Don't tell King Abdullah how to run King Abdullah University

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah will apparently only put up with so much from his clerics.

Sheikh Saad al-Shethry has been removed from the kingdom's highest council of religious scholars by royal decree, after he criticized a newly-opened multibillion-dollar university for being un-Islamic. Shethry had a particular problem with co-ed classes:

"Mixing is a great sin and a great evil," al-Shethri was quoted as saying. "When men mix with women, their hearts burn and they will be diverted from their main goal (which is) ... education."

Abdullah has acquired a reputation as an unlikely reformer after this year's Valentine's Day reforms, in which he sacked the head of the infamous religious police and appointed a woman to his cabinet for the first time.

But as Saudi Arabia expert Toby Jones argued at the time, Abdullah is probably less interested in liberalizing Saudi society than he is eliminating threats to his family's power.

The firing of Shethry certainly seems to be an example.

The university -- which is named after the king, of course -- is something of a legacy project for Abdullah. He has touted it as a "beacon of tolerance" and as part of his plan to make Saudi Arabia a center of technological innovation. His patience for unsolicited sharia advice from the peanut gallery is likely to be pretty low.

Source: Foreign Policy

The West's Darkest Hour

Larry Auster

The following is only a part of a speech, “A Real Islam Policy for a Real America”, that Lawrence Auster gave at the Preserving Western Civilization conference earlier this year. It has been recently published in a book:

To deal with the crisis facing our civilization, we must be both realistic and imaginative. The realism part consists in recognizing how bad our situation is. The entire Western world is at present under the grip of the modern liberal ideology that targets every normal and familiar aspect of human life, and our entire historical way of being as a society.

The key to this liberal ideology is the belief in tolerance or non-discrimination as the ruling principle of society, the principle to which all other principles must yield. We see this belief at work in every area of modern life.

The principle of non-discrimination must, if followed consistently, destroy every human society and institution. A society that cannot discriminate between itself and other societies will go out of existence, just as an elm tree that cannot discriminate between itself and a linden tree must go out of existence.

To be, we must be able to say that we are us, which means that we are different from others. If we are not allowed to distinguish between ourselves and Muslims, if we must open ourselves to everyone and everything in the world that is different from us, and if the more different and threatening the Other is, the more we must open ourselves to it, then we go out of existence.

This liberal principle of destruction is utterly simple and radically extreme. Yet very, very few people, even self-described hard-line conservatives, are aware of this principle and the hold it has over our society. Instead of opposing non-discrimination, they oppose multiculturalism and political correctness.

But let's say that we got rid of multiculturalism and political correctness. Would that end Muslim immigration? No. Multiculturalism is not the source of Muslim immigration.

The source of it is our belief that we must not discriminate against other people on the basis of their culture, their ethnicity, their nationality, their religion.

This is the idea of the 1965 Immigration Act, which was the idea of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to all of humanity: all discrimination is wrong, period. No one in today's society, including conservatives, feels comfortable identifying this utterly simple idea, because that would mean opposing it.

To see how powerful the belief in non-discrimination is, consider this: Prior to World War II, would any Western country have considered admitting significant numbers of Muslim immigrants? Of course not; it would have been out of the question.

The West had a concrete identity. It saw itself as white and in large part as Christian, and there was still active in the Western mind the knowledge that Islam was our historic adversary, as it has been for a thousand years, and radically alien.

But today, the very notion of stopping Muslim immigration is out of the question, it can’t even be thought.

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Source: Caesar Tort

H/T: David F.

Real Liberals Should Support Israel

By Ryan Mauro

At the end of my three-week stay in Israel, made possible by the generous folks at Eagles’ Wings Ministries’ Israel Experience program, I realized that Israel is a model of liberalism, a country that embodies progressive values and every cause American liberals champion.

The moment when this point hit me was when I was on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem, taking a break from enjoying the night life on a bench, when a loud group with flags marched past me and handed me a flier.

The group, called the Coalition of Pink Communities, was rallying in support of equal rights for those with alternative lifestyles, with the flier specifically mentioning “lesbians, homosexuals, transgenders, bisexuals, queer, intersex.”

The fact that this even occurred, in the holy city of Jerusalem no less, is proof that such equal rights have been granted. The demonstrators were not harassed, attacked, or even approached in any way, despite the presence of Orthodox Jewish onlookers.

This stands in sharp contrast to anywhere in the Palestinian territories or Arab world, where such actions would be met with brutality of the highest order. Israel, which stands alone as the country most derided by human rights advocates daring to call themselves liberals, has upheld freedom of speech and shown a tolerance of homosexual lifestyles in a way deserving of far-reaching liberal praise, allowing openly gay centers to operate and known homosexual soldiers to serve.

To be fair, I must mention the murder of two homosexuals in Tel Aviv while I was in the country, but the genuine outcry over the incident and extensive media coverage show that this was a rare incident, worthy of conversation and attention, rather than an act of normalcy.

This scenario alone should dispel the notion that Israel’s status as a Jewish state makes it theocratic, but this democratic country is still frequently referred to as “apartheid” on college campuses, an insult that denigrates the true victims of apartheid, both in the past in South Africa and those suffering from true oppression in the Arab world.

Rarely is the gender apartheid in major parts of the Islamic world or the oppression of gays, dissenting political voices, non-Muslims (especially Jews), and Muslim minorities in such areas a cause for a fuss.

The apartheid comparison is so wrong on so many levels that using it should disqualify the users from being termed “academics” or “experts.” Few seem to know that twenty percent of Israeli citizens are Arabs, given the same rights as their fellow Jewish countrymen. They are provided with social services, serve in the military, and even are elected to the Knesset.

The security “wall,” 97% of which is chain-link fence, is often touted as proof of Israel’s racism, but it is not designed to separate Jewish and Palestinian communities. Read more here ...

Source: Pajamas Media