Islam - Primitive Culture in need of Reform. The reform must come from within and most likely from the women. Westen men are combating the primitive culture of Islam and working to protect from its nuances seeping into our culture.
Cultures are not morally equivalent; with its warts and all, Western Civilization going back to the Greeks has had its strengths and its weaknesses always; however, taking stock of itself from time to time and moving inexorably forward. We've had a relapse from time to time, such as the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts around 1620; we did fall into the slave-trading trap set by the Arabs in Africa much to our shame; we did keep women from voting until 1920, about 60 years after ALL males in the United States were given the vote.
So, we've had our ups and downs, and lapses here and there. However, we have always seemed to be able to make corrections and move forward; not so our Muslim brothers.
I say brothers because there is not a centilla of difference between Arabs and Jews and their fighting is beyond ridiculous. The Catholic Church - the Holy Roman Empire - have all had their digressions into "naughty" behavior and there was the Protestant Reformation, of course. Succinctly, we've had our little revolts, and revolutions, and have our little sects but we are united against the threat that Islamic leaders (political, clerical, et al) have set before us today through their over-bearing immigration and their calls to jihad.
As I was reading Michener's
Caravans, I came across a series of pages that depict a scene better than any other in graphically presenting what we are fighting for: our women and our society to remain free. We must not allow
under any circumstances any shred/thread of Sharia Law to worm its way into our Western Civilization. If the worms have started, root them out, now, while you have a chance. The threads are insidious and appear innocuous, non-threatening. It really is a case of the camel getting his nose under the tent. And somewhat like mesquite taking hold in pasture land. Horrible to eradicate but a job that must be done for the pasture land to remain viable.
As I was reading the section of
Caravans that I have retyped for you here, I could hardly help but recall the hideous scene at the soccer field in a city in Afghanistan when the Taliban reigned there. Maybe you recall the tragic sight of two-three women clothed from head to toe in pale blue burkas. These helpless women had violated some "law" and the mullahs had condemned them to death.
The women were loaded out of the truck onto the soccer field. The stands were full. An extraordinarily brave man came up behind the women, once their sentence had been read out, and shot them in the back of the head as they kneeled before the screaming "audience" of shrieking perverts - good men all. I wonder which brave man in the crowd was the adulterer who defiled these helpless women. The bodies lay in pale blue shouds until at last they were tossed into the bed of a truck and wheeled away. Shame, shame on the cowards: the ones who defiled these women; the ones who brought the charges; the ones who sentenced them; and the vile being who shot them in the back of the head. (circa 2000)
Perhaps that is why Muslim men cover their enslaved women so that the world cannot put a face to the shame of these men who are cowards. In Islam, the word of a woman is about 1/2 the value of a man and may not always be counted in court.
If you are not moved to know the face and the name of the enemy after you have read the excerpt from James A. Michener's
Caravans, (pp.111-116), then perhaps nothing will move you:
....As I was paying for my meal and bidding my guests good-by, some men in long coats ran across the square, shouting. I did not understand their words and was about to return to the hotel so that Nur could eat, when the men around me became very excited and tugged at my sleeve. I was to follow them. Together we trailed the first men across the square and out of the gates of the city. I remember thinking that I should return to Nur Muhammad, but some evil genius kept me running and soon I was in the midst of a mob converging on a spot outside the gates where a heavy stake had been driven into the earth.
On the far side of the stake, which rose to a height of seven feet, stood four mullahs, including the two who had accosted me earlier. They were mournful, aloof and terrifying. In their beards and turbans they seemed like patriachs of old, and I was assailed by the uneasy feeling that I had intruded upon some Biblical scene which should have terminated twenty-five centuries ago. The lean, angry mullahs were from the Old Testament. The string of camels placidly grazing by the crumbling walls were of an ancient time, and the crowd of turbaned men, their faces brown from sun, their beards gray with desert dust, could have been waiting for some religious rite in Nineveh or Babylon.
As I looked hurriedly about I could detect only one note that indicated we were in the twentieth century. Outside the gates of Ghazni, jammed into a crumbling fragment of wall that may once have formed part of a fort guarding the imperial city, stood a telegraph pole which carried three precarious wires from Ghazni to Kabul. What I was about to witness could thus have been telegraphed to the whole world in a matter of minutes, but no one in Ghazni, except perhaps Nur Muhammad, would have considered it worthy to report.
The mullahs were praying, and the declining afternoon sun threw handsome shadows athwart their faces. The prayer stopped. From the nearby gates marched four soldiers bearing carbines and bandoleers, leading between them a hesitant, bare-footed figure covered by a coarse white chaderi. In Kabul I had seen pleated chaderies of exquisite cloth with embroidered peepholes for the eyes, and the savageness of the custom was temporarily overlooked; but in Ghazni this chaderi was a coarse, dirty white shroud and the opening no more than a tiny square of cheap mosquito netting.
I was not told who hid inside the chaderi, but it had to be a woman, for so far as I knew men never wore the shroud. Whoever it was must have seen the bitter looks of hatred that greeted her as she passed.
When the soldiers reached the stake, they inexpertly drove several nails into it and lashed their prisoner's hands to these nails, at the same time securing her ankles to the bottom of the stake. When they stepped back, the dirty white chaderi fell completely over the bare feet and the prisoner was wholly masked. She was still free, however, to look out upon the world of hate-filled (male - added) faces.
Now the four mullahs prayed, and the crowd responded in a ritual I did not understand; but this was followed by a speech from one of the mullahs who had accosted me in the square, and what he said was in Pashto, and this I understood clearly, though what it signified I was not then competent to guess. He shouted mournfully, "This is the woman taken in adultery! This is the whore of Ghazsni? This is the raging insult to all men who revere God!" He ended and I stared at the shrouded figure, trying to anticipate what her punishment was to be. If she heard the charges, she did not tremble.
Another mullah stepped forward and cried, "We have studied the case of this woman taken in adultery and she is guilty. We submit her to the judgment of the men of Ghazni." His companions assented, and the first mullah led the bearded men back through the gates of Ghazni and we say them no more.
I had turned to watch the mullahs and did not see what happened next, but I heard a thudding sound and a gasp. I looked around quickly in time to see that a rather large stone had apparently struck the woman and had fallen at her feet. The gasp must have come from her.
Now the men at my right, the ones who had eaten with me and brought me to the scene, knelt to find stones, and the smaller rocks they discarded, but soon all were armed, and with the same skill that I had seen directed at the dog, they began throwing at the shrouded figure. From all sides stones whizzed toward the stake, and most struck, and it was obvious that punishment for adultery in Afghanistan was severe.
The woman refused to cry out, but a cheer soon rose from the crowd. One powerful man had found an especially good stone, large and jagged, and he threw this with force, aiming it carefully at her body, and it struck so violently in her abdomen that soon the first blood of the afternoon showed through the chaderi. It was this that brought the cheer, but I remember thinking how indecent it was that a human body which none could see should send its blood through the interstices of a shroud and deposit it in sunlight as testimony of punishment.
Another stone of equal size struck the woman's shoulder. It brought both blood and cheers. I felt sickness in my throat and thought: Who halts the punishment?
Then I almost fainted. A large man with unerring aim pitched a jagged rock of some size and caught the woman in the breast. Blood spurted through the torn chaderi and at last the woman uttered a piercing scream. I wanted to run away, but I was hemmed in by maniacs and I had been warned by many accounts that for a foreigner to make one mistake at such a scene might lead to his being killed. I prayed that the men had had enough, and then I saw why the soldiers had hammered the nails in the stake. They kept the ropes from slipping, and when the prisoner fainted, her bloodstained chaderi going all limp, these nails prevented her from falling to the ground.
Surely, I thought, the soldiers will release her now. But they watched impassively while men from all sides gathered fresh ammunition.
The sagging body was struck eight or nine times inn the next fusillade, but mercifully the woman could not have known. Now a burly man shouted that he had found the perfect rock and others must stand clear. The crowd obeyed and watched breathlessly as he took careful aim, whirled his arm, and launched his missile with ugly force. It flashed across the fifteen yards separating the men from their target and sped accurately as intended, striking the unconscious woman in the face. Quick blood marked the spot and the crowd cheered.
The blow was so terrible that it wrenched the prisoner's hands from the nails and allowed her to collapse in a heap about the stake. As she did so the crowd broke loose and rushed to the fallen body, smashing it with boulders which no man, however powerful, could have thrown from a distance. Again and again they dropped the huge rocks on the fallen body until they crushed it completely, continuing the wild sport until they had built a small mound of stones over the scene, as a pauper family in the desert might have marked a burial.
In a state of shock I returned through the gates of Ghazni. I passed the restaurant....and was greeted by the men who had thrown the largest rocks. They were gathering to discuss the execution and congratulate each other upon expert performances....
"Why are you so white?" Nur Muhammad asked.
"A woman taken in adultery," I mumbled.
"Stones?" he asked.
"Yes."
Nur beat the rugs, then put his hands over his face. "What a terrible disgrace! My poor country!"
"It was horrible," I said weakly. "How can you permit it?"......
Caravans was written in 1963 about a time occurring around 1946. He states that public punishments were no longer common but that was in 1963 before the Wahabbi form of Islam overtook Afghanistan with the Taliban.
It is estimated that 1.3 billion people follow Islam. That means that there are enough people (women) in slavery among that 1.3 billion people (750 million people) to populate the United States of America twice with 150 million left over.
When our men and women go to fight in Iraq and other middle eastern nations for the people to be able to have self-determination, our men and women are fighting for us, to keep us free and to keep us - their wives, daughters, aunts, grandmothers - from ever being subjected to such barbaric, dehumanizing ridicule and cowardly treatment.
I went to a local Harvest Highlander Parade yesterday. One of the floats was put together by a faternity of bright, handsome young men. At the officials' viewing stand, they stopped, jumped from their camoflaged jeeps, stood to the saying of the Pledge of Alliance in honor of our fallen and of our troops fighting on. At the end, there was a loud, "Ooh aah!"
On that, God bless you, God bless our wonderful nation, God bless our Western Civilization! On this Sunday afternoon, with the scent of fall in the air, the leaves of trees turning their golds, russet reds, and bright oranges - may peace wrap you in its arms and may you have a gracious day...
