RUTHFULLY YOURS

In our pages, over a decade ago, I scoffed at a colleague who had suggested that ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, which used to be the Iraqi franchise of its now rival al-Qaeda — might be concerned that Western nations were on to its rape jihad. Even if we indulged the fantasy that jihadists were possessed of the civilized sensibility that would trigger such a concern, I countered that “the shocking Rotherham rape jihad scandal” that had erupted in England would assure them that “the West is far more likely to look the other way than to mobilize against this signature sexual abuse.”

This is akin to a point so eloquently made by such fearless truth-tellers as John O’Sullivan, Douglas Murray, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Among the most heinous elements of the sudden interest in the rape jihad, catalyzed by Elon Musk’s admirable hounding of Britain’s oh-so-progressive government, is that the “grooming gangs” are a very old story. The rape jihad wasn’t hiding in plain sight; it was willfully covered up by Parliament, by Britain and its allies in Europe’s transnational progressive project, and by the American cognoscenti. Talking about it was a surer guarantee of pariah status than participating in it.

And then there’s the why. Why is it a signature sexual abuse that we’re not supposed to talk about? Well, because it’s deeply rooted in Islamic scripture. If you have the temerity to notice that, there looms the risk of admonition that the problem is not the rape jihad but your “Islamophobia.”

Back in that 2014 column, written when ISIS was conquering territory the size of Britain and reveling in the spoils, I quoted one of the jihadists who was gleefully anticipating “slave market day.” The Koran, he insisted, authorizes Muslims to sexually exploit “the (captives) whom their right hands possess.”

He was right. Jihadists usually are when they refer to scripture. You can argue that the Islam their well-schooled superiors drill into them is a literalist, selective mining of scripture — passages that more progressive, “moderate” interpretations of Islam contextualize, reinterpret, or regard as applicable only to a bygone time. Perhaps . . . but you can’t credibly argue that the jihadists are making it up. It’s in there.

I learned that the hard way in the early Nineties. I wanted to believe that our government was right that the notorious defendant I was prosecuting, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, was a raving maniac, but when I dove into his background — as prosecutors have to do because “He’s a raving maniac” is not a very persuasive courtroom argument — I learned that he was renowned in his milieu as a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from Al-Azhar University, which for a millennium has been the seat of Sunni Muslim scholarship. And when he purported to draw on scripture, the scripture bore him out. That’s why, even though he was physically unable to carry out actions useful to a jihad, he nevertheless exercised profound influence and commanded authority over jihadists.

Doctrine matters to our enemies. Which is why it should matter to us.

Our ISIS jihadist quoted above was referring to sura (or chapter) four, verses 23–24. You may recall that last week, when I discussed the post-Obama woke FBI’s willful blindness to fundamentalist Islam, I recommended The Holy Quran: English Translation of the Meanings and Commentary, a widely distributed version of Islam’s highest scriptural source produced by the Saudi regime (that font of Wahhabism deemed by Sunnis to be the custodian of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s most revered sites).

This translation informs us that, in sura 4:23, Allah outlines the various categories of women (mothers, daughters, sisters, etc.) with whom Muslim men are forbidden to have sexual relations. Sura 4:24 then states: “Also (prohibited are) women already married except those whom your right hands possess” (emphasis added). A footnote helpfully explains “Whom your right hands possess: i.e., captives” (italics in original). Sura 4:24 extends to all Muslim men a license granted to jihad warriors in sura 33:50:

O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers, and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the captives of war whom Allah has assigned to thee. [Emphasis added.]

For many years, I have alluded in these pages to Reliance of the Traveller, the classic sharia manual endorsed by Al-Azhar University scholars and the Muslim Brotherhood’s think tank (the International Institute of Islamic Thought). The manual combines the Koran with the Hadith (collections of the prophet Mohammed’s teachings and actions) and Sunnah (Islamic tradition, drawing on the model of the prophet’s life) to explicate Islamic law. (See this 2012 essay, for example, in which I catalogued a number of sharia tenets outlined in the manual.) According to Reliance, “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s marriage is immediately annulled.”

As Robert Spencer, the founder of the invaluable Jihad Watch, has pointed out, the point of this decree is that such captive women are available for sex slavery. Moreover, the practice of forcing sex on captive women is implicitly permitted in the hadith — for example, Book Eight, No. 3371 of the Sahih Muslim collection (which deals with al-Azl, or coitus interruptus):

We went out with Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) on the expedition to the Bi’l-Mustaliq and took captive some excellent Arab women; and we desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, (but at the same time) we also desired ransom for them. So we decided to have sexual intercourse with them but by observing al-Azl (Withdrawing the male sexual organ before emission of semen to avoid-conception). But we said: We are doing an act whereas Allah’s Messenger is amongst us; why not ask him? So we asked Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him), and he said: It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born.

Get it? That forcing oneself on captive women is halal is assumed; the only question is whether an effort should be made to avoid conception.

In 2010, I wrote The Grand Jihad, a book about the sharia supremacist design on the West. It is not a crude ISIS approach. It is a sophisticated Muslim Brotherhood strategy in which jihad is just one tactic in a broad menu that includes the use against the West of its own laws, media, educational institutions, and organs of opinion.

In the main, the plan is to exploit the West’s — particularly Europe’s — lax border security, generous social welfare regimes, and cultural self-loathing to forge Islamic enclaves. When the Muslim population gets to a critical mass (which need not be large; 5 percent of the population is more than enough if it’s sufficiently compact and aggressive), it seeks to take de facto control of neighborhoods — to the point, often, of making them “no-go” zones for the authorities. The aim of this deliberate adverse possession is to establish the enclave’s “right” to govern its affairs under sharia and to impose fundamentalist mores. Because sharia is deeply discriminatory and antithetical to Western principles of liberty and equality, these enclaves routinely become hellscapes for non-Muslims and, especially, women.

This is a strategy of conquest: The enclaves grow, stitch together, and co-opt the political Left, which shares the fundamentalists’ antipathy toward Western liberalism. And the strategy is working, gradually transforming Europe. In that transformation, the same sharia supremacist protocols that ISIS imposed on territory it captured in Iraq and Syria have similarly been imposed by Muslim fundamentalists in the EU.

This includes the rape jihad. It is often observed that rape is less a sexual act (though it is of course that) than a cruel exercise in intimidation. Progressives do not care to acknowledge that it has surged commensurately with the surge in Muslim migration to the West. But it has — and most of it goes unreported because of intimidation and women’s well-founded perception of the futility of reporting. Rotherham is a despicable example, but it’s not a singular one. (See, e.g., here, here, here, and here.)

Britain’s Labour government is adamantly opposed to an investigation of the “grooming gangs” because its officials — very much including Prime Minister Keir Starmer, formerly the director of public prosecutions — have known what is happening on a rampant scale. It was impossible not to know. It wasn’t a well-covered story, but it also wasn’t an uncovered story.

It’s also inconceivable that officials did not know why the rape jihad was happening. Sharia supremacist icons, such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, were braying that Islam would “conquer Europe, conquer America.” Sharia courts have been up and running in England for over 40 years — because the British government insisted that its liberal legal tradition could seamlessly meld with Islamic law, even as Muslims demanded to conduct their affairs under Islamic law in lieu of British law. This wasn’t pluralism; it was hostility. Instead of confronting the hostile ideology, Britain embraced it as culturally compatible — risibly branding jihadist terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity,” denying that there were any such things as no-go zones, and sweeping under the rug the rape jihad and the conquest strategy’s other doctrinally rooted acts of menacing.

The British government’s rationalization for this was no different from what passes for the reasoning behind Britain’s criminalization of speech. (See my friend Jonathan Turley’s column on that.) If you’re too craven to confront an enemy that means to conquer you, and you’re thus committed to the pretense that Britain can cohere with anti-Britain, then you can’t afford to let the British people bear witness to the madness.

But madness it is — madness so long-standing that one is constrained to ask whether it is incorrigible.