From the Telegraph:

Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, who goes by the nom de guerre Dr Fadl, helped bin Laden create al-Qaeda and then led an Islamist insurgency in Egypt in the 1990s.

But in a book written from inside an Egyptian prison, he has launched a frontal attack on al-Qaeda’s ideology and the personal failings of bin Laden and particularly his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Twenty years ago, Dr Fadl became al-Qaeda’s intellectual figurehead with a crucial book setting out the rationale for global jihad against the West.

Today, however, he believes the murder of innocent people is both contrary to Islam and a strategic error. "Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers," writes Dr Fadl.

The terrorist attacks on September 11 were both immoral and counterproductive, he writes. "Ramming America has become the shortest road to fame and leadership among the Arabs and Muslims. But what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy’s buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?" asks Dr Fadl. "That, in short, is my evaluation of 9/11."

He is equally unsparing about Muslims who move to the West and then take up terrorism. "If they gave you permission to enter their homes and live with them, and if they gave you security for yourself and your money, and if they gave you the opportunity to work or study, or they granted you political asylum," writes Dr Fadl, then it is "not honourable" to "betray them, through killing and destruction".

The Taliban has rallied after its initial defeat by American forces under George W Bush, and now controls 70% of Afghanistan. It is gaining territory in Pakistan too. The Swat Valley, once a happy tourist destination, has been ceded by Pakistan to the Taliban after a year of fighting, and has become one of the Islamic hells on earth, where ‘beheadings are commonplace and schools for girls are regularly burned down’.   

An extract from Kathie Shaidle’s article in Front Page Magazine: 

[Salim] Mansur [an academic consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Wshington, D.C.] predicts that Pakistan as the world knows it will dissolve, sooner rather than later, depending in part upon when American and NATO forces pull out of Afghanistan. He believes that the North West Frontier Province, of which Swat is a part, “will likely detach itself from the existing arrangement within Pakistan and join Afghanistan.” This “nightmare,” he says, which has been envisioned and feared by Pakistan’s elite since 1947, “can no longer be postponed.”

Meanwhile, Mansur explains, the West must decide how to respond to the “reality of nuclear weaponry in the region.” Mansur also predicts “another Mumbai” terrorist assault and an ensuing “regional conflagration” as Pakistan “dissolves.” “The Pakistani elite made their own reckless choices of fraud, double-dealing and sheer mendacity,” says Mansur, “and the time is now close at hand for paying the price of these choices.”

This critical time has not brought out the best in Western leaders, who seem incapable of fully explaining to their war-weary constituents why they are still fighting in Afghanistan, especially during the present economic climate. If Pakistan can capitulate to the Taliban within its own territory after a year of pitched battles, what is to prevent America and its allies from abandoning a fight thousands of miles away? How the Obama administration answers that question will have a great impact on the state of security in Pakistan and beyond.

Extreme danger is brewing in the region which will affect the world, and all the US has to deal with it is an inexperienced Secretary of State who intends to use what she calls ‘smart power’ – of which we have not yet seen a sample – and an even less experienced President, who is perceived as weak by Islamic states, to judge by their reactions to his inauguration: the immediate release from prison of 170 terrorists by the Yemen government, and of Abdul Qadeer Khan, who sold the know-how of making nuclear weapons to whomever would buy it from him, by the Pakistan government.

Okay, President Obama is sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. But to what end? Has any aim been defined for the continuation of the war – other than to capture bin Laden? If that’s it, it looks pretty puny in the light of what’s happening there.

What might a desperate nuclear-armed Pakistan do? In simmering conflict with India, and losing to the Taliban, how much of an added danger does Pakistan pose to a Western world already threatened by Islamofascism and a nuclear-armed Iran?

Analysis of the danger and clarification of policy are urgently needed.

 Michael Yon writes:

While we prepare to shunt perhaps 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan (which still will not be enough), Russia continues to play the Asian chessboard.  The Russians are picking off pawn after pawn, and steadily eroding our foreign policy influence with them and other Central Asian countries.  The Russians know that we need a land route through their country to Afghanistan, especially as we begin the slow process of increasing our combat presence.  The Pakistan land route is one Achilles’ heel to our Afghanistan effort, and Russia is working hard to make sure that Russia is the other Achilles’ heel, which will strengthen the Russian position on matters such as missile defense.  Russia, at the present rate, will eventually exercise considerable control over the spigot to Afghanistan.  The Russians are successfully wrestling us into a policy arm-lock.  While Russia takes American money and gains influence over our Afghan efforts, we will continue to spend lives and tens of billions of dollars per year on Afghanistan in an attempt to civilize what amounts to Jurassic Park.

We must start asking Russia, and others, who the true losers will be if we abandon Afghanistan and leave a resurgent Taliban to lap at their doorsteps.  I am not advocating that we abandon Afghanistan, but our own population and allies might grow weary during the long journey unfolding before us.  The direct threat to us derives far more from al Qaeda than the Taliban, and we can keep punching down al Qaeda for a lot less than it’s costing to prosecute the Afghan war while abdicating significant influence to Russia.  Russia has much to worry about if NATO countries begin to abandon Afghanistan.

Some recent and unfolding examples: Russia allows transit of US military supplies

Russia is not a country given to a humanitarian spirit, and they do not cooperate on matters such as the International Space Station only for the sake of space exploration and science.  Russia can only be trusted to behave in ways that enhance Russian power and wealth.

Beyond the fact that we will need to dedicate decades or even a century to Afghanistan, no country in the neighborhood will cooperate except when it directly affects their own interests.  They will attempt to squeeze every dollar and concession from us as we help secure their neighborhoods, all while the present drug-dealing Afghan government is bucking like a mule while our government is preparing to pin a significant amount of our combat power in a landlocked country.

The sum of many factors leaves me with a bad feeling about all this.  The Iraq war, even during the worst times, never seemed like such a bog.  Yet there is something about our commitment in Afghanistan that feels wrong, as if a bear trap is hidden under the sand…

 Victor Davis Hanson wrote in yesterday’s Investor’s Business Daily:

Once upon a time, Obama and his fans asserted that Iran was a hyped-up threat, that we could go openly into Pakistan if need be to beat al-Qaida, that the surge wouldn’t work, that the Patriot Act and the Guantanamo Bay prison have torn asunder the Constitution, that we have alienated our European allies, that defeating terrorists is more a matter for criminal justice than military force, and that pushing democracy on traditional Islamic societies is culturally chauvinistic and naive.

But like his predecessors, the Obama administration will quickly learn that present U.S. foreign policy is mostly a result of reasonable decisions taken amid bad and worse choices. Therefore, don’t be surprised if a President Obama continues much of what we are now doing — albeit with a kinder, gentler rhetoric of "multilateralism" and "U.N. accords."

Obama has not assumed office yet, and already Iran has mocked the president-elect’s campaign suggestions for unconditional diplomacy. Already, old-new Defense Secretary Robert Gates has indicated a desire to stabilize Iraq before withdrawing forces.

Already, commanders have told the president-elect that a simple surge of more troops into Afghanistan offers no magical solution. Already, we are learning that whether we try more aid or ultimatums, Pakistan will remain Pakistan — a radical Islamic, nuclear failed state that is deeply anti-American rather than merely anti-George Bush.

As Inauguration Day approaches and campaign rhetoric ends and governance begins, words begin to have consequences. Truth is, there are not many alternatives to the present strategy against Islamic terrorism.

Obama doesn’t want a terrorist attack after seven years of quiet — certainly not of the sort that occurred in Mumbai last month. He may tinker with, but not end, Homeland Security measures. He may better articulate the complexities of a tribal Middle East, but he won’t stop American efforts to foster democracy there.

A President Obama may show more anguish over the necessary use of violence, but I suspect he won’t cede a military victory to terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. He will talk up the Atlantic Alliance, but likely complain in private that the U.S. inordinately does the heavy lifting in NATO. And if terrorists dared again to kill hundreds of Americans here at home, our new president would probably take military action.

Most conservatives and moderates expected that candidate Obama’s grand campaign talk of novel choices abroad would end with President Obama’s realist admission of very few new options.

His problem is instead his left-wing base, which for some reason believed Obama’s electioneering bombast that he could magically make the world anew — and so now apparently should do just that or else!

We think this is a fair prediction. But it implies that Obama himself will make decisions. We doubt that he will. We doubt that he can. A man who voted neither yes nor no most of his time as a Senator is not likely to become suddenly decisive. He will float above the hurly-burly of decision-making for as long as he can. Eventually, however much it will pain him, he’ll have to take responsibility for the decisions made for him by others – such as Rahm Emanuel (if he survives the Blackguardovich scandals), and, in foreign affairs, the Clintons. 

 

 The following extract is the second part of an article on the oppression and suffering of Muslim women. The first part is about Female Genital Mutilation. The whole thing is worth reading, and the links are worth following for a fast education in the cruel nature of Islam. 

Violence In The Name Of Allah

 Afghanistan may not be one of the countries where FGM is "justified in the name of Islam" but the treatment of young girls is harsh. I have discussed forced marriage and child marriage, as well as honor killings in Afghanistan. One aspect of Islamist ideology in the country is the opposition to the education of young girls. The Taliban, friends of Al Qaeda and supposedly the "fundamental" proponents of Islam have consistently tried to prevent women from being educated.

 The word "Taliban" meant "students". They tried to revive the form of Islam practiced in the 7th century. Most Taliban leaders had been educated at Deobandi madrassas, such as theHaqqania seminary in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Deobandi teachings accord women second-class status. Deobandis believe that "Women must not mix with men in public.  Deoband tradition teaches that men are more intelligent than women and that there is no point in educating girls beyond the age of eight."

The Taliban came to power onSeptember 27, 1996, when they castrated and tortured President Mohammed Najibullah, and hung him from a lamp-post alongside his brother. During their rule, the Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice enforced the Taliban decree that women should stay at home and not be in employment. They beat women with sticks, wire cables and hose pipes. Women were forced to wear the burka, which even covers the eyes with a grille of crochet work.

 A US State Department report claimed: "In 1977, women comprised over 15 percent ofAfghanistan’s highest legislative body. It is estimated that by the early 1990s, 70 percent of schoolteachers, 50 percent of government workers and university students, and 40 percent of doctors in Kabul were women. Afghan women had been active in humanitarian relief organizations until the Taliban imposed severe restrictions on their ability to work."

 Forced to live indoors, unable to make an income, with many widowed, the regime of poverty and privation led to women becoming malnourished. As one 35-year-old widow said in the State Department report: "The life of Afghan women is so bad. We are locked at home and cannot see the sun."

 Confined indoors away from sunlight and starved, many developed osteomalacia, a symptom of rickets, caused by a lack of sunlight and Vitamin D. The condition involves softening of the bone, making it liable to green-stick fractures. Dr Sima Samar was given the John Humphrey Freedom Award for her work for the human rights of women in Afghanistan. She ran schools and health clinics, and was subjected to death threats from the Taliban. She said at her medical clinic in Kabul in 2001: "Almost every woman I see has osteomalacia. Their bones are softening due to a lack of Vitamin D. They survive on a diet of tea and naan (bread) because they can’t afford eggs and milk and, to complicate matters, their burqas and veils deprive them of sunshine. On top of that, depression is endemic here because the future is so dark."

 When the US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 the cruel regime of the Islamofascists in the Taliban came to an end, but their influence has not gone away. They continue to fight coalition forces and the Afghan government, but they also continue to deprive women of education. Those who defy their edicts against educating girls are dispatched in revolting fashion.

 In November last year, 46-year-old Mohammed Halim from Ghazni paid the price for educating girls. He was snatched at night by Taliban members. He was partially disembowelled and then his limbs were tied to motorbikes. As the bikes sped apart, his body was ripped. His remains were publicly displayed as a warning to any who dared to teach girls. Halim was the fourth teacher in succession to be killed in the region. Fatima Mustaq is a woman director of education in Ghazni, and she and her family of eight children were subjected to death threats for educating girls.

On July 23, 2006, Michael Frastacky, a Canadian carpenter from Vancouver, was shot dead inAfghanistan. His crime had been to help build a school in the Nahrin Valley, a remote part of theHindu Kush, where half the students were girls.

 On March 8 2006, on International Women’s Day, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said: "From fear of terrorism, from threats of the enemies of Afghanistan, today as we speak, some 100,000 Afghan children who went to school last year, and the year before last, do not go to school."

 A 2006 report by Human Rights Watch stated that last year, attacks upon teachers, students and schools increased dramatically, particularly in the southern regions. In January, there were 24 such attacks, in February there were 14, 8 attacks in March, 28 in April, 22 in May and 12 in June. From January to June 2006, the highest number of such attacks took place in Kandahar (36 incidents), followed by Helmand (27), and then Ghazni and Khost with 16 cases each.

 A report from Oxfam from November last year paints a gloomy picture for the future of education, particularly for girls, in Afghanistan. More than half of Afghan children of school age – 7 million – do not attend schools. This is in denial of Article 43 (1) of the national Constitution, adopted on July 11, 2006, which states: "Education is the right of all citizens of Afghanistan, which shall be provided up to secondary level, free of charge by the state."

 Only one in five girls is able to make her way to primary schools, but only one in 20 girls receives a secondary education. Human Rights Watch and Oxfam agree that the presence of accessible schools is a problem, and where there is access to education, it is often provided by poorly trained teachers working in run-down buildings, often with only one or two rooms. These schools can be in need of repair, and most have no clean drinking water or toilet facilities. Textbooks are few and far between.

 Oxfam claimed that 53,000 trained primary school teachers are needed immediately, with a further 64,000 in the next five years. There is a need for more women teachers, as only one in three is female. Teachers in Daikundi province in central Afghanistan receive only $38 per month. Sometimes these teachers have to offer bribes, just to receive their wages.

 There are 20,000 "ghost" teachers who are paid salaries but do not attend schools. The international community, states Oxfam, must donate $563 million to rebuild 7,800 schools across the country. An additional $210 million is needed to print and distribute textbooks over the next five years. Currently, $125.6 million has been given to Afghan’s education sector. The largest donors of these funds are USAID and the World Bank. Coalition military forces inAfghanistan also contribute towards education.

 When the Taliban were in power, their behavior towards women was contemptuous. A woman doctor was stopped while traveling without a male escort (mahram) in a taxi. She said: "The Religious Police chased my taxi, and when I got out in front of the hospital, they stopped me and asked why I was traveling alone. I said I was a doctor and had to go to work, but they said women of Kabul are just prostitutes and addicted to traveling in cars alone. I had to call my boss to identify me as an employee of the hospital, but my boss said he could not confirm who it was because I was wearing a chadari (burka). The Taliban asked me to put up my veil, and once my boss identified me, they hit me with their wire on my head and injured my eye. It took fifteen to twenty days to heal."

 The Taliban may be seen as extremists, but there are plenty of "devout" Muslims who are still funding their activities. The Taliban experiment, which allowed Osama bin Laden a refuge where his cronies could plot atrocities such as 9/11 and work on chemical weapons and bombs in the Derunta training camp, was designed to be a return to original "Islamic values". Islamists and "devout" Muslims criticize the decadence of the West, but rarely if ever do these same people consider the social abomination that made up the Taliban regime.

 All of the worst, most primitive aspects of Islam were exemplified by the Taliban – who were true "fundamentalists". They took to heart the notion that a woman’s testimony was worth only half that of a man, and with their Deobandi ideology they even believed women were half as intelligent. They denied women education, health and human rights, and did nothing to prevent the Afghan culture of honor killings and violence against women. They believed in Sura 4:34 which gives a man the right to beat his wife to keep her under control.

 Currently we have politicians in both the United States and Britain who are trying to "negotiate" with the Muslim Brotherhood. The true face of the Brotherhood can be found in the Gaza Strip, in the violence of Hamas against their opponents. Although the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood may dress in suits and ties, they are still ideologically primitive and rooted in the sexist tyranny of the 7th century. Their spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi supports Type 1 female genital mutilation, and preaches that it is acceptable to kill Israeli civilians. For Hamas, women are expected to go around veiled, and like women under the Taliban they are denied sunlight. Not surprisingly, cases of rickets amongst Palestinian children have increased with the rise of Hamas’ Islamist factions. The WHO reported last year that more than 4 percent of all children on the Gaza Strip aged between 6 and 36 months were suffering from clinical rickets.

 There are no women with positions of authority either in Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. Until there are, there is no point in discussing issues with these groups. Women in the West have equal rights to men, and that means having access to power. Islamists would deny women that power, and until they can acknowledge women as equals, they live in another ideological universe to our own.

 Muslim women are probably more oppressed today by Islamist conventions than they were 20 years ago. Two decades ago women did not have to wear veils to prove their religiosity. Now, women who do not cover their hair, or even their faces, are bullied by their peers into compliance. For women to have genuine equal rights under Islam, the tenets and texts of that faith would have to be interpreted allegorically and not literally. Islamists do not understand allegory. They are slaves to dogma and expect everyone else, their womenfolk included, eventually to become their slaves.

 The following extract is the second part of an article by Adrian Morgan on the oppression and suffering of Muslim women. The first part is about the horrors of Female Genital Mutilation. The whole thing is worth reading.

Violence In The Name Of Allah

 Afghanistan may not be one of the countries where FGM is "justified in the name of Islam" but the treatment of young girls is harsh. I have discussed forced marriage and child marriage, as well as honor killings in Afghanistan. One aspect of Islamist ideology in the country is the opposition to the education of young girls. The Taliban, friends of Al Qaeda and supposedly the "fundamental" proponents of Islam have consistently tried to prevent women from being educated.

 The word "Taliban" meant "students". They tried to revive the form of Islam practiced in the 7th century. Most Taliban leaders had been educated at Deobandi madrassas, such as theHaqqania seminary in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Deobandi teachings accord women second-class status. Deobandis believe that "Women must not mix with men in public.  Deoband tradition teaches that men are more intelligent than women and that there is no point in educating girls beyond the age of eight."

The Taliban came to power onSeptember 27, 1996, when they castrated and tortured President Mohammed Najibullah, and hung him from a lamp-post alongside his brother. During their rule, the Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice enforced the Taliban decree that women should stay at home and not be in employment. They beat women with sticks, wire cables and hose pipes. Women were forced to wear the burka, which even covers the eyes with a grille of crochet work.

 A US State Department report claimed: "In 1977, women comprised over 15 percent ofAfghanistan’s highest legislative body. It is estimated that by the early 1990s, 70 percent of schoolteachers, 50 percent of government workers and university students, and 40 percent of doctors in Kabul were women. Afghan women had been active in humanitarian relief organizations until the Taliban imposed severe restrictions on their ability to work."

 Forced to live indoors, unable to make an income, with many widowed, the regime of poverty and privation led to women becoming malnourished. As one 35-year-old widow said in the State Department report: "The life of Afghan women is so bad. We are locked at home and cannot see the sun."

 Confined indoors away from sunlight and starved, many developed osteomalacia, a symptom of rickets, caused by a lack of sunlight and Vitamin D. The condition involves softening of the bone, making it liable to green-stick fractures. Dr Sima Samar was given the John Humphrey Freedom Award for her work for the human rights of women in Afghanistan. She ran schools and health clinics, and was subjected to death threats from the Taliban. She said at her medical clinic in Kabul in 2001: "Almost every woman I see has osteomalacia. Their bones are softening due to a lack of Vitamin D. They survive on a diet of tea and naan (bread) because they can’t afford eggs and milk and, to complicate matters, their burqas and veils deprive them of sunshine. On top of that, depression is endemic here because the future is so dark."

 When the US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 the cruel regime of the Islamofascists in the Taliban came to an end, but their influence has not gone away. They continue to fight coalition forces and the Afghan government, but they also continue to deprive women of education. Those who defy their edicts against educating girls are dispatched in revolting fashion.

 In November last year, 46-year-old Mohammed Halim from Ghazni paid the price for educating girls. He was snatched at night by Taliban members. He was partially disembowelled and then his limbs were tied to motorbikes. As the bikes sped apart, his body was ripped. His remains were publicly displayed as a warning to any who dared to teach girls. Halim was the fourth teacher in succession to be killed in the region. Fatima Mustaq is a woman director of education in Ghazni, and she and her family of eight children were subjected to death threats for educating girls.

On July 23, 2006, Michael Frastacky, a Canadian carpenter from Vancouver, was shot dead inAfghanistan. His crime had been to help build a school in the Nahrin Valley, a remote part of theHindu Kush, where half the students were girls.

 On March 8 2006, on International Women’s Day, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said: "From fear of terrorism, from threats of the enemies of Afghanistan, today as we speak, some 100,000 Afghan children who went to school last year, and the year before last, do not go to school."

 A 2006 report by Human Rights Watch stated that last year, attacks upon teachers, students and schools increased dramatically, particularly in the southern regions. In January, there were 24 such attacks, in February there were 14, 8 attacks in March, 28 in April, 22 in May and 12 in June. From January to June 2006, the highest number of such attacks took place in Kandahar (36 incidents), followed by Helmand (27), and then Ghazni and Khost with 16 cases each.

 A report from Oxfam from November last year paints a gloomy picture for the future of education, particularly for girls, in Afghanistan. More than half of Afghan children of school age – 7 million – do not attend schools. This is in denial of Article 43 (1) of the national Constitution, adopted on July 11, 2006, which states: "Education is the right of all citizens of Afghanistan, which shall be provided up to secondary level, free of charge by the state."

 Only one in five girls is able to make her way to primary schools, but only one in 20 girls receives a secondary education. Human Rights Watch and Oxfam agree that the presence of accessible schools is a problem, and where there is access to education, it is often provided by poorly trained teachers working in run-down buildings, often with only one or two rooms. These schools can be in need of repair, and most have no clean drinking water or toilet facilities. Textbooks are few and far between.

 Oxfam claimed that 53,000 trained primary school teachers are needed immediately, with a further 64,000 in the next five years. There is a need for more women teachers, as only one in three is female. Teachers in Daikundi province in central Afghanistan receive only $38 per month. Sometimes these teachers have to offer bribes, just to receive their wages.

 There are 20,000 "ghost" teachers who are paid salaries but do not attend schools. The international community, states Oxfam, must donate $563 million to rebuild 7,800 schools across the country. An additional $210 million is needed to print and distribute textbooks over the next five years. Currently, $125.6 million has been given to Afghan’s education sector. The largest donors of these funds are USAID and the World Bank. Coalition military forces inAfghanistan also contribute towards education.

 When the Taliban were in power, their behavior towards women was contemptuous. A woman doctor was stopped while traveling without a male escort (mahram) in a taxi. She said: "The Religious Police chased my taxi, and when I got out in front of the hospital, they stopped me and asked why I was traveling alone. I said I was a doctor and had to go to work, but they said women of Kabul are just prostitutes and addicted to traveling in cars alone. I had to call my boss to identify me as an employee of the hospital, but my boss said he could not confirm who it was because I was wearing a chadari (burka). The Taliban asked me to put up my veil, and once my boss identified me, they hit me with their wire on my head and injured my eye. It took fifteen to twenty days to heal."

 The Taliban may be seen as extremists, but there are plenty of "devout" Muslims who are still funding their activities. The Taliban experiment, which allowed Osama bin Laden a refuge where his cronies could plot atrocities such as 9/11 and work on chemical weapons and bombs in the Derunta training camp, was designed to be a return to original "Islamic values". Islamists and "devout" Muslims criticize the decadence of the West, but rarely if ever do these same people consider the social abomination that made up the Taliban regime.

 All of the worst, most primitive aspects of Islam were exemplified by the Taliban – who were true "fundamentalists". They took to heart the notion that a woman’s testimony was worth only half that of a man, and with their Deobandi ideology they even believed women were half as intelligent. They denied women education, health and human rights, and did nothing to prevent the Afghan culture of honor killings and violence against women. They believed in Sura 4:34 which gives a man the right to beat his wife to keep her under control.

 Currently we have politicians in both the United States and Britain who are trying to "negotiate" with the Muslim Brotherhood. The true face of the Brotherhood can be found in the Gaza Strip, in the violence of Hamas against their opponents. Although the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood may dress in suits and ties, they are still ideologically primitive and rooted in the sexist tyranny of the 7th century. Their spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi supports Type 1 female genital mutilation, and preaches that it is acceptable to kill Israeli civilians. For Hamas, women are expected to go around veiled, and like women under the Taliban they are denied sunlight. Not surprisingly, cases of rickets amongst Palestinian children have increased with the rise of Hamas’ Islamist factions. The WHO reported last year that more than 4 percent of all children on the Gaza Strip aged between 6 and 36 months were suffering from clinical rickets.

 There are no women with positions of authority either in Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. Until there are, there is no point in discussing issues with these groups. Women in the West have equal rights to men, and that means having access to power. Islamists would deny women that power, and until they can acknowledge women as equals, they live in another ideological universe to our own.

 Muslim women are probably more oppressed today by Islamist conventions than they were 20 years ago. Two decades ago women did not have to wear veils to prove their religiosity. Now, women who do not cover their hair, or even their faces, are bullied by their peers into compliance. For women to have genuine equal rights under Islam, the tenets and texts of that faith would have to be interpreted allegorically and not literally. Islamists do not understand allegory. They are slaves to dogma and expect everyone else, their womenfolk included, eventually to become their slaves.

 Ann Coulter writes:

From Power Line: 

In Afghanistan … yesterday, classes had to be canceled at a girls’ school after Taliban members on motorcycles accosted a group of students and teachers walking to school in Kandahar, and threw acid on their faces:

"They don’t want us go to school. They don’t like education," said Susan Ibrahimi, who started teaching at Mirwais Mena four months ago. She and her mother, also a teacher at the school, were wearing burqas on their walk to work when the motorbike stopped next to them.

"They didn’t say anything. They just stopped the motorbike and one of the guys threw acid on us and they went away," Ibrahimi said in a telephone interview. …

Fifteen people were hit with acid in all, including four teachers, Qaderi said.

This young girl was burned especially severely and has not yet been able to open her eyes:

 From Power Line:

In Afghanistan … yesterday, classes had to be canceled at a girls’ school after Taliban members on motorcycles accosted a group of students and teachers walking to school in Kandahar, and threw acid on their faces:

"They don’t want us go to school. They don’t like education," said Susan Ibrahimi, who started teaching at Mirwais Mena four months ago. She and her mother, also a teacher at the school, were wearing burqas on their walk to work when the motorbike stopped next to them.

"They didn’t say anything. They just stopped the motorbike and one of the guys threw acid on us and they went away," Ibrahimi said in a telephone interview. …

Fifteen people were hit with acid in all, including four teachers, Qaderi said.

 

This young girl was burned especially severely and has not yet been able to open her eyes: