Islam,
Sexual Violence, and the West
by Noah Beck
Special to IPT News
July 28, 2016
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 The mass rape of hundreds of German women mostly by Muslim
migrants last New Year's was recently revealed to be far worse than
originally acknowledged. Authorities now believe that more than 1,200 women were sexually
assaulted – more than twice the original estimate of 500. While more than
2,000 men were allegedly involved, only 120 suspects — about half of them
recently arrived migrants — have been identified.
One explanation for why it took half a year for the
full extent of the crime to be revealed is the German police's effort to
avoid a public backlash against refugees. But ultimately, Holger Munch,
president of the German Federal Crime Police Office, acknowledged to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche
Zeitung that there is "a connection between the [sexual assaults]
and the rapid migration in 2015."
Denial is not a strategy. Western countries that cherish women's rights
must wake up to the fact that many migrants could challenge those values.
Most of the mass migration comes from violence-plagued, Muslim-majority
countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where women are second-class
citizens subject to honor killings and various legal
restrictions, and where the local culture often condones rape, encourages
wife-beating, and treats women as sexual objects (with 72
virgins promised to Muslim men who reach heaven).
Thus, just as the mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa
raises the specter of regular Islamist terror on European soil, it also
augurs the kind of sexual abuse that those regions have traditionally
tolerated. German officials implicitly seemed to acknowledge as much with
their laughably impotent campaign to re-educate migrants using signs that explain acceptable
behavior towards women.
Non-Muslim ("infidel") women are especially vulnerable to
sexual assault: Christian women are often abused and denigrated in Islamic societies, as
extensively exposed by Raymond Ibrahim, author of Crucified Again. The Islamic State (ISIS)
regards the Yazidi, another religious minority, as
devil worshippers and reportedly enslaved up to 5,000 Yazidi women,
subjecting them to rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts
of extreme brutality, like burning alive a 20-year-old girl "because she
refused to perform an extreme sex act."
Saudi Arabia, arguably the leader of the Sunni Muslim world, has a legal
system based on strict sharia law, which prohibits women from
dressing as they wish or even driving
a car. Saudi rulings are notoriously abysmal when it comes to rape.
Last year, a Saudi woman was sentenced to 200 lashes after being gang raped by seven
men. In 2013, a Saudi preacher who raped, tortured, and murdered his 5-year old daughter
was punished with just eight years of prison, 800 lashes, and a $270,000
fine. With such legal norms, it's not surprising that when members of the
country's ruling elite travel to the West, their behavior may not change
accordingly (last October three women accused a Saudi prince of sexual assault in Beverly
Hills). By ironic and tragic contrast, U.S. soldiers stationed in Muslim
majority countries are trained to respect local norms to the point that
marines stationed in Afghanistan were actually taught to look away if they find Afghanis raping
children, a common local practice.
While sharia advocates often claim that the Islamic dress code
protects women, the brutally unfair treatment of women by Islamists seems
driven more by power-hungry male chauvinism and/or sexual insecurity than
by any genuine concern for women's welfare, judging from the staggering
hypocrisy of its proudest proponents. The 9/11 jihadists visited strip clubs, and paid for
prostitutes in their motel rooms. Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American-born imam
whose sermons continue to attract recruits to jihad, frequented prostitutes. Osama bin Laden had an
extensive pornography collection, and is among the many examples
of jihadis obsessed with porn and prostitution collected by Phyllis
Chesler, a CUNY emerita professor of psychology and a fellow at the Middle
East Forum.
Between 1997 and 2013, well before the recent mass migration to Europe
began, an estimated 1,400 children had been sexually
abused in Rotherham, England, predominantly by gangs of
British-Pakistani men.
While that scandal involved mostly "white" victims, an
Oxford-educated Pakistani-British woman revealed her own exploitation, noting that "sexual
abuse has been systemically under-reported among Asian girls due to deeply
entrenched cultural taboos – obscuring the reality that there is a
similarly rampant problem of minority girls being abused by members of
their own community."
A few weeks ago, Swedish police received 35 complaints from girls aged
12 to 17 who claimed that "foreign young men" sexually assaulted
them at a popular music festival.
Soeren Kern, a distinguished senior fellow of the Gatestone Institute,
compiled details of dozens of sexual assaults by migrants in Germany during
the first two months of 2016, and noted the enabling reaction from
"the upside-down worldview of German multiculturalism: Migrants who
assault German women and children are simply rebelling against German power
structures. Germans who dare to criticize such assaults are racists."
In contrast to the initial cover-up by German police of the mass rape by
mostly Muslim migrants, France's top security official recently spoke with
candid alarm about the threat that his country faces. Just two days before
the truck-ramming, ISIS-inspired massacre in Nice, Patrick Calvar, chief of
the Directorate General of Internal Security, warned members of the French
parliamentary commission that France is on the verge of a "civil war" that
could be sparked by the mass sexual assault of women by migrants.
There are remarkable exceptions within Islam itself, such as the Tuareg, an Islamic tribe in Africa, where women
embrace sexual freedoms, dictate who gets what in divorce, and don't wear
the veil because men "want to see their beautiful faces." But how
long can the Tuareg's enlightened version of Islam survive in southwest
Libya when ISIS is expanding there, or in Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria,
where Boko Haram is on the march?
There are also brave Muslim reformers trying to improve the way Islam
treats women. However, they mostly operate in the West, where they still
face death threats; one example is Irshad Manji. Another, Fadela
Amara, founded Ni
Putes Ni Soumises, a group that defends Muslim French girls against the
pressures they face to wear the hijab, drop out of school, and marry early
without the right to choose their husband. Amara went on to serve in the
government of Nicolas Sarkozy, but she, too, received death threats for her efforts to liberate
Muslim women.
Muslim feminists outside of the West assume far greater risks. Pakistani
social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch,
who openly expressed her feminist views online, was recently strangled to death by her brother in their family's
home, in an "honor killing." Her "intolerable behavior"
is what drove him to murder her, he said, because her risqué
persona was bringing "dishonor" to the family. There are an
estimated 1,000 honor killings per year in Pakistan.
Even in the West, few feminists dare to criticize Islam because doing so
can invite threats and violence. Absurdly, those brave
enough to do so also risk being prosecuted for "hate speech."
Western countries must support courageous Muslim reformers while
protecting all women living in their territories from the sexual abuse
often encouraged by Islamist culture – whether that abuse is perpetrated by
recent immigrants or long-time residents. The survival of the West depends
on it.
Noah Beck is the author of The Last
Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other
geopolitical issues in the Middle East.
Related Topics: Noah Beck, Cologne
rapes, migrants,
Holger
Munch, honor
violence, Qandeel
Baloch, Yazidi
women, ISIS,
Soeren
Kern, Gatestone
Institute, Tuareg,
political
correctness
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[Re:'Germany:
Muslim Men Harass, Threaten Nude Bathers']: I find it interesting they they
find nude bathing immoral - but apparently slicing throats doesn't bother
them a bit!
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