Muslim Misogyny, Feminist Indifference
by Paul Weston
Feminists are a strange breed of creature indeed. As they teeter precariously around the office water cooler empowerment zone atop their latest Jimmy Choos, their conversation rarely strays toward Islam’s brutal treatment of women. They are much happier when unhappily discussing why grim-booted Bob from accounts is routinely promoted ahead of them, despite his shameful ignorance regarding over-priced cobbling.
They are unconcerned about the truly important areas of concern, such as a religion imported into the 21st century West which treats women as mere chattel of men, denies them equal legal rights, carries a death sentence in the event of a spot of marital infidelity, and allows the husband to add three more wives to his harem should he so wish. Another aspect of Islam which rarely crosses their minds is why do Asian/Muslim females in the 16-24 age group commit suicide at a rate three times higher than any other demographic?But is it always suicide? The Islamic practice of Honour Killing is but a recent addition to the glorious diversity a previously mono-cultural Britain was hitherto unable to celebrate. Failure to marry the man chosen by your father is to bring shame and dishonour upon the family, doubly so if a girl is foolish enough to consider a relationship with a non-Muslim. This is why murdering your daughter is termed an “honour” killing. It is done to regain the honour of the family, and there exist in Britain many Muslims who really believe this to be true.
When Turkey passed life jail sentences for murdering daughters in 2005, previously immune murderous fathers asked them to commit suicide instead. The “suicide” rate rocketed in the aftermath of the new legislation. Girls told to kill themselves are usually given one of three options — a noose, a gun or rat poison. They are then locked in a room until the job is done.
Their fate is usually decided during a “family council”, when the extended family meets to discuss breaches of honour. In these meetings, it is agreed how the victim must be killed. If the girl rejects a forced suicide, a killer is chosen. The youngest male member of the family is often ordered to kill, in the belief he will be treated more leniently if caught.
And the statistics are terrifying. A Turkish girl states: “When I was at school, a few girls I knew were killed by their families in the name of honour.” Simple mathematics tells us the total number of murders across the entire country (Turkey) must run into thousands. Such horrific figures lend weight to a report in The Independent suggesting there are 17,000 victims of honour-related violence a year in Britain.
The Independent does point out that murder is a very small percentage of these incidents, the majority of cases being rape, kidnap and beating. Yet the point is clear — there is little knowledge of what goes on in the murky world of Muslim honour violence, but what is known suggests it is only the tip of the ice-berg. In light of Turkish “suicides” perhaps we should look at the elevated suicide rate of British Muslim females from a new perspective.
Forced marriage of course, could bring about suicidal tendencies. The Telegraph reports that up to 8,000 forced marriages took place in 2008, and in Bradford alone some 750 girls aged 13-16 were either subjected to a forced marriage at home, or taken abroad, never to return. Sociologist Nazia Khanum spent a year investigating this issue in Luton before publishing her report, which estimates that 4,000 children are forcibly married and taken out of Britain against their will every year.
Worse still, the precedent set by the prophet Mohamed in marrying a six year-old girl enables modern day Muslims to do much the same, leading to horror stories about the government’s Forced Marriage Unit fighting cases concerning girls aged only eleven and in one case a girl of only nine.
While this is happening, hundreds of thousands of women are being imported from Muslim countries, principally Pakistan and Bangladesh. Ex-Labour MP Ann Cryer, who represented Keighley, estimated that 1 million Pakistanis came to Britain over a four year period to work, study or marry. Imported wives made up 80% of all marriages in her area.
Muslim women now outnumber Muslim men by a ratio 2:1, which has itself led to Muslim men taking multiple wives; all illegal of course under British law, but permissible under Sharia law. On Newsnight two years ago, a representative of a British Sharia court claimed it would be discriminatory not to allow multiple wives as it would consign 50% of imported women to lives of unmarried, childless desolation. The British government agreed, and now provides welfare payments to multiple wives, providing the marriage was conducted in an Islamic country.
In addition to the Forced Marriage Unit, Britain now plays host to Project Azure another state-funded specialist crime department of the British police, this one dedicated to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) a form of child abuse usually associated with Islamic African countries like Northern Sudan, but now growing in Europe as a result of immigration and refugee movement.
The procedure is traditionally performed by an older woman with no medical training. Anaesthetics and antiseptic treatment are not generally employed, and the practice is usually carried out using basic tools such as knives, scissors, scalpels, pieces of glass, tin lids and razor blades. Often iodine or a mixture of herbs is placed on the wound to tighten the vagina and stop the bleeding.
This rarely happens within British borders. Young girls are normally taken abroad at the beginning of school summer holidays, thus allowing the wounds to heal before the victim returns to Britain. The Met Police inform us that consequences of this Stone Age Barbarity “include extreme pain, shock, infection, haemorrhage, infertility, incontinence, HIV and death.”
A study by the Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development estimated that 66,000 women living in England and Wales had been circumcised, most before leaving their country of origin. The government-funded research also found that more than 6,500 girls were at a high risk of being subjected to genital mutilation in Britain, with some 3,500 in London alone.
It has been proposed that teachers in certain schools receive specialist training to detect whether Muslim girls have been genitally mutilated, but it is unlikely Muslim fathers will allow their daughters to be subjected to the type of gynaecological inspection necessary to occasion proof positive. No one should be surprised therefore, that despite Female Genital Mutilation constituting a criminal offence, not one person has been prosecuted.
Although not as horrific as FGM, why will the sisterhood not broach the subject of the misery inflicted on Muslim women and children via the practice of first cousin marriage? 50% of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins, and 10% of their children either die at birth or live with serious congenital disorders. People coming from agricultural villages in Pakistan are unlikely to understand why they have such problems, but our failure to educate them lest we upset their cultural sensibilities borders on a crime against humanity.
As does the behaviour of Labour politicians dependent on the Muslim vote in their constituencies. Jack Straw, for example, is fully aware of all that I have described above, yet he is also acutely aware that confronting it would mean being labelled a “racist” and lead to the loss of his seat, his salary, his expenses and his John Lewis perks. So, like all hypocritical socialists, he finds it more convenient to ignore the savagery and misery his male constituents inflict on his female constituents, as do twenty other of his socialist colleagues representing safe Labour seats in Muslim areas.
I suppose politicians at least have an excuse. What I find really inexcusable, however, is the attitude of the feminists. If European men behaved as Muslim men do, there would be a national outcry led by the Germaine Greers of this world. If feminism is to taken seriously, then the definition of the oppression of females cannot apply only to corporate glass ceilings and the lack of sufficient bonuses required to fill a wardrobe with Manolo Blahniks. It must instead be redirected at the genuine suffering of Muslim women and girls in Britain, because the wilful refusal by feminists to recognise crimes against humanity is morally no less obscene than the committing of them.
Previous posts by Paul Weston:
19 comments:
Western "feminists" are monsters.
http://www.faithfreedom.org/articles/women-in-islam/open-letter-to-western-feminist-figureheads-and-academics/
You may rest assured that as a feminist, I completely agree with you.
I argue with people anytime I can about these issues. I am happy to say I do NOT tolerate these things.
Your race, ethnicity or culture isn't a defense for human rights violations.
It isn't just Muslims that do some of these things. Friends have hidden girls from their Indian parents until they have come of age too. When girls with citizenships are sent to these countries to be married against their will, governments and advocates are turning a blind eye.
It isn't acceptable.
I rarely take a look at the death issue from the Islamist side, but for some reason my mind wandered...
17,000 honor victims in Britian a year, compared to approximately 180,000 voluntary legal-abortion victims.
We're worried about Islamists killing their children when we kill them at 10 times the rate they do?
We'll make no headway in convincing them they are misguided with these statistics.
I’ve tried to bring up Islam with a number of women. I have been routinely dismissed as some type of bigot.
This is quite sad because, one of the most realistic ways to induce a reformation on Islam is to truly liberate Muslim women. Islam as it has existed for 1,400 years won’t last a week with liberated women.
Bob Smith
http://islamsfatalflaw.blogspot.com/
Paul, this is spot on. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this, is that western feminists are racists. They believe that muslims form a race, and as such what is done to the women of that "race" is no concern of the western feminist. Her only concern is with women who are white (and probably middle class). When I have argued about this with radical feminists I know, they've maintained that a woman in Britain wearing a burqa is exercising her freedom of choice. The same feminists would not accept that any western woman who chose to work for lower wages was exercising her freedom of choice.
It is their own internalised racism that means that western feminists are only concerned about the rights and equality of western women.
The sad fact about this is that we hold dark-skinned peoples to a much lower standard than we do white people.
This is the unspoken rule of political correctness: the racism of low expectations. We should either abandon it or come clean about it.
I think there are two reasons the feminists do not take on the vicious treatment of women by Muslims.
One reason is that corporate accountants are much safer to criticize or even picket, than Muslims. Today's limousine feminists would be at a total loss if they were actually threatened. The chances of being threatened or worse become much higher when you take on a bedrock practice of the Muslim community.
The second reason is money. There is a great deal of institutional support for academic or organized feminism, particularly by our universities. There's a lot of money sloshing around supporting far-left politics. The National Organization for Women (NOW) would cut itself out of a significant revenue stream by taking on an issue that wasn't popular with the bulk of far-left ideologues.
A third possible reason is cognitive dissonance, which is the inability of a person to admit that his strongly-held concepts are incorrect. Here is an excerpt from a column by the NOW president in 2009:
Is a Muslim man in Buffalo more likely to kill his wife than a Catholic man in Buffalo? A Jewish man in Buffalo? I don't know the answer to that, but I know that there is plenty of violence to go around -- and that the long and sordid history of oppressing women in the name of religion surely includes Islam, but is not limited to Islam. We need to call out the repression of women whenever and wherever we see it, while recognizing that the roots of violence are long and deep, and require a concerted response from every community.
http://www.now.org/news/note/022009.html
Quote:
We need to call out the repression of women whenever and wherever we see it, while recognizing that the roots of violence are long and deep, and require a concerted response from every community.
end
She has decided to generalize and mystify the language of the issue, and thus to facilitate a sort of paralysis in response.
The "repression of women" is a way of dismissing and even excusing femicidal murder as honor killing, as suicide, female genital mutilation (it can kill), and rape as a systematic weapon of Muslim enslavement and conquest.
To talk of the repression of women is to dismiss a careful study of history, to generalize the specific, to obfuscate and dumb down what is many-faceted.
I also note the refusal to note any intrinsic evil in the act of beheading a woman.
I believe that such an act is intrinsically evil; it is not just the denial of some unspoken "right".
Feminism is conceptually vacuous.
Quote:
On Newsnight two years ago, a representative of a British Sharia court claimed it would be discriminatory not to allow multiple wives as it would consign 50% of imported women to lives of unmarried, childless desolation.
end
It would compel the 50% to look outside the Ummah for their husbands.
The talk of not looking at the religion of the perpetrator to decide whether a denigration of women's rights has occurred is, in my opinion, admirable.
But it is utterly belied by the facts on the ground. Feminists talk about responding to oppression of women regardless of race or religion, but they go to extraordinary lengths to ignore the victims of Islamic culture. Aeon's contention that, "It isn't just Muslims that do some of these things" is entirely correct, but very telling. It tells me she would rather talk about women who aren't victimized in the context of Islam.
I can say the same...It isn't just Muslims that do some of these things. But it is entirely reasonable to be more vigilant when certain cultural indicators are present, and Islam is currently the leading cultural indicator. Yes, some oppressive practices (like non-consensual arranged marriages) are also found elsewhere, India being an example...but at much lower rates than in Muslim countries.
One might as well talk about forced marriages among homosexuals as bring up Indian marriages in the same breath as Muslim marriages. It betrays a lack of seriousness about actually addressing the issue.
Chiu Chun-Ling.
The feminist movement in the West was never about women. It was always about the leftist agenda. Because the left has made a devil's bargain with Islam, feminism is deaf to the women in Islam.
I merely point out that this problem exists in other contexts, and in any of them I am willing to both say, and act on them as I can.
Where a religion or culture's practices, words, and actions conflict with equality, it is unacceptable. It contravenes laws, human rights, the charter/ constitutions. It offends the self-evident nature of inalienable human rights.
Islam promotes some of these ideas to make changes to laws and the application of human services in a way which is utterly unacceptable.
There are other groups who do so. The fact is, I'm totally willing to take a hunk out of their hides. Which makes me so happy, because then I can legitimately claim that I hold Islam to the exact same standard.
It is a standard Islam fails to meet. The tolerant answer to this is apparently that I should just accept that one's right to promote their religion supersedes female rights to equality.
This seems to be to be set up to be a game of chicken, and women are being encouraged to buckle under to what is the more important category under current political doctrine. That is what it amounts to too.
One's choice of religion is MORE important than any other category of human rights, and usually only one religion gets star billing.
I say no. Vehemently.
It doesn't make me overly popular, but seems to delight my quieter female friends who just enjoy their freedoms even if academic/professional feminism seems to be just too good for the like of us. :)
"Where a religion or culture's practices, words, and actions conflict with equality, it is unacceptable."
And this is where we must part ways. The entire point of any religion is to move away from simple equality. If I go to a gym, I fully expect that the program of training I receive there will move me away from being equal to others in terms of physical abilities, if it does not, I stop going. Religion is no different.
"It contravenes laws, human rights, the charter/ constitutions. It offends the self-evident nature of inalienable human rights."
This is the giant leap that utterly ignores the separate natures of government and all other undertakings. It is the job of government to treat everyone as equal...it is not the job of anyone or anything else. This is because with everyone and everything else it is a matter of individual choice to put up with their values and judgments. Not so with government.
And, incidentally, this is how we distinguish between whether something is a concern of the government. If someone is inflicting some treatment on you without giving you a choice to reject it, then they have entered the realm of government, and the government has to apply the law to see which of you is in the wrong (or find you both in the wrong).
As long as feminists inflict their views on everyone else, they have to play in the realm of government just like Islamists do. When feminists can say to others, this is the way we do things, take it or leave it and find some non-feminists to deal with, then they can be just another voluntary choice people make.
Chiu Chun-Ling.
Genital Mutilation (FGM) a form of child abuse usually associated with Islamic African countries
associated with any islamic country.
Chiu, I have no idea what you are talking about. The only thing I tell people they can't do is define me for me.
Islam, fascists, conservatives, communists, Jews, Christians, whatever. If *you* apply your own rules to yourself, and look for a spouse that wants to work that way with you.... good for you.
We agree, that at the point that a person or group moves from there to legislating your ROLES in your own life they have crossed the line.
Equality of opportunities doesn't mean what people try to make it mean. So I'm unmoved by the "equality" in the gym argument. I have equal access to the gym, what I do with it from there has no effect on anyone but me.
Islam is a massive threat to individualist style governance at the moment.
As such, even if you don't like it, we're on the same side about this. And I don't care if that makes you squirmy. :D
Phyllis Chesler
Oriana Fallaci
Daniela Santanche
«mohammad was a pedophile»
youtube.com/watch?v=ZpdCfbSsNzQ
Daniela Santanche protested against the burka in front of a mosque. A mohamadan punched her.
(Does Paul Weston protest in front of mosques?)
rossoshocking.ilcannocchiale.it/mediamanager/sys.user/63837/normal_santanche2~0.jpg
Ni Putes ni Soumises: A Republican Feminism from the Quartiers Sensibles
informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a908177994
Swiss Feminists Swing Vote against Minarets
europenews.dk/en/node/27947
2 JUNE 2006 | GENEVA — A new study published by the World Health Organization (WHO) has shown that women who have had Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) are significantly more likely to experience difficulties during childbirth and that their babies are more likely to die as a result of the practice.” (WHO website)
“Among social activists and feminists, combating female genital mutilation (FGM) is an important policy goal. Sometimes called female circumcision or female genital cutting, FGM is the cutting of the clitoris of girls in order to curb their sexual desire and preserve their sexual honor before marriage. The practice, prevalent in some [sic-ALL!] majority Muslim countries, has a tremendous cost: many girls bleed to death or die of infection. Most are traumatized. Those who survive can suffer adverse health effects during marriage and pregnancy. New information from Iraqi Kurdistan raises the possibility that the problem is more prevalent in the Middle East than previously believed and that FGM is far more tied to religion than many Western academics and activists admit.”
“Most studies speak of “justifications”[36] and “rationalizations”[37] for FGM but do not speak of causes since this could implicate Islamic rules relating to women and sexual morality. Islam is regarded as a wrong “justification,” often with a citation that the Qur’an does not require FGM. That many women in northern Iraq—and presumably many women in Egypt—believe that the practice is rooted in religion is a factor ignored by Western universities and international organizations.”
“In short, some clerics condemn FGM as an archaic practice, some accept it, and still others believe it to be obligatory.” (Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2007, pp. 29-36)
jihadwatch.org/2010/04/amnesty-international-suspends-womens-rights-activist-who-questioned-its-partnership-with-taliban-su.html
As long as we're clear that only those who deal in violence are required to answer for that before the principles of law.
In the broadest sense, 'violence' is the root of 'violation', we can understand violence as activity which violates a person against their will. Not all violence is produced by people, even indirectly. The import of this is that violence that is not the result of sentient action can be restrained, preempted, or averted without without infringing on other person's against their will.
But violence that proceeds from the choices of a person cannot be mitigated without impairing that person's choices. Thus the law must be applied without regard to one person over another, or it encourages or directly enacts rather than averting violence. Which is to say, justice requires that an insult be answered with an insult of the same category. If someone writes something that offends you, it is inappropriate to pay for a band of thugs to beat them to death over it, while there is nothing wrong with writing a rebuttal.
When 'feminism' confines itself to answering insults to womenhood with categorically similar insults, I have no problem with it. But if, like Islam and Sharia, it answers insults with the threat of armed violence to rob, imprison, or kill...which is the effect of "sexual equality" legislation, then it is injustice. What's good for the goose must be good for the gander. If it is not acceptable for men to have women deprived of property, beaten, or killed for insulting men, then it isn't right for women to have men deprived of property, beaten, or killed for insulting women.
Likewise, if Muslims are allowed to rape, assault, and kill infidels for not being Muslims, then infidels must be allowed to rape, assault, and kill Muslims for not being infidels.
If you have trouble agreeing with any of that, then there can never be any agreement between us on any other point. Because the principle of justice trumps all other agreements...it is the basis of calling anything 'agreement' in the first place.
Chiu Chun-Ling.
If it is not acceptable for men to have women deprived of property, beaten, or killed for insulting men, then it isn't right for women to have men deprived of property, beaten, or killed for insulting women.
huh?
We had the same b*llsh!t over here in the US: the feminist group here is called National Organization of Women. In the OJ Simpson murder case in the 1990s, it came out Simpson had beaten his wife continually.
And where was the NOW on this? Nowhere to be seen or heard- it was disgusting
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