Posts for Nov 7th: Lybian newspaper suspended, Al-Awlaki's influence, Spying AQ, Commemorating intifada, French "youths" attack Catholic Mass, Professor denies Holocaust, British Abu Hamza, Terrorist arrested, Kosovo's headscarf ban, "Education" for Islamic apostates, Mosque bombings, silence of Muslim leaders

1. Lybia: Pro-reform newspaper suspended. The Libyan government has suspended printing of a newspaper controlled by a reformist son of leader Muammar Gaddafi, local media reported, in what could be the latest phase in a power struggle inside the oil exporting state. The newspaper had accused the Govt of not tackling corruption.
2. UK: Al-Awlaki sermons influenced Muslim woman to stab British MP. Roshanara Choudhry, a 21-year-old student who has been jailed for life for trying to assassinate British MP Stephen Timms in May this year, told police she had wanted to die as a martyr after watching more than 100 hours of video sermons from the American-born extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki on the internet.
3. Terror: Spy agencies have infiltrated AQ. The case of Rahman (an ex-GITMO who spied the Taliban and who was killed after they discovered it), which Shah (the Taliban spokeman) recounted to The Associated Press, falls in line with a key aspect of the fight against terror — Western intelligence agencies, with help from Islamic allies, are placing moles and informants inside al-Qaida and the Taliban. The program seems to be bearing fruit, even as many infiltrators like Rahman are discovered and killed.
4. UK: Venezuelan embassy to commemorate intifada: The intifada was “at the forefront of the world struggle against white supremacist neo-colonialism and settler-colonialism,” according to the embassy.
5. France: "youths" throw stones and pine cones at Catholics during All Souls' mass: 150 people attending the memorial service for the dead late Tuesday afternoon in a church in a sensitive area of Carcassonne, were victims of two teenagers (between 13 and 14 years),who, after entering the building, they began throwing stones and pine cones to the faithful. One person was hit. In addition, a statue of the Virgin, targeted by the young snatchers, was damaged.
6. US: Vanderbilt radical professor denies Holocaust: Kaukab Siddique, associate professor of English at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, is an Islamic radical who demonizes Jews, mocks Holocaust victims and calls on Muslims to “liberate” Jerusalem.
7. UK: Citizenship restored to cleric wanted on terrorism charges on the US: A British government ruling stripping the Egyptian-born Muslim cleric known as Abu Hamza al-Masri of his British citizenship was struck down Friday by a special immigration court. But government officials said the court’s action would not affect the government’s plan to extradite the cleric to the United States, where he is wanted on terrorism charges. Officials in the office of Home Secretary Theresa May said no decision had been made on whether to appeal the immigration court’s ruling to a higher British court.
8. Germany: terrorist suspect arrested in Saarland region. The man demanded the release of an imprisoned member of the so-called Sauerland group which attempted to blow up US army bases in Germany in 2007.
9. Kosovo: Headscarf ban sparks debate over country's identity: The government decided to forbid the wearing of headscarves in public schools late last year, in accordance with the constitution that declares Kosovo – which unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008 – a secular country. “The scarf in Kosovo is not an element of our identity. It’s a sign of submission of female to male, rather than a sign of choice“, Kosovo’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Vlora Citaku explains.
10. "Islam not invasive": "retreat centers" for Christian converts from Islam in Malaysia: A two-hour journey from the capital city of Kuala Lumpur revealed an isolated encampment where some Christian converts say they’ve been taken in order to be forced back to Islam.
11. Pakistan: Death toll in mosques' bombing over 70. The mosques belong to Ahmaddiya community. The death toll right now is of 95.
12. Salim Mansur: "We have a deadly silence of the Muslim leadership": " we have deathly silence of the Muslim leadership as non-Muslim minorities inside the Arab-Muslim world are routinely abused, their homes and places of worship under daily duress, and their hearts filled with fear of violent death in the hands of Muslim jihadis."

Dissecting the Burqa

This Islamic garment is a symbol of oppression for a variety of mostly straightforward reasons, and as such is morally reprehensible. What I just said shouldn’t be controversial at all to uphold, were it not for the raging storm of political correctness that has swept through our culture lately. So I’m not going to go through the ideological reasons of how and why the burqa sucks, because to me it’s so trivial. Plus I don’t even invoke any of that when I see a woman in a burqa: the silent war of cultures, the sickening throwback to a savage era of female subjugation to men, etc…

My immediate reaction whenever I spot a burqa-girl comes as an intimate shocking shudder down my spine. What an awkward and obtrusive image! It ironically generates the same kind of silent tension in common social settings as would the presence of a completely naked person sitting next to you in the bus, or nonchalantly walking into a bank or a restaurant. Whether one tries to mingle with people while naked or hermetically covered from head to toe, the absurd contrast to what everyone else is wearing screams out loud at the crucial subtleties we commonly take for granted in the spectrum of human relations.

Our clothes keep us warm, seal off and protect our most delicate body parts from environmental damage, conceal our genitals and breasts so as to not rub in everyone’s faces our crude sexual attractiveness or lack there of, but also allow us to invent a public identity through a personalized combination of designs, accessories, and possibly symbols and slogans. So our clothes enhance our individuality but it’s our face that forms the epicenter of our public persona: we cognitively anchor the representation of anyone’s personality to that person’s unique facial features. We are prone to recognize faces out of random mixes of objects whenever possible, so our brains are primed for this. The face takes up a disproportionately large chunk of our mental representation of human beings as children’s drawings illustrate. Eye contact and facial expressions play an important role in how we relate to others during conversations and even in how we warm up to strangers.

The burqa is a monstrous device because it effectively shaves off the most basic and accessible dimension of identity: the face. The woman hiding underneath it is dehumanized in the eyes of her beholders: she is reduced to an indeterminate object of unspecified form and features. A horse can hide under a burqa, or a clown, or a monkey, or a coffin, or a thief, or a ghost, or a mummy, or a giant noodle. Not only does the burqa erase the wearer’s most human and recognizable trait, her face, but it also razes to the ground all other external symbols of identity: the distinctive combinations of clothing items, styles, accessories, jewelry… How can I empathize with someone in a burqa if all I see is a monochromatic faceless shapeless bag? The wearer is practically interchangeable with anyone else wearing a burqa. There is zero potential for deep or subtle interpersonal relations through such a discomforting barrier. It’s alienating on a human level to be the one who is fully open and exposed while your interlocutor is hiding behind an opaque veil. This makes any kind of interaction with burqa-girls intrinsically awkward.

The burqa has also a perverse X factor that elicits laser beams out of my eyes: in its underhanded way it’s so self-righteously slutty! The entire rationale for it is that you need to fully cover every square inch of your face and body lest any random male passerby spontaneously breaks down and starts to compulsively drool (or worse) all over you. You really think you’re such hot shit that it’s a big deal whether anyone can see your hair or face? Nobody cares! Nobody is aroused by your stupid hair! Get over it!

Not only does wearing the burqa imply an overly sexualized sense of self, but it also silently spells out a moral condemnation of all women who do not abide by such anal and self-demeaning standards of “modesty”. If your standards for socially proper attire are so far removed from the norm that you are practically living in your own moral planet, and that planet is collapsing into a black hole under its own warped field of ‘judgmentality’, there will be a point where the principle of general cultural relativity breaks down in an asymmetric fashion: As viewed from the PC planet, your style is kind of weird and no fun, but perfectly equivalent to whatever they’ve got over there, and while they might not go out of their way to bond with you for one politically correct excuse or another, you must surely be a great girl underneath and the PC crowd wishes you all the best in life. As viewed from your planet, however, the PC crowd is roaming with lustful immodest sluts who seduce every male in their path by flaunting their face and hair, and are so going to burn in hell for it.

The burqa is eerie, alienating, judgmental, demeaning, dehumanizing, and is calling everyone else a whore.

--crossposted at Kejda.net