Piotr Stanczak did not exhibit the slightest hint of hesitation when the Pakistani Taliban asked him to choose between execution and conversion to Islam.
Whether the Polish geologist acted out of pride or religious conviction, he decided to pay through his blood to save his faith, a choice that bewildered his killers and keep them talking about him with respect after his murder.
[...]
“Our people were keeping an eye on his movements for several months. We were expecting that we could exchange some of our mujahideen in the government’s custody for him,” Amir quoted a guard as saying.
“Piotr never showed any sign of nervousness or fear. He would finish the food we gave him and sleep well. We all admired his courage. It was not an easy decision even for our commander to kill Piotr,” the guard, who identified himself as Abdullah, told Amir. “That’s why he gave him a last chance,”
“But he was very stubborn and refused our goodwill gesture to save his life,” Abdullah was cited as saying by Amir.
“Piotr said first we should release him. He will go back to his country, consult his family and read about Islam and only then deicide [that is one hell of a sic] about converting to Islam.”
This surprised everyone but we had to kill him because principles are principles - we gave him a chance and he lost it, the guard told Amir. “But undoubtedly he was a brave man.”
Of course, giving a Christian or Jewish hostage a three-part choice comes straight from the holy, holy Qur'an:
Qur’an 9:29 “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued”
He didn't pay their jizya demands, didn't convert to Islam; the only remaining choice is clear, smiting at his neck.
After reading this update, I greatly admire Piotr Stanczak, who was a true martyr for refusing to give up his beliefs even to save his life. But then Christianity does not have a concept like 'taqiyya', which allows Shi'a Muslims to lie about their faith in order to avoid being murdered by Sunni Muslims. God values honesty, Allah values deception. Piotr Stanczak was no victim; his faith defeated their threats of violence. His killers live, but they live as Muslims, which is its own purgatory.
I hope we could all emulate Piotr Stanczak's resolve.
These are turbulent times for actuaries, the people who find accountancy too exciting. From The Times:
A row has blown up in the usually tranquil backwater that is the actuarial profession. Members of the Faculty of Actuaries in Scotland and the Institute of Actuaries, which in any event have acted as if joined at the hip for some years now, have until July 23 to vote on a formal merger. There are more than 10,000 eligible to vote. The problem is that the merged body will be known as the Chartered Actuarial Profession and so the most qualified members, the Fellows, will henceforth be known as FCAPS, an unfortunate acronym if you pronounce it at speed.
“You might find that amusing, but some of us really don’t,” grumbles my informant, “Anxious Actuary”. A spokesman for the professional body admits: “I’ve heard a few people saying that. It’s not something we’ve been rushed into. It’s a big change and there will be people who are unhappy about it.”
A compromise has been reached. Existing members can deem themselves FFAs or FIAs, according to affiliation. New entrants will, indeed, be FCAPs. “If you feel like publicising this inanity as soon as possible, we would be enormously grateful,” says Anxious Actuary.
Years ago the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants was forced to re-jig its potentially embarrassing acronym to ACCA. So how about PFCAS?
Sharia courts: are their rulings breaching British law?
A sensible assessment by Frances Gibb Legal Editor of The Times on the Civitas report Sharia Law or ‘One law for all’?. Sharia courts operate in Britain in the shadows. Little is known about them or their rulings or how extensive their network is or the reach of their jurisdiction.
A report this week sheds some light. It reveals that there are not just the main five generally acknowledged to exist — in London, Manchester, Bradford, Birmingham and Nuneaton — there are another 85 operating largely out of mosques.
It also concludes that such courts, or tribunals, are handing down rulings that are likely to breach fundamental principles of British law and it urges the removal of their formal statutory recognition under the Arbitration Act 1996. Sharia Law or ‘One law for all’? comes from Civitas, the independent think-tank. David Green, its director, says in an introduction to the report: “It cannot be accepted that Sharia councils are nothing more than independent arbitrators guided by faith.
“The reality is that for many Muslims, Sharia courts are part of an institutionalised atmosphere of intimidation backed by the ultimate sanction of a death threat.” He adds: “The underlying problem is that Sharia reflects male-dominated Asian and Arabic cultures.
“It cannot therefore be accepted as a legally valid basis even for settling private disagreements in a country like ours where law embodies the equal legal status of everyone, regardless of race, gender or religion.”
The actual rulings of the tribunals are hard to come by so the report examines the fatwas, or edicts, put out on popular online fatwa sites by religious leaders or muftis, which, it says, give a good indication of the rulings of the Sharia courts.
It concludes that these “walk a very fine line between legality and illegality”, adding: “If put into practice, they would undermine UK law by allowing a single community to play fast and loose with British law and customs.
“They are divisive, many of them are discriminatory against women and non-Muslims, and they deeply undermine the freedoms that all British citizens are entitled to enjoy.” Some “advise illegal actions” and others “transgress human rights standards as they are applied by British courts”.
The report calls for Sharia rulings to be excluded from their present recognition under the Arbitration Act 1996. Meanwhile, Green notes that comments such as those by Lord Phillips or Dr Williams are damaging to the debate.
Far from helping integration, any further encouragement of Sharia will, he says, only “undermine the efforts of British Muslims struggling to evolve a version of Islam consistent with a tolerant and pluralistic society”.
Meanwhile in The Guardian's Comment is Free Inayat Bunglawala has lots to say against Denis MacEoin, The Daily Mail and the Beth Din (no one criticises the Jewish courts so why are you always picking on us, wail!) but little to say on positive reasons why a Sharia Court might be a GOOD THING.
Don't demonise sharia courts
The Civitas report into sharia law courts relies on evidence from the internet to create an unrealistic picture of the work they do
A lady reporter from the Daily Mail rang me yesterday afternoon to ask about my thoughts regarding a new report on shariah "courts" that operate in the UK. . .
It might seem perfectly possible in our Wikipedia age to trawl through online fatwas and infer from them a summation of the operations of sharia tribunals, but it would hardly stand up to scrutiny as a piece of serious, reliable work. Nor would it accurately reflect what sharia tribunals mediate on and what sorts of mediated outcomes arise from their involvement.
Such would require proper investigation of the workings of the sharia councils themselves. An exercise MacEoin doesn't seem to have bothered with.
Orthodox Jewish communities have a similar set up with their Beth Din courts. They are regarded as a form of alternative dispute resolution. But I'm not aware of MacEoin accusing the Beth Din courts of "communal claims to superiority" and "special status".
The supremacy of English law has always been acknowledged by Beth Din courts that have existed and operated for decades in the UK. Never has the authority of English law been questioned in relation to the arbitration offered by the Jewish courts, so why then the fuss concerning sharia councils that operate under exactly the same regulations? Sadly, for no other reason, it seems, than that the latter are intended for use by Muslims. Rarely does one hear of the criticisms made of the sharia courts similarly extended to the Beth Din courts though both essentially serve the same purpose.
It is not difficult to go and visit sharia courts. There was an interesting write-up by Dan Bell in the Guardian a couple of years ago about the best-known sharia council in London, which operates out of the back-room of a converted corner shop in Leyton. He found that:
The Muslims who consult the Islamic Sharia Council are not asking for permission to stone adulterous wives, or chop off the hands of thieves, but simply for day-to-day guidance on living in accordance with their faith.
However, that doesn't quite have the shock factor needed for a suitably alarmist Daily Mail front page, does it? I like these comments in particular.
Inyat, The reason why so little fuss is made about Beth Din is that the Jewish community are not intent on converting the rest of England. However there are many muslim groups intent on converting us infidels, thus the reason for such a backlash when Sharia is mentioned.
And
Do you know for a fact that no unofficial Islamic 'court' has ever sanctioned an honour killing in this country, ever?
In response to this post, regarding the color green and the reason for its significance to Islam , reader "be-hijabbed j. samia mair" (who certainly gets points for the gentle sense of humor) writes:
You have it backwards. Green was the Prophet Muhammad's, peace and blessings be upon him, favorite color because of what it represents.
And what it represents, according to her thesis, is moderation and balance, because "Green falls in the middle of the visible spectrum."
Depending on how you define the boundaries of the visible spectrum, the midpoint is somewhere around 575 nanometers, which is on the boundary between green and yellow. If Mohammad wanted to choose the middle frequency of the visible spectrum as his favorite color, he should have chosen yellow-green, maybe kind of a stone-ground-mustard-yellow, or the color of dried, dead leaves.
But, what Qur'anic verse supports the theory that Mohammad was interested in choosing the middle frequency of the visible spectrum as his favorite color in the first place? It sounds like bida, an unauthorized innovation, on your part. (And I won't even argue the point that the theory of color being a property of a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum that can be represented by a wavelength of photons, would have been unknown to 7th Century Mohammad, because I'm sure this is just more proof of how far ahead of his time he was in scientific thinking, even as he wiped his anus with stones after defecating and as he prescribed camel urine as an elixir).
Green may be the color of chlorophyll, which gives leaves their color, but it is also the color of envy, which is defined as, "[A] feeling of discontent and resentment aroused by and in conjunction with desire for the possessions or qualities of another." That sounds like a more appropriate explanation for his choice of favorite color.
The "green sickness" (chlorosis) is today known as anemia. The symptoms include lack of energy, indigestion, headaches, and shortness of breath. It was also known as "morbus virgineus" ("virgin's desease"), for which the prescription in the mid-1500's was for female sufferers to copulate with men. With Mohammad's and Islam's obsession with copulation, especially with virgins, this also sounds like a more appropriate explanation.
And, at least in the West, green is associated with money. An outdated slang term for a dollar is a "greenback". With Mohammad's obsession with material wealth (he devoted an entire chapter of the holy Qur'an to rules for dividing up booty taken by force from non-Muslims), this is another alternate explanation.
Whatever Mohammad's thought process in choosing his favorite color, green was his favorite color, therefore green is the representative color of Islam. The rest is just fluff.
Delivered to the New English Review Symposium in Nashville, Tennessee on May 30th, 2009)
Strategies of Denial –the title is ambiguous. Possibly deliberately. What might it mean? It might refer to Muslims, and to all the ways that adherents of Islam, “slaves of Allah,” especially those living in the West, have managed so successfully to distract or confuse or intimidate, morally or intellectually or physically, so many non-Muslims, managed to keep those non-Muslims from finding out too much about what Islam inculcates, and to achieve this despite the fact that the Islamic texts -- Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira – are easily accessible, no more than a mouse-click away, and their meaning discussed at thousands of Muslim websites. And though not always a mouse-click away, the long record of Islamic imperialism, of the conquest through violence and the subsequent subjugation, through violence and the threat of violence, of non-Muslims, which had always been known throughout the Western world, discussed by its outstanding figures (see John Quincy Adams, see Tocqueville, see Winston Churchill), noted as a matter of course by Western travelers to Muslim lands, whose own experiences revealed the clear hostility of Muslims toward them (and toward all non-Muslims), and when the great mass of Christians thought about Muslims at all, they never doubted that those who had studied Islam and those who had encountered Muslims must surely be right: Islam was a ferocious and fanatical faith – for “faith” and not “religion” was the word used until the past century, and it was American writers of books for children who first began to use that leveling phrase about “the world’s great religions” and not until recent decades that the soothingly misleading phrase about “the three abrahamic faiths” began to be used. Never before, in the history of the Western world, would such a phrase have been invoked, never before would it have been taken seriously or used to convince non-Muslims that there was some kind of shared faith and shared traditions which bound Christians (and Jews) to Muslims. People once understood, even if they could not site sura and ayat, the Muslim injunction to “take not Christians and Jews as friends, for they are friends only with each other.” And even if Sura 9 and a hundred other Jihad verses in the Qur’an had not been read, and the hundreds or thousands of malevolent anti-Infidel hadiths were unknown, inhabitants of the Western world – the chief obstacle to the spread of Islam for a thousand years – did grasp, in the main, the nature of Islam. more>>>
"We were a self-centered army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom… a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare… Sometimes [my two] selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments."
Today's Corriere della Sera carries a story with a remarkable headline:
"Musica: Ligabue, sold out le sette date all'Arena di Verona dal 24 settembre."
Why is "sold out" deemed necessary to replace the perfectly good Italian that already exists: tutto esaurito? Why did someone or some ones think it necessary to replace "entroterra" with "hinterland" -- an English word not nearly as common in its native language as is "entroterra" in Italian, the language of a water-surrounded peninsula? And why is it that any expression of dismay at the too-frequent adoption of English words into other languages sometimes makes one the butt of mockery, when there is no need to adopt such words and thereby to damage the future prospects of the native-born linguistic baby, just because the English language is connected to those Great Things, Business and Entertainment and Sport. In the case of "hinterland" I suspect what was most attractive about it was the echo of the New Hampshire clothing company, Timberland, that has had such a good run in Italy.
In the case of "sold out" and its sudden apparent appeal to Italians," I wrack my brain to figure out what is so wonderful about the phrase -- is it the snappiness of the spondee that so appeals, or is it just that it is in wonderful English? I don't know, but I've given it at least a minute's thought, and you know what that means for someone of my age. It means that at this point I feel, mentally, un po' esaurito. Or completemente esausto. Or something.
Kayanya heboh yah pak pane klo udah pd kongkow pak pane dgn pak gejospak faisol pak woto. tp pak faisol & pak woto jrg posting. ayo dong pak faisol & pak woto biar rame neh. yg laennya jg dong jgn silent reading.
LONDON, June 23 (Reuters) - Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari said on Tuesday Britain has to tackle its own issues of deprivation to stop the radicalisation of British Muslims.
In an interview with ITV's "News at Ten", he rejected the suggestion it was Pakistan's role to win the hearts and minds of radicalised British Muslims, although he said his country would arrest any radical Briton visiting Pakistan and send them back to the UK.
"The appeal has to be on the other side," he was due to say in the programme to be aired on Tuesday evening.
"I think Britain has to take the responsibility and make sure that they do not feel the deprivation they have been. Because we all know this is a state of mind that comes up from some kind of this.
"And one has to fight it in Britain and not in Pakistan."
I hope nobody has confused me with Michael Jackson, despite the fact that we're both M. Jackson. There are many differences between us, the main one being that I'm alive. You can't get much more different than alive is from dead.
Michael Jackson could more readily be confused with Farrah Fawcett, since they died on the same day. He had lighter skin towards the end, but the main difference, of course, is that while Ms. Fawcett cavorted with Majors, Mr. Jackson cavorted with minors.
Getting all my girlish ghoulishness out of the way in one post, when a famous figure dies, I sometimes look to see how fast Wikipedia puts the death date in, and changes "is a famous...." to "was a famous..." The haste is often unseemly, and the celebrity can scarcely be cold. A zealous Wikipedia editor may one day kill someone just so they can get the time of death to within a second.
I returned with specimens of the Powdered Quaker, the Clouded Drab, the Hebrew Character, the Beautiful Brocade, the Marbled Coronet (but failed to find Barrett's Marbled Coronet, taken by him at the Baily Lighthouse, Howth, Co. Dublin, on 10.vi.1861), the Sword-grass, the Red Sword-grass, the Deep-brown Dart, the Brindled Ochre, the Black Rustic, the Lunar Underwing, the Marbled Green (outside Cork City), the Copper Underwing, the Old Lady, the Small Dotted Buff, the Mother Shipton, the Nut-tree Tussock, the Fan-foot, and the Yellow Shell in the banded form of Gumppenberg.
I did not find the Dingy Shears or the Feathered Ranunculus or the Small Mottled Willow or the Common Fan-foot.
Fire fighters in northern Israel fought dozens of blazes that broke out during the day Wednesday, most of them around noontime.
A source in the Hadera Fire Services told News1 that due to the fact that numerous fires broke out in a relatively limited area, the working assumption is that they were deliberately set. “We still do not know how the fires were set and we do not have details about the arsonist or arsonists,” he said.
In one of the fire locations, north of Rosh Pina, the fire spread to within close range of the residents of Rosh Pina, and dozens were asked to leave their homes. The Israel Land Fund said that more than 1,000 dunams of natural thickets had gone up in flames.
Arson likely Initial investigations by fire fighter squads in the numerous fire locations found a likelihood of arson. “This is man-made terror,” a fire commander said. “Fires don’t just break out on their own.”...
The other day I began to read "Unfinished Business," a memoir by the actor and writer John Houseman.
Here are the first two paragraphs:
"I was conceived in the second year of this century and legitimized five years after that. By then I was speaking English with my mother, French with my father and his friends, Rumanian with the household and German with a visiting governess. Two of my first four birthdays wre celebrated on board the Orient Express between Paris and Bucharest, the city where I was born on 22 September 1902 of a Jewish-Alsation father and a British mother of Welsh-Irish descent.
He first saw her in the Bois de Boulogne riding a bicycle and wearing a bright red blouse with black polka dots. A month later they were living together at Maisons-Lafitte near the race track. Six months after that, when he was sent off to manage his family's grain ahd shipping interests in the Balkans, she accompanied him to the shores of the Black Sea, where they occupied a large brick house on a hill overlooking the Danube.
Till I was four and a half my hair fell in long golden curls over my shoulders: the day it was cut off I was photographed twice -- before and after. That same year my father's family business collapsed as the result of a great-uncle's disastrous investment in the Marseilles streetcar system. As a result he was able to marry my gentile mother and I was registered at the French consulate under the name of Jacques Haussmann. Returning to Paris, he set up in business for himself as a broker and operator in commodities. He was a gambler; for the remaining ten years of his life he rode a series of speeding roller coasters (wheat, cotton, sugar, cocoa, cofee and various sorts of vegetable oils) up and down the 'futures' markets of the world. They carried him from month to month, and sometimes from week to week, from riches to ruin and back again."
I was put immediately in mind of Humbert Humbert:
"I was born in 1910, in Paris, a salad of racial genes, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in my veins. My very photogenic mother (picnic, lightning) died when I was three...."
But I was also put in mind of more than a sentence, however memorable, in a book. I thought of Europe Before The Great War, and then of that diminished entre-deux-guerres Europe after that war and before the Second World War, and then, of the still more diminished Europe, stripped of its possessions abroad, which is now again in a pre-war period of sorts, a drole de guerre that is likely to be lost and won not on any battlefield or Field of A Cloth of Gold (though gold -- in the form of OPEC revenues -- is certainly playing its part). This wa, this Jihad, is being conducted, steadily and insidiously, through means other than that of open warfare. I wonder if the indigenous peoples of Europe, after the self-inflicted wounds of the quite-unnecessary Great War, and after the self-inflicted wounds of the quite necessary World War II, might at long last come to their senses, and exhibit powers of recuperation and resistance that will depend on the level of intelligent gratitude for the civilisational legacy which they have inherited and hold in trust (with life estates, not fee simples), and so have no right, whether out of fecklessness or fear, to hand over that legacy into the destructive hands of primitives, animated by a cruel and barbarous faith that reduces men to mental slavery.
