Letter From America (About One of the Heroines of our Generation)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali fights radical Islam’s real war on women

By Ashe Schow 
December 8, 2014
Washington Examiner

In early April of this year, Brandeis University, under pressure from student activists and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reversed its decision to give an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a global advocate for women’s rights. (Graeme Jennings/Examiner)

 

In early April of this year, Brandeis University, under pressure from student activists and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reversed its decision to give an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a global advocate for women’s rights. The decision was triggered by Hirsi Ali’s outspoken criticisms of Islam. The Somali-born activist has sounded alarms about the prevalence of extremism in Muslim countries and the misogyny that pervades even mainstream Islam. During the Brandeis controversy, a CAIR spokesman called her “one of the worst of the worst of the Islam-haters in America.”

But Hirsi Ali’s warnings about Islamic extremism were quickly supported by world events, as just a week after Brandeis rescinded her honorary degree, the Islamist terrorist organization Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls in the first of many such abductions throughout the summer. A few months after the kidnappings began, news spread that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, another terrorist group, was selling Yazidi women into sexual slavery. . . . 

The real horrors facing women in the world aren’t discussed in America, where those who try to point out what is going on in other countries or criticize the trivial nature of feminist obsessions are sidelined from the public debate.  Critics have attacked Hirsi Ali as Islamophobic and have argued that the portrait she paints is not representative of Islam at large. But her disagreements with Islam are rooted in her own East African upbringing.

Hirsi Ali was subjected to female genital mutilation at the age of 5 in her home country, Somalia, while her father, who opposed the traditional practice, was in prison. Her father escaped and moved the family to Saudi Arabia, then to Ethiopia and finally to Kenya when Hirsi Ali was 11 years old.  She grew up as a Muslim woman, reading and accepting the Quran and its teachings. But when her family prepared to force her into an arranged marriage, she fled to the Netherlands. She eventually became a translator, speaking on behalf of Somali women who, like her, were seeking asylum.

Hirsi Ali discovered many women continued to suffer under Islam even in the secular, liberal Netherlands. She decided to enter politics to bring attention to the plight of Muslim women and girls, and in 2003 she was elected to the Dutch parliament.  Her charisma and criticism of Islam as a member of parliament gained the attention of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. She wrote and narrated his film “Submission” about oppressed women in Holland, a film that outraged Dutch Muslims. On Nov. 2, 2004, an Islamist shot and stabbed van Gogh to death in Amsterdam as he rode his bicycle to work. A letter was pinned to van Gogh’s dead body with a knife, a letter that included a death threat against Hirsi Ali.

She moved to the United States in 2006 following her resignation from parliament amid accusations that she lied on her asylum application. But even in America, a security detail accompanies her wherever she goes.  Hirsi Ali has a reputation as a fearless critic of Islam, but she spoke quietly, almost timidly, even though her security detail was on alert just outside the secluded room where our interview took place.  Liberals, she said, protect Islamic extremists partly because the Left has no idea what really goes on in Muslim countries.

“They feel all religions are the same, and they’re not,” she observed. “I think if I adopt the position in good faith to multiculturalists and leftists, I would say [they take the position they do] because they see them [Muslims] as victims. They see them as victims of the white man and so they think: ‘Let’s protect them from the white man. Let’s protect them from capitalism.’… That is misguided at best and malicious at worst.”

One need only remember the tragic shooting at Fort Hood in 2009 to see such indifference to extremism in action. U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people and wounded many more after becoming radicalized and corresponding with Yemeni-American terrorist leader Anwar al-Awlaki. Despite evidence that Hasan’s rampage was religiously motivated — he shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is great”) before opening fire — the Obama administration classified the attack as “workplace violence.” . . .

Being a woman is not a sin or illegal in Islamic countries, but women are treated more as property than as human beings. In Somalia, where Hirsi Ali was born, 98 percent of women and girls have undergone genital mutilation, a procedure that involves removing the clitoris and labia and sewing the area closed, leaving only a small hole for urination. Somalia has the highest percentage of women and girls who have undergone the procedure, according to a July 2013 report by UNICEF.

Millions of young girls in East Africa are treated as property and forced into marriage in exchange for wealth or status. Women who refuse to marry a husband selected by their families can be slain by their own parents and siblings in an “honor killing.” In some cases, the man she prefers is slain as well.

These situations are not isolated but are, rather, spreading into Western cultures. Between 25 and 28 honor killings occur in the United States each year, according to Hirsi Ali’s human rights organization. The United Nations estimates that more than 5,000 honor killings occur worldwide each year and that 800 million women and girls live under the constant threat of such violence.

“Wherever [Islamists] gain power, you see exactly what they do: The first thing they do is they chase women out of the public space, force them to cover up, beat them up, rape them, sell them into slavery,” Hirsi Ali said.  Such violence against women needs to be exposed, and Western liberals need to “review their thinking,” she said. 

That will prove difficult. In her speech to the dinner guests in Washington, Hirsi Ali recalled meeting Vice President Joe Biden. He informed her that “ISIS had nothing to do with Islam.” When she disagreed with him, Biden actually responded: “Let me tell you one or two things about Islam.”  “I politely left the conversation at that,” Hirsi Ali said, to laughter. “I wasn’t used to arguing with vice presidents.” . . .

The rest of the world, which doesn’t enjoy the rights that Americans do, is where feminists should focus their attention, she said. “They should be focusing on the rights of women in China; the girls who are being aborted before they’re even born,” Hirsi Ali said. “The culture of rape in India. Latin America in the Western world, with all its problems with it being where the West was four or five decades ago. And then, Islamic extremism, which is like a cancer and it’s spreading all over the world.”

Hirsi Ali noted that she has been warning Westerners about the dangers of Sharia, or Islamic law, for more than a decade but wasn’t taken seriously.  “Nobody really believed me. They thought I was exaggerating,” she said. “But now they can see when these people come to power what they do.”

A Terrible Crime

Female Genital Mutilation in the West

A Creeping Crime Against Humanity

by Phyllis Chesler
Breitbart
November 19, 2014

Tomorrow, on November 20, 2014, an Egyptian doctor, Raslan Fadl, will for the first time in history be sentenced because his 13-year old patient died during a female genital mutilation (FGM) procedure; he claims she was allergic to penicillin. [update: Fadl was unexpectedly acquitted.]

This girl died—but she was probably viewed as among the lucky few who have real physicians perform the mutilation in a clinic, as opposed to a midwife or tribal elder who performs the mutilation on a mud floor and with a rusty knife or razor blade.

We know that this horrendous practice is pandemic in the Middle East and Africa. Some claim that FGM is not an Islamic practice per se but is, rather, an African and tribal practice. Thus, FGM is practised in Muslim Africa (Egypt, Somalia, Sudan) but also in pagan and Christian Africa, as well as nations that are a mix of Christian and Muslim (Nigeria, Sierre Leone, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Kenya). It is also increasingly practised in Muslim Indonesia.

Recently, a photographer was present at the FGM “ceremonies” of four teenage Kenyan girls of the Potok tribe. They look terrified.  According to UNICEF, 91% of Egyptian women have been genitally mutilated.  The practice is supported by both women and men who view women as unclean and unmarriageable if they have not been “cut.” A number of brave and poignant memoirs have been written by women who have undergone this procedure. Dr. Nawal el-Sadawii, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Soraya Mire all come to mind.

But we also know that this practice flies under the radar in the West as well among immigrant communities, mainly from these regions. And we know that Western authorities have failed to stop it.

National Health Service data suggests that up to 170,000 women and girls living in the UK may have undergone female genital mutilation.

Last week, Detective Chief Supt Vanessa Jardine of Manchester stated that the genital mutilation (FGM) of girls in England should be treated as a form of “child abuse and not as a cultural issue.”

In other words, it is a crime and perpetrators should be prosecuted. It is not a tribal, ethnic, racial, or cultural issue to which Western law enforcement should continue to turn a politically correct blind eye. Jardine stated that “this is about protecting a child, not (about) being a racist.”

Recently, the British National Health Service documented “467 new cases of FGM in England.” Half live in London. Estimates suggest that “up to 170,000 women and girls living in the UK may have undergone FGM.”

FGM has been viewed as a violation of girls’ and women’s human rights by international treaties. This has changed nothing. UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon has announced a global campaign to end this atrocity within a decade.

I doubt this will happen. A number of countries have banned FGM, including Egypt, in 1959 and again in 2008. It did not stop this practice.

In 2008, a 12-year-old Egyptian girl died during a clinic surgery. That alone—her death—is what led Egypt to again ban FGM. In other words, the life-long agony and negative medical consequences which FGM inflicts upon girls and women does not matter. The fact that she will never be able to experience any sexual pleasure whatsoever does not matter. In fact, that is the object of this mutilation: to make sure that a woman will be less likely to have pre-marital or extra-marital sex; to ensure that a father need not worry about his daughter’s “promiscuity” and a husband need not worry about whether her pregnancies belong to him, and not to another man.

A woman is meant to suffer—little enough punishment to pay for the crime of being born female. It does not matter that she will probably be in agony each time she urinates, has sexual intercourse or, given the massive scarring involved, gives birth to a child. It does not matter that she may develop a fistula and become incontinent, that she may also smell “bad” and for this reason, be shunned by her family. It does not seem to matter that she may later die from an infection.

A woman is meant to suffer—little enough punishment to pay for the crime of being born female.
It does not matter that she will probably be in agony each time she urinates, has sexual intercourse or, given the massive scarring involved, gives birth to a child. It does not matter that she may develop a fistula and become incontinent, that she may also smell “bad” and for this reason, be shunned by her family. It does not seem to matter that she may later die from an infection.

These are crimes against humanity. We may not be able to stop such crimes if they take place in Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, or Egypt. But we can and must stop such crimes if they take place in any Western country—even if the parents send the girl back home to be mutilated.
What might deter this practice? I fear that laws and treaties per se will not be able to do so. Here’s what might. Parents and relatives of a mutilated girl who are complicit in the crime – including knowing about it and failing to tell police – should be deported if they are not citizens and jailed for many, many years if they are. This might give pause to the next set of parents who live in the West but whose hearts remain in the Middle East and Africa.

This is a radical suggestion. I would recommend it for honor killings in the West as well. A family can be “shamed” by having a non-mutilated daughter or they can be “shamed” for having mutilated their daughter and thereby being responsible for the deportation of their entire extended family. The choice is theirs to make.

Phyllis Chesler, an emerita professor of psychology and women’s studies and the author of fifteen books, is a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Saudi Government and "Honour" Kidnappings

 The Long Reach of Islamic Totalitarianism

It’s difficult to know what to make of the story below, which appeared in a NZ daily recently.  It is being alleged that two Saudi Arabian Christian converts, resident in New Zealand, have been kidnapped and repatriated against their will to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Arabian government pays for hundreds of students to attend universities in New Zealand.  It is generally understood that the totalitarian Saudi government monitors them, keeping tabs on their activities whilst in this country.  Now we read this:

Two Saudi Arabian asylum seekers at opposite ends of the country have suddenly flown home, and friends are convinced they have been forcibly repatriated because they’d turned their backs on Islam.

A half-eaten chop rots in a frying pan on a stove. Packaged food spills out of a pantry. Elsewhere: electrical appliances, spartan furniture, towels, clothing. Someone has left this council flat in the Christchurch suburb of Redwood in a hurry. No-one has seen or heard from the tenant, Saudi refugee Khalid Muidh Alzahrani, known as Daniel, for three weeks, and the council has applied for an abandonment order for the property.  Alzahrani, 42, suffered polio as a child, uses a walking stick and a wheelchair, and has other serious health problems.

He arrived in Christchurch about five years ago on a Saudi Government scholarship to study English, moved to Dunedin after the earthquakes and then returned to Christchurch, converting to Christianity and applying for asylum. He was granted refugee status on the grounds that he would be persecuted in Saudi Arabia, and told friends he was terrified he would be kidnapped and forced to return.

The Saudi ambassador to New Zealand told the Sunday Star-Times Alzahrani had “insisted” on returning home to visit his mother and the consulate had paid for his air ticket. But his friends don’t believe it – they say he was last seen in the company of two strange Arab men and believe he was taken out of the country under duress, possibly by agents of the state or family members.

Police state that they are not treating the case as a kidnapping at this stage but have reached out via Interpol to make sure that Alzahrani is OK.

We can believe that the Saudi government would strenuously strive to keep control of Saudi students in New Zealand.  If too many defected, or converted to Christianity, it would threaten the whole educational programme of Saudi students here.  Secondly, there is the matter of family “honour”.  Islamic “honour” kidnappings are well known and documented.  There is no reason blithely to assume they would never happen in New Zealand.  In fact, New Zealand is a relatively open society and definitely unwary, so it would be extreme naivete to presume that honour kidnappings and even killings would not occur here.

Further details have emerged:

In Christchurch, an elderly neighbour said the last time he saw Alzahrani was about three weeks ago, leaving in a white, four-door car with two men “who weren’t New Zealanders”.  Alzahrani’s GP alerted police when he failed to turn up to a medical appointment. Immigration New Zealand confirmed that Alzahrani left the country on July 31 but refused to say if he was travelling alone.  Police said they were satisfied he had left voluntarily.  “However, due to Mr Alzahrani’s ongoing health issues, police have made a request … to the Saudi Arabian authorities to enquire as to his welfare,” they said in a statement.

Saudi Ambassador Ahmed Al-Johani said in a statement Alzahrani had “insisted” he wanted to return home, “so we provided him with a ticket as he requested”. He left New Zealand on a Cathay Pacific flight via Hong Kong and had “safely arrived to his family”.  Al-Johani released health records from two-and-a-half years ago when Alzahrani had sought help from the consulate because he could not afford his medical bills. “We offered Mr Alzahrani all the help and support he needed.”

The Star-Times understands that was before Alzahrani sought asylum. Al-Johani ignored other questions about Saudi Arabia’s stance on Christian converts.  Members of the Christian community in Christchurch who were providing Alzahrani with financial support to supplement his invalid’s benefit are upset with the police response to their complaint. They have tried repeatedly to reach Alzahrani, without success.

They said his dream was to bring his two young daughters to New Zealand. It was out of character for him to disappear without telling his friends, they said.  “Daniel made it very clear that he would never return to the Middle East as it was too dangerous for him as a Christian,” a friend said. “He shared many times that he was fearful of abduction.”

A source said Alzahrani’s brother had visited Christchurch a few months ago and given him an air ticket to return to Saudi. He had refused to take it.  “The fear of his brother visiting caused him to have very bad nightmares about being killed in his flat.” the source said. “He felt in a very dark place and was irrational at times. Why would a man like this want to go back into the lion’s den?”

A source familiar with Saudi asylum-seekers said that when a family member converted, “religious police” would visit the family and give them a deadline to sort it out themselves.  “Often the oldest son will be sent to get them and bring them home and re-indoctrinate them.”

Then there is this case:

In May last year, a young Saudi Christian who had arrived in Auckland two months earlier and claimed asylum was snatched off the street by three men just three days before his refugee interview and was flown back to Saudi Arabia, where it is believed he spent time in prison and was tortured. His lawyer, Roger Chambers, said the man had managed to secretly make contact with his friends in Auckland. “He has had a dreadful time in Saudi Arabia,” Chambers said. “[He was told] more than once if he did not renounce his Christianity that he could expect to be beheaded.”. . .

In the Auckland case, it is believed one of the three men who snatched the asylum-seeker was his brother. A source said the other two were travelling on diplomatic passports and were captured on CCTV footage at Auckland airport.  Chambers said his client had been so worried about the possibility of being kidnapped and forcibly returned home that he changed his name by deed poll and applied for asylum on religious persecution grounds.

His conversion had “outraged” his family.  The Star-Times has been told he was married to a member of the wealthy, influential bin Laden construction family.  After he disappeared his friends searched his flat in Grafton, central Auckland, and found all his clothes and belongings still there, including credit cards.

Chambers said New Zealand officials met the man when his plane landed in Hong Kong, but he indicated he was returning voluntarily and was allowed to proceed.  “There was considerable doubt as to whether that was a voluntary statement. The evidence suggests he was kidnapped … and we suspect they were agents of the state, but there may have been a family involvement.”

He had written to Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse seeking help in the case, and hoped that the man could be returned to New Zealand to resume the asylum process.  “I am really concerned. If we can do something to rescue him I’d very much want that. Any New Zealander would be horrified, it’s appalling.”

Our inclination is to believe these to be genuine cases of Saudi state-sanctioned kidnapping.   When a Muslim converts to Christ, he or she becomes immediately subject to the death penalty.  This automatically extends to Islamic students converting to Christianity living in New Zealand.  Secondly, Saudi Arabia is an Islamic totalitarian state.  Thirdly, Saudi Arabia nurtures Wahhabi, one of the most extreme manifestations of Islam on the planet.  Its devotees and followers would most definitely want to see family members who depart Islam to be recaptured and/or killed for their apostasy.  Fourthly, honour kidnappings and killings are very common worldwide.  Only the myopically naive would rule them out in New Zealand.  Finally, the Saudis–including many Saudi families, particularly those whose children  would “qualify” for a study grant in New Zealand–would have the money and resources to execute such illegal kidnapping.

In both these cases, the Saudi embassy has been complicit and involved.  In both cases, the Saudi embassy appears to have played fast and loose with New Zealand law.    That alone lends credence to the story of kidnappings. 

Letter From Australia (About Self-Loathing)

This self-loathing insults Australian values

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
June 26, 2014

THE Sydney Opera House is Australia’s most iconic building. And on its stage in August was to be a taxpayer-funded talk: “Honour killings are morally justified.”

Be clear: the title is not a question but a statement.  Yes, in the heart of Australia we are now to rationalise the strangling, stoning, burning, beating or shooting of daughters and wives for supposedly shaming their men. . . .

In this case, Uthman Badar was invited by Sydney Opera House and the St James Ethics Centre for their Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and planned to attack critics of honour killings as the usual “secular (white) Westerner”, wickedly using these murders as a symbol of “everything that is allegedly wrong with the other culture”. Note: honour killings are only “allegedly wrong”. 

Yes, to see Westerners criticise an “Oriental” woman-killer was to see “the powerful condemn the powerless”, according to the blurb approved by Badar. Pity those powerless murderers.

The Opera House has now cancelled Badar’s speech, but only on the grounds that his critics misunderstood the poor man. (Depressingly, not one critic was a prominent Muslim.)  As the Opera House put it, “a line has been crossed” by giving the lecture its “provocative” title, because “it is clear from the public reaction that the title has given the wrong impression of what Mr Badar intended to discuss”.

We are now asked to believe a talk entitled “Honour killings are morally justified” would say something different, although the organisers and Badar haven’t said what. The Opera House merely asserts neither Badar nor the organisers “in any way advocate honour killings” — and it cancels the talk it claims would have said the same.

How curious.

In fact, this blaming of the critics is terribly familiar. Our cultural elite doesn’t condone Islamic extremists; it just attacks those who condemn them. Example: when Dutch political leader Geert Wilders toured Australia last year to warn against the Islamist threat to our freedoms and safety, he was vilified even by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry for allegedly “inciting hatred and animosity”. Example: when I criticised our leading Islamic apologist, ABC presenter Waleed Aly, for refusing to identify Nigeria’s Boko Haram as Islamist or blame it for kidnapping schoolgirls, I was damned by the ABC’s religious affairs editor as “mad”, “lunatic”, “maniacal” and “idolatrous”.

Or take Ann Mossop, co-curator of the festival that invited Badar. She has repeatedly tweeted support for an activist who defaced posters protesting against jihadist attacks on Israel with the slogan: “In any war between the civilised and the savage, support the civilised man.”

Indeed, in this cultural war, the support too often is for the savage and our will to resist is white-anted by a self-loathing of one of the richest, safest and most free societies the world has seen.

“We have a reputation at the moment as being one of the nastiest countries in the world,” feminist Eva Cox declared on the ABC’s Q&A this week. Australia has a “racist” Constitution and a “very dark past, a brutal history of dispossession, theft and slaughter”, claims Australian of the Year Adam Goodes.

Our Anzac dead were just “killed or wounded while their country engaged them in the business of killing”, Tasmanian Governor Peter Underwood reproached Dawn Service mourners this year.

Yes, we have such rotten values that we should be more open to imported ones.
Honour killings, anyone? For a cultural elite with a death wish, it almost makes sense.

Letter From the UK (About An Honour Killing)

Honour Killings

In case any thought that “honour killings” were some hyperbolic fantasy, consider the following:

Guilty Husband Wore Wife’s Clothing After Murdering Her in ‘Honour Killing’

By Nick Hallett  

6 Jun 2014

Breitbart London

A man walked away from a crime scene wearing his wife’s clothing after murdering her in a so-called ‘honour killing’. Ahmed Al-Khatib was caught on CCTV wearing Rania Alayed’s clothes to give the impression that she was still alive.

The Express reports that Syrian-born Al-Khatib lured his wife to his brother’s house in Salford, Greater Manchester and killed her because she had left him to become more “Westernised”. He claimed in court that he had killed her in self-defence during a row because he believed an evil spirit had entered her body.
However, he was yesterday found guilty at Manchester Crown Court of murdering his wife and of perverting the course of justice, and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.

After the murder, he stuffed his wife’s remains into a suitcase before he and his brother drove the body 87 miles and buried it at the side of a lay-by on the A19 road in North Yorkshire. His wife’s body has never been found.

Al-Khatib initially claimed his wife had moved to Turkey, but police became suspicious after it emerged that Ms Alayed had asked a lawyer to help “free her from the shackles of marriage”, angering her husband.
She then further enraged her husband by attending a college, meeting new friends and then beginning a relationship with another man.

Although Al-Khatib eventually confessed that his wife was dead, he denied murder, saying she had fallen and hit her head during an argument.  Detective Chief Inspector Phil Reade of Greater Manchester Police said that the murder was a pre-planned “honour killing”.

“Rania was beginning to put an abusive and violent relationship behind her and had genuine cause to be optimistic for the future,” he said.  “But at the point when she thought she might be able to create a better life for her and her children – free of the domestic abuse she suffered at the hands of Al-Khatib – her husband snatched it all away in the cruellest and most despicable way possible.

“Invited to a neutral meeting place, he murdered her in cold blood while her children were in the next room.

“To deprive his own children of their mother is both sickening and chilling in the extreme.  To later attempt to justify the killing by claiming a Jinn [evil spirit] was about to attack him is both insulting to Rania’s memory and counter to all the evidence of a pre-planned honour-killing.

“And, make no mistake, this was an honour killing.”