RUTHFULLY YOURS

Unfortunately, for most of women in the Middle East, veils are not an “exciting development”, but an imposition by an obscurantist ideology. After the Islamic State was defeated in Raqqa, Syria, many women took to the streets to take off their veils and were filmed burning them.

“The enemies of freedom are first recruited from the free societies, from some of the enlightened elites who deny the benefit of democratic rights to the rest of humanity, even to their own compatriots, if they have the misfortune to belong to another religion, to another ethnicity.” — Pascal Bruckner, author.

Instead of embracing these veils, a true feminism should defend the rights and freedoms of all women. It should not be ideologically submissive to those who repress women.

We are not talking about the dreary type of Muslim garment of Raqqa or Kabul, but a global market that is a Westernized, colorful, supposedly joyful Islamic enterprise.

First it was a Muslim woman wearing a hijab in Playboy. Then Nike released a “performance hijab” for athletes. Meanwhile, last spring, Aab, one of the world’s leading Islamic clothing retailers, opened its first boutique in London, just in time for the annual London Fashion Week. Vogue Arabia published its first-ever print issue. Last month, Mattel unveiled, so to speak, the world’s first hijab-wearing Barbie doll, who is apparently part of a new series dedicated to women “breaking social barriers”.

A conformist and “inclusive” establishment, eager for profits, has turned the Islamic veil into a purportedly new symbol of freedom and fashion. Islamists have understood this psychology among Western elites, who are terrified to be accused of “Islamophobia”. This is how Islamist misogyny has been turned into a global garment. Take a recent Vogue announcement:

“Dolce & Gabbana is producing a collection of hijabs and abayas [full-length Saudi covering for women] targeted to Muslim customers in the Middle East. To Muslim women with a taste for luxury fashion, this collection is an exciting development”.

Unfortunately, for most of women in the Middle East, veils and abayas are not an “exciting development”, but an imposition by an obscurantist ideology. After the Islamic State was defeated in Raqqa, Syria, many women took to the streets to take off their veils. Last June, similar images were seen after Raqqa was first freed from the Islamist dictatorship. Women were filmed burning their veils.

The Pakistani parliament is becoming increasingly radicalized — as the results of a local by-election in Lahore in September demonstrated.

In such a political climate, and with a new prime minister who refuses to criticize his country’s blasphemy laws, let alone work to repeal them, Pakistan’s already fragile “democracy” is on a steady slide backwards.

In late September — less than three weeks after newly instated Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi attended the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly in New York — two Christian boys employed as cleaners at a hospital in Pakistan were arrested for violating the country’s blasphemy laws. According to the complaint lodged with police, the boys had swept up and burned strewn pieces of paper on which Quranic verses happened to be written.

At around the same time, a Pakistani court sentenced a Christian man to death for insulting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in a poem he sent to a Muslim friend on the WhatsApp messaging service. This came two months after a young Muslim Pakistani was sentenced to death for “blasphemous” posts on Facebook.

On September 20, after the closing of the General Assembly, Abbasi was invited to give a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the Q&A period — at the end of his “conversation” with David Sanger of the New York Times — he was asked by Human Rights Watch (HRW) director Kenneth Roth whether he would “speak out against [Pakistan’s] blasphemy law, and certainly about [its] harsh application…with death sentences and mob violence and the like.”

Abbasi replied by dodging the question:

“[I]t’s only up to the parliament to amend the laws. The job of the government is to make sure that the laws are not abused and innocent people are not prosecuted or prosecuted.”

At this point, Sanger interjected:

“[C]ertainly it is up to the parliament, but you’re in a position of both great political and moral leadership now in your post as prime minister. And I think the core of the question was whether or not the leaders of Pakistan are willing to go stand up to what seems to be, at least through American and Western eyes at time(s), deat

In February 2016, the director general of the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau warned the government that ISIS was emerging as a threat, with Pakistani terrorists providing a foothold for the group, whose Pakistani branch is called Walayat-e-Khurasan.

ISIS also enlists “partners of convenience” in Afghanistan and “outsources” terror attacks to Pakistani organizations — such as Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar — a recent UN Security Council counter-terrorism report revealed. In addition, as many as 100 Pakistanis left the country in 2015 to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

The most vulnerable victims of this threat are Christians, who make up a mere 2% of the Sunni Muslim-majority state. ISIS is only the latest terrorist group to have attacked Christians in Pakistan.

Concern over the extent of the presence and power of ISIS in Pakistan resurfaced on December 17, when a suicide-bombing at a church in Quetta left at least nine worshipers dead and more than 50 seriously wounded.

Had Pakistani security forces not responded swiftly to the attack on the Bethel Memorial Methodist Church — where 400 men, women and children were attending Sunday services – the assailants “would have managed to reach the main hall of the building, and the death toll would have been much higher,” Sarfraz Bugti, the provincial home minister of the Baluchistan province, where Quetta is located, told Gatestone Institute.

Responsibility for the attack — in which two terrorists, clad in explosive vests and armed with AK-47 rifles — was later claimed by ISIS, which has an impressive record of honesty in taking credit for attacks, in a statement published by the Amaq News Agency.

This was the sixth ISIS attack in Pakistan in the past year and a half. The first took place on August 8, 2016, when a suicide bomber killed at least 70 people and wounded more than 100 in an attack on a crowd of lawyers and journalists gathered in a government hospital in Quetta — in the province that borders Afghanistan and Iran — to mourn a lawyer who had been murdered earlier in the day. The attack was claimed by a joint ISIS-Taliban faction.

On October 24, 2016, ISIS claimed responsibility for a deadly attack on a police training college in Quetta. The assault, committed by three heavily armed terrorists against sleeping cadets, left more than 60 dead and more than 165 others wounded.

A Christmas season bombing of a supermarket in Russia’s second-largest city suggests that killing in the name of Islam never goes out of season.

In addition to being a time for end-of-the-year reflection, Christmas is also a popular time for Muslim terrorists to kill Christians and Jews, and sometimes, other Muslims, too.

Yuletide terrorist attacks seem to be becoming the new normal in several countries – and the Christmas season isn’t over yet in Russia. Eastern Orthodox Christians in Russia won’t celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth until Sunday, Jan. 7, more than a week from now.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the Wednesday evening bombing in Saint Petersburg that sent 10 people to the hospital, but Islamists are thought to have figured in a suicide bombing in the city’s subway system that left more than a dozen dead and 50 wounded in April.

The explosion took place at the Perekrestok market. At that time, thousands of people were present in the shopping complex housing the market. The source of the blast was a homemade bomb packed with shrapnel. The bomb had reportedly been concealed in a locker.

The bombing comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Donald Trump earlier in the month to thank him for a CIA tip that helped head off bombings that Islamic State had planned for the city.

On Dec. 21 a 32-year-old Muslim man named Saeed Noori drove his car into a crowd of people in Melbourne, Australia, injuring 19, three of them critically, according to reports. The Australian citizen entered that country in 2004 as a refugee from Afghanistan.