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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Bikinis, Syrians, Islam and Brazil


Débora Nascimento, a Brazilian actress and model.

Culture Shock
  • Now Brazil is importing Muslim Syrian refugees.  Mix Allah with hot Brazilian women in bikinis . . . You can see the results coming.  It might be somewhere in the back of the Koran in the chapter on stoning (how to).
  • I respect Brazil for their charity.  I pity the Muslim refugees.  But Islam and western ideas of freedom do not mix in the long run.  Let the refugees go to Muslim states like Indonesia, Morocco or Tunisia.  Western nations are only importing future problems.

(The Guardian)  -  Brazil did not loom large in the life of Humam Debas before the war in Syria. As a business manager from the city of Hama with a comfortable income, he had thought about taking his wife to Rio de Janeiro for a holiday. But all he really knew about the distant country was that it had beautiful beaches and a great football team. He assumed everyone there spoke English because it was close to the US.
Today, however, he is taking his first Portuguese class in São Paulo, where he and his family are trying to make a new start as refugees after being wrenched out of their homes by conflict and forced across the world by the reluctance of closer nations to take them in.
Humam Debas (not his real name),
pictured with his family in Rio de Janeiro,
left, was a business manager in Syria
before his home was bombed. 
The move from a suburban neighbourhood of fellow Muslims to a teeming Latin American megalopolis in the world’s biggest Catholic nation has inevitably been traumatic, but Debas is grateful to be taken in by anyone.
“No other country would give Syrians a visa,” he recalls over a cup of Syrian coffee in the one-room apartment he shares with wife, two-year-old son and brother-in-law, in the Cambuci district of the city. “We could have tried to get to Europe illegally by boat, but that was too dangerous for my family. So Brazil was the only safe choice.”
Since 2013 when Brazil opened its doors, 1,740 Syrian refugees have been registered in the country - far more than in the US.
Most are clustered around São Paulo’s main mosques in the Brás and Cambuci districts. Debas (whose name has been changed because he is concerned about family members still in Syria) has been in the latter for four months. 
“Oh my God, it was a shock when we arrived,” he says, speaking almost flawless English. Language and money have been the biggest difficulties.
He and his wife, Lara – graduates of prestigious universities in Damascus – came with about $4,500 (£3,000), most of which was eaten up by hotel bills in the first couple of months. Although the municipal government offered free shelters, Debas did not want his wife and child to share accommodation with street dwellers and crack addicts. Finding their own place was difficult because most landlords in Brazil require a guarantor with property.
Brazil is home to 15 million people of Arabic descent, including 3 million of Syrian heritage, but Debas found few people willing to provide support to this latest wave of arrivals. “There are Lebanese who have been here for generations, but unfortunately most of them don’t offer help. There must be good people here, but we haven’t met them yet.”
Debas makes a little money from teaching English for seven hours a week, but it is not enough to pay the R$750 (£160) rent, so they are desperate to find a more stable income. They are thinking of starting an import business or a restaurant, though the obvious source of start-up capital or loan collateral is gone: “We can’t sell our home in Syria because it has been bombed,” he says.


Islam & Brazil - That Works
Women in Brazil protest for the right to go topless.  
Ipanema Beach, Rio de Janeiro


Their lives were shattered on 1 August 2012 when their home in Hama was caught in crossfire between rebels and government troops. “The first attack started without warning at 2am. The windows were smashed and bullets came through the walls,” recalls Lara. “We tried to shelter by lying on the floor of the corridor. I was pregnant. It was the worst day of my life.”
Many friends and neighbours were killed in the attack. The following afternoon, soldiers ordered everyone to evacuate. In the months and years that followed, they tried living elsewhere in Syria, but it was too dangerous, then moved to Jordan, which was unwelcoming, so last September, they decided to move to Brazil.
“At first, we thought we could go back to our home, that our refugee situation was temporary. ‘Just a couple of months,’ we said. But then it was four months, then a year. Now it looks impossible to go back to Syria. I’ve lost hope of that. The war will continue,” says Lara.
“We are planning to make a new life here in Brazil,” her husband says. “I recommend it to my family and friends in Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Brazil is better than other countries. It is safe and you can build a new life here, even though it is expensive … No other country wants us, not even Jordan, where we used to go for day-trip picnics. War destroys everything. It destroys culture, buildings and people. If you haven’t experienced it, you cannot imagine.”
Other refugees – almost all of whom are highly educated and skilled – tell of similar tough decisions. Until 2013, Hassan Salman, a 36-year-old computer programmer, had lived all his life in Yarmouk, the Palestinian district of Damascus. “It was wonderful,” he says, “until the Mig fighters attacked.” The government was punishing the community for offering refuge to rebels. Rockets destroyed a mosque and a school.
“I was a kilometre away. The explosions made a terrible noise and killed many people, including children and old people,” says Salman. “Then the police came into Yarmouk and grabbed people off the streets. They killed many of my friends for helping the refugees. I had also helped them. That was enough for me to be killed. So I fled.”
Read More . . . .


A Stoning Offence?
Call me crazy, but Allah might not approve of body painting during Rio's Carnival.  I suspect Allah does not like the idea of women enjoying their lives in any way.


Brazilian model Nicole Bahls and Fani Pacheco

filming a commercial on Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro.

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Why am I in America?
Where do I go to get Brazilian citizenship?

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