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Lashing and Flogging: Islam and Iran Vicious and inhumane punishments are on the rise in the Muslim world. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

The ruling clerics of Iran are increasing their reliance on public flogging not only for punishing people, but also for threatening those who are violating minor Islamic and Sharia laws.

Public lashing is orchestrated for several reasons, including to punish the person who has violated Sharia laws, impose fear in the society, humiliate the victims and cause psychological harms to the individuals.

Holding a girlfriend/boyfriend’s hand, kissing in public (even for a married couple), listening to music, drinking alcohol and wearing non-Islamic dress can all be grounds for flogging under the Islamic law of Iran. As an Iranian prosecutor, Esmail Sadeghi Niaraki, who recently arrested people for “dancing and jubilating,” said, “We hope this [flogging] will be a lesson for those who break Islamic norms in private places.”

Yesterday, according to Iran’s state-owned news agency, Tasnim, Iranian officials arrested 150 young people for being at a mixed-gender birthday party in the city of Islamshahr, close to the capital of Tehran. Young people who are arrested for attending mixed-gender parties are often fined, flogged, beaten and sometimes raped.

According to Colonel Mohsen Khancherli, Iran’s police commander for the west of Tehran Province:

“After we obtained a report about a mixed-gender party in a garden in the vicinity of Islamshahr in the west of Tehran Province, an operation was carried out by the police and another organization, leading to the arrest of dozens of boys and girls.”

He added:

“Some 150 boys and girls had gathered at the mixed-gender party under the guise of a birthday party in this garden which is situated next to a studio where unlawful music was produced and recorded. Upon arrival of the police, all those present were arrested and sent before the judiciary.”

A few weeks ago, more than 30 college students were arrested, and within 24 hours the judge ordered each to receive 99 lashes for attending a graduation party. In the last two months, approximately 600 people have been arrested, fined and lashed for celebrating.

In this video, a teenager is being lashed for helping a girl whom the moral police were attempting to arrest for wearing bad hijab. He can be heard begging for mercy.

According to Ismaeil Sadeqi Niaraki, a top Iranian cleric, Iran will not tolerate “freedom” or “having fun.” He praised the moral police for arresting and punishing those who break the Islamic laws: “Thanks [sic] God that the police questioning, investigation, court hearing, verdict and implementation of the punishment all took place in less than 24 hours.”

According to Chapter III of the Iranian Islamic constitution, Enforcement of Sentences of Flogging, Article 27: “Flogging will be administered by a woven leather belt of approximately one meter in length and one-and-a-half centimeter in width.” The penal code goes on detailing how one should be flogged:

Article 32: Enforcement of hadd for female convicts will be carried out while the convict is in a sitting position with her body fully covered by clothing.

Hungary Blasts EU with Common Sense on Islam The writing was on the wall a long time ago. Raymond Ibrahim

In “an astonishingly savage tirade”—to quote from the UK’s Express—Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban recently tore into the European Union “over [Muslim] migration and taunted Angela Merkel for failing to protect German people from Islamist terror.”

(Click here to learn why central and eastern European nations, Hungary chief among them, are wary of Islam.)

In the course of his speech, Orban made two important points that I habitually make, and which explain the true reasons behind the unprecedented rise of terrorism in EU nations: 1) Islam’s Rule of Numbers; 2) Western enablement of Islam.

In regards to the first point, Orban

issued a stunning rebuke to Mrs Merkel on migration, blaming recent terror attacks on the mas[s] influx of refugees… Migration, he argued, “increases terrorism and crime” and “destroys national culture” in a thinly-veiled swipe at Mrs Merkel’s decision to roll out the red carpet to millions of people from the Middle East.

This is as simple as it gets. Over three years ago, in May 2013, I explained why a Muslim man decapitated a British solider in the middle of a busy street in London as follows:

It reflects what I call “Islam’s Rule of Numbers,” a rule that expresses itself with remarkable consistency: The more Muslims grow in numbers, the more Islamic phenomena intrinsic to the Muslim world—in this case, brazen violence against “infidels”—appear….

Thus as Muslim populations continue growing in Western nations, count on growing, and brazen, numbers of attacks on infidels—beheadings and such.

Europeans, Hit by Terror, Exalt Palestinian Master Terrorist The irresistible “charm” of Marwan Barghouti. P. David Hornik

Last Tuesday terrorists broke into a French church, murdered an 85-year-old priest, and severely wounded another person. On Friday it was reported that several French municipalities had initiated the granting of honorary citizenship to jailed Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti.

Arrested by Israel in 2002, in 2004 Barghouti was sentenced to five terms of life imprisonment on five counts of murder. Leader at the time of the Tanzim militia, he is seen as the mastermind of the most vicious sustained terror assault in history—the Second Intifada (2000-2005), which, in a country one-tenth the size of France, killed over a thousand people in five years.

As the Israeli ambassador to France, Aliza Bin-Noun, wrote in an open letter on Thursday: “Barghouti is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people. At a time when Western countries should unite against the threat of terrorism, the French support for Barghouti in fact legitimizes his actions.”

Barghouti’s popularity in France, however, is of long standing. From 2007 to 2010, a dozen French municipalities made him an honorary citizen. In 2013 another municipality, Bezons, gave him that distinction along with Majid al-Rimawi, who took part in the murder of an Israeli cabinet minister in 2001.

And in December 2014 the Parisian suburb of Aubervilliers conferred the honor on Barghouti, three months after another Parisian suburb, Valenton, had done the same.

In all or most of these cases, the municipalities paying homage to the Palestinian terrorists were Communist-led. In recent years the French Communist Party’s fortunes have declined, and today it holds only a small minority of legislative seats and runs only a small minority of municipalities.

So far the reports on last week’s new round of moves to honor Barghouti don’t say whether the municipalities in question are Communist-led ones. But even if Barghouti’s fan club in France is not that large, he is a cause célèbre elsewhere in Europe as well.

A Guide to the Palestinian Lexicon by Khaled Abu Toameh

Many Palestinians refer to cities inside Israel proper as “occupied.” Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Tiberias, Ramle and Lod, for example, are often described in the Palestinian media as “Palestinian Cities” or “Occupied Cities.” Jews living in these cities, as well as other parts of Israel, are sometimes referred to as “Settlers.”

Many Palestinians have still not come to terms with Israel’s right to exist. For them, this not only about the “occupation” of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The real “occupation”, for them, began with the creation of Israel in 1948.

Non-Arabic speakers may find this assertion baseless, because what they hear and read from Palestinian representatives in English does not reflect the messages being relayed to Palestinians in Arabic.

It is no secret that Palestinian leaders have failed to prepare their people for peace with Israel, and deny its right to exist.

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell, 1984.

What do you do if you do not like Israel, but have only one outlet for that dislike: expressing it in rhetoric and print?

Well, if you are a Palestinian, you can always come up with your own terminology — one that sheds negative light on Israel and anything that is associated with it. This is precisely the tack Palestinians have taken over the past few decades, inventing their own terms and phrases when talking about Israel.

Modern Slavery by Josephine Bacon

It is worth investigating the labour practices of the host country, Qatar, which are certainly in breach of even previous European legislation, let alone the UK’s Modern Slavery Act and European equivalents.

Qatar offered bribes to FIFA to be able to get the right to host the event, according to Greg Dyke, former Chairman of the British Football Association, and other BFA officials.

The Guardian reported that Nepalese migrant workers in Qatar are dying at the rate of one every two days. Recent visitors to Qatar have taken photographs of the appalling squalor in which foreign construction workers live — forced to sleep in tiny cell-like rooms in which they barely have room to lie down. There are no proper sanitary or kitchen facilities.

In Qatar, the new law will only apply — if applied at all — to foreigners who took up employment after the law was passed,

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph on July 31, Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May, stated, “Last year I introduced the world-leading Modern Slavery Act to send the strongest possible signal that victims were not alone and that those responsible for this vile exploitation would face justice”. Yet these campaigns to tackle modern slavery carefully overlook the countries in the Arab world in which slave-ownership is permitted by the legislation.

In 2015, the Modern Slavery Act came into British law to address heightened levels of human trafficking (now considered by criminals to be more lucrative than drug-smuggling) and the treatment of many of the servants of wealthy foreigners.Like their wealthy employers, these indentured servants are shepherded straight from an incoming flight to a car waiting on the tarmac, and do not pass through immigration or customs. They are not treated like the rest of us — the supremely wealthy and their employees live under different laws. As such, cases of servant mistreatment rarely get to be heard in court. The few cases that go to trial are the result of these servants escaping the clutches of their “employers,” and the stories they tell are horrific (albeit largely unpunished and unreported for political reasons).

One example was documented in the Daily Mail on March 15, 2011. An African servant was forced to sleep on the floor, a situation she endured at first for £10 a month “wages” until her employer, a female doctor of Asian origin, decided not to pay her anything at all.

What the Arab League Meeting Reveals by Lawrence A. Franklin

The most significant aspect of this year’s Arab League conference was the downgrading in significance of Palestinian issues on the agenda.

The community of Arab states is bereft of the confidence to act collectively in its own interests, and has a fearful inability to meet the challenge of either Iran or radical Islamic terrorism, which threaten the very existence of their regimes.

The Arab League concluded its 27th annual summit on July 28 in Nouakchott, Mauritania. The sessions exposed the deep divisions in the Arab world, the bloc’s decreased influence in regional affairs, and the declining importance of Palestinian issues in the Middle East.

The annual affair apparently failed to make progress on last year’s Saudi proposal to establish an all-Arab, multinational force in response to Iran’s aggressive policies in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. The Nouakchott-hosted sessions also seem to have made no progress toward developing a unified anti-terrorist agenda. The growth of the Islamic State presence in Libya and elsewhere in North Africa was evidently a prime motivator for the perceived need for an anti-terrorism policy.

Edwin Dyga: Weaponising Our Weaknesses

Despite the evident failure of leftist social theory, so-called ‘establishment’ conservatives have failed to re-shape popular culture. One explanation is that ‘establicons’ blithely accept the moral authority of the ideas upon which their opponents’ ideology is founded.
That a profound malaise has struck conservative thought throughout the contemporary West, particularly across the Anglosphere, is an axiom of the political zeitgeist. Strong circumstantial evidence of this is the peculiar situation in which political outsiders – sometimes obvious non-conservatives such as Wilders in the Netherlands or Trump in the United States – successfully express anxieties that would ordinarily define the fears and aspirations of the electoral centre-right, but which are systematically censored from the political debate by the candidates of more ‘respectable’ parties in the so-called ‘moderate’ centre.

Recent attempts to revitalise opposition to the ‘progressive’ behemoth have obtained mixed results: Despite receiving almost 13 per cent of the popular vote at the last general elections, UKIP won one seat while losing another, and thus failed to increase its strength in the House of Commons beyond a single MP. Even as the third largest electoral force in British politics, the party’s recent and decisive defeat in the Oldham West and Royton by-election dampened any enthusiastic predictions of an imminent shift in the party-political culture of Albion. Meanwhile, faux-conservatives in Canada have been vanquished by the son of an iconic ’60s progressive statesman, New Zealand’s conservative government has assimilated leftist policies for the sake of perceived electoral ‘relevance’, less than impressive candidates for the US Republican presidential elections have been consistently overshadowed by an outsider whose political future remains hotly debated, and Australia’s maverick Senator Cory Bernardi, despite being widely popular among core constituencies of the popular centre-right, remains largely isolated form his governing party’s power centre (for now).

Conversely, the recent elections in Poland have seen the literal eviction of all explicitly leftist parties from its houses of parliament, ushering in a new era in which ex- and post-communists have been wholly ejected from the country’s executive and lawmaking branches for the first time in history. The President and Premier (Andrzej Duda and Beata Szydło respectively) have wasted no time in preparing sweeping reforms, appointments and changes to the administrative sector, security apparatus and the nation’s Constitutional Tribunal, perhaps paving a way to a national renovation similar to that of its southern neighbour, Hungary.[1] With the earlier victory and consolidation of Budapest’s conservative government under Viktor Orbán, this represents an interesting trend towards a nationally assertive right at least in Central Europe, where a genuine third way seems to be gaining popular traction against the cultural imperialism of Brussels and the political imperialism of a revanchist Moscow.

Given the different social background to each of these electoral phenomena, immediate comparisons can only be superficial, necessarily reductionist and may therefore lead a policy analyst to error when attempting to devise a unified theory of how best to confront the political left at the ballot box. No such unified theory exists because local politics are always a function of the local people, their specific history and particular culture. However, glimmers of reactionary success anywhere across the turbulent social landscape of the West can illustrate that, to borrow from the parlance of the revolutionary agitators of decades past: another world – is indeed – possible.

Polish Experts: ‘Europe is at The End of its Existence. Western Europe is Practically Dead’ Oliver Lane

Speaking to Polish television, a former member of Poland’s counter-terror police and an academic expert on information warfare and terrorism have articulated their concern about the intellectual and spiritual collapse of European civilisation, remarking it is “at the end of its existence”.

Former Central Bureau of Investigation (CBS) officer Jacek Wrona and military history academic Dr. Rafa³ Brzeski were guests on the Polish TVP Info programme discussing the Munich shooting in which nine were killed, and were forced to conclude it was a symptom of the end of European Civilisation. Information warfare expert Dr. Brzeski rejected the suggestion in German media that the Munich killer — an 18 year old Muslim — was mad, pointing out the killing had “an element of planning”, reports wPolityce.

As for the treatment of the attack in the mainstream media, the academic said it was a case of the “ministry of propaganda at work… it is self-censorship. There is nothing worse than self-censorship in journalism”. Rejecting the reluctance of mainstream media to recognise the killings as a terrorism, he said: “this is definitely an act of terror… the execution of an act of terrorism. He was setting out to scare people, and that is an act of terror”.

Pre-empting the emergency press conference held by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in which she said her government stood by its policies and decisions which helped create the migrant crisis, and recognising the frustration of the German people with this approach, the academic remarked: “The Germans have had enough of this, which does not mean the government has had enough. These are two different approaches”.

European Prisons Fueling Spread of Islamic Radicalism Convicted terrorists sit atop the social pecking order in many facilities, using jail time to plot new attacks or groom petty criminals for jihad By Noemie Bisserbe

PARIS—After his capture in Belgium, the Paris terror suspect Salah Abdeslam was transferred to a prison cell in France where the paint on the walls was still fresh.

Prison staff had spent three weeks renovating the space, bolting down furniture and installing video cameras to make sure the 26-year-old’s solitary confinement went smoothly, said Marcel Duredon, a guard at Fleury-Mérogis, the high-security facility on the outskirts of Paris.

Still, the measures did little to calm the ruckus that erupted in the cell blocks as dusk fell and word spread about the prison’s newest inmate, the last surviving suspect in the Nov. 13 attacks.

“Some welcomed him as the messiah,” Mr. Duredon said.

The rise of Islamic State has caught Europe’s prison systems flat-footed. Convicted terrorists, some of whom serve prison terms as brief as two years, sit atop the social pecking order in facilities like Fleury-Mérogis.

Many use jail time to forge ties with petty criminals from the predominantly Muslim suburbs that ring European cities, authorities say, grooming them for jihad missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria—or attacks at home.

Now the return over the past year of an unprecedented number of jihadists from Islamic State territory is placing European prisons in an even bigger bind. To keep militants off the streets, authorities are throwing many of them in jail, but that is injecting battle-hardened radicals into overcrowded prisons. Researchers estimate that 50% to 60% of the roughly 67,000 inmates in the French prison system are Muslims, who represent just 7.5% of the general population.

Prison officials are also faced with a difficult choice between absorbing hardened militants into the general prison population, where they might radicalize others, or to concentrate them in special wards where they may be better able to hatch plots.

“We’re sitting on a time bomb,” says Adeline Hazan, who heads a state agency tasked with auditing French prisons. CONTINUE AT SITE

Germany: “Because I am a Muslim”: Media cover-up as Afghan smashes up church By Robert Spencer

And the first thing Western leaders will say is, “No, you did not actually do this because you’re a Muslim. You did this because you’re poor, or disenfranchised, or discriminated against. We need to give you a job and some cash, and all will be well.”https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/07/germany-because-i-am-a-muslim-media-cover-up-as-afghan-smashes-up-church

The second thing they will say is, “More migrants. Bring us more!” The mainstream media, by covering up such incidents, aids in the migrant importation enterprise by keeping the public as ignorant as possible about the devastation the Muslim migrants are causing.

Because I am Muslim

“‘Because I am a Muslim’: Media cover-up in Germany as Afghan smashes up church,” Diversity Macht Frei, July 29, 2016:

It happened a week ago, but the police kept quiet about the incident and the church management did not file a complaint, it has only just come out: last Friday a 19-year-old Afghan stormed into the Versöhnungskirche [Church of Reconciliation] at around 7.20 pm in an open community evening in the Eilbek district of Hamburg. He threw chairs and benches around, kicked over a Bible stand, splintered the glass and threw hymn books onto the ground. According to an eye-witness, the church-goes present were very afraid and let him continue his destruction. No wonder, he was wearing swirling Islamic dress, which might have hidden a suicide belt.

The Muslim did not speak during his destructive rage and also had no connections to Salafists, therefore the State Protection department of the state criminal prosecution agency assumes there was no “Islamist” motive.

…Eyewitness Peter H, who sent PI the photo of the Afghan attacker, reports that he asked the Muslim in front of the church why he had done it as he ended his affray. The Afghan then screamed the answer: “Because I am a Muslim!”