A NORTH West Euro MP has reignited a debate about Muslim women wearing the burka.
Liberal Democrat Chris Davies says the burka ‘does not belong in 21st century Britain’ and is calling on Muslim women in Lancashire to take them off.
Sweet Lord, it’s like reading that Graham Norton’s been cast as Major Alan ‘Dutch’ Schaefer in the remake of Predator.
Reality soon returns with refreshing speed, however.
But Mr Davies stance has been slammed by the Lancashire Council of Mosques which believes more education is needed to understand why women choose to wear the burka.
A burka covers a woman from head to toe and only leaves the eyes visible.
Mainstream media at its best; this. Incisive. Well-informed. Obvious. Badly type-set.Inaccurate.
The issue was pushed to the forefront when Blackburn MP Jack Straw said Muslim women should not wear veils to cover their faces.
Mr Davies said that people should have the legal right to wear whatever they wish, but that politeness should not prevent disapproval being expressed.
He made the remarks after President Sarkozy of France this week attacked the burka as an assault upon the dignity of women.
Mr Davies said: “There is no mention in the Qur’an of the burka and it is a style of dress used principally in those countries where women are treated as mere chattels of men.
"I believe that it does not belong in 21st century Britain.
“I have a passionate belief that women and men are equals,
Just for fun this bit; apart from Britain’s rosy future in the European Union, I’d put this at the top of my list of the three whole things in the entire world that Liberal Democrats care passionately about.
…and both sexes should be free to express their identity through the dress they wear.
"In my experience, the burka acts as a mask, reducing identity and discouraging women from developing their own skills and personality.
“If there are men who want to use the burka to impose their own will upon women in their family they should feel the full force of society’s disapproval.”
So well done, Mister Davies, congratulations on your fine speech. It’s actually pretty brave of you to say such a thing. In Britain and in the Lib Dems it must take a pair to threaten the multi-culti consensus.
Now, what would the Liberal Democrat response be to the forced veiling of schoolgirls, I wonder? Tougher than some Tories’, I suspect, as we’ll see later.
Ooh, but the ever-vigilant mainstream media have a counter-view, because they’re all about edgy, state-of-the-art, in-your-face deep-cover investigative sound bite reprinting.
Salim Mulla, vice-chairman of Lancashire Council of Mosques, said: “It is absolute nonsense to say men force their partners, wives or daughters to wear the burkas.
Here’s some absolute nonsense for you and it’s not precisely about burqas.
Honour killing victim Banaz Mahmod was failed by police when she turned to them for protection, an investigation has ruled.
The 20-year-old Muslim begged police for help four times before her brutal murder at the hands of her father and her uncle….
The police officer who took her statement, PC Angela Cornes, dismissed her account as fantasy and wanted to charge her with criminal damage because she broke a window during her escape, her Old Bailey murder trial was told…
A month later Miss Mahmod was raped, tortured and murdered and her body was found buried in a suitcase in a garden in Birmingham three months later.
"He probably needs to talk to people like myself…
Such as this chap, coincidentally a co-religionist of his:
Yet another Muslim father kills his daughter
JUST weeks after we reported the case of an Iraqi man who beat his daughter to death in an ‘honour” killing, comes the news that a Pakistani man is behind bars in the USA after strangling his daughter. He was said to be upset that Sandeela Kanwal, 25, wanted to leave her arranged marriage.
According to this report, Chaudhry Rashid, 54, is charged with strangling his daughter with a bungee cord at their home in Jonesboro, Georgia.
…Or maybe another respected community leader like this?...
Her father gave up his factory job and became an Imam, the leader of his mosque…
A few weeks later Hannah tried to protect her mother so her father turned on her. She was 6 years old and from that day was punished regularly for her evil in tempting her father. Her punishments included regular rape and periods locked in the cellar. If she were to tell of what he did he threatened to kill her, and then such an evil dirty little girl like her would go straight to hell.
The crime drips with brutal irony: a woman decapitated, allegedly by her estranged husband, in the offices of the television network the couple founded with the hope of countering Muslim stereotypes.
Muzzammil "Mo" Hassan is accused of beheading his wife last week, days after she filed for divorce. Authorities have not discussed the role religion or culture might have played, but the slaying gave rise to speculation that it was the sort of "honor killing" more common in countries half a world away, including the couple's native Pakistan.
…and the Council of Mosques to educate himself about the issue.
And here’s a local councillor in Burnley, and a Tory, too. Makes me proud.
TWO sons who helped get their father elected into County Hall have pleaded guilty to knocking out the front teeth of a teenage girl.
Waqar Mohammed Younis, 20, and his brother Khawar Younis, 17, both of Nuttall Street, Accrington, appeared at Burnley Crown Court last Tuesday charged with occasioning actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm with intent.
See? In Accrington they don’t even keep the fun to their own – they’re involved in active outreach to support volunteering in the wider community.
"It is up to individuals if they want to wear the burka.
A Kurdish Muslim from Iraq has been jailed for life for slitting his teenage daughter's throat in a so-called honour killing after she decided to marry a Lebanese Christian…
In October last year Heshu barricaded herself in the bathroom of the family home in west London. The father broke down the door and stabbed her daughter repeatedly 11 times, before slitting her throat and leaving her bleeding in the bath.
Time for some plain, good, old-fashioned Lancashire good sense from a fine and typically Northern fellow.
Burnley-born Communities Minister Shahid Malik said: “It is not the job of government to dictate what people should or should not wear in our society - that is a matter of personal choice.
”This freedom to choose is one of the great values of our nation and why we are revered around the world.
Just like I learned at my old Mum’s knee as she stood cheerfully over my cousin/fiancée, stick in hand, as they cheerfully sewed on into the night.
”There are no laws stating what clothes or attire are acceptable and so whether one chooses to wear a veil or burka, a mini-skirt or goth outfit is entirely at the individual’s discretion.
Sadly, Goths don’t have much of a life expectancy in some parts of Lancashire either, poor kids.
Perhaps it’s the whippets?
”It is true that many Muslims feel the veil and its rationale are misunderstood and so sensible discussion provides an opportunity to create a better understanding and ultimately ensures we are more at ease with the diverse society within which we live.”
Actually, I think I understand just fine.
Mrs Northwester points out that some Muslim women choose to use the veil to protest and to protect themselves in a country that’s not very welcoming to them, and I can believe it in some cases, but there doesn’t seem to be all that much equality and respect for women throughout the community in other areas of life, so why on the face instead?
I don’t know what the Islamists call regiments of jihadi terrorists...
Oh, I tell a lie - they call them ‘wedding guests’ and ‘militants’ and ‘children.’
She should get a pension from the Ministry of Defence. And M16. And Special Branch, and the anti-terrorist squad. And the British feminist movement. And every A & E Ward and Social Services department in Britain’s multicultural cities. Strangely enough, I don’t think that she does.
The MoD, MI5, A & E, et al, plus the feminists should seek to protect people from harm (in this case the harm from Islam) and especially the harm done to women for the latter bunch, and all of them are charged, one way or another, with picking up the pieces after violence. Supporting this brave and good woman would be an excellent way of inoculating our people and our country from one particular virus – the many violent aspects of Islam.
Her autobiography, The Imam’s Daughter, should be required reading for all military officers whose duties take them up against Islam as well as for our counter-spies and the other anti-terrorist apparatus of the British state. It should be advertised and reviewed, commented upon, quoted from and chewed over throughout the British feminists’ website The F Word.
I hope that you’ll buy the book and send her lots and lots of money and below I’ll tell you why.
‘You’re too savage in criticising Islam,’ said Mrs. Northwester. ‘You won’t win friends and influence people if you call Islam a death cult,’ she said. ‘You need to look at the small picture,’ she added, ‘and see what the people in it think and feel. Then you might be more persuasive.’’
I paraphrase (badly) her more elegant words. This was after I’d posted something especially virulent against some Islamist/dhimmi twonk over at A Tangled Web late one Sunday night. But it is the female of the species’ mission in life (and often their direst necessity, alas) to gentle the excesses of the male, and so I listened and thought about it, read the review by Granny Weatherwax in The New English Review and bought the book: all Victor Kayam-style Right-wingly.
Maybe by reading something other than Irshad Manjis’s similar-but-different The Trouble With Islam Today and Robert Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and Islam Unveiled, its predecessor and source-work, and perhaps by reading another personal view - and a British one at that - I might get a bit more perspective on the topic. She got her wish.
Be careful what you wish for, incidentally.
If you do buy the book, and I hope that you will because this young woman has a mission and we can all be a part of it, I suggest for your own peace of mind that you try to think of it not merely as the diary of a young girl, but rather as a home-grown version of the Great Escape. I choose my words carefully here. She lived her early life in the shadow (and the threat of death, reading between the lines and from what her father said) of a life-denying totalitarian ideology that plans to subdue the world, and it is now her mission, despite being on the run, to frustrate that ideology and to bring freedom to Muslims throughout Britain and the world: particularly the women and girls.
Hannah Shah’s huge capacity to love her fellow human beings in general, and her utterly undeserving family in particular, is almost beyond belief. She is still on the run from her vengeful family, whose ‘dishonour’ is still so important to her that she refuses to take the details of the decade-long campaign of incestuous rape by her imam father to the police. Doing so would hurt the mother, brothers and sisters who ignored and left unpunished the multiple sexual assaults that her father inflicted on her throughout what in a parallel universe would be called her ‘childhood.’ So she hasn’t done it.
She was born free: a British subject in a Northern English town and a descendent of Pakistani Muslims and she lived her whole childhood in chains of her family’s making until she finally broke away.
And what chains. Many of the neighbours in her all-but completely Pakistani Muslim terraced street stayed so close to home that they never left it. This was especially true of her father who, once he decided that as an imam he was above working for a living, went on sickness benefits and housing benefits for the rest of his life.
One of the many wonderful things about Hannah Shah’s story is that despite it all she is, delightfully and definitely, English to the core. Her outrage at her father’s fraudulent welfare claim; at his laziness and dishonesty and his contempt for the supporting country and culture off which he sponged and financed his worthless life could come straight from the pages of the Daily Mail, or from the disgusted conversation of my colleagues at the Department for Hurt and Awful Nuisances. Or from BNP campaign literature, come to that.
Many of the womenfolk were forced to stay at home, though many also worked. Her own mother was nearly as much of a prisoner as she was – and was beaten savagely in front of Hannah on many occasions for imaginary or exaggerated imperfections in her cooking or housework. Imam Shah loved to inflict pain and to bully anyone around him who he could. Hannah Shah is always keen to give ‘moderate Islam’ the benefit of the doubt, and points out that, despite her never having been bought a single toy in her life, despite her never receiving a single word of praise or affection from her father, other fathers and especially one did play with their daughters and show them affection and give them treats.
Her father was especially cruel, and so her argument goes that there is room in the Pakistani Muslim community - even there - for some forms of love. She also points out that class makes its presence felt – her family and friends were from impoverished farming stock, but other Muslims in the town are city-bred, lovers of education and ambitious, in some ways, even for their daughters. So it’s not Islam’s fault, right?
Up to a point. Because when she finally breaks away and changes her religion and is living in one of a series of safe houses (in England! Safe houses for British subjects to escape the violent ambitions of Islam!) that she has to occupy to evade a vengeful family, then the armed mob of Muslim men who find her, and from whom she barely escapes with her life, then her favourite moderate Muslim neighbour the doting father is right there with the mob supporting the frenzied Imam Shah who has come to claim his property and bring her home, to a certain beating, rape, and possibly murder.
This is honour killing under the Spar shop sign; the Koran to be enforced in its brutal bloody fullness where Walkers Crisps and Mars Bars are for sale along with Coke and Tizer and The Sun and The Mirror. This is England.
When not beating and sexually assaulting his elder daughter and calling her worthless, evil and a temptress, and throwing her to the filthy floor of their coal cellar, her father is a virtual prisoner himself; rarely leaving the street except for his frequent trips to the mosque where he ruled as an absolute monarch. The women were separated from the men in more ways that the Koran prescribes - excluded, ignored, and even kept apart from the men during weddings.Hannah stresses the intellectual sterility of Islam in her background, and its lack of anything like humanity. All passages are read in Arabic, which nobody understands, and learned by rote and repeated by human recording machines.
Her father refuses to have Jesus’ name mentioned in the house, and speaks spitefully of him, though the elder Hannah, the theology graduate, points out that Jesus is named more often in the Koran than Mohammed was.
One of her brothers – hitherto and thereafter treated as a lord of creation for not being a girl and therefore not endlessly called ‘worthless’ – was sent off to Pakistan against his will to learn to memorize the Koran at a madrassah. He returned years later, a beaten and broken young man; prone to mental illness and with much of his childhood affection burned out of him. So much so that he goes along with the family’s persecution of the apostate Hannah. They all do, one way or another.
Forced marriage to cousins, here or back in the old country, is part and parcel of the brutal life of the autocratic Imam Shah and many of his rural peasant neighbours. Hatred of white people is ever-present – ‘gora’ and ‘gori’ are spoken as contemptuously as any skinhead cretin’s ‘Paki’ by her father whenever Hannah’s would-be friends tried to visit, or about the white TEFL teacher who secretly taught English to an earlier, gentler, non child rape-excusing mother.
Anything and everything Western or English is haram-‘forbidden’ - in Imam Shah’s lawless world of unspoken but often broken and always savagely enforced rules. Everything; except from the benefits he receives for pretending to be sick and for having many children. Everything Western is rejected, apart from the technology – cars and television and the air liners which take them home for holidays in Pakistan to be feted as millionaires – and anything else the imam and his male relatives and neighbours want to use and enjoy. The proud elder brothers’ cars are used once to take Hannah out for a ride beyond the street/ghetto/prison of her birth, and never to help the ageing mother carry heavy groceries home form the despised gora supermarkets.
Men and boys are everything, women and girls worthless – to be expensively dowered off and good riddance. Women and girls are seductresses, who inflame men to sexual lust and who tempt them away from worshipping Allah – this is what the rapist imam uses to excuse his frequent violations of his won daughter.
Is it Islamic to do so? And if so is it Koranic, and therefore supposedly immutable as the pure and complete word of God, or merely from the Hadiths, which some Muslims argue are heretical and blasphemous?
If the imam says it’s Islamic - and his authority is unquestioned in these communities - then it is indeed Islamic. And that’s all that the friends and relatives of poor little Hannah Shah cared about when they helped track her down to meet her family’s ‘justice.’
And what of the outside world; of school, and friends and the white people: the goray whom her father loathed and despised once again as soon as he’d cashed his Gyro?
Hannah loved them. She loved her school and the knowledge that it sought to impart; heterodox and varied and questionable. She loved her generous friends and the gentle white adults who never beat her or raped her or left her bound and starving in a coal cellar, and who showed her affection, and who saw her as worth talking to, and who were never allowed to visit her and whom she was never allowed to visit. She loved the soap operas and the teenage heart-throbs and the western fashions and the dolls’ houses that her friends owned though she had nothing to show to her friends in return because she owned no toys. She loved the teachers who sought to bring out her writing and story-telling, and who in her teen years tentatively tried to draw her out about her silences and bruises and her many unexplained absences from school…
Hannah loved them even though they failed her.
They didn’t pursue her noteless absences from school as they would have had with white children. Miss Shah is unequivocal in her contempt for the politically correct white society that respects her community’s ‘traditions’ – which means that when girls disappear forever their absenteeism is never followed up to discover they have been sent to rural squalor and even more intense drudgery in Pakistan.
(This has been going on for decades. My mother was a teacher in what was quaintly called a ‘special school’ back in the 1970s and she once described to my horror that a thirteen-year-old girl; bright and funny and learning English at an exponential rate and soon to have a place at the ‘normal’ school and who had once made her beloved schoolteacher and classmates some chapatis (the first I had ever seen) had been sent home to her family’s village to be married. I knew even then as a kid that you had to be sixteen at least to marry. I don’t know what if anything Mum did to chase the ‘truant’ Rani up, but Mum was a giver and a striver in her day. Maybe she had a go but didn’t trouble her young son with the details. Her headmaster was a clock-watcher and a pension-chaser so I doubt that Mum had much official back-up if she did go to Social Services about the poor lass. I wonder whether the political will existed in the 1970’s to confront Muslim or Pakistani child abuse – it’s surely in short supply now, and this book should help to drum up some more backbone – if we can get it publicized. Sometimes I think that Edward Heath’s sacking of Enoch Powell wasn’t entirely a good thing for life in Britain. But only when there’s a ‘y’ in the day. So there you have it; a Northwester family skeleton. I hope you’ll help this book to make some difference to a new generation of Ranis.)
When the school finally brings in Social Services because a Christian teacher follows Hannah’s problems up, then they send her…a Pakistani Muslim social worker who immediately betrays her to her father and gets her a massive and especially foul beating and more rape. It appears that the social worker worm Omar thinks that betraying the ‘community’ to outsiders is worse than raping and beating a little girl year after year.
I’m being judgemental here, I know, but what is judgement for but to tell the difference between cute folk customs like the giving of Eid sweets and morris-dancing on the one hand and child slavery and badger-baiting on the other?
Hannah’s eventual escape (last-minute, potentially deadly and always precarious) is as exciting an adventure story as any I’ve read in fiction given the natural physical and the falsely-induced emotional weaknesses that the Pakistani women in Hanna’s neighbourhood are prone to. In a sense it’s still going on as her family and community have never given up hunting her.
Her triumph is one of love – specifically Christian love as many of her supporters and protectors are Christians – but also of the love that is available when people are allowed to associate with other, different people from other religions or none, in our imperfect, Western, capitalist society.
There is so much material wealth too outside the hate-filled and ignorant world of Hannah’s home that her friends do have available, for example; cars and spare bedrooms in large houses for escape and refuge; and spare cash to clothe and feed Hannah as a free woman. There is also a State education system that is still richly funded enough to give her a second and then a third chance at a degree and qualifications and an escape to work in the south of England where she finds more friendship and still more love.
The second part – the post-escape part is as interesting and is way less harrowing then the sex-slave beginning. Her triumph, love's triumph, and in many ways Britain’s triumph at least reminds us of what is so good and beautiful and worth defending at any cost in our free society, and I recommend that conservatives, liberals, libertarians, nationalists and socialists alike should all read this book before next talking about multicultural society or Islam. All observant Muslims should read it, also, and do some comparisons.
Miss Shah has done her country and our civilization a great patriotic and charitable service in writing this harrowing and enlightening – and often inspiring and also amusing – work of social history.
She specifically and clearly criticises the politically correct white population that will not confront sex slavery and child rape, and particularly the BBC journalist who asks her ‘So what do you hope to achieve by speaking out? Surely, you’ll just cause more trouble?’
Hannah Shah doesn’t believe that the liberal establishment’s policy of silence or ignoring these atrocities will let it all go away. She celebrates and appreciates religious and political choice and freedom of speech in our democracy. She does distinguish her father’s type of Islam from supposedly gentler varieties, and I have to say she doesn’t provide much in the way of examples, though we can infer that, just as only small a minority of our Muslim neighbours are involved in Jihadist activities and maybe a larger minority has jihadist opinions, then perhaps also only a minority of girls are being raped, beaten and surely only a few are murdered by their families.
So how is she an antimatter suicide bomber?
She describes the obscurantist, ignorant, brutal, male-dominated and xenophobic culture from which our home-grown 7/7 suicide-bombers sprang. All were brought up and educated in the north of England, and 3 out of 4 were born here. They attended mosques like Hannah’s father’s and travelled to be further radicalized in Pakistan, and learned as Hannah’s brothers did all about the worthlessness and corruption of Western society (to the point that their ‘community’ holds it wrong to phone the police when a white neighbour is being assaulted) in the febrile atmosphere of Sub-continental Islam.
There is little gentleness there, and what there is dissolves at the first hint of the imam’s disapproval.There is racial and religious hatred of foreigners – imam Shah has a hierarchy of the races from the Arabs down through Pakistani Muslims to other Muslims down to whites and finally down to Jews. I forget exactly where he placed black people, but you get the point.
Women and girls are worthless – expensive to provide with dowry – and sexual temptresses who must be masked and beaten and kept I their place. Is it any surprise that such a mind-set, such a culture isn’t overflowing with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens?
At the very least, Miss Shah is needed by Britain to expose this foul undercurrent in our ‘diverse’ society.
And she can help soften it; reform it and offer refuge and advice to women and girls on the run from unreformed Islam’s foulest superstitions and nastiest practises, and one great thing that our homeland needs is free, outspoken, inoculated Muslim women to expose and shame the violent, self-centred, secretive corruption that much – though not all – of Islam encourages and allows to occur.
Free, confident, jihad-free Muslim women or ex-Muslim women who can live their lives for themselves according to their own wishes and standards are needed; as examples; as beacons of what freedom and love rather than hatred can achieve in this country, and as antibodies to the hatred.
They might tempt at least some Muslim boys and men away from Islamist brutality on the internet and the bone-dry, savage world of the kaffir-hating mosque, because breeding - all other things being equal – will out.
The Ministry of Defence, M15, Special Branch, the anti-terrorist squad and the British feminist movement are all bollocks.
Hannah Shah should get a pension from the Ministry of Defence. And M16. And Special Branch, and the anti-terrorist squad. And the British feminist movement. And every A & E Ward and Social Services department in Britain’s multicultural cities. I don’t think that she does.
Oddly enough, a site-search for this incestuously raped, countlessly beaten, from-the-cradle enslaved and would-be force-married little girl on the F Word draws a blank. Perhaps it’s a lousy search facility on the site? They do lead today with an approving account of stink-bombing a beauty pageant, so they are - as it were - somewhat on the ball against the Bikini Threat to London’s long-suffering student womanhood. Yey. Go British feminists.
Oh, and if you search our national broadcaster; the one that produces Woman’s Hour and supports and celebrates ‘diversity’ and ‘women’s’ rights’ in all things – guess what you get if you search its website for either her name, or her book?
Did you guess correctly? I suppose there’s not enough room on the site or in the archives for this little tale; what with all the football and the plight of the Palestinians, right?
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