RUTHFULLY YOURS

Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors, initiated in a country which once prided itself on being among the first in the world to throw off clerical intrusion into politics.

By prosecuting Wilders, the courts in Holland are effectively ruling that there is only one correct answer to the question Wilders asked. They are saying that if someone asks you whether you would like more Moroccans or fewer, people must always answer “more,” or he will be committing a crime.

At no point would it occur to me that anyone saying he did not want an endless flow of, say, British people coming into the Netherlands should be prosecuted. Nor would he be.

The long-term implications for Dutch democracy of criminalising a majority opinion are catastrophic. But the trial of Wilders is also a nakedly political move.

The Dutch courts are behaving like a religious court. They are trying to regulate public expression and opinion when it comes to the followers of one religion. In so doing they obviously aspire to keep the peace in the short term, but they cannot possibly realise what trouble they are storing up for our future.

Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors. In Britain, the gymnast Louis Smith has just been suspended for two months by British Gymnastics. This 27-year old sportsman’s career has been put on hold, and potentially ruined, not because of anything to do with athletics but because of something to do with Islam.

Last month a video emerged online of the four-time Olympic medal-winner and a friend getting up to drunken antics after a wedding. The video — taken on Smith’s phone in the early hours of the morning — showed a friend taking a rug off a wall and doing an imitation of Islamic prayer rituals. When the video from Smith’s phone ended up in the hands of a newspaper, there was an immediate investigation, press castigation and public humiliation for the young athlete. Smith — who is himself of mixed race — was forced to parade on daytime television in Britain and deny that he is a racist, bigot or xenophobe. Notoriously liberal figures from the UK media queued up to berate him for getting drunk or for even thinking of taking part in any mockery of religion. This in a country in which Monty Python’s Life of Brian is regularly voted the nation’s favourite comic movie.

After an “investigation,” the British sports authority has now deemed Smith’s behaviour to warrant a removal of funding and a two-month ban from sport. This is the re-entry of blasphemy laws through the back door, where newspapers, daytime chat-shows and sports authorities decide between them that one religion is worthy of particular protection. They do so because they take the religion of Islam uniquely on its own estimation and believe, as well as fear, the warnings of the Islamic blasphemy-police worldwide.

The mainstream media in Western Europe and North America isn’t even pretending to be an objective news source anymore; instead, “journalists” are working openly to quell what looks increasingly, on both sides of the Atlantic, like a popular revolution against the hegemony of the self-appointed political and media aristocracy that seems hell-bent on driving Western civilization over the cliff. And so it’s time for another round of their Two-Minutes Hate against Dutch politician and freedom fighter Geert Wilders.

Wilders has yet again gone on trial in the Netherlands for “hate speech,” and this time the case against him is especially flimsy: as Europe is roiled by the criminal activity of Muslim migrants, he is being accused of “hate speech” for saying that the massive influx of immigrants from Morocco (from which most of the Muslim migrants in the Netherlands come) has to be stopped.

This trial could very easily backfire on the Dutch inquisitors, and make Wilders more popular than ever with the people of the Netherlands and Europe in general, as they are increasingly fed up with the political and media elites’ forcing them to accept a massive influx of Muslim migrants that ensures a future only of civil strife, bloodshed, and Sharia oppression.

Consequently, those elites are trying desperately to shore up their position. Wilders chanted “No more Moroccans” at a rally. The horror! To any sane person, this means “Stop the influx of Moroccan immigrants who only inflate crime rates and welfare rolls.” To the media, which at this point is quite insane, insofar as insanity means an inability or refusal to accept reality, this means “Genocide!”

And so, in this Deutsche Welle (DW) piece by freelance “journalist” Teri Schultz, we’re told that European Parliament lawmaker Cecile Kyenge, who was born in Congo, had “numerous racial slurs – not to mention, bananas, literally – thrown at her, along with suggestions she go back to ‘her country.’” Does this have anything to do with the crime and civil strife that are the foundations for Wilders’ position? Of course not, but Wilders, Schultz tells us, is (of course) “far-right,” that all-purpose and meaningless semaphore that serves only to signal to right-thinking Deutsche Welle readers that Wilders is, as far as the media elites are concerned, unsavory, and must be opposed and shunned, his positions left unexamined.

http://mystealthyfreedom.net/en/

The right for individual Iranian
women to choose whether they want hijab.

In Iran women have to cover their hair in public according to the dress rule enforced after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. My Stealthy Freedom is an online social movement where Iranian women share photos of themselves without wearing the hijab.

My Stealthy Freedom is an online social movement that was started by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad on May 3, 2014. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 women in Iran have had to cover their hair in public, but many Iranian women and men feel that wearing a hijab in public should be a personal choice. To address this issue we created a Facebook page where women from inside Iran could share photos of themselves not wearing their hijabs. Our website is a living archive of the photos and videos shared with us by these brave women, and the media coverage (both good and bad) that we receive from inside and outside Iran.

Babette Francis is the National & Overseas Co-ordinator of Endeavour Forum Inc., a women’s NGO having special consultative status with the Economic & Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations

If our Foreign Minister had a mind to do something of genuine value for her oppressed sisters, she might consider re-visiting Tehran on a bicycle while wearing leggings and a coat with writing on the back — ‘offences’ that could see an Iranian woman punished, even executed.
In April, 2015, our Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Hon. Julie Bishop, was criticized online by Iranian and other women for wearing a headscarf, and on occasion a hat, during her official visit to Iran; they deplored her decision to not take a stronger stance on the issue of headscarves — voluntary for her but compulsory for women in Iran. Iranian political journalist Masih Alinejad who now lives in the US, is founder of My Stealthy Freedom page and lobbies for freedom for women from wearing the hijab in public. She says that freedom to dress as you choose is also a free speech issue.

Julie Bishop always looks very fetching in photographs, and she looked even more so in her glamourous headscarf which revealed most of her hair, whereas Iranian women are punished if their headscarf does not completely cover their hair. I should mention that women who are privileged to have a personal audience with a Pope in the Vatican, traditionally wear a hat or mantilla, but it is not compulsory, does not conceal their hair, and is a mark of respect to a religious leader, whereas Julie Bishop was meeting with her political counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian Minister for Foreign Affairs, and not a leading cleric.

So I have much sympathy for Masih Alienjad who wrote an open letter on line to Julie Bishop saying, “You were not brave enough to challenge the compulsory hijab rules yet. We hope you will soon. You may say you were respecting Iran’s culture but compulsory hijab is not part of our culture”. Alinejad had previously challenged Ms Bishop to eschew wearing the headscarf in the country, calling it an insult to “human dignity”.

News Corp journalist Victoria Craw further reports that “other women joined in the criticism, with Australian-Iranian woman Moji Joon saying she was ‘quite disappointed Ms Bishop did not use her political position to take a stance for her fellow females.’ Another woman, Jeanie Mac, wrote: ‘The moral support this would have given the women in Iran who are protesting the wearing of compulsory hijab could have been huge. Instead it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth that she cares so little for women’s liberation and human rights.’ Others commented that they were ‘disappointed’ or ‘disgusted’, with some adding they were ashamed the foreign minister did not have the courage to challenge the rule.

Bishop’s visit marked the first official talks between Australia and Iran in 12 years and covered asylum seekers, intelligence and ISIS. She achieved some kind of deal on intelligence-0sharing to help track ISIS fighters, but Iran rejected her request to accept its nationals who have been deported from Australia. Iranians make up about a quarter of the people held in immigration detention centres.