Sharia Street

[Snowden]

SHARIA STREET
Steyn on Britain and Europe
Thursday, 27 December 2007
HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review

Ever since this here Internet thingy came along, I spend the first hour of each morning trying to figure out which if any of the gazillions of overnight e-mails is genuine. This one struck me as obviously fake: a press release for a new reality TV show in which non-Muslims get to live under sharia.

But, inevitably, it turns out to be genuine. Filmed in Harrogate, one of the least Muslim towns in Yorkshire, the series will air on Britain’s Channel 4 and feature infidels trying to live as a Muslim for three weeks. It’s not as easy as it looks. One participant, offered a cold baked potato at the end of his fast, stomped off to the pub for a pint of beer and a pork pie. “That incident was completely unprompted,” the producer Narinder Minhas told The Guardian, “and the scene with Suliman, one of the mentors, and Luke, the gay hairdresser, in the clothes shop is one of my favorites.”

Luke the gay hairdresser? Yes, Mr Minhas has chosen a scientifically representative sample of early 21st century infidels: a gay hairdresser, a “glamour model” partial to flashing her breasts, an atheist taxi driver with a porn habit, etc. Evidently, Harrogate has changed somewhat from the genteel spa town it was when I took tea and crumpets there some years ago. Anyway, the gay coiffeur and the porno cabbie et al have to live without pork, alcohol, immodest ladies’ clothing and non-marital sex. Which pretty much eliminates every pillar of the Yorkshire infidel lifestyle.

Minhas, previously the producer of Priest Idol and Indian Finishing School, says he and Channel 4 wanted their new reality series to be “fun”. “We were a bit tired,” he explained wearily, “of seeing guys with beards who are a bit scary.” Indeed. Who among us has not found himself fighting vainly the old ennui at the umpteenth fire-breathing imam exhorting the lads to one more chorus of “Death to the Great Satan”? It was unclear from the publicity what happens if you find the three-week sharia tough-sledding. Do you get voted off the island? Or beheaded off the island? It had the vague feel of sharia-lite, the Islamic equivalent of Richard Gere Buddhism. A day or two later, I awoke to an e-mail about a British teacher in Sudan facing 40 lashes and blasphemy charges for having been careless enough to let her pupils name a classroom teddy bear “Mohammed”. Don’t know what precise sura references the matter of cuddly-toy nomenclature, but apparently it’s a big deal. You can’t help feeling Luke the gay hairdresser would have a livelier sharia-for-a-day session in the Khartoum spin-off.

Meanwhile, away from reality TV, reality plods on. In Pakistan, the suicide bomber who killed 170 people at Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming rally is believed by police to be a one-year old child involuntarily conscripted by his jihadist father. Miss Bhutto had glimpsed the kid and beckoned dad over for a baby-kissing photo-op, but someone got between them and her motorcade swept on, fortunately for her. In the west, not many of us would wire up our one-year olds, and, if we did, they’d soon be outnumbered. I said in my book that Europe’s demographically shriveled liberal progressives had in effect adopted the same strategy as the 19th century Shakers, who were forbidden to reproduce and so could increase their numbers only by conversion. Result: There aren’t a lot of Shakers around today. At the time I wrote it, a year and a half back, I meant it as a cheap metaphorical crack at the expense of European fertility rates. After all, it would be absurd to suggest that liberal progressives were formally enjoined to desist from going forth and multiplying.

But I’m reminded of some advice I once got from a showbiz veteran: the easiest way to make a million bucks is to take your favorite gag and play it for real. My little Shaker crack has been eagerly taken up and made literal by the environmental movement: As the Daily Mail headline put it, “Meet The Women Who Won’t Have Babies – Because They’re Not Eco-Friendly”. The best way to save the earth for the next generation is not to have a next generation. So Toni and Sarah, at the peak of their reproductive years, both decided to have themselves sterilized to “protect the planet”. As Toni explained, “Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of overpopulation.” We are the pollution, and sterilization is the solution. It’s the ultimate reality TV show: a series of Survivor where everyone gets voted off the island.

Toni and Sarah assume they’re saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bears, and the spotted owl, and the three-toed tree sloth, and the green-cheeked parrot. In fact, they’re saving the planet for the cultures whose womenfolk don’t get themselves sterilized. Forty per cent of children in London primary schools now speak a language other than English at home. No matter how frantically Toni and Sarah and all their chums tie their tubes, England grows ever more crowded.

The culture that built the modern world is playing Civilizational Survivor. Alas, sharia isn’t a TV show. For one thing, it never gets canceled.

from National Review

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/828/26

[sabadgeman]

The last line is so true it never gets canceled the only way to cancel it is to wipe it from the face of the earth!

[Snowden]

Yet there are the moderate Muslims; they don't need shari'a, of course.

One point that's made here only subtly is that of "Tony and Sarah" aborting their children. Radical Islam does not have abortion -- Islam has no birth control. They've been creeping across Europe for 700 +/- years, sometimes violently, mostly quietly -- just breeding. A man can have four wives at the same time. I knew a man in Jerusalem with two wives and 18 children. This type of breeding results in large populations, and they simply can smother the aborting civilizations as they move through the United Kingdom and the U.S.

Islam does have divorce. So if one wife is no longer desirable, he can tell her three times that she is divorced and take it to court. In a year, the divorce is final and he is free to marry a younger, more fecund woman and continue to breed even into his dotage. An older, retired man I often sat in the coffee with, drinking coffee or tea lost his wife. He remarried a 17-year-old girl. The last time I heard, they had three children. That was in the late 1980's. By now, she could have had 10 or more children.