Driving Miss Crazy !

A week ago in a city in Saudi Arabia, that bastion of ultra-Islamic Wahhabism, the government moved swiftly to extinguish a budding protest movement of women claiming the right to drive, a campaign inspired by uprisings across the Arab world demanding new freedoms but is at risk of foundering. It's not like she wanted to topple the Saudi government, but no matter, any dissent is not tolerated.

Manal al-Sharif, 32, (see photo) one of the organizers, was detained Sunday in the eastern city of Dammam for up to five days on charges of disturbing public order and inciting public opinion by twice driving in a bid to press her and her female supporters cause. She was arrested after two much-publicized drives to highlight the Facebook campaigns she helped organize to encourage women across Saudi Arabia to participate in a collective protest scheduled for June 17.

The campaign attracted many supporters, more than 12,000 on the Facebook page, but have been blocked by the kingdom. Ms Sharif's arrest was very likely intended to give others pause before participating in the protests in a country where a woman's public reputation, including her ability to marry, can be badly damaged by an arrest. Her imprisonment is due to the government not wanting anybody to think they can get away with organizing anything on Facebook. They saw that the revolt that overthrew Hosni Mubarak gained crucial momentum online.

Saudi Arabia is the only country that bars women from driving. But the topic remains a highly emotional issue in the kingdom, where women are also not allowed to vote, or even work without their husbands' or fathers' permission. For religious puritans (scumbags) the ban on women driving is a sign that the government remains anarchically steadfast in the face of a Western onslaught on Saudi traditions which should have been buried under a huge pile of camel dung a hundred years ago!

Ms Sharif's supporters have sent an online petition to King Abdullah, asking him to free her and grant women the right to drive which gathered signatures from more than 600 men and women. However, some women were opposed to this campaign because they said that driving remains such a social "lightening rod" and that raising the issue is likely to set back efforts to gain more fundamental freedoms like voting or ending the legal guardianship that allows Saudi men to control virtually every aspect of women's lives.

But Ms Sharif and others decided to take to the roads this month to encourage a higher turnout for June's national protest. Saudi newspapers have been filled with articles in recent days detailing a rash of women taking to the roads and then publishing confessions of women who drove their children to school, a father to the airport and of themselves on errands.

The Way I See It....is that these suppressed Saudi women have watched Oprah Winfrey on the their TV sets over the years and have been instilled with her "get-up-girl-and do-it" kind of energetic self esteem, much to the chagrin of the Kingdom's menfolk. The internal frustrations are welling up.

However, one of the main arguments for allowing women to drive is the economic cost. There are some 800,000 foreign drivers in the kingdom and the roughly $350 monthly salary needed to hire one is considered an economic drain on the middle class. Perhaps and hopefully soon the rulers of Saudi Arabia will realize that a few concessions will give them future security from a larger backlash.

I Am, We Are...Australians - by Andrew Bolt

Editor's Note: Andrew Bolt is a popular journalist for the Herald-Sun newspaper.

I AM an indigenous Australian. Most of you are probably indigenous, too. We were born here. We are of this land and we love it. There is nowhere else we would or even call home. We are as the Webster Dictionary describes under indigenous, "produced, growing, living or occurring naturally in a particular region."

That's US! Australians! Produced right here. Yet how often we've been insulted. At almost every Government function it's been the same. It's opened by some dignitary who tells us this country is not really ours---that we, who were born here, are in fact interlopers on the land of some traditional owners (who didn't do anything with it in the first place) we must now acknowledge.

ENOUGH! Thank heavens for Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu, who this week ruled that Government ministers would no longer be forced by political correctness to make this acknowledgment at major functions. So often we've watched a white person piously tell a room of other whites, "I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of....", well it's so toe-curling.

How terribly empty is this modish ceremony that was compounded further a few years ago by the leftist former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd saying "SORRY" to the Aboriginals over the phony "stolen generation" guilt trip. There's almost never some Aborigine, let alone a traditional one, to be encouraged by this pat on the head. It is entirely to display our superior compassion that we do it, with not even the expectation that it will do any good to anyone but ourselves. Not one Aboriginal child ever lifts their head to say thanks. Not one workless Aborigine suddenly finds himself in a job. What happened to our shining aim to judge each other as individuals, not by birth but how we can help this country be even better than it is.

The Way I See It....there's just a lot of non-Aborigines clutching their glasses of wine trying to look briefly concerned. But if this acknowledgment, now routine in our political, artistic and elitist academic classes, was merely useless I would probably not much care. But it is also RACIST and undermines our sense of being at home and part of a whole bigger than us under one flag. Thank you Andrew for giving us this renewed perspective.

To Leftists, Every Woman Looks Like a Hotel Maid

I suppose we'll know the truth when the DNA testing comes back, but close observers of privileged leftist/socialist men are not shocked by the accusations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the socialist leader of the International Monetary Fund. (And you thought you were getting screwed by YOUR banker!) Maybe he thought I.M.F. really meant...I-f you're a M-aid, you're F-airgame.

Only in Hollywood movies are handsome polo players from nice families seen as likely rapists. In real life, they look more like the 5-foot-2-inch Roman Polanski or pudgy, unathletic Bill Clinton or now the homunculus 5-foot-3-inch Strauss-Kahn. And how could Strauss-Kahn possibly think he could get away with the violent rape of a chambermaid in a $3000-a-night hotel room, booked in his name without trying out the neighbourhood Escort Service first?

First of all, Dominique has evidently gotten away with treating the fairer sex as his playthings for some time. No wonder his nickname among the French is "le grand seducteur," which I believe roughly translates to "the short, tubby serial rapist." The New York Times reports that as far back as 2007, Brussels journalist Jean Quatreme remarked on Strauss-Kahn's troubled behaviour -- "close to harassment" toward women, saying the press knew all about it, but never mentioned it because "we are in France."

Secondly, it's not unheard of that a wealthy socialist would assume the law does not apply to him. Actually, let me restate that: Wealthy leftist/socialists always assume that laws don't apply to them. Let's take Roman Polanski, the legendary director of two good movies and about 100 unbelievably bad ones, who drugged and anally raped an underage girl in Southern California.

Not only did Polanski think he could get away with it, he did get away with it by fleeing the country (to France) when he discovered, to his shock and dismay, that in America, a person can actually be sentenced to prison for drugging and raping a 13 year old. That was in 1977. He has never been brought to justice. And oh how the socialists supported Polanski's evasion of punishment for this child's rape, especially with the Hollywood leftists denouncing his arrest in Switzerland a couple years ago...howling that he had suffered enough! He wasn't even allowed to come to the U.S. to pick up his Oscar in 2003! Maybe someone should shove it up his ass so he knows how it feels!

Here's one for you pinko historians. Karl Marx kept a female slave from the time she was 8 years old, eventually using her not only as a servant but as his mistress, never acknowledging his child with her or paying her at all. She waited on him hand and foot while he explained to the world that profit is the stolen surplus value of the laborer. Like so many leftist icons, including Henrik Ibsen, Bertrand Russell, and the "disgustingly dirty" Jean-Paul Sartre, Marx seldom bathed and left his wife and children in poverty.

The Way I See It....these socialist pond-scum seem driven by their massive insecurities (often based on physical defects, such as their diminutive size or soap allergies) to chose illiterate, servant-class and teenage females as their sex partners. No wonder leftist/socialist women think men are pigs: Their men are pigs! Right Hillary?

"Stealth Jihad" comes to Australia

Yesterday the nation's peak Muslim group, The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, used the Gillard government's re-embracing of multiculturalism to push for the introduction of Sharia law in Australia. This is the same multicultural wagon that England, France, Denmark and Germany have stopped pushing, explaining in the strongest terms that IT'S NOT WORKING. The rest on the European countries are also leaning toward a selective immigration policy, but our Immigration Minister Chris Bowen naively says everything's fine in OZ; "bring'em In!". Did he ever hear of the Trojan Horse?

In a newspaper interview, the organisation's president, Ikebal Adam Patel, who wrote the submission, says the AFIC "strongly supports that multiculturalism should lead to legal pluralism...and twin toleration." This is the same "game plan" these people used to convince the Europeans to allow them to do this and now they are stuck with the arrangement. Note, how Gillard's multiculturalism encourages those who want to retribalise Australia, rather than stress what unites us.

I can just see it now.....the Muslim enclaves (ghettos) in our cities are enjoying Sharia Law so
now they can have:

• backyard stonings


• honour killings


• thieves brought to halal butchers to have their hands cut off


• a molested woman trying to find 4 men to verify the molester did it or she gets punished


• Muslim men are allowed to marry 10 year old girls, like the esteemed Prophet enjoyed
  
  Jihad by stealth has begun.

Today...we get another submission from the AFIC stating they want taxpayers to finance the expansion of Islamic schools (better known as"extremist incubators") and halal food outlets into mainstream suburbs. In this submission to the federal inquiry into multiculturalism, Mr Patel said that, "Muslims were forced to live in enclaves near Islamic schools, mosques and halal food stores. The Government should invest in expanding services like halal meat premises as well as faith-based schools." He went on to stress; "If the Government and politicians cannot recognise this as essential, it should no longer accuse the Australian Muslim community of intentionally living in enclaves!" I ask...has any previous group of immigrants demanded so much, with the threat that otherwise it will not fit in??? I say, "Get The Hell Out of Here!"

The Way I See It....whoever wants to make their own private or religious arrangements about living together as a group can do so, provided they do not conflict with Australian law. But for the law to specifically endorse verdicts of religious groups is to give them a power and legal standing that seems at odds with the notion of one law for all, as with our Constitution's insistence on a separation of church and state. Something these Muslims don't appreciate since many are coming from Islamic countries that has the church controlling the state.

What fits with Australian values is the idea that we are one people bound by one law, not rival peoples with each our own. Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun newspaper articulates it so well when he says...."At such a price, is Muslim immigration worth the hassle?"

Requiem for a Reprobate

Two weeks ago the World learned of the death of a misogynistic, homophobic, racist mass murderer who supported a theocratic, neo-fascist ideology posing as a liberation movement.

To be sure, Osama bin Laden was opposed to every tenet of modern progressive politics; secular democracy, representative government, equality of the sexes, anti-racism and the core values of the Enlightenment itself.

It is a bizarre historical coincidence, President Obama announced to the world that bin Laden was dead on May 1, the very same day that, 66 years earlier, Adolf Hitler was dead. It's fitting that two of history's great mass murderers share a day of death. Both embodied charisma and intelligence deployed in the service of evil and both were utterly callous about the killing of innocents to further their cause.

There are, of course, many differences between the two, but one great similarity holds. Hitler's death marked the end of the Nazi challenge from Germany. And bin Laden's death will mark the end of the global threat of al-Qaeda. Of course there are still groups groups that call themselves al-Qaeda and they will still plot and execute terrorist attacks, but the danger from al-Qaeda was always much more than that of a few isolated attacks. It was an ideological message that we feared had an appeal across the Muslim world of 1.5 billion believers.

While U.S. foreign policy might have been a contributing factor for their anti-western message of opposition and rage, it wasn't the main sore point and it could not alone explain the scale, depth and intensity of Islamic terrorism. There was something different about the nature of Arab frustration that had morphed into anti-American terrorism.

The Way I See It.....the central problem was the stagnation and repression of the Arab world--40 years of tyranny and decay--had led to deep despair and envy of the Western democracies ability to change, grow while still maintaining freedom for their citizens. The West became a target because it supported the Arab autocracies and al-Qaeda believed that the only way to topple these dictatorships was through violence and that the people wanted and would cheer an Islamic regime.

Osama bin-Laden would've seen the writing on the walls of his isolated refuge that his movement's message and force was dissipating over that past months as millions in the Arab-world have toppled regimes relatively peacefully, and what they have sought was not a New Caliphate, not a Theocracy, but a modern Democracy. The crowds in Cairo's Tahrir Square did not have pictures of bin Laden in their hands, but signs reading "Freedom" and "Equality".

Polls around the Muslim world confirm that support for bin Laden had been plummeting over the past five years. As al-Qaeda morphed into a series of small local groups, they turned the locals against them as they killed more Muslims than Infidels. Their "support" for radial jihadism had always been more theoretical than real, a support for a romantic notion of militant opposition to the West and its domination of the modern world. Once this terrorism came home, the people realized that they didn't want to return to the 7th Century and they didn't much like the men who wanted to bomb them back there.