One wonders just what took so
long. How often do a civilized people
need to have their intelligence insulted and their hospitality betrayed by brainwashed
sociopaths bent on using their religion as a rationale for hatred and general
barbaric criminality?
I think that every mosque needs
to have skeptical eyeballs on board and that the protection of religious
freedom be stripped from any group that preaches hate in any form. This expose clearly shows us that this is a real
and growing problem as is readily apparent with brainwashed women in our
streets supposedly proudly wearing their veils.
It used to be young boys and
girls wearing a swastika and we all know how that all worked out.
This item shows us that the
bright light of day inspires a furious reaction from zealots who all believe
that they will soon enslave the rest of us and enjoy a private paradise on
Earth that will be a horror for all others.
Let us bring that bright light
into every mosque and perhaps we can shame them into joining the enlightenment.
Going Undercover in Sweden’s Mosques
Posted by Bruce Bawer on May 21st, 2012
You may recall that back in 2007, the series Dispatches, produced
by Britain’s Channel 4, sent reporters into several mosques in that country
with hidden cameras and microphones. The result was a program entitled Undercover
Mosque, which – for those who didn’t already suspect that fishy stuff was
going on behind those walls – was mind-blowing, confirming pretty much every
claim made by the critics of Islam that had been furiously rejected by imams as
sheer Islamophobia. Among other things, Channel 4 caught preachers on
videotape rejecting Western law and integration into Western society; asserting
the intellectual inferiority of women and the acceptability of marrying
pre-pubescent girls; and calling for the murder of Jews, Hindus, gays, Muslim
apostates, and British soldiers.
If you remember that program, you may also remember what happened
afterwards. The British police investigated the mosques, but decided they
didn’t have enough evidence to charge them with anything. At which point
the cops did a 180 and reported Channel
4 to Ofcom, the UK’s answer to the FCC, for allegedly editing its footage in
such a way as to misrepresent the preachers’ views. The good news is that
Ofcom eventually rejected the charges; the bad news is that, once again, the
critics of Islam became the heavies, the Muslims the victims. And despiteUndercover
Mosque‘s explosive revelations, nothing much changed as a result of them.
Now, to its credit, and to the astonishment of many, Swedish television
has done its own version ofUndercover Mosque. The 60 Minutes-style
series Uppdrag: Granskning (Assignment: Investigation) sent two women
in burkas into ten Swedish mosques. One of them carried a hidden camera;
the other pretended to be a woman whose abusive husband had taken a second wife
and who wanted to know the answers to these questions:
Is a man permitted to marry more than one woman?
Is a woman permitted to deny her husband sex?
Is a man permitted to hit his wife?
If so, is she permitted to call the police?
Again, for those who have been following these matters for years in
North America and Europe , the results of this
investigation will not come as much of a surprise. But in Sweden , where
the media try their best never to approach these matters in a remotely honest
way, this episode ofUppdrag: Granskning provided a rare taste of media
candor.
One of the ten mosques was the Stockholm
Mosque, the most prominent Muslim house of worship in Sweden .
An official at the mosque, Mahmod Adam, told his burka-clad interlocutor that
it’s perfectly acceptable under the Koran for a man to take four wives, so long
as he can support them and treat them equally. “Understand?” he
asked. “Yes,” she replied meekly. In response to which he told her,
sharply, “You’re supposed to listen!” – in other words, “Shut up!”
The faux wife went on to tell Adam that her husband hits her if she so
much as opens her mouth – and that he cites the Koran in his defense.
Adam replied that her husband is allowed to smack her on the arm – and that
under no circumstances, in any case, should she call the police on him.
His final advice: to show her husband more affection.
Elsewhere the advice was similar. At the Örebro Mosque, Abdur
Kadir Salad told the woman not to call the police because she’d end up getting
a divorce and breaking up her family – and Muslims don’t want that, for Islam
is about building families, not breaking them up. At the Islamic Center
in Malmö, same advice: no police, because “they can take your kids.” At
another Malmö mosque, the message was unambiguous: “Never, never consider
calling the police.” Even if he hits her twenty or thirty times? Smacking
himself on the arm, the imam said forcefully: “This is not hitting!”
On to Uppsala ,
where Abdul Wadod – who, amusingly, looked not unlike Sasha Baron Cohen with a
beard – told the woman that when her husband hits her, she shouldn’t call the
cops; she should apologize. Apologize? Yes. He cited what he
called “a very fine hadith,” which, according to him, says in effect that a
good wife responds to spousal abuse by telling her husband: “I’m sorry, I just
can’t sleep until you’re satisfied with me.”
That was the overall pattern. There were exceptions. “It
doesn’t matter if he ends up in prison,” said the counselor at the Islamic Cultural Center in Rinkeby when asked about how
to deal with domestic violence. “You must report him to the
police.” (Curiously, of all the mosques, this is the one that has the
reputation of being the most conservative; I couldn’t help wondering if he’d
figured out that his visitor was wearing a wire.)
The final score: at six out of the ten mosques, the woman was told that
it was her duty to submit to sex with her husband. At six, she was told
not to report spousal abuse to the police; at two others, the advice she
received was vague or contradictory; only at two mosques was she told to go to
the police. And at nine out of ten, she was told that her husband has the
right to take four wives.
All of this advice, as Uppdrag: Granskning duly noted – and
as the mosque employees certainly understood – is in explicit violation of
Swedish law. And these mosques, as was pointed out on the program more
than once, receive generous financial support from the Swedish government.
After the women had finished making their rounds, a male reporter for
Swedish TV visited the Stockholm Mosque, where, in a sit-down interview, he
told Abdallah Salla of Sweden’s Islamic Federation that a woman had asked an
official of that mosque, Mahmood Adam, for counsel. He told Salla what
Adam had said, whereupon Salla got Adam on the phone and, after a brief
conversation, assured the reporter that Adam had never said any such
things. Such advice, he insisted, would be utterly counter to Islam,
which, he explained, is all about democracy, sexual equality, and so on.
At which point the reporter, in classic 60 Minutes fashion, whipped
out his laptop and confronted Salla with a video of Adam saying everything he’d
denied saying.
What followed was instructive. First Salla tried to argue that
Adam hadn’t really said what he’d said. When the reporter confronted him
with the absurdity of this claim, a cowed, defensive Salla agreed to meet with
him and Adam the next morning to discuss the matter. But when the
reporter showed up the next morning, Salla, now in a thoroughly aggressive
mode, said that the plans had been changed. Adam would not be coming;
there would be no meeting; the mosque would perform its own internal
investigation. And he would not be giving any more interviews to the
media.
And that was that.
The only surprising thing about this program is that Swedish national
TV broadcast it at all, given that it violates the see-no-evil policy on Islam
that has guided that country’s politics and journalism from the git-go.
How, one wonders, did the producers get away with this? Part of the
answer is that the program’s emphasis on the mosques’ unequal treatment of
women made it far more acceptable than it might have been had the mosques been
criticized from another angle. Sweden, after all, prides itself on the
notion that it is (as we were reminded at the beginning of the program) the
country in the world in which men and women enjoy the greatest equality.
Which trumps which in Sweden :
multicultural blindness toward Islamic misogyny or the proud Swedish tradition
of equal rights for women? The producers of Uppdrag: Granskning were
plainly betting on the latter.
In addition, the producers manifestly strove to frame the program not
as an attack on Islam but as a criticism of rogue mosques by “good” Muslims and
their allies in the name of “true” Islam. Viewers were informed at the
outset that one of the two women in burkas is a Muslim and that the other is an
ex-Muslim. The producers also granted a prominent role to Mohammad
Fazlhashemi, a Muslim historian of Islam, whom they presented as a
personification of decent, moderate, democratic, law-abiding Swedish Islam, and
whom they kept cutting back to: instead of having an infidel Swede comment on
the counsel given to the women at the various mosques, the producers accorded
that role to Fazlhashemi, who smoothly argued that the unfortunate statements
made by the men at the mosques to the undercover women in burka only fuel the
fire of Islam’s enemies, including the Muslim-haters in the Swedish Democrat
Party. By giving such counsel, lamented Fazlhashemi, his fellow Muslims
“live up to all the prejudices of the Islamophobes.” Thus did the
producers manage to affirm their abhorrence for “Islamophobia” and their
solidarity with “good” Muslims like Fazlhashemi.
Whatever. At least it got the show on TV. But whether it
will make any difference is, I would guess, doubtful. I hope I’m
wrong. But Sweden
is a tough case. And in Britain, as noted, where the media are a lot more
open about these things, the only people who ended up in trouble with the law
as a result of Undercover Mosque were its producers. Heaven
only knows what’s in store for the gutsy folks at Uppdrag: Granskning.
2 comments:
In an effort not to write a tome I will only address one issue. That of polygamy. Since marriage is an institution between the creator and man and woman, government should stay out of it. Government should be protecting peoples right to polygamy if that is what they believe, not violating that right. What the US government did to the Mormon religion was an atrocity. What is the next religious belief and right that government will destroy?
While I cannot imagine being married to more than one woman, marriage is a civil contract and none of the government's business. When women are abused, in or out of any type of marriage, people should take steps to protect them including, if necessary, the police.
Post a Comment