Posted on 03/14/2002 4:41:08 PM PST by dighton
SAUDI Arabia's religious police are reported to have forced schoolgirls back into a blazing building because they were not wearing Islamic headscarves and black robes.
Saudi newspapers said scuffles broke out between firemen and members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice who tried to keep the girls inside a burning school in Mecca.
Fifteen girls were killed as they stampeded to escape from the blazing building in the Muslim holy city. Saudi media and families of the victims have been angry over the deaths of the girls in the fire that gutted the school.
The resulting public criticism of the religious police, or mutaween, is highly unusual.
The English-language Saudi Gazette, in a front-page report yesterday quoted witnesses as saying that members of the religious police stopped men who tried to help the girls escape from the building, saying: "It is sinful to approach them."
A civil defence officer told an Arabic-language newspaper, al-Eqtisadiah, that he saw three members of the religious police "beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya".
He added: "We told them that the situation was very critical and did not allow for such behaviour. But they shouted at us and refused to move away from the gates."
The father of one of the dead girls alleged that the school watchman refused to open the gate to let the girls out.
"Lives could have been saved had they not been stopped by members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice," the Saudi Gazette said.
The much-feared mutaween roam the streets of the conservative kingdom wielding sticks to enforce dress codes and sex segregation and to ensure that Islamic prayers are performed on time.
Those who refuse to obey the orders of the religious police are usually beaten and sometimes jailed.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
Lovely.
Two words: breeder reactors.
...and sometimes driven back into burning buildings to be killed.
That's raped women with no clits because they chop those off right after birth.
In my universe, every one of these mullahs would be hunted down and given a bullet in the head before visiting lucifer.
So shall I tell him why people at Free Republic are interested in fires at schools?
I only know why it interests me.
It reminds me a a terrible fire in a school in 1958.
As a result, major changes were made to the fire standards in schools.
from spectator.com-In Turkey, a teenage woman's throat was slit right in a town square after a love song was played on a local radio station, dedicated to her.
A Pakistani woman was shot dead by her husband as she lay sleeping beside her 3-month-old son because a neighbor had seen a man, not a member of her family, standing in a field near where the woman was working. "I could not let people say I didn't protect my honor," her husband explained.
A 16-year-old Jordanian girl who had reported to the police that she had been raped was shot in the head four times by her older brother as soon as she returned to her family. "She came to the house at 8:15," the brother proudly told a Time magazine reporter, "and by 8:20 she was dead.... She committed a mistake, even if it was against her will. It's better to have one person die than to have the whole family die from shame."
Dr. Hani Jahshan, the deputy medical examiner of Jordan, has the job of examining girls and women who leave home and are subsequently accused of having had illicit sex. He tells of examining the hymen of one 17-year-old girl who had run away from home with her sister. The girl's father had accused her of meeting strange men in a restaurant. Dr. Jahshan found that the girl's hymen was intact and ordered her released. Two weeks later both the girl and her sister had been killed by their father and two brothers who refused to believe that the sisters were still virgins.
OK, MEMRI is run by a former Israeli intelligence officer...
For the record, some really interesting writers have been total bastards. It's not been that uncommon to find instances of substance abuse, spousal neglect and even cruelty to animals. (That Hemingway, shooting all those poor African animals!) What's on the page should (or should not) speak for itself.
Sure, I wouldn't want to spend too much time poring over the collected writings of Charles Manson, or John Wayne Gacy, but I would really rather you didn't rely on that "consider the source" thing for the MEMRI website. All it convinces an impartial reader to conclude is that they may be revealing information that portrays the Islamic world in a less than flattering light. And since I recall you in an earlier thread saying something along the lines of 'post-911 interest in Islam has increased 300 percent' (such a round, convenient number!) I'd guess you'd rather people didn't link to MEMRI, as a matter of course...
So, the issue of who's right just collapses and devolves into the clunking mechanical nightmare of a moving, closed loop, endlessly advancing and receding... Proposition A (yours) or proposition B (MEMRI's) might be true, but not both, and because both include negations of the other, there's no way to find out by directly examining A or B...
Or something like that. ...So, if you know something that could break the mutual annulment by assertion/ad hominem deadlock, please let us know. ...Is there any kind of watchdog link that's actually exposed or debunked some of the 'disinformation' or the sources?
PS -- Thanks for the link to the pchelp website. It really does look helpful and interesting. ...Interesting screen name, too.
The people called for Jesus to be crucified.. but that was not the entire population of Jews in Israel.. Pilate asking such a question was all part of a plot, that of the Roman government and the Temple authorities. They both feared His growing popularity, while some called him Messiah others called Him King of the Jews while others called him Rabbi...So first the High Priest and Sadducees had to insite the worshippers, then the plot thickened from there.. The high priest insinuated that Jesus was a heretic and blasphemer.. so when Pilate asked which man was to be crucified, which was worse a thief or a blaspheming heretic? Well that left no doubt in their minds.. Although to a Roman this was not exactly a punishable offense and thus he washed his hands and to his glee thinking he has stopped the preaching and teaching of this man and surely he had stopped his followers,and for sure the Jews would all go back to business as usual and the Romans would indeed continue to control the region..
We are the kind of "bigots" that LOVE GOD AND FREEDOM.
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