Why Girls Are the Key

Tuesday

Below are a couple of quotes from an article in the New York Times called The Women's Crusade, by Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas D. Kristof, the authors of Half the Sky and the creators of the Girl Effect.

If you help women, you solve many of the problems we have on earth, including the problem of Islam's relentless encroachment.

The reason I feel this should be shared is because about half the non-Muslims who write to me and who want to do something about the terrifying brilliance of Islam are not very adept at influencing people. They have a strong desire to share what they know, but they are finding that the only people willing to listen are those who already know it and agree with it.

But we need to reach the rest of them. That is a central pivot point in the cause. If enough people knew, we could change national polices. But some people really don't want to know about it, for whatever reason, so the word is not spreading as quickly as it should.

One way to deal with it is to improve your ability to influence people, which I highly recommend. But another way is to choose something that has less built-in ready-made resistance to it. The Girl Effect is an excellent candidate.

You can get people to watch and share the video on the Girl Effect website and you can convince them to get involved. You can share with them the quotations below, and invite them to join the Girl Effect on FaceBook to get updates. You can read the book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide and share the book with your friends. And for all these things, you will get very little resistance.

Anyway, on with the quotes:

There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution...

In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty...

Our interviews and perusal of the data available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children (2 percent). If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries. Girls, since they are the ones kept home from school now, would be the biggest beneficiaries. Moreover, one way to reallocate family expenditures in this way is to put more money in the hands of women. A series of studies has found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier.

In Ivory Coast, one research project examined the different crops that men and women grow for their private kitties: men grow coffee, cocoa and pineapple, and women grow plantains, bananas, coconuts and vegetables. Some years the “men’s crops” have good harvests and the men are flush with cash, and other years it is the women who prosper. Money is to some extent shared. But even so, the economist Esther Duflo of M.I.T. found that when the men’s crops flourish, the household spends more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women have a good crop, the households spend more money on food. “When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves,” Duflo says.

...Yet another reason to educate and empower women is that greater female involvement in society and the economy appears to undermine extremism and terrorism. It has long been known that a risk factor for turbulence and violence is the share of a country’s population made up of young people. Now it is emerging that male domination of society is also a risk factor; the reasons aren’t fully understood, but it may be that when women are marginalized the nation takes on the testosterone-laden culture of a military camp or a high-school boys’ locker room. That’s in part why the Joint Chiefs of Staff and international security specialists are puzzling over how to increase girls’ education in countries like Afghanistan — and why generals have gotten briefings from Greg Mortenson, who wrote about building girls’ schools in his best seller, “Three Cups of Tea.”

Read more...

How Similar Are These Two Books?

Sunday

In a Wall Street Journal article, Stop The Trial Of Geert Wilders, Leon de Winter wrote:

The Amsterdam court trying the controversial Dutch politician is now preoccupied with the question of whether this book, sacred to more than a billion believers, can be compared to one of the most vile publications in the history of Western civilization — Hitler's "Mein Kampf."

In his writing and speeches, Mr. Wilders has found these two works to be similar in terms of their anti-Semitism and incitement to hatred, and has thus called for a publishing ban on the Quran similar to the one in place for "Mein Kampf." This is what triggered Mr. Wilders's prosecution for discriminatory and insulting remarks against Muslims and Islam.

The court will have to determine just how similar the two books are! And they will do it on camera.

This trial may be the best thing that has ever happened to the citizen warriors of the world who have been trying to educate our fellow non-Muslims about Islam's relentless encroachment. Geert's trial is going to help bring to light the content of Islamic doctrine to an audience who would normally avoid the knowledge.

Thank you, Pastorius, for bringing this article to my attention.

Read more...

Freedom of Cuisine Versus Freedom of Speech

Thursday

In an article in the Telegraph, Ed West writes, "Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party is on course to top the polls in the Dutch election in the summer, after tremendous gains in local elections this week – it came first in Almere and second in The Hague, the two only local authorities the party contested, and this despite Wilders being put on trial earlier this year for 'insulting Islam.'

"Or maybe because of… Despite the media consensus that Wilders is 'far-Right' and Islamphobic, and a trouble-maker with a dodgy haircut, the Dutch people obviously saw his trial for what it was – proof of his point that multiculturalism threatens freedom. They decided that, whatever the benefits of 'diversity,' the most important thing is diversity of opinion. Freedom to eat two dozen different cuisines in an evening or visit half a dozen religious buildings is small comfort if it is at the expense of freedom of speech.

"...unlike many opponents of mass immigration, he’s not a fascist or a racist – the British establishment would love Wilders to reveal himself to be another Nick Griffin or Jorg Haider, someone with lots of skeletons dressed in SS uniform in his closet, but he’s not. He’s just a normal mainstream conservative who sees, like many others, that the liberal establishment suffers from sort of groupthink madness when it comes to the subject of immigration."

Read the article here: Is Geert Wilders the new William of Orange?

Read more...

12 Strange Muslim Rules

Sunday

The following is a list of twelve odd facts about Islam — a list I found at SIOTW.org:

1. It is a sin to pluck your eyebrows.

2. It is against Islamic doctrine to have pictures in your home.

3. If a Muslim wife refuses to wear a veil, others will see her as her husband's slave rather than his wife.

4. The punishment for having unmarried sex is whipping with a hundred lashes and then being exiled for a year.

5. Getting into Paradise is usually not a sure thing. Your good deeds must outweigh your bad deeds, but who knows for sure if they do? But there are three things you can do to guarantee you'll make it to Paradise: a) killing a non-Muslim in battle, b) if two of your children were killed fighting for Allah, or c) memorizing the ninety-nine names of Allah.

6. Allah not just allows, but encourages Muslims to deceive non-Muslims if it will further the goals of spreading Islam.

7. Women are not allowed to wear hair extensions or a wig.

8. Wearing the color yellow is forbidden.

9. A Muslim must avoid yawning. Mohammad said, "Yawning is from Satan."

10. Dogs should be killed. All dogs.

11. Mohammad recommended women breastfeed young men. Then the men are considered family and would be allowed to talk to the woman unveiled. However, once she breastfed him, he would not be allowed to marry her.

12. It is a sin to lie on your back and cross your feet.

Okay, so SIOTW.org chose some largely unimportant and quirky things to put on their list. It has certainly caused a lot of commenting, but mostly what people are commenting about are the silliest, most unimportant items on the list. Who cares if Muslims pluck their eyebrows? What IS important is what educated non-Muslims don't like about Islam. Read about that here.

But if you're interested in more, this page on WikiIslam lists some of the most humorous texts found in Islamic doctrine: Qur'an, Hadith and Scholars: Islamic Silliness.

And for still more: Some of the Absurd Teachings of Muhammad.

Read more...

Article Spotlight

One of the most unusual articles on CitizenWarrior.com is Pleasantville and Islamic Supremacism.

It illustrates the Islamic Supremacist vision by showing the similarity between what happened in the movie, Pleasantville, and what devout fundamentalist Muslims are trying to create in Islamic states like Syria, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia (and ultimately everywhere in the world).

Click here to read the article.


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