Herlig humor:
Norway’s ‘Beloved’ Terrorist Heads Back to Iraq
January 9, 2012 – Bruce Bawer
How time flies! It seems only yesterday that we folks in Norway first heard the name Mullah Krekar. The sometime leader of Ansar al-Islam — which narrow-minded individuals insist on calling a terrorist organization, but which I prefer to think of as a heavily armed, Koran-toting Iraqi version of Rotary or the Knights of Columbus — the charismatic Krekar has long since become every (well, not quite every) Norwegian’s lovable grandpa. Now, after many years in Norway, he has announced that he will soon be leaving us and returning to Iraq, where he will continue to pursue the task to which he has consecrated his life: that of serving his God.
And oh, how many ways there are to serve God! Ansar al-Islam, according to the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, has “burned down girls’ schools and beaten and killed women for not wearing the burqa.” Human Rights Watch notes that under its previous name, Jund al-Islam, Krekar’s industrious associates took over villages in which they required, among other things, “the obligatory closure of offices and businesses during prayer time and enforced attendance by workers and proprietors at the mosque during those times; the veiling of women by wearing the traditional ‘abaya; obligatory beards for men; segregation of the sexes; barring women from education and employment; the removal of any photographs of women on packaged goods brought into the region; the confiscation of musical instruments and the banning of music both in public and private; and the banning of satellite receivers and televisions.” The Lord’s work never ends!
Mere HER hos AINA. Kan også læses her i FrontPageMagazine.
Norwegian Schools Preach the Wonders of Niqab
January 10, 2012 – Bruce Bawer
The news came three days before Christmas:
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has announced that the Department of Defense will now allow Muslim and Sikh students participating in Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) to wear headscarves and turbans while in uniform.
When I read this, the first thing I thought was: What?! And the second was: Since when does CAIR make announcements on behalf of the Department of Defense?
The background was as follows: a Muslim girl in Tennessee was told by her JROTC commanding officer that she could not wear her headscarf, or hijab, in a homecoming parade. She contacted CAIR, which in turn contacted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, asking for a change in policy. And instead of informing CAIR that the Department of Defense does not take its marching orders from fronts for terrorist organizations, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army Larry Stubblefield fell right into line, writing a letter to CAIR assuring that henceforth JROTC policy would be different.
Mere HER hos AINA. Kan også læses her i FrontPageMagazine.
A Thumbs-Up for Gender Apartheid in Sweden
January 18, 2012 – Bruce Bawer
The other day I wrote about a young Muslim woman in Norway who wears a niqab — a veil that covers everything except the eyes — and who’s busy these days giving talks at Norwegian schools about her religion and her choice of outerwear.
Now, just across the border in Sweden, that country’s version of the Department of Education, which is called Skolverket (and which in English labels itself the Swedish National Agency for Education), has sent down a ruling about the role of niqab in Swedish schools. This ruling is a response to new legislation as well as to a decision by Sweden’s Discrimination Ombudsman, which in turn came in response to a complaint by an adult student in Stockholm who cried prejudice a couple of years back when she was told to take off her niqab in class.
Skolverket’s decision, interestingly, has been represented by the Swedish media in different ways — indeed, in two more or less antithetical ways. On the one hand, Dagbladet begins its report as follows: “Students’ right to wear veils in schools has long been a hot question. Now Skolverket has ruled that full-covering veils may be forbidden in certain situations.” Dagbladet goes on to quote Skolverket’s guidelines to the effect that niqab can be banned in lab or shop classes, in which there may be safety issues, or when the niqab “significantly impedes the interaction between teachers and students.” Skolverket leaves it up to teachers to decide when there’s a problem.
Mere HER hos AINA. Kan også læses her i FrontPageMagazine.
‘Urinegate’ Spurs Anti-American Hysterics
by Bruce Bawer on Jan 17th, 2012
Anti-Americanism is, of course, as European as Apfelstrudel. But over the last few years it’s rollercoastered like the stock market. The invasion of Iraq sent it skyrocketing. It was muted somewhat by the election of a black man as President of the United States. (That Americans, whom Europeans are taught to think of as incurable racists, had done such a thing rendered some veteran America-bashers temporarily mute.) But European anti-Americanism has never entirely gone away, and the troubles America has been through of late have been the occasion for much Schadenfreude, especially given that they’ve provided a pleasant distraction from Europe’s own even more formidable problems.
Still, it wasn’t until I ran across an article the other day in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet that I realized European anti-Americanism, thanks to Urinegate, is once again in full bloom. The article, written by somebody named Asbjørn Svarstad, begins by noting that the American soldiers who filmed themselves urinating on dead Taliban members may not be the first GIs to have behaved in such a manner. “American commandos who were dropped over Snåsa [in northern Norway] toward the end of World War II,” writes Asbjørn Svarstad, “are suspected of having displayed the same kind of contempt for their enemies.”
Mere HER i FrontPageMagazine.
Last July Matthew Kaminski opined in the Wall Street Journal that the transition to democracy in the Middle East would be as easy as it was for the democracies that emerged after the fall of the Soviet empire. Alas, this was predictably not so and has now been proven, as vote after vote has shown, the strength of the Islamists, most particularly in Egypt, where they have won some 70 percent of the ballot. With his article on January 3, “Arab Democracy Is the Best Bet for a Muslim Reformation“, Kaminski continues in this vein of false optimism, based upon his propensity to project Western conceptions and norms onto the Islamic world, where they are largely irrelevant.
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