In this mailing:
- Guy Millière: France: Slouching Toward Totalitarianism
- Nonie Darwish: Faked Outrage in the Middle East
- Irfan Al-Alawi: FGM Debate Continues in Muslim Lands
France: Slouching Toward Totalitarianism
by Guy Millière
July 18, 2013 at 5:00 am
July 18, 2013 at 5:00 am
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A
"blacklist" of writers and analysts who are never to be invited on a
television or radio talk show is circulated. The "fachosphère" cover
of Le Nouvel Observateur looked like a poster of photos of wanted
criminals. Those on the cover were not only all those who still dare to
criticize Islam, of course, but also this who dare to support Israel, those who
turn a critical eye on the Obama presidency and those who cast doubt on the
viability of the euro.
As expected, the Paris Court of Appeals declared Philippe Karsenty guilty of
defamation against journalist Charles Enderlin and public television station
France 2. The evidence accumulated by experts and specialists, showing that the
al Dura video report was a hoax and that the young Mohamed al Dura had not been
killed by Israeli soldiers and, in fact, had not be killed at all, were totally
ignored.The Israeli government report explaining the same thing -- and adding that the al Dura video report was an anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic blood libel -- was also completely ignored.
If justice in France were independent from the government, another result could have been possible; but justice in France is strictly dependent on the government, and when an "official truth" has been set, judges do what they are asked to do.
In this video still
from Charles Enderlin's infamous video footage, young Mohamed al-Dura lifts
up his hand and peeks out, after having already been reported as shot dead.
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The al Dura case and the conviction of Philippe Karsenty are further evidence that France is not a free country and is dangerously slouching toward totalitarian behaviors.
Year after year, French justice becomes increasingly a means of imposing a monolithic vision of the world. More and more laws revise historical events, and historians who challenge the revisions take risks in doing so. Laws originally implemented to "fight against racism" are now used instead to prohibit the statement of obvious facts. Today, for example, in France, although slavery is considered a crime against humanity, the enormous slave trade in Africa and the Arab world is excluded from the definition; even speaking about it may lead to harsh accusations. This is what happened to Professor Olivier Pétré-Grenouillau in 2004 in response to his book, From Slave Trade to Empire. Columnist Eric Zemmour was accused of inciting racial hatred and, in 2011, sentenced to a heavy fine for having reported a fact: that the number of Muslim offenders was particularly high in French prisons.
Another columnist, Ivan Rioufol, is now being prosecuted for having criticized a poster released by a French Islamic movement, "Collective Against Islamophobia". The poster states, "We are the nation," and shows only veiled women and bearded men, which Rioufol denounced publicly by saying that the French nation is also composed of non-Muslims. He will stand trial soon for this "offense".
Another journalist, Robert Menard, former General Secretary of Reporters Without Borders was recently dismissed by all his employers for having said that, "in some cases, one could understand that people are in favor of the death penalty."
Even more recently, a television reporter, Clement Weil Raynal, was heavily penalized for having released a picture taken on the premises of the main trade union of French judges: the very leftist Syndicat de la Magistrature. The picture shows a huge bulletin board, labeled the "Wall of Scumbags," complete with hostile graffiti against the main political leaders of the French right. The list of all available examples would quickly become very long.
French mainstream media are now a means of imposing a vision of the world which is exactly the same as that imposed by French justice; and all those who work for dailies, magazines, radio and TV stations know what they risk if they open their mouths and seem to think differently. A "blacklist" of writers and analysts who are never to be invited on a television or radio talk show is circulated. Articles giving names are published. A few months ago, a weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, released a map showing what the editors called the "fachosphère" (the fascist sphere). The map appeared on the cover, and looked like a poster showing photos of wanted criminals. Those on the map were all those who still dare to criticize Islam, of course, but also those who still support Israel, those who turn a critical eye on the Obama presidency, and those who cast doubt on the viability of the euro.
All this is clearly and loudly endorsed and encouraged by the present political leaders of the country, who happen to be socialists.
The judiciary in France is dependent upon the government, but the same could be said about the media. Three of the six main French television channels are public channels. Other channels belong essentially to companies that rely on government contracts (public works or defense industry corporations). Newspapers and magazines depend on advertising, and more than thirty percent of their advertising revenue comes from the government or from companies that rely on government contracts.
Aside from the al Dura case and the outrageous conviction of Philippe Karsenty, there is another loathsome case that is particularly significant of what is happening in France. The French Department of Culture owns and operates many of the country's museums and subsidizes many exhibitions. More than ever, the exhibitions it subsidizes belong to the domain of propaganda: "art" is now , more than ever, an excuse to spread a falsified view of history or to incite hatred. An exhibition currently held at the Musée du Jeu de Paume is a step in this direction: it is a photographic display of the worship of "martyrs" in Palestinian families (the word "martyr" is used in the explanatory notes placed under the photos). The "martyrs" in question are all terrorists who perpetrated suicide bombings and killed Israeli civilians. The exhibition's catalog describe them as bold "resistance fighters" who fought the "colonialist occupation" and who "sacrificed their lives" for "freedom." The "artist" is a "Palestinian" woman, Ahlam Shibli.
The exhibition could move to a gallery in Gaza, and Hamas would find nothing wrong with it. It is a clear glorification of terrorism and murder. In a grotesque example of Orwellian moral inversion, the exhibition depicts murderers as victims, and victims as criminals who deserved to die. The potentially negative effect on impressionable French Muslim visitors is easy to deduce.
The main French Jewish organizations have alerted the French Department of Culture; they have said that at least a warning should be placed at the entrance of the exhibition, explaining that the "martyrs" killed innocents.
The Department of Culture answered that Ahlam Shibli was a "recognized artist," and that her work could not be "censored". Jewish organizations then called for a peaceful protest on Sunday, July 7, in front of the museum; the protest was banned by the police. French Islamic and "pro-Palestinian" movements had said they might "act" if the protest occurred. They did not have to "act." Not only did the French media unanimously praise the "artistic" work of Ahlam Shibli, but complaints were filed against the Jewish organizations who called for a protest. Why ? The Jewish organizations were accused of "inciting hatred".
In today's France, the government subsidizes photo exhibitions that glorify terrorism and incite hatred, but if you voice the truth, not only might you charged, convicted, and fined for "inciting hatred" in a court of law, but if you are threatened by Islamic and "pro-Palestinian" movements, your right to assemble in a peaceful protest will be denied.
Related Topics: France
| Guy Millière
Faked Outrage in the Middle East
by Nonie Darwish
July 18, 2013 at 4:00 am
July 18, 2013 at 4:00 am
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In the
West, expressions such as "racist," or in Muslim countries
"apostate," are intended to silence citizens and keep them muzzled.
In Muslim countries, the objective is to keep people under the control of
Islamic law through government enforcement. In America, a whole new generation
would rather defend terrorists and criminals than be called
"racists."
Having spent most of my life in the Middle East, I am sensitive to
recognizing artificially-induced, exhibitionistic, whipped-up outrage --
"shaming fits" -- forced upon ordinary people by "the
system.""Shaming," as in, "Have you no shame?" and frequently mentioned in communications among Muslims, is not looked down on, but lifted up as, for example, a fine way of raising children. It is a point of pride to promote a hatred that has been officially designated by officials or the society. Children are "shamed," for example, if they want to befriend Christians or Jews – it would be, in America, something like having your child say he wants to befriend people in some horrendous cult. The Arabic words muayra or khajal come close – but the phenomenon is not really about words; it is about a huge, entire force in a culture.
Every society creates its own taboos: sacred cows in the form of politically correct expressions pressed upon people to encourage them to shrink and cringe whenever certain words are mentioned, and to render whatever or whomever is pointed out as disgusting as an example of what could happen to anyone who dares to "cross the line" of what is considered "correct" in each country In the West, expressions such as "racist," or in the Muslim world expressions such as "apostate" can do the trick: these words are intended to silence citizens, keep them muzzled, and keep them beaten down.
The Muslim world is at the top of the list of cultures that have perfected the art of using this cultural tool in the Middle East, and apparently elsewhere, to stop people from thinking so they will not be able to evolve beyond the officially-provided baggage of group-think.
In Muslim countries, the sacred cow objective -- that for which, above all, "shaming" must be used -- is to keep people under the control of Islamic law through government enforcement, and to prevent any change in that regard. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that Islamic law dictates that the number one job of the Muslim head of state is "to preserve Islam in its original form and never accept any novelty."
The tool of shaming and artificially-induced outrage is nothing new in American politics, either, but its use by the current administration, especially in the Martin/Zimmerman case, has taken America to a new low.
Running out of true racism cases, the current administration had to find a fresh, fake, governmentally-induced outrage to divert attention from its scandals -- similarly to what Islamists do when they call their opponents "apostates." Desperate to change the subject, an administration engulfed in scandals apparently decided it would be politically convenient to distract the public with anything, even the poorest case that only resembles racism, concerning a man who has the opposite of any discernible history of it, and as sometimes sadly happens, a case that, even under scrutiny, lacked any evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The Department of Justice, in the oldest trick in the book, even sent down storm troopers under the guise of "keeping the peace" to rally for the prosecution and whip up racial hatred before a fair trial could even begin.
This is the same unjustified outrage that, in the Benghazi scandal, the current administration consciously created over the video "Innocence of Muslims," which, for weeks, it falsely kept alleging caused the murder of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other brave Americans, while knowing all this time that the information they were purveying was not true.
As in many Muslim cultures, the current administration has perfected the technique of shaming to try to claim moral superiority, as well as to close down free speech (the filmmaker is still the only person from those attacks who is in prison).
Attorney General Eric Holder, who describes America as a "nation of cowards," continues his "outrage" over the Martin/Zimmerman case, even though Zimmerman has been found not guilty. It appears that the U.S. Attorney General would like to keep prosecuting a man who has been found not guilty until a court comes up with the answer he wants -- never mind whether or not it is true. That this man might spend a fortune in court costs trying to defend himself against a government that has unlimited funds -- not to speak of serving years in jail for an alleged crime for which there was no evidence -- does not seem to bother him in the slightest.
There are people, it seems, who are determined from time to time to rub America's nose to the ground to keep alive the profitable business of race politics. It is embarrassing and difficult to see these people using every deceitful shaming-tool in the book to preserve their politically useful accusations of racism for the sake of winning elections and probably also "revenge."
Similarly, as with the artificially-whipped-up Palestinian problem in the Muslim world, compared to other problems there, the race problem in America must be perpetuated and kept alive for the sake of covering up bankrupt agendas, resistance to change and lazy thinking. Also, as with the Palestinian problem, those who cannot to be honest about their real intentions most likely do not even want to resolve America's race saga. It does not matter to these race-baiters that slavery in the U.S. was abolished 150 years ago so that no one now could have been involved in it. Their job, as they possibly see it, is to make sure that their "past due" bill never runs out. They also do not seem overly concerned that massive slavery continues to exist outside the U.S., as in Mauritania, perhaps because they see neither a political nor economic pay-off for themselves from that.
And now America, its government media and educational system, have all become experts in the culture of artificially-inducing racial outrage, "shaming," to manage the direction of where the U.S. is heading, at the expense of helping to move America beyond the color of someone's skin. The "shaming" words have now, in the U.S., become so effective, that a whole new generation of young Americans would rather defend terrorists and criminals than be called "racists" or "bigots."
We also have TV anchors and hosts who are behaving on camera like obedient children who get outraged over nonsense -- and seem happy to stay in a state of outrage and use it to exercise power over others to get what they want. They have been trained to defy the scientific obligation to look at matters objectively in exchange for what they have come to believe is the "greater good": protecting the power of the media over government, instead of even pretending actually to report.
The American psyche -- its innocence and respect for free thinking -- have been greatly harmed by the growing culture of name-calling, intimidation and posed politically-correct outrage.
Perhaps the collapse of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, which landed the Egyptian people in the hands of a religious autocracy, stands as a symbol of what can happen to a people who fall victim to the tyranny of group-think that can form a stranglehold on an entire culture.
Just like the dreaded word "apostate," in the Muslim world, the word "racist" in the West has become an insult to the intelligence of the majority of people who would rather discuss difficult or controversial issues as opposed to having attempts to discuss them shut down. Muslims throw the term "apostate" at each other all the time, and occasionally just as an all-purpose way of having someone dispose of a personal adversary. Reasonable people are offended by the wanton use of the word "racist" in America and the use of the word "apostate" in Muslim countries. These highly charged words are nothing but repressive and tyrannical; they should be taken out of our everyday vocabulary and reserved for the real cases of man-on-man abuse.
Nonie Darwish is the author of "The Devil We Don't Know".
Related Topics: Nonie Darwish
FGM Debate Continues in Muslim Lands
by Irfan Al-Alawi
July 18, 2013 at 3:00 am
July 18, 2013 at 3:00 am
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The
Al-Azhar authorities stated in 1997 that cutting female sexual organs -- even
partially -- has no foundation in Islam, is medically harmful, and should not
be carried out. "Everyone pretends like it never happened."
While overshadowed apparently by the general civil conflict over the Muslim
Brotherhood (MB) regime in Egypt, the spreading problem of female genital
mutilation (FGM) has recently shaken the land of the Nile.Yet the mass upsurge against the tyrannical fundamentalism of the MB is related, however obscurely, to the protests against FGM.
Late in June, British media reported that Suhair Al-Ba'ta, an Egyptian girl aged 13, died during an FGM "operation." She reportedly perished from blood loss while subjected to FGM in a village north of Cairo. The latest terrible "death by FGM" of a girl in early adolescence provoked widespread outrage at the practice. Disregarding public opinion, representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), defended FGM as "Islamic."
FGM has been illegal in Egypt since 2007, after the death in an anesthesia overdose during the mutilation of a 12-year-old girl, Budour Ahmad Shaker. The Egyptian government previously attempted to suppress FGM in 1996, and to reinforce the injunction against it in 1997. Egyptian officials affirmed in 1997 that FGM was not justified by Islam, and were supported in condemning it by scholars from the Al-Azhar Supreme Council of Islamic Research, based in Al-Azhar, the preeminent university in Sunni Islam. The Al-Azhar authorities stated that cutting female sexual organs -- even partially-- has no foundation in Islam, is medically harmful, and should not be carried out.
Dr. Naglaa El-Adly, research director for Egypt's National Council for Women, has argued that the Muslim Brotherhood used its influence to prevent enforcement of the laws against FGM. Dr. El-Adly, like other experts, asserts that FGM is an ancient pagan custom in the region, with no basis in Islam. She noted the existence of the problem among Egyptian Christians, and has called on media and religious leaders "to tell people it is not related to Islam or Christianity."
The Muslim Brotherhood is joined, in defending FGM, by other male Islamist Egyptian leaders. Yusef Al-Badri, one of the country's most prominent Wahhabi preachers, has defined FGM as "ordered by shariah [religious law] from Allah," and has petitioned the Egyptian courts to abolish the anti-FGM law. In February 2013, the Egyptian High Constitutional Court rejected an attempt to annul the ban on FGM.
Al-Badri's retrograde views extend beyond FGM. At the beginning of 2012, as reported by the Egypt Independent newspaper, Al-Badri called for the establishment of an Egyptian ministry to "promote virtue" through "morals patrols" in Egypt's public places. The proposal for the introduction of "morals patrols" in Egypt came while Saudi Arabian King Abdullah had begun curbing the powers of comparable "religious police" -- a misnomer, as they have no police training.
The governments of Iran and Sudan also maintain "morals patrols," which have appeared locally and ephemerally in Indonesia and other Muslim countries.
Late in 2011, Al-Badri obtained the imprisonment of the Egyptian women journalists Fatma Al-Zahraa and Sally Hasan of the daily Al-Fajr [Morning] for, according to his allegations, violating his privacy and defaming him. Al-Zahraa was sentenced to a month in prison and Hasan to two months, for publishing an account in 2009 of Al-Badri charging a fee of about $57, at then-current exchange rates, for a fatwa [religious opinion] delivered during a "guidance session" in his home. Demanding payment for religious opinions is illegitimate in Islam. Both journalists have further been barred from work for three years.
In other countries -- including African states with Christian and animist majorities or pluralities, as well as among Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants in Europe and elsewhere -- the primitive practice of FGM continues, regardless of law. Given a religious cover, FGM may be accepted unquestioningly by mothers who impose this barbaric act of abuse on their daughters.
As in Egypt, FGM is officially prohibited in the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Still, enforcement of laws against it requires continuous effort and involves vociferous theological controversy. Some Kurdish clerics have called for such an atrocity to be eradicated, while others defend it.
At the end of May, the London Independent interviewed the Iraqi Kurdish woman poet Awezan Nuri, 31, vice president of the Pana Centre to Defend Women's Rights, which, as part of its general mission, combats FGM. Nuri described how she escaped mutilation because her father prevented her mother from submitting Awezan Nuri and her five sisters to genital cutting. Nevertheless, Nuri, at the age of 16, was forced into marriage to her 18-year old cousin, who hit her repeatedly. When she fled to her parents' home, she was beaten by her father, who insisted she return to her husband. She did so, but after her father died, she obtained a divorce.
Awezan Nuri grew up in Kirkuk, a city outside the KRG, and divided mainly among Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmens. There, the Pana Centre estimates that 38% of the local women have suffered FGM, with the number rising to 65% among Kurds in the region.
The Kirkuk Provincial Council, denying the local frequency of FGM, has rejected these figures. In March 2013 the local English-language newspaper, Kirkuk Now, published a shocking interview with a well-known local "practitioner" of FGM, Pura Gullstan, now in her mid-60s. Gullstan stated, "I perform female genital mutilation on women daily, in all the age groups; I performed FGM on a 25-year-old woman last week."
Kirkuk Now pointed out that the frequency with which Gullstan claimed to implement FGM suggests that the rate with which the savage custom is forced on young woman may be higher than that charged by the Pana Centre. "I am the saviour of the honour of women and girls," Gullstan declared. "Some of the women and girls hate me as I perform FGM on them, but as their pain fades away, or they get older, they begin to praise me."
Iraqi Kurdistan also resembles Egypt in that FGM is not limited to Muslim women. According to Kirkuk Now, "other ethnicities as well as religious groups prefer female genital mutilation."
The Pana Centre has appealed to the Iraqi central government in Baghdad for a national regulation against FGM.
Egypt and Iraqi Kurdistan are not alone in the widening protests against FGM. Writing in the Pakistan daily Tribune, Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam in February 2013 relayed her interview with a local woman who protested plaintively, "I don't want my daughter to have to go through it. I have been through it; my mom has been through it and so has my naani (grandmother). We have been going through this forever. It's a custom -- the done thing, but I can't imagine my baby having to go through the same! I am 34 and I still remember it distinctly. I felt humiliated even as a seven-year-old. [M]ost of all I feel resentment -- even today -- over the fact that we never talked about it before or after that. Everyone pretends like it never happened."
According to Moazzam, FGM "is practiced by a few communities along the Iran-Balochistan border, and a few isolated tribes, as well as the Dawoodi Bohra community." Dawoodi Bohras are a group of about a million Shia Muslims worldwide, with a strong sectarian bent. Moazzam writes, "Female genital mutilation is one of the best kept secrets."
As women's advocates have contended, the initiative to eliminate this inhumane procedure belongs, above all, with religious leaders. Muslim scholars and clerics must act with one voice to do away with FGM, a stain on all communities in which it is found.
Related Topics: Irfan Al-Alawi
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