Author: Mick Hartley

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My parents chose a husband for me. I was engaged to him at 14 and forced into marriage at 17. when I was 19, I had had enough and I decided to run away from home. On 8 August 1991, I packed my bags and went.

I have since put myself through college and university and now consider myself as an independent career woman.

At the time, I left with hardly anything. And having lived in a sheltered, reclusive environment, I suddenly had to face up to real life for the first time.

I moved away from Leeds and lived in a hostel for a while. I worked at the same time as going to college where I studied for my GCSEs and then A levels. I later went on to read engineering at university.

When I was staying in the hostel, I met many other young Asian girls like me. It was tragic because they wanted to break away from their families but they kept on going home and getting into a total mess.

There must be lots of other men and women who want to break away from their culture. I now want to help other British Muslims who face a similar situation to me.

No doubt we’ll be getting more tales from those trapped on the ground in New Orleans, but this account of the “humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort”, over at Counago and Spaves, is compelling, and damning.

Update: Samizdata posted on this, and the comments suggest that the account should be treated with at least a degree of caution.

This is funny:

Lance Armstrong says he could come out of retirement to try for an eighth straight Tour de France victory.

Armstrong said: “While I’m absolutely enjoying my time as a retired athlete, the recent smear campaign out of France has awoken my competitive side.

“I’m thinking it’s the best way to p*** [the French] off. I’m not willing to put a percentage on the chances but I will no longer rule it out.”

Asked how serious he was, Armstrong replied: “I’m exercising every day.”

Armstrong believes he is the target of a “witch hunt” by the French media.

French sports daily L’Equipe reported in August that urine samples taken from Armstrong during his first Tour victory in 1999 tested positive for the banned substance EPO.

I think Lance is winding them up.

Isn’t he?

Hot on the heels of Solomonia’s interview with Richard Landes on the subject of “Pallywood” – Palestinian manipulation of the Western media – comes this article in Commentary on the most iconic example, the killing of Muhammad al-Dura (via Melanie Phillips, never in danger of understatement: “what might eventually come to be regarded as a racial libel on a par with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in both its malevolence and its contribution to the history of racial hatred”). I won’t extract key passages, as the whole thing needs to be read.

Interestingly, Muhammad al-Dura’s father Jamal, having been given $100,000 to build a new house by a rich Gulf sheik, is trying to back out of the limelight:

After his 12-year-old son died in a hail of bullets in 2000, Jamal al-Dura became the public face of Palestinian suffering as the second intifadah began. He traveled across the Arab world, standing as a symbol of perceived Israeli brutality and growing wealthy from the largesse showered upon him.

Nearly five years later, however, Dura says he has tired of mouthing the counterproductive mottos of Palestinian hard-liners. Instead, with Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last month, he has turned to building a grand new home for his eight surviving children and he has forbidden his eldest son from joining any militant movement, at least until he finishes university.

”One martyr from this family is enough,” Dura, 43, said at his home in Bureij.

He’s only the most famous of a minority of Gaza Palestinians who are rejecting the all-encompassing culture of intifadah, jihad, and martyrdom that has turned camps like Bureij and Jabaliya into locomotives of the Palestinian militant factions.

Update: it strikes me that this would make an excellent subject for a documentary – a Panorama, say. That it’s so unlikely is a sad comment on the state of our television in general, and of the BBC in particular.

Ken Livingstone will be delighted to find himself praised as a “giant” by Dr Azzam Al-Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London. This in contrast to those “traitors to Islam” who renounce violence and claim that organisations like the MCB are not representative of Muslims in Britain: John Ware, presenting Panorama on August 21 “could not have insulted, taunted, and defamed Islam and the Muslims if not for the help he received from some Muslims in Britain, be it during the year-long prior research or during the production.” Nor indeed could Bush and Blair have managed “their frenzied attempt to destroy Islam, which ascends high in spite of them”, if not for this “group of Muslims detached from their faith and from the Islamic nation”.

“Since the July 7 bombing in London, there have been continuous attacks on Islam and Muslims, not only in Britain but throughout the liberal democratic system in what is known as the West, in Europe or beyond.

“There is no doubt that the forces of the extreme right and the racist movements… and the Zionist lobby in this democratic system have been full of rancor and hatred, and that these events gave them the opportunity to spew their venom…

“Yet all the human and material resources possessed by these forces, including media and political [influence], have not served [their interests] as much as has a fanatical group of Muslims, who, competing with politicians and writers hostile to Islam, immediately rushed to defame the most esteemed ‘ulama and the Muslims in general. They shirked from defending the just causes of Islam in Palestine, Iraq, Kashmir and Chechnya, [while they justified] the violations of human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law, under the pretext of fighting [Islamic] extremism and terrorism.” […]

“It is wonderful that the Muslims find non-Muslim men and women who stand by them and support them during this trial, while there is treachery on the part of people who presume to belong to the Islamic nation and claim to be defending its creed and law. These [wretched] ones are a far cry from the giant Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London… likewise, they are a far cry from [other] giants of the British Left, led by the fighter George Galloway, who has allied himself with the Muslims and has defended them against the racists and the Zionists…”

This guy is a professor of psychology. His speciality? Luck. I’d have thought that luck, like Intelligent Design, is something that by definition is outside the range of science: if you find a reason why one person is luckier than another, then it’s no longer a question of luck.

His latest wheeze? (scroll down)

A scientist is to test the reputation of Skibbereen, Co Cork — widely considered to be the luckiest town in Ireland. Professor Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire, will buy 50 lottery tickets in Skibbereen and a further 50 in Dublin, for the draw tomorrow.

I was in two minds about the French ban on headscarves in schools, but if this report is to be believed, they got it right:

Fathima stood outside her lycée chatting and joking with friends. She paused briefly to lift a long, beige scarf off her head and then walked into the playground — an excited teenager back in class after the two-month French summer holidays.

Yet a year ago here, at the Lycée Henri Wallon in Aubervilliers, north of Paris, the mood was very different.

France’s centre-Right Government had passed a law banning religious symbols from schools and girls such as Fathima were at the centre of a fierce national controversy.

The law applies to all visible symbols, including kippas, turbans and large Christian crosses. But no one ever had any doubt about its main target — the Muslim headscarf that was the focus of a long and bitter struggle between Islamic extremists and the secular state.

At the Lycée Henri Wallon, where Alma and Lila Levy were expelled for refusing to remove their scarves, the debate was heated. Most teachers backed the law on the ground, hoping that it would end a drift towards multiculturalism that was separating pupils along ethnic and religious lines.

But leaders of France’s five million Muslims denounced it as an attack on religious freedom and parents expressed fears that children would be driven out of school because of “a bit of cloth on their heads”.

Twelve months on, the row has subsided and the law is being hailed by the Government as a success that has stemmed the Islamic fundamentalist tide and brought calm to the nation’s lycées.

Fathima, who is 16, agrees. “In the end I really don’t think it was a bad law at all. I wear my voile until I get to the school gates and then I take it off. School is not a place for religion. It is a place where we are all French and we are all equal. After lessons, I put the scarf back on again. There’s no difficulty.”

Meanwhile in Britain the PM’s wife successfully argued Shabina Begum’s case that she be allowed to wear a full-length jilbab to school – a case instigated by Hizb ut-Tahrir. And the PM himself is keen to support faith schools….

It’s a race to the bottom for the old-school Tories: the remnants of that inglorious crew who did their best to ensure that no obstacles be put in the way of Milosevic. First Kenneth Clarke, now Norman Lamont:

Mr Clarke was right to call the war “a disastrous decision”. It is remarkable that this needs to be said at all. Iraq has been this country’s biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez, has made Britain and the world a more dangerous place, and yet has hardly been criticised at all by the Conservative Party. There has been a detached indifference to the massive loss of life: 2,000 Americans, probably ten times that number of Iraqis killed, and perhaps 100,000 injured or maimed for life — for what purpose?

For what purpose? Another one who seems to believe that Iraqis suffering under Saddam somehow don’t count – never mind the threat that the Baathist regime posed.

As Saturday’s Times editorial argued, this is “territory into which the wise would step with extreme caution”, but Lamont goes even futher than Clarke:

On one point however, Mr Clarke may be wrong, and may find himself outflanked even by the Americans. He believes it would be “immoral to walk away”, and that we should not pull the troops out. Much the same was said about Vietnam. The time has to come when the Iraqis assume responsibility for their own destiny. As Senator Chuck Hagel has said: “Staying the course is not a policy.” Without a stated intention to withdraw, Iraqis may never be ready or willing to take control of their country.

What a piece of political judgement: only a couple of months after a bunch of Islamist fanatics blow themselves up alongside over 50 Londoners, and days after a video is released of Mohammad Sidique Khan, “Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight”, up pops Lamont to suggest that we are indeed guilty as charged and should do just as this deluded idiot wants.

Another good one from Nick Cohen, on Ken’s continuing romance with al-Qaradawi, and the futility of Foreign Office’s attempts to cosy up to radical Islam:

Livingstone comes from the far left and recruited nearly all his advisers from a minuscule Trotskyist faction which gathered around the Socialist Action newspaper. They were ‘third worldists’, as we used to say, activists who had despaired of the British working class ever obeying the orders of their Leninist betters and therefore supported any movement in the Third World, however barbaric, as long as it said it was socialist.

What is new is that since the death of socialism, they are prepared to indulge the extreme religious right as long at it is anti-American. The reflex is essentially the same, as is the delusion that these are in some way ‘progressive’ forces.

Now it seems the fantasy has spread to the Foreign Office. Documents obtained by this newspaper show that the mandarins have been preparing for an accommodation with radical Islam. […]

The leaked papers show FO mandarins in a land of make-believe. Running through this thinking is an aching need to believe that Qaradawi is a liberal, a peculiar liberal, no doubt, but still a man with whom Britain can do business. The Foreign Secretary may remember the negative media storm when Livingstone last brought the priest to Britain, the civil servants tell Jack Straw. He should ignore it. The accusations came from tainted Jewish sources, ‘the Board of [Jewish] Deputies’ and the Israeli monitoring site Memri, which is ‘regularly criticised for selective translation of Arabic reports’.

This simply isn’t true. Qaradawi’s extremist views haven’t been spread by scheming Jews but are well documented on his very own website.

The FO doesn’t want to know because it is desperate to have authoritative Muslim voices condemn the slaughter in Iraq. That would indeed be nice. So too would be the odd denunciation from the Western left. But it’s never going to happen, and all the FO has done is abandon Arab liberals in a fruitless quest for the approval of their enemies on the religious right.

As a balance to the gleeful Bush-bashing over New Orleans in the British media (‘It’s black people who are dying, so Bush doesn’t care’ – from the Observer), check out the comments at Althouse and Buzz Machine. There’s a good case for thinking that much of the flak he’s taking should be directed at the local rather than the federal response.