Article

By Babette Francis

27th January 2012

Dr Philip Ayres asks, "Why don’t we speak clearly about Islam?" (News Weekly, July 23, 2011). Many have — former Muslims, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan, and Australian Christians such as Rev. Dr Mark Durie, Anglican vicar at St Mary’s, Caulfield, Victoria, and several Jewish analysts.

I myself have written several articles on the subject, including a recent one in which I urged that Muslim immigrants should be required to give certain undertakings before being accepted into Australia (News Weekly, March 19, 2011).

In Islam there is no separation between religion and state. Islam is as much political ideology, like socialism or fascism, as it is religion.

The Koran is regarded as the unalterable word of Allah and is interpreted literally. There are poetic passages, but there are also many incitements to violence and killing and the subjugation of women.

That some verses in the Koran contradict others is puzzling for non-Muslims, but glossed over by Muslim preachers. That Muslims regard Jesus as a prophet and have respect for the Virgin Mary has not stopped them from killing Christians when expedient, or from treating Christians as second-class citizens (dhimmis) in Muslim-majority countries.

Three recent news items highlight why the imposition of sharia law is intolerable. In June this year, a popular Egyptian Muslim preacher Abu Ishaq al-Huwaini boasted how Islam allows Muslims to buy and sell conquered infidel women, so that "When I want a sex-slave, I go to the market and pick whichever female I desire and buy her."

Support for al-Huwaini came from Muslim woman political activist, Salwa al-Mutairi, who once stood as a candidate for Kuwait’s parliament. She too has declared that she seeks to "revive the institution of sex-slavery".

An English report of this appeared in the Kuwait Times, and the Arabic news website Al Arabiya has a video of al-Mutairi addressing the topic.

She said Muslim men who fear being seduced or tempted into immoral behaviour by the beauty of their female servants, or even those servants "casting spells" on them, would be better to purchase women from an "enslaved maid" agency for sexual purposes and that special offices could be set up to provide concubines in the same way as domestic staff recruitment agencies provide housemaids.

Al-Mutairi insists that "it’s of course true" that "the prophet of Islam legitimised sex-slavery". She recounts how when she was in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, she asked various sheikhs and muftis about the legality of sex-slavery according to sharia. They all confirmed it to be perfectly legal, pointing out that "extra virile" men would do well to purchase sex-slaves to sate their appetites without sinning.

Al-Mutairi says: "A Muslim state must [first] attack a Christian state or any non-Muslim state — and they [the women] must be captives of the raid. Is this forbidden? Not at all; according to Islam, sex slaves are not at all forbidden. Quite the contrary, the rules regulating sex-slaves differ from those for free women [i.e., Muslim women]. The latter’s body must be covered entirely, except for her face and hands, whereas the sex-slave is kept naked from the belly-button on up — she is different from the free woman; the free woman has to be married properly to her husband, but the sex-slave — he just buys her and that’s that.

"For example, in the Chechnyan war, there are female Russian captives. So buy those and sell them here in Kuwait to devout merchants. Better that than have our men engage in forbidden sexual relations. I don’t see any problem in this, no problem at all."

She recommends that the enslaved girls be at least 15-years-old….

The second news item is from the UK Daily Mail (July 14, 2011) about a mother, Emma Mitchell, 32, who was prevented from breastfeeding her 19-week-old son, Aaron, by a receptionist at the Oldham Civic Centre in Greater Manchester who told her it was a "multicultural building" and that breastfeeding there would "cause an uproar among Muslim visitors".

She was told to use the toilets of a nearby shopping centre, but argued with a manager before being offered an empty room under supervision. Mitchell said: "It was just awful. I felt humiliated, intimidated and guilty through the whole thing."

As Kuwaiti al-Mutairi recommends that infidel women captured as sex slaves be kept naked from the belly-button up, why would Muslim visitors be offended by an infidel woman breastfeeding her baby?

Fides, a Catholic news agency, reported (July 15, 2011) that an Islamist terrorist insurgency has claimed 4,000 lives in southern Thailand since 2004. Recent victims include two beheaded boys: "They are all innocent victims, guilty only for not being Muslims," according to a Fides source.

"We will kill, burn and destroy all Buddhists: you will never be able to live in peace here," declares a pamphlet distributed by the terrorists. "The Pattani Islamic guerrillas announce that they will never stop the slaughter of infidels of Siam until the land of Pattani [becomes] an Islamic state."

I hope these three recent new items are clear enough about the nature of Islam.

Babette Francis lived in Muslim-majority provinces in India prior to the 1947 partition of the sub-continent into India and Pakistan.

Article

By Senator Barnaby Joyce

27th January 2012

Tasmanian Premier Lara Giddings has declared peace for the forests. I trust she wasn't waving a piece of paper from the foot of the steps after stepping off a plane.
Green peace is an elusive concept, since the Greens can never be appeased. They have no concern for the pieces of people's lives they leave behind.

When I was eight, green activists became active in Dorrigo, in north eastern NSW. It was not the flashiest place on earth, but most had a job until the greenies put an end to the timber industry.

I have been in Tasmania, a state full of potential, but neutered by a philosophy that puts trees first, frogs second and families last. The Greens' undergraduate pop-up-book philosophy promises the fairytale but delivers economic privation to those living many miles from the Manic Monkey Cafe in inner-urban Nirvanaville.

If you really want to see what Green economic policy looks like, try Scottsdale in Tasmania. You won't find many greenies or the green jobs they keep promising, but you will find economic misery left behind by Green policies.

One of the greatest attributes of Australian life is the expression of individual freedom. I can say, basically, what I like, pretty much write what I like, worship who I want, or not at all, and start whichever business I like. These freedoms are being curtailed by the inspired morality of the Greens, who are placing righteous caveats on the freedom of our economic development, expression of thought and even which science we can research.

The Greens have given the term "environment" an omnipotent, all-encompassing quality. Whenever they utter the word it is a precursor that demands blind, unquestioning obedience.

Their cause always follows this path: find the high-colour issue, beatify the cause, then never be satisfied as they ride the horse called Insatiable Nihilism to the town of Shut Down.

The Greens started by opposing the Gordon-below-Franklin dam, but now the Wilderness Society in Tasmania opposes all dams, even small farm dams. The outcome is that it takes two years or more in Tasmania to get a farm dam approved.

The Greens have then been central in shutting down the other major industry in Tasmania, forestry. At the 2004 election the Greens were all about stopping the logging of "old-growth" forests. Now we have another forestry deal, old-growth forests have morphed into all native forests, including regrowth, and the Greens want to shut the whole industry down.

Global warming has morphed into climate change. A $23 carbon tax will, at the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen, morph into a $131 carbon tax to shut down the entire coal industry. How do the Greens achieve these results when nine out of 10 don't vote for them? Don't be fooled by the complexion of their kaftan; their thuggery is different. Recently the Greens have put pressure on a large retailer not to sell products made from Tasmanian native forests.

The tactics of commercial boycott, because you don't share the culture of the targeted merchants, have historically been abhorred. But we seem to let the Greens and GetUp! get away with it.

The victims of these cultural pogroms are hidden from the ABC audience of Q&A. Like the consequences of a conquering army, the fruits of a green victory are depression, unemployment and loss of property values and rights for the defeated people.

The results are there for all to see in Scottsdale, where the economic rug has been pulled out from beneath the town. For the people who stayed, their house values have halved and the Greens think a fair economic prospect is an unemployment cheque.

Last week Greenpeace activists used whipper-snippers to destroy a CSIRO experimental GM wheat crop. A local Greens politician gave his endorsement to this holy crusade to destroy scientific research and public property. He absolved his flock, saying "You have to stand up for what you believe in sometimes." I'm glad he doesn't believe in capital punishment.

For the Greens, sometimes they like the science, sometimes they don't. Ask questions on the science of climate change and you are a denier; destroy a research crop and you are a crusader.

Would we endorse the same action for others? There is neither grace, nor charm, nor style from the person otherwise known as a bully.

Barnaby Joyce is the Nationals' Senate leader.

Labor / Greens "Shared Parenting Rollback"

News Report

Monday 22 August 2011 at 6.30 pm, the Labor-Greens-controlled Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee released their report on the "Shared Parenting Rollback" Bill 2011 www.aph.gov.au/senate. The Greens' member, Rachel Siewert said, “The Greens have consistently opposed the equal shared parenting responsibility legislation” brought into law in 2006.

Warwick Marsh, Dads4Kids Fatherhood Foundation, said, “The Senate report and the Green’s comments show what is driving this shocking new anti-child and anti-father legislation. Never before have major changes to Family Law been enacted on any other than bipartisan agreement between the major parties. This proposed legislation is opposed by the Opposition, and rightly so, because it removes the very wise, friendly-parent provision, redefines family violence to mean anything anybody wants it to be, and removes any possible penalties for perjury and false accusation in the Family Law Court.

This new legislation, even with new amendments proposed by the Senate Committee, is nothing more than radical feminist ideologically-based, anti-family legislation that will ensure the destruction of more families, the suicide of more separated fathers and an increase in the heartbreak of more fatherless children.

Mr Marsh continued, “The Labor Greens government has embarked on an outright war against fatherhood and marriage. This Bill will soon be law and on Wednesday 24 August 2011, this same Labor Greens alliance will be promoting homosexual marriage in the House of Reps: which a notable member of parliament pointed out this week is an oxymoron. Marriage is what it is – the union of a man and a woman. To accept anything less, in law, is to rob children of their biological birthright, exactly what the new ‘Shared Parenting Rollback’ Family Law Amendment Bill 2011 will do for many more Australian children.

"A 2009 Galaxy Poll revealed that 86% of Australians, including those in Labor Party heartland, believe that children should be reared by their biological mum and dad wherever possible.”

Dads4Kids calls on all Australians to make a stand and reject the Labor Greens' attack on fatherhood, marriage and children.

We ask Australians everywhere to write to their local Member of Parliament and request them to reject the Family Law Amendment Bill 2011.

For further information:

Warwick Marsh
Dads4Kids Fatherhood Foundation
PO Box 542
Unanderra NSW 2526
www.fatherhood.org.au

By Bill Muehlenberg - 14th August 2011

27th January 2012

The London riots simply reconfirmed and graphically illustrated what the social sciences have been telling us for a half century now: when we allow society to disregard the institution of marriage and in fact assault the institution of family, we are asking for — and will get — trouble.

The social science evidence on this is as overwhelming as it is clear: by every indicator, children will be worse off when not raised in a biological two-parent family. They will be more likely to do less well at school, to become involved in drugs, to commit suicide, to have a range of mental and psychological problems, and to get involved in gangs and criminal activity.

This has been documented so thoroughly now that only an ideologue who is pushing agendas can deny the evidence. Let me here just offer the smallest sampling of research data on this. These are just a few bits of the available evidence.

In an important book on the subject, Francis Ianni found that most gang members in America come from female-headed households. And a study of British communities in the American Journal of Sociology, by Robert J. Sampson and W. Byron Groves, found a direct statistical link between single parenthood and virtually every major type of crime, including mugging, violence against strangers, car theft and burglary.

One study tracked every child born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1955 for 30 years. It found that five out of six delinquents with an adult criminal record came from families where a parent — almost always the father — was absent.

A study by Douglas Smith and G.R. Jarjoura analysed victimisation data on over 11,000 individuals from three urban areas in New York, Florida and Missouri. They arrived at this startling conclusion: the proportion of single-parent households in a community predicts its rates of violent crime and burglary, but the community’s poverty level does not. Neither poverty nor race seems to account very much for the crime rate, compared to the proportion of single-parent families, Smith and Jarjoura found.

In Australia, a book by Alan Tapper highlights this connection between broken families and crime. In a study of rising crime rates in Western Australia, Tapper suggests that “family breakdown in the form of divorce and separation is the main cause of the crime wave”.

A longitudinal study of 512 Australian children found that there are more offenders coming from families of cohabiting than married couples, and there are proportionally more offenders who become recidivists coming from families of cohabiting than married couples. The study concludes: “The relationship between cohabitation and delinquency is beyond contention: children of cohabiting couples are more likely to be found among offenders than children of married couples.”

Even researchers who are wary of making a connection between broken families and crime have conceded that some relationship exists between the two. For example, David Demo and Alan Acock, who reviewed dozens of studies on the subject concluded: “A tentative conclusion based on the evidence reviewed here is that antisocial behaviour is less likely to occur in families where two adults are present, whether as biological parents, step-parents, or some combination of biological parents and other adults.”

Even stronger connections between crime and family breakdown have been made by the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies, which compared crime rates with out-of-wedlock birth rates from 1903 to 1993. It found that the “percentage of ex-nuptial births correlates significantly with both serious and violent crime at both one and two decades time lapse”.

What we have seen happening in the United Kingdom is just further evidence of this. Many social commentators have pointed this out. Theodore Dalrymple (pen-name for Anthony Daniels) is a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He has worked with these sorts of people for decades and knows full well the connections between family breakdown and crime. And he sees the modern welfare state as playing a key role here.

He says: “British youth leads the Western world in almost all aspects of social pathology, from teenage pregnancy to drug taking, from drunkenness to violent criminality. There is no form of bad behaviour that our version of the welfare state has not sought out and subsidised.

“British children are much likelier to have a television in their bedroom than a father living at home. One-third of them never eat a meal at a table with another member of their household — family is not the word for the social arrangements of the people in the areas from which the rioters mainly come. They are therefore radically unsocialised and deeply egotistical, viewing relations with other human beings in the same way as Lenin: Who whom, who does what to whom. By the time they grow up, they are destined not only for unemployment but unemployability.

“For young women in much of Britain, dependence does not mean dependence on the government: that, for them, is independence. Dependence means any kind of reliance on the men who have impregnated them who, of course, regard their own subventions from the state as pocket money, to be supplemented by a little light trafficking. (According to his brother, Mark Duggan, the man whose death at the hands of the probably incompetent police allegedly sparked the riots, “was involved in things”, which things being delicately left to the imagination of his interlocutor.)” (The Australian, August 11, 2011).

Dalrymple says elsewhere: “Three men were run over and killed as they tried to protect their property in the very area of Birmingham in which I used to work, and through which I walked daily; the large town that I live near when I’m in England has also seen rioting. Only someone who never looked around him and never drew any conclusions from the faces and manner of the young men he saw would have been surprised.

“The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice.

“It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor — quite likely — any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others.

“Even if he were to recognise this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.” (City Journal, August 10, 2011).

Yet we have opinion-makers and our political elites telling us it is a neat thing to deliberately bring children into the world without a mother and father. Thus Finance Minister Penny Wong proudly announced that she and her female lover are having a baby through IVF.

Miranda Devine offers some common-sense commentary on this. She says: “The fact that Penny Wong’s female partner is to have a baby is a cause for private celebration for them. But why are so many people exhorting the rest of us to celebrate as if this were some major milestone in human civilisation? You’d think no politician had ever had a child before.

“We are supposed to ignore Tony and Margie Abbott’s three daughters because every time he is seen with them it is some sort of unfair snub to Julia Gillard and reflection on her marital status. The traditional heterosexual norm of a nuclear family and children is something to be kept in a closet like an embarrassment.

“Tolerance has gone back to front. It is no longer good enough to accept without criticism female politicians in de facto or lesbian relationships. Now we have to downplay traditional marriage for fear of causing offence. No one can be a wife or husband any more. Everyone is a ‘partner’.

“The unorthodox situation of a lesbian artificially inseminated with the sperm of a male ‘acquaintance’ we are supposed to laud as if it were the Second Coming, the wonderful precursor of what the New York Times once lauded as the ‘post-marital’ future. Well, no.”

The media of course is using the Wong announcement to rally for their PC cause of the month: same-sex marriage.

Says Devine: “I believe the push for same-sex marriage is not about enhancing the lives of gay couples. In countries where it has been legalised, there has been no rush to the altar. The issue is largely symbolic. It is simply a political tool to undermine the last bastion of bourgeois morality — the traditional nuclear family.

“You only had to see the burning streets of London last week to see the manifestation of a fatherless society. The collapse of family life in Britain has been laid bare, reported to have the highest proportion of single mothers in Europe and nearly half of all children suffering family breakdown by the age of 16. Fatherless families in underprivileged boroughs of London are the norm.…

“The welfare state has taken over the father’s role of protector, provider, and enforcer, substituting sit-down money for love and care. And what a mess it has made: fatherless boys full of incoherent rage, fatherless girls having another generation of fatherless babies to a string of feckless men.

“It is politically incorrect to say so, but the ideal situation for a child is to be brought up in an intact family with a father and a mother.” (Sydney Telegraph, August 14, 2011).

We have seen the consequences of fatherlessness perfectly played out in Britain last month. And we will see more and more of it played out all over the Western world in days to come. Perhaps before too many more cities burn to the ground we will remember a vital truth: fathers are vitally important, and so too is heterosexual marriage.

When we play fast and loose with fathers and marriage we simply invite the sort of barbarism witnessed in London to become mainstream. We had better wise up before it is too late.

Bill Muehlenberg is a commentator on contemporary issues, and lectures on ethics and philosophy. His website CultureWatch is at: www.billmuehlenberg.com