RUTHFULLY YOURS

Islamic law, always harsh, is still harsher for women. According to the Koran, men have “authority” over women and may beat them if they are “disobedient” (4:34). According to Mohammad, the prophet of Islam, women are less intelligent than men — two women are needed to equal one man’s testimony — and the majority of hell’s population is made up of women, who are likened to donkeys and dogs in their ability to distract a man from his prayer and thereby annul it.

What, then, is Islam’s view of women who are “infidels”? They are at best “meant for one thing, the pleasure of the Muslim man,” as one Muslim told a group of young Christian girls in Pakistan before terrorizing and murdering one. In the Koran, (see 4:24), non-Muslim women seized in a jihad can be bought and sold as sex slaves for Muslim men, as the Islamic State has been doing.

Emily Fuentes, communications director for Open Doors, a human rights organization that advocates for persecuted Christians, said:

Unfortunately, more and more women are the target of [Muslim] terrorist groups. There are numerous international incidents of women being kidnapped, raped, and forced to convert from Christianity to Islam by radical extremist groups…. Many are also sold on the open market. This brutality is not only occurring in the Middle East but in Africa and in many other places. In many of these countries, women are subject to persecution because they are considered second-class citizens because of their gender. As minorities in both gender and faith, Christian women face double the persecution. Although we don’t have an exact number, we know that millions of women are being persecuted…. In these Muslim-dominated countries, Christian women are systematically deprived of their freedom to live and are denied basic human necessities.

Christian women are double damned: barely tolerated both as women and as non-Muslim “infidels; it becomes clear why they are the greatest recipients of Islamic abuse.

By now, the plight of non-Muslim females in the grips of ISIS is well known. Since conquering Mosul in June 2014, the caliphate has executed as many as 250 captive non-Muslim girls (mostly Yazidis and Christians) for refusing to be sex slaves. Most recently, 19 Yazidi girls were placed in iron cages and burned alive in front of a crowd of hundreds, for refusing to copulate with jihadis.

According to a report that appeared one day after Open Doors highlighted the plight of non-Muslim women:

Religious minority women under IS control are often repeatedly sold from jihadi to jihadi. Once militants get tired of raping and abusing one particular girl, they usually sell them off to one of their militant buddies so they can rape and abuse them at their own pleasure.

One escaped Yazidi girl explained how she was

“she was bought and sold by eight different jihadis… We were put on display [in sex slave markets]. Men came in and looked at us like objects. It was like a car showroom…. Women were bought for cash — as little as $20, or exchanged for things like mobile phones, or given away as gifts.”

She was raped at least three times a day for over 16 months by countless ISIS fighters, forced to take contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs, and repeatedly tried to kill herself to escape the abuse. Her account is typical, and has been made by many other escaped non-Muslim girls.

Other recent reports tell of “one 8-year-old girl who was also bought, sold and raped by eight different militants in a span of 10 months”; of another “sex slave who set herself on fire to prevent from being raped”; of a couple who, after their children were abducted by ISIS, answered their door to find a plastic bag containing the body parts of their daughters and a video of them being tortured and raped; and of Christian and Alawite women being raped and slaughtered by ISIS jihadis invading their village.

Islamic State jihadis laugh and joke about buying and selling Yazidi sex slaves, in a propaganda video.

But such Islamic abuse of women is hardly limited to groups such as ISIS or Boko Haram — a Nigerian-based organization that also defines itself in exclusively Islamic terms and is notorious for abducting, enslaving, raping and murdering Christian girls. Approximately 700 Christian and 300 Hindu girls are abducted, enslaved, and raped in Pakistan every year. These are very large numbers considering that Christians and Hindus each make up only one percent of the nation’s Muslim-majority population.

Just four days after Open Doors made its remarks about the plight of Christian women, two Muslim men in Pakistan invaded the home of a Christian woman while her soldier husband was away serving in the army. They tied and gang raped her while threatening to slaughter her two-year-old infant daughter if she did not comply. According to the 30-year-old woman:

“The men treated me like an animal, telling me I was a worthless Christian…. They said Christian women are all whores and they would come back and repeat their debauchery if I ever told anyone.”

Because she is both a female and infidel in a Muslim-majority nation, the police and the law did nothing for her. That same week, five more Christian girls were kidnapped, converted to Islam, and forced to “marry” their captors.

There are many more examples of rape and sometimes murder of Christian girls — and sometimes Christian boys — in Pakistan. After a 9-year-old Christian girl was raped by a Muslim man who boasted of having “done the same service to other young Christian girls,” local residents explained:

“Such incidents occur frequently. Christian girls are considered goods to be damaged at leisure. Abusing them is a right. According to the [Muslim] community’s mentality it is not even a crime. Muslims regard them as spoils of war.”

A similar situation prevails in Egypt. In July 2012, U.S. Congressman Chris Smith testified about the “escalating abduction, coerced conversion and forced marriage of Coptic Christian women and girls. Those women are being terrorized and, consequently, marginalized.”

The late and often diplomatic Coptic Pope Shenouda III, the head of Egypt’s Christian community, highlighted this proclivity back in 1976: “There is a practice to convert Coptic girls to embrace Islam and marry them under terror to Muslim husbands.” Between 2008 and 2013 alone, nearly 600 cases of abduction, rape, and forced conversion of Christian women have been documented in Egypt. The situation has only gotten worse since, as per the title of a 2012 report: “Abductions and Forced Conversions of Christian Coptic Women in Egypt Dramatically Increase.”

If young women are sexually targeted, older women are sexually degraded. On May 20, a 70-year-old Christian woman in Egypt was stripped naked, spat upon, and paraded in the streets of Minya to jeers, whistles, and yells of “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is Greatest”) by an angry Muslim mob.

Two days before the Open Doors report was published, Muslims in Uganda beat and raped a 22-year-old Christian woman because she accused a mosque leader of murdering her father due to a religious argument. A month earlier, the 13-year-old daughter of a mother who left Islam and converted to Christianity, was raped by local Muslims and told: “This is the second warning to your mother for disgracing the faith of the Muslims.”

It should be noted that even in Europe, it is the indigenous females who are suffering the most from the influx of Muslim migrants. Exponentially higher numbers of sexual attacks and rapes are being committed, often on the same logic that prevails in the Islamic State or Pakistan. In the words of a Muslim migrant in Germany who stalked, cursed, and groped a woman: “German women are there for sex.”

A final important point: while non-Muslim women are targeted more than non-Muslim men for sexual reasons, that does not mean that they are targeted less than men when it comes to non-sexual forms of Muslim persecution, such as attacks on “blasphemers” and “apostates.” Chivalry is an alien concept to Islam; when it comes to terrorizing and putting infidels in their place, the religion of Muhammad is strictly egalitarian. In Pakistan for example, the most notorious blasphemy case involves a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who has been in prison on death row since 2009; and when a Christian couple was accused of desecrating a Koran, both husband and wife were burned alive. More recent accounts that surfaced around the same time that Open Doors highlighted the plight of Christian women include:

• Indonesia: In what was described as “an unprecedented use of Shari’a on a non-Muslim,” a 60-year-old Christian woman was publicly caned 30 times for selling alcohol.
• Islamic State: A Christian woman was executed by Islamic militants for refusing to deny her faith in Christ. ISIS also threatened a group of Dominican nuns, demanding they either convert to Islam or pay jizya, tribute (based on Koran 9:29). “The elderly sisters [fled and] began to suffer heart attacks and heart failures from the stress of the mass exodus. Over the past 18 months, 23 of them died, sometimes up to three deaths a week. ‘They died of a broken heart,’ said Sister Huda.”
• Uganda: A Muslim man strangled his wife to death for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity. Another Muslim man beat and threatened to butcher his wife while shouting “Allahu Akbar” because of her conversion to Christianity.

One seldom hears of the reverse, of a Muslim wife killing her husband for apostasy, due to the lack of authority women have in the Muslim world.

You do not want to be a woman in Islam.

Raymond Ibrahim is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (published by Regnery with Gatestone Institute, April 2013).