A Muslim campaign against honor killings

We’ve posted a number of times about honor killings by Muslims in the United States.  See here, here, and here for example, or enter “honor” in our search function. It is one of the disgusting practices brought here by Muslims from some countries, like female genital mutilation.

Today FrontPage Magazine interviews a woman named Linda Ahmed, a Swede who married a Muslim man and converted. She converted only to Islam, however, not to radical Islamism, and she is co-chairman of  a campaign called STOP HONORCIDE! that was launched on Mother’s Day of this year. (The word “honorcide” makes no sense — it means killing honor, but we’ll give that a pass.)

Linda Ahmed is also a co-founded of Muslims Against Sharia, a group that seeks to reform Islam. There is great debate among experts about whether Islam is reformable, so we’ll leave that subject too, except to say we’re glad such a group exists. Here is some of what she says:

Ahmed: As you probably know, honor killings or honorcides are common in non-Western cultures. Even fairly westernized countries like Turkey have a huge honorcide problem. When non-Westerners move to the Western countries, they bring with them their traditions, honorcide being one of those “traditions”. 

Unfortunately Western media is downplaying honorcide problem in the West for fear of offending immigrant populations. You don’t hear names like Amina & Sarah Said, Aqsa Perves, Morsal Obeidi, or Hatin Surucu on evening news.

Honorcide is ignored to such degree that a proponent of honorcide could be prominently featured on an American presidential campaign website. The idea behind this campaign is to attract attention to this problem and to prosecute honorcides to the fullest extent of the law.

She wants to use existing hate-crime laws to do this.

Muslims Against Sharia have no opinion on necessity of the hate-crime laws, but since these laws exist, why not put them to good use? It doesn’t cost much to amend existing hate-crime legislations to include honorcide, but the benefits are tremendous. First, these amendments will shed much needed light on the problem. Second, if that’s not done, it won’t be long before some clever lawyer will figure out the way to present honorcide as a cultural tradition and use it a mitigating factor. Amending the legislations will make sure that the cultural/traditional nonsense is never used in such way.

Such a person as Linda Ahmed is needed here in the United States, but needed more desperately in Sweden. As she tells it,

With one of the highest percentages of Muslims in Europe and very liberal immigration policies, Sweden is becoming one of the primary destinations for economic refugees from Islamic countries. While most of the new Muslim immigrants are not Islamists, upon arrival in Sweden, they fall under influence of radical imams who control the majority of Swedish mosques and Islamic cultural centers.

Thus, radicalization of Swedish Muslims is proceeding at an increasingly alarming rate. I believe that majority of Swedish Muslim want to live in an Islamic state governed by Sharia rather than in a democracy governed by a secular government. But if you want to live under Sharia, go to Saudi Arabia or Iran; do not attempt to change my home country.

And she doesn’t mess around when she prescribes what to do:

Any person from a country where a substantial part of the population is pro-Sharia should not be allowed in the West, not only as an immigrant, but even as a visitor with a few exceptions, i.e., political asylum or as a diplomat etc.

A person claiming political asylum should be thoroughly screened and evaluated and if accepted, accepted on probationary basis long enough to establish his/her loyalty.

Every illegal immigrant should be immediately kicked out. Every legal immigrant should be allowed to stay only if he/she did not display desire to establish a Sharia state in a host country. Any naturalized citizen who displays a desire to establish a Sharia state in a host country should have his/her citizenship revoked and promptly deported. I think the latter two groups is where the real danger lies.

That’s my kind of Muslim. Go, Linda.

Muslim Brothers and Sisters Trucking Company busted

You will be outraged by this story!  Ponder it as you zip along a busy highway in your little hybrid surrounded by 16-wheelers traveling at 60 plus miles an hour, and thank ever-watchful blulitespecial for tipping us all off to this story. 

Muslim Brothers and Sisters Trucking is (was) made up of drivers hailing from Somalia and Bosnia (our refugee program supplying labor for jobs Americans won’t do?) who were never qualified to drive a big rig thanks to this scam busted by the US Attorneys Office in Missouri.

A former superintendent of a truck driving school in West Plains pleaded guilty in federal court today to his role in a scheme that provided fraudulent commercial driver’s licenses to large numbers of Somali and Bosnian nationals, said John F. Wood, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri.

Read the whole story here.  It is a detailed anatomy of a scam of major proportion.     Some of those busted are going to prison, but you can bet they never caught all those students who are now spread throughout the US driving a rig on the highway next to you.

And then there is the larger question, what is in those tractor trailers?

Obama: Islamic terrorism is all about poverty and racism

I’m getting off topic a bit here, but thought you should see this important story.  Hat tip:  Robert.    Here is how the story at World Net Daily begins:

JERUSALEM – The 9-11 attacks were carried out because of a lack of “empathy” for others’ suffering on the part of al-Qaida, whose terrorist ideology “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair,” Sen. Barack Obama explained in largely unreported comments eight days after the mega-terror attacks that rocked the nation.

Please read the whole article.   Obama isn’t alone in his thinking that poverty breeds Islamic terrorism, we see that notion as a driving force even among high level  State Department officials.  Note former Asst. Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey’s comments last year here (bring more refugees to the US so they won’t become terrorists).    Sauerbrey, before joining the Bush Administration, was a Republican leader in Maryland, but must have been drinking too much of the kool-aid at the State Department.  Her comments, and Obama’s, show a fundamental misunderstanding of the imperatives of Islam.

Ho hum, another abuse of women story, this one from Cleveland

Believe me I am not as heartless as my title above suggests.   We have a very serious and growing problem with abuse of women and girls in the immigrant population and it is especially hard to eradicate in the Muslim community that views women as the property of men. 

The difficulty in rooting out the problem is compounded by our reverance for the concept of cultural relativism—multiculturalists would have us think that all cultures are equal.   It is not true, and immigrants and refugees must be taught to assimilate to our culture and the standards we set in this country for the treatment of women.  From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The first time her screams brought police to the house, the Lakewood mother lied. She told the officers that her husband did not strike her.

She was thinking of her immigrant community and the role she was expected to play. Faithful wife. Submissive mother. Mostly, she was thinking of her children and how she would support them without an income.

The night the police came back, she did not have to weigh what to say. She heard her enraged husband admit that, yes, he smacked his wife. He owned her. He could hit her.

“No, you cannot,” she recalls the officer answering, and he led her husband out of the house and out of her daily life.

The Lakewood mother asked that her anonymity be protected because she fears further angering her husband or his family. She is a Palestinian Muslim who last year took a step almost unheard of in her community. She declared herself a victim of domestic violence, secured an order of protection against her husband and filed for divorce.

Good for her!   Since we have been posting lately about the Palestinian refugees, I am wondering how this Palestinian family came to be in the US.  I don’t see any statistics at the Office or Refugee Resettlement database to indicate we are taking Palestinian refugees, yet.

Brian Mosely, Shelbyville reporter, receives award for Somali series

Congratulations to Brian Mosely who took a lot of heat this past December for his hardhitting investigative report on the Somali refugee inlux to this small Tennessee city.   

NASHVILLE — Times-Gazette staff writer Brian Mosely received the state’s top award for investigative reporting by The Associated Press Saturday night, highlighting a total of 18 awards won by the paper in the state’s two major press competitions held this weekend.

Mosely was honored with the Malcolm Law Memorial Award for Investigative Reporting for his five-part series published in December of last year chronicling the influx of Somali refugees to Bedford County.

The Law award for investigative reporting was established by the Tennessee Associated Press Managing Editors in 1973 to honor Malcolm Law, associate editor of The Jackson Sun, who died in December 1972. The award is recognized as one of the most prestigious awards given for journalistic accomplishment in Tennessee. 

Read the rest of the article here.

We followed this story at Refugee Resettlement Watch as it unfolded.   By just discussing the issue of the conflict between citizens of small towns and cities and the refugees from very foreign cultures, especially a culture that resists assimilation,  Mosely was accused of being a racist.       Mosely and his editor at the Times-Gazette must be feeling some sense of having been vindicated by receiving such an important journalistic prize.

Tomatoes, cucumbers and Sharia

This has only the most tenuous connection to refugee resettlement* but it is so funny and pointed that I have to post it. It’s called Stupidity and the Shari’a in Our Times, by Haider Ala Hamoudi, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. Hamoudi is a Muslim who thinks his fellow Muslim law professors do not deal correctly with the insane ways that Sharia is interpreted. His account of a conversation with a vegetable seller in Baghdad is priceless.

I felt I had to ask him about the alleged prohibition of salad.

“Yes, yes, he replied.” No cucumbers and tomatoes together. Even placing them side by side in these crates would have led at least to a whipping maybe death.

The seller tries to explain, and begins by asking the author what a tomato reminds him of:

“It looks like a tomato, that’s what leads me to conclude it is a tomato. If it looked like a horse, I’d say it was a horse. It does not. It looks like a tomato. It is a tomato.” I think I am making a philosophical point, maybe Hume or something, but it’s almost 120F outside and I don’t want to be dilly dallying asking about Al Qaeda. If the terrorists don’t get me, the police might. Hume can wait.

“Okay,” he relents, “what else might it resemble? Notice it is red, like a woman’s lipstick. It is soft and round. Get it? It reminds you of a woman’s flesh.”

“I see,” I said. But I thought, man do you need a wife if you look at a tomato and think that.Then he picked up the cucumber and was about to ask me what I thought it looked like, when I cut him off. That one I could follow better. If a tomato was a woman, I could well assume what a cucumber was.

 So the idea is that it reminds people of sex, it’s the mixing of the man and the woman, the cucumber and the tomato, and unlawful sex at that, and so they forbade it.”

Hamoudi is a practical kind of guy, so he looks for a legal solution:

 Finally, a thought occurred to me. I asked “what if you married the two of them?”

“What?”

“If I married the cucumber and the tomato and made them lawful partners, would that be okay? Then it’s lawful sex,” I said. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation.

“I thought you were a professor. How can a cucumber and a tomato get married? They’re vegetables,” he replied. And with this sound logic, the conversation soon ended. 

There’s more. His main point is that most Islamic law scholars look at things like this and say that’s not Islamic law, so they don’t deal with it. But they need to, because it is law as practiced by Muslims.

(*The tenuous connection with refugees is that many Muslims practice some weird things that may not be official Sharia, but nonetheless are terribly damaging to societies and individuals, and do we want to bring those practices here? Female genital mutilation is the most notable example.)

Italy tackles the Muslim polygamy problem—will we be next?

Thanks to some very brave Muslim women, Italy is now beginning to face up to the problem of polygamy among Muslim immigrants.    Everytime I see an article like this one in the Los Angeles Times which has this lead-in: 

A boom in the illegal marriages is a byproduct of voluminous immigration by Muslims. Authorities largely ignore the unions, leaving the women in a murky world with no recourse when things go wrong.

I am reminded that we are seeing the advance warnings for us— the United States.  Already there are stories of such abuses of women among refugee communities here.  See our previous posts on polygamy.

Also, I’ll bet some of those so-called family members, sisters(?), that have been found to not be related to the applicant through DNA testing are actually extra wives (or would-be wives) the refugee wants to bring to the US through the family reunification program.

Refugees International: Bring the Iraqi Palestinians here now!

Refugees International an NGO (Non-governmental organization) that lobbies to bring more refugees to America is taking up the cause of Iraqi Palestinians caught at the border of Iraq.   The reason these Iraqi Palestinians were fleeing Iraq, according to a Brookings Institution report, is that they were favored by Saddam Hussein and he encouraged their residence in Iraq.  When Saddam met his fate, they fled their homes in an attempt to escape irate Iraqis who had been persecuted by Saddam’s regime.  In other words, it was payback, so don’t let them make you feel guilty, they were not fleeing American military action.

Recently a plan has developed to send 3000 of these Palestinian Iraqi refugees to Sudan—a decision which has really ticked off Refugees International and their ilk.   Bring them here they say: 

Approximately 34,000 stateless Palestinians have lived in Iraq since 2003. Since the beginning of U.S. military operations in Iraq, many suffered persecution at the hands of the Iraqi government and other armed groups. More than 3,000 fled to the Syrian-Iraqi border, where they live in makeshift tents in the desert with limited access to basic services. Syria refuses to allow them to enter its territory and only a few have been resettled, mostly to Sweden and Chile. Failure to act on the part of the U.S. government and other resettlement countries led UNHCR to sign a tripartite agreement with the PLO and the Government of Sudan that called for the relocation of this population to a neighborhood of Khartoum.

“We must not allow this vulnerable population to be used as pawns in a greater political game,” said Younes. “The U.S. government should acknowledge the vulnerability of this stateless population and resettle them here. It is appalling that Sudan, a country infamous for its violations of international humanitarian law, has stepped in to protect these people when the U.S. would not.”

To resettle this vulnerable population expeditiously, Refugees International urged the U.S. State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration to create a special category to process refugee applications. Any process should be held without prejudice to the Palestinians’ right to return to their homeland.

Note that the PLO has been involved in this.  I would like to know why rich Arab countries like Saudi Arabia can’t begin to resettle Muslim refugees into their Muslim country.  Or why won’t Muslim Jordan and Syria let them in?

If we take any (we probably will) lets make sure, as Judy suggested the other day, that they go to cities like Berkeley, CA!  What the heck, put all 34,000 in a city that loves the Palestinian cause.  Maybe the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society could get the government contract to do the resettling.

Muslim immigrants and homeschooling

I’m cleaning out my in-box containing links to all sorts of articles I missed over many previous months.  It takes a while because I’m finding all sorts of things I missed and am now reading!   Sorry to any reader who wrote to us and didn’t get a response—my in-box is a mess! 

Here is a blog report from way back in June that distracted me from my cleaning.  Homeschooling has been a part of our family for many years, so I especially found this enlightening and had been wondering just when Muslim immigrants and refugees would find the home schooling option in America.  I guess they have.

Referring to a New York Times article on Muslim homeschooling, blogger Martin Gaither comments:

In his article, MacFarquhar focuses mostly on Muslim immigrants in Lodi, California. The area is home to about 2,500 Muslims, 80 percent of whom are “interrelated” Pakistani villagers trying to “recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home.” One way of doing this is to shield their girls from American culture, especially once they hit puberty. Of the 90 South Asian girls in the district, 38 are homeschooled (in contrast to only 7 of the 107 boys).

MacFarquhar interviews two of the homeschooled girls and finds that they are being kept home so they will be able to “cook and clean” for their “male relatives” and also to avoid being shunned by others in the community. One of the students remarked, “Some men don’t like it when you wear American clothes - they don’t think it’s a good thing for girls.” Eventually, the girls are “married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.”

Read the whole post here.  He goes on to pose the question about Muslim home schooling becoming a way to avoid assimilation but also to raise jihadis.

I’m wondering, where did all the Pakistanis come from?   I just checked the databases and the Refugee Resettlement Program has only admitted less than 100 Pakistanis in recent years.  I would like to know through which immigration program they are entering the US.

Homeowner exonerated in Kentucky refugee shooting

Here is the latest chapter in the story of the shooting death of a Bosnian teen, from a refugee family resettled in Kentucky.   We reported in April that the 15-year-old was shot while attempting to break into the home of Jeff Maquire.  Maguire shot the boy in the head after being awakened by the sound of breaking glass.  Hat tip: Pogo.

From the Bowling Green Daily News:

A Warren County grand jury decided Wednesday that a Bowling Green man was justified in shooting a 15-year-old boy who was apparently attempting to break into his home.

Eros Berisaj, 15, was fatally shot in the head at about 5:11 p.m. April 3 at 525 Creekwood Court by the homeowner, Jeff McGuire. The case was presented to the grand jury, which issued a “no true bill,” declining to charge McGuire. 

Looks like the teen picked the wrong house (in the wrong state) to rob. 

Kentucky law allows a homeowner to use lethal force to stop someone from committing a burglary, robbery or any other felony utilizing force at his or her home. McGuire also had a permit to carry a concealed weapon in Kentucky. 

The police report had this to say about the teen: 

Berisaj was considered a suspect in several burglaries in the same area where the shooting occurred, according to the report. People interviewed during the investigation also indicated there were at least two other people who could have been with Berisaj when he was shot, according to police records. There had been another burglary at McGuire’s residence several months before the shooting; McGuire had also told neighbors about someone peeking into windows before the burglary.

Other neighbors told police about suspicious activity in their neighborhood in the weeks before the shooting.

The investigation indicates that Berisaj might have been working with someone older who would identify a house to break into, and then Berisaj would actually steal items such as laptop computers and other electronics, according to the investigation.

The witnesses stated that Berisaj would brag about the burglaries in school, according to the report.

During the original 911 call from Maguire he told dispatchers he needed to move out of Bowling Green, presumably a reference to the increased crime in this immigrant “welcoming” city.

In the wake of Clinton’s Bosnian War we resettled over 100,000 Muslim refugees from Bosnia.