FGM: “Think of It as a Genital Burqa”

Nilk in Australia sent this news report about the current clinical situation regarding the widespread practice of mutilation of young girls’ genitals among African and Egyptian immigrants in Oz.

The most striking thing about this story is the headline the paper chose:

Push to Let Australian Doctors Mutilate Genitals of Baby Girls

They are obviously quite clear about where they stand on the issue. Would that Australia’s medical personnel so definitive. Instead, we are treated to weasel words:

The practice involving cutting a girl’s genitals, sometimes with razors or pieces of glass, could be allowed in a clinical setting to stem illegal backyard procedures which are leaving young girls scarred for life.

The Royal Australian New Zealand College of Obstetricians will next month discuss backing “ritual nicks”, a modified form of genital mutilation.

How’s that for relativizing medical ethics right out the door? They are actually considering a way to avoid coming down hard on a superstitious barbarism in order to save the little girls? Try killing them with kindness, hmm?

Female genital mutilation has been outlawed in Australia since the 1990s but is common among African, Asian and Middle Eastern communities.

With the rise in Somali and Sudanese numbers in Australia, doctors are seeing more cases of young girls, and women, needing surgery after illegal operations. Backers of “ritual nick” said it was a superficial procedure leaving no long-term damage.

[…]

“We will need to start to think about [its introduction] but we would have to speak to community leaders from Australia,” Dr Pecoraro said.

This doctor needs CME courses in remedial medical ethics, and he needs them yesterday. “We will need to start to think…”?? I’ll say. This guy has a chronic case of cultural diversity indoctrination. If someone doesn’t intervene, he’ll be ready to pick up that scalpel and start “helping” little girls. What do community leaders have to do with his own medical ethics? If it’s wrong for white Australian girls, it’s wrong for black immigrant girls.

“If a nick could meet the cultural needs of a particular woman, then it might save her from going through what can really be drastic surgery.

“But we need to make sure we do not legitimise the ritualistic maiming of children.”

This is incredible. Just talking about the “if” with “community leaders” is legitimising criminal sadism. Surely the man is not really this dim?

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Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the American Academy of Pediatrics has been pushed to the tipping point by outspoken victims and opponents of this scheme and have backed off from last month’s approval:

The American Academy of Pediatrics has rescinded a controversial policy statement raising the idea that doctors in some communities should be able to substitute demands for female genital cutting with a harmless clitoral “pricking” procedure.

“We retracted the policy because it is important that the world health community understands the AAP is totally opposed to all forms of female genital cutting, both here in the U.S. and anywhere else in the world,” said AAP President Judith S. Palfrey.

[…]

In the April statement, the group raised the idea that some physicians should be able to prick or nick a girl’s clitoral skin in order to “satisfy cultural requirements.” The group likened the nick to an ear piercing.

Believe it or not, this issue has been talked about in the American media for at least the last fifteen years. And we’re only now getting officially serious about it.

I can understand the foot-dragging. The logistics of enforcing this ban are a nightmare, and the notion of having to check little girls for signs of damage is daunting.

There is also the problem of parents returning to the old country, or paying the way here for a “visit” by one of their cutters to come in and mutilate as many customers as possible on her visit. So much cheaper for everyone involved. Except for the little girls, of course.

“Cultural practices” are very difficult to change, much less eradicate. You can take the family out of Somalia, but disconnecting them from an indelible belief that women are evil and will ensnare men is all but impossible. Might as well try to convince the Roman Catholic Church that the idea of a celibate clergy has long passed its sell-by date. Even though many, perhaps a majority, of Catholics in the pew no longer believe in this imposed control, those in power sail on as though this rule is inviolable. It isn’t.

So it is with African and Egyptian immigrants, both Muslim and Christian if this report is to be believed…
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Cutting off a little girls’ genitals and sewing closed whatever tissue remains has been against the law in Egypt for some time. Fatwahs have been issued; legislation has been passed, but the practice continues in full force.

From the report, details of a meeting in November 2006:

Prominent Muslim scholars from around the world, including conservative religious leaders from Egypt and Africa, met on Wednesday to speak out against female genital mutilation at a rare high-level conference on the age-old practice. The meeting was organised by a German human rights and held under the patronage of Dar Al-Iftaa, Egypt’s main religious-edicts organisation. It was held at the conference centre of Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni Islamic institution in the world.

Al Azhar’s grand sheik, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, attended as well as Egypt’s Grand Mufti, Ali Goma’a, whose fatwas are considered binding religious edicts. It is rare for such religious figures in Egypt to attend such a conference on an issue that remains sensitive and controversial here. An estimated 50 percent of schoolgirls in Egypt are thought to undergo the procedure, according to government statistics.

My guess is that it’s higher than just fifty percent. It’s probably also partially a question of class. The further down the socioeconomic scale one goes, the more likely one is to find ‘universally’ accepted cultural norms for the necessity of mutilating girl children.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writing prior to this new retraction by the American Pediatric Association, said [emphasis is mine — D]:

To understand this problem, we need to begin with parental motives. The “nicking” option is regarded as a necessary cleansing ritual. The clitoris is considered to be an impure part of the girl-child and bleeding it is believed to make her pure and free of evil spirits.

But the majority of girls are subjected to FGM to ensure their virginity-hence the sewing up of the opening of the vagina-and to curb their libido to guarantee sexual fidelity after marriage-hence the effective removal of the clitoris and scraping of the labia. Think of it as a genital burqa, designed to control female sexuality.

When the motive for FGM is to ensure chastity before marriage and to curb female libido, then the nick option is not sufficient.

In other words, these parents know the price their daughter will pay if she is not fixed; she will be considered immoral and unmarriageable.

Ms. Hirsi Ali again:

But even once the legislative flaws are fixed, there remains the really difficult question of detection.

For the law to have any meaningful effect in eradicating FGM in the U.S., we need to work out a way of knowing when a girl has been mutilated. As a legislator in the Netherlands, this was for me the thorniest issue. In the United States, where civil liberties are even more jealously guarded, the thorns are likely to be sharper still.

It is not unrealistic to imagine the ACLU defending some African parents being prosecuted for continuing this barbarity in the U.S.

The proponents of multiculturalism are not only ignorant (i.e., FGM is against the law where these people come from to begin with), they create killing fields where little girls are sacrificed in the name of the multi-cultic orthodoxies.

This one is going to be tough to change. In fact, the only way to change it is to insist on assimilation of immigrants into the larger culture, complete with demands for learning English, an end to polygamy, becoming literate, sending children (especially little girls) to school, and insisting that the able-bodied work to earn their way.

You can’t change deeply held cultural convictions in a generation, but you sure can erode them over time. Especially if you can get the enablers in our own culture to stop assisting in the perpetuation of harmful ideas.

This problem is about changing us. If you have any doubt of it, just look at Dr. Pecoraro’s statements in Australia. He’s definitely an elitist; it shows in his purported “thinking”. That’s the real problem: the hollowed-out slogans that pass for thinking among the elites.

Female genital mutilation in the West is a symptom of a larger problem of criminal cultural idiocy among the natives.