Muslim Brotherhood says “no” to women’s equality
Above: Egyptian women wave a flag showing pharaoh Queen Hatshepsut and anti-Muslim Brotherhood banners during a demonstration in Cairo, marking this year’s International Women’s Day.
The Muslim Brotherhood has issued a statement denouncing a proposed statement by the UN Commission on the Status of Women because it “contradicts principles of Islam and destroys family life and entire society.”
The 57th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), taking place from March 4 to 15 at UN headquarters, seeks to ratify a declaration euphemistically entitled ‘End Violence against Women’.
That title, however, is misleading and deceptive. The document includes articles that contradict established principles of Islam, undermine Islamic ethics and destroy the family, the basic building block of society, according to the Egyptian Constitution.
This declaration, if ratified, would lead to complete disintegration of society, and would certainly be the final step in the intellectual and cultural invasion of Muslim countries, eliminating the moral specificity that helps preserve cohesion of Islamic societies.
Ah yes good old “moral specificity” that makes it ok to pretend women are inferior and subordinate, along with good old pseudo-anti-imperialism used to shore up theocratic imperialism. It’s a cute trick, pretending that rights for women amount to “intellectual and cultural invasion of Muslim countries.”
A closer look at these articles reveals what decadence awaits our world, if we sign this document:
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3. Granting equal rights to adulterous wives and illegitimate sons resulting from adulterous relationships.
4. Granting equal rights to homosexuals, and providing protection and respect for prostitutes.
5. Giving wives full rights to file legal complaints against husbands accusing them of rape or sexual harassment, obliging competent authorities to deal husbands punishments similar to those prescribed for raping or sexually harassing a stranger.
6. Equal inheritance (between men and women).
That’s decadence, is it? Not treating women who have non-marital sex as having no rights – that’s decadence? Not treating marital rape as perfectly fine is decadence?
7. Replacing guardianship with partnership, and full sharing of roles within the family between men and women such as: spending, child care and home chores.
Jesus god – it’s decadent to treat women and men as equals as opposed to making men the guardians of their wives, as if women were children?
8. Full equality in marriage legislation such as: allowing Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men, and abolition of polygamy, dowry, men taking charge of family spending, etc.
9. Removing the authority of divorce from husbands and placing it in the hands of judges, and sharing all property after divorce.
10. Cancelling the need for a husband’s consent in matters like: travel, work, or use of contraception.
These are destructive tools meant to undermine the family as an important institution; they would subvert the entire society, and drag it to pre-Islamic ignorance.
The Muslim Brotherhood urges the leaders of Muslim countries and their UN representatives to reject and condemn this document, and to call upon this organization to rise to the high morals and principles of family relations prescribed by Islam.
And these are the people who are in power in Egypt, along with the Salafists, who are even worse.
Hamas’s ‘gender apartheid’ stops Gaza marathon
What description would fit the refusal to allow people to run, simply because of their gender? What would you call such fundamental discrimination and denial of basic human rights to 50% of the population? Surely not ”apartheid” ?
Gaza marathon: UN cancels race over Hamas ban on women
Hamas has provided security for the previous marathons, in which men and women have runFrom the BBC website:
The UN agency which organises Gaza’s marathon has cancelled the event, blaming the refusal of the territory’s governing Islamist Hamas movement to allow women to run.
The marathon was scheduled for Sunday and would have been Gaza’s third.
Hamas said the marathon could go ahead if “local traditions” were respected.
Conservative elements in Gaza have sometimes complained about mixing between the sexes, especially in schools and at sporting events.
The UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) said in a statement that it had taken “the disappointing decision” after “discussions with the authorities in Gaza who have insisted that no women should participate”.
Unrwa “is working on a programme of other events, which will be forwarded to those interested as soon as possible,” the statement adds.
‘No mixing’
“We regret this decision to cancel the marathon but we don’t want men and women running together,” Abdessalam Siyyam, cabinet secretary of the Hamas government, told AFP news agency.
“We did not tell Unrwa to cancel the marathon and we haven’t prevented it, but we laid down some conditions: We don’t want women and men mixing in the same place,” he added.
The Palestinian territory is almost exactly marathon length from top to bottom.
Last year, thousands of runners braved freezing conditions to take part, including some women. Palestinian runner Nader al-Masri won the event on its first two occasions.
In previous years, Hamas has supported the race and provided security.
In the past there have been attacks on the UN’s summer camps for children in Gaza after complaints that boys were allowed to mix with girls, the BBC’s Jon Donnison reports.
The marathon was due to be part of the UN’s fundraising efforts in order to run those camps, our correspondent adds.
Kate Hudson and Andrew Burgin: “On leaving Respect”
Above: readers are invited to suggest captions
The following statement is reblogged without permission, from that increasingly bizarre and unpleasant ”cesspit of the left,” the Socialist Unity blog. The comments that followed (not published here) are good for a laugh as well, with ‘moderator’ Collins threatening to delete anyone who criticises Galloway. It should go without saying that we publish this statement for the information of readers, not because we agree with much (or any) of it. No link because SU prevent us linking:
ON LEAVING RESPECT 8 October 2012
This is a guest post from Andrew Burgin and Kate Hudson. Having joined and become active in Respect as a result of George Galloway’s recent election win, they’ve found themselves being in the position of being forced to leave the organisation without any explanation why.
Joining Respect
We joined Respect two days after George Galloway’s outstanding victory in Bradford, in March 2012. In our estimate, this by-election victory indicated both the support for a clear anti-cuts politics to the left of Labour, and the viability of Respect as a political party which could inhabit that political space. Respect’s election result, across all wards in Bradford, indicated the resonance of the party’s politics across the city’s diverse communities, transcending the wrongly perceived limits of Respect’s political appeal and re-establishing the party on the political map.
Having recently returned from a solidarity delegation to Greece, where Syriza was gaining political ground with a similar politics, we were convinced of the need to advance a left political and economic alternative at a time when social democratic parties have abandoned their redistributive credentials and continue to opt for the failed policies of neo-liberalism. We remain convinced of that need but find that we are no longer able to fight for that alternative through the Respect party.
The Manchester candidacy
In July, Kate accepted nomination as Respect Party parliamentary candidate for the Manchester Central by-election in November 2012. Campaigning in Manchester over the subsequent weeks, it became clear that there was strong local support for a Respect candidacy based on opposing austerity, backing investment, fighting racism and working to end poverty in some of the most deprived wards in Britain. As a safe Labour seat, but with the lowest turnout of any constituency in the country, Manchester Central was a very clear example of how Labour no longer stands for the interests of the working class. Most people saw no point in voting at all. But the support on the doorstep for the Respect campaign demonstrated more clearly than any amount of theorising, that ordinary people want an alternative, that Respect’s political and economic platform provided a popular basis from which to build an electoral alternative. The campaign also demonstrated how political support from outside Respect could also be built for an anti-cuts candidacy and support for Kate’s campaign came from across a range of parties and political organisations which shared the values fought for within the campaign.
Standing down
The decision to stand down as candidate was not one taken lightly. But it was one which became impossible to avoid, after the deeply regrettable comments by George Galloway about the nature of rape, in the context of the attempts to extradite Assange. There is no doubt in our minds that there are attempts to extradite Assange to Sweden, outside of that country’s normal legal procedures, to facilitate his extradition to the US to face charges over Wikileaks. But opposing such practices does not require extemporisation by Respect’s MP on the nature of rape which at the very least exposed his lack of understanding with regard to the legal definition of that crime.
The condemnation of George Galloway’s comments by party leader Salma Yaqoob are well-known and went some way to redeeming the honour of Respect and we wholeheartedly supported them and welcomed Salma’s principled stance. However, the failure of George Galloway to retract his remarks on rape and apologise for them ultimately made it impossible for Kate to continue to stand for Respect in Manchester Central. As she stated at the time, “To continue as Respect Party candidate in this situation, no matter how much I object to and oppose his statements personally, would be in effect to condone what he has said. That is something I am not prepared to do.”
The identification of George Galloway with the Respect party is such that many perceive them to be synonymous. This meant that unless the party itself was prepared to state that it did not support George’s position on rape, and to ask him to retract his statements, it could reasonably be assumed by non-members that the party tolerated George’s position. Apart from Salma’s statement, and Kate’s public support for that, we are not aware of any condemnation by the party of George’s position. Indeed, Salma’s statement was not published on the party website, in spite of the fact that she was leader of the party, and Kate was initially asked by the National Secretary to remove Salma’s statement from her Manchester campaign Facebook page, which she refused to do.
Staying in Respect
Nevertheless, taking into account that we consider the politics of Respect to be essential in the struggle for a left alternative, and that we were aware of strong opposition to George’s position within Respect – even though it was not given expression by the party apparatus and media – we decided not to leave Respect. As Kate put it in her statement on standing down, “I will continue to work within the Respect Party to ensure that our values and principles with regard to women’s rights match up to the Party’s – and George Galloway’s – outstanding record in these other areas.”
Resignations from Respect
In the wake of the Galloway comments and his refusal to apologise, Salma Yaqoob decided to stand down as party leader and resigned from Respect. At the National Council in September, it was announced that a number of long-standing senior party figures had also resigned, including a majority of its national officers. However, we decided to stay in the party and its leadership to work for a party with a life of its own, properly expressing the policies so urgently needed.
Constitutional excuses
Unfortunately, to continue to work politically within Respect is no longer possible. Last week we discovered that we have both been removed from Respect’s National Council. We received no official notification of this, rather, we discovered this when Andrew attempted to post a request for a Respect delegate to the Coalition of Resistance Europe against Austerity Conference on the NC google group. The message bounced back. On enquiring of the Respect National Secretary, Andrew was informed that he had been removed from the NC because he had missed two consecutive meetings of the NC and under the constitution this meant that he would be removed and replaced by a co-opted member. In fact, no such provision exists in the copy of the constitution that we received at this year’s Respect party conference. We have not been supplied, despite Andrew’s repeated requests, with a copy that includes that provision. Subsequently Kate attempted to post on the NC google group and again it bounced back. Her enquiry to the National Secretary about her NC status has received no reply, and she has had to assume that she has also been removed from that body.
Being purged
There are numerous other National Council members who have missed two meetings and have not been removed from the NC. It is clear that we have been purged from the party leadership for political reasons: because we publicly condemned George’s rape comments and backed the position of our party leader, and because we refused to be silenced over the fall-out from the issue within the party. This is in spite of the fact that we have been amongst the party’s most active members over the last six months: we participated in the party’s annual conference in Bradford where we were elected as NC members, we organized a successful London Respect meeting in July involving representatives from Syriza and Front de Gauche, we revived the North London branch and helped to convene a meeting of the London Respect Committee – as well as committing to the Manchester Central candidacy.
Speaking out in Respect
As we have been excluded from the NC by the National Secretary, we have no way of knowing if other comrades are raising these issues too, or share our concerns about the lack of an independent political life on the part of the Respect party, as distinct from that of its MP. We have informed others of our concerns where we have contact details. The silence in the face of our struggle has been disconcerting. We hope that other comrades recognize that speaking out on matters of political principle must be a basic democratic right within any political party.
Looking ahead
At the moment there is no place for us in the Respect party. Those that control the party and its apparatus have seen fit to remove us from any possibility of active work because our political principles led us to speak out against a wrong position and wrong practice. We continue to support the political and economic alternative which the Respect party espouses but we will look for a framework within which to fight for it elsewhere.
The peoples of Europe – and beyond – are facing an unprecedented social, political and economic crisis. Here in Britain, our government is implementing the most savage spending cuts designed to destroy all the social gains of the postwar period. They are damaging the lives of millions.
Throughout Europe people are fighting back. Every day we hear of strikes, mass mobilizations and protest as people fight to defend their societies and reject the barbarism of austerity. The urgent need is for unity of the left, within Britain, and across Europe, to meet these challenges together, to maximize our forces and build a common solidarity that will enable the victory of ordinary people over the brutality of a failed economic system.
That is what we are committed to.
Andrew Burgin and Kate Hudson 8 October 2012
Paul Ryan and the ghostly presence of Ayn Rand
From the New Yorker blog:
Ayn Rand Joins the Ticket
Posted by Jane Mayer
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Two years later, in 2005, Ryan paid fealty to Rand in a speech he gave to the Atlas Society, the Washington-based think tank devoted to keeping Rand’s “objectivist” philosophy alive. He credited her with inspiring his interest in public service, saying, “[T]he reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” (One of the trustees of the Atlas Society, Clifford Asness, the co-founder of AQR Capital Management, a twenty-billion-dollar hedge fund, is one of the many outspoken Wall Street financiers who has shifted political sides, denouncing Obama, who he supported in 2008, for interfering with capitalism by bailing out Chrysler, and by imposing tighter financial regulations after the 2008 economic collapse).
Three years ago, as Tim Mak reports today at Politico, Ryan described America’s political challenge as coming straight out of Rand’s work—saying, “what’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.”
More recently, however, Ryan distanced himself from Rand, whose atheism is something of a philosophical wedge issue on the right, dividing religious conservatives from free-market libertarians. This year, with his political profile rising, Ryan stressed not only that he had differences with Rand’s atheism—a point he had made as far back as 2003—but went so far as to denounce her whole system of beliefs, describing his early attraction to her writing as little more than a youthful dalliance. He admitted that he had “enjoyed her novels,” but, as Mak notes, he stressed that, “I reject her philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas.”
Ryan’s sidestep from Rand was politically essential. As a Mormon, the last thing Romney needs is to alienate the Christian Right further by putting an acolyte of an atheist on the ticket. So it was not surprising that Romney made a point of stressing Ryan’s Catholicism during his announcement of Ryan today, introducing him as, “A faithful Catholic” who “believes in the dignity and worth of every life.”
While Ryan may be distancing himself from Rand now, the Democrats will surely argue that her views on the virtues of selfishness have left a more lasting legacy in the policies that he and Romney embrace. In his début today, Ryan stressed that “We promise equal opportunity—not equal outcomes”—a philosophy that telegraphed a tough message to those who are worst off. Ryan also signalled a Rand-like celebration of the winners, and dismissed complaints from the losers, saying, “We look at one another’s success with pride, not resentment.” Rand’s language was tougher still. She used words such as “refuse” and “parasites” to describe the poor, while celebrating millionaire businessmen as heroes. She abhorred government social programs, such as Social Security, at least until she reached the age of eligibility, and reportedly signed on for both its benefits and those of Medicare.
Ryan wont be the first Rand fan to grace the Vice-Presidential ticket. Jack Kemp, who was Ryan’s mentor in politics, also described himself as influenced by her writing. In some ways, the Romney-Ryan ticket resembles the Dole-Kemp one, in pairing a Presidential candidate short on charisma and conservative credentials with a younger, more ideologically fiery sidekick. Kemp, however, was famously optimistic in his outlook. Ryan has a sterner countenance. Either way, though, while the G.O.P. may be behind when it comes to attracting female voters, in picking Ryan, who like Kemp was deeply influenced by Rand, it has added at least the imprint of an extra woman to the ticket.
For more on Romney, Ryan, and the rest of the campaign, bookmark The Political Scene, our hub for coverage of the 2012 election.
Photograph by Brendan Hoffman/Getty
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/08/paul-ryan-and-ayn-rand.html#ixzz23GmfnyR2
Paul Ryan, conspiracy theorist, climate denier
H-t: Alan T
Our last Galloway post for now – promise!
I guess that regular readers will have worked out by now that ‘Shiraz’ is not a George Galloway fan site. Unfortunately Mr Galloway has wormed his way back into mainstream politics and will soon be taking up his seat in parliament. We shall be watching him with our usual eagle eye.
In the meantime, I suspect that most readers have had enough of Mr Galloway, so I promise not to even mention him for at least one week.
Meanwhile, here is the twat, coming over like the ignorant, arrogant, fascistic arse he is; this really is worth viewing, believe me:
H-t: Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
Galloway: scum rises again
Galloway: 18,341; Labour: 8,201
It seems that the loathsome worshipper of tyranny and preening self-publicist Galloway has carpet-bagged his way back into Parliament by playing his usual, communalist and utterly reactionary game. Here’s an example of the literature he put out in Bradford West:
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“God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you.” Not drinking alcohol seems to be the key test here. Now take a look at the kind of material put out by Galloway’s supporters:
Bottoms Up Imran Hussain
8:15 pm, Tue 27 Mar 2012
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Thirsty Imran Hussain (hic) likes his refreshments; and campaigning in this unseasonally good weather is thirsty work indeed.
The Bradford councillor is Labour’s new hope in the Bradford West seat, being contested by Respect’s powerhouse George Galloway.
A bi-election has been called following the incumbent, Marsh Singh’s announcement that he is to stand down due to health reasons.
If Hussain can’t get his Labour colleagues to help him out canvassing, he might have to rely on his trusted pals John E Walker and Jackie Daniels to give him a hand.
Make no mistake, George Galloway is giving Hussain a real run for his money. Respect and Labour are neck and neck and Respect have the capacity to deliver a historic blow to Labour’s strangle-hold in Bradford. In fact, George could end up giving Imran “both barrels” (but not the barrels Imran was hoping for).
The constituents of Bradford West have a clear choice between the councillor who represents the party that thinks it has a right to rule in the Northern seats, that started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that brought the economy crashing down around our ears, or the candidate who is a tee-totaller and has consistently shown he has the courage of a lion, who has taken on the Zionist scourge, who and is a defender of Muslims and Bradford West’s last hope.
Read more: http://www.mpacuk.org/story/260312/bottoms-imran-hussain.html#ixzz1qYc8BFsE
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It has to be said that it would appear that Labour, too, played the communalist card in this sorry by election. But make no mistake: Galloway’s victory is a serious setback for class politics and a major victory for communalism, identity-politics and “personality”-based populism.
This blog has, for some time, been deliberately ignoring the foul creature that is Galloway. It looks like we’ll have to start writing about him again.
More on this result shortly…
Warsi on secularism: Cameron’s ‘useful canary’?
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. (Matthew 6: 5-6)
When Lady Warsi came out with her denunciation of “militant secularism” allegedly ”denying people the right to a religious identity” in Britain and Europe, my initial reaction was to treat it as self-evident bollocks from a self-evident dim-wit, unworthy of further comment.
I’ll leave aside for the moment the fact that Warsi’s comments were delivered during an official visit to the Vatican – an outfit responsible for the systematic cover-up of mass child-rape and torture by its own clergy, as well as the appeasement of Hitler and collaboration with Franco’s Spain, Tiso’s Slovakia and Pavelic’s Croatia. No, what struck me as self-evidently preposterous was that Wasi could claim that religion is being victimised at a time when, in Britain:
* Christianity (specifically the C of E) remains the state religion, with reserved seats in the legislature.
* “Religion or Belief” (but in practice, just religion) has legal protection in employment matters and religious organisations are exempted from other aspects of equality legislation.
* One third of state schools are run by religions (mainly, but not only the C of E), while religions are busy setting up ‘free schools’ where they will have something close to a free hand to promote their dogma within the curriculum.
* More and more ‘outsourced’ social service provision is being given to religious organisations, who are then free to proselytize to vulnerable clients.
* Religion is given a free plug (Thought for the Day) in the middle of the national broadcaster’s flagship news programme every weekday.
Hardly a picture of religion being “sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere” (Warsi’s words), is it?
The other self-evidently (at least to me) preposterous aspect of Warsi’s ignorant and self-righteous bleating wes her use of words like “militant” and “intolerant.” Does she know what these words mean? Compare are contrast:
* The National Secular Society brings a court case against Bideford Council, to stop it holding prayers as part of its official business (councillors would, of course, remain free to pray before or after meetings if they so choose).
* At Queen Mary College last month a meeting had to be called off when a man came in, filmed the audience and threatened to “hunt down” anyone who he considered had insulted his religion.
Who, exactly are the “intolerant”, “militant” people at large in Britain today, Lady Warsi? Secularists, with their occasional legal actions, petitions and letters to the Guardian, or violent religious fanatics threatening people, picketing plays and demanding the banning of books? And that’s not to mention suicide-bombings.
As for the wider world, who is it terrorising Christians in Africa, the Middle East and Asia (where physical attacks have risen by over 300% between 2003 and 2010)? Secularists or religious people? Surely even Wasi knows (or can guess at) the answer to that.
Sadly, it seems that Warsi’s arguments have not been laughed out of court, at least not by the ‘intelligensia’ (the picture amongst the general public, and even most self-identifying ‘Christians’ seems to be more encouraging – further proof of the contention sometimes attributed to Orwell, that “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”). A large part of the problem seems to be a confusion between secularism and atheism. Just as all cows are animals but not all animals are cows, so it goes with atheists and secularists. As Dave explains here, secularism is no more and no less than the seperation of church (or mosque or synagogue) and state - far and away the best arrangement for religious freedom. Julian Baggini makes the same point here, though in my opinion he is too willing to concede the maintenance of religious privilege in the public sphere.
It has certainly come to something when a leading liberal intellectual like Will Hutton (in today’s Observer) clearly doesn’t understand what secularism is (“Secularism unsupported by atheism is nonsensical,” quoth he) and has to be put right by Richard Dawkins, who has always been clear on the distiction between atheism and secularism, even while he is an outspoken advocate of both:
“Secularism unsupported by atheism is nonsensical.’ Really? You mean the US first amendment is nonsense? The Indian constitution? Their idealist founders enshrined secularism in those constitutions because they wanted all religions to be free: no religion should dominate; no religion should impose. Secularism is supremely liberal, the epitome of tolerance, and you, Will, should be the first to treasure it.
“Gandhi’s and ML King’s inner strength may well have come from religious conviction but they were passionate secularists because they believed religion was a private matter – inner, indeed – and an area in which, for everyone’s sake, it was important that the state remained neutral.”
Read the rest of this fascinating exchange here.
But my main mistake on Wasi was to assume that her Valentine’s Day message to fellow-bigot Benedict XVI was merely a frolic of her own. As Polly Toynbee (not someone I often quote with approval) has suggested, “For Cameron, Lady Warsi may be a useful canary: testing if American flag-and-faith culture wars might fly over here.”
Yes, the more you think about it the more it makes sense: Cameron’s too canny and sophisticated to be seen to advocate a turn to US-style religious bigotry and anti-science ignorance in British public life. But Warsi: she’s just the canary for the job.
The End of the World! Today!! 6.00 pm!!!
And it’s all the fault of them homos.
Well, you might as well go down smiling…
…let us know what you’ll be doing at 5.55 pm today: what music you’ll listen to, what you’ll be eating and/or drinking, what film you’ll be watching, what you’ll be reading, what sort of sex you’ll be having…or would like to have…
Mazar: a barbaric reaction to bigotry
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Terry Glavin writes:
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In Afghanistan, you can always tell the Khomeinists’ hand in “spontaneous” demonstrations by the tell-tale slogan Marg Bar Yahood (Death to the Jews). You can hear it for yourself in this raw video footage, about 55 seconds in.
That was what they were shouting in the first mini-riot in Kabul last week, which, so far as I can determine, the foreign press reported without exception as merely a spontaneous demonstration of Afghan anger in response to the Quran-burning escapade undertaken by that hillbilly crackpot imam Terry Jones. You’d think that Asif Mohseni, Iran’s chosen ayatollah in Afghanistan, has had nothing to do with it. You’d never know that immediately prior to that first protest, Hamid Karzai allowed himself to be engaged by Iran’s propagandists in Afghanistan to utter the ridiculous demand for Jones’ arrest – causing the uproar that was the first that Afghans had even heard about the Quran-burning.
Think whatever you like. For all of you who would prefer to think of the horror in Mazar and now Kandahar as just another instance of Them Devilish Muzzies Gone Mad, you are welcome to your stupid and self-congratulating bigotry. You should be pleased with yourselves that you share precisely the same idiocy that animates illiterate Kandahari hillbillies who fault kaffirs and Yanks at large for the vulgar provocation that was an act of criminal negligence committed solely by Jones and his pathetic little flock of cretins in Florida.
It has been an excruciating and utterly heartbreaking 48 hours for us at the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. But from the reports we are getting from our friends back in Afghanistan, especially from Mazar, what is emerging is a fairly clear picture of a well-organized campaign of incitement to violence and murder carried out by a determined Khomeinist-Deobandist criminal conspiracy. There will be much more about that later.
For now, from Kabul, here’s Thomas Ruttig:
“Who would have thought that something like this could be possible following the Nazis’ autodafé in the Berlin of 1933 were they set the works of Jewish, Marxist and pacifist – in short ‘un-German’ – writers like Heinrich Mann, Remarque, Tucholsky, Kaestner, Freud and Marx alight. (I always admired the Bavarian writer, Oskar Maria Graf, who wrote a letter of protest to the ‘Fuehrer’ when he discovered that his books had been spared). What makes people in Afghanistan so angry that they attack random foreigners, UN personnel who have nothing at all to do with that fringe pastor’s act?”
What, indeed.
