BATTLE OF THE SEXIEST.

In a poll the readers of FHM Magazine have chosen Scarlett Johansson as the sexiest actress in the vhurld. Angelina Jolie comes in second, Jessica Alba third. Then follow Keira Knightley, Halle Berry, Jenny McCarthy, Maria Sharapova, Carmen Electra and Teri Hatcher. From the For Him US site:

"Never have words sounded so right as when spoken with Scarlett's two-packs-and-a-fifth-o'-whiskey rasp. Somehow, she has achieved the voice, a successful acting career and heart-stopping beauty by the age of 21. That accounts for how, in only her second year on this list, Scarlett has landed at the top."

Oh please. Give me a break. Guy probably drank two whiskeys and snorted a fifth-o'-pack. Who says so anyway? Josh Hartnett? If so, next week you may well sing another tune dude, I just heard your fiancé said she does not believe in monogamy. Anyway, for all their merits, Anglosaxon males just don't know how to appreciate REAL beauty. Miserable Fat Belgian Bastards do, however. True, Miss Johansson does not exactly look like the girl next door. But to every man with his head battle-ready and his equipment scr*wed on right, it is crystal-clear that Miss Alba should be in the top spot. I mean, just lookit her here, here here and if that still does not convince you, here.






Of course, barely had FHM made public the choice of its readers or there you had the Cosmotaliban Iranian edition coming up with their selection of hottest females. I don't know what has come over the Iranijuns these days. Especially not since they elected that halo surrounded nutter for president. Why, all of a sudden they seem to be in a competing frenzy with the Great Satan. The US has nukes, they want 'em too. The US has a space program, Iran wants one too. The US is in Iraq, Iran is in Iraq too. The US has stealth planes, Iran announces it has them too. And now FHM US nominates the world's sexiest women, and guess what? There you have the world's hotties according to Mahmoud. Anyway, here goes:

Scarlett Johansson gets stiff competence from Shabina Begum, photo below left, the now 17-year old "British" schoolgirl of Bengali origin who in 2002 refused to don the proscribed uniform at Denbigh High School in Luton, north of London, and insisted on wearing the traditional jilbab, a full-lenght dress showing only face and hands. Since Denbigh High School did not budge, Miss Begum then stayed off school for two years. She took her case to court and was, surprise surprise, represented by the No. 2 on the Cosmotaliban's list, Mrs. Cherie Blair, the wife of PM Tony Blair. Mrs. Blair lost the original case in 2004 but went further, taking it to the Court of Appeal, which ruled in March 2005 that Miss Begum had been denied the right to manifest her religion and ordered Denbigh High School to pay the legal costs of the organization representing Begum's case, the Childrens's Legal Centre at Essex University.



All sanity still not having left the UK, this ruling luckily was in turn overruled on March 22, 2006, by Britain's Highest Judicial Authority, the House of Lord's (Britain's "Senate", so to say) Law Lords, which declared "that the school was fully justified in acting as it did when it sent Shabina Begum, then 14, home for refusing to adhere to the school uniform policy."

As the excellent UK blogger Scott Burgess from The Daily Ablution pointily notes,

"the young lady will now have to decide to either take the case to a judicial authority far more powerful than the highest in this country (namely, the EU European Court on Human Rights*), or simply drop matters and continue her education."

Legal costs for this all in all utterly silly affair have cost the British taxpayer thus far in excess of 70,000£. It's probably what Miss Begum has in mind when she thinks of the West as a "free" society.

About Mrs. Blair, the Cosmo's rival for Angelina Jolie, we can be short. Her hubby is a good fella - euroweenie attitudes on social security notwithstanding - but Cherie is another matter. The PM's wife is known to have delivered scathing attacks at President Bush, still thinks he stole the 2000 elections, picked a fierce argument with him during a private meal over the death penalty in Texas, has heavily criticized the Gitmo resorts, and is of the opinion that the US Constitution is anachronistic, calling American legal code a "grandfather clock among 21st Century timepieces." Hallelujah. Oh well. Maybe her aversy for (Republican) US presidents is in the genes you know. Cherie Blair, née Booth, has a rather infamous relative who lived in the States in the mid-19th century.

In short, Mrs. Blair undoubtedly thinks of herself as a highly intelligent and sophisticated world citizen, infinitely more in the know than those blunt Americans. Too bad some important things escape even her attention. With regards to the Shabina Begum case e.g. that in the course of the first trial against Denbigh High School's dress code it was disclosed that Shabina Begum was initially influenced by her brother, Shuweb Rahman, to don the jilbab. Indeed, as The Telegraph notes in its March 23, 2006 issue:

This case wasn't even about religion, or conscience, or the dictates of faith. At least it wasn't primarily about those things. It was about power. It was about who really runs the schools in this country, and about how far militant Islam could go in bullying the poor, cowed, gelatinous and mentally spongiform apparatus of the British state.

Until yesterday, it seemed that there was nothing to stand in the Islamists' way, from the moment on September 3, 2002, when Shabina's brother and another man turned up at her school, and told a harassed maths teacher called Mr Moore that their Shabina was going to wear the full jilbab in the name of her "modesty", and that, if they didn't jump to it, the school would be sued.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is an extremist Muslim group banned in Germany and even in most of the Middle East. In western press, its name really started to resonate after it was discovered that Dilpazier Aslam, a The Guardian trainee journalist, was a Hizb-ut-Tahrir member. You may recall that Mr. Aslam in an op-ed piece in the Guardian defended the perpetrators of the July 7 London bombings, calling today's young muslim males "much more sassy with their opinions and actions" - at a moment when rescue crews were still scraping charred Londoner's remains off Underground tube walls.

I just want to say, in the course of a case a lawyer is supposed to be documented about every aspect of it, right? So somewhere along the line it must have been brought to Mrs. Blair's attention that the ball started to roll with Shabina's brother, member of a dangerous radical muslim organization, coercing his sister to don a jilbab? No problem for Cherie. On the contrary, as Mark Steyn wrote on her successful March 2005 case:

Ms Booth hailed this as "a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry."

Over to Mrs. Antje Vollmer, no. 3 on the list. Under the Schroeder government, she was the highest female member of the Bundestag, the German Parliament. Actually, she was Vice President of it. Vize-Praesidentin der Deutschen Bundestag, jawohl! Mrs. Vollmer, of the Green Party, often has outspoken opinions. Her hour of glory came last year after Pope John Paul II's death, when she suggested that...

...the US government set the Catholic pedophilia scandal in motion because it wanted to weaken an already frail pope. That's also why it made Poland its chief partner in the Iraq war: to make the Vatican look bad.

Apart from that, you have to admit she looks better with that Islamic dress over her, don't you think? The photo was taken early last year when Herr Schroeder was on a trade mission to our pals the Saudis. Unlike Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Mrs. Vollmer knows how to dress decently in the Middle East. Over and out.


MFBB.