London Protest: Christians Persecuted in Pakistan Demand Equality

Saturday 2nd March I attended in London the protest against discrimination and persecution of Pakistani Christians.

Organized by the British Pakistani Christian Association, it included the presentation of a petition both to London's Pakistani Embassy and to the British Prime Minister's residence in 10 Downing Street. Several religious figures and human rights campaigners were speakers at the demonstration.

A Peace Rally and Memorial Concert in Trafalgar Square followed, in memory of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Roman Catholic man who was Pakistan's first Minister for Minorities Affairs from 2008 until Muslim extremists assassinated him in 2011 for his work to abolish the country's blasphemy law which has been used to persecute faith minorities. He was the only Christian in the government.

Minister Bhatti had received repeated death threats for his consistent defence of the rights of Pakistan's religious minorities and for his fight for the abolition of Pakistan’s shameful blasphemy laws, which mandate the death sentence for anyone thought to have spoken ill of Muhammad or to have in any way offended Muslim sensitivities: the standard of accepted evidence is very low, and intent or lack of it is not a consideration in passing the sentence.

Two months before the assassination of Bhatti, another man campaigning for the same cause, Provincial Governor Salman Taseer, had been killed by his own bodyguard, who for his crime was welcomed as a hero by many Pakistani Muslims.

Saturday's event, like a similar one in 2012, commemorated the anniversary of Shahbaz Bhatti's assassination on 2 March 2011 outside his home in Islamabad.

Constantly Pakistani Christians are killed for their faith, or other atrocities are committed against them, like the rape of a Christian 2-year-old girl because her father refused to convert to Islam.

The situation of Christians in Pakistan is dire. Recently a Christian 19-year-old boy, Mard-e-Khuda, living in the Bahawalpur district, was barbarically killed on the false accusation of having an affair with a Muslim girl.

"20 million Christians in Pakistan are treated as second class citizens and denied justice in Pakistan by Islamic governments which never feel ashamed to release Muslim criminals and terrorists" said Dr. Nazir S Bhatti, who has been been campaigning for equal rights for Christian people in Pakistan since 1985 and is President of the Pakistan Christian Congress (PCC). He had to flee Pakistan for his safety and now lives in the USA.

While in his country Nazir Bhatti was arrested many times. The government of Pakistan registered 21 false cases of treason and blasphemy against him on February 13 1998, for leading a protest against the burning of the Christian village Shanti Nagar in Punjab by radical Muslims.

The reality of Christian victimization and persecution in this Muslim-majority country is so horrific that I suggested that the international community, particularly the British Commonwealth of which it is part, should give Pakistan the South African treatment and treat it like a pariah until it repeals its blasphemy laws and protects its religious minorities.

As usual, last Christmas was a dark Christmas for Pakistani Christians, and, amid growing fear of persecution and rampant economic and social discrimination in Pakistan, the year 2012 was one of the worst years for them.

Raymond Ibrahim, in his monthly report of Muslim Persecution of Christians throughout the world for December, writes about Pakistan:

Birgitta Almby, a 70-year-old Bible school teacher from Sweden, was shot by two men in front of her home; she died soon after. She had served in Pakistan for 38 years. Police said they could not find the assassins and could not unearth a motive, although Christians close to her have no doubt "Islamic extremists" murdered the elderly woman: "Who else would want to murder someone as apolitical and harmless as Almby, who had dedicated her life to serving humanity?" That service may have included sharing the Gospel with Muslims, an act strictly forbidden in Islam.

Other recent Muslim atrocities against Christians are listed on Jihad Watch.

The list of horrors could continue, but I'm sure that those who do not want to look away and pretend it does not happen have now got the message.

On a positive note, March 2nd has now been proposed as the Annual World Day against Christianophobia, with a petition to the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for the recognition of a World Day against “Christianophobia”.

I would have probably preferred "against the persecution of Christians" to another "phobia", but it is true that the latter includes other forms of attack against Christianity, like the ones coming from the Western "progressives" as well as from communist regimes or the 1,400-year-old cult of Islam.

Female Genital Mutilation Is an Islamic Practice

Another macroscopic, gigantic example of media cover-up regarding the reality of Islam.

The London Evening Standard yesterday carried an article, London’s challenge to stop girls’ mutilation, in which it managed never to mention the words "Islam" or "Muslim" once in the entire piece while discussing FGM, female genital mutilation, the removal of part or all of the external female genitalia (vulva) to prevent sexual pleasure.

The dhimmi newspaper Independent (from reason and reality), which in past articles by Robert Fisk, a journalist personally recommended by Osama Bin Laden as a messenger of al Qaeda's propaganda, has shamefully demonized the Egyptian and Syrian Christians for not supporting the Islamist "revolutions" which for them spell persecution, has gone even further.

For this British rag's columnist Sadaf Qureshi, FGM, far from having an Islamic dimension, does not even have a cultural one: to believe it has, one can safely assume, she would probably consider a sign of racism.

For her "Female genital mutilation (FGM) isn’t just something that’s carried out in the deepest, darkest recesses of the globe. It's a UK problem too." I wonder in what mysterious ways it became a UK problem.

The most interesting part of that article is outside the article, in this illuminating comment:

Of the 31 countries with a proportion of Muslims greater than 90% of their population, the following 15 appear on the list of countries where FGM is prevalent. Afghanistan Iran Mauritania Yemen Tajikistan Iraq Turkey Somalia Niger Comoros Algeria Palestinian territories Saudi Arabia Djibouti Libya Pakistan Senegal Gambia Egypt Syria Bangladesh. Of the next 12 with between 70% and 80%, a further 8 are on the FGM list: Bangladesh Indonesia Oman Guinea Qatar United Arab Emirates Sierra Leone Sudan. There are only 53 countries on the FGM list.

That the practice of FGM pre-dates Islam is true but irrelevant. Islam has perpetuated and continues to perpetuate through its teachings this savagery, that Christianity never ever condoned. In fact, in many African countries like Kenya and Tanzania Christians are actively campaigning against it.

The mutilations carried out in London today do not have a "cultural" origin, as the Standard falsely says, but an Islamic one, brought as they have been into this city which did not know them before by Muslim immigrants, now settled here in great and increasing numbers.

As Jamie Glazov points out:

Naturally Muslims are not the only ones who perpetrate FGM. Of course, FGM is practised outside of Islam, including under non-Islamic African tribal cultures. I never said anywhere that FGM is only practised by Muslims. But the key issue here is that Muslims are the principle religious group that practices this sexual violence against women. And the reality is that if you are a victim of FGM, then the chances are very high that you live in a Muslim household and in a Muslim culture.

Now within the context of Islamic FGM, the barbarity is kept alive and legitimized by Islamic theology. This is the case in Egypt, where this crime against girls is waged on a massive level. The Egyptian government banned FGM in 1996, but an Egyptian court overturned the ban in July 1997 because of the ferocious uprising of the Islamic clerics, who fervently pointed to Islamic teachings to re-implement this war against women’s sexuality. The Muslim mutilators pointed to traditional Islamic teachings that sanction FGM, which include the Prophet Muhammad’s instruction that circumcising girls is “a preservation of honor for women.” Also, a legal manual of the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, ‘Umdat al-Salik, which is endorsed by Al-Azhar University of Cairo — the oldest and most prestigious university in the Islamic world — states that circumcision is obligatory for both boys and girls.

Here is the whole quotation from the text mentioned by Glazov, The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law ‘Umdat al-Salik by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri:

Circumcision is obligatory (for every male and female) by cutting off the piece of skin on the glans of the penis of the male, but circumcision of the female is by cutting out the clitoris (this is called HufaaD).

Recently, the largest Muslim organization of Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, defended FGM as a "human right".

Nonie Darwish's book about Sharia law Cruel and Usual Punishment (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) says:

In Indonesia, the practice had previously been unknown before Shafi'i Islam was introduced into South-East Asia. The claim that female circumcision is not a religious practice doesn't hold up.

While many say there is nothing in Islam requiring female circumcision, one of Sunni Islam's 'Four Great Imams', Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (from whom the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence takes its name) quotes Mohammed as saying, "Circumcision is a law for men and a preservation of honour for women".

The practice of FGM, moreover, is perfectly aligned to the whole message of Islam with its subjugation of women. So, linking the two has a much deeper significance than associating, for example, as the media disproportionately and misleadingy do, Catholic priesthood and homosexuality or paedophilia, as both of the latter are antinomic to Catholic teachings.

It is abominable that Islamic apologists and their leftist allies continue to try to exculpate Islam with assertions like: Muhammed was not a paedophile because in those days it was ordinary practice to marry prepubescent girls, or: FGM is not Islam's fault because it is "cultural". And all this nonsense is daily repeated by the media: no wonder the resistance against Islamization makes such a slow progress in Europe.

UK: Indoctrinate Them When They Are 3-years-old

In the highly politically correct UK, school children as young as 3 have been branded "homophobic" or "racist".

In 2010, an astonishing 100 primary school pupils a day on average were reported to local authorities for such "offences" as calling each other “gaylord”, "gay", "lesbian", or saying: “This work’s gay”.

A survey in England and Wales concluded that more than 20,000 nursery and primary school children, aged 3-11, were racist or homophobic.

It is basically a mini totalitarian education system, in which toddlers and children are put on record, registered on a government database, and their future careers potentially damaged, for so-called "hate crimes".

These reports, which include the child's name, a description of the incident and the punishment, can be used by the police and social services, and can remain on a child’s record into secondary school or even into later life, effectively labelling the child.

And if schools are asked for a pupil reference by a future employer or a university, the record could be used as the basis for it, meaning the pettiest of incidents has the potential to blight a child for life...

Heads who send in ‘nil’ returns are criticised for ‘under-reporting’.

Between 2002 and 2009, 280,000 incidents were reported.

"The policy is no longer being carried out after the coalition government changed guidance to allow schools to use their own judgment."

This is one of the many abominations for which we have to thank the Macpherson inquiry, ordered by Labour, to look into the police failure to apprehend those who in 1993 killed black teenager Stephen Lawrence in South London.

In 1999 the inquiry concluded that the Metropolitan Police investigation had been deeply flawed and that the police were guilty of “institutional racism”. The Macpherson Report contained pearls like this: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person", opening the door to any abuse of the term.

In addition, it called for “education and example at the youngest age, and an overall attitude of ‘zero-tolerance’” to free society of racist attitudes.

So, British schools were required by the Labour government's Department for Education and Skills to investigate, log and report every alleged racist incident in the playground, even among very young children, and figures started to be compiled from 2002. Since, by Macpherson diktat, "racism" in the United Kingdom now means anything "perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person", it's not surprising that the number of these incidents have snowballed. And, for good measure, other forms of political incorrectness, like "homophobia", have been thrown in.

The Department for Education said in 2006 that school staff must always “explore” the “possibility of a racist dimension” to an incident, because the Macpherson Report claimed that there could be “unwitting or unintentional racism”. Jokes, graffiti, comments made in classroom discussions: all was fair game. Anyone could report these incidents, even if the alleged victim was not offended.

France Will Be 40 Percent Muslim in 2030

The quotation below is liberally translated from the French from Muslim Immigration to France. You Won't Be Able to Say You didn't Know.

I didn't write it, only translated it, so I cannot provide sources for the data or indeed how they have been arrived at.

Although it's true that France is prohibited by law from collecting official statistics about its citizens' race or religion, it's possible to make estimates based on studies calculating the number of people in France originating from Muslim-majority countries.

Nevertheless, I think that the precise figures should be of less concern than what will become of France and indeed what is already happening there. There is no doubt that France is becoming progressively Islamised, and Muslims only need to be a 10-20 percent of a country's population (even less) to try to turn it into a sharia state, as it's evident by just looking at a map of the world.

Does this piece want to alarm people? Yes, it does.

In 1968 the French population was 49.7 million people. Muslims in France were 610,000 or 1.23% of the population.

In 1988 the French population was 56 million. Muslims in France were 2,000,000 or 3.6% of the population.

In 2009 the French population was 67 million. Muslims in France were 8,000,000 or 11.94%.

These are official figures, which are likely to underestimate the real number of Muslims.

France's Muslim population has been multiplying by at least 3.5 every 20 years since 1968.

If this growth is not stopped or reversed, in 2030 the French population is projected to be 70 million people, of whom 28 million will be Muslim, or 40% of the French population.

Therefore, at the current rate of immigration, in just 17 years nearly one in two people living in France will be Muslim. This is shocking for a country that has no Islamic tradition and had no Arab population as late as 1930.

So what will the situation in France look like 20 years from now, since Islam is a conquering religion that rejects any coexistence with other religions?

Anti-white Racism Growing in France

In France, cases of anti-white racism have recently started being tried in court, with anti-white racism as an aggravating circumstance, following the pattern of other cases of racism.

That happened when a young man at the Paris Station Gare du Nord was attacked with a knife without apparent reason by three men shouting "dirty French" and "gawerer" ("dirty white" in Arabic). Witnesses heard the insults.

In Toulouse, Houria Bouteldja, the spokeswoman for a movement representing immigrants from France's former colonies, went on trial for insulting white French and was charged with "racial injury":

Bouteldja, of the movement Indigenes of the Republic, called native white French "souchiens" in a TV interview. The word derives from "souche," or stock, as native white French are commonly called, but could sound like a hyphenated word meaning "lower than a dog."

A study from the French government's statistical agency INED has brought to light that 18% of French "indigenes" (who are neither immigrants nor the children of immigrants) have been the target of racist insults, remarks or attitudes.

Politician Jean-François Copé, who wants to succeed ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy at the head of France’s main right-wing party, has written a book, excerpts from which were published in Le Figaro newspaper.

In the book he says that more and more inhabitants of Meaux, the town of which he is mayor, complain of being victims of anti-white racism. He writes:

An ‘anti-white racism’ is developing in neighbourhoods of our towns where individuals – some of whom have French nationality – express contempt for French people, calling them ‘Gaulois’, on the basis that they are not of the same religion, the same skin colour or the same origins as them.

Despite the predictable protests against the book by the Left, even the Socialist Party's spokesperson Najat Vallaud-Belkacem had mentioned “anti-white racism” in her book Raison de plus!.

“Copé can’t make his mind up whether to be the spitting image of Sarkozy or the parrot of Marine Le Pen,” tweeted the newly appointed leader of the Socialist Party, Harlem Désir, who started his political career at the head of the anti-racism campaign SOS-racisme.

It is worth mentioning that Harlem Désir, the first black to lead a major European political party, has a criminal conviction, having "served 18 months in prison for fraud related to an immigrants rights group he was with".

The “anti-white racism” is manifested according to Copé “by the fact that there are areas where it is not good to be a woman, be white… some of our countrymen to flee the area where they live because they understand that they are not at home, it is unbearable,” he said.

More quote from Copé's book:

I hear more and more people complain of Meaux and this racism is as unacceptable as any other form of racism and we must denounce it as we condemn all other discrimination. I know I broke a taboo by using the term “anti-white” but I do deliberately, because it is the truth that some of our citizens live this way and silence exacerbates the trauma.

These phenomena are impossible to see from Paris, in the media and political spheres where the vast majority of officers are French of white skin born of French parents. In these microcosms, the lack of diversity limits the presence of people of color or of foreign origin. But let’s face it: the situation is reversed in many parts of our suburbs.

Of course, if you decide by diktat that only whites can be racist, as ex-London-mayor Ken Livingstone's former senior advisor on race policy Lee Jasper did, then the problem is solved, right? Or, more likely, enouncing this statement is in itself another sign of anti-white racism.

If you consider that Lee Jasper is currently also co-chairman of Black Activists Rising Against the Cuts, chair of the London Race & Criminal Justice Consortium, political adviser to the 1990 Trust and board member of Lambeth Police Consultative Group, no less, you start getting an idea of why anti-white racism is on the rise in the UK as well, and indeed throughout the West.

Moderate Muslims and Nicolai Sennels

The excellent psychological and sociological essay linked to below is by the Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels, who has worked with many Muslims and non-Muslims of similar age and socio-economic background in a Danish prison, making his - quite unique in this field - a scientific study of the experimental group, young Muslims, for the presence of a control group in which the only different variable is the one under study.

This and other writings by the same author gave me a lot of inspiration and food for thought.

Nobody so far seems to have devoted much attention to this subject: not so much what Islam is, or the Koran says, or Mohammed did, or the history of the Muslim world past and present, as what individual Muslims' psychological makeup is (in this case Muslims living in Europe).

It is very interesting for many many reasons, one of which is this: it breaks apart the distinction between Islam as a doctrine - something abstract - and the concrete reality of Muslim persons.

This in turn dissolves, or at least greatly dilutes, another distinction, which may be real but is also puzzling: that between the intransigence, intolerance, violence and criminality found in both the teachings of Islam and at least some - though we do not really know how many and what proportion of the Muslim population in every country they are - Muslims on one hand, and the so-called "moderate" Muslims on the other.

To be honest, I find this concept, "moderate Muslims", very unclear and imprecise, more prone to raise questions than capable of answering them.

What do we mean by that?

These are the possibilities:

a) Muslims who are not involved in violence. Obviously there will be many of them, particularly in the West where they are still a minority. But does it change anything? No population in history has ever gone to war with another en masse (it would be impossible biologically, because it would lead to the self-destruction of that population): it's always a minority, an avant-guard, that engages in actual combat. Britain during WWII did not take the approach that it was not at war with Germany because there were many "moderate Germans" who were not taking direct part in the military conflict. And German, as well as Italian, nationals were interned in camps, whether they were peaceful and even opposed to the war or not. We may keep saying that we are not at war with Islam, but it matters not one iota because Islam is at war with us.
A further problem with this definition is that it is too vague and general: is it enough for a person not to act violently and criminally to be considered "moderate"? No, this is not the common definition of the word, because the term is applied in reference to opinions and attitudes, not just behaviour.

b) Muslims who are opposed to the use of violence in the name of Islam by their correligionaries. Here the number of individuals covered by this definition will start decreasing from definition a, but how much we don't know. There aren't enough opinion polls among, say, British Muslims to give a full picture, although those that exist are not very promising, showing high percentages of them approving of Islamic violence.
This seems perfectly consistent with what we see every day. For example, although Muslims are amply represented in demonstrations of various types (against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, against Salman Rushdie, Mohammed cartoons, Bush, Blair, and other examples), we have never seen a Muslim demonstration against Islamic violence, against Al Qaeda, Bin Laden and so on.
Furthermore, there are too many nuances and needs for refinement to the definition. Individual Muslims may approve of some episodes of Islamist violence but not others. It is so complicated as to be useless as a definition.
And again, the fundamental problem raised in "a" applies here too: is this the same definition of the term "moderate" that we use for non-Muslims? No, a "radical" or "extremist" could be opposed to violence and still be considered such if he holds views at the extreme poles of the political or cultural spectrums.
So, why should we make an exception for Muslims? In respect for their "cultural identities", because we recognize that what for us is extreme and radical, anything but moderate, for them is the norm? But this is exactly the problem from which we started, the reason why coexistence is difficult if not almost impossible.
Saying that some - or even many - Muslims are "moderate" because the radical views they hold are the norm for their culture and religion is simply answering the question with the same question, it means getting stuck in a vicious circle.
The problem is exactly that: that we need to use the word "moderate" with a different meaning when applied to individual Muslims because they are not moderate at all by the general definition of the word.

This essay by Nicolai Sennels seems to confirm my suspicions. This concept is an artefact of the appeasers, the Chamberlains in our midst (no shortage of them, especially in the Left). The differences between Muslim mindset - cultural and sociological, and therefore psychological - and Western one are real and profound.

What Sennels says in relation to solutions and to the wishful thinking of Westerners about hopes of "integration" is also particularly important and illuminating. What Westerners do - or at least have done so far - reminds me of what they call "battered wife syndrome". Wives regularly beaten by their husbands or partners apparently continue in the relationship without leaving their men thinking that these will change.

As psychologists and wise people know, human beings do not change just because somebody else desires them to change.

People only change due to an internal motivation which, as Sennels very eloquently and descriptively shows, overwhelmingly is lacking in Muslims living in Europe.

And, if someone wants his circumstances or the people in his life to change, what he must do is take the initiative, change himself first, and the rest will change as a consequence. In the case of a battered woman, for instance, becoming aware of her problem and leaving her abusive partner could likely lead to a better relationship.

Western countries and societies are acting in relation to Muslims in their midst in perfect analogy with the battered wife with her husband.

They anxiously and hopefully wait for Muslims to "change", in this case to integrate (and become good, much less troublesome British, or Danish etc citizens).

What they should instead do is start from themselves, look at the mistakes they have made - since all evidence, as this Danish psychologist says and we already know, points in the opposite direction of integration, with each immigrant generation being more radicalized, violent and criminal than the previous - and begin making changes to "their" own views, attitudes and policies regarding the Muslim community, and only after that they will very likely see changes among the Muslims.

People like Ken Livingstone saying that London (and the UK) are good examples of integration must be deluded to the point of madness.

If several riots and bombs, and the facts that London is now a centre of international Muslim terrorism and a haven for criminal Islamists wanted all over the world, are not enough to show the idiocy of such a statement, just think of the police and security forces having to be in continuous alert over possible Islamic terrorist threats which, squandering precious resources, has now become the permanent condition and possibly the only reason why we have not had more bombings and attacks.

It is true that Sennels has studied young, imprisoned Muslim criminals, but through them he has had a unique insight into the European Muslim community in general.

Nicolai Sennels: Report from the therapy room: Why are Muslims more violent and criminal?

Rolling Stones Mock Pro-Palestinians and Honour Israel's 65th Birthday

I've always loved the Rolling Stones. Now I know why.

The Rolling Stones openly taunt pro-Palestinians.

Despite a barrage of attacks and even threats from European and American anti-Israeli groups, Mick and co. maintained their planned concert in Jerusalem for Israel's Independence Day on 15 April 2013.

Mick Jagger said that they received many criticisms and provocations, but that only made them resolve to have two concerts rather than one.

A pro-Palestinian activist retorted that this was a huge mistake by the Stones, and threatened that they would lose much money and fans, many of whom support the boycott of Israel.

When Jagger was asked if indeed this move could damage the Rolling Stones' image or career, he answered that he is not a businessman.

It is an important gesture because they are prepared to lose fans over this, and they are a role model to many. If many more people in the West had their courage or at least defiance for group-think, things would get better.

There have been accusations that the above picture has been photoshopped with the addition of the Israel flag, but the news remains true.