I have no opinion on whether there is something inherent to Islam which perpetuates devaluing women. Many claim so. I know little from personal experience, but the behavior of American Muslims would suggest that improving status for women is possible. The behavior of Muslims in Europe recently has many darker passages, and in Muslim countries, reports continue to be grim. I recommend the following three articles, heartbreaking as they are.
Spengler, over at Asia Times, declares that demographically, the Iranians have already lost.
Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.
The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards In 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.
Fjordman's report on rape in Scandinavia shows the grim toll coming to Europe.
According to a new study from the Crime Prevention Council, Brå, it is four times more likely that a known rapist is born abroad, compared to persons born in Sweden. Resident aliens from Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia dominate the group of rape suspects. According to these statistics, almost half of all perpetrators are immigrants. In Norway and Denmark, we know that non-Western immigrants, which frequently means Muslims, are grossly overrepresented on rape statistics. In Oslo, Norway, immigrants were involved in two out of three rape charges in 2001. The numbers in Denmark were the same, and even higher in the city of Copenhagen with three out of four rape charges. Sweden has a larger immigrant, including Muslim, population than any other country in northern Europe. The numbers there are likely to be at least as bad as with its Scandinavian neighbors. The actual number is thus probably even higher than what the authorities are reporting now, as it doesn't include second generation immigrants. Lawyer Ann Christine Hjelm, who has investigated violent crimes in Svea high court, found that 85 per cent of the convicted rapists were born on foreign soil or by foreign parents.
And Theodore Dalrymple has hisusual perceptive take on Muslim women in the UK, who he frequently saw as psychiatric patients, in despair and suicidal. He contrasts the plight of Shakespeare's Juliet with modern Muslim girls
How often have I been consulted by young Muslim women patients, driven to despair by enforced marriages to close relatives (usually first cousins) back “home” in India and Pakistan, who have made such an unavailing appeal to their mothers, followed by an attempt at suicide!
Capulet’s attitude to his refractory daughter is precisely that of my Muslim patients’ fathers:
Look to’t, think on’t, I do not use to jest.
Thursday is near, lay hand on heart, advise:
And you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend;
And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,
For by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee,
Nor what is mine shall ever do thee good.
In fact the situation of Muslim girls in my city is even worse than Juliet’s. Every Muslim girl in my city has heard of the killing of such as she back in Pakistan, on refusal to marry her first cousin, betrothed to her by her father, all unknown to her, in the earliest years of her childhood. The girl is killed because she has impugned family honor by breaking her father’s word, and any halfhearted official inquiry into the death by the Pakistani authorities is easily and cheaply bought off. And even if she is not killed, she is expelled from the household—O sweet my mother, cast me not away!—and regarded by her “community” as virtually a prostitute, fair game for any man who wants her.
7 comments:
AVI, for the life of me, I cannot understand how the feminists (of the liberal variety), the gays and the folk who claim everything "for the children" do not stand up and scream bloody murder at how women, gays and children are treated in many Muslim societies. Shameful!
Good post AVI, keep hammering them each and every time.
Because the point is dominance for their tribe's interpretation of reality, not Bush's, and everything is sacrificed to that.
If I may interject my opinion....they don't do it because they've built their argument on "to each his own" and other very "let me do what I want and leave me alone" type arguments. Feminism took a downward turn that way when they started fixating on abortion rights. It's a slippery slope when you build your arguments on "to each his own" and denial of absolute truth/morality.
I read a good book about his subject entitled "Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World," by Jan Goodwin.
In it she goes country by country and speaks with women in various classes and states of life about living as a woman in the Muslim world. It is very objective and informative, yet clearly portrays the terror and abuse that women suffer under these strict Islamic regimes.
I am so grateful that I live in the U.S. This is the best place in the world to live if you're a woman.
I have a different perspective on this that may help clarify the problem. I'm a second-generation American of European stock. My people came from a part of Bohemia where the Bohemians were a trampled underclass. Nationalistic like all Europeans + shamed = many narcissistic Bohemian men. We called the type "Bohunks." They too treated women (and children and animals) like Muslims do. See what they were doing?
We saw a similar phenomenon in Southern "white trash," who had the mentality that "if you can't look down on a black, you can't look down on anybody."
You don't see this much among American Muslims because they came here because they wanted to. They don't feel downtrodden. They have no sense of inferiority complexed into a superiority act of denial.
European Muslims have been driven there by poverty in the Middle East and have not integrated or succeeded economically and socially. They still feel downtrodden. So they must strut and need someone to get step up on. Hence they treat women as inferior just to prop up their fragile, boyish egos.
You presume Muslim societies mistreat women. That is too much of a generalization. And it ignores the status of women in Western societies just 100 years ago.
Well, there's something to that, john b. Not all are the same. But I think the general level is low, low.
As for the Western societies, I would put that level of mistreatment back much farther. It is hard to measure how hard it was in societies so much poorer than we are now, because people had enormous hardship even if they weren't mistreated. By my grandmother's schoolmates didn't have to endure public stoning and arranged marriages, anyway.
On the other hand, individual violence against a woman by her boyfriend or husband is still tolerated in many pockets of the west.
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