Saudi preacher who raped, tortured, murdered 5 year old daughter gets 8 years

From AFP:

A Saudi court sentenced a preacher convicted of raping his five-year-old daughter and torturing her to death to eight years in prison and 800 lashes, a lawyer said Tuesday.

In a case that drew widespread public condemnation in the kingdom and abroad, the court also ordered Fayhan al-Ghamdi to pay his ex-wife, the girl's mother, one million riyals in "blood money," lawyer Turki al-Rasheed told AFP.

Blood money is compensation for the next of kin under Islamic law.

The girl's mother had demanded 10 million riyals.

Ghamdi's second wife, accused of taking part in the crime, was sentenced to 10 months in prison and 150 lashes, said Rasheed, who is the lawyer of the girl's mother.

Ghamdi was convicted of "raping and killing his five-year-old daughter Lama," he added.

The girl was admitted to hospital on December 25, 2011 with multiple injuries, including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, extensive bruising and burns, activists said. She died several months later.

Ghamdi, a regular guest on Muslim television networks despite not being an authorized cleric in Saudi Arabia, had confessed to having used cables and a cane to inflict the injuries, human rights activists said earlier this year.

Randa al-Kaleeb, a social worker from the hospital where Lama was admitted, said the girl's back was broken and that she had been raped "everywhere".

Reportedly, Ghamdi had tortured and raped his daughter after he had doubted her virginity.

Oh, why didn't you say that he tortured and raped her repeatedly to maintain family honor? Now the sentence makes sense! Those slutty five year olds, turning on their fathers like that. How dare they!

In fact, this sentence is an improvement over what originally happened in this case.

Last February, Ghamdi was released from prison altogether because a judge figured the blood money was enough punishment for him. Apparently, an international outcry caused this re-sentencing.

This also shows the importance of shaming Arab countries into causing them to act like normal human beings, even if they fight it all the way.

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Controversial British Islamic public school closed for health violations

From the Derby Telegraph, last week:

WOMEN teachers at Al-Madinah School in Derby claim they are being told to cover their heads and shoulders with a hijab – an Islamic scarf – whether or not they are Muslim.

This is one of several complaints made by staff to their unions at Al-Madinah School, which is currently under investigation by the Education Funding Agency for alleged irregularities over its grants.

A member of the teaching staff told the Derby Telegraph that women were being told to sign new contracts that say they must wear hijabs and that girls are told to sit at the back of classes.

It is understood that the new contracts for staff also include rules about not taking non-halal food into the school and not being allowed to wear jewelry.

Mr Raine added: "There are worries over practices concerning the discrimination between male and female pupils in the school, with the girls being told to sit at the back of the class regardless of whether they can see the board properly."

The school, which occupies space at Norman House, Friar Gate, where primary-age children are taught, and Midland House, Nelson Street, for secondary children, was set up in September 2012.

The then head teacher, Andrew Cutts-Mckay, who has left after less than a year in post, said at the time that the school was being set up so that "the timetable will be flexible with time for Islamic teaching but pupils will be able to opt out of this and there will be a chance to learn about other faiths".

He said the school would "honour all faiths" and that he envisaged a school where 50% of pupils are Islamic and the other half were not.

Sue Arguile, branch secretary of Derby National Union of Teachers, said: "This school was first launched as based on Muslim principles and not as a Muslim school.

"If the school is not sticking to the original reasons behind why it was set up, then it does call into question whether public money is being used properly and for its intended purpose."

The Daily Mail adds:

Jane is a good school teacher and proud of it. She lives in a handsome, detached house surrounded by neatly mowed lawns on the outskirts of Derby, with her husband and three pet cats.

For nearly 20 years, she has taught history, geography and religious studies in schools throughout the East Midlands city. In all that time, there has never been one word of complaint against her from head teachers, parents or pupils.

‘I feel I do a good job and always wear a business suit with trousers or a sensible skirt in school. It is a sign of respect for my profession and sets a good example to the children.’

Yet, one day in October last year, she returned home from the classroom in tears to her husband, a successful businessman. To her horror, she had become embroiled in a furious row at her school over what she wore to work.

The Islamic Al-Madinah school in Derby, one of the newest of the Government-sponsored free schools, had asked her to dress modestly, covering her hair and ensuring she did not show any flesh apart from her face, hands and feet.

She abided by the request — or so she thought.

For earlier that October day, wearing a grey suit with a skirt well below the knees, thick knitted black stockings, calf-length boots and her long brown hair completely covered, she stepped into a lift at the school with a male teacher.

To her shame, he looked her up and down and told her that she had failed to observe ‘common decency’. The two inches of leg hidden in the 100 denier stockings which showed between her boots and the hem of her dress were ‘abhorrent’, he warned. Her discreet outfit was, he deemed, ‘figure hugging’ and immodest.

‘That encounter in the lift with this Muslim male teacher made me feel like a slut,’ Jane says today. ‘It was the final straw. '

The webpage for the school says, improbably:

The entire idea of a public Islamic school seems odd, but one where even the basic principles of society are spurned is outrageous.

Anyway, the school was just closed, at least temporarily, after a health and safety inspection.

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Latest Egyptian rumor: Muslim Brotherhood army being formed in Gaza under Hamas

News out of Egypt is unreliable, to say the least, as the pro- and anti-Muslim Brotherhood sides hurl nutty accusations at each other.

Egypt's Youm7 newspaper quotes unnamed senior Egyptian officials as saying that the new head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mahmoud Ezzat, had fled to Gaza several weeks ago and is now overseeing a new mini-army of  Gaza militants and1500 Muslim Brotherhood soldiers and smuggled from Egypt into Gaza through tunnels.

These troops are being trained with Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades, according to the rumors, and they are in two areas of Khan Younis. It is being funded by the Muslim Brotherhood and is receiving weapons from Turkey, smuggled to Gaza through Cyprus, including anti-tank missiles.

The rumor gets a little more fantastic when it says that some of the weapons are stolen from both the Egyptian and Israeli armies.

(What is true is that Mahmoud Ezzat has not been seen for several weeks, since he was appointed in his new role. The idea that he is directing operations from Gaza is a bit far-fetched, though.)

The commenters are taking this seriously, though, with one suggesting that it is time for the Egyptian army to hold its own "Cast Lead" against Gaza, damn the civilian casualties.

Even though the story seems filled with holes, the fact that it even gets such prominent play in Egypt (and even gets leaked by Egyptian officials to the media) says volumes about how Hamas and Gaza itself is regarded as an enemy.

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August 1948: The Arab League starts to slide into Islamism

I just found this fascinating article from the Palestine Post, August 22, 1948:

Robert Martin, who had been in the Arab States since the outbreak of the Palestine war, went to Cyprus to file dispatches on the situation which the Syrian military censors refused to pass for transmission.

He summarizes his impressions as follows:

A tragically unexpected and potentially dangerous result of the conflict in Palestine is the increasing trend among the Arabs toward meek acceptance of nationalistic, totalitarian governments. 

The Arab League was formed in 1945 to protect the independence of all Arab countries...But critics of the League believe that it is tending to become Islamic rather than Arabic.

One minor point of evidence is that the former Lebanese Foreign Minister, Kamid Frangieh, a Maronite, had never been permitted to attend a League meeting. When the League's Military Committee assembles, the Lebanese Chief of Staff, Gen. Fuad Shehab, a Christian, is barred, and his place is filled by a Moslem officer of inferior rank.

Other critics believe that the League ismoving away from its former professed ideal of promoting regional unity and democracy, and has become fundamentally a bulwark against the West. If true, the League will become the spokesman of reaction rather than of progress.

In the eyes of some Arabs, the chief offenders are the youth groups, especially the Young Men's Moslem Association and the Moslem Brotherhood, whose leaders are in part graduates of Al Azhar University. Under their guidance, Islam is tending to become more and more a retreat into the past, breaking away from everything that is Western and progressive. They preach Moslem orthodoxy, and in their minds religion and politics are inextricably entwined. They have progressed beyond the mere acceptance of the constitutional provision that "the religion of the state is Islam" and now look to the State to bar all outside thought or culture.

Self--centered and feudalistic, this concept of Islam inevitably denies the oppressed people in the Arab States any improvement in their status. For these interpreters of the revived Islam are linked up with their landlords, who are the keystones in the feudalistic family, tribal and social system.

Martin's major mistake, of course, was to attribute this pivot towards Islamism as being a reaction to Israel. (Linkage has been around a long time!) After all, even he admits that the banning of Christians from meetings was happening from the beginning of the League, and the League's apparent first decision was to boycott Jewish products - not Zionist, but Jewish - back in 1945.

Even so, his description of radical Islam of 1948 is remarkably similar to what we are seeing in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world 65 years later.

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Spoons in underwear to help stop forced marriage

From AFP:

As Britain puts airport staff on alert to spot potential victims of forced marriage, one campaigning group says the trick of putting a spoon in their underwear has saved some youngsters from a forced union in their South Asian ancestral homelands.

The concealed spoon sets off the metal detector at the airport in Britain and the teenagers can be taken away from their parents to be searched -- a last chance to escape a largely hidden practice wrecking the lives of unknown thousands of British youths.

The British school summer holidays, now well under way, mark a peak in reports of young people -- typically girls aged 15 and 16 -- being taken abroad on “holiday,” for a marriage without consent, the government says.

The bleep at airport security may be the last chance they get to escape a marriage to someone they have never met in a country they have never seen.

The spoon trick is the brainchild of the Karma Nirvana charity, which supports victims and survivors of forced marriage and honor-based abuse.

Based in Derby, central England, it fields 6,500 calls per year from around Britain but has almost reached that point so far in 2013 as awareness of the issue grows.

When petrified youngsters ring, “if they don’t know exactly when it may happen or if it’s going to happen, we advise them to put a spoon in their underwear,” said Natasha Rattu, Karma Nirvana’s operations manager.

“When they go though security, it will highlight this object in a private area and, if 16 or over, they will be taken to a safe space where they have that one last opportunity to disclose they're being forced to marry,” she told AFP.

“We’ve had people ring and that it’s helped them and got them out of a dangerous situation. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to do with your family around you -- but they won't be aware you have done it. It’s a safe way.”

The charity is working with airports -- so far London Heathrow, Liverpool and Glasgow, with Birmingham to come -- to spot potential signs, such as one-way tickets, the time of year, age of the person and whether they look uncomfortable.

“These are quite general points, but there are things that if you look collectively lead you to believe something more sinister is going on,” said Rattu.

People who come forward can be escorted out of a secure airport exit to help outside.

Marriages without consent, or their refusal, have led to suicides and so-called honour killings, shocking a nation widely deemed to have successfully absorbed immigrant communities and customs.

Officials fear the number of victims coming forward is just the tip of the iceberg, with few community leaders prepared to speak out and risk losing their support base.

One woman, whose identity was protected by Essex Police in southeast England, was forced to get married in India.

She said she was threatened by her father “because he said if I thought about running away he would find me and kill me.”

“I was shipped off with a total stranger.

“That night I was raped by my husband and this abuse continued for about eight and half years of my life.”

She eventually fled.

Last year, the Foreign Office’s Forced Marriage Unit dealt with some 1,500 cases -- 18 percent of them men.

A third of cases involved children aged under 17. The oldest victim was aged 71; the youngest just two.

Two?!?!

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