Stop that blubbering

I have long believed that corsets, lipstick, margarine and dog-food are evidence that support the existence of a benign and omnipotent Creator, since what other source can there be for the human ingenuity and heroic co-operation that can make something good of such ugly, stupid, and otherwise entirely pointless creatures as the great whales?

Here, like another gift from that Creator, is an article located by the ever-vigilant Biased BBC.

Many another commentator has had his say or hers, but there are lives at stake, and if the devil’s in the detail, then his adversaries must open it up to the big picture.

And there are lives at stake.

How do I hate slavery? Let me count the ways.

Slavery mother-in-law divides town

By Ruth Clegg

BBC News

On the surface Naseebah Bibi did not appear to be an out-of-the-ordinary figure.

So we get that hilariously ordinary picture.

Do you think it even matters to Ms. Clegg that something might also have been lost along with what we have ‘gained’ from multiculturalism? The suffragettes’ uneasy shades might like to discuss the veil with their great grand daughters, I suspect.

Often seen around her home town…

Not a hint of irony there. I mean, even if you accept - as I do - that immigrants can indeed make a good home in a foreign country, does it really seem that this is what’s actually happened? She’s actually helped, in part, to make someone else’s home into a foreign country, and for the daughters-in-law, making a foreign country into a prison.

of Blackburn, she would wear a niqab while shopping for her family.

But behind closed doors the grandmother imprisoned her three daughters-in-law and used one as her slave for 13 years.

Since the details of the 63-year-old's "enslavement" of the three emerged her actions have been described as "inhumane", "horrific" and "outdated".

Watch that word, outdated, because it implies former legitimacy and that it’s a thing of a past from which we are now, somehow, disconnected. Note the use of the word ‘slave.’ In England, in 2009. An actual slave.

But to some women she is held in awe and, instead of anger, they pity her.

They blame her incarceration on her three victims who "clearly wanted revenge against this poor lady".

People have different viewpoints and attitudes; that’s part of the human condition, but some unspecified people are reported by our national broadcaster as willingly admitting to siding with this crazy old loon. Apparently unquestioned by our three billion pound per year BBC, these women are walking around their homes, though in some cases maybe no further than the end of the street if Hannah Shah is to be believed, thinking that holding one’s daughters-in-law enslaved and being punished for it makes her some kind of a victim. They’re there, in Blackburn,

Blackburn, with a population of 105,000 - of which nearly a quarter are Muslim Asian - is greatly divided when it comes to Bibi.

She was found guilty of falsely imprisoning Nagina Akhtar between 1993 and 2006, Tazeem Akhtar from 2001 to 2003 and Nisbah Akhtar between 2005 and 2007.

One of Naseebah Bibi's daughters-in-law recalls her treatment

The three women, who cannot speak English,

So, nothing out-of-the-ordinary there – or is it? I’d love some kind of contextualizing here about the prevalence, scarcity, or downright uniqueness of some ‘Asian’ Muslim women being unable to speak English after several years in England. I’d like to know if this was just an inescapable consequence of their unique experience of slavery, or if, on the other hand, it’s actually part of something bigger; something that happens often, and maybe in certain particular groups. And then it would be a social problem like domestic abuse, and perhaps worthy of prolonged BBC investigation, and comparing with like groups elsewhere. Perhaps they’d like to interview Hannah Shah who has an interesting story to tell about a similar community. Oh, no. They still haven’t.

But I have the feeling at this stage that it’ll turn out to be a one-off problem. And anyway, what kind of a crazed racist cares much about education? Education? Education…

were married to her three sons, who were also their first cousins.

Now that’s what I call a coincidence. Bit like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Is there a lot of that kind of thing in, er, the North, do you think? Must be the remote mill villages clustered around waterfalls that worked the looms, or near the pits – now abandoned after the Thatcher cuts – that brings families so close together. There may be some health issues, but I’m not prepared to surf the net using the technical term for this kind of thing,

Preston Crown Court heard that the three women would be subjected to constant beatings and abuse and were made to sit behind a sewing machine for 13 hours a day.

Now this could be the plain story of a nasty old woman bullying her younger relatives, and from the photograph from the BBC article about her sentence, she looks like a major loon, (though I don’t suppose anyone looks like Barbie in a police photograph; particularly if you’ve never shown your naked face to outsiders before), and this is nothing to do with the communidee…

Some Muslim women have said she was exploited by her three daughter-in-laws who came to the UK because they thought "money grew off trees".

They come over here and take our cousins, steal our seats at the sweat-shop table…

One woman said: "I feel sorry for the elderly lady [Bibi], she has not been treated well and I think it is a clear case of revenge."

Nas, a local community worker, said: "As a first generation Asian we have experienced these things first hand and I don't think it's enslavement."

Okay, so I was wrong about the not being to do with the community thing.

Shop owner Jamil, who knows the family, said he was shocked that this could happen to "such a nice family".

You can’t help asking yourself how someone defines ‘nice’ wherein some new family members have never learned the language of the land they are living in after years. Of course, family secrets can be just that, but these are tightly-knit communities, huddled together for protection against the white racist hordes on Northern England. Someone must have known something, surely? Or does nice in the Blackburn dialect mean ‘not uppity, and knows her place?’

But he condemned Bibi's abusive actions, saying: "It's acceptable to treat women like this in other countries

Now he really could have meant that there was a regrettable consensus for slavery and girl-hurting in other countries; one which he abhors, or it he could have meant that it’s okay to slap girls in the face and force them to sew for thirteen hours per day where they drive on the right hand side of the road, or keep goats, or whatever. I do wish that he had made his thoughts on this matter plain.

but not in our country,..

‘our country!’ How patriotic of him. He might mean it too, but I prefer my anti-girl-hurting statements to be less equivocal.

in England no, it's not acceptable."

Musharrat Zia is the director of Practical Solutions, an organisation which works to challenge stereotypes and negative myths about different cultures.

Listen to the Sound of Silence.

So the BBC finds a Muslim-named person who just happens to be challenging ‘stereotypes’ and ‘negative myths’ and she strolls into BBC article about Muslims oppressing Muslims and half the community siding against the whistle-blowing victims. You know, if you’re dealing with vicious bullying and family abuse by a particular ethnic or religious group and which is protected by the secrecy and the open support of part of that group, but you are concerned about events that actually happened, then it may very well be stereotypes and negative myths that you’re trying to challenge - but it’s not lies. There’s something rotten in the state of Blackburn and it’s only the negative myths you’re challenging? How about the BBC getting someone on who is challenging the source of negativity?. You know: tough on enslaving women; tough on the causes of enslaving women.

She said: "I am saddened by it, living in an age where equality and justice is there for everybody.

"This practice is quite outmoded, its outdated.

She may mean that it was always wrong to treat people that way, but that now a consensus amongst Asian Muslims hold such things to be wrong. I might or might not believe you - there are some very brave people trying to change things for the better, i.e. making things more British – but saying that old pathologies that were once common are now rare or obsolete is a common propaganda technique. I hope that by this she really means ‘I hate being a second-class citizen in the whites’ eyes as an Asian, and I hate being lower than a snakes’s belly in the misogynist Muslim background from which I came, but I’m just not ready to say that this kind of thing was and is common – because I may lose my ‘in’ with fearful people I mean to help.’

Or she could think something less helpful, and be concentrating on the challenging stereotypes and negative myths Shtick for some other purpose.

"I am surprised that it has taken so long to come to light - it could have been fear or their [the victims'] lack of awareness.

"I am very sad that this is an older lady and she should be setting an example in their communities.

"It may have been perceived as the norm in her generation in other countries, but that should make her set a precedent by not doing it.

"I just hope this sentence acts as a deterrent to other people, no one should have had to go through what they did."

Let’s look at a bit from the article about sentencing, shall we?

Judge Brown said he had taken into account the "cultural element" of the case.

"I take into account that in arranging the marriages in the first place you felt obliged to follow the wishes of your own parents concerning arranged marriages," he said.

You’ve got to wonder if this taking into account was ever extended to the boys from rough communities; brutalized and brainwashed in madrasahs as does happen, would get lighter sentences from any anti-kuffar activities than, say, violence perpetrated by white middle-class people lucky enough brought up in leafy suburbs but who then who go off the rails.

Send Nigel to the Scrubs and throw away the key! Throw the book at him (it’s in three volumes with footnotes and a preface by John Mortimer). It’s the only language these bourgeois bastards understand! Except for French, German, Latin and Greek.

So if the brutality of a culture is seen as mitigation for any crimes committed by its members - or ‘victims’ as we might more justly think of them - and if there should be understanding and therefore more leniency with sentencing them, and that only a full an liberal education, along with great education opportunities in life can convey full responsibility and perspective and to merit the full force of the law, then you might get to a situation where repeat leniency to society’s more brutal (because brutalized) individuals allows them ever more chances to hurt the innocent, whereas the majesty of the law falls most heavily only on its better-off and more prosperous members because they should know better.

But that can never happen.

Judge Robert Brown, sentencing, said it was evident her victims had suffered physical and psychological trauma and had spent long periods "living in fear".

He ordered that Bibi serve three-and-a-half years in prison before being allowed out on licence, but would then face further monitoring.

I can see this communidee being all chatty around nice white social workers from County Hall about Bibi’s doings after three years in Holloway, can’t you? They’ll just open right up over a cup of tea and a few Koranic passages about how women are defective.

He said: "It seems to be necessary in the public interest that you should be subject to a long period of supervision after you are released from prison so that your situation and that in your household can be monitored.

"At the same time, because of your poor health and in particular your mental health, I shall keep the custodial element of sentence as short as I can, consistent with my duty to punish you, to deter you from further offences and to protect the public."

A difficult balancing act, no doubt.

You can read some helpful comments on this article straight from the community here.

Oh, and some slightly more detailed descriptions of what she actually did here and here.

Now look, this might just be a nasty family tale and only an exception but not the rule. And as such the treatment of women in the ‘Asian’ Muslim community would not be a true national ssue, except for us race-hating hate-mongers of hate. Might.

Only…Despite the BBC’s flim-flam act with challenging negative myths and the hopeful thought that some people at least think that slavery is outdated in this country (if acceptable in other lands with different unique and vibrant cultures), even then with the best politically-correct multiculti will in the world since records began the BBC found plenty of people who thought that the young victims were gold-diggers – and perhaps traitors to the group – and that this nutso old cow was some kind of victim.

So maybe a lot of this cruelty and harming is still going on in just such tightly-knit communities elsewhere in Britain, and maybe the BBC and its liberal chums should investigate, expose and criticise the deliberate imprisonment and abuse of illiterate immigrant girls.

But to even publicise this problem might to cause a backlash in the future of ‘racism’ and ‘islamophobia.’ So we’d better not look too closely into what may be the widespread beating, starving, and imprisonment of girls just in case some contemporary Adolf Eichmann kicks off about it.

Even back in Leafy Suburb Grammar School (founder Matthew Hopkins) between Introductory Hate-Crimes and Breeding A Better Briton lectures, it was explained to me that hurting girls was somehow wrong, and something we’d better not do or allow to happen. I still feel the same, despite living in more enlightened times.

So forgive me when I don’t get all exercised the way the BBC does extensively about a bunch of animals; however useful their carcasses might be when they choose to move swiftly and and,er, draw a discreet veil over people-hurting behaviour by favoured groups.

Now, I need to be off to add further to the sum total of human happiness, and I'll have done so as soon as I’ve figured out exactly how to combine ski-jumps, clay pigeon guns and Galapagos tortoises.

Oh, and this was a head-on collision sure to happen eventually - apologies to Dumb Jon.