A moderate caning

Wednesday night I participated in what turned out to be a jihad whitewashing circus hosted by Christiane Amanpour on ABC. It was part of the “This Week” show and will run at 11AM Eastern on Sunday morning, but I will not be watching, as Amanpour was energetically carrying water for the Islamic supremacists and dissemblers throughout the whole program. One egregious example came toward the end of the taping, when during the question-and-answer session Daisy Khan of the Ground Zero mega-mosque initiative said flatly, “It’s not a mosque.” A 9/11 family member and a member of lower Manhattan’s Community Board 1 then asked to speak, saying repeatedly that Khan was lying, since she had said that it was a mosque during a Community Board hearing. I added, “I was there, too, and I heard her say it was a mosque.” But Amanpour would not allow them a microphone, and actually cut off taping at that point.

That was the worst of it, but more lowlights came mostly from the sleazy Islamic apologist Reza Aslan, who retailed smear after smear of me — but when I tried to reply, Amanpour actually shushed me with her finger to her lips. (I kept talking anyway, but fully expect that that part and others in which I was able to get a word in will end up on the cutting-room floor.)

More on all that presently; in the meantime, this story put me in mind of that show as well, since one panelist — I believe it may have been Daisy Khan herself — invoked Indonesia as a bastion of Islamic moderation, a place where people could see an Islam that was vital, vibrant, and vastly different from the twisted, hijacked version of Osama bin Laden. You know the drill.

And so do Murni Amris and Rukiah Abdullah.

“Indonesian women caned for selling food during Muslim festival of Ramadan,” from the Telegraph, October 1 (thanks to Doctor Bulldog):

The two women were found guilty of selling food during the fasting hours of Ramadan, thereby violating Islamic sharia law.Hundreds of people gathered to watch as Murni Amris, 27, received three lashes and Rukiah Abdullah, 22, received two at a mosque in the city of Jantho, southeast of the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, Indonesia.

“The two women were found selling rice in a stall at noon during Ramadan. The sharia forbids selling food during fasting hours at Ramadan,” said Marzuki Abdullah, Aceh’s sharia police head.

Ms Amris owned the food stall where Ms Abdullah was selling the rice….