August 2013
The Rise of European Islamo-Fascist Police
Here’s another Arabic word that both you and I would prefer not to have to know but probably should: mutaween.
It means “religious police” or “morality police.” In Saudi Arabia it’s an officially constituted entity whose officers are fully empowered to arrest and punish anyone who violates sharia law – which, of course, can mean anything from committing various sexual acts to being caught taking a sip of water during Ramadan.
The Saudi morality police made international headlines in March 2002 when they physically prevented dozens of girls from escaping a burning school in Mecca because they weren’t properly covered. After that horrific incident, which resulted in fifteen deaths, people around the world congratulated themselves on not living in such a backward culture. And yet the Islamic morality police, far from being confined to Saudi Arabia – or even to the Muslim world – are an increasing presence in Europe and elsewhere.
To be sure, Islam’s moral cops in the Western world aren’t officially sanctioned. They aren’t even necessarily an organized force; many, if not most, of them are self-appointed monitors of public morality.
And compared to their counterparts in Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and the Gaza Strip, they’re amateurs.
But hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.
Consider the situation in Oslo, where things are bad, though not quite as severe (yet) as in many other European cities.
Zahid Ali, an actor and stand-up comic, recalled in a 2010 interview that he’d been living with Oslo’s morality police for twenty years, ever since his early teens. “If he smoked on the street in Oslo,” reported NRK, “his mother, father, uncles, and aunts know about it before he got home” – because the news had been passed to them via Pakistani cab, bus, and tram drivers, a class of people whom Ali described as the “largest intelligence service” in Norway.
Ali, now a familiar face on Norwegian television, said that members of the morality police in the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Grønland now routinely stopped him on the street to tell him: “I don’t like what you’re doing! I hate you! I’m going to kill you!”
The threats, which he said had grown steadily worse over the previous five or six years, were usually delivered in Punjabi, and when Ali replied in Norwegian, his tormentors grew even angrier. (“If I answer in their language,” he explained, it means that “I’ve accepted their culture, accepted that they’re right.”) Ali said he took the threats seriously enough to avoid Grønland whenever possible.
In [July 12th's] Aftenposten, the subject of the morality police surfaced yet again. This time we were introduced to Erfan Tarin and Bahar Shekari, a non-religious Kurdish couple from Iran who endure daily harassment at the hands of their Muslim neighbors.
One day, Shekari was out shopping when an elderly woman in hijab spit on her, saying: “What kind of clothes are those? We’re Muslims. You can’t go around dressed like that!” “Every time I go to the mall I just look down at the ground and walk very fast,” Shekari told Aftenposten . “I don’t feel safe there.”
The other day, noting Aftenposten ‘s renewed attention to the morality police, Hege Storhaug of Human Rights Service pointed out that that newspaper’s editors have consistently rejected, and even mocked, her own organization’s efforts to persuade the government to address this grim challenge in a constructive, assertive way. There’s no surprise in that contradiction. The fact is that morality-police stories make such good copy that your average Norwegian newspaper editor can’t bring himself not to run them – but, at the same time, his own cultural-elite politics, his reflexive need to stand with Islam against the odious “Islam-haters,” compels him to oppose any serious attempt to put a stop to this supreme example of creeping sharia.
And so the problem worsens by the year, and the media continue to exploit it to sell papers – even as they routinely ridicule and demonize those who actually want to do something about it. It doesn’t take a genius to see where all this will lead in the long run; on the contrary, it takes a fool to not see it – or to refuse to.
The Rise of European Islamo-Fascist Police | FrontPage Magazine
The Rise of European Islamo-Fascist Police
Here’s another Arabic word that both you and I would prefer not to have to know but probably should: mutaween.
It means “religious police” or “morality police.” In Saudi Arabia it’s an officially constituted entity whose officers are fully empowered to arrest and punish anyone who violates sharia law – which, of course, can mean anything from committing various sexual acts to being caught taking a sip of water during Ramadan.
The Saudi morality police made international headlines in March 2002 when they physically prevented dozens of girls from escaping a burning school in Mecca because they weren’t properly covered. After that horrific incident, which resulted in fifteen deaths, people around the world congratulated themselves on not living in such a backward culture. And yet the Islamic morality police, far from being confined to Saudi Arabia – or even to the Muslim world – are an increasing presence in Europe and elsewhere.
To be sure, Islam’s moral cops in the Western world aren’t officially sanctioned. They aren’t even necessarily an organized force; many, if not most, of them are self-appointed monitors of public morality.
And compared to their counterparts in Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and the Gaza Strip, they’re amateurs.
But hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.
Consider the situation in Oslo, where things are bad, though not quite as severe (yet) as in many other European cities.
Zahid Ali, an actor and stand-up comic, recalled in a 2010 interview that he’d been living with Oslo’s morality police for twenty years, ever since his early teens. “If he smoked on the street in Oslo,” reported NRK, “his mother, father, uncles, and aunts know about it before he got home” – because the news had been passed to them via Pakistani cab, bus, and tram drivers, a class of people whom Ali described as the “largest intelligence service” in Norway.
Ali, now a familiar face on Norwegian television, said that members of the morality police in the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Grønland now routinely stopped him on the street to tell him: “I don’t like what you’re doing! I hate you! I’m going to kill you!”
The threats, which he said had grown steadily worse over the previous five or six years, were usually delivered in Punjabi, and when Ali replied in Norwegian, his tormentors grew even angrier. (“If I answer in their language,” he explained, it means that “I’ve accepted their culture, accepted that they’re right.”) Ali said he took the threats seriously enough to avoid Grønland whenever possible.
In [July 12th's] Aftenposten, the subject of the morality police surfaced yet again. This time we were introduced to Erfan Tarin and Bahar Shekari, a non-religious Kurdish couple from Iran who endure daily harassment at the hands of their Muslim neighbors.
One day, Shekari was out shopping when an elderly woman in hijab spit on her, saying: “What kind of clothes are those? We’re Muslims. You can’t go around dressed like that!” “Every time I go to the mall I just look down at the ground and walk very fast,” Shekari told Aftenposten . “I don’t feel safe there.”
The other day, noting Aftenposten ‘s renewed attention to the morality police, Hege Storhaug of Human Rights Service pointed out that that newspaper’s editors have consistently rejected, and even mocked, her own organization’s efforts to persuade the government to address this grim challenge in a constructive, assertive way. There’s no surprise in that contradiction. The fact is that morality-police stories make such good copy that your average Norwegian newspaper editor can’t bring himself not to run them – but, at the same time, his own cultural-elite politics, his reflexive need to stand with Islam against the odious “Islam-haters,” compels him to oppose any serious attempt to put a stop to this supreme example of creeping sharia.
And so the problem worsens by the year, and the media continue to exploit it to sell papers – even as they routinely ridicule and demonize those who actually want to do something about it. It doesn’t take a genius to see where all this will lead in the long run; on the contrary, it takes a fool to not see it – or to refuse to.
The Rise of European Islamo-Fascist Police | FrontPage Magazine
