Dreams Into Lightning 2

Deposed Maldives President: "Another Pakistan"

The former president of the Maldives - an island chain to the south-west of India, which is nowhere near Argentina - warned of the rising influence of radical islamists in the nation:

During his term as president , Nasheed is credited with introducing a number of reforms in Maldives and being the face of moderate Islam - which are the reasons he says radical elements within the country turned against him.

"The strength of radical Islamists within Maldives is rising. In fact, the country has become another Pakistan right now. Look at the way the coup against me happened. There is a strong similarity with the way Nawaz Sharif, another democratically-elected leader was ousted. He sacked general Musharraf and Musharraf plotted against him. I asked a colonel and deputy chief of police to go and they staged a coup and removed me."

Now on a mission to sensitize the international community , Nasheed says the only way things can improve in his country is to have free and fair elections as early as possible. ...

Barry Rubin Interviewed

He's interviewed by the Daily Caller. For me, the most exciting part is this announcement near the end:

Any plans to write another book? If so, about what?

My next book is already completed and I think it is going to have a big impact. It is entitled, Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East, written with Dr. Wolfgang Schwanitz, and based on newly released CIA and never before translated German documents. Basically, it shows how the alliance was stronger and more important than previously understood and also how individuals, ideologies, and groups that collaborated with the Axis have ruled the Arabic-speaking world for the last sixty years and will continue to do so in the current Islamist wave.

I've posted before about Arab Nazis and I've quoted Barry Rubin on the subject of safe antisemitism. As Barry observes, "nobody is going to complain about Naziphobia" because the Nazis are a politically safe target; their ideological descendents are not. So his forthcoming book on the Nazi-Islamist axis is very timely and much needed.

Meanwhile, in Tunisia ...

Tunisia president backs conviction for "insulting Islam".

Iraqi Arab Man Challenges Islam to a Debate

I. Q. Al Rassooli will offer

is offering any television station $10,000 for 15 minutes of airtime to argue against the Islamic religion. Al Rassooli was raised as an Arab Muslim in Iraq. Today he lives abroad and argues that the Islamic religion promotes violence and terrorism. He is the author of “Lifting the Veil: The True Faces of Muhammad and Islam." ...

Read the rest at the link.

Easy Targets

Nobody is going to complain about Naziphobia. - Barry Rubin

There's no downside to being against Nazis. Anyone can declare that the Holocaust was a great evil, anyone can say "never again". As I wrote in an earlier post,

That the Nazis did horrific things to humanity in general and the Jews in particular is well known; "Nazi = evil" is not a controversial statement. But Nazis are a "safe target". They were white, nominally Christian Europeans acting on a professed ideology of white supremacism; so it's easy to conflate them with the likes of the KKK. Best of all, they lost the war!

Commenting on the reconstituted anti-semitism program at Yale, Barry Rubin picks up this line of thought here:

But now Yale has sidestepped criticism about ending the program by changing its name slightly and choosing a new head who is an expert on Jews in France and especially the Holocaust and French literature there. No doubt we will be fed a steady diet of things like the Dreyfus affair, antisemitism in nineteenth-century French literature, and the situation in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. As if masses of studies haven't been done on such things. But obviously nothing on antisemitism from certain groups, ideologies, and individuals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. So you see academia really cares about antisemitism, as long as the Jews involved (and in most cases their persecutors) are already long dead. Nobody is going to complain about Naziphobia.

I hope he's wrong about the Yale program, and I'm willing to give the new department head a fair chance. But the main point is this: there's little value in studying the antisemitism of the past if we ignore its most dangerous present manifestations, and by this of course I mean the ideologies of radical Islam.

Obama Cairo Speech

Rich Lowry:

'... the fundamental question about Obama’s address is whether it worked as public diplomacy. On balance, will it make the intellectual and political isolation of Islamic extremists more or less likely? Because the speech makes it more likely, it must be judged a success.'

Ha'Aretz:

The Israeli government praised U.S. President Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world Thursday, saying it shared his hopes for Middle East peace, but stressed that Israel's security interests remained paramount.

"We share President Obama's hope that the American effort heralds the opening of a new era that will bring an end to the conflict and to general Arab recognition of Israel as the nation of the Jewish people that lives in security and peace in the Middle East," an official statement said after Obama's address in Cairo.

Victor Davis Hanson:

'President Obama made an earnest effort — as is his way in matters of discord — to split the difference with the Islamic world. His speech essentially amounted to: “We did that, you did this, tit-for-tat, now we’re even, and can’t we all just get along?” He should be congratulated for expressing a desire for peace and for gently reminding the Muslim world of the way to reform, even if he did so while inflating Western sins.

But the problem with such moral equivalence is that it equates things that are, well, not equal — and therefore ends up not being moral at all.'

Jonah Goldberg:

'This was precisely the moment to let Obama be Obama. For instance: Yes, he is a hypocrite for downplaying his Muslim connections when running for office and then touting them once in office. But such hypocrisy is a small price to pay. If Nixon was a statesman for laying aside his anti-Communism to engage China, then surely Obama can brag about his Muslim father. Obama has a cult of personality in the Muslim street. If he can exploit it for America’s and the world’s benefit, he should.'

Bruce at GayPatriot:

I wish I could say that I picked up on this myself, but I must give full credit to New Zealand blogger Darren who writes at The Fairfacts Media Show and the No Minister blog and who emailed me earlier today.

Why did President Obama completely ignore the persecution and pogroms of gays where Islamic law is the rule of the land? It is happening in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and even Egypt. (The list goes on and on actually….)

Gays living under strict Islamic law (whether in a nation or a region) are subject to death. Women(as a group) actually have better lives in the Muslim faith than do gays and lesbians. Although gay men seem to be particular targets of the horrific state/mosque-sanctioned atrocities.

Debka:

US president Barack Obama stressed the need for mutual respect and tolerance among the world's faiths, denigrated al Qaeda and extremism, said the US "does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," will respect all elected peaceful governments provided they respect their peoples, and called for universal human and women's rights to be upheld. His much awaited speech to more than a billion Muslims which quoted extensively from the Koran, but also the Bible and the Talmud, won cheers from the selected 3,000 strong audience in Cairo University's Great Hall Thursday, June 4.
Along with a declaration that US bonds with Israel are unbreakable, President Obama demanded that Israel and the Palestinians uphold their obligations to the roadmap. "America will align its policies with those who seek peace – Israelis, Palestinians or Arabs," he declared and promised to personally pursue the goal of peace and security for breaking the Israel-Palestinian stalemate. Palestinians must be allowed to live a normal life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he said, but they must abandon violence.
Rockets on sleeping children or bombs killing old people on a bus are intolerable, but the US does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements and Israel must recognize the Palestinian right to the dignity of a state of their own but so must the Arab world recognize Israel.

Full transcript of President Obama's speech in Cairo.

Arkansas Recruiter Shooter Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammed

Phyllis Chesler:

According to my esteemed colleague Steven Emerson, (and as I noted yesterday), Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammed has been under investigation in an effort to understand his “possible contacts with extremists overseas.” Emerson believes that Muhammed probably attended “the (Al-Da’awah Center) madrassa in Dammaj, a tribal area of Yemen, run by a Salafi cleric named Yahya Hajuri.” Unbelievably, Hajuri is the designated heir to one Muqbil ibn Hadi, who once launched an attack on Mecca and a war against Christians in Indonesia.

Yemen: What do I recall about Yemen? Osama bin Laden’s father is from Yemen, from a place called Hadramut which, I am told, means “Death has come.”

More important, according to Emerson, Abdulhakim M. Muhammed “was urged by members of the local Muslim community, (in the United States), to travel to Yemen, for more education. The (country) is considered a hotbed for terrorists, and Muhammad may have been exposed to more radical ideas there.” ...

Yemen? Who do I recall who knows something about Yemen? Might be Jane at Armies of Liberation:

Update: He sought to go to Dammaj to study with Hajoree. (The six Americans arrested in 2008 were coming from Saada to Sanaa when they were arrested but were supposed to go to Maber). He was arrested in Yemen for using a Somali passport.

Its a good idea to keep an eye on anyone who changes their name from Carlos to Mujahid.
The article would be more accurate if it said, “The suspect is a subscriber to the radical jihaddist ideology which advocates the murder of non-believers, converts and those who transgress their interpretation of Shaira law.”

Chesler and Novak both cite Amir Taheri's column on Obama and Islam:

Obama has aroused more curiosity in the Middle East than any previous US leader, partly because of his Arabic-Islamic first and middle names. The choice of the date for Obama's address indicates his attention to detail. It coincides with the anniversary of the start of the first battle between Islam, under Prophet Muhammad, and Christendom in the shape of a Byzantine expeditionary force in AD629. The “address to Islam” also marks the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini's demise and the appointment of Ali Khamenei as the new “Supreme Guide of the Islamic ummah”. More importantly, it also coincides with the rebuilding of the Ka'abah, the stone at the heart of Mecca, which had been destroyed in a Muslim civil war.

Rich in symbolism, Obama's “address to Islam” is also full of political implications. Obama is the first major Western leader, after Bonaparte, to address Islam as a single bloc, thus adopting the traditional Islamic narrative of dividing the world according to religious beliefs. This ignores the rich and conflict-ridden diversity of the 57 Muslim-majority nations and fosters the illusion, peddled by people such as Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Islam is one and indivisible and should, one day, unite under a caliphate.

By adopting the key element of the Islamist narrative, that is to say the division of humanity into religious blocs, Mr Obama also intends to send a signal to the Middle East's nascent democratic forces that Washington is abandoning with a vengeance George W. Bush's “freedom agenda”.

Brownworth: The feminist revolution is just beginning.

Victoria Brownworth has a stand-out column in the April 2008 print edition of Curve. The article is not available online, so I'll just post a couple of brief excerpts here.

I am a feminist. Not apologetically, under my breath. I believe that the single most important civil rights movement of the 20th century was feminism. But then, I live in the United States, where women have a great deal of freedom. I never cease to be grateful for the fact that I was born here. Being born female in the majority of the world is a very, very bad thing. That is, if you get born at all. Sex-selection abortion, for example, is rampant throughout Asia and the Asian continent.

Brownworth goes on to recount her niece's description of her time in Cairo:

She is a formidable young woman, remarkably fearless, and wears the privilege that comes with being born female in the United States; she will not be made second-class.

But according to her firsthand reports, there was never a day in Cairo or its outskirts when she was not the victim of demeaning and damaging sexual predation. She was angered and repulsed by the constant assaults - verbal and physical - but in no way cowed by them. As she noted, a tone of surprising bitterness in her voice, "At least I always knew I was coming home."

In a very different, quiet voice, she added, "But as I traveled outside Cairo, it was so hard knowing that all around me were women who were victims of FGM [female genital mutilation]."

Brownworth, herself a rape survivior, then recalls an exchange with a woman in Libya; the two women had discussed the case of the Saudi rape victim who was sentenced to 90 lashes. (I posted on it here.) The woman's sentence was increased after she challenged the ruling; she was finally pardoned after international protest.

My friend in Libya was appalled by my "insensitivity and disrespect" for Islamic law. I told her I would be equally outraged had this occurred in a Christian theocracy - except there haven't been any for centuries.

She then told me that if the woman hadn't gotten into a car with a strange man, she wouldn't have been raped. So although the penalty seemed harsh from my "Western perspective", it was for the woman's own protection.

I am no longer friends with this woman. ...

It's worth your time to read the whole piece, and pass it on to a friend. It's in Curve 18 #4; you can purchase back issues at the link.

On a side note, Curve doesn't ignore lesbian conservatives. Go here and scroll down for a McCain endorsement:

I’m a rare out lesbian this campaign year because in the face of two Democratic candidates who are dividing almost the entire LGBT vote, I’m voting for the other guy: John McCain. Before you call me a traitorous wretch and lob verbal attacks about internalized homophobia, let me explain. I’ve been a Republican since Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, though I briefly fell off the wagon to support Clinton No. 1, which I regretted almost instantly.

To hear former President Bill Clinton tell it today, he and Hillary are the most gay-positive politicos out there. However, Clinton himself signed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—which has ousted thousands of queer service members since it was enacted in 1993—as well as the Defense of Marriage Act.

John McCain supported it too, but he remained one of the few Republicans to rally against a federal anti-gay marriage amendment, calling it “antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans.” Like a true Republican, he’s repeatedly said that states should have the right to define their own policies. ...

Go to the link for the rest. When you're done, check out Tammy Bruce:

I’m a pro-choice lesbian feminist. I’m also an independent conservative and have grown increasingly frustrated with all the candidates for president. I have never voted for a candidate because of the letter after the name, and I still have not made a decision about whom I will vote for in November. For the first time in a presidential race I am not only not excited about a candidate, I am extremely concerned about all their agendas.

How I identify may sound like a contradiction, but it’s really not. I want government to be small and unobtrusive. Whenever government gets big, that means it’s interfering in our lives, and that’s never been a good thing for gays, whose freedom and independence rely in large part on the majority leaving us alone. A main problem is how conservatism is viewed—which is that it has been attached to religious politics for too long. ...

Well worth a read. Longtime readers of Dreams Into Lightning will recall that a piece in Curve prompted my 2004 post on women and power.

Honor Killings, Suicides Up in Iraqi Kurdistan

France 24, via Muslims Against Sharia:

By Shwan Mohammad

Medics in Iraqi Kurdistan said on Saturday that they had seen a surge in violence against women in May, with both so-called "honour" killings and female suicides on the increase.

"At least 14 women died in the first 10 days of May alone," a doctor told AFP in the region's second largest city of Sulaimaniyah.

"Seven of them took their own lives, the other seven were murdered in still unexplained circumstances" -- apparently the victims of "honour" killings.

"Over the same period, we recorded 11 attempted self-immolations. These women were so desperate they set fire to themselves," the doctor added, asking not to be identified.

According to Kurdish regional government figures, in Sulaimaniyah province alone more than 50 women attempted suicide by burning in the first four months of the year and another eight tried to hang themselves. ...

New York Strikes Back Against Libel Tourism

Via LGF:

Saudi billionaire Khalid Salim Bin Mahfouz, who successfully sued Cambridge University Press last July, has failed in his efforts to silence Rachel Ehrenfeld.

The American Center for Democracy in Defense of Freedom, which Ehrenfeld directs, has just issued the following press release. The New York State legislature today passed the “Libel Tourism Protection Act,” which will help protect American writers from the likes of Bin Mahfouz, who uses his millions to silence critics of his own past and of others who work to spread Wahhabi Islam around the world. For the likes of Bin Mahfouz, the inability to convince people of the merits of your arguments leads instead to efforts to sue them into silence. That underhanded assault on our freedom of speech has now become more difficult, as this new legislation corrects holes in New York’s law that had left Ehrenfeld, and other authors, open to suits from foreigners like Bin Mahfouz.