Category Archives: thuggery and intimidation

Costly taps installed for hooked hate preacher

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From The Daily Mail

Hate preacher Abu Hamza gets new £650 taps fitted in his prison cell… so he can operate them with his hook

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 1:11 PM on 16th November 2009

The jail cells used by extremist Muslim preacher Abu Hamza have been specially-adapted to accommodate his hook – prompting angry claims that prison officials are ‘bowing down’ to him.

The cells used by the 51-year-old – who is serving a seven-year sentence for inciting murder and preaching hate  – have been fitted with lever taps costing £650, despite claims he is prefectly capable of using the standard twist ones.

Handrails were also put in the lavatories used by Hamza, who is allowed to wear his prosthetic limb fitted with a hook inside the high-security Belmarsh prison.

Jailed: Hate preacher Abu Hamza, pictured outside the North London Mosque at Finsbury Park surrounded by supporters in 2003Jailed: Hate preacher Abu Hamza, pictured outside the North London Mosque at Finsbury Park surrounded by supporters in 2003

A prison source told The Sun that officials at the jail were always catering to his whims.

‘It seems that whenever he says, ‘Jump’, the authorities ask him, ‘How high?’,’ said the source.

‘No one in here can understand why we’re spending the money to do this when he’s had no problem using the same taps as everyone else for the five years he’s been here.’

Egyptian-born Hamza lost both arms and an eye in a blast in Afghanistan and now uses a hook in place of his right hand. He has been held at Belmarsh, in south-east London, since 2004.

Two cells have already been kitted out for him because prisoners held at the jail are moved every month. The work, all at taxpayers’ expense, took two days.

He had spent 21 months on remand when he was jailed for seven years in February 2006 for inciting murder and preaching hate at Finsbury Park Mosque in North London.

American prosecutors want him extradited to stand trial on terrorism charges, including setting up al Qaeda training camps.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance estimates father-of-eight Hamza has so far cost Britain £2.75million in welfare payments, council housing, NHS and prison bills, trials and legal appeals.

It is feared his fight against deportation could take five years and soak up another £250,000.

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice said: ‘Two cells have been fitted with hospital-style taps to enable disabled prisoners to use them. The cost is approximately £650, which will offset the cost of prison staff providing physical assistance to prisoners.’

thanks kitmanTV:

Riots in France.

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I have avoided blogging this for the day despite having had links to videos and articles since early this morning. However, early reports were that these riots are somehow connected to the results of a soccer game, Egypt beats Algeria or something like that. My impulse was to blog about how Muslims at least in one way integrate nicely into European culture. They riot over the results of soccer games. However more and newer information is coming in that seems to indicate that while soccer may be the catalyst for these riots, the real motive and desired result is distinctly political and likely jihad. After all, the numbers of Muslims in France now make the hijra nearly large enough to move to a pretty much full time jihad phase of the establishment of the dominance of Islam.

Here is one of several videos. I will post more information as I get it here in this post.

1:19 AM Nov 16 The Snaphanen blog in Denmark has a reference to hunting white people in full quotes. Information is still a little fuzzy but it appears that the Paris riots were motivated by a publicity stunt by a Belgiun company, that was planning to give away 40,000 Euros. When they saw the massive turn out, they cancelled. People went wild in the streets and there was talk of “Hunting White People”. Go to the blog and use your google translator. For those of you with Flock or Firefox, I recommend Foxlingo, a free plug in that allows rapid and quite good machine translations for many languages.

More here at the Gates of Vienna:

8:00 PM Some information seems to indicate that the riots in Paris are not motivated by the same things as Marseilles.

Eeyore.

Everyone needs one of these at a soccer game

Everyone needs one of these at a soccer game

Thanks to Steen, Gates of Vienna and KitmanTV for much you see and will see here as well as others.

Turkish apostate of Islam in Germany

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Here is a nice little film clip from what I believe is a German TV woman’s network about a girl who left her religious Turkish Muslim family and integrated into greater German society. Personally, I wouldn’t sell her life insurance if I was Lloyd’s of London. But she has a great attitude anyway.

Thank you to StopSHARIAlawNOW for sending me this video and to Jscivias for the translation. Any errors are mine and mine alone.

More on the shootings at Ft. Hood for when they tell us our eyes are bad

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Frankly, I don’t really want to post endless information about how the Fort Hood shooter was in fact a Muslim Jihadi. We all know it and anyone who says otherwise as an agenda other than the truth.
However in my experience, giant events like this one have a habit of, what is that expression, ‘falling down the memory hole.

One just has to ask any Canadian about the ‘Marc Lepine’ Massacre at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and they will tell you he was a woman hating Canadian man who wanted women bare foot and pregnant in the kitchen. Well they would be half right. Marc Lepine was not his original name. He was in fact shouting Allahu Ackbar as he shot those women, he was the son of an Algerian Muslim who treated women exactly as Koran says they should be treated and as he taught his son to treat them and so on. However all that information comes as a great shock to Canadians and Im reasonably confident that two or three hours after you inform one, they forget it again and re-adopt the feminist party line on this, Canada’s first real jihadi-Islamic attack.

So I feel I really should post what I can find before the Obama administration finds a spin it likes, parachutes in another batalion of grief councilors and convinces us all it was as the British would call it “An anti-Islamic activity” designed to make our future religion and culture look less than perfectly liberal.

First, this video with Lt. Col Ralph Peters.

Here is Phyllis Chesler on Lou Dobbs thanks to Solstice
Then, this article from The Ottawa Citizen: H/T Gates of Vienna for this one

You can’t ignore the role of radical Islam

By Tarek Fatah, Citizen SpecialNovember 10, 2009Comments (6)

As dozens of talking heads descended on CNN and FOX TV to give their opinions on the Fort Hood massacre last week, no one seemed to notice the significance of the attire that suspect Maj. Nidal Hasan was wearing the morning of the killings. It was captured on a store surveillance video as Maj. Hasan bought a coffee.

CNN’s Arab commentator incorrectly reported that the major was wearing “Muslim garb” commonly worn in Jordan, and that it reflected his devoutness as a Muslim. However, to Pakistanis and Afghans watching the clip around the world, his clothing reflected something far more significant and sinister.

Maj. Hasan was wearing the “shalwar-kameez,” the traditional attire worn by Pashtuns on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border. Had Maj. Hasan been of Pakistani or Afghan ancestry, it would have meant very little, but for an Arab-American to wear this attire was significant.

In the Middle East, over five million Pakistanis and Afghans work and live among the local Arab population. The shalwar-kameez is common on the streets of Dubai and Jeddah, but no Arab male would ever want to be seen wearing this garb. I have lived a decade in the Arab world and not once did I see an Arab wearing the shalwar-kameez.

Having said that there is one particular group of Arabs who did embrace the garb of the Pashtuns. They were the “Afghan Arabs” who went to Afghanistan to wage jihad alongside al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Continue Reading →

Ottawa Taxi boss convicted and sentenced for threat of honour killing

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From The Ottawa Sun:

Thanks to everyone who tipped us to this.

Taxi boss jailed for threats against daughter

Man threatens to break daughters lesg, kill her

Man threatens to break daughters lesg, kill her

By MEGAN GILLIS, Courts Bureau

Last Updated: 11th November 2009, 7:26am

The city’s taxi union boss was handed a year in jail Tuesday for what a judge deemed an “honour crime.”

Yusef Salam Al Mezel, 44, had pleaded guilty to criminally harassing his 23-year-old daughter, Eman, over three weeks in July 2007.

“Mr. Al Mezel has threatened his daughter with serious violence and has caused her to fear for her safety in the name of honour,” Judge Lynn Ratushny wrote. “He has committed the crime of harassment against her in the name of honour.”

Al Mezel admitted to pushing his daughter, threatening to break her legs and kill her and smashing her computer. When she fled marriage to a Syrian man for a $9,000 dowry, he stalked her to a shelter and a friend’s home.

He sent her e-mails threatening her uncles and cousins would go “crazy” over the family’s honour and to come home before someone got hurt.

Police spirited the young woman — and the family sheltering her — out of Ottawa.

There’s no evidence Al Mezel would have killed her but his threats “invoke a seriously dangerous belief system that can and has led to violence against women,” Ratushny wrote.

The judge noted that Al Mezel, who came from Kuwait 20 years ago, is a community leader — a founder of his mosque, city council candidate and representative of 1,500 taxi drivers.

But she wrote that a year is the minimum to denounce what he’s done and deter others.

The Crown had asked for up to two years.

Eman Al Mezel testified she’d stained the family “sharaf” by running away and shedding the hijab and killing her was the only way to clean it.

Al Mezel’s other daughters testified that their father was never violent and is a religious “modernist.” His brothers testified the family are “lefties” and believe men and women are equals.

Al Mezel himself said that listening to expert evidence on honour crimes was like hearing about a “different world” — he’d never, he said, lived in that world or held those beliefs.

Al Mezel’s lawyer, Geraldine Castle-Trudel, argued at sentencing that Al Mezel was a desperate father who wanted to bring his daughter home and the victim of anti-Muslim stereotypes. She’d sought probation.

“My heart breaks for him and his family,” she said Tuesday. “He’s a really, really decent person who made a very bad mistake.”

me**********@******ia.ca

Muslim gets jail time for threatening honour crime

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From The Ottawa Citizen

Union boss jailed in ‘honour’ crime

Yusef Al Mezel gets one-year term for threatening daughter with violence

By Andrew Seymour, The Ottawa CitizenNovember 11, 2009

The head of Ottawa’s taxi union has been sentenced to 12 months in jail for threatening his daughter with an honour crime if she did not obey his wishes.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Lynn Ratushny said the sentence was the minimum penalty that Yusef Al Mezel could serve to address the “strong need” for denunciation and general deterrence after he implied that the actions of his 23-year-old daughter would be met with violence because she had shamed and dishonoured her family.

While the judge recognized Al Mezel was a respected community leader whose threats would not likely result in an honour killing, she said they do remain as threats of some possible form of violence in the name of honour that required significant condemnation.

“They invoke a seriously dangerous belief system that can and has led to violence against women,” said Ratushny.

“Mr. Al Mezel has threatened his daughter with serious violence and has caused her to fear for her safety in the name of honour. He has committed the crime of harassment against her in the name of honour,” she said.

“He has professed no adherence to any personal belief in there being any justification for honour killings, however he has committed another form of honour crime by deliberately and repeatedly invoking the concept of violence against her in the name of honour,” said Ratushny.

Al Mezel’s lawyer, Geraldine Castle-Trudel, said he is now considering an appeal of the sentence. As it stands now, Al Mezel is eligible to apply for parole after serving two months of his sentence.

“It’s a tragedy when you have a really decent person who has been a contributing member of the community … going to jail,” said Castle-Trudel, who had earlier asked the judge to consider a conditional sentence including house arrest. “This is not a career criminal. This is a man who lost his good judgment following issues with his daughter.”

Al Mezel, the 44-year-old president of the Canadian Autoworkers Local 1688, ran unsuccessfully for a city council seat in the Alta Vista ward in 2006.

In September of 2008, he pleaded guilty to criminal harassment, admitting he repeatedly called, wrote, followed and visited the residences of his daughter in July 2007 in an attempt to get her to return home after a violent incident in which he pushed her into a flight of stairs and threatened to break her legs and kill her before smashing her computer.

The incident occurred after an argument over Eman Al Mezel’s volunteer work. Eman Al Mezel said she moved out of the home after her father arranged for her to marry a 24-year-old Syrian man.

In one e-mail to his daughter, Al Mezel tells her that they could no longer “hide the problem” from her uncles and cousins and that he could not guarantee the “safety of anyone” if she didn’t return home. “Eman, you know when everyone hear about, they will react crazy, and no one will care about police or other thing, you know your family,” read the e-mail.

In the message, he also wrote of “the Sharaf of the family,” which Eman Al Mezel later explained to police was the belief that she had shamed and dishonoured her family because she had run away from home and shed her hijab and Muslim beliefs.

Crown prosecutors had been asking for a jail sentence of between 18 and 24 months, arguing Al Mezel’s threat of an honour killing was designed to “control and dominate” his daughter.

Al Mezel was trying to deny his daughter “every basic freedom as to how she could live her life,” assistant Crown attorney James Cavanagh argued, the result of an “underlying notion of patriarchal dominance” based on a “perverted and archaic belief in family honour.”

as******@****************st.com

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

Why do we permit the translation as ‘marriage’?

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As I have posted here before, the issue in front of western courts these days should not be one of polygamy, but of Muslim marriage itself.

If a group of people want to live together in any fashion at all, who are we to stop it? How do we stop it? Cameras under the bed sheets? Clearly there are legal implications to marriage that need to be examined, but well before we get there, the question needs to be asked, ‘Is marriage in Islam in any way related to the western concept of an adult man and adult women voluntarily entering into a contract where all parties are aware of, and consenting to, the arrangement and have more or less equal recourse to the law and an exit strategy.

Clearly in Islam, this is not remotely the case. Women under sharia law are property. All laws dealing with contractual arrangements having to do with women are property deals. Women may in some cases actually choose their own destiny in some Islamic nations but that would be a privilege. Very often, women are forced into marriage for money, or to settle a debt for a father etc. As these two excellent videos illustrate, the way women are viewed in islam simply has no parallel in western societies and the sharia arrangement where a woman is transferred from one man to another should under no circumstances be permitted to be translated as ‘marriage’.

These should be looked at, and treated in the west as we would slavery. pedophilia, prostitution of children, forced sex slavery etc. An examination of this is urgent. As it is now in western nations distinctly different legal standards are being applied to muslims and non muslims, a giant step towards the implementation of a two tier system making sharia, or muslim law, dominant and the rights of the dhimmi. or non muslims resident, as secondary.
h/t TT for these videos:
Link: Muslim marriage

Link: Women in Afghanistan

Video of the author of the Danish cartoon book, which Yale censored.

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h/t Snaphanen

Muslim father accused of running down ‘westernized’ daughter nabbed

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From The Arizona Republic

Glendale man accused of running over daughter found

Faleh AlmalekiFaleh Almaleki

by JJ Hensley – Oct. 30, 2009 08:55 AM
The Arizona Republic

The Glendale man accused of running down his daughter for being too “westernized” was taken into custody Thursday night, police confirmed.

Faleh Almaleki, 48, was in custody in Georgia, Peoria police spokesman

Mike Tellef said late Thursday.

Jim Joyner, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service in Atlanta, said Almaleki was arrested Thursday when he arrived at Atlanta’s airport

.

Police believe Almaleki ran over his daughter, Noor Almaleki, 20, and Amal Edan Khalaf, 43, in a Peoria parking lot on Oct. 20 because he felt his daughter had disrespected the family.

Khalaf is reportedly the mother of Noor’s boyfriend.

The two women were still in the hospital, with Noor Almaleki in “life-threatening” condition and Khalaf’s condition improving, when police updated their status earlier this week.

Faleh Almaleki had evaded police for more than a week since running over the two women.

Noor’s brother, Peter-Ali Almaleki, said their father called home late last week to check on his daughter’s condition but his wife hung up on him.

Includes information from The Associated Press

Muslims Threaten Breslin Owner After He Laughs Off Bar Demand

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H/T Diana West:

102809breslin.jpg
Katie Sokoler/Gothamist

The lovely-looking restaurant and bar The Breslin begins lunch service tomorrow, and co-owner Ken Friedman (The Spotted Pig) is planning on serving alcohol despite objections from the Masjid Ar-Rahman mosque across the street. Earlier this month the mosque’s leaders called a meeting with Friedman at The Ace Hotel, where The Breslin is located, and asked, “Can you move the bar?” Friedman’s response makes us want to hurry over to The Breslin right now for a dram of Laphroaig to show our support (and drown out the voices):

I laughed. And the guy said, “Oh, you think that’s funny?” And I said, “Yeah, that is funny, that is really funny, because we’re not going to move the bar just because you discovered we’re serving booze.” Can you name one restaurant in New York that doesn’t serve booze? I said, “This is the United States of America and we’ll do whatever the fuck we want.” He said the mosque had suggested it couldn’t control the behavior of “a few bad eggs”; i.e., we could get a brick through our window.

Friedman notified police of the threat, but just to show he’s not a hard-hearted man, that it’s not all dollars and cents, he agreed to put a curtain over the windows so devout Muslims wouldn’t be corrupted by the sight of infidel inebriation. But the curtain hasn’t arrived yet, so over the weekend he actually taped paper over the windows to hide a gay wedding. A volunteer at the mosque says city law forbids serving liquor within 200 feet of a place of worship and that “not more than 200 feet is between the mosque and the bar.”

But Ace Hotel developer Andrew Zobler tells The Observer, “The law is clear that in order for that to apply it has to be an exclusively dedicated house of worship, and at their space they have both residences and a restaurant, so basically, because of those uses the law allowed there to be a bar within 200 feet. Everyone was aware of that when the liquor license was granted.” And Friedman adds, “They can threaten, but they can’t really stop us.” Yeah, heh, what are these devout, pissed-off Muslims gonna do?

Another article on the same story below the fold. I believe this is a much more important story than perhaps even terrorism as we are more familiar with it, as this type of extortion and intimidation wide spread can collapse a culture and civilization such as ours much much faster than occasional attack.

Eeyore for Vlad

Mosque ‘unhappy’ with booze served at New York resto-bar, threatened brick toss

By Grace | October 30, 2009

From The New York Observer

Spotted Piglet Hiccups: Boozy Breslin Clashes With Mosque

October 27, 2009 | 8:00 p.m
Ken Friedman.

The much-hyped, soon-to-open Breslin restaurant, situated in the 12-story Ace Hotel on Broadway and 29th, is giving members of the Masjid Ar-Rahman mosque across the street some agita. “Five times a day, there’s a hundred cabs on the street—the good news is you can always get a cab,” co-owner Ken Friedman told the Transom the other evening. He said some mosque visitors “object to seeing people drink alcohol.” Continue Reading →

UK: SCHOOL ALLOWS THUGGISH BEHAVIOUR FOR FEAR OF BEING BRANDED AS RACISTS

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A classic example of political correctness run amok. Treating students with kid gloves (read = differently) because they are minorities, is in fact …racism. It’s a shadowy form of racism that thrives within the dogma of political correctness, which focuses solely on Western societal institutions, norms, customs and values.

The idea behind political correctness, the brainchild of cultural Marxists, is to destroy Western society from within by attacking its institutions as being racist. Inevitably, political correctness produces a racism all its own, but that doesn’t phase or stop the cultural Marxists, because when it’s all said and done, they’re not against racism at all, but against Western society.
So here it is in full display, a school staff scared to death of being labeled as “racists”, turn a blind eye to the thuggish behaviour of their students, solely because they are ethnic Pakistanis. This is the direct outcome of PC dogma having been accepted as a mainstream ideology, which has resulted in societal approval of the form of racism that the Tundra Tabloids has long been describing as “humanitarian racism”. KGS

“An attributing of intrinsically reduced responsibility for their acts to people of certain ethnic or national groups.” [Dr.Manfred Gerstenfeld, Behind the Humanitarian Mask, The Nordic Countries, Israel and the Jews, pp.22]

He gave his name as Henry Webster when he stepped into the witness box at the High Court in London last week. But he wasn’t the Henry Webster his family and friends remember.

The real Henry Webster was a strapping 6ft 2in rugby player, not someone who struggled to string sentences together and had to be given painkillers to complete his evidence.

Instead of preparing for college or university, he has been left with learning difficulties, short-term memory loss, and epilepsy. Henry will settle for that because the alternative would have meant not being here at all.

This is the only upside of being attacked with a claw hammer that left an inch-deep impression on his skull.

One claw hammer and 12 teenage thugs versus one young man. Those were the odds when a gang of Asian youths ambushed him.

After their work was done, his attackers punched the air in triumph -‘that’s what you call Paki bashing,’ they yelled.

The thugs have all been jailed. Not all the culprits, however, have been brought to book – not in the eyes of Henry’s family, anyway. They believe teachers at his school, near Swindon – where the assault took place in 2007 when Henry was just 15 – are as guilty as the actual perpetrators themselves.

Why? Because, they say, the school allowed ethnic minority pupils to get away with flagrant misbehaviour, and then handed them less severe punishments than their white classmates because staff feared they might otherwise be accused of racism.

In other words, a culture of ‘ educational apartheid’ prevailed in all but name at Ridgeway School.

Had this not been the case, Henry’s parents insist, their son would probably not have sustained brain damage outside the school tennis courts one day in January nearly three years ago.

Read more:

IFPS and Lord Malcolm Pearson

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Here is a chilling interview with the man who invited Geert Wilders to speak at the British House of Lords. ‘This is not a right wing nut’ nor a racist but in fact a liberal in every sense of the word and most importantly, in the true ‘Jeffersonian’ sense of it. Once men of this caliber begin to risk their public profile with opinions which are unfashionable, it is safe to say we have a very real crisis on our collective hands.

Lord Pearson Oct 28 Washington DC from Vlad Tepes on Vimeo.

Saudi man demands cash for wife’s freedom

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From The National Post

Saudi husband demands $300K for wife’s freedom

Marian Scott, Canwest News Service Published: Thursday, October 29, 2009

Nathalie Morin's husband has refused to give her permission to return to Canada, demanding $300,000 for the release of his three children and wife. Courtesy Durocher Family Nathalie Morin’s husband has refused to give her permission to return to Canada, demanding $300,000 for the release of his three children and wife.

The common-law husband of a Quebec woman is demanding $300,000 for the release of his three children and wife, who swore in an affidavit that she has been held against her will in Saudi Arabia since 2005.

Samir Said Ramthi Al Bishi met with Canadian officials in Saudi Arabia on Sept. 22, at which time he demanded the cash in exchange for the release of his wife, Nathalie Morin, 25, a Longueuil woman and mother to the couple’s three children, ages 7, 3, and 11 months.

Canadian officials responded by saying Mr. Al Bishi’s demand is legal under Saudi law, so “we cannot take sides and will continue to consider the situation of Mrs. Morin and her three children as a private, family matter,” consular official Nathalie Tenorio-Roy told Ms. Morin’s mother, Johanne Durocher, in an email on Oct. 22.

“I’m completely scandalized that the government would pass on this demand to me,” said Ms. Durocher, who compared Mr. Al Bishi’s request for cash to a ransom demand. “You don’t buy your children,” she added.

Ms. Durocher said she has no intention of negotiating a payment for her daughter’s return, and has no money to do so anyway.

Meanwhile, information obtained by Bloc Quebecois MP Francine Lalonde under freedom of information reveals that Canadian consular officials suggested Ms. Morin’s children might be better off staying in Saudi Arabia without her.

“Maybe we will get the children to Canada — to be with their high-school-educated, 22-year-old mother,” an embassy official wrote in a memo on Oct. 19, 2006.

In another memo, sent the previous day, the official wrote: “We have higher priorities and I have spoken with Nathalie — not her priority either.”

Ms. Durocher rejected the official’s claim that bringing her children back to Canada was not a priority for Ms. Morin.

Her daughter might have told embassy officials she was prepared to leave her children in Saudi Arabia because she was demoralized from enduring beatings and not being allowed to leave the house, Ms. Durocher said.

But Ms. Durocher said that Ms. Morin, who visited Montreal for one month in 2006 without her children, went back to Saudi Arabia because she couldn’t bear being away from them.

Ms. Morin’s Montreal lawyer, Julius Grey, said he is studying the documents obtained under freedom of information to determine whether she has grounds to sue the government.

Ms. Morin met Mr. Al Bishi in 2001 in Montreal, where he was living illegally. He was deported in 2002, soon after she had a child by him. She moved to Saudi Arabia in 2005 after two visits there.

Gar Pardy, a former Canadian ambassador and expert on consular matters in Ottawa, called on the government to take a stronger stance on Ms. Morin’s behalf.

“The government has to stay involved by pushing the Saudis to do something appropriate,” he said.

Natalie Sarafian, press attache to Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, noted that when Canadians leave Canadian territory, they are subject to foreign laws.

“Minister Cannon’s greatest wish is that this matter is settled and we are doing everything we can to enable this,” she said.

Ms. Sarafian added that Mr. Cannon met with Saudi Arabia’s Commission on Human Rights and raised the Morin case with his Saudi counterpart on Saturday during a visit to the Middle East.

Sharia law: Coming to a city near you. 100 cops Vs. 10 sandwiches

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Where a picnic is against the law

Moroccan assnic

Moroccan protests against the Ramadan fast provoke arrests and angry threats.
By Erik German – GlobalPost
Published: October 26, 2009 06:51 ET

RABAT, Morocco — Death threats, police interrogations and a media firestorm aren’t typical upshots of a decision to enjoy an afternoon picnic.

But that’s just what happened after a circle of Moroccan activists tried meeting for an outdoor lunch during Ramadan last month.

The activists planned the meal to protest a national law that punishes those who break the Islamic holy month’s mandatory daytime fast. Their stated aim was to spur debate on religious freedom.

The resulting brouhaha has observers debating the sway fundamentalists hold in a country that has a 98 percent Muslim majority and which, despite travel advertisements that make its society appear modern and secular, is actually quite traditional. Continue Reading →