Spanish Senate Votes To Ban The Burqa

The New York Times reports: MADRID — In a significant escalation of Spain’s debate over how to handle radical Islam, the Senate on Wednesday narrowly and unexpectedly approved a motion to ban Muslim women from wearing in public the burqa or other garments that cover the whole body. The vote, 131 to 129, was another setback [...]

“The Law Of God Which Is Above Human Rights”

Any religion, or interpretation of a religion which takes the view that the law of God can be above human rights cannot be immune to violating human rights.  In this case, we have an Iranian cleric calling for unveiled women to be treated like criminals as though they were drug traffickers, robbers, or terrorists: Guardian [...]

Bruce Bawer: Multiculturalism, Freedom of Speech and Appeasing Islam

Bruce Bawer is a gay liberal and the author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. And below is a powerful speech.  If you don’t have time for the whole thing, at least make time for the first part: The description of the video [...]

Muslims Illegally Shutting Down Streets Of Paris For Prayer

Last week we mentioned that a proposed street festival of pork and wine protesting Muslims praying in the streets was prohibited from occurring in Paris.  Here is footage of such prayer sessions, which apparently are meant to be an act of civil disobedience: Thanks to Tony for the link. Your Thoughts?

United Arab Emirates Court Sentences Teenage Gang Rape Victim To Prison

The weak, cruel, unjust, and barbarically stupid misogyny of laws in the Islamic world never ceases to sicken or anger me: A court in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has convicted an 18 year old girl (”LH”) to one year in prison for “consensual sex.”  The UAE court convicted her because she agreed to be alone [...]

Zakir Naik Compares Outspoken Apostasy To Treason And Supports Capital Punishment For It

And that’s not all: On Osama bin Laden, [Zakir Naik] has said: “If he is terrorizing the terrorists, if he is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, every Muslim should be a terrorist.” And now he is coming to Toronto in a couple of weeks for what “is being described as the largest Islamic [...]

Pakistani Police Investigating Mark Zuckerberg On Charges Of Blasphemy From Lawyer

In response to “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day”: Last month, according to English-language Pakistani newspaper The News International, a Pakistani High Court judge summoned the police after lawyer Muhammad Azhar Siddique filed an application for a First Information Report (FIR), claiming that the owners of Facebook had committed a heinous and serious crime under Section 295-C of [...]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali At The Ottowa International Writer’s Festival

An interview from June 10 with the author of Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations: Your Thoughts?

Paris Bans A “Sausage And Wine” Protest Of Muslims Who Close Down Roads By Praying In The Streets

From Reuters’s FaithWorld blog: A giant “sausage and wine” party planned later this week in a Paris neighbourhood with many Muslim residents risks sparking disturbances and will therefore be banned, police in the French capital announced on Tuesday. The event, announced on the social networking site Facebook late last month (see page here in French), [...]

The Rise Of Islamo-Erotica

(Image: “God Is Great” by Makan Emadi) Betwa Shermer has a really interesting piece about Muslim artists in America who incorporate nudes into their art.  Defenses of nudity in art as permissible by Islamic standards: The Lebanese-born artist, who now lives in New York, insists that the taboo stems from a conservative society and not [...]

Is Shari’a Law “Inevitable” For UK Muslims?

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, claims it is: Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4′s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social [...]

What is fundamentalism?

A couple of days ago, I saw Dan’s post of a Ayaan Hirsi Ali video, in which she was explaining that the willingness of fundamentalists to kill people cannot be only blamed on their destitute situation (for two reasons: 1. not all of the fundamentalists who become terrorists are poor, 2. not all poor people [...]

Taliban Executes 7 Year Old Boy, Accusing Him Of Spying

So despicable. Your Thoughts?

Creepy Pro-Geert Wilders Propaganda

I’m as troubled by Islam’s authoritarianism of thought and practice as any one but Christian crusading is is not much better.  This is called “Geert Wilders The Lion Heart” and unless it’s just an exceptional satire, it’s a really unsettling, unrestrained glorification of Christian warfare against Islam. How long until the Christian theocrats begin embracing [...]

Exit Polls Say Geert Wilders’s Anti-Islamic Party Doubles Its Seats In Dutch Parliament

The Guardian: The Netherlands’ anti-Islamic MP Geert Wilders appeared on course for major gains in a general election yesterday, more than doubling his party’s seats in the Dutch parliament and overtaking the incumbent ruling Christian Democrats, according to exit polls last night. Wilders’ Freedom party looked to have taken third place in a close-fought election [...]

The Right To Apostasy

Former Muslims United claim the right to apostasy for American Muslims is in danger: FMU has asked me to note two corrections that need to be made in the article below: Wafa Sultan is the president of Former Muslims United. The right of apostasy pledge was sent to 111 Muslim leaders, not groups. In the fall [...]

Lars Vilks, Recently Attacked At Speech, Joins “Kill Lars Vilks” Facebook Group

After he drew Mohammed with the body of a dog, an Al-Qaeda front organization put a bounty on Lars Vilks’s head: $100,000 for killing him and $150,000 if it’s a death by slit throat.  He was recently attacked at a talk he was giving when he showed photos of his controversy riling drawings. Now he [...]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Don’t Blame Islamic Terrorism on Economic Woes

Here is the complete talk from which this clip derives. Ayaan’s books are Infidel, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam, and, her newest, Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations. Your Thoughts?

Inside Kandahar’s Secret School For Girls

How can you not admire the bravery of these girls? And how can you not fear for them? Thanks to OneGoodMove.org. Your Thoughts?

Angry Atheist Debate About A Mosque Near Ground Zerosts

Saturday I put together a large post highlighting a spectrum of thoughtful and/or provocative opinions on the recently approved plan to build a mosque a couple of blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center in New York.  That day, for the sake of balance, I wanted to find someone who could [...]

A Mosque At Ground Zero?

New York City has approved a plan to build a 13 story mosque and community center near the site of the former World Trade Center as part of the area’s proposed revitalization. I decided to group all the most interesting and relevant videos and editorials I could find into one large post in order to [...]

Sex And The City 2 (And Religion) (And Feminism) (And Race) (And Homophobia)

Diana Bass complains: It just wasn’t very funny to see four smart American women parading western consumerism and sexualized identity in blatantly insensitive and anti-religious ways in a traditional world.    Wait a minute, what she describes may not be funny but it’s certainly the best thing I’ve heard about the film from everything that I’ve [...]

“I Prefer John Locke To Jesus Christ, I Prefer John Stuart Mill To Jesus Christ…I Prefer Jon Stewart To Jesus Christ”

If you missed Ayaan Hirsi Ali on The Colbert Report last night, make time to see the interview here. And in either case I also recommend her first interview with Colbert, from March 15, 2007, in which he hardly knows what do with her. Ayaan’s books are Infidel, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women [...]

The Challenges To Saudi Women’s Automony

Last fall Nesrine Malik discussed the repressive guardianship laws in Saudi Arabia and challenged the thinking of a female Saudi journalist who thinks Sharia and Islam are the routes to women’s liberation: When living in Saudi Arabia, every time I wanted to travel outside the kingdom I had to produce a piece of paper from my [...]

American Academy Of Pediatrics Reverses Support For Female Circumcision “Compromise”

The American Academy of Pediatrics had proposed permitting American doctors to ritually “nick” the clitorises of girls whose parents want to maintain their customs in America.  The thinking was that this compromise would prevent such parents from going underground to have a fuller mutilation of the clitoris carried out instead.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues that [...]