From the La La Land (December 2012)

 

From the La La Land (December 2012)

Christmas

The December 23 issue of Munsif (Hyderabad) carried two items concerning Christmas. One described how the Ulama Council in Indonesia had declared participation by Muslims in Christmas activities to be un-Islamic, and urged Indonesian Muslims not even to greet Christians with a cheery “Merry Christmas.” The same report also detailed similar actions by “major” Muftis and scholars in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They too, apparently, have declared it as harām for any Muslim to participate or use expressions of joy at Christmas time. According to them, Muslims should not go to any church service if invited, for that is when “Allah casts down his particular displeasure upon Christians.”

The other item was datelined Medak (AP). Apparently the place is a favorite with holidayers at this time of the year. And local Muslims too have long enjoyed the various events that take place at Christmas. Now a Maulana Muhammad Javed Ali Hussami, President of the Muslim Welfare Society, has taken umbrage. He has issued a call to all Muslims not to participate in any non-Muslim festival, though his immediate target were the celebrations at the Church of India at Medak.

 

 Another Conspiracy

The same issue of Munsif also carried a boxed item on the front page, with the headline: “The Massacre of Children in the American School was a Jewish Terrorist Attack.” Here is the initial part of this long item:

A sensational disclosure has been made that Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence agency, was involved in the incident at the Newtown School. The disclosure was made by none other than the future Defense Secretary of the USA. His statement has been reported by the Iranian Press TV. [The report] says that the Jewish agents committed the massacre at the school to teach a lesson to Americans, and to warn them against giving any support to the Palestinians. It should be evident that the Israeli Prime Minister and the Jewish lobby in the America are enraged at the recognition given by the U.N. to the Palestinian state.…

The former Governor of Arizona (sic), Michael Harris, has openly said at an international level (sic) on a TV channel that the incident in Connecticut was a terrorist act of revenge on the part of Israel.

The rest of the boxed space contains more similar claims by Mr. Michael Harris, including: “The Jews of Hollywood have encouraged the culture of violence in America;” and “The killings on the Norwegian island were also a similar vengeful Israeli act.”

Please note, Press Council of India:

• The only source of this most reprehensible piece of reporting is a small Iranian news agency, PressTV, which has an office in Washington, D.C. No other news agency located in Washington sent out anything remotely like it. (Claiming it to come from “Agencies” is a blatant lie.)
• Former senator Chuck Hagel, now nominated by President Obama for the post of the Secretary of Defense, never issued any such statement. (Another blatant lie.)
• In fact, even the Iranian news agency did not make such a libelous claim concerning Mr. Hagel. Munsif made it up entirely on its own.  Was it intentional or due to poor command of English, I cannot say. (Worse than a blatant lie.)
• The only person who brought up Mr. Hagel’s name in any fashion was Mr. Michael Harris, who publicly claimed that since Senator Hagel had a reputation to be fair minded concerning the Palestinians, his nomination had enraged Israel and it supporters in the United States, and that both had launched attacks on him.
• So who is this Michael Harris? A search on the Internet with his name and Arizona will suffice. He is NOT a former governor—either of Arizona or any other state. He is NOT even a former Republican nominee in an gubernatorial race. His claim to fame is that he ran in the 2006 Republican gubernatorial primary in Arizona, and received 18000 votes.

 

The Rape in New Delhi

 Mr. S. A. Sagar is a regular columnist in the daily Sahāfat, published from Delhi, Lucknow, and Mumbai. On December 24, 2012, under the heading “Why Such Violence Against Ladies?” he wrote about the demonstrations protesting the horrific rape of a young woman in New Delhi. After describing the demonstrations, Mr. Sagar makes his major point: immodest dress of women causes men to behave like animals.

We may have heard that before, but Mr. Sagar is different.

Original to him is his “scientific” explanantion, based on an article he found in the Tarjumān-al-Quran, the monthly journal of the Jamaat-e Islami, which, according to Mr. Sagar, was a translation of an article published in 2008 in Pravda. It seems that a Russian doctor—I failed to recover the original name from its Urdu transcription—believes that the high incidence of prostate cancer among European and American men, as compared to the very low incidence of the same in the “Muslim” lands, is due to the sexual agitation and frustration European and American males suffer, surrounded as they are by scantily-clad women. This “scientific” proof then leads Mr. Sagar to rhapsodize about the “balanced inequality” between sexes in Islam, and condemn what he considers “unbalanced equality” championed under the slogan of “Women’s Freedom.”

The note struck by S. A. Sagar was also sounded by a few other writers in Sahāfat, who similarly found in the Western ways, as imitated by South Asian women, the chief cause for the rising incidence of rape. Needless to say, they show no awareness of the rapes that occur in villages and towns where women do not go around in jeans, or the rapes in Kashmir now, and in Bangladesh in 1972, that were not perpetrated upon scantily clad women, nor of course the rapes that immigrant women have suffered in “Islamic” Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

One intriguing piece was written by a very young-looking Muhammad Asif Iqbal, in the Sahāfat of December 26, under the bold heading: “Behind the Cry for Women’s Freedom.”  Actually, he was far more sensible than the older contributors, and was concerned with many more issues plaguing the Indian urban society. What intrigued me was the incident he cited when he too turned to the theme of the accursed West and its more accursed Feminism. Allegedly, five girls at some unnamed university in Arizona climbed into the room of a Yemeni student, took of their clothes and invited him to make love to them. He, naturally refused—“My religion does not allow it”—leaped out of the window, and rushed to the campus police, who promptly arrested the five girls. What happened next, we are not told. But Mr. Iqbal assured his readers that nasty things would not happen if more people showed the strength of character that the Yemeni student did.

I failed to find any story of that description in the Arizonian press. It could be there, but hard to find at this late date. I, however, found the same story repeated on any number of websites in English, in more or less the same words.

A Yemeni student got sexually harassed by the Americans five female students in Arizona. They went to his private apartment near the campus, and take off their clothes, after closing the apartment door to prevent him from escaping but the student opened the bedroom window and jumped to the street. Essam Sharabi immediately inform the police attended the area and the girls arrested. After investigation, one of the students acknowledged that they believe that the student in question is suffering from a psychological issues as they asked him to go out with them on dates more than once, but he refused claiming that religious young man and his religion prevents him from exercising any intimate relationships with other than his wife. And by virtue of the state law prohibits all forms of harassment unless one of the two parties agree to establish a relationship with the other party.

Since the English text sounded very much like a bad translation from Arabic, I expanded my search, and was not surprised to find an Arabic text on a site named “Yasater.” It seemed to have been the source for the English, and what was on “Yasater” was itself derived from an item published in “Al-‘Arabia” in May 2012. The latter, luckily, concluded its report with a reference to the number of clothes the wild co-eds at the unnamed university shed off at an annual event. I could then easily find what inspired Al-‘Arabiya: an event in April 2012 at the Arizona State University at Tempe. One report:

Arizona State University students pose for photos as they celebrate the last day of classes by taking off their clothes and donating them to charity during the ASU Undie Run 2012 in Tempe, Arizona April 24, 2012. Over 15 thousand students participated in the end of the year tradition, with over 5,000 pounds (2,268 kg) of clothes and 3,000 pounds (1,361 kg) of food donated to local charities.

Shedding clothes and running in underclothes may not be the ideal way to raise funds for charity, but must it be reported with prurient intentions? That is what the so-called Muslim sites did, when they deliberately left out the charitable purpose. Needless to say, the annual semi-nudity has never caused anyone to assault a man or a woman.