EU: ‘Being too Western’ reason for 71% of ‘honour’ killings

Via the Irish Independent:

Yes, it’s a cultural rather than a religious thing, stemming from some nasty tribal customs of South Asia and the Middle East, but though Hindus, Sikhs and the odd Christian might be perpetrators, the blunt truth is that honour killings are mainly Muslim-on-Muslim (91 per cent worldwide, 84 per cent North America, 96 per cent Europe).

Worldwide, two-thirds of victims (93 per cent women) were killed by their families of origin: 49 per cent in North America, 66 per cent in Europe and 72 per cent in Muslim countries. More than half the victims died in agony, having been either gang-raped or burned or stoned or beheaded or stabbed many times.

Being ‘too Western’ did for 58 per cent: this includes being insufficiently subservient, rejecting Islamic dress, wanting a career, having non-Muslim friends or boyfriends, rejecting an arranged marriage or leaving an abusive husband. This criterion covers 91 per cent of North American murders, 71 per cent of European and 43 per cent in the Muslim world. Offences against sexual propriety (eg being raped or accused of adultery) were the justification for the other murders.

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Brussels: Israeli minister speaks with EU officials about combating Muslim antisemitism

Via European Jewish Press:

Israeli Minister for Public Diplomacy and Diaspora, Yuli Edelstein, was in Brussels this week to attend an event marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the European Parliament.

At this occasion, he also met with several European Union officials, including Viviane Reding, EU Commission Vice-President in charge of justice and fundamental rights, and Stefan Füle, EU Commissioner for enlargement and neighbourhood policy.

With Commissioner Reding, who has the fight against anti-Semitism in her portfolio, he brought up several subjects including the issue of education, educating younger generation against Holocaust denial and against all forms of xenophobia and anti-Semitism.

“I brought her attention to the fact that unfortunately Muslim communities in many European countries are more and more exposed to anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda,” he said in an interview with European Jewish Press.

“We have to pay special attention to proper education about the Holocaust, about Jewish history and against anti-Semitism in these communities. We have a lot of cooperation with the EU in this field. Once a year, we hold a special seminar organized by the Israeli foreign ministry and the EU on the issue of anti-Semitism. And I myself chair an international committee on combating anti-Semitism on the Internet. I suggested that a representative of the EU join this committee which was accepted.”

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Morocco: Sex for a European husband

Via nieuwsblad (Dutch):

Poor Moroccan girls are willing to do everything in order to get a European husband.

Said, a 21 year old tourist in Tangier says there’s no talk of love, he says of the flirting in the streets of Tangier between locals and European-born youth. “In Morocco marriage has become big business. Singles no longer look for a beloved, but for somebody who will inject capital into their lives. Poverty is consuming this country, it makes its residents unemotional materialists. There is no future here for the Arab Romeo and Juliet.”

Many dream of a life in another country, preferably overseas. Some adventurers flee at nights by boat to Spain. Whoever fears the water, tries hooking somebody from Europe. Tangier in particular is flooded in the summer by Moroccans from abroad, to the delight of many poor Moroccan girls. Without any diversions they offer money or sex for European residence permits.

Naima from Antwerp: “In the nightclub I met a Moroccan girl from Casablanca. Very quickly she asked me how much my brothers would cost. I answered her that my brothers weren’t for sale, but she kept on pressing. She wanted to get out of Morocco. She was tired of the country and was looking for a boy from Europe. I joked that one of my brothers is asking for 10,000 euro. She couldn’t pay that, she said seriously. After that she asked if we couldn’t get to an agreement some other way.”

Ahmed, a twenty-something from Brussels, is passing through Tangier. He’s constantly confronted with desperate bartering: a night out for papers, sex for the right documents.. these are proposals boys from Europe often get.

“Ad nauseum,” says Ahmed. “And every year it gets worse. They see as as walking residence permits.” He says the girls aren’t ashamed of what they do at nights. “It’s downright disgusting and shocking. For some money or a false promise you get everything by Moroccan chicks. They’re whores!”

The older generation of Moro0ccans thinks the youth living in Europe are no good. “They’re westernized, also in their sexual behavior,” says Fatima (70) from Tangier. “The foreigners imported their uninhibited sexual mores to Morocco and turn our youth onto the wrong path.”

Of course there are differences in sexual mores between Morocco and Europe. 86% of the women in Morocco feel sexually intimated on the streets. The journalist says she herself got lewd comments multiple times while she was out. Even pregnant women aren’t exempt, and her pregnant niece was accosted by a disturbed man. [Ed: this article is summarized and I did not feel like translating all the comments]

Everything in Morocco is done secretively, and Moroccan society shuts their eyes, for fear of family or sex scandals. “And yet the Moroccans insist that their country is not sexually depraved. I’m irritated to no end by the hypocrisy,” says a Brussels woman. “In the hotel my friend and I can’t sleep in the same room because we aren’t married, but the Saudi sex-tourists can get Moroccan whores sent up to their room. The petro-dollars are suddenly above any modesty law. Sex tourism is flourishing like never before in Morocco. I see it with my own eyes, Morocco is a second Thailand.

Netherlands: Dutch plan ban on Muslim face veils next year

Via Reuters:

The Dutch minority government plans to ban Muslim face veils such as burqas and other forms of clothing that cover the face from next year.

The ban would make the Netherlands, where 1 million out of 17 million people are Muslim, the second European Union country to ban the burqa after France, and would apply to face-covering veils if they were worn in public.

“People should be able to look at each other’s faces and recognize each other when they meet,” the interior affairs ministry said in a statement Friday.

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Via RNW:

The burqa ban passed by the cabinet on Friday is drawing mostly negative reactions, both among Muslim organisations and political parties.

A large Turkish interest group, IOT, says the government hasn’t considered the ban’s consequences. “Women who currently only venture outside, or are allowed to go outside, wearing a burqa, will from now on stay home,” IOT chair Aydin Akkaya warns.

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Are Europe’s Muslims America’s problem?

Via Al-Jazeera:

“Soft power” programmes in the US that reach out to European Muslims have drawn ire from EU governments.

(…)

For several years now, the State Department has been quietly trying to introduce its ideas around race, multiculturalism and affirmative action into European policy and activist circles, aiming to alter the discourse on Islam in Europe – and in some cases, actively trying to help “integrate” European Muslims. The WikiLeaks cables that probably stirred the most anger in European capitals were those where US diplomats castigated allies – France, Britain, Holland – for mistreating their Muslim minorities, and not doing enough to battle domestic extremism.

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Ireland: Gov’t plans to be first EU state to sell Islamic bond

Via the Irish Examiner (h/t Jihad Watch):

IRELAND plans to become the first European nation to sell sovereign sukuk — Islam-approved financial certificates — as its equal tax treatment for Islamic-finance products attracts investors.

The Government has agreements with more than 60 countries to avoid double taxation on Islamic transactions, Micheál Smith, the south-east Asia director of IDA Ireland, said.

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Brussels: Professor says Muslim countries should establish theological schools in Europe

Via KUNA:

A Belgian professor of sociology and researcher on Islam Felice Dassetto is calling on rich Muslim countries to assist in establishing Islamic theological schools and faculties in Europe to overcome the gap in intellectual leadership of European Muslims.

“One of the major problems Muslims in Europe face, except perhaps for UK, is the absence of religious intellectual leadership,” said Dassetto who teaches sociology in the university of Leuven and has published three books on Islam.

In an interview with the Kuwait news agency, KUNA, he explained that the reason for this vacuum is the absence of Islamic theological faculties in Europe.

He said Gulf countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia can help in the establishment of such Islamic faculties in Europe.

“They must help because the European Muslim must be in contact with the Muslim world,” said the Belgian academic.

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UK: ‘Bin Laden aide’ Abu Qatada wins extradition appeal

Via France24:

The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday blocked the extradition by Britain of Jordanian national Abu Qatada, who is alleged to have been Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand-man in Europe.

The court in its judgement said there was a “real risk” that evidence against Abu Qatada, a radical British-based Muslim cleric, had been “obtained by torture of third persons” in custody in Jordan.

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Sweden: Immigrant homelessness on the rise

Via the Local:

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In total, the study showed that 34 percent of the overall homeless population, some 10,900 people, were born outside of Sweden.

Some 40 percent of these were women and 60 percent were men.

A third of these came from other European countries. The second largest group originated in the Middle East and the third largest in Africa.

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EU: Muslim antisemitism rooted in integration failure

Via Latitude (NY Times):

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But while incidents in the Middle East are relevant, the root cause of the problem between Jews and Muslims in Europe isn’t simply the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it is primarily the failure of European states to integrate immigrants, Muslims in particular.

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In fact, the real answer lies much closer to home: according to a position-paper by the Brookings Institution, if Muslim communities in Europe felt less marginalization and had more economic opportunities, they would resort less to misdirected violence. Although attacks on Jews are scary and hard to explain away, there is no broad and systematic anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe, neither among Muslims nor among the rest of the population. This is not 1936.

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