Tag Archives: Islam

News

Muslim man proud of son for murdering his daughter after she married a Christian

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Leftist Pew Research: Should converts away from Islam be killed?
Leftist Pew Research: Should converts away from Islam be killed?

A friend sent me this article and it just made me so unhappy.

The article appeared in the Calgary Sun:

For two months, over the thunder of machines at the steel mill, the men taunted Mubeen Rajhu about his sister. Even now, they laugh at how easy it was to make him lose his temper.

Some people had seen Tasleem in their Lahore slum with a Christian man. She was 18, a good Muslim girl, out in public with a man. Even though the man had converted to Islam out of love for her, this couldn’t be allowed.

“Some guys got to know that his sister was having a relationship,” says Ali Raza, a co-worker at the mill. “They would say: ’Can’t you do anything? What is the matter with you? You are not a man.”’

Raza can barely contain a smile as he talks about the hours spent needling Rajhu.

“He used to tell us, ’If you don’t stop, I will kill myself. Stop!”’ Raza says.

He raises his voice to compete with the sounds of the coal-powered mill, and workers blackened by its dust gather to listen. They too smile. A few laugh at the memory of Rajhu’s outbursts.

“The guys here told him, ’It would be better to kill your sister. It is better than letting her have this relationship,”’ Raza says.

Rajhu told them he had bought a pistol, and one day in August he stopped coming to work.

Rajhu discovered that his sister had defied the family and married the Christian. For six days he paced. His rage grew. How could she?

He watched her laughing on the phone, ignoring their mother’s pleas to leave the man.

On the seventh day, he retrieved the pistol from where he had hidden it and walked up to his sister and with one bullet to the head, he killed her.

Killed her? He murdered a defenseless woman. This is the exact opposite of what a brother should do for a sister. Instead, he should use force to protect her from evil – not bring the evil himself.

But what was interesting was how everyone accepted it:

In the vast majority of cases, the “honour” killer is a man and the victim is a woman.

She is a sister who falls in love with a man not of her family’s choosing. She is a daughter who refuses to agree to an arranged marriage, sometimes to a man old enough to be her father. She is a wife who can no longer stay in an abusive marriage and divorces her husband.

He is a brother, like Rajhu, who cannot bear the taunts of other men brought up as he was, believing that women are subservient and must be kept in the shadows, their worth often measured by the number of sons they can produce. He is a neighbour, like Raza at the plant, who doesn’t think his friend did anything wrong in taking his sister’s life. He is a father, like Tasleem’s, who is angry about her killing not because she is dead, but because her death will reveal her “shame” to other members of the family and beyond.

The father says some terrible things about the daughter, and is completely oblivious to looking at things from her perspective.

In some places, it really is very difficult to be a Christian:

The man Tasleem married, Jehangir, fled the night she was killed. The gate to his home, barely a block from Tasleem’s, is padlocked. But the fallout from his love for Tasleem has engulfed the members of the small Christian community living in the area.

Earlier this month, just weeks after the killing, gunmen fired shots into their homes. No one was hurt, but no one has slept well since. In this majority Muslim country, Christians make up barely 5% of the population and in recent years have come under increasing attack by militants, who insist all non-Muslims are unbelievers. Yet Pakistan’s minorities, including Christians, are protected in the country’s constitution.

“We have been scared since the killing took place,” says a neighbour, Shahzia Masih, sitting in a small room decorated with pictures of Jesus and Mary. “There are just a few houses of Christians here, but we have nowhere else to go.”

I suppose that since I am tough on women choosing good men, someone might ask me what I would do if my sister married an atheist. Answer: I have a longstanding policy of always putting my relationships with Christians above family members who aren’t interested in Christianity. I naturally prefer to do things with people who don’t shush me when I want to be myself and speak about the beliefs that matter to me. I’m fine with people who let me be myself, family or non-family. I certainly don’t expect everyone to agree with me. All I ask is that if they want a relationship with me, that they not stifle me. I have atheists cousins that I play online games with, but they don’t shush me about my beliefs and moral views at all. My atheist aunt and uncle know that they can get me to do things if they let me talk about the things I care about. But they don’t have to agree with me, of course. Because they don’t believe what I believe. I like to say what I think, but I don’t want anyone to be scared into agreeing with me. I’m different from Islam and the secular left in that respect. You believe what you want, but let me believe what I want if you want me to be your friend. Surprising how many Muslims and progressives won’t take that deal.

I am pretty confident in Christianity as a worldview in the sense that I believe that if people put reason and evidence first, then they will arrive at Christianity. It doesn’t make any sense to try to coerce people into it… Jesus is the Son of God, and he had all the power in the world to coerce. He wasn’t willing to do it, not even to save his own life when he took on the form of a man in order to meet with his creatures and rescue them. That means something to me. You just have to read Philippians 2 to see that this unwillingness to use power, but to instead serve others, is at the core of Christian teaching.

Commentary

Correcting four myths about the history of the Crusades

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Crusader
Crusader

Here is an interesting article from First Principles Journal.

Intro:

The verdict seems unanimous. From presidential speeches to role-playing games, the crusades are depicted as a deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history. In many corners of the Western world today, this view is too commonplace and apparently obvious even to be challenged.

But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination.

The four myths:

  • Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.
  • Myth #2: Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich.
  • Myth #3: Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda; rather, they had ulterior, materialistic motives.
  • Myth #4: The crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians.

Here’s the most obvious thing you should know. The Crusades were defensive actions:

In a.d. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. Outside those boundaries were other large Christian communities—not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. Most of the Christian population of Persia, for example, was Nestorian. Certainly there were many Christian communities in Arabia.

By a.d. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula.6 Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.

What had happened? Most people actually know the answer, if pressed—though for some reason they do not usually connect the answer with the crusades. The answer is the rise of Islam. Every one of the listed regions was taken, within the space of a hundred years, from Christian control by violence, in the course of military campaigns deliberately designed to expand Muslim territory at the expense of Islam’s neighbors. Nor did this conclude Islam’s program of conquest. The attacks continued, punctuated from time to time by Christian attempts to push back. Charlemagne blocked the Muslim advance in far western Europe in about a.d. 800, but Islamic forces simply shifted their focus and began to island-hop across from North Africa toward Italy and the French coast, attacking the Italian mainland by 837. A confused struggle for control of southern and central Italy continued for the rest of the ninth century and into the tenth. In the hundred years between 850 and 950, Benedictine monks were driven out of ancient monasteries, the Papal States were overrun, and Muslim pirate bases were established along the coast of northern Italy and southern France, from which attacks on the deep inland were launched. Desperate to protect victimized Christians, popes became involved in the tenth and early eleventh centuries in directing the defense of the territory around them.

If you asked me what are the two best books on the Crusades, I would answer God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Baylor professor Rodney Stark and The Concise History of the Crusades by Professor Thomas F. Madden. If you get this question a lot from atheists, then I recommend you pick these up. Anything by Rodney Stark is useful for Christians, in fact.

News

UK judge sentences radical Islamist imam who lived on welfare to 20 years in prison

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Democrats think that the real threat to America is not radical Islamic terrorism
Democrats think that the real threat to America is not radical Islamic terrorism

This story is from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

A senior judge has challenged Islamist extremists who live on benefits while claiming to “despise” Western democracy, as he sentenced hate preacher Anjem Choudary to five-and-half years in prison.

Choudary has lived on benefits in the UK for the past 20 years, during which time it is understood he has claimed up to £500,000 from the state.

While living off the state – dubbing his benefits ‘Jihadiseekers’ Allowance’ – Choudary became one of the country’s most notorious radical preachers – professing hatred against the West.

But he managed to avoid a criminal conviction until he was charged last year with drumming up support for a terrorist organisation by pledging allegiance to Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (Isil).

On Tuesday he was sentenced alongside fellow radical Islamist Mohammed Mizanur Rahman after both being convicted of inviting support for the terrorist group.

[…]The judge said Choudary had invited support for Isil while it was “engaged in appalling acts of terrorism”.

He said: “At no point did either of you say anything to condemn the violent means by which [Isil] claimed to have established a caliphate.”

The UK had Labour Party rule for well over a decade, and they opened up their immigration policy to import many, many unskilled immigrants from countries with a significant presence of radical Islam. The idea of the secular leftists was that they would be able to buy the votes of unskilled workers with welfare money paid by the people who actually had jobs. And it worked. Well, there are some problems: they have gangs of Muslims raping and sex-trafficking children, but the strategy of importing anti-conservative voters worked.

I think that a lot of Western countries with welfare states and open-borders immigration policies often have problems like the UK does. And in especially leftist countries that have weakened marriage by redefining it, you get even more welfare fraud.

In Canada, polygamous Muslims can already collect multiple welfare checks for their multiple wives.

Excerpt:

Hundreds of [Greater Toronto Area] Muslim men in polygamous marriages — some with a harem of wives — are receiving welfare and social benefits for each of their spouses, thanks to the city and province, Muslim leaders say.

Mumtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, said wives in polygamous marriages are recognized as spouses under the Ontario Family Law Act, providing they were legally married under Muslim laws abroad.

“Polygamy is a regular part of life for many Muslims,” Ali said yesterday. “Ontario recognizes religious marriages for Muslims and others.”

He estimates “several hundred” GTA husbands in polygamous marriages are receiving benefits. Under Islamic law, a Muslim man is permitted to have up to four spouses.

However, city and provincial officials said legally a welfare applicant can claim only one spouse. Other adults living in the same household can apply for welfare independently.

The average recipient with a child can receive about $1,500 monthly, city officials said.

Note that expanding the welfare state and increasing unskilled immigration from countries with anti-Western populations is a central plank in leftist political parties such as our own Democrat Party. The Democrat Party itself is very much in favor of expanding welfare (Obama repealed the 1996 welfare reform policy) and are also in favor of weakening border security.

More details emerged today in the Wall Street Journal about the payments that Obama sent to Iran: (H/T Ari)

The Obama administration followed up a planeload of $400 million in cash sent to Iran in January with two more such shipments in the next 19 days, totaling another $1.3 billion, according to congressional officials briefed by the U.S. State, Treasury and Justice departments.

The cash payments—made in Swiss francs, euros and other currencies—settled a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal dating back to 1979. U.S. officials have acknowledged the payment of the first $400 million coincided with Iran’s release of American prisoners and was used as leverage to ensure they were flown out of Tehran’s Mehrabad on the morning of Jan. 17.

[…]The Obama administration briefed lawmakers on Tuesday, telling them that two further portions of the $1.3 billion were transferred though Europe on Jan. 22 and Feb. 5. The payment “flowed in the same manner” as the original $400 million that an Iranian cargo plane picked up in Geneva, Switzerland, according to a congressional aide who took part in the briefing.

The $400 million was converted into non-U.S. currencies by the Swiss and Dutch central banks, according to U.S. and European officials.

The Treasury Department confirmed late Tuesday that the subsequent payments were also made in cash.

Do you ever wonder where your taxpayer money is going? Obama is using it to prop up dangerous Islamic regimes who sponsor terrorism and kill our troops on the battlefield in Iraq. That’s what every Democrat voter voted for, as well. They are responsible, whether they intended these consequences or not.