This, they try to Call Living in the Light

A YOUNG schoolboy was “converted” to Islam on the streets of Birmingham by a radical Muslim preacher, the Sunday Mercury can reveal.

The bewildered-looking 11 year-old, who gives his name as Sean, was filmed repeating Arabic chants and swearing allegiance to Allah.

The white schoolboy is prompted throughout by controversial cleric Anjem Choudary, a follower of exiled hate-preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed.

One can only wonder where both radical and not-so-radical Islam’s hate – hate relationship with the world comes from, especially when it comes to the sick business of exploiting the young. It seems different for boys than it is for girls, but it’s still founded upon a kind of coercion and exploitation, knowing that from the scared and the innocently young, the hateful and manipulative will go unchallenged. As with paedophiles, they get a feeling of control over another living being that cannot evade that headlock of submission.

Muslim countries in the Middle East and north-central Africa lead the world in human trafficking, according to a new U.S. State Department report. Of the 17 countries that were given the "Tier 3" listing reserved for the worst offenders, nine were Muslim countries or countries with a large Muslim population from these two regions. Tier 3 countries are defined as those “whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards" of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 and "are not making significant efforts to do so.”

Is it rare? Is it merely a rural phenomenon? Can one be convinced to call it a feature of native culture that has to be respected as so many of the west’s theoretical expects on culture (but not civilization) would have you know? Of course not.

Amir Taheri on the other hand doesn’t wonder at all. They are not alone in taking joy of others’ pain:

Foucault was not alone among Western leftists to be seduced by Khomeinism. Some of the historic figures of the May 1968 student revolts in Europe visited Iran during these troubled days to see their fantasy revolution take shape in a Third World country. Like impotent voyeurs, they watched the tragedy imposed on Iran by a revolution they could only dream of in their own countries.

And for the thinnest of reasons too, the same reason it’s impolite in EUtopia to dwell too much – too much being in any way that would make a real impression – on the real state of being of those exploited for the pleasure of a fantasy-revolutionary or an equally mal-adjusted people who enjoy taking advantage of those they’ve made servile.

For Western return-ticket revolutionaries, watching the Iranian tragedy was-and for some, still is-a way of obtaining vicarious pleasure without a price in pain. Just as quite a few Western pedophiles travel to Third World nations to gratify the bestial tastes they cannot easily indulge at home, aging European and American revolutionaries flocked to Iran to see a revolution such as they no longer hoped to see in their own countries, and they tried hard to describe it as a "people's revolution."

And for those in western Europe too simplistic to look past the first explanation they’re handed, the use of terminology might sound familiar:

In a single incident in August 1978, over four hundred people were burned alive at Cinema Rex in Abadan, set on fire by one of the commandos that Foucault had admired. The commando had blocked the emergency exits from the outside and destroyed firefighting equipment to make sure that a maximum number of people would die. The Supreme Guide of the revolution, Khomeini, dismissed the incident as "a sign of the rage of our youth."

So don’t be surprised if the consequences we see someday are largely the same.