Illinois Board Nixes "Muslim-Friendly" Surgi-Center

Common sense prevails--for now:

BOLINGBROOK — A state regulatory board indicated it plans to reject a plan to build a Muslim-friendly surgery center in southwest suburban Orland Park.  

But several board members said they sympathize with a problem they hadn’t realized exists: the discomfort that followers of Islam — especially modesty-conscious Muslim women — feel about using any of the existing hospitals, urgent-care centers and surgery centers in the Chicago area.

And proponents say they have not given up on the project. 

Naser Rustom, a Muslim Arab-American, has asked the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board to approve a “certificate of need” for a $5.5 million 11,000-square-foot “ambulatory surgical treatment center” with five operating rooms in the former Plunkett’s Furniture store building adjacent to Orland Square Shopping Center. 

Meeting in Bolingbrook on Tuesday, the board voted unanimously, with one member absent, that it “intends to reject” the application. 

The issue will come back to the board for a final decision in June or August. 

If you want to import Saudi Arabian standards into Chicago-area hospitals, maybe that's a clue that you're better off staying in Saudi Arabia.

Update: It turns out that Dr. Naser Rustom is quite the sharia-motivated entrepreneur:

A Chicago doctor who owns a lavish Middle Eastern eatery on West Randolph Street wants to open the first outpatient surgery center in Illinois that he says will follow Islamic law.  

Dr. Naser Rustom, who opened Alhambra Palace in 2007, has in mind a venture with a much more religious flavor. He proposes to establish a $5.5 million medical facility in southwest suburban Orland Park that would cater to Muslims, including space for prayer and ritual washing and partitions for enhanced patient privacy.  

The proposal reflects how more businesses are looking to tap into the growing population of Arab-Americans and Muslims, offering products ranging from home mortgages to meat that satisfy religious standards. This comes at a time of passionate national debate over the religious rights of business owners, sparked by scores of lawsuits filed against the Obama administration over a regulation that requires employer health care plans to cover contraceptives.  

Some interpretations of Shariah, or Islamic law, require strict segregation of the sexes, a practice that Dr. Rustom doesn't intend to follow because, in his view, it likely would violate federal and state laws.  

While his plan is aimed at conservative Muslims, his pitch may be driven more by marketing than dogma.  

“It's not as if we can open up the books of Islamic law and find a chapter on what makes a Shariah-compliant health care facility,” says Kristen Stilt, a professor at Northwestern University Law School who has studied the development of Islamic law...

What bollocks! Dr. Naser, for one, knows exactly what it takes to makes make a medical facility sharia-friendly. And, of course, if you have a problem with that sort of thing, prepare to be described as an "Islamophobe," a word that works wonders when dogmatists want infidels to bend to their will.

An Object Lesson in How Fear of Jihad and Political Correctness Have Dumbed Us Down

Following their prize-winning performance in Bordeaux, France, the Schumann Quartet had an unfortunate run-in with imbecilic airport security:

The Schumann Quartet won the prestigious Bordeaux Competition yesterday. This morning, airport security told them they could not take the small trophy on board. After much deliberation, they were allowed to pay 70 Euros for the dubious privilege of putting it in the hold.

Well, after all, there might have been a bomb in that thing. Alternatively, the musicians could have used it to slug the pilot and commandeer the plane while screaming, "Mozart Akbar!"

"Blasphemy" Is Freedom

Silencing "blasphemers," on the other hand, is the M.O. of totalitarians:

The pale, young Christian woman sat handcuffed in the courtroom, accused of insulting Islam while teaching history of religions to fourth-graders. A team of Islamist lawyers with long beards sang in unison, "All except the Prophet Muhammad." 

The case against Dimyana Abdel-Nour in southern Egypt's ancient city of Luxor began when parents of three of her pupils claimed that their children, aged 10, complained their teacher showed disgust when she spoke of Islam in class. According to the parents, Abdel-Nour, 24, told the children that Pope Shenouda, who led the Egyptian Coptic Church until his death last year, was better than the Prophet Muhammad. 

Blasphemy charges were not uncommon in Egypt under the now-ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak's regime, but there has been a surge in such cases in recent months, according to rights activists. The trend is widely seen as a reflection of the growing power and confidence of Islamists, particularly the ultraconservative Salafis...

The trend is quite worrisome in Canada, too.

Barack Obama Has Sucked Up Like Mad to Egypt, Given the MuBros in Charge Tons of Cash. Surely That's Endeared Him and the U.S. to Egyptians, No?

Well, no:

There is a consensus, however, regarding the United States – overwhelmingly, Egyptians see the U.S. negatively. Despite President Barack Obama’s efforts to improve America’s image in the Arab world, beginning with his famous June 2009 Cairo speech, his ratings have slipped steadily in Egypt since he took office, and ratings for the U.S. are lower now than they were during the Bush administration. Moreover, few Egyptians place much value on a close relationship with the U.S.

It seems clear that the more money you give 'em, the more they hate you. Time to cut them off, cold-turkey, and thereby cause them to manifest a greater appreciation for what they've lost.

A Cautionary Tale for Parents: Don't Let Your Pre-Pubescent Daughter "Friend" Pedophiles Who Post Naked Pics of Themselves on Her Facebook Page

If you don't want your little darlin' to be lured into a sex ring by some creepy dude named "Akhtar," that is:

She would arrive late for the 7.30pm family supper. And — after a time — she often did not come home at night and went missing for days on end. 

Now her horrified mother knows the reason for her daughter’s worrying behaviour. She was being seduced by a predatory gang of paedophiles, who lured her into a life of sex slavery by giving her gifts of cocaine, cannabis, cigarettes and vodka.  

By the age of 13, Rachel had more than 700 men’s names on her Facebook page.  

Hundreds of others were sending text messages and even naked photos of themselves to her pink mobile phone.  

She changed her online identity to a Muslim name. And when she did come home, she often had savage bruises and bites all over her face and body. 

‘We would search the streets for her in our cars,’ says Georgina. ‘We did everything to try to keep her indoors, locking all the doors and windows at night.  

‘But she would wait until we had gone to sleep and let herself out. Then she would turn up the next day in tears and say she was sorry.’...

She had the names of 700 strange men on her Facebook page?!?

Seriously?

I would say that hers are the opposite of "helicopter parents"--ones who hover too closely and try to monitor every aspect of their child's life. Let's call them "space station parents," since they are somewhere out in the heavens, and are merely orbiting their kid's world.

Reading Between the Lines of an Anti-Sunni Article You Can See the Shias' Purposeful PR

Who's nuttier, Khomeinists or Wahhabists? It's rather a toss-up, I'd say, but in the following story, Wahhabists are made to sound way wackier (no doubt because the source of the story is Khomeinist):

A man identified on Twitter as Abul Ala and claiming to be a Salafist-Wahhabist cleric, has decreed women should not turn on air conditioners or coolers at home, in the absence of their husbands.

According to the Iran-based Al-Alam news network the cleric is alleged to have decreed: "turning on the cooler ventilator is prohibited for women in the absence of their husbands" because "the woman's act is very dangerous, and may bring about immorality in the society. When she turns the cooler on, someone may notice her presence home, and this might bring about immorality".

The news report also stated Salafist-Wahhabist clerics "have a distorted reading of Islam" and their decrees are "incompatible with common sense".

Salafist and Wahhabist ideologies are considered to be ultra-conservative branches among Sunni Muslims and such kinds of bizarre decrees and Fatwas (a ruling on a point of Islamic law) coming from clerics belonging to these sects are not uncommon. 

 As if ultra-conservative Shia clerics are the quintessence of "common sense."

Irony Sneaks Up on Barack Obama and Nails Him--Hard

Funny how that happened, observes Steyn:

Speaking at Ohio State University earlier this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity.” Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists with a straight face that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he “learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.” Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd, because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so you’d think he’d at least get a bit of a heads-up...

Obama, clearly, is nothing like Hitler (save for both leaders' much-vaunted "charisma" and gift of oratory), but one is reminded of how Ian Kershaw, in his bio of the tyrant, explains that Hitler (a rather lazy leader who didn't want to be bothered with details, unlike, say, Stalin, who was more of a micro-manager) didn't have to tell his underlings and their bureaucracies what to do. Instead, they took it upon themselves to "work towards the Fuhrer," i.e. and in essence, to ask themselves "what would Hitler do?"--and then do it. 

Now, that may or may not be what happened at the IRS--that underlings, in the absence of a direct order, took it upon themselves to "work towards the POTUS." I would suggest, though, that, whether it aims to serve the interests of an arrogant demagogue or of a Nazi (ba dum pump), such an ethos is sinister to the enth degree.