Posted by
Doctor Poddy on Tuesday, December 04, 2007 5:25:52 PM
Like many of my longer essays, I posted this on
Bloggernews, and will cross post it here.
One of my "beefs" with liberals is that they moan Islamophobia but ignore the 900 000 Filipino OFW (80 percent Catholic) who aren't allowed freedome of religion in Saudi....and then there are 600 000 Keralan Christians,/...
Two years ago, a Keralan catechist/preacher was deported. Yet if you google there are few stories about these people...
And the Jesuits, who smuggled priests into Elizabethan England and communist Russia, don't seem to worry about the Catholics in Saudi...
and the bigotry is not a Muslim thing, since they are allowed to worhip in Dubai, and Kuwait.
And the girl lashed in the essay below was one of the Shiite minority in Saudi: they also aren't allowed mosques...
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December 3rd, 2007 by Nancy Reyes
Well, at least the NYTimes editorial page has gotten around to chastising the gynephobia of certain regimes that profess a religion that cannot be named.
Muslims who wonder why non-Muslims are often baffled,
angered, even frightened by some governments’ interpretation of Islamic
law need only look to the cases of two women in Saudi Arabia and Sudan
threatened with barbaric lashings.
In Saudi Arabia, a woman who was gang-raped was
sentenced to 90 lashes. The reason? Before the rape, the woman, who was
then 19, had been in a car with a man who was not a family member…In
Sudan, a British primary school teacher was originally threatened with
40 lashes, a fine, or six months in jail after her class of 7-year-olds
voted to name a teddy bear Muhammad….
Hmmm…seems like a pattern here.
It’s called: Gynephobia.
Defined as “a persistent, abnormal, and unwarranted fear
of women”, each year this surprisingly common phobia causes countless
people needless distress.
To add insult to an already distressing condition, most gynephobia
therapies take months or years and sometimes even require the patient
to be exposed repeatedly to their fear. We believe that not only is
this totally unnecessary, it will often make the condition worse. And
it is particularly cruel as gynephobia can be eliminated with the right
methods and just 24 hours of commitment by the phobic individual.
So there you have it.
We’ll just put all those narrow minded mullahs and judges on Prozac,
and then place them in a “desensitization” program, starting with
Bollywood musicals and expanding to Deep Throat and Girls Gone Wild…
Seriously, the NYTimes is correct in noting that there seems to be
more outrage about a teddy bear than the genocide of Muslims in Dafur.
However, when it comes to Saudi Arabia, they have carefully funded
their fifth column in “think tanks” of major universities who are
willing to shill for the worst atrocities and blame them on the West.
Take this article,
in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post (the “on Faith” area
has a wide discussion of faith matters, and if you read it often
enough, makes you want to drink a shot of ipecac and then read Christopher Hitchens as an anecdote).
Why look, it’s written by two professors from a Saudi funded think tank at Georgetown.
Well, after all, why not? The Jesuits have a long tradition of
promoting intellectual discussions and promoting social justice. And,
of course, the $20 million bucks (”the largest single gift to the university”) didn’t hurt either.
The two fifth column professors paint the Teddy bear story as merely an overreaction to the bigotry of the west:
At a time when Islam is under siege from Muslim
extremists and extremists from the Far Right in Europe and America, the
judiciaries of Sudan and Saudi Arabia have managed to reinforce the
vilification of Islam and used Islamic law as a weapon rather than a
yardstick for justice…
The problem: Before Dafur, the Sudanese government waged a series of
genodical wars against Black tribes (animist and Christian) in their
south: phase one, starting in 1955, and phase two,
starting in 1983, killed almost two million people, and caused millions
of refugees. After they made a truce in 2005, they started working
against the Muslim blacks in Dafur…
Similarly, the Saudi royal family allows extremists to impose their
version of Sharia law so that the royal family can stay in power.
But their outdated version of Islam –which thanks to Saudi oil money
is being exported all over the world via Saudi funded mosques and
mullahs– has little in common with the easy going “sufi” Islam that
converted much of non Arab Asia: an Islam that stresses the mercy of
God, not the need to follow a million dehumanizing rules to pacify an
angry deity.
Finally, I am happy that the Saudis have hired apologists for their
8th century version of Islam,but if the purpose is to “build stronger
bridge of understanding between the Muslim world and the West as well
as between Islam and Christianity”, then why didn’t the Jesuits propose
a similar “think tank” to promote understanding of Christianity in a
Saudi University?
Nope, a million Catholics live in Saudi Arabia, but the nearest
church is in Dubai; and my cousin was forced to throw her rosary away
when she arrived to work there as a nurse.
Jesuits used to support people’s search for civil rights, but I guess 20 million bucks is more important than defending poor Asian and African overseas workers from being exploited in Saudi Arabia.
Where is Christopher Hitchens when we need him?