Washington Post runs major story on Female Genital Mutilation

This is now a couple of days old, sorry I didn’t get to it sooner.   The Washington Post has a graphic story that fills an entire page of the print edition on the (mostly) Islamic practice of Female Genital Mutilation in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Since my time is short this morning, I’ll direct you to Robert Spencer’s discussion of the article at Dhimmiwatch here.

We have written about this barbaric practice because it is creeping into the US with refugees from countries that approve of the mutilation of little girls’ genitals.

The Malta Mess (Part II)

Actually when I wrote about the firestorm of citizen comments to an article about would-be Somali rapists in Malta yesterday, I didn’t know there would be a Part II about the “hysteria” so soon.

This is from the Guardian in the UK:

Since 2002 the Maltese government has processed 11,500 refugees and economic migrants, a figure, it says, equating to about 1.7 million arriving in France, Italy or the UK. The tensions are palpable. Anti-immigrant daubings have sprung up amid the sandstone walls of Valletta, Malta’s fortified 16th century capital; Africans say they frequently suffer racism, and a prominent Jesuit charity has been the victim of arson attacks for its outspoken support of migrants.

“There’s an ugly xenophobia developing here and I think the government carries some responsibility for that,” says Dr Neil Falzon, the local representative of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. “It is selling the idea that Malta can’t cope. The truth is it has to. There’s already a settled African population on this island, they just live in a different reality to the rest of Maltese society. The government should be leading the process of integrating them with jobs, education and homes instead of taking part in this kind of national hysteria.”

Whenever someone uses the word “xenophobia” it infuriates me.  It’s like the “racist” label, it is meant to shut good people up!

The people of Malta aren’t afraid of people who are differant from them, they are afraid of losing their way of life, their jobs, the way they grew up, the things that they are comfortable with, their country(!), and that is a normal human reaction.    When Somalis in the US join together in apartment buildings and larger communities we don’t call them xenophobic, they just want to live with their kind of people!   Or how about if thousands of Europeans went to Somalia and demanded jobs and a piece of the country, the Somalis wouldn’t be called xenophobic (actually the Europeans would be called invaders and the Somalis would kill them).

Back to the Guardian with a prediction from a pro-immigrant Jesuit:

“The result will be a social catastrophe,” says Father Joseph Cassar, of the Jesuit Refugee Service. “In five years I fear we’ll see ghettos, social unrest and a rise of far-right politics.

Ahhhh!  The dreaded “far-right politics.”

Josiah, the featured refugee in this story has other plans anyway:

“The Maltese people don’t want us, there’s no work and when we find a job we are paid nothing. In Somalia you live or you die … here I am not dying, but I am not alive. I will go to Italy.”

So what does this have to do with Refugee Resettlement in the US?  We are bringing some of these Somali illegals to the US, here.

Malta: Somali would-be rapists cause firestorm of comment

Update Dec. 31st:  More on Malta here today.

The story is tiny, only 149 words in the Times of Malta.   A couple of drunk Somali refugees attempted to rape a girl on Christmas Day.

Two Somalis allegedly caught trying to rape a 17-year-old girl on the Birzebbuga promenade on Christmas day were so drunk they did not know what happened.

But, check out the comments!  There are thousands and thousands of words of comment, mostly very angry comments, about the plight this little island nation is in with boatloads of refugees arriving daily in the good seasons of the year.

We have reported on Malta on several previous occasions mostly because the US must take some of the blame for Malta’s predicament.    We are taking some of Malta’s Somali illegal aliens as refugees, a practice that will only serve to encourage more Somalis and other Africans to try to reach Malta.

If shipping them off to America is not incentive enough consider the fact that the US Ambassador to Malta gave a tea-party send-off to one group of Somalis as they headed for Colorado, here!

Iraqi official lists three things hindering the return of Iraqis to their country

Baltimore Sun reporter Matthew Hay Brown has been doing some good reporting these days on the Iraqi refugee issue.  I would like to see AP reporter Matthew Lee write something other than ‘bring more Iraqis to the US now!’ and ‘Bush is bad.’ 

According to Mr. Brown, an Iraqi official at the Iraq’s Embassy in Syria lists three things delaying the return of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their country.

DAMASCUS, Syria – Adnan al-Sharafy sees a few obstacles holding up the return of Iraqi refugees to their home country: the U.S. military, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the news media.

Sharify, an official at the Iraqi Embassy here in Syria, helped to organize government-sponsored bus trips at the end of last year that he says carried 420 Iraqi families back to Baghdad. (The United Nations estimates the Iraqi population here at 1.2 million.)

More free rides home are planned, Sharify says. But finding takers is likely to remain a challenge.

Sharify blames the U.S. military for making it difficult to enter Iraq, causing waits at the border that he says can last days. He blames the United Nations refugee agency for raising the hopes of Iraqis seeking resettlement to North America or Europe. And the news media, for reporting every violent incident that occurs in Iraq.

“About 90 percent of Iraq is safe now,” Sharify says.

I can’t speak to the veracity of the point about the military checkpoints holding up people for days, but I sure can see the other two things as impediments to progress.  Heck we have NGO’s here in the US calling for 60,000 (or 100,000!) refugees to be brought to the US ASAP.    Those same NGO’s are beating the drum that it isn’t safe to return to Iraq.  

Meanwhile the Iraqis who are arriving in the US are extremely frustrated at not finding any suitable work and we have only resettled about 13,000 this past year.  Imagine if the number should grow to 60,000 or 100,000.  We don’t know why the UN and the NGO’s aren’t telling Iraqis the straight story about the job situation here.

We have maintained from the outset that the solution is for us to help Iraqis in the region to return home.

As for the media, as long as Bush is President Iraq will be a dangerous place, but as Judy remarked earlier, just watch when it’s President Obama in charge, Iraq will be transformed, as if by magic, into a more peaceful welcoming land.

Free speech is in bad shape in the west

As a counterbalance to my previous post about the Dutch’s new confidence in their culture, here’s an article from the Australian called Talk About Surrender. It’s already New Year’s Eve in Australia, so it’s kind of a roundup of the state of free speech in 2008.

If 2006 will be remembered as the year the West rolled over when tested on free speech – think the Danish cartoons, which large swaths of the media refused to publish for fear of causing offence – two years on, things are worse.

The year 2008 deserves to be seen as a year of anticipatory surrender, a year when the West decided to roll over on free speech of its own accord. Just in case. No threats. No demands. Just suppress controversial speech in advance, just in case it causes offence. You understand, we don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. In fact, such a trashing of core Western values is difficult to understand.

The author, Janet Albrechtsen, gives a brief rundown of events, beginning with “the the comments of Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, who announced in October that Islam deserved different coverage in the media compared to other religions because Muslims were an ethnic minority.”  A comedian commented that the BBC would let vicar gags pass, but not imam gags, and the BBC agreed. Then:

The same rank capitulation occurred in the private sector when, in August, Random House pulled the publication of The Jewel of Medina, a book by Sherry Jones that told the tale of Aisha, the child bride of Mohammed.

The publisher had received no threats, just “cautionary advice” that publishing the book “might cause offence to some in the community (and) incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment”.

She goes on to mention Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, who are heroes because they will not be silenced. She also mentions a Dutch cartoonist who was arrested and interrogated for his cartoons that mocked Islam.

And in Canada, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant were hauled before that country’s Human Rights Commissions for being critical of Islam. (Steyn’s case was especially bizarre because he was cited for saying something which was actually a quote by a Muslim.) These two are also heroes.

But her point isn’t to highlight the heroes. It’s this:

If large sections of the media – normally devotees of free speech – cave into what the BBC’s Thompson called the “growing nervousness about discussion about Islam”, that self-censorship ripples out to all corners of society.

After the Danish cartoons fiasco, the onus was on the West to show its spine, to reassert its faith in freedom of expression. So far it has failed on that score. Let’s hope 2009 is a better year for free speech and the West’s confidence in itself.

Amen. Let’s hope indeed. Perhaps the Dutch will now lead the way.