RUTHFULLY YOURS

[Editor’s note: The article below is reprinted from our Nov. 1, 2006 issue. The subject is Western feminist silence about Muslim rape of kafirs (non-Muslims) and the Islamic theology that sanctions it. Frontpage’s editors thought it would be relevant in light of the vicious sex attack recently suffered by “60 Minutes” reporter Lara Logan at the hands of a mob in Egypt — and the Left’s complete silence in response.]

Unveiled women who get raped deserve it.

That’s the pedagogy preached by the Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, who recently sparked an international stir by pronouncing that women who do not veil themselves, and allow themselves to be “uncovered meat”, are at fault if they are raped.

This is nothing new, of course, and it is somewhat mysterious why the Sheikh’s comments have caused any shock at all, since his view is legitimized by various Islamic texts and numerous social and legal Islamic structures. And that is why back in September 2004 in Denmark, al-Hilali’s Australian counterpart, the Mufti Shahid Mehdi, declared exactly the same thing, stating that unveiled women are “asking for rape.”

All of this, in turn, explains the skyrocketing epidemic of Muslim rape in non-Islamic countries. Muslim newcomers are significantly overrepresented among convicted rapists and rape suspects throughout European nations such as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

No wonder why many Muslim rapists openly admit their actions and justify them smugly with casual references to their religious and cultural beliefs. This horrifying phenomenon was on display in a court trial in Australia last year, in which a Muslim rapist, going by the name ”MSK”, taunted his sobbing 14-year-old victim and proudly professed the legitimacy of his sexual assaults on young girls by explaining that his victims were not veiled — as the Islamic religion mandates women to be. [1]

“MSK” is from Pakistan. He is doing in Australia what he learned best back home: in some of the most notorious rural areas of Pakistan, gang rape is officially sanctioned as a legitimate form of keeping women marginalized and “in their place.” As noted earlier, certain realms of Islam help institutionalize this form of violent misogyny. The Koran, for instance,  permits Muslim men to enslave – and have sexual relations with – the women of unbelievers captured in the spoils of war (Sura 4:23-24). The Islamic legal manual ‘Umdat al-Salik, which is endorsed by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, sanctions this violence, affirming that Muslims can enslave captured infidel women and make them concubines.

To compound this pathology, a notion has developed within the system of gender apartheid in which Muslims like “MSK” have grown up: the idea that a woman who does not veil herself is somehow responsible for any sexual or physical harm done to her. In the psychopathic mental gymnastics that occur in the perpetrators’ minds, the unveiled woman must be sexually punished for violating the “modesty” code. Thus, when Islamic Muftis like Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali and Shahid Mehdi declare that women who refuse to wear headscarves are “asking for rape,” they are merely regurgitating a popular theme in many segments of Islamic culture.

In traditional Islamic law, rape cannot be proven unless four males testify as witnesses (Sura 24:4 and 24:13). In other words, raped women cannot get justice anywhere Islamic law prevails. More horrifying still, a woman who has the courage to say she was raped, and fails to produce the four male witnesses (which is obviously almost always the case), ends up being punished because her accusation is regarded as an admission of pre-marital sex or adultery. And this is why seventy-five percent of the women in prison in Pakistan are behind bars for the crime of being a victim of rape.

In Holland, myriad women now bear the horrible scar that has infamously become known as “smiley,” whereby one side of the face is cut up from mouth to ear – a war mark left by Muslim rapists as a warning to other women who don’t veil themselves.

In France, the phenomenon of Muslim gang rape as punishment for non-veiling even has a word to describe it: “tournante” (take your turn). In areas where Muslims form the majority (i.e. the Muslim suburb of Courneuve, France), even non-Muslim women feel pressured to veil themselves in fear of Muslim sexual and physical punishment.

In the context of this epidemic of Muslim violence against women, and the open legitimization of it pronounced by Islamic clerics, one would think that the Western feminists of our time would be up in arms, sympathetically coming to the side of their raped sisters and standing up for women’s rights in general.

But this is just not the case.

The West’s leftist feminists are responding with an apathetic heartlessness and deafening silence. [2]

It’s all very much understandable and expected, of course: it is politically correct and cutting-edge to scream with moral indignation about a woman’s right to an abortion in the West, but to actually care for – and come to the public defense of – the female victim of a gang-rape committed by Muslims is unthinkable. This is so because admitting the Muslim rape epidemic, and the theology and institutions on which it is based, and denouncing it, would violate the central code of the “progressive” leftist faith: anti-Americanism and cultural relativism. No culture can be said to be better than any other – unless it is American culture, which is always fair game for derision and ridicule. But to criticize any Third World culture in general – and an adversary culture in particular – is to surrender the political cause and faith.

And that’s why leftist feminists are also completely mum on the horrors of forced marriages, honor killings and female genital mutilation within the Islamic world.

The worldview of Oslo Professor of Anthropology, Dr. Unni Wikan, is perfect in representing leftist feminists’ stand on Muslim rape and Islamic gender apartheid. Wikan’s solution for the high incidence of Muslims raping Norwegian women stresses neither the punishment of the perpetrators nor the repudiation of the Islamic theology that legitimizes such abuse of women. Instead, Wikan recommends that Norwegian women veil themselves. This is because, in Wikan’s view, Western women must take their share of responsibility for the rapes, since they are not dressing and behaving according to Muslim understanding. The Norwegian women, in her view, are to realize that they live in a multicultural society and should, therefore, adapt themselves to it. Sheikhs Taj al-Din al-Hilali and Shahid Mehdi would be proud.

It has long been evident that Western leftist feminists couldn’t care less about real actual breathing women; they care only about their ideological beliefs. For them, the victims of Muslim rape can be easily forgotten and dismissed — for the pursuit of their ultimate goal: to aid and abet the West’s totalitarian enemies and to wreak the destruction of their own free societies which bestow the individual liberties and rights that they despise and abhor.

NOTES:

[1] Although debate exists about whether Islam enforces women’s veiling, and there are some valiant Islamic reformers fighting for a tolerant Islam that does not enforce veiling, the unfortunate reality is that Muslim fundamentalists find legitimacy for forced veiling in Islamic texts. See Robert Spencer’s Onward Muslim Soldiers, pp. 77-78 and The Truth About Mohammad, pp. 44 and 61.

[2] Dr. Phyllis Chesler has powerfully documented Western feminism’s betrayal of Islamic gender apartheid’s victims in The Death of Feminism.

Get the whole story of leftist feminists’ alliance with Islamofascists in Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror.