A Stitch in Haste

Separated at birth?

Megalomaniacal villain with evil creation:


Megalomaniacal villain with evil creation:


Just saying...

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Meanwhile:

A top Iranian judiciary official has warned against the "destructive" cultural and social consequences of importing Barbie dolls and other Western toys.

Prosecutor General Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi said in an official letter to Vice President Parviz Davoudi that the Western toys was a "danger" that needed to be stopped.

Iranian markets have been inundated with smuggled Western toys in recent years partly due to a dramatic rise in purchasing power as a result of huge increase in oil revenues.

In Monday's letter, Najafabadi called for a crackdown on the smuggling of these toys which threatened Iranian culture.

No word yet on whether Iran will seek to -- wait for it -- "exterminate" toy Daleks.

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Some classic Doctor v. Davros:

The State Department has published its latest edition of the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices:

We take all of our human rights commitments seriously and, in our good faith efforts to meet those commitments, we value the vital role played by civil society and independent media. We do not consider views about our performance voiced by others in the international community to be interference in our internal affairs, nor should other governments regard expressions about their performance as such. Indeed, under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is the right and the responsibility of "every individual and every organ of society to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance."

Noble words that all too rarely translate into noble acts. This is the same administration, remember, that supported both repealing the First Amendment in the context of flag desecration and constitutionalizing second-class citizenship for gays.

In any case, I felt an urgent need to look up the report for Iran:

Violence and legal and societal discrimination against women, ethnic and religious minorities, and homosexuals; trafficking in persons; and incitement to anti-Semitism remained problems.
...
On August 6, the general prosecutor ordered to close the last major reformist daily Shargh. The ban placed on Shargh in September 2006 was lifted on May 14, but the paper was operational for less than three months before being closed again. The government reportedly closed the newspaper in response to a published interview with a writer accused of being a homosexual activist.
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In 2004 the judiciary formed the Special Protection Division, a volunteer unit that monitored and reported moral crimes. The law prohibited and punished homosexuality; sodomy between consenting adults was a capital crime. The punishment of a non-Muslim homosexual was harsher if the homosexual's partner was Muslim. At a speech at Columbia University in September, the president publicly denied the existence of homosexuals in the country.

Why the sense of urgency?

An Iranian homosexual man who has said he will be executed if he is deported from the Netherlands has had his claim for asylum overturned.

Mehdi Kazemi has said his life is in danger if he is returned to Iran, where he says his boyfriend named him as a partner before being executed. Homosexual acts are illegal in the Islamic republic.

A Dutch spokesman said Mr Kazemi would now be sent to the UK, the first European country he entered. A claim for asylum in the UK had already been turned down.
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Mr Kazemi, 19, said he had travelled to Britain in 2005 to study English, and learned that his lover in Iran had been executed for sodomy, his lawyer Borg Palm said.

After his asylum application was turned down, he fled to the Netherlands in 2006, having narrowly avoided being sent back to Iran.
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The Dutch are refusing to consider the case. Under the EU's 2003 Dublin Regulation, the state the applicant first enters is responsible for processing their application.

Surely it cannot be the case that some intra-EU bureaucratic quibbling could result in an innocent young man being sent to his death at the hands of "Religion of Peace" barbarians?


Aren't we relentlessly reminded how much more "enlightened" and "progressive" than us the Europeans are? Maybe they'd like a chance to prove it?

Right?

I tried to abstain from blogging about this:

The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK "seems unavoidable".

Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4's World at One that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.

I'm no fan of Williams or his hyper-bigoted Church of England. But the hysteria, both in England and the blogosphere, over this uncontroversial statement has been astounding.

Sharia law is a code crafted by barbarians for barbarians. Point conceded. But that doesn't mean that said barbarians, assuming that they are competent, consenting adults, shouldn't be allowed to mutually agree to have their private disputes resolved by such a code -- even in a non-barbarian country such as the United Kingdom.

The idea of members of an insular religious community agreeing to private arbitration, often by religious elders, is hardly new or radical. Certain Jewish sects do it. The Mormons did it in the days before Utah statehood. The Mennonites have made conflict resolution a central tenet of their faith.

Of course, the complicating factor for Muslims and Sharia is the notion of "competent consenting adults." Executing gays, stoning adulterers and lashing the victim of a gang rape are certainly not arrangements that are entered into voluntary; they are imposed by government force. And these are obviously not the kinds of "alternative legal principles" that the West should adopt or even tolerate.

A gay adolescent hanging from a noose is not a competent consenting adult. A Muslim woman (or worse, a Muslim child) conscripted into an arranged marriage (or, worse, de facto sex slavery masquerading as "marriage") is not a competent consenting adult and should not be re-condemned to relying on goatherder justice in a non-goatherder society (or anywhere else, of course).

But if, for example, two Muslim neighbors have a property squabble, or two Muslim business partners want to dissolve their enterprise, or two truly competent Muslim adults agree a priori to rely on a Sharia court to hear any future divorce litigation, then where exactly is the "abomination"? Why the calls demanding Williams' ouster for stating the obvious?

Sharia undoubtedly deserves damnation -- in certain contexts. This simply isn't one of them.

First it was strapping bombs to the bodies of children. Now it's strapping bombs to adults with the minds of children:

U.S. and Iraqi officials said Saturday that pictures showed the bombers had Down syndrome and likely did not know they were being used in Friday's attacks.
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"It appears the suicide bombers were not willing martyrs, they were used by al-Qaida for these horrific attacks," he said. "These two women were likely used because they didn't understand what was happening and they were less likely to be searched."

Behold the Religion of Peace. I wonder, in situtations like this, who gets the 72 virgins?

Meanwhile:

Police in Senegal have arrested several men following the publication of pictures claiming to depict a wedding ceremony between two men.
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Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country and gay men and women remain socially marginalised.

And Senegal is generally considered to be one of the "better" (i.e., less barbarian) Muslim countries in Africa. Go figure.

Even during the worst periods of failure in Iraq, at least the neoconservatives, along with the rest of us, could point to Afghanistan — the "legitimate" post 9/11 war — as a success story. The Taliban was deposed, a democratic government with a secular, Western-friendly leader was elected...

...and (almost) no government-imposed Sharia-inspired slaughter of journalists:

An Afghan court in northern Afghanistan sentenced a journalism student to death for blasphemy for distributing an article from the Internet that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, the judge in charge of the court said Wednesday.

The student, Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, who also works for a local newspaper, was charged with insulting Muhammad by calling the prophet "a killer and adulterer," the judge, Shamsurahman Muhmand, said in a telephone interview.

The sentence was denounced as unfair by Mr. Kambakhsh's family and journalists' organizations. Mr. Kambakhsh's brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, denied that his sibling had committed blasphemy, and said that his brother was not given enough time to prepare his defense and was denied a lawyer.
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The case is the third time that clerics have called for death for a blasphemer in the six years since the removal of the Taliban leadership and reflects the deep conservatism that prevails even under the more liberal government of President Hamid Karzai.

"Deep conservatism"? Is that what naked bloodlust by barbarian goatherders is called these days?

And remember: This is not just more "insult the prophet" nonsense. Plenty of regimes, including some Western democracies, have no problem censoring expression and criminalizing thought. Nothing new in that.

But here the goatherder-judges are (allegedly) also committing other Islam-as-usual crimes against humanity: trampling property rights, conducting authoritarian searches, denial the inherent right to present a defense and retain advocates. Even Canada doesn't go that far.

If we had kept our focus on Afghanistan as we should have, then perhaps these remote circles of hell could have been brought out of the Dark Ages. In the meantime, just list young Mr. Kambakhsh as "collateral damage" in the War on Terror.

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Speaking of "some Western democracies" —

A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned down by a government agency's awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims.

Of course, the fact that giving book awards is not a legitimate function of government is a topic for a different blogpost. For our purposes, the lesson is simply that children, in modern Western democracies, are being taught that the state should decide whose primitive beliefs and irrational feelings matter more than theirs as a matter of public policy. Class dismissed.

January may be Canada Month at Sunday CuteTuber™, but every day is Individual Rights Day at the rest of this blog:



Back story here; see also here. The rest of the "interrogation" here.

(Via Fusionist Libertarian.)

Technorati Tag: Ezra Lavant.

You read about the Muslim female who gets blown up (by other Muslims, of course).

You might not read about the Muslim female sold into slavery at age 11 (by other Muslims, of course):

He's forty, she's eleven. And they are a couple — the Afghan man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. "We needed the money", Ghulam's parents said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school. But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan's Ghor province know better: "Our men don't want educated women." They predict that Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children for Faiz.

It is true that there are other barbarian proto-cultures besides the Religion of Peace in which soulless parents sell their prepubescent daughters into slavery insolently cloaked as "marriage." Point conceded. But those other barbarians don't typically go around insisting that it is in fact Westerners who are the "infidels" and who must, when confronted with primitivism, either submit to it or die.

It's one thing to be a threat to the little girls in your backward, goat-herder village; it's another thing the threaten all the little girls in the world — with dynamite if not with slavery.


(Photo by Stephanie Sinclair.)

Socialized medicine is an inevitable disaster everywhere it's tried not just because it politicizes health care rationing, but also because it ends up politicizing everything else.

For example:

Overworked nurses have been ordered to stop their work five times a day — and move Muslim patients' beds to face towards Mecca.

The procedure is creating turmoil among staff on NHS wards already struggling through a lack of beds.
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One nurse at Dewsbury said: "It would be easier to create Muslim-only wards with every bed facing Mecca. Some people might think it is not that big a deal but we have a huge Muslim population in Dewsbury. If we are having to turn dozens of beds to face Mecca five times a day, plus provide running water for them to wash before and after prayers, it is bound to impact on the essential medical service we are supposed to be providing."

But socialized medicine is never really about "essential medical service we are supposed to be providing." It's about politicians and bureaucrats playing God — or Allah, as the case may be — not only with people's wallets but with their health and indeed their lives.

Another thought: If Muslims (the ones who don't go around blowing each other up in Iraq, that is) are so dedicated to their Religion of Peace, then couldn't they round up some faith-based candy-striper volunteers to accommodate their fellow Muslims' bizarre need to engage in primitive rituals? Compare:

But we also are keen to accommodate all faiths, for example if a patient is Roman Catholic then we would try and ensure they can receive Holy Communion.

Perhaps. (And eating a transubstantiated cracker is certainly no less bizarre a ritual than eating faith-based dirt from a certain direction five times daily.) But that of course doesn't mean turning nurses into priests — it only means allowing and perhaps facilitating access to priests. The difference is not a difficult concept, except to those who deliberately seek to make it difficult — such as Muslim intolerance-mongers and their health care socialist collaborators.

Nurses should be allowed to stick to nursing, or else what lingering claim can socialized medicine have to being a "better system for the allocation of scarce resources"? At some point that claim must cross from "unlikely" to "utter nonsense."

UPDATE: The NHS bureaucrats capitulated and scrapped the policy.

By now you have seen the reports concerning the arrest, by Sharia witch doctors, of a British schoolteacher in Sudan for committing the "religious crime" of insulting Mohammad:

Ms. Gibbons, 54, asked a 7-year-old girl to bring in a teddy bear and asked her classmates to pick a name for it.

"They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad," [the school's director] said.

When it came time to vote, 20 out of 23 children choose Muhammad, one of the most common names in the Muslim world.

The school

is known as one of the more expensive private schools in Khartoum. The students are the children of wealthy Sudanese families and foreign diplomats, a mix of mostly Muslims and Christians, and the lessons are in English.

So being wealthy, sitting next to Christians and being taught in English are not offenses to Islam, but naming a bear Muhammad is? Go figure.

In reality, the Sharia witch doctors just make this stuff up as they go along. When you're a backward Muslim in a backward nation, sometimes you just need to blast the West for -- well, for something. Just like you need to lash someone (preferably a woman) or hang someone (preferably a gay) -- every so often. (Ms. Gibbon indeed faces lashing, as well as imprisonment and fines, if convicted.) After all, if you don't brutalize an infidel every so often, then what's the point of even being a theocracy adhering to the Religion of Peace?

And when religious criminals are in short supply, they must be manufactured -- no different than any scarce commodity.

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The latest reports suggest that Sudan is caving to international pressure and likely to release the teacher. Let us hope so. And perhaps Westerners, even those with "humanitarian" motives, think twice about setting up shop in nests of brainless barbarism.

Two dispatches from the Religion of Peace:

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ITEM: The Palestinian Authority has deployed "Ramadan police" --

One recent afternoon, vice squad Lieutenant Murad Qendah got a radio call telling him a suspect was spotted in the street imbibing karoub -- a local soft drink made from carob pods. He ordered his six-man squad to seize the man's papers pending investigation. Police say violators are usually held for 24 hours.

"If anybody violates respect for Ramadan in the street, we take their identity papers and hold them for investigation," said Qendah, 27, whose officers wear red shoulder badges that say "morality police."
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"The duty of the morality police is to preserve public manners in public places and to preserve the feelings of the people who are fasting," he said. "Violating the holiness of Ramadan is a violation of people's freedom."

Read that jaw-dropping illogic again: Exercising one's freedom not to be a Muslim violates the rights of Muslims. Can there be a better example of why the term "democratic theocracy" is simultaneously scary and silly?


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ITEM: What's wrong with this story --

In a recent episode of Saudi Arabia's most popular television show airing during Ramadan this month, a Saudi man of the future is seen sitting in his house as his daughter pulls into the driveway, her kids piled into the back of the car.

"Where have you been?" the father asks.

"The kids were bored, so I took them to the movies," she replies, matter-of-factly, as she gets out of the driver's seat.

A) Women are forbidden to drive in Saudi Arabia.
B) Movie theaters are forbidden in Saudi Arabia.
C) Both.

If this scenario is indeed the Saudi Arabia of the future, then it will be despite, not because of, that backward nation's adherence to Islam, which -- like almost all organized religions -- is anti-modernity, anti-progress, anti-liberation and generally anti-life-on-this-earth.

Sickening:

The suicide bomber behind last week's attack at an Algerian naval barracks which killed 30 was a 15-year-old student, according to a statement from Al-Qaeda's self-styled offshoot quoted Monday.

Nabil Belkacemi, who carried out Saturday's blast at the port town of Dellys, 70 kilometres (45 miles) east of Algiers, had assumed the nom-de-guerre Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after a Jordanian Al-Qaeda leader killed by US forces in Iraq, the Al-Watan daily said, quoting the statement.
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"He spent the night in the mosque and then he disappeared," [his mother] told Al-Watan. "He called me on a cellphone and asked me not to worry and said he would be back soon. It was ten days before a critical school exam," she said.

But in another telephone call, he said: "Mother, I am scared, I don't know where I am. I would like to escape but I am scared they (the Islamists) will kill you. They told me that if I ever escaped, they would take it out on you.

So we have authoritarian Christians raping children and authoritarian Muslims blowing them up (and not for the first time). And about the only moral premise they seem to share is an insistence that homosexuality is a sin — oh, and a threat to children.

Madness. Sheer madness.

Another Sharia-shaman regime is at it again:

Iranian police have closed more than 20 barbers' shops in the capital Tehran.

The authorities say the barbers were encouraging un-Islamic behaviour by offering Western hairstyles, tattooing and also eyebrow-plucking for men.

Police say they have inspected more than 700 shops during a two-week crackdown in the city.

The move is part of an annual campaign against what is known locally as bad hijab, or un-Islamic clothing, that this year is also targeting men.

What can you say to these barbarian goatherders -- except: "Pluck you!"

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On the other hand.