To combat female jihadists. Reports Crossroads Arabia,

They are playing a part in the overall efforts of the Saudi government to discourage youths from adopting extremist ideologies, nipping the problem in the bud rather than having to fight them in the streets. The article points to the way Al-Qaeda has paid attention to women in its own outreach programs and how female extremists are more difficult to pull away from their ideologies.

See what you think.

A Pakistani human-rights organzation says that at least 565 women were murdered in the country “in so-called honour killings.”

However, it said many more cases may have gone unreported and has estimated in the past that the annual total may be about 1,000.

Many men in deeply conservative rural areas of Pakistan consider it an insult to family honour if female relatives have an affair outside of wedlock or even if they marry without their consent.

Some view attacking or killing the women or their partners as a way to restore family honour.

In the report released today, the commission said at least 475 of last year’s honour killings followed accusations of “illicit relations”.

Sixty of the dead were minors.

Arrests were made in only 128 cases, it said.

I wrote about the dynamics of an honor-shame culture and how it severely oppresses women last October.

Sorry, but this custom is just nuts. Seems self evident. Hundreds injured in Muslim animal sacrifice.

“Hark, the angels aren’t singing in Bethlehem,” at American Thinker details the exodus of Christians from Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. Sixty years ago, Bethlehem was 85 percent Christian. Today only 12 percent of its residents are. Here’s a cite from a British newspaper article:

… the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, are to lead a joint delegation to Bethlehem this week to express their solidarity with the beleaguered Christian populace.

The town, according to the Cardinal, is being “steadily strangled”.

The sense of a creeping Islamic fundamentalism is all around in Bethlehem.

As late as last year, “the British archbishop of Canterbury and the resident Greek Orthodox cleric, blamed the Israelis-naturally-” for the slow elimination of Bethlehem Christians; one wonders what they will have to say this year. Thinker’s writer Ethel C. Fenig predicts,

Oh sure, as usual, the religious dignitaries will again blame the Israelis. And in the meantime, the manager of the Christian radio station prepares to leave because, “As Christians, we have no future here,” he says. “We are melting away.”

I have to wonder how long it will be before Jerusalem follows.

From the mind and computer of the incomprable Scott Ott, here is is al Qaeda’s number 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Christmas message to America.

Oct. 7, 2001 was World Communion Sunday. It was also the day that the air campaign against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan began. On that day, not knowing that the bombing raids would begin exactly during the time of our worship service, I concluded my sermon thus:

Today is the first Communion Sunday since al Qaeda killed six thousand of us. This Communion Sunday is a special one when Christians around the world recognize that we are one body in Christ. We reach out in the Lord’s spirit to share the bread and the cup, and we are praying for one another and the whole world.

Let us dare to pray that the day can come when we may welcome even Osama bin Laden and his cohorts into Christian communion as our brother in Christ. Let us pray and work for a day when the world’s hatred and rage and murderousness are overcome by the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Let us pray for a day to come when we can kneel even with our present enemies at the altar of the Son of God and partake together of the goodness of Christ. Let us hope and work for the day when we break bread together with them on our knees.

Let people of Christian faith remember to pray for our enemies. Our Lord and Savior, whom our enemies know of, but do not actually know, commands it. And so we do it, even if sometimes it is through clenched teeth.

I guess we can expect to see Iran’s soon-to-be-former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad standing on the corner holding a sign saying, “Will hate Jews and threaten the USA for food.” Why? He was videotaped leering at dancing, unveiled women.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who flaunts his ideological fervour, has been accused of undermining Iran’s Islamic revolution after television footage appeared to show him watching a female song and dance show.
The famously austere Mr Ahmadinejad has been criticised by his own allies after attending the lavish opening ceremony of the Asian games in Qatar, a sporting competition involving 13,000 athletes from 39 countries. The ceremony featured Indian and Egyptian dancers and female vocalists. Many were not wearing veils.

Women are forbidden to sing and dance before a male audience under Iran’s Islamic legal code. Officials are expected to excuse themselves from such engagements when abroad but TV pictures showed Mr Ahmadinejad sitting with President Bashar Assad of Syria and Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister, during last Friday’s ceremony in Doha.

Religious fundamentalists, usually Mr Ahmadinejad’s keenest supporters, are asking why he attended a ceremony that violated his own government’s strict interpretation of Shia Islam.

So, Mahmoud is hoist on his own petard (whatever the heck that means). Stick a fork in him, ‘cause he’ done. He’s gonna make like a tree and leave. Yep, just like horse poop, he’s gonna hit the trail. Didn’t Hollywood already make a movie about him? Oh, yeah, there were two: “Gone in 60 Seconds” and “Gone With the Wind.” Yes, indeedy, he’s ghost. So long, Mahmoud, sayonara, goodbye, wiedersehen, tschuss, au revoir! Been nice knowing ya! Oh, wait, no it hasn’t.

You may recall that in September Pope Benedict gave a speech in Germany in which he stated that “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,” and in which he referred to a 14th- and 15th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus.

The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war. He said, I quote, ” ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.

As may be expected, this speech inflamed the fabled “Muslim street” and Muslim clerics and leaders of Islamic nation demanded apologies from the Pope. The “street” rioted across most of Islamia, as directed by their leaders.

Via email I received from Michael Edward McNeil some highly relevant links as this story continues. First stop, David Warren:

An extraordinary thing happened [in mid-October]. Thirty-eight Muslim scholars and chief muftis, from across the Muslim world, jointly replied to the Pope’s speech at Regensburg (and more have associated their names with this document, since). It was presented to the Vatican’s envoy at Amman; the full text in English is available through the Islamica magazine website, the Catholic website, Chiesa, and elsewhere. I look through the list of signatories, and they are a “who’s who” of the learned leaders of a faith that has always aspired to be led by its most learned. …

The signatories renounced and condemned violence against Christians in the name of Islam. They accepted without qualification the Pope’s post-Regensburg clarifications, and both accepted and applauded his call for dialogue. They unambiguously denounced and rejected all terrorist interpretations of the word “jihad”; they insisted on the priority of Surah 2:256 of the Koran (”There is no compulsion in religion”), stating explicitly that it is not obviated by later Koranic passages or Hadiths.

Firas Ahmad, senior editor of Islamica Magazine, notes the paucity of coverage this extraordinary document received in the Western media:

On October 12th 38 highly respected and theologically diverse clerics from the Muslim world wrote what is widely considered a respectful and engaging “Open Letter” to the Pope in response to his controversial comments about Islam made during his Regensburg address in September. Not only was the letter of historical significance, but it also represented an articulate and reasoned invitation to dialogue from Muslims with the Papacy on matters of theology and faith. The signatories included top scholars from Bosnia, Croatia, Egypt, the United States, the United Kingdom, Jordan, Kosovo, Oman, Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Iran.

Around the same time, a single Muslim cleric in Australia, Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali, delivered a sermon to about 500 followers where he allegedly compared some women who do not dress modestly to uncovered meat being left out for a cat.

I wonder which story received more news coverage.

The open letter signed by 38 scholars, who represent all eight major schools of thought in the Islam, is more representative of the global Muslim community than this one lone Australian cleric. However, judging by the prevailing media coverage any casual reader would think the exact opposite.

Buddy, take a number and wait in line.

Anyway, the six-page letter really is quite extraordinary, collegial in tone and highly civilized in content and reason. It is online here. Its major headings are:

There is no Compulsion in Religion
God’s Transcendence
The Use of Reason
What is “Holy War”?
Forced Conversion
Something New?
“The Experts”
Christianity and Islam

Read the whole thing; it’s very informative. I have to wonder, though: if the signing scholars are the foremost of the Islamic world, then are they teaching this sort of thing to the Muslim ummah?

Well, a Muslim cleric in Australia has said on the one hand that raped women were really asking for it and that therefore their rapists were not entirely to blame. Now the Saudis have sentenced a gang-rape victim to 90 lashes of the whip.

A Saudi court has sentenced a gang rape victim to 90 lashes of the whip because she was alone in a car with a man to whom she was not married.

The sentence was passed at the end of a trial in which the al- Qateef high criminal court convicted four Saudis convicted of the rape, sentencing them to prison terms and a total of 2,230 lashes.

The four, all married, were sentenced respectively to five years and 1,000 lashes, four years and 800 lashes, four years and 350 lashes, and one year and 80 lashes.

A fifth, married, man who was stated to have filmed the rape on his mobile phone still faces investigation. Two others alleged to have taken part in the rape evaded capture.

Saudi courts take marital status into account in sexual crimes. A male friend of the rape victim was also sentenced to 90 lashes for being alone with her in the car.

Can you make sense of this? I can’t. However, Arab culture of one of honor-shame, and also overwhelmingly patriarchal. A woman’s honor has nowhere to go but down, it can’t be increased, and is concerned almost exclusively with her sexual purity.

Maybe the poor woman should be glad she doesn’t live in another Arab country, like Jordan, where she might have actually been executed for being raped. More about that here.