Abortion is a moral issue that will never go away.The “choice” is too stark and compelling to walk away from. Will we protect the life of the unborn child,or will we murder it ? It is a decision that has profound implications for many people. Albert Mohler has a fine article on this issue,and he also has a link to a very interesting pro-life organization. Please read the article and visit the website,you will be glad you did.(MW)

From Albert Mohler -

Catherine Davis is a woman with a message, and that message is getting harder to ignore. “Black children are an endangered species.”

The Director of Minority Outreach for Georgia Right to Life, Davis is taking that message to the public, along with a massive public awareness campaign that has captured national and international attention. Drivers in the metro Atlanta area are seeing billboards that demand attention — and are changing minds.

Her argument is simple and the statistics are irrefutable. She accuses abortion providers in general, and Planned Parenthood in particular, of targeting blacks for abortion. She told The New York Times, “The impact of abortion has become so great that it has begun to impact our fertility rate.”

Consider the chilling facts documented in the data. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 57.4% of the abortions performed in Georgia in 2006 were performed on African-American women, but blacks make up only 30% of Georgia’s population. Nationwide, the pattern is similarly stacked against black babies — black women have approximately 37% of all abortions each year, while blacks make up only 13% of the national population.

You can see why Catherine Davis’ message demands attention. She points also to the fact that, in Georgia, every single abortion clinic is located in areas of black concentration. She argues, quite pointedly, that this amounts to an intentional effort to reduce the black population in the United States.

The rest of the article can be read here -

http://www.albertmohler.com/

It is a most unfortunate fact that Muslim women are treated as chattel throughout much of the world of Islam.This picture symbolizes the apartheid,the oppression,the non-significance of the individual woman within  Islam. Via- Jihad Watch – http://www.jihadwatch.org (MW)

“Some 1,500 years ago, it was decided for an individual’s personal reasons that women should [be secluded] and since then millions of Muslim women all over the world have had to suffer it”

This photo, via Asia News, is particularly poignant in light of the renewed controversy over Taslima Nasrin’s article on the burqa.

And the other side of the coin – how Islam can justify pretty much anything from the men’s perspective. An article by Raymond Ibrahim, editor and translator of the Al Qaeda Reader.(MW)

How the Islamist Mindset Rationalizes — and Promotes — ‘Sex Sins’

Almost anything is permissible if it can help advance the jihad.

March 1, 2010 – by Raymond Ibrahim – http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/how-the-islamist-mindset-rationalizes-and-promotes-sex-sins/?singlepage=true

Is it inconsistent for Muslim “holy warriors” to engage in voyeuristic acts of lasciviousness? Because would-be jihadists and martyrs have been known to frequent strip bars — such as the 9/11 hijackers and Major Nidal Hasan, whose “late-night jiggle-joint carousing stands at odds with the picture of a devout Muslim” — many Americans have concluded that such men cannot be “true” Muslims, leading to the ubiquitous conviction that they are “hijacking Islam.”

In fact, Islamists rely on several rationalizations — doctrines, even — that make “jiggle-joint carousing” consistent with Muslim piety. Considering that Islamic law permits sex slaves (Koran 4:3), who can be kept topless by their masters, and makes sex one of the highest paradisiacal rewards, this should come as no great surprise. However, to elaborate:

First, the doctrine of taqiyya allows Muslims residing among infidels to deceive the latter by, among other things, behaving like infidels, e.g., frequenting strip bars: “Taqiyya [deception], even if committed without duress, does not lead to a state of infidelity — even if it leads to sin deserving of hellfire.”

In conjunction, the overarching Muslim principle that necessity makes that which is forbidden permissible goes a long way in helping Islamists validate their libidinous desires: “It is ‘necessary’ for me to be at this strip club so infidels come to believe that I’m just a regular bloke and not a soldier of Allah.” Indeed, sometimes the mere gratification of sexual urges is deemed a “necessity” that makes the forbidden permissible in Islam, as in this historical anecdote:

After conquering the Banu Mustaliq tribe in 628, Muhammad’s men deemed it “necessary” to rape their captive women (citing their wives’ absence and untended desires). However, they also wanted to sell these women for a profit, which posed complications, as copulating with them risked impregnating them. So they rationalized that ‘azl (coitus interruptus) would solve the problem and asked Muhammad. The prophet went one step further and offered a cosmic rationalization, dismissing coitus interruptus as unnecessary, “for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born” — that is, pullout or not, you cannot thwart Allah’s will, so don’t bother. (See here and here for more ‘azl quotes.)

Muhammad also maintained that death in the jihad not only blots out all sins — including sexual ones, a la voyeurism — but it actually gratifies them:

The martyr is special to Allah. He is forgiven [of all sins] from the first drop of blood [that he sheds]. He sees his throne in paradise, where he will be adorned in ornaments of faith. He will wed the ‘Aynhour [a.k.a. “voluptuous women”] and will not know the torments of the grave, and safeguards against the greater terror [hell]. … And he will copulate with 72 ‘Aynhour (see The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 143).

In light of this, how “un-Islamic” can it be for Islamists to gawk at nude, gyrating, infidel women — especially prior to “martyring” themselves in the jihad, which, as Muhammad said, blots out all their sins? This rationalization has precedents going back to the Middle Ages: Muslim groups like the Isma‘ilis created hidden “gardens of delight” swarming with voluptuous women, and, prior to sending their assassins on missions, would immerse them in these gardens, thereby giving these prototypical “suicide attackers” a foretaste of the sexual delights awaiting them in the afterlife. After this experience, the assassins would eagerly undertake any assignment simply to be “martyred” and return to the gardens of delight, which were based on “the description Muhammad gave of his paradise” (see Marco Polo’s 13th-century account).

Nor has this intersection between sex and violence subsided in the modern era. The Arabic satellite program Daring Question recently aired various clips of young jihadists giddily singing about their forthcoming deaths and subsequent sexual escapades in heaven. After documenting various anecdotes indicative of Islamist obsession with sex, human rights activist Magdi Khalil concluded that “absolutely everything [jihad, suicide operations, etc.] revolves around sex in heaven,” adding, “if you look at the whole of Islamic history, you come up with two words: sex and violence.”

Deceit, rationalizations, and a paradise that forgives the would-be martyr’s every sin — indeed, that satiates his hedonistic urges with 72 voluptuous women (which may only be raisins) — all help demonstrate how Muslims can be observant and simultaneously frequent strip clubs.

Yet there is one final explanation that requires an epistemic shift to appreciate fully: in Islam, legalism trumps morality, resulting in what Westerners may deem irreconcilable behavior among Muslims, that is, “hypocrisy.” As Daniel Pipes observed some three decades ago in his In the Path of God:

[There is] a basic contrast between the Christian and Islamic religions: the stress on ethics versus the stress on laws. Controls on sexual activity directly reflect this difference. The West restricts sex primarily by imbuing men and women with standards of morality. … Muslims, in contrast, depend on “external precautionary safeguards” [e.g., segregation, veiling] to restrain the sexes. … Rather than instill internalized ethical principles, Islam establishes physical boundaries to keep the sexes apart. (my bold – MW)

In this context, the problem is not Muslims frequenting strip clubs, but misplaced Western projections that assume religious piety is always synonymous with personal morality — a notion especially alien to legalistic Islamists whose entire epistemology begins and ends with the literal words of seventh-century Muhammad and his Koran.

And it is this slavishness that best explains Islamist behavior. For the same blind devotion to the literal mandates of Islam which encourages Islamists to lead lives of deceit also explains why Islamists are callous to human suffering, why they are desensitized to notions of human dignity and the cries of their raped victims, and, yes, why they cheerily forfeit their lives in exchange for a fleshy paradise. In all cases, Muhammad and his Allah said so — and that’s all that matters.