Jay Reding.com

Ayaan Hersi Ali, one of the bravest and most important writers today has an excellent but chilling piece on how multiculturalism is hurting the victims of abuse among European Muslim communities:

The biggest obstacle that hinders Muslim women from leading dignified, free lives is violence–physical, mental, and sexual–committed by their close families. Here is only a sample of some of the violence perpetrated on girls and women from Islamic cultures:

• Four-year-old girls have their genitals mutilated: some of them so badly that they die of infections; others are traumatised for life from the experience and will later suffer recurrent infections of their reproductive and urinary systems.
• Teenage girls are removed from school by force and kept inside the house to stop their schooling, stifle their thinking and suffocate their will.
• Victims of incest and sexual abuse are beaten, deported or killed to prevent them from filing complaints.
• Some pregnant victims of incest or abuse are forced by their fathers, older brothers, or uncles to have abortions in order to keep the family honour from being stained. In this era of DNA testing, the girls could demonstrate that they have been abused. Yet instead of punishing the abusers, the family treats the daughter as if she had dishonoured the family.
• Girls and women who protest their maltreatment are beaten by their parents in order to kill their spirits and reduce them to a lifelong servitude that amounts to slavery.
• Many girls and women who can’t bear to suffer any more take their own lives or develop numerous kinds of psychological ailments, including nervous breakdown and psychosis. They are literally driven mad.
• A Muslim girl in Europe runs more risk than girls of other faiths of being forced into marriage by her parents with a stranger. In such a marriage — which, since it is forced, by definition starts with rape — she conceives child after child. She is an enslaved womb. Many of her children will grow up in a household with parents who are neither bound by love nor interested in the wellbeing of their children. The daughters will go through life as subjugated as their mothers and the sons become — in Europe — dropouts from school, attracted to pastimes that can vary from loitering in the streets to drug abuse to radical Islamic fundamentalism.

Ms. Ali is quite correct in pointing out that if young Muslim women in Europe spend every day being treated as little more than chattel, then the European Union is refusing to uphold their own standards and is betraying the very concept of human rights. Throughout Europe, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of young female Muslims are being stripped of even the most basic human rights — and the authorities seem to have little interest in interfering with this slavery. Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered in the streets of Amsterdam for daring to expose this system of brutalization and oppression.

If Europe is to live up to its civilized values, if it is to show that it truly cares about human rights, it must not allow these inhuman practices to continue. Islam does not give anyone the ability to abuse the human rights of another. The governments of Europe have shown dangerously little wherewithal in trying to fight those who would live in Europe but not share in the most basic of Europe’s values.

It is one thing to deny one religious expression; but when that religious expression involves harming the innate human rights of another, all claims to freedom of expression end. Yet Europe’s commitment to its values is simply too weak to allow them to speak out.

As Ms. Ali continues:

European policy-makers have not yet understood the huge potential of liberating Muslim women. They are squandering the single best opportunity they have to make Muslim integration a success within one generation. Morally, governments need to eradicate violence against women in Europe. This would make clear to fundamentalists that Europeans take their constitutions seriously. Now, most abusers simply think that Western rhetoric about the equality of men and women is cowardly and hypocritical, since Western governments tolerate the abuse of millions of Muslim women when they’re told it’s in the name of freedom of religion.

Europe has already surrendered much of its territory to a system of values which is incompatible with human rights. If we truly believe that violence against women is always unacceptable, if we believe that young Muslim women deserve a chance to have an education and choose the course of their own lives, then we must join with Ms. Ali’s courageous call. The fact is that if we are not willing to enforce the values of equality and freedom, then we are hypocrites, and those values will surely be eroded away into nothingness.

Pejman Yousefzadeh notes that analysts are predicting significant drops in gas prices over the next few months as supplies increase and consumption grows at a rate that is slower than expected.

Gasoline tends to be an inelastic commodity, but a year of high prices do have an effect on people’s willingness and ability to reduce fuel usage. With the airlines being socked with even more restrictive security requirements, their fuel usage is down as well as more flights are cancelled due to security and fewer passengers. The end of summer means less driving and an end to some federal regulations demanding more expensive fuel blends.

Politically, there seems to be some correlation between gas prices and Presidential approval. That’s understandable, as gasoline prices are the most singularly visible sign of he economy’s overall health, and have a rather significant effect on the pocketbooks of American voters. A decrease in gas prices may ease some pressure on the GOP majority which is taking some of the blame for the increase in prices.

Will this be enough to have a significant effect on the election? It’s quite possible, although midterm elections tend to be more about local issues than national ones. However, the GOP needs all the help it can get, and if gas prices are closer to $2 than $3, voters will be less inclined to throw out incumbent politicians than they otherwise might be.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece on the history of the A.Q. Khan nuclear network that proliferated nuclear technologies from the West to Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and Libya (undoubtedly others as well). The A.Q. Khan network was responsible for making Pakistan a nuclear power under the nose of the IAEA and the Clinton Administration despite the fact that Pakistan barely has the industrial capacity to produce sewing needles, no less nuclear weapons.

It is an interesting consequence of history that the war in Iraq helped crack open the A.Q. Khan network. As pressure built up on Saddam Hussein to disarm, Libyan dictator Mohammar Qadafi was worried that he would be next. He had been in negotiations with the governments of the United States, Britain, and Italy to unilaterally disarm himself of his entire nuclear program — a transaction which began shortly before the fall of the Hussein regime and concluded shortly after Saddam Hussein was captured by US forces. The technology and documentation recovered was invaluable to stopping A.Q. Khan’s deadly network. Dr. Khan himself was arrested by the Pakistanis in February of 2004.

But there’s yet another twist to the story. One of the people who was responsible for getting to the bottom of the A.Q. Khan network’s attempt to procure uranium from Africa was none other than former Ambassador Joseph Wilson — the same man who was charged with that task in regards to Iraq three years later in 2001. Wilson said that he found no evidence that the Pakistanis were getting uranium from Africa — despite the fact that it is well documented that Dr. Khan visited the African states of Niger and Mali, both of whom are sources for uranium ore that can be processed into weapons grade material.

Wilson’s failure to uncover the truth in 1999 was repeated again in 2001 where he deliberately lied to The New York Times about finding no evidence that Iraq officials were pursuing African uranium when he himself reported that then-Iraq trade minister Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf had gone to Niger on a trade mission — and Niger’s chief export of interest to Iraq happens to be uranium.

The fact that the CIA continually dropped the ball when it comes to counterproliferation, just as they did on counterterrorism only shows how poor our intelligence capabilities were in the last few years. In a time when both al-Qaeda and nuclear proliferation were gathering threats on the horizon, the CIA failed to accurately assess the status of Pakistan’s nuclear program and the impact of the A.Q. Khan network. We should consider ourselves fortunate that the first sign of this tragic miscalculation wasn’t a terrorist-detonated nuclear weapon in a major American city.

CNN has a piece on President Bush and other Administration officials finally catching on to the term “Islamic fascism”. While CNN generally takes a negative stance on the use of that word, it is an accurate description of the enemy we fight.

Al-Qaeda belongs to an ideology that divides the world into Dar al-Harb (The House of War) and Dar al-Islam (The House of Islam). It holds that all those who do not follow their strict interpretation of Islam are practicing jahiliyya(paganism). They are either Salafists — believers that Islam must return to the austerity of the first Imams of the Muslim faith, or radical Shi’ites whose millennialist theories envision a great battle between the Muslim world and those who do not submit to the will of Allah.

The believe in one master group of people, the systematic oppression, the intolerance of dissent, and the reaching for an idealized past — all of those things are part of what it means to be a fascist. The term “Islamic fascist” is a perfectly accurate way of describing the enemy we fight. It’s what we should have called them in the first place. The war we fight isn’t against the tactic of terrorism, it is against a particular set of groups and nations with particular aims that are rooted in an Islamic world view.

The late Steven Vincent made it quite clear in one of his last interviews, a statement that is as accurate and as important as anything written about this war:

Words matter. Words convey moral clarity. Without moral clarity, we will not succeed in Iraq. That is why the terms the press uses to cover this conflict are so vital. For example, take the word “guerillas.” As you noted, mainstream media sources like the New York Times often use the terms “insurgents” or “guerillas” to describe the Sunni Triangle gunmen, as if these murderous thugs represented a traditional national liberation movement. But when the Times reports on similar groups of masked reactionary killers operating in Latin American countries, they utilize the phrase “paramilitary death squads.” Same murderers, different designations. Yet of the two, “insurgents”—and especially “guerillas”—has a claim on our sympathies that “paramilitaries” lacks. This is not semantics: imagine if the media routinely called the Sunni Triangle gunmen “right wing paramilitary death squads.” Not only would the description be more accurate, but it would offer the American public a clear idea of the enemy in Iraq. And that, in turn, would bolster public attitudes toward the war.

Via The Corner comes an interesting excerpt from an interview of a French documentary filmmaker who spend time interviewing the families of suicide bombers. His observed:

Q - How can we put an end to the madness of suicide bombings and terrorism in general?

A - Stop being politically correct and stop believing that this culture is a victim of ours. Radical Islamism today is nothing but a new form of Naziism. Nobody was trying to justify or excuse Hitler in the 1930s. We had to defeat him in order to make peace one day with the German people.

He is right. The evils of Islamic fascism are no less evil than those of the Third Reich — and sooner or later their capacity will grow to the point where they pose a similar threat. (Indeed, it could be argues that their lack of moral constraint makes them an even greater threat than the Third Reich was. Hitler never attacked the continental United States directly.) If we cannot even name this grave enemy, how can we possibly effectively combat it?

The official spokesperson for the Hamas government in Palestine has spoken out against the “stupid anarchy” of the Palestinian Authority:

Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas government’s official spokesman, said Palestinians had been “attacked by the bacteria of stupidity”.

“The anarchy, chaos, pointless murders, the plundering of lands, family feuds … what do all of these have to do with the occupation?” he asked in the opinion piece published in the Palestinian newspaper, al-Ayyam. “We have always been accustomed to pinning our failures on others, and conspiratorial thinking is still widespread among us.”

He was particularly scathing about the failure of the Palestinians to make a success of the Gaza Strip, the territory that Israel effectively surrendered a year ago.

“When you walk around in Gaza, you cannot help but avert your eyes from what you see: indescribable anarchy, policemen that nobody cares about, youth proudly carrying weapons. From time to time you hear that so-and-so was murdered in the middle of the night, and the response comes quickly the next morning. Large families carry weapons in tribal wars against other families.

As loathe as I am to offer any praise for a member of Hamas, Mr. Hamad is exactly right. The Palestinians have been living in a state of anarchy for years now. Hamas was elected in the hopes that someone other than the corrupt and weak Fatah Party could make things better, and Hamas has yet to do much to improve the lot of the average Palestinian.

The situation there is blamed on Israel — but the reality is that most of the Palestinian’s wounds are self-inflicted. Israel doesn’t create the political violence that is nearly a constant in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel doesn’t create the autocracy and corruption that keeps Palestinian government from functioning. It isn’t Israelis fault that money that could have gone to schools, roads, bridges, and other necessary pieces of social infrastructure went to killing innocent Israelis in cold blood. Yassir Arafat was one of the richest men in the world while his people starved in the streets. The Palestinians have been used as pawns by other Arab nations who see them as little more than a means to an end: and the Palestinians have played their part, allowing themselves to be so used.

One would hope that more people would join in Mr. Hamad’s call. Gaza was an opportunity to show that the Palestinians could create a functioning and livable state for themselves — instead, Gaza fell into anarchy and mob rule. The Palestinians will never find peace until they choose to advance themselves rather than try to destroy their neighbor. Israel cannot be blamed for all of the problems of the Palestinian people, and ultimately it is the choices that they will make that will determine whether Palestine remains a place of squalor or whether the Palestinian people throw off the shackles of ancient feuds and work to become part of the modern world.