Today in the Boston Herald was a rather interesting story. It seems that a group that is planning on building a $22 million-dollar mosque in Boston somehow managed to get the land from the city for less than half the fair-market value.
The Islamic Society of Boston forked over $175,000 and undisclosed “in-kind benefits” to the Roxbury Community College for a 1.9 acres of prime Boston real estate, appraised for over $400,000. A city councilor is calling for investigating. Meanwhile, a local Islamic scholar who fled Egypt for his moderate views is denouncing the Islamic Society for alleged ties to radical Islam.
This attention to Islam so close to home reminded me of a lot of things that I find disturbing, frightening, and disgusting about Islamism, but I’m going to focus on just on aspect of it.
Shari’ah law is the law derived from the Koran, and what the Islamists wish to impose on the world. (This comes after Shari’ah’s amazing success in Afghanistan.) It is very harsh; it is the source of the “cut off the hands of thieves” principle of Islamic law that is often bandied about.
But one aspect of Shari’ah law really bothered me, and that was it’s treatment of rape. According to this article I found, the penalty for a man who commits rape is 80 lashes if the woman is unmarried. If she is married, the penalty is increased to death, for he will have committed adultery as well.
That’s all well and good, on the surface. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Under Shar’iah law, in order for a man to be convicted of rape, there must be four witnesses to buttress her accusation. Further, they must be male — women have no standing under Shar’iah law. If the woman makes the accusation and the man is acquitted, the woman is given 80 lashes for slander and another 100 lashes for “immoral behavior.” If she is married, it’s the death penalty again.
This is where I dig out my usual rhetorical technique of taking a set of conditions and extrapolating them to ridiculous (but still remotely plausible) extremes to show just how ridiculous (and, in this case, obscene) they are. Suppose I am walking down the street with two friends and we see a man raping a woman in an alley. My friends and I would say “there are three of us, and one of him. We should stop him!” and then we would act.
(To be perfectly honest, knowing myself and my friends, we wouldn’t stop to think at all, but bear with me — I’m making a point here.)
But let’s change one little detail above. Let’s presume that I and my friends are Muslim, and we subscribe to Shar’iah law. Under the same circumstances, my friends and I would be obligated to consider the following possibilities:
“It appears that the man is attempting to rape the woman, but we must not jump to conclusions. Perhaps the woman is his wife, and he is simply asserting his husbandly rights. Perhaps she has been disobedient, and he is doing this to chastise her. Perhaps she is his slave, and he is using his property rights. Or perhaps she is an unbeliever, and therefore she has no rights at all to refuse a Muslim man. But on the chance she is Muslim, and not his wife, and he is indeed raping her, we should go and find a fourth man to watch so we may testify against him should she press charges.”
That’s why I could never be a Muslim. I could never belong to a society that can see something as brutal, as ugly, as inhuman as a man raping a woman and immediately think of several perfectly legal justifications for the act.
And that’s one of the things we’re fighting against in this war on terror, this war on Islamism. We’re fighting against a culture and a way of life that thinks of women as property, as chattel, as things that can be treated however men want.
This isn’t just dehumanizing to women, it dehumanizes the men as well. It twists and warps them, deprives them of the ability to have normal relations with women, and gives them a huge (but completely unfounded) sense of pride and entitlement and privilege. And they will fight to preserve this when it is threatened.
This is what we’re fighting in Iraq. It’s what we dismantled in Afghanistan. It’s what was behind the 9/11 attacks. And it’s what we need to continue to fight, because they aren’t about to give up until they achieve their stated goal of imposing Shar’iah law on the whole world. After all, that is what their God has commanded.
J.
(Author’s note: I’m not entirely happy with the title and the concluding paragraphs of this piece, but I promised someone it would go up tonight. If you find them a bit weak, you’re not alone.)
Update: The Boston Herald isn’t letting this story go. Here, the Anti-Defamation League is calling for a further investigation into certain inflammatory statements by and ties between Mosque backers and terrorist groups. And here, it turns out that one of thehigher-ranking officials of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (the body that authorized the sale) is also a key backer and big fundraiser for the proposed Mosque. Curiouser and curiouser…
Update 2: And FINALLY the Boston Glob (owned by the New York Times) is chiming in. They’re reporting on the ADL allegations, but completely missing the sweetheart deal the Mosque backers got on the land, as well as a key backer’s possible conflict of interest. Sadly, how typical.
“extrapolating them to ridiculous (but still remotely plausible) extremes”
Jay, I think you forgot to include your ridiculously extreme example.
I know you tried, but the competition is tough. How about that story from Iran they hung a schoolgirl from a crane because she was insolent in a courtroom and removed her headscarf.
There’s the howler from Saudi Arabia where a girls’ school caught on fire, and the morality police would not let the girls out of the building, lest they caused the men to get boners. The girls died, but the guys didn’t have to take cold showers because they were looking at bunch of 10-year old girls.
There have been some very recent cases similar to your example, where the woman is sentenced to death, or even to rape by the family of the original perp.
John Kerry and John Edwards do have a plan to stop these atrocities. They keep talking about it all the time — No Blood For Oil, Bring our boys home, The wrong war…, Bush lied – people died.
Kerry has been quite consistent about his plans. If Kerry becomes president, the U.S. will survive. It is the rest of the world, too weak to defend itself, that I fear for.
I do love the way Kerry’s surrogates are able to distill the highly decorated Vietnam Vet’s message into to a simple slogan that will fit on a poster — “Bush=Hitler”.
Personally, I prefer “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It has quite a ring to it, doesn’t it? As does, “4 more years!”
My grandfather, a Syrian, escaped from the Muslim extremists (remember the Mahdi) and came to America 100 years ago. He knew that there had to be a better way to live and America gave him that better way to live. He’d be shaking his head today at some of the rhetoric he’d hear coming from the Democrat Party. To them, the true evil is George W. Bush, not the Islamofascists or their supporters and cheerleaders. Did Michael Moore make a film about the injustices and atrocities committed by Islamists? Is Bruce Springsteen touring the country to raise money for the newly freed people of Iraq and Afghanistan? Is NOW staging protests in the name of freedom for Muslim women? Is The Reverend Jesse Jackson or Rev. Al “The Blimp from Brooklyn” Sharpton going on national TV to bring attention to the slaying of thousands and thousands of people in the Middle East and Northern Africa?
Nope. To them the true evil in the world is our Commander-in-Chief. It’s often said, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Perhaps they should also say, “The enemy of my friend is my enemy.” GWB is my friend.
This is partly the reason the left are so frustrating with regards to the WoT, and the ensuing cultural battle.
Some could argue that the extremist of Islam are on a par with the Christian Right. It’s the women, gays, and probably the pro choicers, groups the left holds dear to it’s heart, who have the most to lose from Islam. Even the most extreme views on the Christian Right are nothing compared to life under Sharia Law.
The left seems totally blinkered on such issues, opting instead to offer protectionism for any group regarded as the underdog (KKK excepted). While they balk at any element of Christianity in society, they would move heaven and earth to ensure that any promotion of diverse alternatives, either religion, sexuality or race, be pushed into the face of society or those attending educational institutions. e.g. no, you can’t have a Christmas Tree, but lets all fast for Ramadan, and have a Kwanza party.
This is why I consider the Bush Doctrine vital. We can’t stop terrorism, we can’t be on the defence all the time. There is no amount of intelligence work that will stop Ahmed from loading up his car with Propane tanks, and driving it into a building, or blowing it up in rush hour.
It starts at the root, which is the Middle East, and when you make changes there, there isn’t so much incentive to go kill the great satan when you have a good job, food on the table for you and your family, and no fear that they aren’t going to get hauled off the next day. When they no longer have ills in their lives, the Mullahs can no longer distract the populace by saying ‘See what the Great Satan has done to you and yours’.
It’s not going to be easy, and it won’t go perfectly, but it must be done. The left may sit back and pour scorn and derision on every mistake and fail to see every success, but at the end of the day, it’s a matter of seeing the bigger picture, and that I do not believe Kerry and the Democrats see that picture.
Sorry, I may have gone off topic here.
Jim, further to your post, someone else had previously mentioned that all these artists ‘support the troops’, and yet how come Springsteen and the gang haven’t done a USO Tour for the troops?
DG – good points. My father who served on a minesweeper in the Pacific in WWII puts it succinctly. ‘These terrorists in the middle east want nothing more than to kill you and I.’
He’s right. To those threatened by Christianity in the US, if the Christians do not evangelize you, they are not going to turn around and slit your throat (the US today is not the Church of the middle ages. Do you see Billy Graham endorsing that sort of activity? No.) Islam is nothing more than killing the infidels; it is not a religion of peace as some moderates would profess. Where has the outrage over the beheadings been from the so-called moderates in the US Muslim community? Why have they not condemned the activities of those Islamofascists who killed children in Beslan? Because they cannot bring themselves to do so…. they cannot betray themselves or their belief system.
EXcellent piece of work, J. We know there is more to it than this but this is a perfect example of the vileness nature of these people. I certainly hope your message gets passed on because it is really important for people to know these things. How can we bring attention to what Kevin calls “the target audience?” It has to be done because these people should not be allowed free in any society and certainly not here in Boston – that is a very scary thought. Europe says they hate Americans but I hate these Muslims and this so called religion of peace and love that is nothing but. I’m just sorry to say that most of our country is ignorant of these facts by Islam and that frightens me. It also should frighten everyone.
Maybe what we all should do is collect articles like this and any other stories that show the brutality of this so called “religion” and send them to all our local newspapers even if it’s just a letter to the editor stating facts like this and maybe reach that target audience that does not read blogs.
This is why this election is very important. Bush knows the dangers of these people and as racist as that may seem, I do not want these people in our country, in our society, in our lives because it could cause some dangerous problems in our world and change our society altogether. With land like that and another ownership of property recently purchased (noted on NEIN), you know what they’ll be doing is training right out under our noses and end up destroying everything we have ever foughten for in this country of ours.
Very well done.
~Cindy
Pure and simple: under Islam, no one is to have FREE WILL, which is one of GOD’s gifts to us. If they are not the Luddite example of the Borg, what is?
Anyone notice that so far there have been no Liberals posting on this thread? Why do you think that is? I suspect it’s because they just don’t care unless it’s something that can be used to bash Bush or bash the USA. It goes to the core of what we’ve said: the Libs in the Democrat Party hate George W. Bush more than they hate the terrorists.
Let’s not jump to conclusions, Jim. I posted this pretty late last night, and it’s still kind of early. Perhaps the liberal readers, unlike me, actually have lives…
J.
What about the Islamic communitites right here in the US. I recognize that not all are to the extreme. I speak of one man in particular that I know through my daughter (19)
Her friend is the daughter born to a wealthy muslim father and an american woman (divorced now) She is the second oldest of 5 children. She considers herself american in all respects since she was born here. She does not practice the faith of her father. The other children do because to resist would almost certainly bring a heavy fist from the father. Her free will costs her dearly on a regular basis. The mother offers no safe haven because she too is afraid of the man who has held a knife to her own throat in the past. He has scarred her both physically and mentally. The boys in the family are allowed to punch and hit the mother and the sisters without fear of punishment becasue they are the superior gender and it is encouraged by the father.
This young girl I speak of is stiffled at every turn by her father and calls my daughter “devil child” because she is a bad influence on his daughter. He blames my daughter for his daughters free will. (how friggin moronic is that?)
He is now trying to arrange the marriage of this girl to a muslim man. She refuses and he shows his fist.
She is supposed to bow down to this man as her father and he demands that she do as she is told or he will “slit her throat” (I have heard this threat via phone when she has called for support because she has been forced to go to her fathers house for her weekly visits) Not being able to do anything except call the police is heartbreaking for me. I can’t go get her and I can’t keep her from going.
It goes on and on but my point here is that I agree it is why we fight this extremism. The value of the life of a woman should hold no less importance than that of a man. This young girl is not allowed to work, is not allowed to date, is not allowed to go anywhere except school and home. The one night she was allowed to spend time at my house the hourly phone calls to her home line had to be forwarded to my cell phone so that she could answer and confirm that she was home. PATHETIC…The story doesn’t end here but I have made my point. People need to take off the blinders and see these idiots for what they are.
~sigh~
Since, as a christian, I no longer have the right to my religion, thank you ACLU, I wonder what happens here when two desparate civilizations collide. When morality is taken out of the equation what are you left with? Anarchy? Socialism?
My point is this. Throughout history you’ve leveled the charge that more people have been killed in God’s name than any other. You sight the Crusades, the Inquisition and so on. Yet no one seems to ever site the total annihlation philosophy used by Mohammed. Islam worships the God of Mohammed; a false prophet. I worship the God of Moses.
The difference between the “holy wars” and the jihad of Islam is that Islam IS the war. It’s what they learn. It’s what they live and breathe. Christians killed in the name of God, through a church that sought redemption through conversion.
Jay has pointed out what I feel is only the tip of the iceberg. With Islam’s incredible financial resources and subsequent political power, they will own this country outright. Then what? We’ll all sit around and sing Kumbaya and drink cool-aid? They have no more right to force their religion on me anymore than I have to force mine on them.
Until we get past this PC crappola about what Islam is supposed to be and into the fact that it is a religion of war, we are doomed to our own failure.
Jay, a couple of things…
You’re factually wrong–but philosophically correct–in your assertion that Muslim women’s witnessing doesn’t count. It does, but only for 1/2. Eight women would be needed in the place of four men. Shari’ah law accords women–and non-Muslims–a half-vote in terms of witnessing. Your larger point, however, is taken.
Your example, however, is seriously flawed. Were you and two others (all assumed to be Muslim) to witness a rape, you would be sorta stupid to see it as a matter of criminal justice. Your first instincts would be to stop it and probably beat the crap out of the rapist, or worse.
Your first thoughts would probably not be on how the legal prosecution of the matter could be accomplished. I dare say you would act in precisely the same manner were you non-Muslim and the incident were taking place in Hoboken. Even if you were an attorney, I doubt that your first inclinations would be the litigation.
There are lots of bad interpretations of Islam out there. Many Muslims try to live by the “incontrovertable word of the Koran”. And that doesn’t work well because the Koran is an obscure document, parsed over several hundred years by people who had no better clue to what it “really” meant than you or I do. This tendency to read what one wants into a document is not exclusive to Muslims.
I don’t know what the deal is with the Boston mosque, but I’ll look into it. I do know that cities do offer cut-rate prices to non-profit establishments (and sometimes full-profit, e.g. K-Mart) if they perceive a social good to be derived from it. My city of Sarasota, FL, has a couple of similar issues on the social burner at the moment. One pertains to a mosque, the other to a synagogue.
I don’t think anyone questions it’s definitely a religion of war, Roundguy, for that’s pretty obvious – to us anyway – maybe not to those who only watch tv news and read newspapers but it has to be the absolute worst – whereas even clerics can’t figure it out. But one thing is sure, it is a religion of war and it will destroy the world if we let it. That just cannot happen. There’s also a building in Buffalo NY that you can check out – where they are probably going to train terrorists right in our own back yard. Whatever is going on in Boston, we should all make sure is never built or at least sold to a non-muslim with no ties whatsoever to that war religion.
~C
Debra,
She is old enough to be legally out of the house; let her come and live with you and get her out of that abusive family; no one should have to suffer that kind of indignity.
Good Luck,
~Cindy