Muslims sponsor child brides, Canadian officials claim ‘little they can do’

From The Toronto Sun

Immigration: ‘Child bride’ loophole can’t be closed

By TOM GODFREY, QMI Agency

Last Updated: March 11, 2010 4:49pm

Federal immigration officials say there’s little they can do to stop “child brides” from being sponsored into Canada by much older husbands who wed them in arranged marriages abroad.Top immigration officials in Canada and Pakistan say all they can do is reject the sponsorships of husbands trying to bring their child-brides to Canada. The men have to reapply when the bride turns 16.

The marriages are permitted under Sharia Law.

Muslim men, who are Canadian citizens or permanent residents, return to their homeland to wed a “child bride” in an arranged marriage in which a dowry is given to the girl’s parents.

Officials said some of the brides can be 14 years old or younger and many are forced to marry. The practice occurs in a host of countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Lebanon.

In classified documents, Canadian visa officer Steve Bulmer said he refused to allow one Pakistani man to sponsor his 15-year-old bride in August 2009.

“I can find no section (of law) that states the marriage is ‘invalid’ or ‘void,'” Bulmer wrote in e-mails obtained by lawyer Richard Kurland under Access of Information. “I am afraid the age does not invalidate the marriage even if it is illegal to marry.”

Abdul Hameed, of the Canadian embassy in Islamabad, said child marriages are not valid in Canada.

“A child marriage is punishable but it does not render the marriage invalid,” Hameed said. “We are refusing such application on grounds the marriage will not be valid as per Canadian laws.” William Hawke, of immigration’s Permanent Resident Unit, said the young brides won’t be allowed in Canada.

“Sponsorship applications submitted for a spouse under 16 will be refused,” Hawke said. “Once an underage spouse turns 16 they are a member of the family class” and can be sponsored.

He said the application is rejected if a spouse turns 16 during processing. Kurland said there’s little that can be done to stop Canadians from marrying child brides.

“A 15-year-old bride doesn’t void a marriage,” Kurland said on Thursday.

“The application is turned down and the person can reapply when his bride turns 16.”

He said the practice has been going on for years and “is a concrete loophole that can’t be fixed.”

Immigration officials quoting an Afghanistan Law of Marriages said in some countries it is “customary for young females to wed men considerably older, especially if the man is in a position of financial or social power.”

According to the law, it is not uncommon for marriages between first cousins or extended family members.

Britain: plans for mosque at Sandhurst thrown out

From The Daily Mail U.K.

Battle of the Minarets: Surrey residents say a Mosque at Sandhurst is an act of provocation, their critics say they are racist

By Sue Reid
Last updated at 12:14 AM on 12th March 2010

Victory was being celebrated yesterday in the leafy avenues and Victorian villas of Camberley.

In a triumph for local democracy, a plan to build a huge £3 million mosque with two 100ft minarets, which would have been visible from Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, was thrown out on Wednesday night by the town’s councillors.

A thousand people from the affluent Surrey town queued to get into the meeting, some waiting for hours from 9am to get in.

Seven Muslims caught plotting death of Swedish Cartoonist

Seven held in Ireland over plot to assassinate cartoonist Lars Vilks

By Sarah Stack, Press Association

Tuesday, 9 March 2010

Seven Muslims were arrested in the Irish Republic today over an alleged plot to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog, police said.

Al-Qa’ida put a $100,000 bounty on the head of cartoonist Lars Vilks after a newspaper published his cartoon.

The four men and three women were detained after an investigation involving European security agencies and the United States’ CIA and FBI.

Mr Vilks, who lives in an isolated area of Sweden, was put under police protection after threats were made against his life.

When al-Qa’ida put the bounty on the cartoonist’s head in 2007 it offered a 50 per cent bonus if Mr Vilks was “slaughtered like a lamb” by having his throat cut, while another $50,000 was put on the life of Ulf Johansson, editor-in-chief of Nerikes Allehanda, the local newspaper which printed the cartoon.

However those arrested are not believed to be members of the terrorist group.

It understood some have converted to the Muslim faith.

The arrests were made at around 10am as officers conducted a number of raids.

Gardai said the operation was supported by members from National Support Services and the Republic’s anti-terrorist Special Detective Unit.

A Garda spokesman added: “Throughout the investigation An Garda Siochana has been working closely with law enforcement agencies in the United States and in a number of European countries.”

London: Islamists mobilize votes for Livingston, IFE helped secure massive swing

From The Telegraph U.K.

Islamists got voters out for Livingstone

A fundamentalist group which believes in sharia law, jihad and creating an “Islamic social and political order” in Britain arranged an “unprecedented mobilisation” of voters for the former London mayor, Ken Livingstone, at the last mayoral election.

By Andrew Gilligan
Published: 9:00PM GMT 06 Mar 2010

In an election lost by Mr Livingstone, the Islamic Forum of Europe helped secure massive and unexpected swings towards him in its east London heartland.

In one ward, Spitalfields, his vote share rose from 29.6 per cent in 2004 – an election he won – to 68.4 per cent in 2008, a rise of nearly 39 percentage points.

In every other ward in Tower Hamlets and Newham with a sizeable Muslim population, his vote rose by between 23 and 36 percentage points. His vote in other Muslim and ethnic minority areas of London also rose, but by far smaller amounts.

Mr Livingstone’s economic development body, the London Development Agency, had agreed to pay more than £1.3 million to the East London Mosque, controlled by the IFE, and described by critics as hardline.

Emails leaked to The Sunday Telegraph show that a senior LDA official furiously protested against at least £500,000 of this grant, saying there were “major concerns” about the mosque project and “no case” for giving it the money.

However, the official was overruled and the grant was paid.

Part of Mr Livingstone’s voting rise will have been due to his opposition to the Iraq war and support for the Palestinian cause, both popular among Muslims. Continue Reading →

Canada: Muslim lauches complaint against Quebec school for non-compliance to sharia

From the CBC

Niqab-wearing woman pursues Quebec college

The niqab is a style of headwear that covers the whole body,  leaving only the eyes exposed.The niqab is a style of headwear that covers the whole body, leaving only the eyes exposed. (CBC)

Quebec’s Human Rights Commission is studying a complaint from a permanent resident expelled from a French college class last year after she refused to remove her niqab veil.

The Egyptian woman was enrolled in a language class for new immigrants at the CÉGEP St-Laurent in northwest Montreal when she was asked to remove the religious clothing.

She claims school officials violated her freedom of religion by requesting she not wear her modest dress, which covers the entire face and body and leaves only the eyes exposed.

The school says it tried to accommodate her on several occasions. Officials say she was not wearing her niqab veil when she applied for the program, nor when she met with school representatives for the first time prior to the 10-month course.

But when she showed up for class, she was wearing a niqab because of the presence of male students.

The school said the teacher allowed her to do her oral tests alone in a separate room, and present her assignments with her back turned to the class.

The teacher told her it was important when learning a new language to be able to see others’ faces.

The woman’s demands created tension in the class, school officials said.

“For the teacher it was more difficult to hear her, and it was more difficult for all the people to understand what she has to say,” said the school’s director, Paul-Émile Bourque.

But one Montrealer who wears a niqab said she doesn’t understand how it could be a problem in the classroom.

“I went through four years of university in engineering and I graduated with distinction,” said Afifa Naz. “It didn’t affect my grades. I participated in projects with my group and really I had no problems.”

But the government is sticking by its guns.

A spokesman for the province’s immigration minister says the woman could have stayed in the French class had she agreed to remove her niqab for certain exercises.

She claims school officials violated her freedom of religion by requesting she not wear her modest dress, which covers the entire face and body and leaves only the eyes exposed.

The school says it tried to accommodate her on several occasions. Officials say she was not wearing her niqab veil when she applied for the program, nor when she met with school representatives for the first time prior to the 10-month course.

But when she showed up for class, she was wearing a niqab because of the presence of male students.

The school said the teacher allowed her to do her oral tests alone in a separate room, and present her assignments with her back turned to the class.

The teacher told her it was important when learning a new language to be able to see others’ faces.

The woman’s demands created tension in the class, school officials said.

“For the teacher it was more difficult to hear her, and it was more difficult for all the people to understand what she has to say,” said the school’s director, Paul-Émile Bourque.

But one Montrealer who wears a niqab said she doesn’t understand how it could be a problem in the classroom.

“I went through four years of university in engineering and I graduated with distinction,” said Afifa Naz. “It didn’t affect my grades. I participated in projects with my group and really I had no problems.”

But the government is sticking by its guns.

A spokesman for the province’s immigration minister says the woman could have stayed in the French class had she agreed to remove her niqab for certain exercises.

Dispatches: Britain’s Islamic Republic

The rest will be posted soon. Here is part 1. which is worse, the Muslims or the British government face for them, making preposterous claims about Islam.

At last! The long searched for, moderate Muslim!

Thank you Don’t Bend over for Allah. Below is the explanation of who this guy actually is.

What makes this especially disturbing is that this man is not your run of the mill religious supremacist,
this man is Mehdi Hasan, the Senior Political Editor of Britains New Statesman Magazine.

STOPshariaLAWnow posts this video:

It is refreshing to see a woman actually fighting back against the horror of Islam. Modern feminism seems to be in league with Islam as modern feminism is more concerned with being in alignment with anti-West and anti-capitalism than they are with actual women’s rights as human beings. My only criticism of this video, is that while STOPshariaLAWnow is 100% correct that the ‘small stick’ or the ‘beat them lightly’ is not a mitigating factor in any way whatsoever, and in fact it is obscene to even sugest it is,  Robert Spencer’s book on Koran exposes how actually only in the English translations of Koran and other Muslim holy books, are those preposterous excuses used, and not in the original, placed there to anaesthetize western peoples to the true depth of horror and depravity which is Islam.

Infidel cyclist run over by a holy car of Riyadh

Vlad has to a small degree, focused on how Islam is antipathetic to the arts and music and musicians in particular. There are many reasons for this not the least of which is that artists tend to be the most sanctimonious of the leftists, not to mention strident advocates of multiculturalism. The other is that supporters and producers of the arts need to know, that other cultures, specifically Islam, do not see the arts as Americans do.

Celebrity culture is uniquely an American experience even if it has been exported to many western nations. Rome for example, loved and admired the arts but felt Artists overall, were considerably lower in status than people in the trades. I tend to agree with the Romans.

In any case, now cyclists have been targeted in Saudi not so much because they are cyclists, but because they are infidels. The trial, if there is one, and the sentence, if there is one, will be very revealing as to how sharia law will view this, if indeed it is a crime at all.

The bigger point is, that in a world with increasingly higher numbers of Muslims being brought into western nations, nations which have a profound culture of their own but are in denial of it, we will start to see the following.

Our culture, which allows for people to make themselves very vulnerable to strangers from time to time, will begin to change those behaviours. That we will have to start to examine our food and where it is from more. To not use bicycles trivially for exercise and sport where we may be vulnerable to strangers in cars.

‘Situational awareness’ will become something people learning more and more circumstances and not just something taught to spies and security personnel. We already see this in aviation to a very large degree. Aviation is merely the first area where western civilization has grudgingly changed its sense of security to accommodate the multi cultural fantasy. But it will not be the last.

Our refusal to accept the fact that we are indeed at war with Islam, as we have been historically more often than not, means we will have to come up with more and more creative reasons why we are losing and why its somehow OK, or more likely, our own fault. Civilization has already thrown Israel and by extension Jewish people, under the bus. Israel’s foreign policy has aggravated the peaceful Muslims and made victims of the ‘Palestinians’ and they deserve what they get or some other rationalization.

There is also of course, massive denial of the facts on the ground for Jewish people world wide and especially in universities. Have a look at this stunning case of selective enforcement at York U. This is a very serious matter. This means that York has allowed the most vicious and hostile people to western ideas, the very ideas a university is supposed to perpetuate, to set the agenda, and the parameters of who may and may not speak, and what ideas may or may not be presented to the student body.

Granted this example of the cyclist was in Saudi Arabia but this is about stages. With larger numbers of Muslims, you get a larger demand for more and more strict applications of sharia law. Already at Carleton U. in Canada, the main bar, Roosters Pub, which was rumoured to be one of the largest beer outlets in North America, was forced to go booze free to accommodate Muslim ‘students’* who felt they had a right to be in there without being offended by the presence of infidels drinking.

Much more disturbingly, the facts, which at the time where printed in local newspapers etc. where hushed up and its very difficult to find evdience of this now. This by the way, was in the 1990s or earlier. I went in and interviewed staff members myself who refused to speak on the matter or denied knowing anything about why a massively profitable institution became dry.

It will be well worth watching the trial of those arrested for deliberately running over foreign workers in the KSA who were cycling. It is the future of our own nations. First in the behaviour, the attacking of the vulnerable in any way possible in order to destroy our trust based culture, and then in the judicial process that follows. All this I guarantee until and unless we admit in the west, that we are indeed at war, with Islam.

Eeyore for Vladtepesblog.

Col Allen West speaks in Washington D.C. Feb 19 2010 from Vlad Tepes on Vimeo.

*I put ‘students’ in single quotes because people who  are there to learn seldom demand that everything at the institution of education change to conform to what the ‘student’ already knows.

East London Mosque headquarters for Islamic Forum of Europe

From The Telegraph U.K.

Inextricably linked to controversial mosque: the secret world of IFE

On Whitechapel Road in the heart of the East End stands the East London Mosque.

By Andrew Gilligan
Published: 8:00AM GMT 28 Feb 2010

http://nickbaines.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/east-london-mosque.jpg

For most of the 15,000 ordinary Muslims who pray there each week, it is simply a place of worship. For many, it provides valuable social facilities, and creche and outreach services.

But for a small number, the mosque is the headquarters of a secretive, fundamentalist political network. The Islamic Forum of Europe is dedicated, in its own words, to changing the “very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed … from ignorance to Islam”.

The mosque and IFE are inextricably intertwined. Dr Mohammed Abdul Bari, the chairman of the mosque, and its vice-chairman are former IFE presidents.

The director and imam of the mosque are trustees of the group. Of 22 IFE trustees in recent years, only five have not also been trustees or officeholders of the religious centre.

The mosque calls the IFE a “social welfare organisation” and the IFE presents itself as committed to “community cohesion” and “tolerance”.

But the undercover reporters discovered that it was also a sophisticated political group with a structured rank system and hardline goals.

Prospective recruits must attend training. One undercover reporter was told that she would have to take an exam and swear an oath of allegiance and ordered to keep her membership of the IFE a secret. Continue Reading →

“Death to gays, Jews are filth, Green is good”: Kings College plays host to Sheikh Quick

From The London Evening Standard, courtesy TROP.

Islamic preacher who called Jews ‘filth’ to speak at London university

Felix Allen
25.02.10

A London university has been condemned for inviting an Islamic preacher with anti-Semitic and homophobic views to give a lecture to students.

Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick Guest speaker: Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick will lecture students at King’s College.

Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick is due to speak at King’s College‘s Strand campus at six tonight.

Peter Tatchell, of pressure group Outrage, accused university bosses of cowardice and “complicity with fundamentalism” by giving the preacher a public platform.

Sheikh Quick has denounced the “filth” of Jews and once gave a televised lecture in which he said the Islamic position on homosexuality is “death”.

He added: “Muslims are going to have to take a stand [against homosexuals] and it’s not enough to call names.”

He is due to give a talk on the environment in an event organised by the University of London Union Islamic Society for its Green Week campaign.

Mr Tatchell said: “King’s College would not host a white supremacist who advocated racism or death to black people… King’s College has an equal opportunities policy that prohibits the promotion of hatred against minorities, but it is not enforcing it.

“The university is not a safe place for Jewish and gay students when it facilitates a vicious homophobe and anti-Semite like Sheikh Abdullah Quick.”

He claimed that the university’s attitude represented “collusion with the gateways to terrorism”.

A King’s College spokeswoman said Sheikh Quick’s talk would be on “environmental problems, Islamic solutions”, adding: “He has already spoken at other universities without controversy and there is no indication that the topic of his talk will be controversial.

“The Dean of King’s College London, who oversees multi-faith relations, and the president of the students’ union will attend the event. If they deem any comments from Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick to be offensive to minorities, the talk will be stopped.”

Sheikh Quick is also due to visit the University of East London at the weekend.

His website says he was born in America and completed a masters degree and a doctorate in African history at the University of Toronto, and has served as an imam in Los Angeles, Jamaica, Canada and Cape Town.