Shahid Malik addressing an audience of fellow Muslims, describing the Onward March Of Islam by Muslims Working Within The System:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttz8-ucWhYc&eu...

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuTm1OnFAc&fe...

Shahid Malik was forced to resign -- temporarily -- in the scandal over the expenses claimed by MPs. He was one of the worst offenders. Sir Philip Mawer was said to have looked into Malik, but the British government refused, even after repeated requests, to publish the details of Mawer's investigation, and there is internal evidence to suggest that Mawer did a poor job, intended to clear Malik.

For more, google along with "Shahid Malik" (who said he looked forward to a Muslim MP), such words as "scandal" or "cover-up" or "corrupt."

Incredible.

Shhhh. Please. Don't mention that or the boys at IntenseDebate, seeing that they allowed this thread's comments to get through unscathed, will make sure that they rectify that little act of negligent mercy.

What an opportunity Cherif Bassiouni provided. And you are akin to that Robber Baron of the Mauve Decade who proudly explained “I sees my opportunities, and I took ‘em.”

That amazing exchange above would fill any polemicist with envy. Rich in years and honors and worldly acclaim and so on and so forth he may be, but still the not-quite-candid-and-more-than-slightly-confused Cherif Bassiouni, has just seen his own polemic carefully taken apart, in public (“in the full light of history”), with the resulting parts then held up for examination and silent -- there is no need for sound effects here, the sound can be turned off -- ridicule.

Your reply to him is unanswerable. He has no answer. He must now remain silent. And .If he still has some of his wits about him, he must at this point be truly mortified. For what can he say? He's one of those eminences so used to being an eminence, he can't quite fathom those who do not yield to his (to him) self-evident authority and rank, and who demand of him such things as truthfulness, logic, consistency -- you know, stuff like that. He expects, but in this case did not receive, the accustomed salaam-salaaming of everyone. I could have told him -- I happen to know -- that Robert Spencer is no respecter of parsons. We're in America now, and the Argument From Authority (I'm the famous legal scholar, you have to defer to me) cuts no ice here.. The same intellectual standards are required for all. And Bassiouni is clearly no Lauterpacht, or De Visscher, or – nota bene – Julius Stone.

This exchange also puts me in mind, too, of a cartoon dear to many a young American. I am thinking of Wile E. Coyote, just when he has assumed he has successfully launched a missile --an Acme Missile, bien entendu -- in the direction of the Road-Runner, and then suddenly he hears that tell-tale "Beep Beep" and sees the Road-Runner whizzing happily by, and then W. E. Coyote looks down, and sees just under his seat, the Acme Missile still sitting on its launch pad, because it had apparently failed to launch correctly, and just then, just as he looks down, just as the awful truth is shown by the expression of fear and horror on his face, that Acme Missile explodes in his face.

That is more or less what happened to Cherif Bassiouni. He no doubt bitterly regrets having dared to answer you (with such obvious illogic, about the admitted difference between what the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence have concluded about apostasy, and the view, which he, Cherif Bassioni claims is quite different, of something he calls “Islam.” What a perfect occasion to demolish him, and what sportsman could have resisted?

Tant pis pour lui.

The exchange (ah, ces echangistes!)? Epatant.

These bits of slightly off-color parlez-vous have been supplied, with malice aforethought, since M. Cherif Cherif Bassiouni is, undoubtedly, and quite proudly, francophone. For without French as his passport to the great world, the world of Western thought, and Western legal theory and practice, then where, really, would Cherif Bassiouni, and others of his ilk, undoubtedly be?

"I asked him, was the indoctrination (the boys received) meant to point them to becoming a bridegroom to commit jihad," he said...[about the imam who found recruits to be suicide bombers].

Endows with new meaning the phrase Salinger lifted from Sappho:

Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters.

Indeed.

One more reason to go beyond mere oppositioin to the results of the stolen election, and to analyze the "gift of the Arabs" that has created, in the minds of Muslims, the kinds of attitudes that will always make the primitive masses -- the ahmadinejads and not the kierostamis or nafisis -- so dangerous. Iranians have the possibility of an alternative identity to appeal to, to re-assume. The advanced Iranians should take this opportunity, and exploit Iranian resentments, of all kinds, including that directed at members of Hezbollah who some think have been helping the Basii as Arafat and the PLO helped Khomeini's earliest supporters. Use the dislike or hatred of the Arabs to sully Islam. Many in the Soviet bloc could denounce Stalin but for a long time could not bring themselves to denounce Communism and attempt to pull it up, root and branch. There was a lot of "if only Lenin had lived" or "Lenin would not have stood for this." It was soothing nonsense. And there are people who, through no fault of their own, still find it so difficult to analyze the nature of Islam, the impact that Islam naturally has on the minds of men, and all the ways in which Islam explains the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Muslim peoples and states. If one wishes to tame Islam, you can take the root of Ataturk -- but after 80 years of Kemalism's systematic constraints, Islam is back, with its very own vengeance. The only way out is to diminish the appeal of islam, to persuade people in much greater numbers to jettison Islam. This can be done best among the most advanced Iranians, for they have another identity that they can discover, or even partly invent, and it is the non-Arab Muslms -- the Berbers, the Kurds, and the Iranians, among others -- who have the greatest possibility, one denied the Arabs, to find and emphasize another non-Islamic identity. If the American government had clever people in control, at the Pentagon and the State Department they would be burning the midnight oil to figure out how to divide and demoralize, and diminish the ranks, of the Camp of Islam.

But that is not -- yet -- the case.

I was about to reply to a posting that had been made here before, but now I see that that posting, and many others, have disappeared. I should have known. After all, during the past two weeks many of my own postings, that I had hoped to come back to, disappeared entirely, and I finally realized there was little point in continuing to fell timber and attempt to log-roll it down what I thought was a navigable river, but turned out to be the Lethe, leading only to oblivion.

"Ramadan has been hosting a weekly talk show on the English-language Press TV titled 'Islam & Life'."

Press TV is an English-language propaganda organ of the Iranian police state.

Remember, the next time you are told this is merely "cultural" and "has nothing to do with Islam" that 1) these "honor" killings take place in Jordan, Syria, Iraq, among the "Palestinian" Arabs, and in Turkey, and all over the Muslim world, and it is not so much the fact of the killings as the fact that Muslim states have great difficulty in punishing the killers that merits our vigilant attention

and

2) Islam permits fathers to go unpunished for killing their own children for reasons deemed legitimate. That is why it has been so difficult in Jordan, for example (with its Son-of-Plucky-Little-King Hussein, King Abdullah), to pass legislation that would punish such killings. It goes against both the spirit and the letter of Islam.

That is the point: to punish male relatives for killing female relatives in order to preserve family "honor" may indeed go back to the pre-islamic Arab customs, but it has become part of Islam, and as part of Islam, cannot easily be dislodged. For both the spirit and the letter of Islam are on the side of those doing the killing.

This has to be mentioned, again and again, so that the apologists for Islam do not have their sly way, as they so often do.