comity because there is a paternal preference in Pakistani law. If the only difference between the custody laws of Maryland and Pakistan is that Pakistani courts apply a paternal preference the way Maryland courts once applied the maternal preference, the Pakistani order is entitled to comity.

Once again:

“Whatever bad things the Pakistanis might have done in the past, we’ve done the equivalent. Who are we to judge?”

The court could find nothing in the disposition of this case that involved “principles of law repugnant to Maryland public policy” because it was not allowed to look.

The spirited dissent written by Judge Hollander is worth reading. But even that does not dare to deviate substantially from PC MC rules; it simply argues against the majority decision based on technical points of the law.

What seem like plain facts to regular readers of this blog — that the mother could not possibly have received a fair hearing in Pakistan as Westerners understand it, and had good reason to fear for her life if she returned — are simply not admissible in a court of law.

Such is the dhimmified state of American jurisprudence.

Why Is This Not Treason?

Our English correspondent Paul Weston returns with a spirited broadside against the treacherous behavior of the Labour government and their creation of Modern Multicultural Britain.

William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw

Why Is This Not Treason?
by Paul Weston

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague. — Cicero

On the 3rd of January 1946, William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, was the last man in Britain to be hanged for the ancient crime of treason. Unless a future government changes the law it is unlikely that traitors will ever dangle again, after Tony Blair rather conveniently repealed the death penalty for such a crime in 1998.

That is not to say treason no longer exists. Now the full extent of Labour’s thirteen-year rule has become apparent, an increasing number of Britons are volubly accusing the Labour Party of wilfully and cold-bloodedly betraying Britain and deliberately jeopardising our children’s future.

Lord Haw-Haw of course sided with the Nazis during the hot war of 1939-1945. The recent Labour government might not have been operating in a hot-war theatre, but they certainly carried out a warm-war against the British (principally the English) via mass immigration from one of the most hostile and anti-Western countries in the world, Pakistan.

Consider some of the following statistics:

  • Only nineteen percent of Pakistanis have a negative view of Al Qaeda and by default the Taliban, whilst seventy-five percent wish to see Sharia law implemented. British-born Muslims make an estimated four hundred thousand trips a year to Pakistan, where as many as thirty threats against Britain are being monitored at any given time.
  • Thirty-three percent of Muslim students in Britain think killing in the name of Islam is permissible. Only thirty-seven percent oppose the introduction of Sharia law and only twenty-five percent oppose the creation of a worldwide Muslim caliphate.
  • MI5 believe there are up to four thousand potential terrorists and thirteen thousand Al Qaeda sympathisers living in Britain. The CIA devotes an astonishing forty percent of their anti-terrorist homeland security operations against suspects not in Afghanistan or Waziristan, but in Britain itself — a country described by one CIA operative as “a swamp of Jihadis.”
  • Barack Obama’s counter-terrorist advisor Bruce Riedel recently stated: “The British Pakistani community is recognised as probably Al Qaeda’s best mechanism for launching an attack against North America.”

All in all then, it would seem less than prudent to allow any more bearded ideologues into Britain, yet the Labour government — and this must sound quite insane to most people — actually went to the extraordinary lengths of advertising for foreign colonisers from the very same country the Home Office was paying Danegeld to in a typically limp-wristed appeal to stop it from blowing us up.

The British Embassy in Pakistan distributed glossy pamphlets entitled “Multicultural Britain — a Land of Immigrants” which gave a raft of arguments as to the benefits of living in Britain such as well paid jobs, plain old welfare, and the prospect of inviting over the entire extended family (sans goat) once a British passport had been acquired.

And of course there was the rather unpleasant — nay, treacherous — implication that there was no such thing as a homogenous Britain, no such place as an English homeland, just an indeterminate area of land settled by a vague mongrel collection of disparate peoples including any number of rag-tag colonial racists awaiting divine racial redemption from those they once oppressed.

So desperate were the Labour traitors to destroy Britain that, having secured power, they immediately carried out two political acts which could only place our peaceful future in doubt. The Human Rights Convention was immediately incorporated into British law and immigration rules were relaxed to allow an open-door policy of mass Muslim immigration.

A few thousand people who could gently assimilate were of little use to the Labour government. To ensure the success of their revolutionary plan, they urgently needed inassimilable millions and were quite prepared to deceive the British public about the real number of Muslim immigrants — and the real reasons Tony Blair wanted them in Britain.

And once the floodgates were opened, it became supremely important not to turn anybody away. Of the 2 million visas issued every year, fifteen percent of them were “processed” when they should not have been in order to hit “productivity targets,” with immigration officials placed under intense political pressure to issue visas rather than reject them.

One man who took advantage of Blair’s treachery was Abu Baseer, the spiritual advisor to Ansar ul-Islam, a jihadist organisation linked to Al Qaeda. Baseer was originally based in Iraq prior to settling in West London, from where he issues various fatwas calling for death to British soldiers and the overthrow of the West. He had this to say on the subject of immigration:

“One of the goals of immigration is the revival of the duty of jihad and enforcement of power over the infidels. Immigration and jihad go together. One is the consequence of the other and dependent upon it. The continuance of the one is dependent upon the continuance of the other.”

The next stage in Labour’s war against Britain and its indigenous people was to make sure the foreign colonisers maintained their 7th century ideology and customs through a curious yet highly effective liberal process called “multiculturalism.” This guaranteed their non-assimilation and thus provided Tony Blair and his friends with a hostile and ever-growing tool with which to incrementally erode traditional Britain.

Despite the obvious violence that emanates from massed Muslims wherever they are in the world, the Labour government went to great lengths to portray Islam as The Religion of Peace, even as Christianity was mocked and defiled, and decent, moral and patriotic Britons were re-cast and criminalised as Islamophobic, race-hating Nazis.

Not even our children were safe from Tony Blair’s thought police. The propaganda arms of the BBC and the state educational service tried to convince our children that their race, culture, religion and history consisted only of genocide, racism and evil. The spectre of Adolf Hitler was also constantly invoked with the quite deliberate intention of linking any resistance to the religious and ethnic colonisation of Britain with the actions and ideology of the Nazis.

And while third-world immigration continued apace, the Labour Party lied to cover up the attendant serial catastrophes. We were told that they were peaceful, that they committed little crime and that they were a benefit to the economy. None of this was true, as detailed by the exposure of Labours’ various lies and distortions, which showed a negative cost to the economy and a disproportionate level of crime including rape and murder — and of course, terrorism.

Nine out of ten new jobs were taken by immigrants, along with eighty-five percent of new housing. Muslims are grossly over-represented within Britain’s jails and within Britain’s welfare state, which supports fifty percent of Muslim males and seventy-five percent of females who reproduce like belt-fed mortars rather than going out to work.

To further bolster the Muslim demographics, Britain’s laws against polygamy were overlooked in the case of Islam. Muslim males could thus legally amass four imported wives, twenty to thirty children and a large house (or houses) in which to raise them, all paid for by the Labour state — right down to the satellite dish tuned into the various sources of jihad beamed direct from the East.

Only two out of three babies born in Britain today are classified as white British. Twenty percent of mothers are first generation immigrants, and a further twenty-five percent second or third generation immigrants. The idea that there are only 2.4 million Muslims in Britain is therefore ridiculous. There is strong evidence to suggest the numbers could be somewhere between 5-10 million.

The welfare-funded Muslim birth-rate has already rendered English children a minority in many city schools. In London, white school children now enter their first year as an ethnic minority. Figures from the Office of National Statistics suggest that British people of all ages will become a minority by 2066 with the young becoming a minority far earlier, and the young English earlier still.

These apocalyptic figures led Professor David Coleman of Oxford University to state that the transition of white Britons to a minority was likely to be: “unwelcome… and would represent an enormous change to national identity — cultural, political, economic and religious”.

Professor Coleman is quite right, but what is scarcely believable is that these enormous changes were precisely what the Labour Party had in mind in 1997. This was made apparent when Peter Hitchens recounted his dismay regarding a fellow hack who jumped ship in order to work for the Labour Party:

“I asked him why he had done this awful thing. He replied: you have no idea at all just how enormous the New Labour Project really is.”

Other people were all too aware of the size and direction of the Labour Party juggernaut, but still managed to hold onto their naiveté as to its ultimate destination, which appears to be the cultural and racial eradication of the English people. This genocidal policy was explained by Tony Blair’s speech-writer Andrew Neather in 2010, when he rather foolishly came out with the following treasonous nuggets:

‘It didn’t just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year was to open up the UK to mass migration… to make the UK truly multicultural…the policy was intended to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date… this shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants’

There were two main reasons for such treachery. The first was held by Labour’s minority hard-left who wanted to destroy utterly the hated traditional establishment, and in this respect they had no choice but to declare war on their own people. To the hard-left, the enemy was the conservative, Christian, capitalist West of liberal-democracy Western civilisation — or, in other words, the majority of the English.

The second reason, held perhaps by the majority of Labour apparatchiks, was to ensure a socialist government in perpetuity via the imported foreign vote. Research into voting patterns conducted for The Electoral Commission in May 2005 showed that Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshis voted 56%, 50% and 41% for Labour. The equivalent figures for the Conservatives were 11%, 11% and 9%

The Labour Party has form with this kind of gerrymandering. Ex-Communist Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, Herbert Morrison, who was Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister between 1945-1951, came up with the novel idea of constructing soviet-style concrete tower-blocks for the working-class to live in who would subsequently vote Labour and thus “build the f*****g Tories (Conservatives) out of London.”

Tony Blair simply took it a stage further, and imported a “vigorously encouraged to feel oppressed class” from foreign climes to serve as cultural destroyers / Labour bloc-voters. This is a subtle re-working of Bertolt Brecht’s comment in the wake of East Berlin’s 1953 bread riots, when he suggested: “Wouldn’t it be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

Who would have thought this would one day apply to “democratic” Britain where the indigenous people are not so much being dissolved as replaced, and where “population replacement” is simply a more refined way of saying ethnic cleansing?

It was James Burnham who first coined the phrase “Suicide of the West”, but this is not a majority-ordained suicide. It is a minority-controlled murderous genocide. Let me be very clear about this: Tony Blair and the Labour Party declared war on their own people, and there is (as yet) no substantive reason to believe we can survive this century, let alone the long term.

The point of war is not about fighting and shooting and storming and gung-hoing; it is about gaining physical territory and taking political control of the defeated territory and its people. This is exactly what is slowly but surely happening to the English.

And because it is happening so slowly, many people are unaware of the situation. If a man is injected with a fast acting poison and dies minutes later, he has clearly been murdered. But is it not still murder if the poison were slow acting and allowed the man to live another twenty years?

It is the act of injection, knowing the consequences, which makes it murder, and Tony Blair injected Britain with a lethal cocktail of fast-breeding inassimilable aliens in the full and calculated knowledge that the country and its indigenous people would be incrementally destroyed as a result.

We can see this destruction today. Vulnerable girls in Northern towns were groomed and raped by Pakistanis for over eight years without any recrimination. The police simply pretended nothing untoward was happening. Much the same happened in Berlin in the mid 1930s to the Jews, who suffered tremendous persecution that was subsequently ignored by the authorities.

In London, entire areas are slowly coming under Islamic control. Tower Hamlets is now lost to the West as Jews, women and homosexuals are persecuted whilst English street names and the few remaining whites are systematically replaced. Soon to be lost, if indeed they are not already lost are Luton, Bradford, Oldham, Birmingham, Leicester, etc. Fjordman calls this Beheading Nations and asks the following question:

“Less attention has been paid to the fact that Muslims are beheading entire nation states. Although this is happening in slow motion, it is no less dramatic. Historically, the major cities have constituted a country’s ‘head’ the seat of most of its political institutions and the largest concentration of its cultural brainpower. What happens when this “head” is cut off from the rest of the body?”

When our racial / religious society cedes territory to a rival society, then we are losing a battle. When the state enacts laws to reward the aggressive incomer and to penalise the passive native, then we are losing a battle. When our children are brainwashed into the belief that they are evil and worthy only of displacement, then we are losing a battle. When our women and children are raped and abused whilst the state remains silent, then we are losing a battle.

And when finally we become too defeated even to breed whilst we pay the aggressor to demographically swamp us, then we have not just lost a battle, we are in the midst of losing a war, our homeland, and our civilisation. We are rapidly on our way to extinction.

We have been betrayed. Tony Blair and the Labour Party have committed treason. The British people were never asked if they wished Muslim immigrants to colonise Britain in such large numbers that it constituted invasion. Had they been asked they would have replied with a resounding No!

Although lawyers may argue over the precise meaning of the word “treason”, everyone else understands it only too well, including Tony Blair, which (along with the EU sell-out) is presumably why he repealed the treason laws. The Labour government was elected to represent the best interests of the British people, not those of Mirpur.

It does not really matter whether the third world was imported for revolutionary or electoral gain. All that matters is that Tony Blair’s Labour Party systematically allied itself with the massed imported ideologues of the Western world’s most persistent historical aggressor, and actively sided against Britain and the British people.

Rather than sign off with a furious tirade about the severe recrimination traitors should endure, I will leave you instead with a calm yet deeply poignant quote from Alex Henshaw, chief test-pilot for Vickers Armstrong during the Second World War. Despite test-flying ten percent of all Spitfires during their development stage, Mr Henshaw survived the war and lived a long life before dying in 2007:

“I feel extreme emotional sadness for the young men I knew that gave their lives willingly for a cause in which we all believed. And I often say to myself now if those young boys would come down now and walk through the villages, through the towns and through the cities and look around and see what is happening to us, they would say somewhere along the line we have been betrayed.”

Yes, Mr Henshaw. I am afraid you have.



Previous posts by Paul Weston:

2007   Jan   22   The Week Britain Died
        26   Britain’s Dystopian School Children
    Feb   2   Questioning the Sanity of Liberals
    Mar   1   Multiculturalism — Merits and Debits
        31   Is European Civil War Inevitable by 2025?
    Jun   26   The Big Story That Isn’t
    Aug   10   An Open Letter to Fellow Europeans
        24   A Brussels Perspective
    Sep   12   Democratic Europe R.I.P.
    Nov   2   The Coming Third World War
        21   Cool War — Warm War — Hot War: Part 1
        29   Cool War — Warm War — Hot War: Part 2
2008   Mar   27   The Face of Moderate Islam in Britain
2009   Feb   9   Wilders in Wonderland
        13   Who is Lord Ahmed?
        25   Temporary Peace Trumps Freedom of Speech
    Jul   1   Muslims, Mosques and Mosquitoes
        2   Islam, the BBC, and Young Children
        8   Review of “A Bridge Too Far”
        17   Socialist Propaganda in British Education
    Oct   15   Multiculturalism Has Destroyed the British Police
2010   Mar   16   Ethnically Cleansing the English
    Oct   7   Banana Republic Britain
        30   “We Will Hold You to Account”
    Dec   5   The Metaphorical Front Line of Islam
        5   The West Needs to Wake Up
        7   Land for Peace — Or Land for a Terror State?

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day: One Year Later

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day now seems like a million years ago, but it was really just one year ago today — May 20, 2010 — when Molly Norris’ ironic inspiration caused the world’s 7.8 quintillion Muslims to enter a state of apoplectic outrage.

Or rather, to re-enter a state of apoplectic outrage.

Or, to be even more precise, to ratchet up their permanent state of outrage from “apoplectic” to “utterly deranged”.

Last year’s Everybody Draw Mohammed Day was billed as the “first annual”, but it seems to have fallen down the memory hole in the interim — as far as I can tell, no one else is observing it today.

But we’re stalwarts here at Gates of Vienna, so: let today be the Second Annual Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!

In honor of the occasion, I present this excellent original drawing by Proud Kafir, who produced a much better image than I could ever create:

Mohammed Creates Allah by Proud Kafir


So here we are, one year later, and nothing much has changed.

Muslims are still offended.

President Obama continues to grovel in his repeated attempts to placate them.

Merely thinking about burning a Koran can cause the deaths of thousands.

Nobody who wants to retain his standing as a public figure dares to mock, depict, criticize, or say anything remotely disrespectful about Mohammed.

And Molly Norris is presumably still living under an assumed name.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/19/2011

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/19/2011President Obama laid out his vision for Middle East peace, and — surprise! — it involves strong-arming Israel back within its pre-1967 borders. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is not having any of it, and was quick to point out that Mr. Obama’s expectations differ significantly from what the USA had previously agreed to, which did not include a return to the status quo ante 1967.

In other news, the German state of Bremen has lowered the voting age for state elections to 16.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to AC, Brutally Honest, C. Cantoni, CSP, Egghead, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Steen, TV, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Everyone Remembers “When”…

Men's pajamas

2011 Spring Quarterly Fundraiser, Day 5

It’s Day Five of our Spring fundraiser. This bleg is rushing by and I just remembered the reason: I’ve neglected my thank you acknowledgements in order to do yard clean-up. We’ve had almost a week of rain; with the arrival of the sun I had to rescue the plants I’d prepared for the garden. Instead of writing, I’ve been squeezing water out of small plant pots and pulling weeds. The latter have grown luxuriant in this weather.

I’ve also been answering emails here and there. For example, JLH (our German translator) and I began a discussion the other day which has ended up incorporated into this post. If I had more energy, a lot of emails would experience that fate.

At any rate, he’d mentioned our comment section, and when I asked for clarification, J said:

My remark on your comments is really the recognition that you can generate a level of sophisticated discussion among your readers at GoV without “putting on airs” about your own intellectual powers and general level of cultivation. You just attract thoughtful people.

He’s right. About our commenters, I mean. Some of the threads can be more enlightening than the original post. So much depends on the focus of the commenters. I still prefer brief comments: there is something about a computer screen that causes MEGO [My Eyes Glaze Over] much faster than would a block of similar text in, say, a book or magazine. This may be the reason Commenter B can miss the point Commenter A was making and begin addressing something else entirely — all the while sure that he’s staying On Topic. By such means do threads go sideways. Back when my health was more normal, I’d ask people to stick to the topic but now it’s a good day when I can even open the comment threads. And it’s a red-letter day when I can actually respond to someone.

However, mea culpas are in order here.

Tip jarSince claiming (above) that brevity is the soul of a good comment thread I’ll have to admit to my own verbosity. In fact, it was that very character fault trait which led to the birth of Gates of Vienna. Over many months, a particularly prune-mouthed participant in Wretchard’s comment section would sternly and repeatedly remind me that a courteous comment should not be more than two paragraphs. Whoops! Failed again. And again. Eventually I picked up my hat and departed to start GoV with the Baron. I told myself I’d return to the Belmont Club, and sometimes I do. There is still no one blogging as a sole proprietor who continues to maintain gravitas, moderation, and in-depth analysis. And yes, I’m a one-woman band for BC. Here’s some trenchant brevity for you, from his most recent post, second paragraph (he is talking about Obama’s recent Middle East speech):

In giving his speech the President may have done three things, none of which he quite intended. First, he has essentially denounced as evil and misguided, though in a lukewarm fashion, decades of American policy in the Middle East. Second, he has delegitimized Israel, at least within the context of its current borders. Third, he has by implication suggested that the rule of many of his allies is undemocratic and in consequence, declared himself King of Arabia. He has assumed ultimate responsibility for the political development of the region now. He’s declared it broken. Now he owns it.

You can go here to read the rest and look at the comments.

But my respect for Belmont Club eventuating in Gates of Vienna is a different path from that of the Baron, or from JLH’s involvement in the blogosphere. Their paths are quite similar — maybe it’s a guy thing? — except that the Baron would add Little Green Footballs and Fjordman to his list. That was back when Fj kept a blog. People are still reading it; I know because I see a fair number of referrals from his website, all these years later.

JLH describes what he meant about our commenters:

Actually, I had in mind a blog that I still visit and enjoy, but that I think exemplifies that description — Power Line. They are, in fact, what started me reading blogs, during Dan Rather’s last attempt to avenge himself on Papa Bush by trashing his son’s National Guard record. It is when I discovered “bloggery” and started to branch out, first by following their references to other blogs.

And then he gave me this:

For you entertainment, I add something I wrote near the beginning of my adventures with the blogs. After finishing, I discovered that there really was no home for what I’d written on any of the blogs I have come to know and trust. However it explains why I have jumped into groups like ICLA through the window of your site.

When you read JLH’s journey, it’ll bring back memories for you regarding your own adventures in cyberspace. From the context, you can pin down when he began reading, and then when he got serious about it.

This story could be told in a similar fashion by all of us. From wherever we started, well… here we are on the same page, I writing and you reading — and then perhaps you describing your own adventure in virtual reality for the rest of us.

“Distributed” adventures?

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Men in Pajamas

or

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blogs


Suppose you are an end-of-the-20th-century semi-Luddite, who has learned that word processing is infinitely superior to typing. Now you can correct mistakes and not be haunted by type-overs and erasure marks, like a literary Mark of Cain. Then you discover that there are things called search engines, and, if you aren’t indiscriminately trusting, you can locate information much faster than hopping from a dictionary to an encyclopedia to a history book — even assuming they are all together in the same space. Slowly but surely, you leave the card catalogue behind and learn how to distinguish one kind of search engine from another. That is how it starts. A new source of information has elbowed its way into your life.

How do you go from there to becoming addicted to the blogosphere? How do you even learn enough to call it “the blogosphere”?

Suppose that you listen to the evening news and read the daily paper. Maybe you even become ambitious and start listening to cable news channels. That’s more than there used to be. If you really have to know something more about the world, there’s always Time and all its reports from Asia, Europe, Africa. There’s The New York Times, BBC, Le Monde, Der Spiegel. What more could you want?

So why do you have the niggling feeling that you still don’t know what is going on — at home or abroad? Why do you have the same dark feeling of dissatisfaction you had when your high school history teacher declaimed that a new world was coming, and it would be governed by the UN?

Ah, the UN. That wonderful, noble palace of utopia living its corrupt octopus life on Turtle Bay. Some day future generations will look back on that failed experiment and wonder what in the world we could’ve been drinking thinking to go on with it for so long.

How many of you remember those Hallowe’en cardboard cartons you took with you on your trick-or-treat rounds, piously asking your neighbors for whatever they were willing to donate to the UN “for the poor children around the world”. The first time I saw a bumper sticker saying “GET US OUT OF THE UN” I was certain the driver of that car was a loon. Instead, we went on to become good friends, and now I’m even more of a loon than she. Recently, during supper at our house we had an civil if murky conversation on “moderate” Muslims. When she pointed out a particular acquaintance of ours, I reminded her that he identifies himself as a Persian, not a Muslim. She pondered that and said, “You’re right. He used to go on and on about being a Persian”. So my long-term UN-hating friend is now trying to parse terrorism and where our mutual acquaintance fits in…unlike JLH, she never took that first step into the political blogs, though I have no doubt she’d enjoy considering herself a member of the VRWC.

JLH describes his moment on the Damascus road:

Then something happens. For me it was the Dan Rather-George W. Bush National Guard story. I heard or read that there was a controversy about the story and that the story behind the story had been broken by some blogs, including one in particular. So I located this thing called a blog and I started to read the authors’ mix of politics and sports and pop music and news of their college alma mater. I shared with a former student that I had learned something or other on a blog and he wrote back from France, where he was studying: “What is a blog?” That was when I knew I had crossed some invisible line and, in my own technologically helpless way, joined the internet generation. At the time, I had not heard that Al Gore had invented it. And his even greater invention was yet to come.

Once across that line, it is like deciding to “take a little walk” in Central Park or Hyde Park. You never quite get done. One day the blog you are reading mentions a subject of interest and refers to another blog. When you go to investigate at a thing called a URL, there is another complex and self-sufficient microcosm. At first, you take small steps. If you are from the US, you probably start out with US blogs. If you’re a Brit, you start with one from the UK, if you are German, with one in German, if French…well, let’s not get into imponderables.

Gradually, like walking in that big park, one path leads to another, your interests expand, new people and places beckon. Finally it becomes obvious to you why you felt you did not know everything that was going on. Because you didn’t. The media you have been trained to trust are like a large department store. There is a department for almost everything, but not much time is spent in any one of them and, even when it is, it appears that the same things are on sale every time. Somebody is deciding what you will be allowed to buy. You are not expected to discriminate — just buy.

“Trained to trust”? We certainly are. And no doubt many of you have family members who trust every word that drops from the mouth of those in the MSM. How about those who get their information from, say, Jon Stewart. An admission: I wouldn’t know this man if I fell over him. However, given the many references to him on other blogs, it appears he’s important to night-time television (here in the US). If I’ve understood his shtick, he does comedy focusing on the news, or at least on other famous people. He mixes liberal news with liberal humor and has a bias so big that he’s impregnable to actual input. That’s the usual case: if one is a popular entertainment “personality” one doesn’t need an input button, does one? No doubt he ladles it all out with lashings of snark. Liberals usually do.

But back to J’s further education in cyberspace:

Blogs that you have come to know are more like a selection of boutiques — each one specializes in its own way: culturally, politically, ethnically — take your pick. Instead of hanging on the news reports that — even on cable — repeat and repeat and repeat, you can go from a Brit boutique to an Austrian one; from a cultural concentration to international politics and from there to a consideration of economic questions.

Compare it to how you purchase clothing: instead of buying a suit and shoes and tie all in one place (and all of the same quality) you can go from an Italian tailor to an English haberdasher and end the day by picking up a Indian silk ascot in a wild paisley. Thus, when someone dressed in an off-the-rack double-breasted from one of the big outlets condescends to smile snidely at your eclectic attire, you can give him a swift kick with your L. L. Bean boots, knowing that you are better dressed than that twerp.

That’s a good comparison. When we look at how other people dress, depending on our own sartorial prescriptions, we judge accordingly. Thus a commenter at New English Review (I don’t have the URL to hand) pointed out Geert Wilders’ attire at some function in Tennessee. He had on a blue suit with brown shoes. Gasp! Something most American men have drummed into them by mothers or wiser-than-you girlfriends: never, ever wear a blue suit with brown shoes. It is the number one mortal sin in men’s business clothing, or at least it is here in the US. Maybe Europeans never got that memo. Maybe his wife dresses him funny — because you know that any married man is off the hook for his clothing choices. His wife makes them.

Further observations from JLH as he continues his journey:

Not only that, each blog has its own personality, so you learn not only where there is something worthwhile to see, but where you feel at home. It is like wandering through a town full of friends and acquaintances, each of whom knows something that is not in the local newspaper: news of local politics, scandalous doings, concerts or exhibitions worth going to. How can one or two antediluvian news sources compete with that?

Again, agreed. If you live in a small enough area, where there are few if any “degrees of separation” from you and those in charge, your informal network has much more resilient information than the bi-weekly newspaper does. Not that it’s not fun to read the obituaries.

He points out the new ways one has of interacting with the know-it-alls in town:

It is comforting to know something those fellows in the double-breasteds don’t know — especially when opinionated souls confidently speak bias as if it were fact. However, now they can no longer drown you in the warmed-over gruel that is being served up by the MSM. You have answers the MSM doesn’t know — or doesn’t want to know. When the willfully blind choose not to believe your point of view, you have some facts and arguments to back them up. They may not believe you, but their relationship to their own source of information will become a little strained. And that’s enough.

The old rulers of the information game are only now beginning to catch on. They are sending their troops out to man their own blogs and spread the gospel according to MSM. Too late. Now we know who they are. They flail and splutter, but we are part of the new underground. We can stand by and observe, or even join in, as the cold wash of contrary opinion sweeps over them. I expect to hear them cry: “Oh my beautiful wickedness. It’s melting!”

I think the Old Guard, the Gatekeepers of Information, are terrified. You know this must be the case when you see their level of reactive fear. They can feel the edges of the river banks crumbling beneath their feet. They can see the river rising, but all the sand bags in the world can’t keep them from drowning in the waves of The New Information Age.

Somewhere, Gutenberg is cheering us on.

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The Failure of the Nazi Cudgel

Akademikerbund


This time last year the board of the Wiener Akademikerbund — the Academic Society of Vienna — was shut down by its parent organization for its independent thinking and political incorrectness.

The national Akademikerbund had no legal right to take such actions, and the Viennese free-thinkers fought back. After a long legal battle, they won their case.

Our Austrian correspondent AMT introduces two translated articles about the WAB’s victory:

A Victory for the Wiener Akademikerbund
by AMT

Regular Gates of Vienna readers will remember the Wiener Akademikerbund, a genuine think tank which in 2010 was lambasted by the ruling PC MC political elite in Austria for daring to think.

The reason for this outrage was a so-called position paper which included many different ideas, but it was the WAB’s ideas about freedom of speech and thought regarding the “Verbotsgesetz” that enraged the Austrian Akademikerbund and the ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party).

Within a matter of hours, the entire WAB board was relieved of its duties and board members Professor Müller — a survivor of Nazi terror — and Christian Zeitz were stripped of their ÖVP party membership. No one from the ÖVP — in a very EU, non-democratic fashion — ever asked for their opinions or explanations.

It was clear from the start that the actions taken by the Austrian Akademikerbund were illegal and against the by-laws: the Austrian Akademikerbund cannot legally interfere with the WAB.

And after one year of fighting for rehabilitation, WAB has emerged victorious.

Our thanks go out to JLH for his translations.

The first of two articles translated by JLH was written by Christian Zeitz, one of the principal victims of the national Akademikerbund’s purge. He has some choice words to say about the ÖVP:

The Tale of the “Evil Viennese Akademikerbund”

How the ÖVP is Trying to Divert Attention from its Incompetence

by Christian Zeitz

The dealings of the ÖVP with the Viennese Akademikerbund reflect the inner structure of the “people’s party.” For many years, the ÖVP has not known what to do with the numerous (offered exclusively unremunerated) analyses, concepts and strategy papers of the Viennese Akademikerbund. Out of caution, Schüssel (former chancellor) mostly did not react, Plassnik (pro-EU “Alliance of Civilizations” advocate, former foreign minister) had her office send form letters (“the EU is listening”), Khol (former parliament president, now member of board of ATIB, the Turkish government in action in Austria) stigmatized the Akademikerbund’s dispute with Islam as an expression of rightist radicalism. And Spindelegger (currrent vice chancellor and foreign minister) left the Akademikerbund because he did not want to put up with the EU-critical comments.

Anyone who knows the Viennese Akademikerbund knows that it is the home of identifiable causes, solid research, and values-based, clearly presented arguments — propositions that can and should be discussed; positions that do not fit in the prescribed mainstream, uncomfortable prognoses, which have proven to be all too accurate. Not even trace elements of “rightist extremist thought.” But the VP bigwigs have discovered that they can most easily suppress the capacity for criticism and thought with the ritual use of the “Nazi cudgel.” In a political culture in which “political correctness” is the prime virtue and unthinking preservation of power and the system is the best qualification for securing political survival, the unimaginative folklore about “rightist extremism” obviates the necessity of having to deal with political content.

The ÖVP has eliminated the necessity of thinking and talking about its political context in the most basic way — it no longer has a context: not academic, nor sectarian, nor civic, nor artistic, nor any other kind. It has condensed its official nomenclature to the point that it has been reduced to alternating dependencies on economic radicalism and a blind obedience to the EU.

It must be seen as tragic that the ÖVP has lost any vestige of problem-solving ability through prohibitions decreed on speech and discussion. For a long time now, their amateurish offerings in all political fields have strained the public’s tolerance. After educational policy had stultified for years under Gehrer, the army under Platter had been systematically dismantled, and family policy was pursued at best as an adjunct of economic interests, they are now limping aimlessly after the initiatives of their political opponents. Speaking of the economy: can anyone discern something like economic policy in the ÖVP, which was once so proud of its economic competence?

The lack of any problem-solving ability is so unforgivable, because over the years the ÖVP would have administered heavily staffed bureaucratic operations and millions in ministerial budgets and other resources, so they could have produced serious studies in all problem areas, undisturbed and beyond any campaign uproar, specifying truths, types of action and their consequences and, finally, developing comprehensive concepts and presenting them to the public for a decision. This is especially true of the sensitive subject area which is decisive in the to-be-or-not-to-be future of our culture — immigration/integration/Islam. No “right extremist” or “populist” has ever prevented the ÖVP from demonstrating qualities that go beyond the stereotypical repetition that immigrants should learn German. The fact is that the ÖVP vigorously supported the clichés of “xenophobia,” “Islamophobia,” as well as “enrichment” and “diversity” for so long that in the end not even the slightest room was left for a factual, unemotional discussion on the topic. The responsible ÖVP ministers have not even managed a more objective development of the data bases. Still worse, no one in the ÖVP has ever given even a qualified answer to the relevant questions: Who should be allowed to come to Austria and who should not? What problems are solved by immigration and what problems arise because of it? What is the net economic effect of immigration — who enjoys the benefits and who bears the costs? How is it determined whether Austrians are prepared to share their well-being, while allegedly certain problems are solved that way, and other problems occur?

Attempting to camouflage their lack of answers by insulting the Viennese Akademikerbund as “swamp rats” or the political opponents as “rightist populists” does not disguise the fact that, compared to the leadership conferences of various ÖVP committees, so many “street-corner” discussions take on a virtually academic level.

The hope that practical competence will return to the ÖVP is hard to support. That is especially true of integration policy. Sebastian Kurz may be raring to go (one hopes, at his age…). But his appointment as state secretary for integration questions (probably the most difficult of all governmental offices) shows not only the miniscule reach of ÖVP personnel, but also the level of irresponsibility with which the ÖVP head will use up a youngster just to send a “signal” of strong pleasure in politics.

The ÖVP has been beyond reform for a long time. And sooner or later, it will go the way of Italy’s Democrazia Cristiana.

In future, the Viennese Akademikerbund will concern itself even more with solving the basic future questions of our society and in the process seek a refined, equidistant dialogue with all democratic forces in Austria.

Below is an article from last week’s Die Presse reporting on the resolution of the controversy over WAB. Many thanks to JLH for the translation:

Uproar Over Prohibitive Law: Organization of Academics Splits

by Martin Fritzl
May 4, 2011

The Viennese regional group of the organization closely allied with the ÖVP is becoming independent. The federal organization retracts the expulsion of leading members. Schnider confirms the Akademikerbund’s differences in political direction.

Vienna. The disagreements within the ÖVP-related organization, the Akademikerbund, have reached a mutually agreed solution: the national organization has retracted the expulsion of leading heads of the Viennese Akademikerbund. Simultaneously, the regional organization is separating from the national and is becoming independent.

Last year, the Viennese Akademikerbund caused an uproar with a “position paper.”
It contained the demand for rescinding the “prohibition law,” a “fundamental correction” of the time limits on abortion, a cancellation of the sex discrimination law and a general end to immigration. A woman’s place is “at the stove.”

Positions with which the Volkspartei could not make any friends in the run-up to the municipal elections and therefore expelled from the party the head of the Akademikerbund, Josef M. Müller and board member Christian Zeitz — former regional secretary of the ÖVP. The Austrian Akademikerbund, led at that time by Franz Fiedler, former president of the auditors’ court, struggled with the consequences. Because the regional organizations are legally autonomous groups, an intervention in the local by the national is legally impossible. Nonetheless, the attempt was made: The entire Viennese leadership was removed, and Müller and Zeitz expelled from the organization.

Resolution without a War of the Roses

The Viennese called for arbitration and eventually prevailed. The new president of the Akademikerbund — Andreas Schnider, former regional secretary of the Styrian ÖVP — realized that the expulsions were contrary to statute, and therefore tried for a solution “without a War of the Roses.”

In his explanation, he decided that the removal from office as well as the expulsions were “contrary to statute” and also, absent authority, substantially “contrary to law.” He publicly regrets that the Viennese functionaries had, through accusations and “unjust expulsion,” sustained considerable injury to their public reputation.

By contrast, the Viennese organization as a whole leaves the Austrian Akademikerbund. Zeitz bases this on different concepts: while the national organization has a strong, close relationship to the ÖVP and wishes to establish itself as an allied organization, the Viennese branch want to keep equidistant from all parties. Even before last year’s conflict, there was disagreement with many of the party’s positions. Since then, the relationship has deteriorated further. Thus, Zeitz called the ÖVP unelectable in the Vienna elections. In the future, the Viennese Akademikerbund will concentrate on activities with themes like Islam, family policy and financial policy.

No Regional Branch in Vienna

Schnider confirms the differences in political direction. He intends to establish the Akademikerbund more strongly as an ÖVP ally and introduce expertise in areas like education policy. For now, the organization has no Viennese section. Schnider says he would be happy if one formed.

The Intrusion of Sharia into American Justice, Part 2

Constitution Shahada


I wrote the other night about the release of a ground-breaking report by the Center for Security Policy on the application of sharia law in American jurisprudence (see “Shariah Law and American State Courts” and the paper itself, Shariah Law and American State Courts: An Assessment of State Appellate Court Cases [pdf]).

Because the document itself is more than 600 pages long, I’ll undertake a series of posts to highlight some of the more important parts of the report for our readers. Tonight’s excerpts are from the “Background” section that introduces the paper.

Most Americans would probably be surprised to discover how widespread the application of Islamic law is in this country. Yet none of this is a secret. American Muslims are not hiding their efforts to impose sharia — they are quite open about what they are doing. The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA) is up-front in its acknowledgement that the sharia it intends to implement is “another system of law outside the U.S. Constitutional framework.”

We often talk about “stealth jihad”, but there is no “stealth sharia” — what we see is “in-your-face-sharia”. All you have to do is turn off the MSM, take off the blinders, and look around you.

When you read these excerpts, you’ll notice that the AMJA instructs its members to place their allegiance to Islamic law above any allegiance to the United States and its Constitution.

You’ll see that Muslims who undertake jury duty are required not to render any judgment that violates sharia.

American Muslims are plainly instructed to co-operate with our political and legal institutions only to the extent that those institutions do not require them to violate Islamic law.

If we lived in a sane country, these writings and the organizations that sponsor them would be considered seditious. Those who wrote them would be held accountable. Any lawyers adhering to them would be disbarred and prosecuted.

But we live in a degraded times. Not only do such actions go unpunished, they are even celebrated, funded, and promoted by our own government.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *


Muslims would have us believe that this is all about family law: “This is just a family affair. Nothing to see here. Nothing to bother yourself about. Just a few private matters…” That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

But “family” is actually a proxy term for the rights of women and girls, and for the rights of the individual. Women and girls are denied their rights under sharia, and under Islamic law the individual does not have the same rights that are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

So this isn’t really about families at all. The Muslim family is just the beginning: this is about undermining the legitimacy of the United States Constitution.

Bear all this in mind when you read the excerpts below, from pages 19 through 28 of Shariah Law and American State Courts: An Assessment of State Appellate Court Cases [pdf, footnotes omitted from these excerpts]:

In addition to the legal and academic literature on Shariah law in the U.S., a study of Islamic law in the U.S. was conducted by Emory Law School in 1999, which resulted in numerous country reports focusing particularly on issues of reform and personal status of women under the Shariah. This study, “No Altars: A Survey of Islamic Family Law in the United States,” includes a section on conflicts between Shariah and U.S. laws, including conflicts in the areas of polygamy, marriage to non-Muslims, forced marriages, and spousal abuse. The authors’ observations from twelve years ago apply even more today: “Some Muslims are proactively interested in ways to legitimately opt out of United States legal norms that potentially conflict with their Islamic preferences.” The purpose of the Emory Law School project on Islamic Family Law (IFL) is described at the website: “The first objective of this Project is to verify and document the scope and manner of the application of IFL [Islamic Family Law] around the world, including Muslim communities living within predominantly non-Muslim countries.”

Also of note, in a non-academic but still influential article published in 1993 originally in the print edition of The American Muslim by the American Muslim Council Deputy Director Issa Smith, “Native American Courts: Precedent for an Islamic arbitral system,” the author argued for a number of milestones that have since been achieved. These milestone include the creation of Muslim Bar Associations, and National Muslim Law Students Association, and the various organizations dedicated to the study of, promotion of, or enforcement of Shariah law in the U.S., which are listed in part later in this study:

Although the Muslim community in North America is vastly different from the Indian community, I feel that in developing a plan for the implementation of Muslim family law, we can in some ways imitate the paradigm of the tribal court system and its supporting network. In particular, I recommend that as a first step, supporting organizations dealing with Islamic family law be established immediately. A professional association of Muslims in the law field (of whatever specialty) is a must. A law school students’ support group should be formed, and Muslim youth should be encouraged to enter this field.

A second step would be to establish institutes in the U.S. which can supplement legal education with courses in Islamic family law. At the same time, pressure should be put on law schools to include courses in Shariah taught by Muslims. An idea suggested in several quarters and being developed by the American Muslim Council, is the moot court where students and legal experts can act out Muslim family court scenarios…

The process of implementing Muslim family law will not be accomplished overnight. Changes of their type take place very slowly in American society, and our community is far from being prepared for this tak [sic]. I commend the continental council of Masajid for organizing this conference, and bringing together so many workers and thinkers. I pray to Allah the real decisions are made here that can be implemented by those ready to work. However, I strongly urge that consideration be given to political realities and the sensitivities of the American public. Such a radical change in American law — allowing Muslims to take control over their family law issues — must be initiated from the indigenous Muslim community here in the United States. To have it seem that this initiative is originating from overseas or from organizations financed overseas, would create a very negative impression that would likely destroy this effort. [emphasis added]

United States-Based Muslim and Non-Muslim Institutions Supporting Shariah Law

United States universities and colleges are increasingly offering courses and specializations In Shariah law, including business schools, law schools and general courses. The academic study of all kinds of comparative law including Shariah is worthwhile; but in many cases, these courses may not provide full information on the conflicts between Shariah and Western legal traditions and values. In many cases, particularly for courses in Islamic Finance, they focus on the technical and operational aspects of the topic, without ever discussing the actual nature of authoritative Shariah law as understood and documented both here and abroad. This list does not include Muslim Bar Associations in many cities and states, the Muslim Lawyers Association, or the National Muslim Law Students Association. These groups are identified here to show the intent and extent of institutionalized study of Shariah law, as well as promotion and enforcement of Shariah law, in the U.S.

  • Shariah Scholars Association of North America (SSANA)
  • International Society for Islamic Legal Studies
  • Islamic Law Students Association
  • Islamic Law Section, The Association of American Law Schools
  • Karamah — Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights
  • Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School
  • Cordoba University
  • North American Fiqh Council
  • North American Imams Federation
  • Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America

The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America

The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA) is a U.S.-based organization committed to the establishment of Shariah law, especially for personal status and family law. Their extensive boards (123 members combined) include local Imams and Shariah authorities across America, as well as Shariah authorities from other countries. The entire AMJA membership, as listed at their website, is provided with titles when given as Appendix C.

AMJA is highly rooted in local American communities, and associated with international and U.S. Shariah authorities and Shariah institutions, as well as a prolific center at the website for fatwas on many topics. AMJA also holds conferences and publishes proceedings. They appear to be an active organization with significant reach and influence.

If such an organization promotes Shariah law in the United States, and they have representatives in influential positions across the country, their statements of intent are important in understanding the possible threat of Shariah law intruding into the U.S. legal system. For example, the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America posted at their website an October 2010 article by M. Ali Sadiqi, “Islamic Dispute Resolution in the Shade of the American Court House.” This article’s conclusions on the conflict between public policy and Shariah suggest that a law such as the American Laws for American Courts Act (ALAC) is needed to preserve the intent of stated public policy in enforcement decisions. Sadiqi addresses the Constitutional barrier that Shariah-adherent Muslims must hurdle, in obtaining enforcement of at least some Islamic arbitration decisions in America:

Private citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, can enforce agreements they have made between and amongst each other by filing a case in the appropriate court seeking various remedies. The challenge for Muslims seeking resolution under binding Islamic Arbitration is to demonstrate to the court that it has the legal authority to enforce the Arbitration Award, given the fact that it is based on another system of law outside the U.S. Constitutional framework. [emphasis added]

Sadiqi states that one of the purposes of his article is to “look at some concrete methods for ensuring enforceability of Islamic Arbitration Awards in American courts… What this means is that the state, including any court, has the duty to enforce any contract made between consenting parties, unless there is some compelling state interest in not doing so.” He goes on to give an example of when an Islamic arbitration could not be enforced by the state courts:

However, there is at least one roadblock facing Islamic Arbitration — determinations of inarbitrability based on public policy. For example, under Islamic inheritance law, the Fara’id, a wife is entitle [sic] to a specified share of one quarter of the tarik or estate if there are no children; if there are children, then she is entitled to one eighth. Under American law, most states protect the rights of a spouse to a portion of his or her spouse’s estate through “elective share” laws. Such laws allow a spouse to elect whether to take the share given them in a will or to take the statutorial share, usually 1/3 of the estate. Thus, it is quite possible that an arbitral award of 1/8 of the tarik could be overturned if the wife does not specifically agree to this amount and waive her statutory elective share.

Issues of child custody and visitation also invoke the public policy scrutiny of the courts. American courts use a “best interest of the child” standard” in custody and visitation determinations.” They will be unlikely to allow agreements to stand without some form of judicial review.

AMJA supports compliance with existing laws of the host country only when Muslims have no choice, a doctrinal Shariah position. However, in Muslim-majority countries — or where Shariah adherents can dominate secular legal systems — they advocate the supremacy of Shariah law over secular law. A number of statements below make clear these distinctions, drawn by AMJA authorities, between Shariah doctrine and secular, democratic principles. Emphasis has been added to the original articles:

AMJA: From “About Political Plurality in Islamic country” by Dr.Salah Al-Sawy

Ninth: As for the extent of legality of political plurality before establishing the Islamic State, we see it is permissible to have plurality that is capable of co-ordination, completeness, common work and co-operation with others to set up Islam, and at the same time, we see it is impermissible to have plurality that rejects co-operation, the closed plurality that is built upon ideologies and concepts, because they are a hindrance to the way of enabling for fixation…

Tenth: There is no problem in making alliances with moderate secular trends in the stage of pursuance of establishing the Islamic State, on condition that the subject of alliance is legal, and that it must not comprise any bindings that would harm the message of the religion, or that would tie the hands of the people who are involved in the Da`wa works and prevent them from spreading the truth and from marching towards the objective of establishing the Islamic State…

As for making alliances with the secular trends for eliminating the prevailing falsehoods, and then taking the matter afterwards to the test of the will of the majority, we see it is permissible to have what we mostly think it comprises the ability of power to establishing the Islamic State, or at least, reducing the degree of prevailing oppression and paving the convenient way for the Da`wa activities to prosper and flourish, and we prevent alliances in which we mostly think would not achieve any of these objectives for the Islamic State…

AMJA: A recent fatwa from AMJA on democracy

But democracy gives free reign to the authority of the Ummah, and puts no ceiling on it. The law is the expression of its will, and if the law says it, the conscience must be silent! A constitutionalist even said: “We have departed from the divine right to rule for kings, and replaced it with the divine right to rule for parliaments!” The shari’a, on the other hand, differentiates between the source of the legal system and the source of the political authority. The source of the legal system is the shari’a, while the source of the political authority is the Ummah. Meanwhile democracy makes the Ummah the source of both.

AMJA: Judiciary work outside the land of Islam

AMJA members discussed the permissibility of resorting to the judiciary system outside of the land of Islam. In this connection, AMJA asserts that in principle, it is incumbent upon all Muslims to resort to Islamic law for arbitration inside and outside the land of Islam. Indeed, resorting to Islamic law for arbitration whenever it is within one’s ability to do so is what distinguishes a believer from a hypocrite.

However, it is permissible to resort to a man-made judiciary system in a land that is not ruled by Islamic law if it becomes the only way for someone to retrieve one’s legitimate right or alleviate a grievance — provided one does not exceed what rightfully belongs to him under the Islamic law. Therefore, one should consult with the scholars first to know precisely what is due for him in that specific dispute under Islamic law.

Furthermore, since attorneys are representative of their clients, it is permissible to practice law within the scope of permissible, just, and legitimate cases that are filed to demand a right or alleviate a grievance. Similarly, it is permissible to study, teach, and understand man-made laws for the purpose of realizing the superiority of the Islamic laws, or practicing law in an environment that does not recognize the sovereignty of the Islamic law, intending to defend the oppressed people and retrieve their rights. This is, however, contingent upon the possession of enough Islamic knowledge, in order to avoid becoming an unwitting participant in sinful actions and transgressions.

AMJA members agreed that, in principle, it is prohibited for someone to assume a judiciary position under an authority that does not rule by Islamic law unless it becomes the only way to alleviate a great harm that is threatening the main body of Muslims. This is, again, conditional upon possessing knowledge about Islamic law, knowing rules and regulations of the Islamic judiciary system in Islam, and choosing a branch of practice as close in specialty as possible to the rules and regulations of Islamic law. In addition, one should judge between people according to Islamic law as much as one can. Furthermore, while in this position, one should maintain displeasure in his heart to the man-made laws. Needless to say, this ruling is an exception that is governed by the aforementioned provisions and restricted to necessity only.

AMJA further clarified that it is permissible for Muslims to serve as members in a jury proceeding, with the stipulation that their opinions be in compliance with Islamic law and with the intention to establish justice for all.

AMJA: On Marriage to gain permanent residency

d) The case of the nominal marriage for the purpose of getting permanent residency

The nominal marriage is the marriage contract in which the parties involved do not intend the reality of marriage and have no regard for its requirements and prerequisites. Rather, it is only used as a means to gain certain benefits. This type of contract is prohibited for lack of intention to consummate it, for the violation of the objectives for which marriage was legislated, and for the devising of prerequisites that are contrary to the objective of marriage.

However, the outward legality of this contract is dependent on how verifiable the nominal nature of this contract is before the court. If it is incontestable, then the contract is invalid, but if it is not, then the contract is considered valid, provided that all the prerequisites of marriage are fulfilled and no preventive reason existed.

AMJA: Working with the media:

E.   It is not permissible to publish any information — even if it is true or permission has been granted — if doing so would result in harm as defined by Shari’ah.
F.   Information must be broadcast via lawful means (in accordance with Shari’ah) and prohibited means must be avoided.
G.   Any work with institutions known to be enemies of Islam must absolutely be avoided if such work would involve supporting their injustice and aggression.
H.   Any work with institutions whose main focus is on anything prohibited in Shari’ah must be absolutely avoided, such as magazines or channels specialized in spreading sin and vice.

AMJA: Working in Courts of Law

VIII: Working in courts of law and the various affiliated branches outside the lands of Islam

A.   Allah sent His Messengers and revealed His Books for people to stand forth with justice. The way to do this is to judge by His Laws, to stand up for pure justice and to renounce all the vain desires and human arrangements that go against it. Therefore, it is not lawful to seek judgment from man-made courts of law, unless there is a complete lack of Islamic alternatives which would have the power to restore people’s rights and eliminate injustice, and as long as one’s demands before the court are lawful and one does not make anything lawful unless it agrees with Shari’ah. If judgment is pronounced in a person’s favor, without due right, he/she must not take it, because a judge’s verdict does not make the prohibited lawful, nor the lawful prohibited; the judge’s role is merely to reveal, not to create.
B.   It is incumbent upon Muslim communities to try to solve their disputes by compromising within the limits of Shari’ah judgment and by seeking out ways that are legal in their countries of residence which would enable them to judge by Islamic Law, especially in terms of personal status laws.
C.   Working in the field of legal representation is lawful if the attorney is convinced of the justice and Islamic legitimacy of what he is being asked to represent.

AMJA: On conflicts between national allegiance, and allegiance to Shariah

Decisions Regarding Contemporary Aqeedah Challenges The Debated Relationship between Religious Loyalty and Nationalistic Affiliation

  • There is no harm in citizenship if it is taken as means of organizing the affairs of the residents outside the lands of Islam and establishing da’wah and founding their institutions. This is so long as its (the citizenship’s) possessor keeps his loyalty to his creed and nation (i.e. Islam and the Muslims), fulfills his covenant with Allaah and His messenger, and he and his family are secure of tribulation in their religion.
  • The legal framework that governs the relationship with the hosting nations outside of the lands of Islam is the contract of security. This is what is stipulated in the official residency documents. Of its implications is the abidance by the laws and local regulations as long as it doesn’t drive one to commit a sin or abandon an obligation. Fulfilling this contract is a necessity by sharee’ah and for the sake of da’wah. Upon conflict (of one’s legal vs. Islamic obligation), reservation (from participating in the Islamically impermissible) is to be made in the item that conflicts, and all else remains on the default of abidance.

We recommend, to understand AMJA’s doctrinal imperative to impose Shariah in the U.S., further reading of additional fatwa, conference proceedings and articles at the AMJA website, and also at the websites of the other organizations listed above.

We reaffirm our goal from this paper’s introduction: with the publication of this study and subsequent studies now in preparation, our objective is to encourage an informed, serious and civil public debate and engagement with the issue of Shariah law in the United States of America. This public debate is more urgent than ever before, as organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and their salafist coalition partners state openly their intent to impose the Shariah State and Shariah law as dominant across all Muslim majority countries.

Fjordman: A Brief History of Pasta

Vlad Tepes’ blog is finally back in service. In honor of the occasion, Fjordman’s latest essay on the history of pasta has been published there. Some excerpts are below:

In recent weeks I’ve been on two major travels, one to Beijing, China, and another to northern Italy. I couldn’t really afford to go, but then I got some money from the CIA and the Mossad for my Islamophobic essays. I also remembered that I had not cashed in on my annual white privilege bonus for a few years. Once I had done that, I could go for a holiday, anyway.

I will describe my impressions from these travels in later essays, but will start with reflecting on the history of pasta. I talked to one Italian man who believed that pasta was invented by the Arabs, whereas another frequent claim is that it was invented by the Chinese. I am personally skeptical of both these claims. To quote food historian Linda Civitello in Cuisine and Culture:

“For hundreds of years, it was accepted ‘fact’ that Marco Polo discovered noodles in China and brought them back to Europe. Now, in his masterwork, A Mediterranean Feast, food historian Clifford Wright states flatly that there is no truth to the story of Polo and pasta. Wright unravels the tangled strands of the origin of pasta and takes it down to its basic ingredient: hard semolina or durum (Latin for ‘hard’) wheat. This makes pasta different from bread, which is made from soft wheat. The Chinese did not have durum wheat. Wright places the origins of ‘true macaroni’ — pasta made from durum wheat and dried, which gives it a long shelf life — ‘at the juncture of medieval Sicilian, Italian and Arab cultures.’”

Marco Polo (1254-1324) was the son of a merchant from Venice in northern Italy who had good contacts in the East. The book Il Milione (“The Million”), describing his alleged travels in Asia in the late thirteenth century, became hugely popular in the Renaissance period and inspired other European travelers in their search for Asia, among them Christopher Columbus. Polo supposedly spent years in Mongol-ruled China but never mentions tea, nor the Great Wall or the practice of foot binding, which crippled millions of Chinese women well into the twentieth century. It is quite possible that he was a well-traveled man for his time, but scholars are still arguing about whether he really did all of the things he claimed to have done.

Read the rest at Vlad’s place.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/18/2011

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/18/2011Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund who was arrested several days ago at the airport in New York for sodomizing a hotel maid, has resigned his post at the IMF. The Greeks are very dismayed at Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s difficulties, since they regard him as someone who understands the Greek situation and is willing to help the country find a way out of its debt crisis.

Speaking of the Greek debt crisis: German Chancellor Angela Merkel chastised the southern Europeans, particularly the Greeks, for their lax work habits and their tendency to retire early. She says those characteristics have contributed to the current crisis, which the hard-working German taxpayer will be forced to pay for.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to AC, C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, KGS, Nilk, RE, TV, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Taking Care of Our Own

L'Arc de Triomphe

2011 Spring Quarterly Fundraiser, Day 4

As regular readers know, we depend on Vlad Tepes for his invaluable video services, so it’s only fair he should be able to depend on us. Dymphna and I came to the independent conclusion that we needed to help Vlad pay at least a small part of the costs of his new website service. That’s why we decided to deliver a tenth of your generous donations to him this quarter.

Tip jarHe’s not the only one we’d like to help. Despite the modest amounts that come through our hands, we do what we can to assist other colleagues. When money is not available, I do my best to deliver in-kind services: articles, linkage, digital images, referrals, etc. We’re all in this together.

I hope to see the day when Gates of Vienna can actually pay transcribers, translators, and contributors. If we manage to acquire the expertise to develop a reasonable business model — and the increased traffic to support it — we might be able to reward some of the dedicated people who make this blog possible. We wouldn’t be able to pay them what they’re worth, of course — not even Bill Gates has that much money — but it would be gratifying to provide some form of compensation for their contributions to this joint effort.

None of that is possible right now. For the time being we’re going to have to scrape by as we have been for the last few years. Just keeping this blog open is task enough for the moment.

The wolf at the doorBut I never thought we’d come this far. When we started these periodic fundraisers a few years ago, it was always on a quarter-by-quarter basis. It never seemed possible that we could make it through the next round — surely the wolf could only be kept from the door for a little while longer, and then reality would intrude. Soon enough I’d be down there at Food Lion or McDonald’s, filling out the employment forms and trying on my new corporate uniform.

Surprise! Despite the bad economy, despite all the signs of impending doom, despite the Long-Legged Mack Daddy, every quarter our readers have decided that I should stay in this line of work for a little while longer.

So who knows where we might end up?

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

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Today’s donors hail from the following locations:

Stateside:

California, Colorado, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, and Tennessee

Near Abroad:

Canada

Far Abroad:

Australia, Belgium, Denmark, India, Spain, and the UK

Many thanks to each and every one of you. You will be hearing from they official thank-you note writer (i.e. Dymphna) in due course.



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