Entre Nous / Musings of a former Belgian

Yellow badges for Jews in Iran?

There are conflictying reports on alleged attempts by the Iranian regime to pass a law mandating identifiable dress codes for each of the non-Muslim minorities. (I have no doubt whatsoever that they're crazy or morally degenerate enough to do it, though. Then again, many "urban legends" stick precisely because they are somewhat plausible.) Hot Air summarizes evidence either way.

Corporal punishment

Singapore is just about the only "normal" country I know that not only has corporal punishment on the books (caning, to be specific) but fairly routinely carries it out. I am certainly with the judge on this one

SINGAPORE: A Singaporean Muslim man with 10 wives and 64 children was sentenced to 32 years in jail and a caning for raping five of his under-age daughters, court documents showed.

The 45-year-old man, who cannot be named in order to protect the identity of his daughters, was sentenced after he pleaded guilty to five charges of rape and admitted to another 34 charges, including rape and attempted aggravated rape.

"The numerous rapes in this case were systematic and sickening," said High Court Judge Tay Yong Kwang in the judgment.

"The mothers of the young girls had somehow been persuaded by the accused that what he was doing was right. That deprived the daughters of one escape route that they could have taken – that of approaching some adults whom they trusted to confide in them their predicament."

The court sentenced him to 24 strokes of the cane.

According to the court documents, the man said he was a qualified religious teacher. During a religious class, he told his wives and daughters that, according to the Koran, he had complete ownership over his children as a father, including the right to have sex with them.

The wives then acted as his messengers, telling their daughters to meet their father in his bedroom whenever he wanted sex over a period of 18 months.

Two of the teenage daughters became pregnant and had to have abortions. The eldest daughter, who is now 16, went to the police last June to report the rapes.

In his mitigation plea, the man said he had found his older daughters "behaving inappropriately" with boys and he thought that "if he could satisfy the sexual needs of his daughters, they would be less likely to engage in sexual activities with boys".

(Hat tip: Clayton Cramer.)

Quote of the day

Todd Seavey in the Wall Street Journal:

Perhaps the greatest evidence that there is little intellectual heft left in the anarchist movement is the occasional protests in Albany, N.Y., where self-proclaimed anarchists turn up to protest budget cuts at state-run schools. It's a satire Burke never could have dreamed of.

First-ever Belgian islamikaze --- a European woman

Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, quoting both Luxemburg TV and sources in the Belgian judiciary, reports that Belgium now has its first home-grown suicide bomber --- a female, ethnically European one at that.

The woman, living in Brussels, apparently converted to Islam following her marriage to a Moroccan immigrant, who hung around in radical islamist circles. She apparently blew herself up in a November 9 assault on an American patrol in Baghdad.

The soldiers found her Belgian passport on her body. As it turned out, she travelled to Iraq via Turkey, and preparations for the islamikaze attack were made by her "loving" husband.

The circumstances make me wonder whether she was pressured/manipulated into this following real or imaginary marital infidelity. We saw this a number of times here in Israel --- where the "Palestinian" woman in question was basically given the choice of "honorable martyrdom" or (presumably slow and painful) "execution". As in addition I consider any Western woman who converts to Islam to be certifiably insane, I consider her more a tool/victim in the hands of her "loving husband" than anything else.

The recommended course of medical treatment for the latter waste of oxygen, in my opinion, would be double orchidectomy without anesthesia, followed by forced ingestion of the removed organ tissue. Death is too noble a fate for this piece of human excrement.

UPDATE: Belgian daily De Standaard (in Dutch) has more. The woman was apparently one Muriel Degauque from the Walloon town of Monceau-sur-Sambre. Born in a working-class Walloon [=French-speaking Belgian] family, she had converted to Islam at the time of her first marriage, to an Algerian immigrant. Five years ago, she remarried to a Moroccan named Aissan, and her Islamic life took a sharp turn for the radical: she started wearing a burqa and even wore black gloves so her hands would not be visible. She moved to Brussels and was barely in touch with her parents.

Apparently she and her husband drove to Iraq via Turkey and Syria, from which latter country she talked one final time on the phone to her parents. Her husband was planning to blow himself up as well, but was killed, together with five accomplices, during a gun battle with American soldiers. An explosive belt was found around his middle.

In an operation against what appears to be a network of splodeydope smugglers, Belgian police made 14 arrests on Tuesday night in Brussels, Antwerp, Riemst, and Charleroi. Nine were brought before an Investigative Judge [= the first stage of felony proceedings in Belgium] on charges of membership in a terrorist organization. Among them is an Antwerp couple who wanted to leave themselves, and were found out by wiretapping. Another was the son of a notorious Koran teacher of Tunisian origin, who was himself expelled in 1991 for incitement.

UPDATE 2: Leave it to Charles Johnson to come up with the headline Exploding chocolate poodle.

History: queerer than we can suppose

Quiz question: which US organization made new members pledge allegiance to (among other things) "The eternal separation of Church and State"?

(a) The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

(b) The American Jewish Committee

(c) American Atheists, Inc.

(d) The Ku-Klux Klan

The answer, believe it or not, is (d).

Paraphrasing J. B. S. Haldane, "history is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose". (The word "queer" is used here in its original meaning of "strange".)

Saudi journalist: "Radical islam worse than Nazism"

Read the whole thing.

Guardian reporter-trainee member of extreme Islamist group

Still alive, swamped with work.

A good one here: British blog The Daily Ablution reveals thatGuardian reporter-trainee is member of extreme Islamist group. Can't say I am surprised.

Several decades ago, the late Belgian justice minister Jean Gol (an ex-Trotskyite turned what we now call "neoconservative") commented that his country suffered from political AIDS "in the etymological sense of the word" (i.e., acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). Sadly, his words get truer by the day.

UPDATE: The Daily Ablution can claim two scalps over the affair: not only was the Islamist journalist fired, but his enabler, teh Guardian's executive news editor, has resigned.

[Scott] Burgess [a.k.a. The Daily Ablution] reports that his source at The Guardian said Scardino's position had become "untenable" due to the split between Aslam's supporters and those who wanted him gone.  Editor Alan Rushbridger has conceded that this affair and its internal repercussions constitute "a significant crisis for the paper".

Go read the whole link-filled summary.

The anti-Muslim hate crime that wasn't

Get this:

[...] last month [...] burned Korans were reportedly discovered at a local mosque in southwest Virginia.
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations issued an immediate press release on June 16 calling for "Americans of all faiths to obtain and read the Quran after burned copies of Islam's revealed text were found" in a shopping bag at the front door of the Islamic Center of Blacksburg. [etc. etc. etc.]

Laila Al-Qatami, a spokeswoman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, lambasted police: "If pages from the Bible were burned and put in a bag outside a church," she huffed to the Associated Press, "I think the reaction of the police would be that it would be a hate crime."
Actually, in this country, when you dunk a crucifix in urine that's "art" and when you hang a framed copy of the Ten Commandments inside a courthouse, that's a crime.

[...]
It turns out, you see, that the burnt Koran was left at the mosque by…a Muslim student.


According to the [Associated Press], a Muslim Virginia Tech student took responsibility saying he dropped off the burned Koran and other singed materials at the mosque, hoping "it could be given a respectful disposal." Police Lt. Bruce Bradberry reported that the student, who was not named, apparently contacted police last week, "saying he was going to be traveling abroad and didn't know what to do with the Koran, which had been burned in a 2004 house fire. The student said he placed the book and other fire-damaged materials in a bag and left the bag at the Islamic Center with a note, which apparently blew away."

EUranian draft constitution starts with...

The Brobdignagian draft EU Constitution starts out with the words:

HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS

Enough said.

IDF soldier arrested for Neo-Nazi activity

No sh*t. On Holocaust Memorial Day, no less.

Police on Wednesday arrested an Israel Defense Forces soldier suspected of belonging to a neo-Nazi group, Army Radio reported Thursday.

A detective squad detained the soldier, a new immigrant and a resident of the Ariel settlement in the West Bank, after his behavior aroused suspicion. Officers found heroin in his vehicle, Israel Radio reported.

Upon his arrest, the soldier told police he was a neo-Nazi and that he hated the state. A swastika was found tattooed on his left arm.

Police search the soldier's home and found material connecting him to neo-Nazi organizations overseas.

The soldier, who serves in a non-combat unit, lives with his mother.

When police arrived at their home, the soldier's mother also declared she was a neo-Nazi who hated Israel.

Military Police are investigating the drug-related suspicions against the soldier and Ariel police are probing his suspected neo-Nazi affiliations.

The Interior Ministry announced Thursday that it was looking into the possibility of stripping the mother and son of their Israeli citizenship.

The Jerusalem Post adds that the [censored] immigrated four years ago from Russia.