Hot on the heels of my public debate with a leading Muslim last week, plenty more examples of what I warned about in my talk are coming to light. Indeed, there are far too many to choose from, so let me just highlight three examples of how the religion of peace is not quite living up to its own PR.
The first two examples come out of the UK. The first has to do with the very worrying trend of a rise in ‘honour’ crimes. As the Guardian reported this week, women are experiencing a big rise in attacks associated with honour killings and retaliation.
The article begins this way: “The number of women and girls in the UK suffering violence and intimidation at the hands of their families or communities is increasing rapidly, according to figures revealing the nationwide scale of ‘honour’ abuse for the first time.
“Statistics obtained under the Freedom of Information Act about such violence – which can include threats, abduction, acid attacks, beatings, forced marriage, mutilation and murder – show that in the 12 police force areas for which comparable data was available, reports went up by 47% in just a year.
“The figures, shared with the Guardian by the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (Ikwro), also reveal that a small number of forces – including four in Scotland – are still not collecting data on how often such violence occurs.
“The 39 police forces that gave Ikwro figures recorded 2,823 incidents in 2010. Ikwro estimates that another 500 crimes in which police were involved were committed in the 13 force areas that did not provide data. But this is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg, campaigners say, as so many incidents go unreported because of victims’ fears of recriminations.”
The article also contains the story of one such poor woman: “When I was 16 my mum came into my room one day and said I had to get married to my cousin in Pakistan. I was horrified: I wanted to go to college and get a job, and I didn’t even know him, how could I marry him? But when I said no, my mum slapped me across the face.
“After that I wasn’t allowed out. My family treated me with disgust, as if I had shamed them. My father, mother, even my young brother, beat me on a daily basis. My body was covered in bruises. I wasn’t given any food for days on end, and I tried to take an overdose on several occasions. I just used to sit on my bed from morning to night. Prison would have been a better place.
“After around a month, they let me go out to the doctor. Terrified, I sat in the toilet and called a solicitors’ firm. I’ve not seen my family since that day. A wonderful solicitor got me a place at a refuge and a forced marriage protection order. But I’m still constantly paranoid: I’m always looking over my shoulder. I’ve lost everything. And I’m scared of what will happen if they find me.”
Now unless I have missed something, such honour crimes were never a problem in the UK before. But with the arrival of so many Muslim immigrants, it is becoming a very real problem indeed. And while I cannot enter into detail here, both the Koran and the hadith make it quite clear that such honour killings are an integral part of Islamic ideology.
A second case of creeping sharia and stealth jihad in the UK also took place quite recently. As reported in The Daily Telegraph, a “Christian worker loses her job after being ‘targeted’ by Islamic extremists”. The story opens this way:
“A Christian worker has launched a landmark legal action after she lost her job when she blew the whistle on what she says was a campaign of ‘race hate’ by fundamentalist Muslims. Nohad Halawi, who worked at Heathrow Airport, is suing her former employers for unfair dismissal, claiming that she and other Christian staff at the airport were victims of systematic harassment because of their religion.
“She claims that she was told that she would go to Hell for her religion, that Jews were responsible for the September 11th terror attacks, and that a friend was reduced to tears having been bullied for wearing a cross. Mrs Halawi, who came to Britain from Lebanon in 1977, worked in the duty-free section as a perfume saleswoman of the airport for 13 years but was dismissed in July.”
As I and others have documented, this is not at all uncommon in the UK and in many parts of the West. Special rights and privileges being given to Muslims are resulting in Christians increasingly being penalised by the law, and losing their jobs and their rights.
Instead of real integration where everyone is treated equally, we have instead segregation and apartheid, where some are more equal than others. And of course this is all one way traffic. Christians in Muslim-majority nations never experience such preferential treatment – quite the opposite.
Lastly, a story of an Australian unlucky enough to be in Saudi Arabia. The sad tale goes this way: “The Federal Government will ‘urgently’ seek leniency after a Shepparton man was sentenced to a year in jail and 500 lashes in Saudi Arabia for religious offences.
“Father-of-five Mansor Almaribe, 45, was charged with blasphemy last month while participating in the Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Shiite Muslim was initially sentenced to two years in jail and 500 lashes but then reduced the sentence to one year and 500 lashes.
“The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade today said the Australian ambassador had been in touch with Saudi authorities and was providing consular assistance to Mr Almaribe’s family. ‘The Ambassador will urgently pursue avenues for leniency with relevant authorities,’ a spokeswoman said. Mr Almaribe faced the death penalty after he was accused of insulting the companions of the prophet Muhammad under the country’s blasphemy laws.”
Ah, the religion of peace strikes again. The truth is, there is no freedom of religion in Islam, and there is no freedom of conscience. The only freedom is one-directional: people are free to convert to Islam, but they most definitely are not free to leave Islam. The penalty for such “apostasy” is death.
Islam is a political ideology and a totalitarian religion, which brooks no dissent, questioning or difference of opinion. Those who dare to question The Prophet or the Koran are regarded as traitors who must be silenced. Islam will never be compatible with Western freedoms and democracy,
As Mark Gabriel, former lecturer of Islamic History at Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt recently wrote, “The war today is between seventh-century Islamic culture and twenty-first-century modern culture. These cultures are incompatible. They cannot coexist because the values of one violate the values of the other.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/03/honour-crimes-uk-rising
http://www.islam-watch.org/SyedKamranMirza/honor_killing.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8917675/Christian-worker-loses-her-job-after-being-targeted-by-Islamic-extremists.html
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/australian-mansor-almaribe-faces-500-lashes-for-blasphemy/story-e6frf7jo-1226215942843
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