From PBS, a year go:

A court in Saudi Arabia has handed down a guilty verdict in the case of a professed atheist accused of posting hundreds of tweets denying God’s existence and criticizing religion.

His sentence: a decade in prison, a fine and a flogging.

According to a Saturday report in the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — the Saudi religious police force whose duties include monitoring social media — found more than 600 tweets posted by an unnamed 28-year-old dissenter.

According to the report, the man refused to repent for the tweets and said that he had the right to assert his opinions.

In addition to the 10-year prison term, the court sentenced him to pay 20,000 riyals — about $5,330 — and receive a beating consisting of 2,000 lashes. Such floggings are generally broken up into weekly bouts of 50 lashings each and administered according to specific guidelines.

The legal basis of the court’s decision is a series of Interior Ministry regulations introduced in 2014 under the late Saudi King Abdullah.

The laws ostensibly seek to combat terrorism, but also allow authorities “to criminalize virtually any expression or association critical of the government and its understanding of Islam,” according to the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

These regulations contain provisions — including one that criminalizes “calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based” — that Human Rights Watch says have been used to silence activists and peaceful dissidents.

Atheism is a taboo subject in Saudi Arabia, where the government derives legitimacy from its adherence to an ultraconservative form of Islam, but a 2012 WIN/Gallup International poll found that 5 percent of Saudi respondents described themselves as atheists, and anecdotal reports suggest that unbelief may be on the rise in the kingdom.

read more:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/saudi-court-sentences-man-to-10-year...

Today:

On Tuesday, a Saudi Arabian court dismissed an appeal from Ahmad Al Shamri, who had spent three years in prison over charges of “atheism and blasphemy,” the Exmuslim website reports.

READ MORE: UN Watch outraged as Saudi Arabia takes place on UN Women’s Right Commission

Al Shamri was in his early 20s and lived the city of Hafr Al-Batin in the country’s Eastern Province, according to the website. He had reportedly renounced Islam and posted various videos reflecting his views on social media. The man was arrested in 2014, faced trial and was sentenced to death in February 2015.

After the appeal was rejected, social media users were split over the court decision, posting their comments under a trending hashtag, which can be translated from Arabic as “apostate from Hafar Al-Batin.”

Many social media users condemned Saudi Arabia, pointing out that the country is a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/386196-saudi-death-penalty-apostasy/

see also:

Humanism and the quest for good in social constructs...

I'm at a wedding and my heart sinks. The imam is smiling as he addresses a large South Asian banquet hall fragrant with biryani waiting to be devoured.

The imam proclaims how it is the duty of the groom to love and be kind to his wife, as if she were a dog or a child.

He then reminds the bride to respect and obey the authority of her husband.

This seems at best benign and paternalistic. But it is just one example of how male guardianship and authority proliferates in Muslim faith communities.

It is a form of control that has a profound impact on women seeking divorce and religious mediation in marital disputes, and normalises the social policing of a woman's movements, behaviour and even dress, the kind of control that defines domestic violence.

So why is this occurring?

In part it is because of the problematic Quranic verse 4:34, which is misused by some men to claim superiority over women.

It's an evasion to say beliefs in male headship are only cultural when the framework of guardianship asserted in understandings of this verse inform roles and expectations of women.

The recent video of two women, reportedly belonging to the fringe Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, discussing the apparent permissibility of symbolic wife-disciplining has highlighted the schisms in diaspora Muslim communities struggling to understand how to adapt to a modern Western context.

While the controversial video was widely condemned by Muslim community leaders who reject the notion that Islam permits violence against women, the Hizb women aren't entirely misinformed.

It doesn't negate the fact some Muslims do believe it is permissible to discipline your wife.

They are getting their information from readings I've heard myself in the Uncle-led mosques of the western suburbs.

These are the circles not privileged by the affluent or middle-class intellectuals. They are ordinary Muslims.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-01/how-muslim-feminists-can-reclaim-r...

See also:

Humanism and the quest for good in social constructs...

I'm at a wedding and my heart sinks. The imam is smiling as he addresses a large South Asian banquet hall fragrant with biryani waiting to be devoured.

The imam proclaims how it is the duty of the groom to love and be kind to his wife, as if she were a dog or a child.

He then reminds the bride to respect and obey the authority of her husband.

This seems at best benign and paternalistic. But it is just one example of how male guardianship and authority proliferates in Muslim faith communities.

It is a form of control that has a profound impact on women seeking divorce and religious mediation in marital disputes, and normalises the social policing of a woman's movements, behaviour and even dress, the kind of control that defines domestic violence.

So why is this occurring?

In part it is because of the problematic Quranic verse 4:34, which is misused by some men to claim superiority over women.

It's an evasion to say beliefs in male headship are only cultural when the framework of guardianship asserted in understandings of this verse inform roles and expectations of women.

The recent video of two women, reportedly belonging to the fringe Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, discussing the apparent permissibility of symbolic wife-disciplining has highlighted the schisms in diaspora Muslim communities struggling to understand how to adapt to a modern Western context.

While the controversial video was widely condemned by Muslim community leaders who reject the notion that Islam permits violence against women, the Hizb women aren't entirely misinformed.

It doesn't negate the fact some Muslims do believe it is permissible to discipline your wife.

They are getting their information from readings I've heard myself in the Uncle-led mosques of the western suburbs.

These are the circles not privileged by the affluent or middle-class intellectuals. They are ordinary Muslims.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-01/how-muslim-feminists-can-reclaim-r...

See also:

Humanism and the quest for good in social constructs...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who visited Saudi Arabia on Sunday to discuss relations between Berlin and the Gulf monarchy, decided to defy the strict dress code. Welcomed to the palace of Jeddah (west) by King Salman and his principal collaborators, Mrs. Merkel therefore did not wear a headscarf.

State television from Saudi Arabia, which broadcast the meeting, nevertheless had to stick to the traditions of the country. Angela Merkel, who refused to wear the hijab, a traditional obligatory element of women's clothing in the country, was shown on TV with a blurred head.

read more:

https://fr.sputniknews.com/international/201705041031235688-merkel-refus...

Melania and Ivanka Trump have come under intense fire for their praise of Saudi Arabia’s so-called “empowerment” of women.

It didn’t take long for social media to mock the First Lady and President Donald Trump’s daughter for their hailing of the country’s “empowerment of women” and “encouraging progress” in women’s rights. Moreover, Ivanka’s new $100 million investment from the Middle East has been called into question.

#Ivanka & #Melania Trump praise Saudi Arabia’s ‘encouraging progress’ in empowering womenhttps://t.co/01trtTKptvpic.twitter.com/7E48T5qn4k

On Sunday, the World Bank announced that President Donald Trump’s daughter, and White House advisor, had secured a combined $100 million donation from Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates for Ivanka’s yet to be established ‘Women Entrepreneurs Fund’.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/viral/389155-melania-ivanka-trump-saudi-women/

Has Trump not realised yet that Saudi Arabia is trumptonite to the USA beefsteak? Like poison kryptonite to Superman? 

A Saudi cleric who said women should not drive because their brains shrink to a quarter the size of a man’s when they go shopping has been banned from preaching.

Saad al-Hijri, head of fatwas (legal opinions) in Saudi Arabia’s Assir governorate, was suspended from all religious activity after advising against allowing women to drive in a speech that contained comments “diminishing human value”, a spokesman for the governor of Asir province said.

Women remain banned from driving in Saudi Arabia despite ambitious government targets to increase their public role, especially in the workforce.

The ultra-conservative kingdom has some of the world’s tightest restrictions for women. They are also bound by law to wear long robes and a headscarf and require the consent of a male guardian for most legal actions, including study, travel and other activities.

In a video this week, Hijri asked what the traffic department would do it if it discovered a man with only half a brain. “Would it give him a licence or not? It would not. So how can it give it to a woman when she has only half?” he said.

“If she goes to the market she loses another half. What is left? A quarter ... We demand the traffic department check because she is not suitable to drive and she has only a quarter.”

The comments sparked outrage on social media, which is hugely popular in the kingdom.

Twitter users shared the video, many criticising it and making jokes about his remarks, under the Arabic hashtag “Al-Hijri-women-quarter-brain”.

The hashtag was used 119,000 times in just 24 hours.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/23/saudi-cleric-saad-al-hijri...

Read from top...

Women in Saudi Arabia have been granted the right to drive, overturning a cornerstone of Saudi conservatism that had been a cause celebre for activists demanding reforms in the fundamentalist kingdom.

King Salman ordered the reform in a royal decree delivered on Tuesday night, requesting that drivers licences be issued to women who wanted them.

The decision comes amid a broad reform program that last week led to women being allowed into a sports stadium for the first time.

It is the most significant change yet to a rigidly conservative social order in Saudi Arabia that has strictly demarcated gender roles, and severely limits the role of women in public life. 

Earlier this month, a Saudi cleric was banned from preaching after saying that women should not be allowed to drive because their brains shrink to quarter the size of a man’s when they go shopping.

The move had been widely anticipated amid a transformation of many aspects of Saudi society that has been branded by one senior minister as “cultural revolution disguised as economic reform”. Recent months have seen live concert performances in Riyadh – albeit to male-only audiences – in Riyadh, while the powers of the once-omnipresent religious police have been curtailed.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/26/saudi-arabias-king-issues-...

Read from top...

The cost of driving lessons for women range between SR2,000 and SR3,000 as compared to SR450 for men, according to the head of the Saudi Society for Traffic Safety Dr. Abdulhameed Al-Mejel.

Driving schools for women will be completely different from those of men and will be run by female trainers and supervisors who are highly-qualified, Al-Mejel was quoted as saying by Al-Watan Arabic daily on Tuesday.

Read more:

http://www.gulf-insider.com/saudi-women-driving-lessons-cost-6-times-men/

• Judy Woodruff:

  Today, the administration's nominee to become ambassador to Saudi Arabia, retired General John Abizaid, testified in the Senate. He defended the kingdom's importance to U.S. foreign policy, despite sharp criticism from senators who accuse the kingdom of cracking down on its critics.

  As foreign affairs correspondent Nick Schifrin reports, even Saudi citizens here in the United States say they can't escape the watchful eye of their government.

• Nick Schifrin:

  College senior Abdulrahman Al-Mutairy is carefree with his classmates, but he feels he has to watch his back.

• Abdulrahman Al-Mutairy:

  I was extremely afraid. I had to change my location. I didn't know what could happen next. I didn't know what to expect.

• Nick Schifrin:

  In a Manhattan art gallery, photographer Danah Al-Mayouf is worried.

• Danah Al-Mayouf:

  Who are these people attacking me all the time who, like, want to basically put me in jail, want to see me homeless in America?

• Nick Schifrin:

  And ,in Washington, D.C., Georgetown University fellow Abdullah Alaoudh says, even 6,000 miles from home, there's nowhere to hide.

• Abdullah Alaoudh:

  They have no limits. They can reach you everywhere. They fear every criticism and every different opinion.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Three Saudi citizens living in the U.S. who say they're targeted for their criticism of the Saudi government. They may be protected by U.S. laws, but they say they have no protection from Saudi surveillance.

• Abdulrahman Al-Mutairy:

  It's a reality, and, unfortunately, it's happening in United States soil.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Al-Mutairy is a senior at the University of San Diego, and an activist via online video blogs. Last August, he began criticizing the ultra-conservative Saudi religious establishment.

• Abdulrahman Al-Mutairy:

  If God accepts repentance, who are you to curse me?

• Nick Schifrin:

  The videos earned him thousands of Saudi and international followers, and the ire of the government.

  He had been studying on a Saudi government scholarship. After the criticism, he says the Saudi Embassy warned him to stay silent. When he kept talking, he received this e-mail revoking his scholarship and this notification blocking his student portal.

  Technically, he'd been warned. In 2017, the Saudi government published a list of rules for students studying abroad. Rule number one: Don't engage in political or religious discussion or conduct media interviews. By disobeying, Al-Mutairy ended up broke.

  And on Twitter, critics said the government should crucify him. Terminating his scholarship wasn't enough.

• Abdulrahman Al-Mutairy:

  Just because I expressed my religious belief, without harming anyone, my scholarship gets taken away. And it was a hard fact to digest that my own people and own government want me to be executed.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Up until then, Al-Mutairy's criticism was narrowly focused on religion. But then Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered while visiting Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consulate, and Al-Mutairy turned his target to his own government.

• Abdulrahman Al-Mutairy:

  You didn't only kill him. You chopped him up. Is this a government or a mafia?

• Nick Schifrin:

  He said there's no chance Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, wasn't involved.

• Abdulrahman Al-Mutairy:

  If he didn't know about this, he doesn't know about anything in the country. MBS doesn't know about the war in Yemen. He doesn't know that I'm a Saudi citizen who voiced his opinion and got my scholarship pulled, and now I live below the poverty line, and now I'm eating (EXPLETIVE DELETED). I'm eating dirt.

• Nick Schifrin:

  After that video, the government labeled him a political dissident, and he says his family in Saudi Arabia was instructed by the government to cut him off. He hasn't spoken to them since.

• Abdulrahman Al-Mutairy:

  I really miss them a lot. I hope, if they're watching this interview, they know I'm OK and I miss them a lot.

• (through translator):

  I miss you. May God protect you. And I hope we meet soon.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Mohammed bin Salman has ushered in dramatic reforms, trying to curb the conservative clergy's power, and allowing women to attend movies and sporting events and drive.

  But critics accuse him of silencing dissent. In November 2017, the government rounded up rival royals in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, arrested the very women who successfully campaigned for the right to drive, and senior officials close to MBS are accused of murdering Khashoggi.

• Abdullah Alaoudh:

  They said it's a red line to criticize the crown prince, the Saudi crown prince. Well, killing a journalist in the Saudi consulate is not a red line? I mean, they have their own version of truth, probably.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Before Abdullah Alaoudh became a Georgetown fellow, back in 2014, he was on a Saudi scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh. He says it also got canceled because he criticized the government.

  And how has the Saudi government targeted you while you're in the United States?

• Abdullah Alaoudh:

  I get threats every day from Twitter accounts that a lot of people think is somehow associated to the Saudi government.

  I mean, just today, I got, for example, a threat from a Twitter account, saying that we're going to lock you up, and we're going to find you, and we're going to bring you back and put you in a cell next to your father.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Alaoudh's father, Salman, is an outspoken activist and scholar who's released his own videos and called for a change in the Saudi government. He was arrested and now faces the death penalty.

  Alaoudh said his father's interrogators mention him during interrogation.

• Abdullah Alaoudh:

  Talking to somebody about his son and saying that, we are going to arrest him, we're going to torture him, we're going to do this and that to him, it's a way of intimidation and pressure.

• Nick Schifrin:

  And have they also tried to pressure you?

• Abdullah Alaoudh:

  Yes, because they try to send the message that whatever you do is going to be reflected on my father and how they deal with my father.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Alaoudh says how the Saudis deal with him here is surveillance. He says, in 2016, before a public event, he was approached by another Saudi citizen who said he was there to spy and report back.

• Abdullah Alaoudh:

  The Saudi government has no limits. So, if you're dealing with somebody like this, it's just scary.

• Nick Schifrin:

  The Saudi government denies it surveils its citizens in the U.S. via the embassy or the cultural mission, which oversees Saudi students.

  Saudi Embassy spokesman Fahad Nazer:

• Fahad Nazer:

  I think the claim that the Saudi cultural mission is there to collect intelligence on students or to follow them around a very big country like the United States is a little absurd. They are there to help, and not to collect intelligence. That is simply not what they do.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Nazer himself received a Saudi scholarship to study in the U.S., one of hundreds of thousands of Saudi citizens to do so. He says focusing on the criticism misses the bigger picture.

• Fahad Nazer:

  The experience for the overwhelming majority of them is a positive one, and many of them actually contribute positively to their local communities visiting senior homes. They're working at soup kitchens. They are informal, unofficial ambassadors. And the overwhelming majority go back.

• Danah Al-Mayouf:

  I fell in love with freedom, and I didn't want to go back.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Danah Al-Mayouf is a Saudi photographer and activist. She's a former student who says she didn't speak out, for fear of losing her scholarship. But now she advocates for Saudi women's rights.

• Danah Al-Mayouf:

  Basically, we have been taught that we're less than men, and men are supposed to marry not only one wife, but four, and we should be fine with it, and all these poisonous ideas.

  We learn them in school. So that's why I'm angry. Like, I'm an activist right now because, basically, this is wrong to teach young girls that you're less than men.

• Nick Schifrin:

  As she gained prominence, she said she received two strange offers, this e-mail with a lucrative job in the Saudi stock market, if she silenced herself. Then another Saudi citizen offered her a photography job, only to tell her in this WhatsApp message there was a case open against her and she'd be deported.

  Looking back, Al-Mayouf thinks the whole thing was a trap.

  Do you think that there's been an attempt to lure you back home?

• Danah Al-Mayouf:

  Yes, I think so.

• Nick Schifrin:

  And do you have any idea who's behind it?

• Danah Al-Mayouf:

  I believe the government, the Saudi government. They just hate seeing people talking. It's like their worst nightmare to see people talking, especially women.

• Nick Schifrin:

  But she wasn't alone. In 2017, Alaoudh applied in Washington to renew his Saudi passport.

• Abdullah Alaoudh:

  They said, if you want to renew your passport, you have to go back to Saudi Arabia in order to do that.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Do you think they were luring you back home?

• Abdullah Alaoudh:

  Yes, I strongly think that. And, you know, the case of Khashoggi is just another example.

• Nick Schifrin:

  For Al-Mutairy, the attempt to lure him home was a phone call from a fellow Saudi promising a family reunion.

• Abdulrahman Al-Mutairy:

  He said: "Well, you know what? I am in L.A. right now. And I want you to join me and go to Saudi Arabia, where you say hi to your parents."

  And I said, "No, I'm not going to go to Saudi Arabia."

  And he said, "Well, you have to go back to Saudi Arabia."

  This is when things kind of escalated.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Can you go home today?

• Abdulrahman Al-Mutairy:

  The best-case scenario would be going to jail, without any charge, for five, 10, 15, 20 years. Worst-case scenario, I would be publicly executed.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Which is why he and the other activists are trying to stay here, knowing that, despite the freedom provided by the Southern California sun, they're always watching.

  For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Nick Schifrin.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Read more:

  https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/these-saudi-citizens-in-the-u-s-critic...

   

   

  Read from top.

Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia held a conference in Sydney a few days after it announced that its Australian spiritual leader Ismail al-Wahwah had been released from a Jordanian prison, where he had been held since July 2018.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia (HTA), which is considered to be a radical Islamic group that has come under scrutiny from the Australian government, held a conference in Sydney on 27 April to speak out against diversity, the West, and for the need to implement Sharia law.

READ MORE: Virgin Australia Cuts Staff Holidays With Royal Brunei Over Sharia Penal Code

During the four-hour "Unapologetically Muslim" conference, HTA spokesman Wassim Doureihi, whose name hit world headlines in 2014 after he refused to denounce Daesh* in Syria and Iraq, told the audience, “the West has its boots over [Muslims’] necks", and voiced his support for a so-called Hudud, an Arabic word which refers to punishments under Sharia law, that can involve chopping off a hand for stealing.

"We’ve probably bought into the lie that is tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism. We’re sold the rhetoric of acceptance of diversity, and different people’s and different opinions and different religions but not realising the reality of what that entails", he said.

While saying that "we don't want to be accepted", Doureihi claimed that Australia’s three largest parties "support wars against the Muslim world, and all of them are contributing to the Islamophobia in which [Muslims] exist today".

READ MORE: Google Hosts 'Sharia' App Helping Indonesian Muslims Report Blasphemy, Heresy

Doureihi told the audience he discouraged his own children from singing Australia's national anthem at school, and said that it was oppressive to Muslims.

"My kids go to a public school and every so often, I think it's once or twice a year, whatever it is, they play the national anthem. Personally, out of respect, my kids will stand up but they won't sing. Should we stand up and sing along? Or should we take a position that expresses our resistance against what the national anthem represents? It's colonialism. As Muslims we are under the spotlight and as Muslims we have to take positions on things that are not going to be comfortable", he said.

The conference was held despite a 2016 New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal ruling which found HTA's gender segregation policies at public events were a form of unlawful sex discrimination.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/asia/201904291074544984-pro-caliphate-islamic-gr...

Read from top. I have not seen this item in the Australian MSM so far. Possibly trying to keep things quiet... Note: Not a single woman in the picture. Note also that the attitude of this "community" is to colonise Australia by numbers.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book ‘Prey’ is uncomfortable for a West that can't admit its issues with Islamic migration, but she isn't wrong

By Damian Wilson

Across the world, Muslim men keep their wives locked indoors, so much so that some suffer a vitamin D deficiency. But don’t take my word for it, there’s an expert out there with all the evidence and that’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali who details pretty much all you need to know in her latest forensic study of the issue in ‘Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights’. 

Born a Muslim in Somalia and raised in the Middle East before she emigrated to Europe where she became a Dutch MP just 12 years later, Hirsi Ali is a lightning rod for liberals who accuse her of Islamophobia, racism, bigotry, hate speech and alt-right opinions. None of which ring true if you would just read her book.

She explores the reality that in the religion of Islam, women are not considered equal to men. They are the chattels to be owned. Why else would a man wish to have multiple wives? It is like those millionaires who own garages full of cars. Look at me, look what I can afford, look how many cars/wives/racehorses I have. 

It’s not just Dubai, with its glitzy veneer of sun and luxury beach tourism masking a conservative Muslim state, that has a problem. Just this week in Palestine, a Hamas-run court in the Gaza Strip ruled that women must have the permission of a male guardian before they travel. As a reminder, the year is 2021.

This is the sort of Middle Ages nonsense that the West goes to war over. When Islamic State or the Taliban enforce these types of restrictions on women, diplomats can’t jump to their feet fast enough to denounce them in the United Nations.

But when those making the rules are allies of the UK, have fat budgets to buy Brit-made weapons and military equipment or are deemed strategically important proxies in more complicated regional relationships, the criticism is muted. 

As Hirsi Ali is at pains to point out, this is not a viewpoint driven by race. It is about religion and how many men, in particular, see the role of women within that ideology. It is about how deeply conservative Muslim attitudes are being exported to Europe from places such as Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq by men who are claiming asylum and how this is turning European neighbourhoods into men-only no-go zones for women as their failure to integrate creates an intimidating environment for females. 

And in the twisted logic of those hand-wringers in liberal Western democracies of nations such as Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK, women are being urged to be more sensitive to the cultural peccadilloes of these men so that THEY don’t feel unwelcome. 

Prey was awarded a hostile reception by theNew York Times, that seething cauldron of identity politics where staff seem to devote more time to spying on one another and writing letters demanding colleagues be sacked for infringing upon the unwritten rules of their paralysingly woke work space than doing anything of substance. In a vicious hit-piece, writer Jill Filipovic plays the (wo)man and not the ball, concentrating on Hirsi Ali’s personal story in her attempt to undermine the author’s motives and mistakenly citing opinions that are never expressed. 

Most significant of these include Filopovic’s claim that, “Hirsi Ali suggests scrapping the current asylum program, which offers safe harbor to those facing persecution.”  

Err, no she didn’t. What she did say was, “The global asylum and refugee system is no longer fit for its stated purpose. As a beneficiary of that system, I do not make such a statement lightly. But the reality is that this outdated asylum system can no longer cope with the challenges posed by mass violence and global migration today.” 

As Hirsi Ali commented herself on Twitter, this is all too typical of the way the left now conducts itself in the United States. First the big lie and then the repetition.

I do not expect anything but hostile reviews from the @NYTimes. But @JillFilipovic's review makes a number of completely false insinuations about the book, essentially accusing me of reviving racist stereotypes about sexual violence and "the other."

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali (@Ayaan) February 11, 2021

But I digress. And this is what I mean, by pulling at the threads of issues on the edge of Hirsi Ali’s argument, and distracting readers from what she is saying, the liberals hope to unravel the work to its very core. 

The Inglehart-Welzel world cultural map reveals in a glance the distance between the traditional values of Muslim countries and the values of self-expression treasured in the West and it’s easy to see why problems arise when the two value sets meet and this is the theme at the centre of ‘Prey’.

As Hirsi Ali says, the liberal view is that asylum seekers from failed states arrive at their new host country as blank slates, ready to absorb the values of Western democracy, along with the way we treat one another. This is plainly wrong. 

In fact, these men, and asylum seekers are predominantly men because they are considered the stronger sex at home and considered more likely to prove successful if they emigrate, carry the baggage of their own mainly Muslim cultures.

The liberal media loves to fantasise that every war zone asylum seeker is a highly-trained neurosurgeon or quantum physicist who will slide effortlessly into his adopted homeland’s top social strata using his fluent German, English or French. This is not the reality. As Hirsi Ali points out, regressive religiosity impacts Muslim employability and is reflected in higher unemployment rates within their communities in the West. The UK Social Mobility Commission found that only 19.8 percent of adult British Muslims had a full-time job in 2017. The more observant, the less able to integrate. 

This reinforces what the author calls “parallel societies” and further acts as a barrier to integration. Drugs, crime, violence and anti-social behaviour become entrenched and these societies become breeding grounds for male aggression. Witness the attacks on police in the outlying suburbs of Paris last summer. 

The outcome is not just poor schooling and poverty. As ‘Prey’ points out, events in Germany and the UK, have shown that a large contingent of disaffected young Muslim men with a hostile attitude towards their host country can disrupt the way of life for women, sometimes permanently. Bizarrely, they win protection from pearl-clutching liberals determined to justify aberrant behaviour for fear of being branded Islamophic or racist. 

Hirsi Ali looks at the string of grooming gangs composed of mainly first and second generation migrant men that operated across Britain and were subject to a 2014 report that found the vast majority – 84 percent – were Asians with Arabic backgrounds, that is, Muslims. 

Over the years 1997-2013, the report estimated that 1,400 underage girls in the UK had been groomed and sexually exploited. As Hirsi Ali insists, it is impossible that this has only occurred in Britain and evidence of similar activity has surfaced in Sweden and the Netherlands, where authorities had never heard of the UK grooming gangs. There is an alarming deficit of information sharing so the global picture of this vile practice is missing many pieces.

As the British report found, the local authorities and police were quick to blame the young girls, often turning a blind eye in order to prevent confrontation with the local Muslim community. In court, the men viewed their victims as worthless objects “that they could sexually misuse and cast aside.”

This gross objectification of Western females by Muslim men also drove the attacks on women during the 2015 New Year’s Eve celebrations in the German city of Cologne. A mob of 1,500 drunk and unruly men, mostly newly-arrived asylum seekers from North Africa broke off into groups to surround and sexually assault women – grabbing their breasts, and even attempting to insert their fingers into their vaginas – while the police deliberately looked away. 

In the aftermath, 661 women reported being sexually assaulted while on New Year’s Day, a Cologne police statement declared the evening “largely peaceful.” 

Unsurprisingly, this statement was soon retracted and the police chief sacked. It emerged that similar, yet smaller, attacks had also taken place in other cities across Germany on the same night. Twelve months later, the new Cologne police chief Jurgen Mathies confirmed that the attacks had been coordinated to intimidate the German population. 

It was the price paid by Chancellor Angela Merkel for failing to stem the flow of asylum seekers that flooded into Germany in a catastrophic misjudgment in September 2015 when she announced there was to be no limit to the number of asylum seekers allowed to come to Germany. For a strong female leader, this was an awful decision for German women.

So how to approach the problem of men who “come from a gender-segregated society that abhors the free movement of women in public” and who “see no reason to alter their views simply because they now live in western Europe.”

As mentioned, Hirsi Ali suggests fixing the asylum system which is being abused by those for whom it was never intended. The current rule is that a refugee should not be returned to a homeland in which their life may be in danger. That rules out just about every deportation to Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. It’s too easy to exploit and needs to be changed. 

More immediate would be to call out – without fearing attack as a bigot, racist or Islamophobe – the misogyny, the sexism and the inhumanity of ignoring womens’ rights from the Muslim ghettos of European cities to the glittering towers of the Middle East. Turn things on their head and think first of basic human freedoms not of cultural offence.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/515856-ayaan-hirsi-ali-prey-islamic-migration/

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Concern-trolling over the dismal plight of women in Afghanistan is powerfully appealing to liberals who look for reasons for the United States to maintain a military presence there. If and when the Taliban return to power, the warmongers argue, the bad old days of stonings, burqas and girls banned from school will come back.

And it’ll be our fault because we didn’t stick around.

Outrage over women’s inequality is often only ginned up in the service of some other aim, like invading Afghanistan or banning transwomen from high school girls’ sports teams. Scratch the thin veneer of phony feminism and the true agenda, which has nothing to do with women or girls, is quickly exposed.

You may be surprised to learn that, according to a U.S. News & World Report analysis of data provided by the United Nations, Afghanistan isn’t among the ten worst countries for women. Which nations do have the worst gender inequality?

A list of staunch pals of the U.S.

But you’ll never see “woke” news media go after the U.S.’ best bros for treating women like dirt, much less the suggestion that these countries ought, like Afghanistan, to be bombed, droned, invaded and subjected to two decades of brutal occupation under a corrupt U.S.-installed puppet regime.

Continuing down the list, we find U.S. “strategic ally” Qatar (#2), U.S. ally Saudi Arabia (#3), U.S. “treaty ally” India (#4), U.S. “partner” Oman (#5), major recipient of U.S. military aidEgypt (#6), U.S. “major non-NATO ally” Morocco (#7), U.S. ally South Korea (#8), U.S. “regional strategic ally” Sri Lanka (#9) and U.S. “key partner” Jordan (#10). Anyone who cares about the oppression of women should backburner Afghanistan, start with the UAE and work their way down this list of misogynist nightmare nations.

Not to say that the women of Afghanistan don’t have anything to worry about as the Taliban return to power. They do. Taliban spokesmen tell reporters that they’ve moderated their views about the status of women since 2001, that they would even allow women to work as judges and will now allow girls to continue their education and for women to work so long as they wear hijab. “Local sources told us the Taliban removed art and citizenship classes from the curriculum, replacing them with Islamic subjects, but otherwise follow the national [U.S.-backed government] syllabus,” the BBC reports from Balkh province near Mazar-i-Sharif. “The government pays the salaries of staff, but the Taliban are in charge. It's a hybrid system in place across the country.”

It is perfectly reasonable to worry about the future of Afghan women. Though, to be fair, many were viciously oppressed, forced to wear the burqa, denied an education and even stoned to death, throughout the last 20 years of U.S. occupation. If you don’t, you are morally deficient.

But don’t forget the hierarchy of needs: women are even worse off in a number of other countries, all of which get a pass from the American press and giant chunks of American tax dollars from the American government. So the next time you hear someone affiliated with the U.S. government or in mainstream corporate media talking about how the Taliban mistreats women, remember that their real agenda is oppression and militarism, not emancipation.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/columnists/202107211083427510-the-worst-countries-for-women-afghanistan-isnt-on-the-list/

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