The left will mount the expected disinformation campaign to confuse people that “honour killings” are just a general part of violence against women, the cure for which is greater social intervention in private lives by police and the ‘caring’ professions, plus more social spending on the same client groups.

The appeal in the Shafia case will attempt to throw sand in everyone’s eyes in this regard, seeking to de-legitimate the analysis of honour killing.

Aisha Gill, in the Guardian, writes the following confused nonsense, which will be a template for the Left to avoid the issue of Islam:

“Yet, by focusing on the subject of honour, such violence is too often explained away by cultural stereotypes – allowing society to dismiss these cases as something that only happens in minority communities with their “outdated” notions of justice. This allows us to completely overlook that, first and foremost, these cases are of violence against women, and the concept of honour is being used to legitimate the continued oppression of women.”

The two ideas are perfectly consistent. We are completely aware that the vast majority of honour crimes are Muslim in origin, followed by Hindus enforcing caste sensitivities. This is not a “stereotype”; this is an observation of fact. And yes, we are completely aware that these murders are intended to control women and prevent them from marrying whom they love or choose.

She goes on:

There is a tendency in the west to see so-called honour killings as exclusively related to specific cultural traditions. [Yes, we do, because they are] They are often depicted as culturally specific to Muslim communities although they are not, in fact, restricted to any particular religion, culture, type of society or social stratum[The lack of restriction does not affect the fact that they are disproportionately committed by Muslims] In its report on harmful practices, for instance, the charity Imkaan reported a case of a Traveller woman forced to leave her community due to “honour-based violence”.

Now watch the sand being thrown in your eyes in what follows:

“Yet there is a widespread belief that honour is no longer as important in western societies, what with their emphasis on individual rights and legality. However, the modern-day importance of “honour” should not be so quickly cast aside. In the UK data from the British Crime Survey 2009/2010 suggests that nearly a million women experience at least one incident of domestic abuse each year, while close to 10,000 women are sexually assaulted every week – how many of these cases relate to the “honour” of the perpetrators being allegedly besmirched by victims and survivors?” [You do it too, you nasty white people!]

Merely by asking a fatuous question does not turn interpersonal violence, even male-female violence,  into a culturally approved tradition of killing daughters who consort with males in any way before marriage. Honour killing is the enforcement of the idea that the penalty for unchastity is gruesome death of the daughters, sisters, or other females relatives,even if the unchastity was involuntary, such as rape, especially incestuous rape. Further, these killings are approved by other female members of the family. The last honour killings in Western societies died out in the 1840s, and they were called duels, exclusively fought by successful males of equal rank in formalized contests of bravery.

Watch how  Aisha Gill’s specious analysis shifts the blame from tribalism and Islam to feminism in the following:

“Tackling “honour” killings requires a shift in political thinking. Instead of regarding them as a cultural tradition common to a range of “backward” societies, the issue needs to be seen in the context of violence against women and the inequality found throughout society.

Instead of soft-pedalling the Islamic, Hindu and tribal nature of the phenomenon, let us call it by its true name: barbarism. Why are we importing these people?

“The main lesson of the Arab Spring ought to be that this remaking of Islam has happened only in our own minds, for our own consumption. The Muslims of the Middle East take no note of our re-imagining of Islam, being, in the main, either hostile toward or oblivious to Western overtures. Muslims do not measure themselves against Western perceptions, although the shrewdest among them take note of our eagerly accommodating attitude when determining what tactics will best advance the cause.

That cause is nothing less than Islamic dominance.”

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former prosecuting attorney and he is  very clear on the concept of Islam.

The Telegraph reports: 

“He says he does not regret these actions. That is of course a message that is difficult to convey, but he is very clear on this point … He believes it was necessary,” Geir Lippestad told the TV2 News Channel.

For these reasons we are considered conservative when what we really oppose is authoritarian leftism, based on group rights, a movement which has appropriated the word “liberal” in the United States and Canada, and is nothing of the sort.

For others of a particular religious or political clarity, such as David Warren, Barrelstrengthians would be found wanting in doctrinal rigor, and quite likely fatally infected with Enlightenment ideas, such as rationalism, progressivism, or deism. (I don’t think so but we stand on guard)

To our brethren of schools even more extreme conservative than us, we say: peace. We have no quarrel with you, though you, by rights, may find us wanting in faith, clarity, or political rigor. There remains so much aggressive anti-Christian, anti-male, anti-white political thought and agitation out there that I have no time for intra-mural vilification. Even within the Blogging Tories list, it is very difficult to have a frank argument about race, say, when one side of that debate (namely that it is real, politically and statistically significant, and that genetics matters) is declared by the ideological gatekeeper as cause for expulsion.

So if you would like to venture into the deeper realms of rejection of modernity, there are a few blogs by men whose rejection starts at the Reformation, or the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and they are not kidding.

• Throne and Altar
• Stuff Black People Don’t Like
• View from the Right
• Steve Sailer 

Here are some examples of blogs taken to be conservative which are, in my view, simply dealing with matters from a liberal (meaning concerned with individual rights) commonsensical position. I am not intending to insult them for this reason. I agree with that perspective in many respects, and am not certain where I would disagree with it, or their authors.

• Steynonline
• Jihad Watch
• Vlad Tepes

In other words, you do not have to be a throne and altar conservative to oppose islamization or unsustainable public finances. You can simply say, as we do, that a great deal of what needs doing in modern North American society is to stop trying to engineer equality of outcomes, and to support reasonable limits on the power of the state to transform us in the name of silly nineteenth century ideas.

I would be interested in comments on the validity of this division among conservative blogs and in additions to the list of really out-there (but sane) conservative blogs. Which are your guilty pleasures?

The better source on this word jizya is Wikislam, which is much less politically correct.

Once a land is conquered by Islamic armies the ruler can impose a taxation on those non-Muslims who will not convert to Islam.

Jizyah is paid as a sign of submission and gives Dhimmis some legal protection in return. Under dhimmitude (the status that Islamic law, the Sharia, mandates for non-Muslims) Dhimmis usually are not allowed to carry arms to protect themselves, serve in the army or government, display symbols of their faith, build or repair places of worship etc. If the conquered do not wish to pay or convert, their fate may very well be slavery (under which, rape is permitted) or (as evidenced in the quotes above) death.

The amount of the Jizyah tax and the way it was collected varied from time to time and from place to place, but when imposed, the forced payment of Jizyah greatly stimulated the conversion of non-Muslims into Islam.[1] In some cases the taxation of the non-Muslims was so profitable that the Islamic rulers prohibited their subjects from converting to Islam, lest they should lose their income.

Secular humanists have trouble with evil in a different sense than Christians have trouble with evil. For the secularist God-abolishers, evil is not supposed to exist, and talking in those terms is suspect, like talking in terms of “humours” or other medieval claptrap. Evil is something which the progress of science is supposed to have abolished.

The Guardian has an interesting article from a Norwegian on the subject of Breivik which glimpses the truth and then retreats from it. The author sees the hatred which motivated Breivik as political in origin, but fails to draw the necessary conclusion that Breivik was sane. Locking him up, on whatever pretext, is the only answer. People so much agree on the necessity of putting him away that they close their minds to the possibility the man was entirely clear about his principles, willing to act on them, and knew the quality of his actions. Nazis were not insane. Breivik is not insane. Evil, but not insane.

The Guardian article writer says:

In fairness, Ford had a brain-freeze, while Kinsella stands unreservedly by such dissembling nonsense:

In the commendable decision to rule that a law against polygamy (strictly speaking polygyny) did not constitute an offence to Charter rights, the large obvious fact was missed, at least  in any coverage I have seen. My point is that, given the anti-male bias of contemporary society, the harm to men is not perceived, and if perceived, not thought worthy of mention.

Mr. Justice Bauman discussed the damage in terms of reduced male parental investment in children, and hence lower survival rates for children, higher rates of violent crime (from surplus men), exploitation of women and violence in the household, and the “lost-boy” effect, when male children reckon that they will never have a woman to love, so they leave the community.

If all of the society is polygynous, then there is no community which surplus males can leave except by emigration to another country which forbids polygyny. Fat chance of that for the Muslim world, and the 100 million surplus males of China and India.

And what do you do with 50 million surplus males, such as China or India have? The answer is obvious. You go to war. You have an inbuilt incentive to spend your surplus males on warfare, brigandage, and wife-gathering. And how do you gather a wife? You kill her husband, and take her home. Iran got rid of a huge surplus of its male population in the Iran-Iraq war(1980-1988), spending them as wastefully as they could. Half a million battle deaths resulted from the use of World War 1 tactics in that ill-fought conflict.

Among Mr. Justice Bauman’s many findings, these three struck me as closest to the theme of this article:

[785]     The sex ratio imbalance inherent in polygyny means that young men are forced out of polygamous communities to sustain the ability of senior men to accumulate more wives. These young men and boys often receive limited education as a result, and must navigate their way outside their communities with few life skills and little social support.

[786]     Another significant harm to children is their exposure to, and potential internalization of, harmful gender stereotypes.

[787]     Polygyny has negative impacts on society flowing from the high fertility rates, large family size and poverty associated with the practice. It generates a class of largely poor, unmarried men who are statistically predisposed to violence and other anti-social behaviour. Polygyny also institutionalizes gender inequality. Patriarchal hierarchy and authoritarian control are common features of polygynous communities.

The damage is done by “the internalization of harmful gender stereotypes” is minuscule compared to the evident unfairness of polygyny to most males. Multiple wives mean sons without effective fathering, and produces  a surplus- unwanted collection of surplus males available for war, and crime, and disinclined for useful work. Osama bin Laden was the result of such an upbringing.

Such is the political correctness of our times, and its anti-male bias, that the principal harm of polygyny is mentioned briefly in the decision, and rates nothing in the media treatment of the question.

But this week we read headlines which may be of fundamental importance. The second experiment has demonstrated that neutrinos have moved faster than light. If this proves to be true and not merely the artefact of the experiment or observational bias, then the foundations of physics have just taken a five megaton hit.

So what is staying the same this month?

Eurozone crisis - same, but worsening.

Islamic inability to behave democratically? – same, but the evidence keeps coming in, all of which is ignored in the MSM picture of the world.

[Man-caused] global warming hysteria – the nails keep being driven in to that coffin, but the zombie keeps escaping.

My apologies to readers – job pressures have kept me from blogging lately. Happy is the blogger with a day job.

The nature of Islam reveals itself to those who read books. It is neither pretty, nor is it liberal, nor is it compatible with any other religion on earth (let alone Christianity). It is as reasonable to call it a totalitarian political ideology as it is to call it a religion in the Christian sense of that term, or the Buddhist, or post-Enlightenment for that matter. You could also call it a theory of knowledge, a legal code, and a series of schools of jurisprudence. But what it is not, is a private belief about the nature of God, as we westerners understand religion.

The excerpt below is from the introduction to Section II, pp 88-91:

“The idea of a separate Indian Muslim state, once it had been formulated, couldn’t have been resisted. The idea was put forward in 1930 by a revered poet, Sir Mohammed Iqbal (1876-1938), in a speech to the All-Indian Muslim League, the main Muslim political organization in undivided India.

“Iqbal’s argument was like this. Islam is not only an ethical ideal; it is also “a certain kind of polity,” Religion for a Muslim is not a matter of private conscience or private practice, as Christianity can be for the man in Europe. There never was, Iqbal says, a specifically Christian polity; and in Europe after Luther the “universal ethics of Jesus” was “displaced by national systems of ethics and polity.” There cannot be a Luther in Islam because there is no Islamic church-order for a Muslim to revolt against. And there is also to be considered “the nature of the Holy Prophet’s religious experience, as disclosed in the Koran … It is individual experience creative of a social order.”

To accept Islam is to accept certain “legal concepts.” These concepts — revelatory, but not to be belittled for that reason — have “civic significance.” “The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.”

“Iqbal, in fact, is saying in a philosophical way that in an undivided India Islam will be in danger, will go the way of Christianity in Europe and cease to be itself. Muslims, to be true to Islam, need a Muslim polity, a Muslim state. The Muslims of India especially need such a state, Iqbal suggests; because “India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best.” And Iqbal’s solution was simple: the Muslim majority areas of northwest India should be detached and consolidated into a single Muslim state.

“Seventeen years later (and nine years after Iqbal’s death) it happened — and to the Muslim-majority northwest was added the Muslim majority eastern half of Bengal, a thousand miles away. But that Muslim state came with a communal holocaust on both sides of the new borders. Millions were killed and many millions more uprooted. And it was only afterwards that it became clear that that plan for the creation of Pakistan, apparently logical, meeting Muslim needs, had a simple, terrible flaw.

“Muslim passions were strongest among those Muslims who felt most threatened, and they were in that part of the subcontinent which was to remain Indian. Not all of those Muslims, not a half, not a quarter, could migrate to Pakistan. The most experienced Muslim political organizations were rooted in Indian India rather than in Pakistan. Indian Muslim politicians, campaigners for Pakistan, who went to Pakistan became men who overnight had lost their constituencies. They became men of dwindling appeal and reputation, men without a cause, and they were not willing to risk elections in what had turned out to be a strange country. Political life didn’t develop in the new state; institutions and administration remained as they were in British days.

“A special word began to be used in Pakistan for the migrants from India: mohajirs, foreigners. In the province of Sind, especially, where Karachi became a mohajir city, local resentment built up into separatist feeling.

“In the new state only the armed forces flourished. They were seen at first as the defenders, and possible extenders, of the Islamic state. Then it became apparent that they were the state’s only organized group. They became masters, a country within a country. […]

“The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith. The state had been founded as a homeland for Muslims. If the state failed, it wasn’t because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for. And in that quest for the Islamic absolute — the society of believers, where every action was instinct with worship — men lost sight of the political origins of their state. They forgot the secular ambitions of Mr. Jinnah, the state’s political founder, who (less philosophical than Iqbal) wanted only a state where Muslims wouldn’t be swamped by non-Muslims. Even Iqbal was laid aside. Extraordinary claims began to be made for Pakistan: it was founded as the land of the pure; it was to be the first truly Islamic state since the days of the Prophet and his close companions.”

Substitute Mohammed for Landru. The system can be ‘reformed’ only in the inimitable fashion of James T. Kirk.

The final quotation of Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey is prophetic:

“Democracy is a tram that brings us to the destination — and then we get out.”

“This is absolutely catastrophic.”

Gramscian versus Stalinist forms of Islam.

“A majority of Canadians believes conflict between Western nations and the Muslim world is “irreconcilable,” according to a new national survey that revealed a strong strain of pessimism in the country leading up to Sunday’s 10th anniversary commemorations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.”