"A Woman Is A Thing You Keep At Home"

The article to which, with a characteristic dig at the United States' Middle East policy, the anti-Israel vicar of Virginia Water (seemingly an inveterate apologist for Islam, like his equally anti-Israel followers) links, is by Dr Faheem Younus, a physician who is the Baltimore president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA and a senior fellow at the Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics at the University of Baltimore.

Dr Younus writes, inter alia, regarding the abduction of Nigerian schoolgirls by the misogynistic barbarians calling themselves Boko Haram:

'.... It’s not Islam but savage bearded men who are scared of little girls. Inserting “Islam” into the equation is a distraction; it augments the agenda of Boko Haram, who are craving religious legitimacy. Deny them that.

I am a father of two girls. What anguish the parents of over 200 abducted girls must be experiencing is beyond me. I cannot comprehend why the world is not acting swiftly to unite 276 innocent girls with their families, or why a “coalition of the willing” is not removing the localized tumor of Boko Haram before it metastasizes into a pan-African cancer.

What I do comprehend, however, is the common thread of ignorance and hatred between Boko Haram and Islamophobes. Both know zilch about the true Islamic teachings; their ignorance is directly proportional to the number of words they utter. Both hold blanket hatred for the other: Boko Haram hates all Western ideas (hence their name, which translates roughly to “Western education is a sin”), and Islamophobes like Pat Robertson compare Islam to Nazism. And both resort to a “buy one, get one” sales strategy: Buy into this narrative of ignorance or hatred and you get to use or bash Islam – depending upon your location – for free....

 .... When my daughter returned from school today, she described how one of her Jewish classmates lamented the obvious practice of specifying the "Muslimness" of an extremist act in the headlines. See how apparent it has become?

So end this sensationalism, please. Let's bring the filthy thugs of Boko Haram to justice, yesterday. And let's stop elevating their status by linking them to Islam in our headlines from tomorrow.'

On the BBC's "Dateline London" program, Al Beeb's old mate and frequent panellist Abdel Bari Atwan (notorious, though not, of course, among the Beeboids, for declaring that if Iranian missiles hit Israel he'd dance for joy in Trafalgar Square), insisted that Boko Haram are not genuine Muslims, a line of argument pursued by CAIR and other Islamist-apologist groups, who fail to face up to the fact that (while not all Muslims are terrorists) most terrorists in the world today are Muslims.  Anyone who points out, as does the American satirist and political commentator Bill Maher in the following video, this "elephant  in the room", is promptly labelled a racist and an "Islamophobe".

Israeli blogger Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was killed in Jerusalem at the age of fifteen, one of the victims of an atrocity carried out by a female suicide bomber (who now walks free),  wrote of Michelle Obama's televised condemnation yesterday of the abduction:

'From the official text of her speech, it's hard not to notice that she uses the word "terrorist" three times in describing the Islamists of Boko Haram who have openly taken credit for the kidnappings.

But not once does she use the words Boko Haram or Islam or Islamist.

There's a flip-side to this. Although Michelle Obama herself (or her speech-writers, if one were to be coldly pedantic about this) calls them terrorists, the ever-delicate – and hugely influential – BBC does not use the word even once in its coverage of her speech. ... Oddly, they have no problem inserting Boko Haram and Islamist into their report, though Mrs Obama's speech does not mention either term. She does call them terrorists, but to the oh-so-doctrinaire BBC, they're militants.

As for Mrs Obama's perfectly justifiable outrage at grown men "determined to keep these girls from getting an education", we wonder if she is aware of the other unconscionable atrocities for which this group has taken responsibility.... 

Clearly – though Mrs Obama's appeal today gives zero hint of it – there are some powerful religious forces at work in the unfolding Nigerian tragedy which no amount of reportorial spin or speech-writing acrobatics can fully hide. That however doesn't stop them trying....

Excising the Islamist dimension from their understanding of what is happening dooms some of the most influential people in our societies to continue seriously misapprehending the goals of Hamas, of Boko Haram and of the rising tide of terrorism-addicted savages with Islamist passion in their hearts. Ultimately, we all pay a price for this, and it's unconscionably heavy.' [Emphasis added]

So, if free and forceful discussion of the issue is ever to be properly vented,  it must be pointed to those who attempt to silence criticism with the "Islamophobe" label out that there are Muslims who have acknowledged the presence of the elephant in the room, notably Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, former editor of the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, who wrote in 2004:

"Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims. The kidnappers of the students in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepalese workers and cooks are also Muslims. Those who rape and murder in Darfour are Muslims, and their victims are Muslims as well. Those who blew up the residential complexes in Riyadh and Al-Khobar are Muslims. Those who kidnapped the two French journalists are Muslims. The two [women] who blew up the two planes [over Russia] a week ago are Muslims. Bin Laden is a Muslim and Al-Houthi [the head of a terrorist group in Yemen] is a Muslim. The majority of those who carried out suicide operations against buses, schools, houses, and buildings around the world in the last ten years are also Muslims.

What a terrible record. Does this not say something about us, about our society and our culture? If we put all of these pictures together in one day, we will see that these pictures are difficult, embarrassing, and humiliating for us. However, instead of avoiding them and justifying them it is incumbent upon us first of all to recognize their authenticity rather than to compose eloquent articles and speeches proclaiming our innocence…

Islam has suffered an injustice at the hands of the new Muslims… We will only be able to clear our reputation once we have admitted the clear and shameful fact that most of the terrorist acts in the world today are carried out by Muslims. We have to realize that we cannot correct the condition of our youth who carry out these disgraceful operations until we have treated the minds of our sheikhs who have turned themselves into pulpit revolutionaries who send the children of others to fight while they send their own children to European schools."

(Hat tip: HW)

Nor must the grotesque misogyny inherent in Islam and so much of Islamic society be downplayed.  (Australian television viewers glimpsed that misogyny, raw and ruthless, this evening in a refreshingly candid-about-the-matter documentary on the ABC's Four Corners program regarding the endemic sexual abuse of young children in Pakistan: one serial rapist of little boys, who like others in the transport industry regularly sodomises homeless boys as young as eight at the Peshawar bus station, explained contemptuously that "a woman is a thing you keep at home", and the studio anchor stressed that, although the documentary focused on the rape of little boys, little girls are also victims, particularly in their homes.)

Especially compelling are the words of Professor Phyllis Chesler:

'The world media calls this a “kidnapping” in Nigeria. It is not a “kidnapping.” It is the face of Jihad, the way of Jihad. Boko Haram are not holding these girls for ransom, they are not willing to return them for money. They already view the girls as their God-given booty, and as sale-able property.

The girls are between the ages of twelve and fifteen. The Christian girls will be raped, converted to Islam, and then, like the Muslims girls, “married” to one of their captors. Some will be trafficked into the sex trade, which is pandemic throughout Africa and the Muslim Middle East. Sharia law allows men to purchase the sexual favors of a female child or a young woman for one hour, a week, or a month. Private and public brothels exist as well.

Please understand: Boko Haram are the Nigerian Taliban. Like their Pakistani and Afghan counterparts, they oppose education for girls and would rather marry and impregnate them instead--for Allah’s sake.

This behavior is absolutely par for the course in Islamic history. Anyone who is surprised or shocked by this latest outrage in Nigeria simply does not know the facts.

Boko Haram’s behavior is typical of any armed Muslim force beginning in Mohammed’s time. The Prophet’s warriors went on raids and systematically massacred the Jewish tribes in Arabia. The men who refused to convert were beheaded – and then the Prophet divided the women, children, houses, and chattels among the Muslims. The women were forcibly converted and kept as “wives” or slaves.

Thereafter, Muslim warriors in search of power, land, and gold, did much the same thing.

Contrary to the politically correct intelligentsia, who focus only on Western sins, Islam also has a long and ongoing history of imperialism, colonialism, conversion by the sword, sex slavery, (of both boys and girls), polygamy, sex trafficking, and the brutal subordination and cyclical massacres of religious minorities. 

Westerners either do not know this, do not want to know this, don’t care all that much, or misunderstand this.

Some, including journalists, still believe that Boko Haram and other such groups are crying out against injustice and poverty, against government corruption and ineptitude--all of which exist.

But that is not Boko Haram’s major concern. They want to assert an Islamic state in Nigeria, similar to that which exists in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and now, Brunei. These Muslim extremists, both Sunni and Shiia, want Sharia law to dominate public and private life. This means that the state will have the power to stone people to death for adultery and apostasy, to amputate for theft, to lash and jail for “blasphemy,” to tax and hold hostage, jail, murder, or exile infidels.

Oh, yes – male polygamy will be legal, marriage will be forced, women will be veiled, normatively beaten and raped without recourse, honor killed for the slightest perceived disobedience. Women are breeders and housekeepers – an education would ruin them....' [Emphasis added]

 And as Ayaan Hirsi Ali observes:

'The kidnapping of the schoolgirls throws into bold relief a central part of what the jihadists are about: the oppression of women. Boko Haram sincerely believes that girls are better off enslaved than educated. The terrorists' mission is no different from that of the Taliban assassin who shot and nearly killed 15-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai—as she rode a school bus home in 2012—because she advocated girls' education. As I know from experience, nothing is more anathema to the jihadists than equal and educated women.

How to explain this phenomenon to baffled Westerners, who these days seem more eager to smear the critics of jihadism as "Islamophobes" than to stand up for women's most basic rights? Where are the Muslim college-student organizations denouncing Boko Haram? Where is the outrage during Friday prayers?....

Organizations like Boko Haram do not arise in isolation. The men who establish Islamist groups, whether in Africa (Nigeria, Somalia, Mali), Southwest Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan), or even Europe (U.K., Spain and the Netherlands), are members of long-established Muslim communities, most of whose members are happy to lead peaceful lives. To understand why the jihadists are flourishing, you need to understand the dynamics within those communities....'

She warns:

"I am often told that the average Muslim wholeheartedly rejects the use of violence and terror, does not share the radicals' belief that a degenerate and corrupt Western culture needs to be replaced with an Islamic one, and abhors the denigration of women's most basic rights. Well, it is time for those peace-loving Muslims to do more, much more, to resist those in their midst who engage in this type of proselytizing before they proceed to the phase of holy war.

It is also time for Western liberals to wake up. If they choose to regard Boko Haram as an aberration, they do so at their peril. The kidnapping of these schoolgirls is not an isolated tragedy; their fate reflects a new wave of jihadism that extends far beyond Nigeria and poses a mortal threat to the rights of women and girls. If my pointing this out offends some people more than the odious acts of Boko Haram, then so be it." [Emphasis added]

See also BBC Watch here and Mark Steyn here

Meanwhile, a video released by Boko Haram shows that the girls appear to have been forced to convert to Islam: