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On the Same Day Taliban Vowed to Protect Women’s Rights, They Killed a Woman for Not Wearing a Burqa

August 20, 2021/2 Comments/in Culture Wars, DrRichSwier.com, Politics, Religion /by Robert Spencer

WATCH: Taliban Soldiers Detaining People in the Streets of Kabul

My latest in PJ Media:

Well, this didn’t take long at all. On Tuesday I noted that Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said: “We are going to allow women to work and study, women are going to be very active in society… we guarantee all their rights within the limits of Islam.” With admirable dispatch, the Taliban on the very same day indelibly illustrated how strictly those “limits of Islam” would be enforced. Fox News reported, also on Tuesday, that “fighters from the group shot and killed a woman in Takhar province after she went out in public without a burqa.”

No one should have been surprised, although some people undoubtedly were. The familiar wishful thinking and willful blindness are already appearing in establishment media circles. Wednesday on CNN, Christiane Amanpour, eager as always to be told soothing falsehoods, interviewed Saad Mohseni, director of the MOBY Group, which describes itself as operating in “South & Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa.”

“Headquartered in Dubai, the group employs over 1,200 individuals across 16 businesses,” and says it “has been widely recognized for its role in bringing news and entertainment to underserved populations.” The MOBY Group website also notes that Mohseni was “named one of 10 men fighting for gender equality by BBC 100 Women 2015.”

Mohseni told Amanpour: “Can the real Taliban stand up please? You have different factions, you have different wings… so we’re not even sure which part of the Taliban will prevail. Will the moderates prevail or will the more conservative ones prevail? It’s too early to tell.” Back in the real world, that is, the part that isn’t reported by CNN, this is arrant nonsense. There has been no evidence whatsoever of “moderate” wings of the Taliban, and any internal differences within the group are not likely to involve issues of women’s rights or relations with non-Muslim entities, as the Taliban’s stance on such matters is entirely dictated by the parameters of Islamic law.

Of course, Amanpour and her colleagues don’t have the faintest idea what Islamic law teaches, and even if they did, would dismiss even explicit teachings from the Qur’an and Sunnah as “extremist” and “fringe” and assume, without the slightest shred of evidence, that the vast majority of devout, knowledgeable and Sharia-adherent Muslims reject those teachings. Amanpour and her ilk cling to their fantasies about moderate Taliban factions and moderates among the Iranian mullahs just as tenaciously as they cling to their wholly baseless imaginings of the true, peaceful teachings of Islam that somehow elude the Taliban, and ISIS, and al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram, and all the rest, despite dedicating their lives to understanding Islam properly and implementing its laws faithfully.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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Vatican conference to promote Mary as ‘model for faith and life for Christianity and Islam’

February 19, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Politics, Religion /by Robert Spencer

Does the Vatican really think that this will increase harmony and mutual respect between Muslims and Christians? Vatican top dogs should consider a statement of the Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb:

“The chasm between Islam and Jahiliyyah [the society of unbelievers] is great, and a bridge is not to be built across it so that the people on the two sides may mix with each other, but only so that the people of Jahiliyyah may come over to Islam.”

Dialogue, in other words, is all too often for the Islamic side a means of dawah, Islamic proselytizing, not a genuine discussion. In the Qur’an, the Virgin Mary gives birth to Jesus, but it is stated that he is not the Son of God (19:35), not divine (5:17), and was not crucified (4:157), and thus could not be and is not the savior and redeemer of the world. Do these Vatican officials really think that their Muslim interlocutors will discard what the Qur’an tells them and move closer to the Christian view? Or are they discarding the Christian view of Mary (and hence of Jesus) themselves, so as not to offend their “dialogue” partners? Almost certainly.

“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)

“Vatican to organize conference promoting Mary as ‘model for faith’ for both Christianity and Islam,” by Jeanne Smits, LifeSite News, February 16, 2021:

February 16, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — “Mary, a model for faith and life for Christianity and Islam:” is the title of an upcoming series of online webinars presenting Our Lady as a bridge between Catholicism and Islam organized, among others, by the Pontifical Academy of Mary (Pontificia Academia Mariana Internationalis or PAMI).

Starting on February 18, ten weekly conferences will be given jointly by Catholic and Muslim speakers who will seek “dialogue, knowledge and cooperation” regarding themes such as “Mary, a woman of faith,” “God who is love and faith,” prayer, purity, hospitality and non-violence, fasting and penitence, fraternity and citizenship.

The Franciscan pontifical University of Rome, the “Antonianum,” is another co-organizer of the event through its Duns Scot Chair of Mariological Studies as well as the International Islamic-Christian Marian Commission and the Grand Mosque of Rome and its Islamic Cultural Center of Italy.

The Italian weekly Famiglia Christiana presented the event in the light of the Abu Dhabi declaration, illustrating its article on Saturday with a photo of Pope Francis signing the Human Fraternity Document together with Imam al-Tayyeb of the Al-Azhar University of Cairo.

Quoting at length from the Document, Gian Matteo Roggio commented: “The course of these webinars is therefore aimed at active, free, conscious, solidary and popular participation in the opening of this space of intersection, interconnection, hospitable reception, thus meeting the explicit requests of Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azahr, the noble Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb.”

Readers of Famiglia Christiana in Italy are being asked to believe this: “The figure of Mary, a Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman, belongs by right and by fact to the path, the processes and the experiences that contribute to the generation of such an educational path, which makes a positive and confident wager on the embrace between generations and on a new politics and economy, where countries do not need to build their identity on contempt and on systematic negation, whether overt or covert, of the other and of others: an identity, that is, at the expense of the dissimilar and ready to identify in the other the cause of all the ills, failures, limitations and problems that instead have their multiple causes elsewhere. Belonging to these three religious and multi-cultural worlds (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), the figure of Mary is in itself a pressing and constant invitation to intersect and interconnect these same worlds, even making them a model of plural coexistence where the boundaries of each are made to allow communication, passage, exchange; and not to be closed, according to the many figures of exclusion that have, as their fruit, the culture, psychology, politics and economics of war, hatred and inhumanity.”

In the same grandiloquent style, Roggio added: “The webinars will end during the month of Ramadan with ‘the dates of Mary’ in the Conference Hall of the Great Mosque of Rome (health situation permitting): in memory of what is stated in the Holy Quran (Sura 19,22-26), namely that after giving birth near the trunk of a palm tree, she was called by the newborn child who told her ‘Do not be sad […] shake the trunk of the palm tree towards you and it will drop fresh and ripe dates on you. So eat them,’ a meal of friendship and fraternity will be shared once the sun goes down, as a tangible pact of alliance for the service to the common good of all, no one excluded, in obedience to the ‘understanding of the great divine grace that makes all human beings brothers’ (Document on human brotherhood for world peace and common coexistence).”

Roggio, the author of these very pro-Islamic lines, is not simply a journalist, he is a member of the religious order, the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette. He studied Mariology at the Pontifical Academy of Mary and is now a professor at the same institution. Roggio will be giving the lecture on “God who is love and mercy” on February 25, together with Islamic theologian Shahrzad Houshmand Zadeh, who teaches at the Gregoriana Pontifical University.

Roggio’s words therefore clearly express the spirit of the coming Islamo-Christian webinars: a spirit of profound relativism and misleading equation between the Catholic faith and Muslim beliefs.

The real question is this one: is the Virgin Mary whom we Catholics honor as the Mother of Jesus, only Son of God and the Word Incarnate, the same person as the woman named “Miriam” by the Quran? Is her son, Îssa, the Quranic equivalent of Jesus? He would then be a “Jesus” who could not in any way be the Son of God, because, the Quran proclaims, such an idea is “something monstrous” and that “it is not fitting for the Most Merciful to have a son.”…

VIRGINIA: Muslim professing love for Allah murders two, county attorney says we ‘may never know’ his motive

January 8, 2021/1 Comment/in Courts & Law, Culture Wars, DrRichSwier.com, National Security, Politics, Religion, Waste, Fraud and Abuse /by Robert Spencer

Ivan Maertens Aramayo is Ayanna Maertens Griffin’s father. In this Washington Post report, consistent with the establishment media’s never-ending mission to exonerate Islam from all crimes done in its name and in accord with its teachings, he offers two quotations from the Qur’an, apparently in order to establish that what Mohamed Aly did was completely inconsistent with his “professed love for Allah.”
The first one (“And do not kill one another…”) is Qur’an 4:29. The full verse is: “O you who believe, do not squander your wealth among yourselves in vanity, except in a trade by mutual consent, and do not kill yourselves [or one another]. Indeed, Allah is always merciful to you.” It is thus clearly addressed to “you who believe,” and does not override the Qur’an’s thrice-repeated imperative to kill unbelievers (2:191, 4:89, 9:5).
The other quote is Qur’an 5:32, which is one of the most oft-quoted verses of the Qur’an, the one that Western non-Muslim leaders refer to frequently in order to establish that Islam is a religion of peace. There is, however, less to it than Western leaders and Islamic apologists claim. It is not a general prohibition of killing: there are big exceptions to the prohibition on killing, for “manslaughter or corruption on the earth.” Also, this prohibition is not a general command, but is specifically directed at the children of Israel. After it was given, “many of them committed excesses on earth,” so all this passage is really saying is that Allah gave a command to the children of Israel and they transgressed against it. Some Islamic authorities interpret this passage in a supremacist manner, as applying only to Muslims. The eighth-century Muslim jurist Sa’id bin Jubayr is said to have explained: “He who allows himself to shed the blood of a Muslim, is like he who allows shedding the blood of all people. He who forbids shedding the blood of one Muslim, is like he who forbids shedding the blood of all people.” Then 5:33 continues from 5:32 and makes clear the dire punishments that are prescribed for the corruption and transgressions of the children of Israel, and a warning to the Jews to stop their bad behavior. Seen in its light, this celebrated passage, Qur’an 5:32, is explaining what must be done with Jews who reject the messenger and commit the vague sin of spreading corruption on earth. Contrary to popular belief in the West, the passage is not dictating lofty moral principles.
Meanwhile, is anyone even looking into the possibility that Mohamed Aly’s murders of Ayanna Maertens Griffin and Ntombo Joel Bianda may be tied to his “love for Allah”? Or has such an investigation been dismissed out of hand as “Islamophobic”?
“Nearly a year after a young couple were killed, a guilty plea provides few answers,” by Rachel Weiner, Washington Post, January 4, 2021 (thanks to Darcy):

…Ayanna Maertens Griffin, 18, and her boyfriend, Ntombo Joel Bianda, 21, were shot to death in southern Halifax County nearly a year ago. An 18-year-old student at Alexandria’s T.C. Williams High School was quickly arrested and confessed. Mohamed Aly pleaded guilty in December to first-degree murder counts and sentenced to four life terms, but his reasons for killing two acquaintances remain a mystery.
“One of the most painful aspects of this case is that the family may never know Aly’s motive to murder their loved ones. We are all left asking, why?” Halifax Commonwealth’s Attorney Tracy Quackenbush Martin said in a statement. “We may never have an answer to that question.”…
After the arrest, Maertens Aramayo had looked at Aly’s social media pages and saw that the teenager professed love for Allah. A Roman Catholic himself, he studied theology, and what he knew about Islam gave him an opening. He offered two quotes from the Koran:
“And do not kill one another, for God is indeed merciful unto you” and “Whoever kills an innocent life, it is as if he has killed all of humanity.”

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