Pussy Riot Are Not Supported by Ordinary Russians

These Pussy Riot women are definitely not political martyrs. The very fact that at first, advised by their lawyers, they even denied having been in the church during the concert shows that: if they were prepared to retract, what courageous political message can that be? In the UK The Times even took that denial seriously.

What will its position after thier admission, wonders in a post's comments Alexander Mercouris, who then adds and clarifies the legal case:

Also by admitting that an offence was committed the girls have confirmed that they are not adopting the defence adopted for them by Amnesty International and their western admirers that they were entitled to do what they did as an exercise of their right of free speech under Article 10(1) of the European Convention of Human Rights. Please note: any such defence of the girls you now read in the western media or on the part of assorted worthies such as Amnesty International, Sting, Madonna, Red Hot Chilli Peppers etc, is not being made by the girls themselves in their defence and never has been. They could not previously make this defence because up to now they were not admitting that they were present in the Cathedral so they could not claim a defence of free speech for actions they were not admitting they ever made. Now that they admit that they were present in the Cathedral the girls are also admitting that what they did was an offence albeit only an administrative offence. This is an admission that they were not entitled to do what they did so the defence that they were entitled to do what they did as an exercise of their right of free speech under Article 10(1) of the European Convention of Human Rights does not apply.

The only defence the girls are now making is the defence of proportionality, that the penalty prescribed under the charge of hooliganism is disproportionate to the offence committed. This is a valid defence and one to which Article 10(2) of the European Convention of Human Rights applies.

Where the defence is one of proportionality this creates the classic situation, as I have argued previously, for a plea bargain in which an admission of guilt and an apology is traded for a lower sentence. If the girls had made their admission and offered a sincere apology right at the start of this case we would have been spared all the nonsense of the last few months. The trial would by now long since be over, a lenient sentence could have been agreed and the girls would almost certainly by now be free.

There is no reason why the Court would not have agreed to impose a lenient sentence as part of a plea bargain. There are (or were) ample grounds for mitigation given that the girls are (1) young and inexperienced and therefore could argue that they did not fully understand the upset what they did would cause (2) have no previous history of serious criminal convictions (3) did not cause material damage (4) did not act for material gain (5) can validly argue that they did what they did because they were incensed by the Patriarch’s support for Putin in the election campaign and (6) because two of them are mothers with children. I understand that sentencing practice for the offensive of hooliganism is flexible so the Court has wide discretion as to the sort of sentence it can impose once it has taken the admission, apology and plea in mitigation into account.

The question is whether the outbreak of sanity we have seen this morning has come too late. The trial has now started and the apology offered is much less than fulsome and the mitigation has been seriously damaged by the arrogant and disruptive conduct of the defence up to now. Significantly there is no promise from the girls not to do the same thing again whilst a further bad sign is that the girls’ lawyers have renewed their pointless call for the Patriarch to give evidence at the trial. Since the Patriarch was not present in the Cathedral when the offence was committed he is not a witness and there is therefore no sense in calling him. I understand that the defence is also persisting in its foolish argument that the prosecution is somehow politically motivated, which makes no sense in the light of the admission made this morning and which can only further damage the girls’ mitigation and antagonise the Court.

Let us hope however that the admissions and comments made this morning do represent a sea change and a dawning realisation that the defence tactics adopted up to now whatever their political impact have been from a legal point of view disastrously counterproductive. In that case it is just possible even now that a line may be drawn under the whole affair. I am not holding my breath though.

... The Pussy Riot case shows no crisis within the Russian court system. What it shows is appalling conduct by the defence as I have discussed previously. [Emphasis added]

There are many other things that people in the West don't know, because the mainstream media don't tell them.

Russian public opinion is mostly against Pussy Riot. Maybe, partly because the Russians, speaking the language, are not so easily misinformed by the media as we in the West are, and know exactly what swear words these women were shouting while punching the air and kicking their heads off in the Cathedral's sanctuary containing the altar.

How strange that the word "hate", that so frequently and liberally is spread around by the politically correct Left, is not used by them here when it so aptly describes what the band's behaviour expresses.

This is what Zagolovki, a Russian-language news blog, says (Google translation):

Protesters [at the furst court hearing of the Pussy Riot trial] were significantly lower than during the last few sessions on the arrest of girls from Pussy Riot, - no more than two hundred persons, and opponents with posters "for morality" and "Protect Our Children" was significantly greater.

And the blog Da Russophile summarizes several opinion polls thus:

April poll, Levada: 47% of “shocked and outraged ordinary Russians” [this is what British paper The Guardian had written, which the post intelligently and mercilessly attacks] think 7 years is an adequate punishment; 32% think it is excessive; and a mere 10% do not think they should be criminally prosecuted at all.

April poll, VCIOM: How do Russians look at Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer”? Hooliganism – 46%; sacrilege – 21%; political protest – 13%; PR – 10%; 4% – encouragement of hatred towards religious groups; 1% – art. In other words, only 14% of Russians agree with The Guardian’s interpretation. 86% think Pussy Riot should be prosecuted.

July poll, Levada: 36% approve of the prosecution of Pussy Riot, 50% disapprove.

July poll, FOM: 34% of Russians think that several years in prison is a just sentence, whereas 37% disagree. If they were asked to write a sign a letter in defense of Pussy Riot, 28% say they would and 51% say they wouldn’t.

Pussy Riot Offensive, Expletive-Laden Mock Prayer

This was obviously meant to offend Christianity and the faithful, it was not a political protest with the purest, noblest, most heroic of intentions, but an act of hooliganism directed, surprise surprise, at the most vulnerable, the least politically correct of Europe's beliefs and institutions.

Double Standards: Pussy Riot Mania versus Silence on Egypt Crucifixions

Let me make a comparison.

We have on one hand a Russian punk group of three women who, under the pretense of being more intelligent than they are and staging a "political" protest against Putin, chose as the setting for their vulgar and offensive pantomime a Christian church, Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral.

If they are so brave, why not the Red Square? Why didn't they have the courage to choose a mosque, which would have put them not in danger of a few years' imprisonment but under a death threat from Muslims?

Don't give me that stuff about how the group wanted to denounce the close ties between the Russian Orthodox patriarchate and the Kremlin: Red Square is even closer to the Kremlin than any church.

The Pussy Riot later apologised, saying that their stunt was political, unrelated to the Orthodox religion. How can it be unrelated to it if it desecrates one of its churches?

As Orthodox commentators in the Russian media pointed out, the cathedral has become the symbol of Russia's Christian revival after 70 years of state-imposed atheism, and stands as a monument to all those who died for their faith under the Soviet Union.

The Pussy Riot's choice of venue for their action is inexcusable. It is just one of a long line of cases of people attacking Christianity and its symbols and justifying this in the name of "art" or now in this case "political protest".

Now all the international media and "celebrities" from Madonna (from whom I didn't expect anything better) to Paul McCartney (from whom disappointingly I did) have fallen into the trap of these who are at best clueless punks (in every sense of the word) or at worst talentless fame seekers who have got what they want: celebrity status without deserving it.

So, it seems that saving these three would-be singers from jail is one of the most important tasks in the world, a top priority, judging from the carpet media coverage and the intervention of everybody, from feminist groups to organizers of Global Pussy Riot Day protests in many cities around the world.

Politicians got in there too. The German Der Spiegel reported that 121 members of the Bundestag sent a letter to the Russian ambassador in Germany supporting the Pussy Riot.

On the other hand we have opponents of Egypt's President Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood who are killed and wounded in the streets, even literally crucified for their protests, media outlets closed down, journalists beaten up, and how much outcry does that provoke?

You can guess. Hardly anything at all.

Islam Has Different Meanings for the Same Words

This is a problem of semantics.

There is a basic problem of constant miscommunication between the West and the Muslim world.

Practically every major word or concept in their communication has a different meaning for us and them.

In reply to the article by Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood” in Foreign Affairs, Jonathan D. Halevi writes:

Leiken and Brooke were deeply impressed by the support given by the Muslim Brotherhood for "democracy," but they failed to understand that for the Muslim Brotherhood and the West, the word has two completely different meanings. As far as the Muslim Brotherhood is concerned, Islamic rule expresses "true democracy," and that is the only kind to which they are committed.

The Muslim Brotherhood poses a serious threat to the West. It hides behind ambiguous terminology, which makes the organization appear moderate and enables it to operate freely in its host countries, thereby establishing a convenient base from which to disseminate radical Islamic ideology among the growing Muslim communities. [Emphasis addded]

Since in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood won the presidential elections with 52% of the vote, combined with other Islamists - the ultraconservative Salafist Al-Nour party - won 70% of the seats in the Parliament's Lower House, and won 58.33% of the seats in the Parliament's Upper House (80% adding together Al-Nour, which came second with a quarter of all seats), that must also be the majority of Egyptian Muslims' idea of democracy.

That Muslims must intend for "democracy" something completely different, it's also obvious from the results of opinion polls in Muslim countries, results which otherwise would be impossible to comprehend.

In an opinion poll among Muslims, in Egypt, just to take an example, 59% of respondents said democracy is preferable to any other kind of government; but 82% supported stoning for adulterers, 77% were in favour of chopping off hands of thieves, and 84% backed death penalty for apostates, i.e. Muslims who leave Islam. Their idea of democracy must be different from ours.

Similarly, concepts like "innocent", "terrorism", even "murder" are different.

This kind of Western misunderstanding is particularly acute in the case of the crucial concept of "peace".

When Muslims say that Islam is a religion of peace, they don't even need to lie to Western media who are, like most Western people, ignorant of Islam - ignorance which allows The New York Times to write without blushing: "[The Muslim Brotherhood] virtually invented political Islam" -, fact which Muslims in the West exploit to their advantage.

They can play on the different meaning of "peace", because what they actually mean is the Muslim concept of peace, which is somewhat similar to the pax Romana, the peace that followed Rome's conquest of almost all the known world.

So, Muslims can say on Western TVs that Islam is a religion of peace because that is the final goal of Islam, but is a peace that will follow a constant war against the infidels and will be achieved after the whole world will be submitted to Islam: so in fact the final goal of Islam is peace, but their peace is not certainly what Westerners think of when they hear this word.

Another example of this miscommunication is the concept of "charity". When Muslim people like the UK's Baroness Warsi, co-Chairman of the British Conservative Party, appear on the TV saying that charity is a duty for all Muslims, as I watched her say some time ago, they "forget" to add that in Islam the meaning of "charity" is not the same as ours: charity is a duty only to other Muslims.

The Pakistani Christians, during that country's 2010 devastating floods, were victims of systematic discrimination in the distribution of aid - essential to survival - ironically donated by the historically Christian West.

By not explaining the difference in meaning, Warsi contributed to the misunderstanding and created in her audience a non-realistic view of Muslim ethical virtues.

This is indeed a problem common to all contrasting doctrines. Each theory redefines the concepts used in other theories. "Time" and "space" in Newtonian physics are not the same as "time" and "space" in Einstein's relativity.

Mali Islamists Cut Off Thief's Hand

The Islamist group Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) two days ago cut off a thief's hand.

Ten days earlier Ansar Dine (Defenders of Faith), an armed Islamist group occupying the north of the country of Mali and trying to expand to its south, publicly stoned an unmarried couple to death.

Both groups have links to Al-Qaeda.

An armed Islamist group occupying northern Mali said Thursday it hopes to win over the country's south to its ideology and create an Islamic state.

Ansar Dine is one of the groups holding key northern cities in a four-month occupation which has effectively split the west African nation in two.

"We hope to be able to peacefully convince the people of this country (southern Mali) to join us so that all our efforts can be directed against the common enemy," Ansar Dine spokesman Senda Ould Boumama told an Islamist website called "Defenders of Jihadists".

The "common enemy" was described as non-Muslim "miscreants".

Enforcing Islamic law, sharia, is a way to impose Ansar Dine's authority in the region, hence the maiming and stoning.

Honour Killings Are Much More than Domestic Violence

In light of the recent guilty verdict for the parents of Shafilea Ahmed in the UK, the Warrington, Cheshire, teenager murdered by her mother and father in an "honour killing", it is interesting to look at the results of an extensive analysis of more than fifty reported honour killings, entitled "Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?".

The study by Phyllis Chesler, professor of psychology and women's studies at the City University of New York, appeared in 2009 in The Middle East Quarterly, a peer-reviewed publication, and begins:

When a husband murders a wife or daughter in the United States and Canada, too often law enforcement chalks the matter up to domestic violence. Murder is murder; religion is irrelevant. Honor killings are, however, distinct from wife battering and child abuse. Analysis of more than fifty reported honor killings shows they differ significantly from more common domestic violence.[1] The frequent argument made by Muslim advocacy organizations that honor killings have nothing to do with Islam and that it is discriminatory to differentiate between honor killings and domestic violence is wrong.

... A 2008 Massachusetts-based study found that "although immigrants make up an estimated 14 percent of the state's population, [they, nevertheless,] accounted for 26 percent of the 180 domestic violence deaths from 1997-2006." [Emphasis added]

The report shows very clearly different patterns in honour killings and domestic violence, including the facts that in the former whole families participate to restore the honour of the family, that "unlike most Western domestic violence, honor killings are carefully planned", that "In some cases, taxi drivers, neighbors, and mosque members prevent the targeted woman from fleeing, report her whereabouts to her family, and subsequently conspire to thwart police investigations.[19] Very old relatives or minors may be chosen to conduct the murder in order to limit jail time if caught. Seldom is domestic violence celebrated, even by its perpetrators. In the West, wife batterers are ostracized. Here, there is an important difference in honor crimes. Muslims who commit or assist in the commission of honor killings view these killings as heroic and even view the murder as the fulfillment of a religious obligation. A Turkish study of prisoners found no social stigma attached to honor murderers."

In addition, "In both North America and Europe, family members conducted honor killings with excessive violence—repeatedly stabbing, raping, setting aflame, and bludgeoning—in more than half the cases. Only in serial-killing-type scenarios are Western women targeted with similar violence; in these cases, the perpetrators are seldom family members, and their victims are often strangers."

And 99% of perpetrators of the honour killings studied in the research were Muslim, while rest were Sikh.

It concludes:

While the sample size is small, this study suggests that honor killing is accelerating in North America and may correlate with the numbers of first generation immigrants. The problem is diverse but originates with immigration from majority Muslim countries and regions—the Palestinian territories, the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq, majority Muslim countries in the Balkans, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Afghanistan. Pakistanis accounts for the plurality. The common denominator in each case is not culture but religion.

At at the trial of Shafilea Ahmed's parents, the judge Mr Justice Roderick Evans, giving them a life sentence with a minimum of 25 years in prison, told them: "Your concern about being shamed in your community was greater than the love of your child."

This may sound totally implausible, even incredible to Western ears, but can be better understood when one knows about the individual and community psychology prevailing among Muslims and how it differs from the Western one, as well explained in Jihad Watch by Nicolai Sennels, a Danish psychologist with professional experience in the Copenhagen youth prison Sønderbro and acute observer of Muslim behaviour in Denmark:

Secondly, most Muslims are not allowed to integrate. There is an exceedingly strong social control in the Muslim society. Everybody is keeping an eye on everybody, and if someone does not follow the cultural or religious code they are met with criticism and risk severe consequences, such as being banned from their community or even from their own family. In the worst cases – and there are many of those – Muslim women in particular live under a constant death threat that deprives them of basic human rights, such as the freedom to choose one’s own sexual partners, clothing style, friends, religion and lifestyle. Most of my Muslim clients saw their religious and cultural background as the height of civilization and morality – leaving it would be seen as a kind of cultural and religious apostasy and degradation by their kinsmen. And there are not needed many killings, kidnappings, beatings and other honourable kinds of behaviour before the rest do as they are expected to.

... Many of those Muslims who actually manage to go all the way live under constant threats from the traditional Muslim community that see the integrated Muslims' lifestyle as apostasy, punishable by the strict Sharia laws. These social and psychological hindrances have convinced me that Muslim integration will never happen to the necessary extent. It will happen in some places to a certain extent, but the vast majority will not overcome the psychological, intellectual, cultural, religious and social challenges. [Emphasis added]

Human Rights Are Not the Problem

I continue here my discussion of the issue of human rights which I started on the previous post Is There Something Wrong with Human Rights?, so I take it from where I left.

As in my previous article, I will concentrate on the arguments found on Islam versus Europe (henceforth IVE) because, as far as I know, that blog is the only Counterjihad voice to have attempted a systematic attack on human rights.

Throughout this piece I'll refer to human rights using the singular pronoun "it" because the reference is to the concept.

Interestingly, during our discussion IVE says that it advocates only two principles: democracy narrowly intended as majority rule, and nationalism. But later on it reveals that it also supports free speech. What is that if not a classical human right? When somebody says that he believes in free speech, what he means is that he believes in the "right to" free speech: it would not have any sense otherwise.

IVE talks about strategy and asks for a strategy, which is obviously a complex issue that IVE oversimplifies.

IVE doesn't really have a strategy. What it has is an aspiration, doing away with human rights, but doesn't know how to do it: a strategy would require to spell out how to achieve that.

That human rights is a false enemy you can see from a simple example.

Let's take freedom of religion, a typical example of human rights. Let's look at Cameron/Clegg's plan in the UK to force the Christian clergy to go against their religious principles and marry "gays" in church. If the British PM and deputy PM really believed in the right of people to act in accordance with their religious beliefs, they would not do that.

Much more difficult is to justify a "right" of homosexuals to use the services of an established Church in a way that contradicts the tenets of that Church.

Here you can see that the elites don't necessarily believe in human rights, they just use it arbitrarily to favour whomever, for non-human-rights ideological reasons, they like (in this case, homosexuals) when their interests (not rights, but desires) conflict with those of others who don't enjoy their favour (in this case the Christian clergy).

Human rights is just a tool they use because it's there and it's handy, but if they were deprived of it they would find another means.

The real problem is in the ideology of the elites, human rights is just a paper tiger and a false target.

IVE might say that human rights serves well any of the elites' unfair agenda because of its plasticity but, as I explained in Is There Something Wrong with Human Rights?, all legal and ethical principles, all laws need to be balanced against each other, so anything else they could use would have the same ambiguity and the same effect desired by them.

It's a case of appropriation. The current PC, pro-Islam elites have appropriated human rights for themselves and used it for their own agenda and purposes. We must take this principle back and show that it's been distorted and how it can be returned to its original, restricted, better defined meaning.

Many of the constantly-claimed “rights” are actually not rights at all, they are privileges. The definition of “right” these days has become so broad that what people really mean when they say they have a right to something is simply that they have a need or desire for something, as you can see when debt-burdened governments have to cut spending and people say they have a “right” to those benefits or services that are being cut or closed, even down to local libraries. Here's an example of this use of the term:

I believe in our community and its right to our library.

Basically, anything that anybody wants gives rise to a “right”, but this is simply a misnomer of the real concept. It is not difficult to show that these are misinterpretations.

It goes back to my original idea that the principle of human rights is in this predicament because it’s wrongly applied. The distinction between negative rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and positive rights, which we could call for short the never-ending proliferation of “entitlements”, pointed out by Gates of Vienna and vederso of EJBron, is fundamental.

That's the goal of our strategy on human rights. As for the means, this is a good, old-fashioned battle to truly, not just superficially, get public opinion on our side and for power through democratic elections, as it would be anyway, human rights or not.

These are the scenarios, if we concentrated on abolishing human rights:

Outcome 1) We succeed in getting rid of human rights. To achieve that we must have garnered so much power that human rights would no longer represent a problem anyway because, as I explained, the problem is just how the current elites apply and use this principle.

Outcome 2) We don't succeed and we've wasted precious time and resources in fighting a false enemy.

In summary, the real enemy are the ideology and goals of the present elites, not human rights, which is only the means they use to implement that ideology and achieve those goals and would be easily replaced to the same effect.

In the next posts I'll deal with other examples cited by IVE in support of its position.