And Never The Twain...India's Hindu-Muslim Divide
"People are frustrated that they are not being able to get jobs."
"There is angst, which is spreading across communities and people ... It's a reaction to their circumstances."
Vasundhara Raje, Leading member, Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]
"I have a strange sense of confidence now. The group has taught us what is right, what we need to do for society."
"Earlier there was a fear that the government would arrest us, but now with the Yogi government, we don't have any fear."
"Even if a smuggler is killed during a fight, we don't have to worry about it. Even if a life is lost, we don't care."
"All these BJP leaders, they've said, 'Do what you want to do about cow protection. Don't worry, if there is any problem we are there for you."
Ram Kumar, 23, Govardhan, India
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| People walk past a shop selling cow meat in Kolkata, capital of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. |
There are over 600 million people under the age of 24 in India with access to technology and education. But India has a vast population, many in the same age cohort who despite the advance in technology and education available to them now, for whom there will be scant opportunity for meaningful employment. The negatives don't end there; because boys are seen as preferential to girls, the culture selects for males, either in the womb or through neglect after birth.
The result of which is that there is an estimated 37 million men for whom a mate will never be found, thanks to aborted female fetuses. These are called
"bachelor bombs", for whom the presence of a woman in their lives and the fulfillment of family life will never defuse those incipient 'bombs'. The cultural legacy of preference for boys leaves those young men bereft of a normal future.
Each month in India over a million young men enter the labour market, often with inadequate employment skills. India is able to generate 1.8 million jobs annually, according to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy. The government, on the other hand, claims that closer to 7 million new jobs were created last year.
The result of this growing social dysfunction with scant employment opportunities and restless young men for whom life seems purposeless, is a search for meaning. Some attend leadership camps; they are themselves under no economic duress, coming from well-off families. And they are joining right-wing groups in the belief that they can help clean up society's ills.
Their core Hindu beliefs, they believe, require their very particular vigilance to ensure that society knows its place. Beating others suspected of violating those Hindu beliefs, threatening interfaith couples in the belief that Muslims are plotting to steal their Hindu women for whom they're prepared to kill in defence of the faith.
This past summer has seen dozens of people killed by lynch mobs, where extremist Hindus assault and kill other people, mostly Muslims. Religious zealots responded to a minor traffic accident by demolishing a car with sticks to vent their rage, even while police looked on, unresponsively. The Hindu nationalist Bharantiya Janata Party governing India is being blamed for encouraging violence by Hindu extremists.
Ram Kumar is one example of a college graduate who attended a leadership camp sponsored by the Hindu nationalist World Hindu Council. And this is where he became familiar with the need to protect cows held sacred by Hindus but butchered and eaten by Muslims. It is where he was inspired to protect women's modesty, and to prevent those outside the faith from converting Hindus to their own faith.
Military drills, sleeping in spartan concrete dorm rooms, eating lentils and rice was part of the hardening off formula of these activists. Kumar, and his friend Gaurav Sharma, 22, a law student, come from Agra where they grew up, the city that boasts the Taj Mahal, the world-famed monument to love, which they regard as symbolic of the Mughal invaders subjugating India's Hindus.
After Kumar's indoctrination in the training camp he became accustomed to chasing down and threatening interfaith couples, conducting the kind of moral activism he feels is required to stop Muslim men from seducing girls
"as young as 14", a practise known as
"love jihad". At night Kumar prowls the streets on the lookout for cattle traders illegally smuggling cows to slaughter.
He and five other committed activists recently stopped a truck transporting cows and beat the driver, a Muslim, who pleaded for them to spare his life. His life was spared but not by the activists, when police arrived.
"I was raging, if I had a pistol, I would have killed him", said Kumar. Since the BJP came to power in the state of Uttar Pradesh, the activists have no fear of accountability to authorities.
"Our parents never told us anything bad about Muslims. But in madrassas, they learn that Hindus are bad."
"We will tell the next generations how bad these people are."
Gauray Sharma, 22, law student
Labels: Conflict, Customs, Hindus, India, Muslims, Traditions
Stifled and Suffocated in Gaza
"She is beautiful and a widow of a martyr at the same time."
"When I get wealthy, I will marry the third wife."
Majdi Abu Mustafa
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| USA Newsguide |
"Our men fight wars and die. Women stay alive."
"This is why my project supports polygamy."
"Our website encourages them [women] to search for husbands by themselves, to truly choose and say what they like in the man."
"We also fight old traditions that say divorced women should not get married."
Hashem Sheikha, founder, Wesal, Gaza matchmaking website
"Women who lost their men during the last three wars have difficult lives and few options."
"In most cases the husband's family pressures the woman to marry the brother-in-law to control her life."
"This matchmaking service is positive because it encourages these women to choose the potential husband without fear and pressure."
Reham Owda, Gaza women's issues writer
"I felt like I was the happiest man in the world on my wedding day", said Rami Shatali, 38, divorced with four daughters, living together in the Al Maghazi refugee camp in Gaza. He married Majd Shatali 26, divorced as well, and living with her son. They found one another on the website Wesal.
"...I found a woman who madly fell in love with me. The one who could make me forget all about my pain", he said.
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| USA Newsguide |
Single woman from Gaza City, Lina Zein, 25, fails to view the website as a positive contribution to women's welfare in Gaza, however. According to her:
"This website is disgusting. Women are not a sack of onions". Perhaps not, perhaps they represent something far more prestigious than a sack of onions; say, for example, a status symbol.
For Islam permits Muslim men to marry up to four wives. The more wives a man has the more important he seems to himself, and to the community. Since it is also a matter of affordability. One must have the financial capacity to support each succeeding wife. That nuisance is overcome, it seems, when Muslim men in multiple marriages, seen as illegal in the West, nonetheless emigrate there and have all their wives and children supported on welfare.
Majdi and Ghada Abu Mustafa each were looking for spouses; he for a widow of a man killed in battle against Israel. Preferably without children. Preferably between 25 and 30. She, on the other hand, was looking for a married man so she could become part of his domestic entourage. Islam does not permit the exchange of photographs or online chatting. So that's a little tricky.
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| USA Newsguide |
Gaza strip residents are religious conservatives, unlike most of the Palestinian population living in the West Bank. In the three wars that Hamas has launched with Israel, roughly 1,400 Hamas fighters have been killed since 2008, leaving behind widows. Tradition makes it difficult for these widows to become married to single men. Abu Mustafa, 34, stated his wish to give "dignity" to a widow.
Mr. Sheikha, the founder of the website, claims 150 weddings thanks to his venture in bringing people together, since March. Over half of those marriage requests related to men looking for a second or third wife. The website services widows, the divorced and those who have never before married. Users must accept the term:
"I swear by Allah the Great that all my information is accurate, and that I won't use this website for entertainment".
But this is also a religion, one must remember, that permits men to practise the fiction of "temporary marriages", when they want to have sex with a woman and have no intention of committing to one woman through marriage. In this religion, divorce is simple, with the man required simply to state three times in succession:
"I divorce you".
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| USA Newsguide |
"Polуgamу has hit high
rates in Gaza over thе few past уears, seeminglу due tо an increase in
people’s religious inclination, especiallу after Hamas took power in
2007", explained Amal Seуam, head оf thе
nongovernmental Gaza’s Women Affairs Association.
Labels: Customs, Gaza, Islam, Marriage
Revealing Canadian Values in Welcoming Immigrants/Refugees
"Generation after generation [of Canadians complain that newcomers are not integrating into Canadian society]."
"I suspect many [of the respondents] don't know newcomers well. Those of us who do know newcomers, know they're constantly exhausting themselves to do all they need to do [to] make a success of their life in Canada."
"What are we doing to ensure newcomers are able to fit in?"
Janet Dench, executive director, Canadian Council for Refugees
What are we doing? Leaving no assist unturned, from government and private agencies assisting immigrants and refugees to acclimate themselves, learn the language, apply for benefits, use the universal health care system, register for assisted housing, look for employment, school their children and make no demands whatever on the recipients of all this largesse along with general goodwill emanating from the Canadian publicr. The better question is what are the newcomers doing to fit in?
Famously, Canada is a nation built on immigrants who have chosen to arrive at its shores to make a new life for themselves. Originally, those immigrants were supplied by English-speaking Europeans initially, along with immigrants from France. Prospective immigrants from Asia and Africa and those with certain European ethnic backgrounds like Jews were not particularly welcome. Infamously, in the late 19th and early 20th Century Canadian governments put head taxes on Asians to dissuade them from coming to Canada, and during World War II interned Japanese-Canadians, and placed European Jews escaping the Holocaust into camps alongside "enemy aliens".
All of the immigrants that arrived in Canada, those not looked upon favourably, made a concerted effort to find a place for themselves, to meld as best they could, into the prevailing social structure, to familiarize themselves with the language, the culture, the values and the laws. And the succeeding generations had no problems whatever expressing all of that, the language, the culture the values and the laws as being of utmost importance to them, as Canadians. Furthermore, at that time in Canadian history there were no government assists at various levels. "Newcomers" had to struggle on their own.
Now, when immigrants and refugees arrive, it is to a Canada that is open and welcoming to all, a country whose social and welfare support networks are all-encompassing and generous at every level of government. Where earlier, the struggle of new Canadians was to survive and at the same time integrate, currently the level of struggle to survive is hugely reduced, thanks to a generous tax-funded network of assists, and many of those arriving feel no particular urgency to integrate. In fact, second- and third-generation immigrant children becoming fully Canadian is no longer the norm.
And there lies the rub. The mass migration of people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia to escape less than prosperous and politically stable environments under Muslim-majority rule, has led to a gradual and none-too-subtle alteration in the social customs, political-religious realities in the countries that have absorbed them. Looking to countries like Sweden, Norway, Belgium, France and Germany as an example, vast no-go ghettos have evolved where resistance to integration is the norm.
That resistance revolves around Islam. Where Muslim populations feel great resentment against the social mores, justice system and culture and heritage of the indigenous populations and where, as in the United Kingdom, mosques ring out with condemnation of the West and the democratic way of life, agitating for the imposition of Shariah law. And wherever large populations of Muslims agglomerate, there arises a number of problems. One of which is the eagerness of Muslims to live on welfare payments in favour of working for a living.
Another is the realization that criminal acts far in excess of their numbers arise out of that community. And finally, that anti-Semitism on a viral, combustible scale rears its ugly head, at the very time that Muslims decry "Islamophobia" that has resulted largely not from the enumerated social problems, but the steady rise of violent Islamism embracing jihad and trolling within the Muslim ghettos for new conscripts into jihad. The violence in the name of Islam and the hostility emanating from Muslim populations against the West and democracy is not spoken of in polite, leftist company.
To do so is to be labelled 'racist' and to invite the condemnatory label of "Islamophobic" against those who dare to offend by side-stepping the prevailing political correctness. If there is any true irony in this situation it is that Muslim refugees have been created on a gigantic scale of upheaval resulting from Muslims slaughtering Muslims through sectarian conflict. And it is not other Muslim countries by and large that absorb the haven-seeking Muslims who flee oppression and danger but Western countries who see it as their humanitarian duty. And whom the haven-seeking later turn against.
A new survey undertaken by the Angus Reid Institute determined that 47 percent of respondents from among 1,508 Canadians questioned in early February believe that Canada is absorbing
"about the right number" of refugees, while 51 percent feel the number is
"already too high", and eleven percent would prefer to see Canada open its doors to even more refugees. Six in ten Canadians feel the government has
"done a good job" in its refugee file.
One quarter of respondents feel, however that Canada should have undertaken a temporary ban on refugees, reflecting the executive order signed by American President Donald Trump briefly halting entry of all refugees into the United States, along with citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries. Canadians in British Columbia and the Atlantic Provinces were more favourable in allowing more refugees into Canada. Half of Albertans and 55 percent of those in Saskatchewan feel the numbers are too high.
It is the opinion of 54 percent of respondents of the survey that refugees make an insufficient effort to
"fit into mainstream Canadian society". A Pew Research Centre poll established that 90 percent of Canadians feel the capability of speaking English or French, sharing Canadian customs and traditions are of vital importance in reflecting
"truly Canadian" values. For them it appeared to be of less importance if immigrants or refugees were born in Canada, or if they were Christian.
How do
supporters of Canada’s major political parties feel about the
requirement to show faces at while taking the citizenship oath?
- 96 per cent of Conservative supporters
- 85 per cent of Liberal supporters
- 83 per cent of NDP supporters
- 81 per cent of Bloc Quebecois supporters
How do political party supporters feel about allowing Muslim women to wear a niqab or burka while taking the citizenship oath?
- 78
per cent of Conservative supporters disagree with allowing Muslim women
beign allowed to where a niqab or burka when being sworn in as
Canadians
- 76 per cent of Bloc Quebecois supporters
- 66 per cent of NDP supporters
- 60 per cent of Liberal supporters
Percentage
of political party supporters who feel the burka and niqab are symbols
of oppression rooted in a culture that is anti-women.
- 86 per cent of Bloc Quebecois supporters
- 84 per cent of Conservative supporters
- 70 per cent of NDP supporters
- 66 percent of Liberal supporters
Global News Labels: Canada, Controversy, Customs, Immigration, Islam, Refugees, Values
