Winners of this year’s Pure Street Photography awards, celebrating that “decisive moment”:
France Leclerc, “Head Ball”
Stefanie Waiblinger, “Who is Next”
Cazerella Tavs, “Meeting int he Middle’
Chris Yan, “Mirror”
Cristiano Bartoli, “Kite Attack”
Nicola Balestrazzi, “Puebla”
[Images © Pure Street Photography]
Excellent from Janice Turner – What Jihad al-Shamie’s three wives tell us about terror:
Before he made a fake suicide belt and purchased real knives; before he drove his black Kia into a crowd of worshippers gathering outside a Manchester synagogue; before he stabbed and killed and terrorised British Jews on their holiest day, Jihad al-Shamie acquired three wives.
Not serially but cumulatively. The moment a police marksman ended his life, Shamie was married to three women. However, the crime of bigamy, which carries a seven-year sentence under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, did not apply here, since at least two of the marriages were conducted only under sharia law. Besides, Shamie wasn’t a big believer in bigamy. “In Islam a man can have up to 4 wives,” he texted Wife Two, whom he had not told about Wife One, “but these days most women don’t accept it.”
Indeed Wife One, the mother of his two children, left him when she learnt about Wife Two. This woman, a nurse and white convert to Islam who met him on a Muslim dating site and married him in an online ceremony during lockdown, is most revealing about Shamie’s character. He ordered her to read the Quran and visit the mosque, was “controlling and abusive and he did rape me multiple times, but to us we just fulfil what our husbands say”.
You have to wonder what on earth made this woman convert to Islam. “We just fulfil what our husbands say”. And stay at home, and get raped, and wear a veil when going out so no other man can look at us with lust.
The route from violent misogynist abuse to Islamist terror is well charted. Indeed the feminist author Joan Smith catalogues it in an excellent book, Home Grown.
Before he killed five people in the Westminster Bridge attack, Khalid Masood worked in Saudi Arabia, where he adopted strict, literalist Wahhabi Islam, then sought to apply its rules about women, via coercion and violence, upon his wife Farzana until she fled. The leader of the London Bridge terrorists, Khuram Butt, kept his wife fully veiled and believed women should not work. His accomplice Rachid Redouane tried to stop his wife leaving the house, attacked her in the street and demanded she wear the hijab.
Before he killed 22 people, mainly teenage girls, the Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi chided a female classmate about her short skirt then punched her in the face when she argued with him.
The behaviour of these radicalised Muslim men is no coincidence. Central to the mission of Salafism, the conservative strand of Islam that in the past 70 years has swept through once-tolerant, forward-looking Muslim countries, is control of women. Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood member who visited 1950s America, concluded that wanton female sexuality was the mark of western depravity.
An Islamic state, Qutb argued, must define itself against this societal degradation by returning women to the piety codes that bound them during the Prophet’s time — that is, the 7th century. Al-Qaeda drew much of its inspiration from him.
The purity of a Muslim society was measured, therefore, by the “modesty” (invisibility, submissiveness) of its women. This is why the first act of Isis when it took over a city was to shroud and redact the female population. Indeed the Taliban, who deny Afghan women everything bar oxygen (and are probably working on that too) believe this is the route to a supreme Islamic state.
The subjugation of women is absolutely central to this new Islamism. Hence its appeal to a certain type of man.
In many ways Shamie was another textbook male loser: smoking dope, unable to keep a job, estranged from his kids, living with his mother, bulking up his body with weights and still not feeling enough of a man. He was an easy mark for an Islamist doctrine that gave him control over his wives. Then, when even these women evaded him, he directed his aggrieved entitlement, his desire for domination, into a new direction, one celebrated openly of late on Britain’s streets: killing Jews.
As I wondered yesterday: where’s the old tolerant Islam that we saw before the Saudis started spending their billions of petrodollars on spreading Salafist hate?
This is good news. From the Times:
Prosecutors were accused of trying to recreate blasphemy offences “by the back door” after a judge overturned the conviction of a man who burnt a copy of the Quran.
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, hailed the ruling that exonerated Hamit Coskun as a “victory for free speech”.
Coskun, 51, who was born in Turkey, was demonstrating outside his country’s consulate in London in February when he was said to have “briefly” lit a copy of the Islamic holy text. Magistrates convicted him in June of a religiously aggravated public order offence but he appealed to the crown court….
“We live in a liberal democracy,” the judge said. “One of the precious rights that affords us is to express our own views and read, hear and consider ideas without the state intervening to stop us doing so. The price we pay for that is having to allow others to exercise the same rights, even if that upsets, offends or shocks us.”
Now what about the man who attacked him with a knife, and got off scot free?
“Let’s start with facts. Mizrahi Jews didn’t “come from Europe.” They lived in the Middle East for thousands of years, long before Islam, long before Arab conquest, long before any modern state. Their ancestors spoke the same ancient Hebrew mentioned in the Qur’an’s stories, they prayed facing Jerusalem, and their communities in Babylon, Damascus, and Sana’a existed for over 2,500 years. They are as indigenous to this region as the olive trees, as native to the Middle East as we are.
“When Arab states turned against them in the 20th century, after Israel was established, they were ethnically cleansed: homes looted, businesses seized, citizenship revoked, synagogues burned, people lynched. Nearly a million Jews were expelled from Arab lands. Most fled to Israel with nothing.
“And now, decades later, our leadership dares to call them the colonizers? The same families who were driven from Baghdad, Aleppo, and Tripoli – who rebuilt their lives from refugee camps in Israel, are accused of committing the same crime that was done to them. That’s not just hypocrisy; it’s historical amnesia.
“If we truly want justice, we have to stop gaslighting our neighbors and start acknowledging that their story is Middle Eastern too. Our liberation won’t come from denying theirs.“
David Collier has compiled a list of Islamic terror attacks in the UK, starting with Manchester and going back two decades. It’s a grim catalogue, yet little has been done beyond treating each incident as one of a kind, as another inexplicable shock which we’ll overcome by pulling together, turning our backs on hatred, and being nice….until the next time.
The names, dates, and convictions are all public. The pattern speaks for itself.
We allow extremists in from war-torn Libya, they blow up the Manchester Arena. From Somalia, they murder a sitting MP. From Syria, they murder Jews outside a synagogue.
These nations, and others like them, are sectarian backwaters full of repression, extremism, division and violence. Yet UK authorities do almost no due diligence before allowing hundreds of thousands to enter each year. It is a suicidal policy – born of false beliefs, left-wing idealism and wilful ignorance.
Well, fair enough. We all know there’s an immigration issue. Unfortunately though quite a few of these terror attacks were committed by home-grown Islamists. We have a large Muslim population here in the UK, and they aren’t going anywhere. Islam is the issue here: the common denominator.
For Muslims in the UK the two main barriers to integration into mainstream British society are clannishness. – so ban cousin marriages – and the endless hate diatribes from the Friday sermons (and the madrassahs) demonising the “kuffars” and teaching separatism and the inevitable supremacy of Islam. So ban the hate preachers. A start, at least.
It’s worth bearing in mind that back half a century or so ago, in Iran, in Egypt, in Afghanistan even, women were walking around unveiled, wearing short skirts. If it wasn’t for the Saudis spending their petrodollar billions on the spread of hard-line Wahhabism/Salafism, maybe they’d still be there. In Kosovo, as Katya Adler documented in her Living Next Door to Putin series, they used to practice an easy-going form of Islam until the Saudis built a mega-mosque and pushed their hard-line hatred.
Is there not a way back there? Because if there isn’t, we’re in trouble.
Philosopher Peter Boghossian (previously, Against the moral certitude of wokeism) – on Why I Changed My Mind on Gender-Affirming Care:
I’ve changed my mind about certain aspects of “gender-affirming care.” I used to believe that at 18, one should have the ability to make decisions about whether they want to mutilate (and yes, let us be forthright about what it is) their genitals. Basically, one would go to a board-certified physician and undergo certain procedures to significantly alter their bodies for non-medical purposes.
I’ve always been uneasy with my position. While the drawbacks are obvious and ghastly, they still need to be explicitly stated: One becomes a lifelong medical patient; the taxpayer almost always bears the burden; the rate of regret, while hard to precisely ascertain, is significant; the procedures are ghoulish and activate the brain’s deepest disgust and repulsion modules; most of the procedures are irreversible; there is a wholesale lack of evidence for the necessity of these procedures and overwhelming evidence that they’re contraindicated; the medical and psychological establishment has been ideologically captured, thus informed decision-making is almost literally impossible; physicians compromise their professional integrity by doing harm; the ideology preys upon autistic and same-sex attracted people; and the list goes on and on and on.
On the opposing side, I held my principle. In a free society, adults must have bodily autonomy. They must have dominion over their own bodies. Lacking that, we do not live in a free society, by any reasonable definition.
After considerable reflection and frank conversations with Mia Hughes (here and here and here), Colin Wright (forthcoming), Helen Joyce (here), Dr. Eithan Haim (here), Billboard Chris (too many to list, but go here), the work of Travis Brown (here), and many others, I’ve changed my mind. Here’s what caused it to change: Doctors cannot and should not perform any medical procedure a patient desires. Patients should not be able to have their retinas removed because they think it’s a good idea. Nor should they be able to have additional rectums added to their body, or colon vaginas, or cow testicles sewn onto their foreheads, or have their limbs chopped off because it strikes their fancy, nor any other manner of extreme surgery.
Yes, there are people with Body Integrity Disorder, who want a healthy limb removed. Wiki says, “The ethics of surgically amputating the undesired limb of a person with BID are difficult and controversial”. Well indeed. It’s not what medicine is for – “first do no harm”. I’d agree with Boghossian here. The absurdly named “gender-affirming” surgery would seem to be far more fraught with difficulty and danger, mind, than the relatively straightforward lopping off of a limb. Plus all the hormones. And the cultural issue of pretending to be the opposite sex…
Interestingly Boghossian – who as we can see above is a seasoned debater and interviewer – claims to have been unable to get any trans advocate to come along and talk to him.
I recently did a “street event” with Billboard Chris in NYC’s Washington Square Park. That night, Reid and I went out to dinner with Chris and I asked him, “What’s the best argument you’ve heard against your positions?” He responded, “I’ve not heard one. I’ve not heard one because there is none.” While I wasn’t entirely surprised by this, it did stick with me. If anyone would have heard a good argument, you’d think Chris would have. He hasn’t. And as many times as I’ve asked authors and experts who move in this space this same question, every single person has given me the identical answer: There is no good argument for these medical interventions.
A comment:
As a therapist of 30+ years who trained in San Francisco, I have seen it all. The entire matrix of “trans affirming” ideology: children, adults, the Internet, doctors, other medical professionals, schools, parents, churches, big pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, many public spaces with free-for-all bathrooms and locker rooms, sports culture, and more is a mass psychosis the likes of which I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, This is an era of the biggest social contagion, egregious child abuse, and medical malpractice beyond anything one can imagine or recall.
A postscript to the Vancouver Rowling disavowal:
From the Times:
A mosque attended by the Manchester synagogue attacker was previously reported to the Charity Commission over a sermon accused of fuelling antisemitism and division.
Jihad al-Shamie, 35, from Prestwich, Lancashire, began worshipping at Masjid Sunnah Nelson in 2022.
In 2023, Fountains of Knowledge, the charity that opened the mosque in 2021, was reported to the Charity Commission over a sermon in which the imam linked the war in Gaza to the “plotting of the kuffar against Islam”. Kuffar is a derogatory term for non-Muslims.
The National Secular Society (NSS), which filed the complaint, said Masjid Sunnah Nelson was among charities “fuelling antisemitism and division, as well as potential support for Hamas and other anti-western actors”.
Well, this is a huge surprise. Who could have guessed?
In November 2022, he attended a three-day “knowledge conference” at the mosque with his younger brother.
And three years later, after this “knowledge conference”, he killed Jews as a self-proclaimed IIS supporter.
Messages sent by Shamie to one of his three wives, who claims he raped her, said: “I rly love the mosque there.” Footage shared on the mosque’s Instagram page appears to show Shamie sitting in a chair wearing a striped robe.
Naveed quoted a religious text during a sermon last year describing Yahud — Jews — as “treacherous”.
In a sermon last month, Naveed said: “The husband in the house is the one who has the word. He is the man, he has the first and last word. So, this is what they call guardianship. It means that the wife does not do anything except what? Except with his permission.”
The mosque is associated with the Salafi movement, a fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam.
Was anything done about this? Was the NSS complaint followed up? Of course not. Will anything be done about those spreading hatred under the shield of charitable status? Of course not. Meanwhile the government tinkers with its Islamophobia definition…
The Hill, Hampstead, this morning:
Mick Hartley 