For
Some, Sex Appeal is Part of Jihad's Lure
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
May 30, 2017
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 Earlier this month,
the U.S. State Department issued a new travel warning for Americans, cautioning
them about travel to Europe this summer. The extent of that warning was
remarkable: not just a single country has been deemed dangerous, but an
entire continent
And with good reason: terror attacks are becoming more frequent
Europe-wide, from Paris to Berlin, from Stockholm to Brussels.ISIS was quick to claim responsibility for last week's suicide
bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England.
What's more, British intelligence recently warned that as many as 350 British nationals
may soon return from Syria, where they have been fighting alongside ISIS,
many of them prepared to continue their violent jihad at home. They'll have
ample support: England's MI5 suspects there up to 3,000 "violent
Islamic extremists" in Britain, according to the London Times.
Accordingly, civilians and military, police and politicians across the
Western world prepare for the terrorism we have come to know, be it attacks
in our own cities or the gruesome images of beheadings we've seen on the
internet and TV – and even our streets.
But a newly released United Nations Security Council report exposes the one weapon for which the West is
wholly unprepared, and it may be the most powerful: women.
According to the report, women captured and enslaved by ISIS, Boko
Haram, and other Islamist terror groups are not only being raped: they are
frequently forced to convert to Islam; used as revenue streams via,
prostitution, sex trafficking or demands for ransom from their families; or
"treated as the wages of war, being gifted as a form of
in-kind compensation or payment to fighters who are then entitled to resell
or exploit them as they wish." They are offered up as enticements in
recruitment efforts, which often come with promises of wives or private sex
slaves. And they are often forced to act as human shields or suicide
bombers.
In short, women have become the ultimate terror tool, used to recruit
new terrorists, create a new jihadist generation (through forced
pregnancy), and to kill.
Sexual violence is not new in warfare. But Islamic terror groups have
taken it to new and horrifying extremes, from the 2014 kidnapping of 276
girls forced into sex slavery by Boko Haram, to the ethnic cleansing of Yazidis by ISIS terrorists, who
took thousands of Yazidi women and girls as their slaves.
But even more shocking, as Baku Center for Strategic Studies fellow
Najiba Mustafayeva wrote in Modern Diplomacy, "social media
has converted [this] brutality into a form of propaganda to incite,
radicalize, and attack recruits."
And it has done this with particular success in Europe, where some 6,000
Muslim men and women have made the trip to Syria to join in the jihad and the formation of the Islamic
State.
Put another way: young men raised in a European culture that decries
violence against women, where the rape of young girls is viewed not just as
criminal but pathological, are being seduced by the thousands to leave
their homes and families by the hope of enslaving and raping women and
young girls.
And Europe has only itself to blame.
Although these young men were raised in a secular, Western culture, many
Muslim youth have never fully accepted it as their own. From the time
immigrant workers, largely from Turkey, Morocco, and Algeria, first arrived
in Europe in the 1960s, Europeans kept them at arms length. They were guest
workers, not immigrants. They were not expected to do the things immigrants
might be, like learning the local language. They formed their own
communities, and over the years, brought their families to join them, or
married women from their home villages – women who, like them, were largely
uneducated, religiously conservative, and naïve about the values of the
countries they now lived in. They often wore headscarves. Their marriages
were arranged. They were expected, and expected themselves, to follow the
rules and values they'd grown up with.
And Europe, still guilt-ridden over the religious persecution that
became the Holocaust, simply looked away.
In fairness, most Europeans, even politicians, were as ignorant of the
cultural and religious traditions of conservative Muslims as the Muslims
had been of Europe's. But even as they came to understand the immigrants,
the European officials stood awkwardly silent in the face of domestic battery,
honor killings, and child marriages taking place in the Muslim communities.
Not that these things were rampant, or taking place in open view. But
until the arrival of the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who in 2003 brought
these issues public as a member of the Dutch parliament, even when they did
happen, no one said a word. Even honor killings went ignored, registered as
"suicides" or "accidents."
Nor had anyone previously observed, as Hirsi Ali did, that more than 60 percent of the
women in domestic violence shelters in the Netherlands were Muslim, while
Muslims accounted for just 6 percent of the population. Similar situations soon also emerged in other countries.
Laws since have changed. Immigration rules have tightened, and this,
alongside a greater awareness of forced marriages, has made it more
difficult to arrange so-called "import bides" – girls brought to
Europe from a family's village of origin in an arranged marriage. France
and Belgium have banned the burqa, that dehumanizing garment that not only
underscores the notion of woman as sexual object, but removes her face, her
human-ness.
But it has taken decades.
The young European Muslim men enticed by promises of a sex slave of
their very own have grown up in this changing environment. Their mothers
may have been import brides themselves, women raised in a world that does
not recognize Western views of women's rights, and who similarly instilled
those values in their sons – as did their husbands.
Indeed, in a recent International
Men And Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), conducted in Egypt, Lebanon,
Morocco, and inside the Palestinian territories, 71 percent of Egyptian
women and almost 50 percent of Moroccan women agreed with the statement
that "wives should tolerate violence to keep the family
together." Seventy-nine percent of Moroccan women also claimed that
their husbands expect them to have sex whenever the husband wants it, which
may explain also why 71 percent of Moroccan women versus 48 percent of men
support criminalizing marital rape Similarly, 33 percent of Egyptian and 36
percent of Moroccan women agreed that "if a husband provides
financially, his wife is obliged to have sex with him whenever he wants."
These figures also correspond with a 2013 Pew study of Muslims in 23
countries. That study found that 90 percent of Moroccans, 65 percent of
Turks, and 85 percent of Egyptians agreed that "a wife must always
obey her husband."
But the sons have a harder time now bringing girls like their mothers to
Europe. And anyway, they know, treating women this way in Europe is against
the law. Even if, as they believe, it's what they're entitled to.
Clearly, the pursuit of female slaves is not the only motivation for
young men to join the Islamic State and other terror groups. Ideology, a
belief in the creation of a pure Islamic culture, and the hope of martyrdom
have all played a role. But for many young men, so, too, have the promises
of (sex) slaves and life in a culture that reflects their own views of male
and female roles.
And so they go to Syria. Or Libya. Or Iraq.
And they learn the art of terrorism.
Many of those men will be among the 350 who return to England, and the
hundreds, if not thousands, of others whom European officials expect will
also try to return home as the caliphate collapses. They will bring with
them the sons who were born there, children of rape, of sex slaves, of
mothers who have been traded away. The psychological impact of these
backgrounds, coupled with their lives in a war zone and the indoctrination
of ISIS training camps, is as unfathomable as it is unpredictable; but it
does not bode well for the European communities that will become their new
homes.
And what will happen to the women?
Nonetheless, there is some hope.
Education, the IMAGES authors maintain, can make a significant
difference. "Men with higher education scored notably higher on the
[gender equality] scale, and women even more so," they write.
Consequently, they offer several recommendations for change within the
region. Among them:
- "Challenge and eliminate gender stereotypes
about the social political, and economic roles of men and women in
school texts and curricula, and implement school-based gender-transformative
education for boys and girls."
- "Build on existing literature, art, and
cultural expressions that already include messages of positive
masculinities, and partner with mass media, social media, children and
youth media producers and other artistic producers, to include
messages about changing norms related to masculinity."
- "Mainstream courses in secondary schools and
universities that focus on students' abilities to think critically
about transforming inequitable gender norms and practices."
Some of these ideas are already in play in Norway. Other Western countries
would be wise to follow suit, not just for the sake of Muslim women, but as
a crucial weapon again Islamist terror now, and for the future.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates.
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