HRS International

While the burka debate rages in many countries, the Norwegian government has put its foot down. The Legislation Department of the Ministry of Justice believes that a ban on women covering their entire bodies with a burka or niqab in public spaces will likely be considered a violation of religions freedom under the European Human Rights Convention. Not everybody agrees. Philip Wendahl, for example, believes that accepting the burka and niqab amounts to sexual discrimination.

In short: a German paper is propagating feel-good anti-Semitism, mocking Auschwitz, slapping Holocaust victims in the face – and seeking the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.

Naeem Chaudhry, the wealthy and influential lawyer on trial in Pakistan for the murder of a 12-year-old Christian girl, Shazia Masih, who had been a servant in his house, was set free in February after paying bail amounting to a mere 100,000 rupees (about USD 1200).

In this piece our man in Sweden, Philip Wendahl, weighs in on the chilling events currently playing out in the city of Malmö. Wendahl, who has studied human rights and theology, is currently writing a book about multiculturalism and Islam.

In his book “Mig og Muhammed” (“Me and Mohammed”) Mikael Jalving bids a final farewell to fashionable society.

Having visited Norway a few times I was always amazed to see how the people of Norway seemed to exist in seamless harmony. But my last visit was a sort of awakening. There is aggression in the air, even some fear one might say. It reminded me far too much of how life is in Pakistan. Norway isn’t nearly as bad, but I fear that if serious action isn’t taken to curb the hold of fundamentalist and largely political Islamic groups over the evolution of societal norms there, there isn’t much hope for Norwegian culture to survive.

In this essay, which appeared recently in the print edition of the International Herald Tribune and is published here with the author’s kind permission, Ayaan Hirsi Ali takes the centennial of International Women’s Day as an occasion to contemplate the status of women around the world today – and a hundred years from now. Hirsi Ali is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a new book, Nomad.

Utterly soul-crushing: I can conceive of no better phrase to summarize my experience with American University's Middle Eastern Studies program. While I am roughly two-thirds finished with the program, I don't think that I have it within me to complete it: it's too demoralizing. I am a man who cherishes his mind and his values, and I have concluded that they are simply better-spent elsewhere. I simply cannot actively participate in a system dedicated to undercutting our civilization.

In recent years Communists and Islamists in Norway and Europe have tried to establish a grotesque myth, namely that ”the Muslims are Europe’s new Jews.” This is as far from the truth as possible, and the truth is, if possible, even more grotesque than the manipulation itself, namely that the Jews are once again being persecuted and are once again in flight. This time they are being persecuted above all by Muslims. It is for this reason that I devoted a chapter in my last book on the rise in persecution of Jews. It now looks as if segments of the media are waking up. This weekend the state channel, Norwegian broadcasting, paid well-merited attention to the new persecution of Jews in Sweden and Norway.

Every country in Europe should have an organization like the small Norwegian think tank Human Rights Service, which for years now has plunged into waters into which the cultural elite fears to dip its toe. Yet because of that elite, and its Islamist allies, HRS is under an attack. We need HRS - because Western European freedom, democracy, and equal rights deserve to live.

The distinguished writer Henryk M. Broder is perhaps Germany’s most eloquent critic of the Islamization of Europe. His most recent books are Hurra,wir kapitulieren (2006) and Kritik der reinen Toleranz (2008); he blogs at achgut.de and contributes regularly to Der Spiegel. In this essay Broder explores the mentality of his fellow Western authors and intellectuals who have chosen to appease Islam.

The Islam that leading Muslim spokespeople represent is increasingly taking on the lineaments of a religion of fear and threats. Now that Norway has taken a quantum leap in the debate on hijab – the prime minister has proposed that the government rule on whether individual scholls may prohibit hijab – the spokespeople are growing more and more aggressive, and are indirectly threatening violence. In addition, the same people who have called us at HRS “extremists” are now slapping the same label on major Labor Party politicians. What this suggests is that the Islamist groups are starting to crack.

For the Ahmadiyyah Muslims of Pakistan, life is spent in a constant struggle. I myself was born into a Sunni Muslim family in Pakistan, hence I didn’t understand how tragic the reality of persecution is for a religious minority in Pakistan until I investigated the matter personally. Being part of the mainstream circles of society did not prepare me for the realization of the atrocities being carried out under the umbrella of protection of the Pakistani Government.

Mahdi Hassan, who lives in Tynset, Norway, was named the 2009 Role Model of the Year, an honor bestowed by the Minister of Children, Equality, and Social Inclusion. Now it emerges that Hassan believes homosexuality should be forbidden in Norway. The Norwegian LGBT Association (LLH) is upset about this, but the leaders of the Socialist Left Party in Tynset think his views are just fine.

On February 12, in response to the publication of a Muhammed cartoon by the newspaper Dagbladet, about 3000 Muslims held a protest rally in the square at the old campus of the University of Oslo, only a short distance from the Royal Palace and Parliament. At the demonstration one of its organizers, Mohyeldeen Mohammed, gave a fiery speech in which he asked: “When will Norwegian authorities and their media understand the seriousness of this matter? Maybe not until it is too late. Maybe not until we have a September 11 on Norwegian soil. This is not a threat, it is a warning.” The “warning” has led to widespread discussion in Norway. Here is what Hege Storhaug had to say in Bergens Tidende on February 20.

In this essay, which originally appeared in “Le Figaro” on February 8 and is published here in English for the first time with the author’s permission, Robert Redeker – the professor of philosophy who was driven from his home by death threats after writing an op-ed about Islam for the same newspaper in 2006 – reflects illuminatingly upon the centrality of the human face to human identity and community, and upon the way in which the burka, therefore, embodies an immense destructive power.

Back in the 1990s, when Bruce Bawer was working on a book with a congressman in Washington D.C., he could walk freely in and out of the Congress building. No security, no checkpoints. The situation was the same when Bawer visited a senator's offices in Washington D.C.: nobody stopped him or asked him for I.D. Interviewing Geert Wilders in the Parliament in The Hague this weekend was a totally different story, more like a science fiction. The result, in any case, was that Bawer was granted an exclusive video interview with the most hunted politician of high rank in today’s Europe.

"Since the Almighty hath put upon me the stamp of beauty, it is my wish that the public should view the beauty and thereby recognize His grace unto them. On no account, therefore, will I veil myself."

Terry Glavin, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia, is a veteran author, journalist, and editor who blogs at transmontanus.blogspot.com. He is a signatory of the Euston Manifesto, in which he and fellow members of the left, reacting to the widespread leftist-Islamist alliance, rejected “fear of modernity, fear of freedom, irrationalism, the subordination of women,” and reaffirmed “liberty, equality and solidarity; human rights; the pursuit of happiness.” In this essay for rights.no he challenges the left’s received wisdom that Afghans want NATO troops out of their country and underscores that mainstream Afghan women view Western soldiers as guarantors of their freedom and security.

Today, in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, leader of a major Dutch political party, goes to court, charged by his nation’s public prosecutor for having expressed his views about Islam. To read the summons addressed to him is to feel as if one has been hurled back into a dark, distant, pre-Enlightenment era; it is to feel that in one fell swoop, the illusion of freedom in Europe has, once and for all, been utterly extinguished.

“That might be true," says Geert Wilders to the Norwegian site rights.no about the possibility that he has lost his freedom for the rest of his life, "and if so is a very sad conclusion. I wouldn’t wish my worst political enemy not to be free. But I have no regrets. I have to pay a high price for the fight for freedom, but it’s worth it because if I and others in the world don’t fight against the ideology of hate and submission, we will all lose our freedom." His remarks came on the day before the man who may become the Netherlands' next prime minister goes to trial for criticizing Islam.

These days the burka and niqab are topics of intense debate in Denmark, while Norway once again seems to have landed in a hijab debate, this time involving the possible prohibition of political and religious symbols on the judge’s bench. Meanwhile, what’s going on in Sweden? Philip Wendahl reports that in Sweden, too, outfits that cover the entire body are also being debated – especially in connection with Alia Khalifa, who demands to be allowed to continue training for day-care center work while wearing niqab. Such demands symbolize the Islamization of Europe, argues Wendahl, who believes that it is undesirable for society to adapt itself to a small, but loud, group of religious extremists – and that it is especially undesirable when we call to mind the ”new Europeans” who have fled from oppressive religious regimes in search of Western secular democracy.

They call themselves the Women of the Wall. They are pious Jews who only wish to pray at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem in a woman-only group in the woman's section. But the State of Israel – which has handled its Muslim citizens with kid gloves, and which has carefully protected mosques and Muslim holy sites – has treated these Jewish women with condescension and abuse. And the treatment has only become increasingly brutal with the passing years. The fact is that the Jewish State – just like the rest of the Middle East – has become rapidly Islamized where views of women are concerned.

HEGE STORHAUG: It is heartbreaking, even as it is unsurprising. In Britain, the authorities are now reporting the forced marriage of girls as young as nine years old on British soil. We are not talking about one case, but several, which take place under official protection. We are not speaking, then, about parents or ”husbands” who are being charged with a criminal offense. The situation, in other words, is completely unacceptable and makes clear that we have a crying need for a new approach to these matters. Government must put their foot down – and powerfully so – so that there will be no doubt as to the way in which such grotesque crimes will be addressed.