Cops: Muslim Sex Grooming Gangs “Didn’t Understand That It Was Wrong"
Cops: Muslim Sex Grooming Gangs “Didn’t Understand That It Was Wrong"
Why Manchester cops didn’t protect young girls from Muslim sex grooming gangs.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Call it a tale of two girls. And a tale of two Englands.
One is an actress who grew up to marry a prince, lavished with luxuries, amassing a fortune, before her tantrums and antics drove her to depart her newfound royal family for a Canadian billionaire’s manor.
The other was put into foster care when she was only 8, by the age of 13 she was being raped by a Muslim sex grooming gang, and by 15, Victoria Agoglia was already dead of a heroin overdose injected by the 50-year-old Muslim pedophile who had been abusing her. Today, she would have been a woman.
Unlike Meghan Markle, Victoria never got the opportunity to marry a prince or even grow up. And while the media weeps for Markle, who is departing for Canada because of some tabloid tales, the story of Victoria, once again in the news because of the release of an independent report on the sex grooming gangs of Manchester, shows what true social injustice looks like. It’s not bad publicity for a celebrity.
It’s a girl who was abandoned to the worst imaginable abuses because intervening would have been politically incorrect.
The report chronicles how Operation Augusta was launched and then scuttled after her death in 2003, despite identifying 97 suspects and 57 victims. The victims were, “mostly white girls aged between 12 and 16”, and the perpetrators were, “mostly men of ‘Asian heritage’”. By ‘Asian’, the report means “predominantly Pakistani men” though at least one of the perpetrators was apparently Tunisian.
Constable B, the anonymous cop responsible for some of the most revealing quotes in the report, said, “What had a massive input was the offending target group were predominantly Asian males and we were told to try and get other ethnicities.”
Mohammed Yaqoob, the pedophile who had forcibly injected Victoria with heroin and was cleared of manslaughter charges, was not the sort of pedophile the Manchester cops were supposed to find.
A meeting at Greater Manchester Police headquarters “acknowledged that the enquiry was sensitive due to the involvement of Asian men” and worried over “the incitement of racial hatred.” There were concerns about “the damaged relations following Operation Zoological.” Those were the police raids targeting Iraqi refugees involved in an alleged Al Qaeda plot to bomb a soccer stadium in Manchester.
Some in the GMP didn’t see the point to stopping the rape of young girls because of cultural differences.
“There was an educational issue. Asian males didn’t understand that it was wrong, and the girls were not quite there. They were difficult groups to deal with. We can’t enforce our way out of the problem,” Constable B said.
And so they didn’t.
More young girls and women were raped. Some of the perpetrators were later arrested. The full scope of the abuse and the cover-up will never be known. The independent report tells us a little of the horror.
The Muslim sex grooming gangs in South Manchester targeted girls from broken families who were taken to care homes. This was not accident or chance. As the report notes, the “offenders understood that a specific children’s home in Manchester was used as an emergency placement unit for children entering the care system and this maintained a steady supply of victims.” And the Muslim sex groomers made sure to be on hand and ready so that the “children were befriended as soon as they arrived.”
These were some of the same tactics used by Muslim sex grooming gangs in Rotherham, Bradford, Huddersfield, Rochdale, Aylesbury, Oxford, Newcastle, Bristol, and Telford, suggesting some level of coordination between grooming gangs from various cities. Possibly over the internet. It’s an angle that the authorities have shown no interest in following up because of its potentially explosive nature.
Some previous Muslim sex grooming gangs were set up among taxi drivers. This gang, according to the report, was based out of the “Asian restaurant and takeaway trade.” Again, by Asian, they mean Indian, Afghan and Pakistani cuisine, kabobs and curry, not Egg Foo Yung and General Tso’s Chicken. These traditionally Muslim businesses served as coordinating networks for the rape and abuse of children.
The migrant populations that destroyed the English working class, displacing them and taking their jobs, leaving men without purposeful work, wives without husbands, and children with broken homes, then completed the hat trick by drugging, raping, and killing the daughters of the working class. And the authorities shrugged because the girls were the worthless leavings of broken homes and a declining populace, the Mohicans and Incas, the Bushmen and the Picts, ragged remnants of defeated tribes brokenly making way for a new conquest, their daughters subjugated by the arrogant colonizers.
There are brief snapshots of the horror of this New Britain: notes from a lost investigation into lost lives.
“Carers reported to police that a child had provided information stating that she was being pursued/threatened/coerced into having sex by two men who were Asian,” a brief summary mentions. “A child begged her carers to get her away from Manchester as she was too involved with Asian men. She disclosed that an Asian man known by his nickname ‘made her do things she didn't want to do’”.
While girls have been the focus of many of the stories, some of the predators also went after boys.
“Child 14 was a male looked after child who regularly went missing,” the report also notes. There were “references from other young people that he was being prostituted by Asian and gay men.”
Despite its thorough documentation, the report ends in a bureaucratic sea of missing information.
In 2005, senior officers of the Greater Manchester Police and Manchester City Council members attended a meeting at Manchester Town Hall and announced the shutdown of the investigation. The report mentions that, "The review team has requested a copy of the minutes for that meeting but neither GMP nor Manchester City Council was able to provide a copy."
It’s no doubt been logged and filed in the same place as Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide videos.
Constable B’s rough answers tell us certain truths about the cover-up. The investigation of Muslim sex grooming gangs was too likely to offend the wrong people. And the behavior of the Muslim pedophiles, who abused young girls and addicted them to drugs, was attributed to cultural differences.
The nameless Constable B tells us the true scope of the problem. Manchester cops like him know that this is habitual and that it’s taking place on a level vastly beyond the scope of Operation Augusta. It’s not 57 girls or 97 suspects. It’s thousands. “We can’t enforce our way out of the problem,” he said.
That’s what you say about vast social issues that involve entire communities and a way of life.
Muslim sex grooming gangs, like drugs or prostitution, are too widespread to be enforced out of existence because, like college students and pot, the culture doesn’t accept that they are wrong.
The police did nothing because these were not isolated crimes by criminals, but clashes of morals and values between two communities, one of which does not believe that child rape is wrong because its sacred texts tell it that Mohammed married Aisha and consummated his marriage when she was 9.
There are nearly 2 million child marriages in Pakistan. The notion that a woman’s consent to sexual relations matters is an utterly foreign concept in a culture where unaccompanied women are fair game.
The child rapists did not believe that their actions were wrong under Islamic law. And they weren’t.
The Manchester City Council and the GMP just accepted this reality as they have accepted it so often. They buried the minutes, shut down the investigation, and walked away from the screams of the girls.
They did it for multiculturalism, integration, and community relations. They did it for social justice.
We know that no real action was taken because the girls were troubled. They didn’t matter. And their bodies and lives could be sacrificed for the greater good.
The real tragedy is not that the rapists didn’t understand it was wrong. It’s that the UK no longer does.
As the media moans over Meghan Markle, sob stories rolling in of the injustice of tabloid headlines and the prejudice of the Brits, it is worth remembering those nameless girls who were sacrificed to progress.
They were not worked to death in factories. The brand of progress is no longer Dickensian. Instead it’s Markleite. It demands that we look away from the broken bodies in the chimneys of social justice, to bury away these cinderellas of the postmodern age until Blake’s angel comes with his bright key.
The princess of social justice is in. And the cinderellas who never get asked to the ball, who never grow up or meet their prince, who are taken by taxi to drug dens, shot up, abused, and then turned out, are obstacles to the brand of progress that Markle, Stormzy, and the rest of the social justice crowd of the ‘Cool New Britain’ that is quick to stomp on offensive speech and quicker to look away from the horrors of the new golden age of acid attacks, sex grooming gangs, and nail bombs at teen girl concerts, represent. There is no fairy godmother for them. Only little black coffins and filing cabinets.
Bodies are buried in coffins and the truth is buried in filing cabinets, along with the unasked questions
There is a red Mercedes linked to four of the young girls. Who was behind the wheel of the car “used in the procurement of the victims”? Where did it go? Who knows.
Ask the GMP. Ask the lost and the dead.
The notes and minutes are missing. The truth has been buried in little black coffins along with the bodies of young girls like Victoria. England might once have been theirs. Now it belongs to their abusers.
Exclusive: 'A Piece of Meat' -
How Muslim Men See White Women
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom
Center.
Why Yasmine Mohammed's 'Unveiled' Is a Must-Read
Duping Americans on Sharia
Exclusive: 'A Piece of Meat' -
How Muslim Men See White Women
Past and present, little has changed.
December 20, 2019
Raymond
Ibrahim
A British girl was “passed around like a piece of meat” between Muslim men who abused and raped her between the ages of
12 and 14, a court heard earlier this month. Her problems began after she
befriended a young Muslim man who, before long, was “forcing her to perform sex
acts on other [and older] men,” and receiving money for it. When she
resisted, he threatened her and her family with death and destruction.
Speaking now as an adult, the woman explained how she eventually “lost count of
how many men I was forced to have sex with” during two years of “hell” when she
often considered suicide. Among other anecdotes, the court heard how the
young “girl was raped on a dirty mattress above a takeaway and forced to
perform [oral] sex acts in a churchyard,” and how one of her abusers “urinated
on her in an act of humiliation” afterwards.
Although her experiences are
akin to those of many British girls, that she was
“passed around like a piece of meat” is a reminder of the experiences of another British woman known
by the pseudonym of Kate Elysia. The Muslim men she encountered “made me
believe I was nothing more than a slut, a white whore,” she said. “They
treated me like a leper, apart from when they wanted sex. I was less than
human to them, I was rubbish.”
What explains this ongoing
exploitation of European women by Muslim men—which exists well beyond the UK and has
become epidemic in Germany Sweden, and elsewhere? The answer begins by
understanding that, although these sordid accounts are routinely dismissed as
the activities of “criminals,” they are in fact
reflective of nearly fourteen centuries of Muslim views on and treatment of
European women.
For starters, Muslim men have
long had an obsessive attraction for fair women of the European variety. This, as all things Islamic,
traces back to their prophet, Muhammad. In order to entice his men to war on
the Byzantines—who, as the Arabs’ nearest European neighbors represented
“white” people—the prophet told them that they would be able to sexually
enslave the “yellow” women (an apparent reference to their fair hair).
For over a millennium after
Muhammad, jihadi leaders—Arabs, Berbers, Turks, Tatars et al—also coaxed their
men to jihad on Europe by citing (and later sexually enslaving) its
women. As one example, prior to their invasion into Spain, Tarek bin Ziyad,
a jihadi hero, enticed the Muslims by saying, “You must have heard numerous
accounts of this island, you must know how the Grecian maidens, as beautiful
as houris … are awaiting your
arrival, reclining on soft couches in the sumptuous palaces of crowned lords
and princes.”
That the sexual enslavement of
fair women was an aspect that always fueled the jihad is evident in other
ways. Thus, for M.A. Khan, an author and former Muslim, it is “impossible
to disconnect Islam from the Viking slave-trade, because the supply was
absolutely meant for meeting [the] Islamic world’s unceasing demand for the
prized white slaves” and for “white sex-slaves.”
Just as Muslim rapists see
British and other European women as “pieces of meat,” “nothing more than
sluts,” and “white whores,” so did Muslim luminaries always describe the
nearest European women of Byzantium. Thus, for Abu Uthman al-Jahiz (b. 776), a
prolific court scholar, the females of Constantinople were the “most shameless
women in the whole world … [T]hey find sex more enjoyable” and “are prone to
adultery.” Abd al-Jabbar (b. 935), another prominent scholar, claimed that
“adultery is commonplace in the cities and markets of Byzantium”—so much so
that even “the nuns from the convents went out to the fortresses to offer
themselves to monks.”
But as the author of Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs,
explains:
Our [Arab/Muslim] sources show
not Byzantine women but writers’ images of these women, who served as symbols
of the eternal female—constantly a potential threat, particularly due to
blatant exaggerations of their sexual promiscuity. In our texts
[Arab/Muslim], Byzantine women are strongly associated with sexual immorality .
. . .While the one quality that our sources never deny is the beauty of
Byzantine women, the image that they create in describing these women is
anything but beautiful. Their depictions are, occasionally, excessive,
virtually caricatures, overwhelmingly negative…The behavior of most women in
Byzantium was a far cry from the depictions that appear in Arabic sources.
The continuity in Muslim
“dealings” with European women is evident even in the otherwise arcane
details. For example, the aforementioned Kate “was trafficked to the
North African country of Morocco where she was prostituted and repeatedly
raped.” She was kept in an apartment in Marrakesh, where another girl no
more than 15 was also kept for sexual purposes. “I can’t remember how
many times I’m raped that [first] night, or by who,” Kate recounts.
This mirrors history. By
1541, the Muslim Barbary State of “Algiers teemed with Christian captives,”
from Europe that “it became a common saying that a Christian slave was scarce a
fair barter for an onion.”
According to the conservative
estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “between 1530 and 1780 [alone]
there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million
and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary
Coast,” of which Morocco—where Kate was abducted to in the modern era—was one.
Women slaves—and not a few men and boys—were always sexually
abused. With countless European women selling for the price of an onion,
little wonder by the late 1700s, European observers noted how “the inhabitants
of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”
It was the same
elsewhere. (The number of Europeans enslaved by Muslims throughout
history is closer to 15 million.) The slave markets of
the Ottoman sultanate were for centuries so inundated with European flesh that
children sold for pennies, “a very beautiful slave woman was exchanged for a
pair of boots, and four Serbian slaves were traded for a horse.” In
Crimea—where some three million Slavs were enslaved by the Muslim Tatars—an
eyewitness described how Christian men were castrated and savagely tortured
(including by gouging their eyes out), whereas “The youngest women are kept for
wanton pleasures.”
Such a long and unwavering
history of sexually enslaving European women on the claim that, they are all
“pieces of meat,” “nothing more than sluts,” and “white whores,” should place
the ongoing sexual abuse of Western women in context—and offer a dim prognosis
for the future.
(Note: All historical quotes and facts in this article are
sourced from the author’s book, Sword and
Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.)
Why Yasmine Mohammed's 'Unveiled' Is a Must-Read
Buy a copy for yourself -- and one for your leftist
Islam-apologist friend.
December 20, 2019
Danusha
V. Goska
"My whole body was
suffocating. My head throbbed, and my skin oozed sweat from every pore …
dressing like the kuffar was evil. I would go to hell if I dressed that way …
when the Caliphate rises, if you're not wearing hijab, how will you be
distinguished from the nonbelievers? If you look like them, you'll be killed
like them … wearing a niqab [face veil] you feel like you're in a portable
sensory deprivation chamber. It impedes your ability to see, hear, touch,
smell. I felt like I was slowly dying inside … I didn't even know who I was
anymore – if I even was somebody at all."
Yasmine Mohammed is a spitfire,
a term once applied both to World-War-II-era combat aircraft and to superstars
like Jane Russell who played hotblooded women who didn't let anyone push them
around. Yasmine is a forty-something Canadian ex-Muslim, atheist, educator, and
activist. (I'm going against convention here and referring to the author by her
first name. She shares a last name with Islam's prophet and founder, and I want
to avoid confusion.)
Yasmine was raised by a strict
Muslim mother who was the second wife of an equally strict stepfather. She was
in an arranged marriage to an Al-Qaeda member. She left Islam and she is now
married to a non-Muslim. Unveiled:
How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam is her first book. And what a first book it is. Unveiled is a
can't-put-it-down instant classic. Authors Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Wafa
Sultan, Kate McCord, Jean Sasson, Nawal el-Saadawi, and Phyllis
Chesler, move over. There is a new star in your literary firmament.
The subtitle of Unveiled, How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, is a bit misleading. Yes, Yasmine takes on actor Ben
Affleck's October, 2014 appearance on Bill
Maher's Real Time HBO show. On that broadcast Maher and Sam Harris, both atheists
and critics of Christianity, bemoaned their fellow liberals' attacking them for
also criticizing Islam. Ben Affleck exploded – no pun intended. Affleck, a
normally cool and ironic actor, devoted a freakish amount of zealotry to
shielding from analysis clitoridectomy, throwing gay men off roofs, and suicide
bombings. Affleck yelled, waved his arms, furrowed his brow and interrupted.
Any criticism of Islamic doctrine is "gross, racist, ugly." Affleck
offered zero facts. Facts are not necessary. Become apoplectic, smear any
critic of jihad or gender apartheid as racist, pose and preen and signal your
own superior, culturally relative virtue, and the good liberal is done. We've
all met versions of this Islamapologist, though most are not as good looking as
Affleck.
Affleck's Islamapologism
outraged Yasmine Mohammed. She notes that Affleck made a film, Dogma, that mocks Christianity.
She insists that liberals like Affleck do great harm to real, live human
beings. "It was unforgiveable for Ben Affleck to deflect criticism of this
ideology that has caused so much suffering in the world … no one in the West
cares if Muslim women were being imprisoned or killed … for not covering their
hair … that bloggers in Bangladesh were being hacked to death … because they
dared write about humanism … this seemingly well-meaning, white-guilt ridden
man was standing in the way!" Affleck's immorality, cowardice, narcissism
and ignorance, so paradigmatic of Islamapologists, prompted Yasmine to write
her book. Unveiled, she says, "is for anyone who feels a duty to defend Islam
from scrutiny and criticism … you are deflecting the light from shining on
millions of people imprisoned in darkness."
"At times Western
corporations actively support the very things brave women fight against. The
2019 Sports Illustrated featured a burkini." Nike put a swoosh on "religiously
prescribed modesty clothing … How can we fight Western patriarchy while
simultaneously supporting Islamic patriarchy?" Yasmine asks.
Liberal Islamapologists'
constant shielding of Islam from critique is not merely a debate question for
Yasmine Mohammed. Decades ago, young Yasmine told her teacher, Rick Fabbro, that she was being
abused. She showed Fabbro bruises on her arms, caused by her stepfather's
beatings with a belt. Her stepfather wasn't punishing Yasmine for any
wrong-doing; he was merely taking out his own personal frustrations on her
body. Fabbro reported the abuse. A Canadian judge ruled that Islamic culture
allowed severe "corporal punishment." "I never felt so betrayed
in my life … how disgusting to allow a child to be beaten because her abuser
happens to come from another country!" Children are being abused, Yasmine
reports, "because their government is hell-bent on cultural and moral
relativism."
Yasmine is not alone. In
2010, a New Jersey judge refused
a restraining order to a teenage Muslima who was raped and tortured by her
arranged husband. The husband told the wife, "this is according to our
religion. You are my wife, I can do anything to you. The woman, she should
submit and do anything I ask her to do." The judge agreed, asserting that
spousal abuse is sanctioned in Islam. The Islamapologism of useful idiots like
Ben Affleck causes real harm to real victims.
Though Yasmine opens and closes
with mentions of Ben Affleck, The bulk of the book is not about liberals
empowering radical Islam. Rather, it is a riveting memoir of child abuse and
recovery. Yasmine's mother is one of the most vile characters I have ever read
about, and I've read a fair number of books about Nazism. "Mama"
quite literally tortures her daughter, all in the name of making her a good
Muslima.
Islamapologists will no doubt
hit upon this aspect of the book. "Yasmine Mohammed's critique of Islamic
gender apartheid and jihad can't be taken at face value. She was raised by an
abusive mother and molested by her mother's male companions. Child abuse is her
problem, not Islam," they'll say. Further, some will accuse Yasmine of
stoking the flames of xenophobic hatred. "By speaking in such detail about
your abuse, you make all Muslims look like monsters!" they'll say.
No, Yasmine does not stoke the
flames of xenophobic hatred. In fact, Yasmine dedicates her book in part
"to those of you who feel compelled to demonize all Muslims. I hope you will
see that we are all just human beings and we battle our own demons." She
rejects racist terms like "sandn----r" and insists that no one should
misconstrue her "personal journey out of faith as an invitation to be
hateful to those still in it." After reading this book, I felt great
compassion and fellow feeling for Yasmine Mohammed, a woman who lived most of
her life as a devout Muslim. Yasmine will, no doubt, arouse that same
compassion and fellow feeling in many readers.
It's also very true that horrific
child abuse occurs in non-Muslim societies as well as Muslim ones. There are
several features, though, that distinguish Muslim child abuse and non-Muslim
child abuse.
In her book Wholly Different, Nonie Darwish discusses the Islamic emphasis on hiding sin.
Darwish contrasts this emphasis with the Judeo-Christian tradition of
confession of sin and subsequent redemption. Darwish heard an Egyptian sheikh say
on TV that if a follower of a sheikh witnesses the sheikh committing a sin, the
follower should say, "it is my eyes that committed the sin" for
having witnessed a power figure do wrong. The holy man is "masoom,"
infallible or free from sin. The Islamic view of public exposure of sin feeds a
culture based on pride and shame. The Koran is replete with references to
"shame," "disgrace," "humiliation," and
"losers." These concepts contribute to thwarting attempts at rescuing
abused children. If you can't see, or talk about child abuse, you can't address
it.
Another cultural factor:
submission to an overwhelming sense that everything "is written." "Any effort to try to create your own destiny is
meaningless … your whole life is written before you take your first
breath," Yasmine writes.
Yasmine describes Islam as a
pyramid-shaped power structure, with unquestioning obedience required at all
levels. Men submit to Allah, women submit to men, and children submit to
adults. Yasmine cites a hadith that describes power
descending from the ruler, to the man, to the woman, and then to the servant.
There are ethnic pyramids of worth as well. Rich Gulf Arabs are superior to
poor Muslims from Pakistan and India.
In such a system, "women
rarely support one another. Each woman is too concerned with saving her own
skin … We hold down our screaming five-year-old daughters and allow a woman to
take a razor to their genitals because a man will prefer her that way."
Girls are close to the bottom of the pyramid of power. Yasmine mentions the
2017 Norwegian film What Will People Say. In the film, the main character, a child of Pakistani parents
growing up in Norway, abuses a cat. Why? Because she's on the bottom. She's
been taught that you deal with frustration by abusing the person, or animal,
beneath you on the pyramid of power. The cat is the innocent and defenseless
target.
The Allah who is the pinnacle
of the Islamic pyramidal power structure is a sadist whose graphic torments are
detailed in the Koran. Don Richardson, in Secrets of the Koran, writes
that one in every eight Koran verses is a threat of damnation. Hell is
graphically described as a place with vivid tortures. By contrast, according to
Richardson, the Old Testament mentions Hell once in every 774 verses, and it is
never described so graphically.
In the Koran, Allah burns off
the skin of the damned. They grow new skin, and that skin, in turn, is burned
off, for all eternity. Young Yasmine dared ask her mother, "Won't I
eventually get used to it?"
No, her mother replied.
"Allah will make sure that every single time it hurts as much as the first
time."
The hadiths, as well as the
Koran, contain graphic tortures of Hell. In one
hadith, Mohammed reports that he saw women
hanging by their hair, with their brains boiling. Their crime? They refused to
wear hijab.
Total, unquestioning obedience
under pain of eternal damnation is pounded into Muslims several times a day,
with the daily prayers. Islamic prayer indoctrinates Muslims in mindless
obedience and group, not individual, behavior. Yasmine details the robotic
movements that must accompany each syllable. These syllables, she says, are
meaningless to most Muslims, who don't understand classical Arabic. They must
merely memorize syllables and repeat them over and over to the point where the
mind is numbed. When praying in a group, they must stand touching other
Muslims. This physical contact provides an extra layer of surveillance. If a
Muslim shirks a given, required movement, other Muslims will not only see it, they
will feel it. Too, Muslims are assured that their prophet is watching them pray, "Make your rows straight for I can see you behind my
back." Any deviation from prescribed activity is automatically a ticket to
Hell. If you don't touch another Muslim while praying, you leave room for
Satan, and you will be punished. "Do not leave any gaps for the Shaytaan. Whoever complete [sic] a row, Allaah will reward him, and
whoever breaks a row, Allaah will forsake him."
"The prayers are
mind-numbingly repetitive. There is no room for the slightest variation. Every
ceremonial motion and every word is specific and methodic, stripping … Muslims
… of any individuality. Get in line. Follow the herd. No distractions … The
meaning [of prayer] was never discussed … Questioning only lead to anger and
admonishment," Yasmine writes. Islam is so thorough in outlining how
Muslims are to live that there is a specific ritualistic way to cut fingernails
and dispose of clippings.
When Yasmine finally does learn
the meaning of the words she's been repeating, she realizes she's been
indoctrinated. "Nearly twenty times a day, I was referring to non-Muslims
as the enemies of Allah. I was chanting that Muslims who became friends with
non-Muslims were doomed to Hell, that non-Muslims were the vilest of animals,
only fit to be used as fuel for the fires of Hell, that Jewish people were
sub-human … I remember one of my aunts lamenting that the cucumbers were
smaller this year because the Jews were putting cancer in the vegetables … At
least five times a day over a billion people are droning on, calling for the
death of all non-Muslims."
Yasmine describes her younger
self being bound, whipped, caned, and locked up. Mama tells little Yasmine that
she has no value whatsoever. Indeed, Yasmine is told again and again that she
is a slut, prostitute, and whore, even though she is a chaste virgin, and,
later, a dutiful wife in an arranged marriage. Don't worry that reading a book
about graphic child abuse will be too upsetting. Yasmine's descriptions are
searing, but brief. The reader never forgets that the author of these nightmarish
accounts is an adult powerhouse who managed to break free both of her
tormentors and the Islam that her tormentors cited as justification.
After each incident is
described, Yasmine offers a corresponding quote from Islamic sacred texts that
is used to justify such tortures. Young Yasmine must kneel at her mother's feet
and kiss them. This is because Islam teaches that "Paradise is under the
feet of mothers." Mama determines whether Yasmine will go to Heaven or
Hell. Yasmine is bound and hung upside down from a hook used to hang the lamb
sacrificed for the Eid holiday. A woman, a sacrificial animal, little
difference. "Hang your whip where members of your household (your wife,
children, and slaves) can see it, for that will discipline them," says one
hadith. Another, "Teach your children to pray when they are seven years
old, and smack them if they do not do so when they are ten."
Yasmine does not cite Koran 18:65-81. In this
passage, Musa, meant to be the Biblical Moses, is depicted as following and
learning from Khidr, a "slave of Allah." Khidr murders an
innocent child. Musa objects. Khidr reprimands Moses for objecting. Khidr
explains that the boy's parents were Muslims and "we feared lest he should
make disobedience and ingratitude to come upon them." In the place of the
child Khidr murdered, Allah "might give them in his place one better than
him." The Koran itself offers a passage often interpreted to mean that
Muslim parents have the right to life and death over their own children.
When discussing honor
killing, Robert Spencer reminds
his readers that, "A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide
to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in
Sunni Islam, says that 'retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a
human being purely intentionally and without right.' However, 'not subject to
retaliation' is 'a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing
their offspring, or offspring's offspring.' ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other
words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic
law."
I admire Yasmine for being so
frank as to recount how long she stayed loyal to her abusive mother, and to
religious observance that she felt to be destroying her very sense of self.
Again and again the door swings open and Yasmine walks past that open door and
back into the sick, twisted prison of her mother's oppressive hold. Again and
again, Yasmine sees utterly plainly how destructive her mother is, and yet
Yasmine continues to live with her and crave her love, a love this poisonous
viper would never bestow on her precious daughter.
Yasmine marries the man her
mother tells her to marry, though she does not love him. This man, Essam
Marzouk, beats Yasmine so badly she miscarries their second child. Eventually,
slowly but surely, Yasmine breaks her conditioning, leaves her family, abandons
her veil, and marries a non-Muslim man. The reader rejoices for her.
This reader has one problem
with Unveiled and
other media produced by some Ex-Muslims, including the Ex-Muslims
of North America. These ex-Muslims decide,
"I discovered that Islam is oppressive, therefore, all religion is
oppressive nonsense." Their dismissals are based not only on scanty
knowledge of the scripture and dogma of other faiths, but also ignorance of how
other faiths have influenced society.
Yasmine says, again and again,
that her encounters with non-Muslims were like encounters, as she herself puts
it, with "angels." There's a reason that the non-Muslims Yasmine
encountered treated her with concern and decency. That reason is their
training, very different from her own. They were raised in a Judeo-Christian
society, that upholds Judeo-Christian values.
In the Old Testament, God
orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. God stops the sacrifice. For hundreds of
years, Jews and Christians have understood this story as separating God's
chosen people from the surrounding Canaanite society, where child sacrifice to
Moloch was practiced. Archaeology confirms Biblical accounts. Various
Phoenician societies around the Mediterranean, including the Canaanites and Carthaginians,
left evidence of child sacrifice. Child
sacrifice was also practiced by several Native American cultures, including
Chimu, Inca, Maya, Aztec, Mississippian and Pawnee; it possibly occurred in Ancient Greece, and child sacrifice occurs today among Hindus in India.
Contemporary scholars debate whether
or not the Isaac story was originally understood as a stand against child
sacrifice, but Christians and Jews themselves understand it that way, and that
interpretation was explicitly advanced by a Jewish scholar eight hundred years
ago. In any case, Biblical verse after verse condemns
parents killing their own children.
The New Testament could not be
more dramatic in emphasizing the value of children. God, the omnipotent creator
of the universe, enters time in the body of a helpless infant born of a lowly
peasant girl, among stock animals in a stable. Jesus famously says,
"Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such
is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the
kingdom of God as little child shall in no wise enter therein."
Pregnant with Jesus, Mary
recites the Magnificat, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and
hath exalted the humble and meek." Jesus says, "The last shall be
first, and the first, last," and "Blessed are the meek, for they
shall inherit the earth." Again and again, the Bible overturns the pyramid
of power.
Early Christian critic Celsus,
a Greek Pagan, dismissed Christianity as a religion that attracted those on the
bottom. Christianity, Celsus sneered, is a religion of women, of children, and
of slaves. The Pagan Roman legal code attributed to Romulus allowed for the
murder of female children, and female infanticide was common in the ancient,
Pagan world. A Greek comedy from the third century BC records, "Everyone,
even a poor man, raises a son; everyone, even a wealthy man, exposes a daughter."
Rodney Stark theorizes that Christianity's remarkable success can be attributed
partially to Christianity's remarkable respect for the personhood of women and
children, even female infants. "Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion
nor kill them when born," said the Didache, "a first century manual of Church teachings." Early Christianity's valuing of young, female human beings
is unforgettably depicted in The Acts of
Paul and Thecla, about a Pagan girl who
converts to Christianity and boldly asserts her own full worth in the face of
murderous Pagan opposition. Finally, of course, Christianity mandates
confession and repentance, rather than the hiding of sin.
Non-believers have only a
partial picture when they refuse to consider how Judeo-Christian teaching and
Christian faith have fostered the features they value in Western Civilization.
Yes, child abuse occurs in Christian families and institutions as well as in
Muslim ones. But there is a difference between, say, Jordan, a relatively
modern Muslim-majority country, and the United States. In Jordan, honor killing
is a perpetual problem. Families practice it; authorities look the other way.
The ancient Koran story of Khidr, a revered Muslim character who killed a child
because the child might someday embarrass his devout Muslim parents, is carried
out daily in Muslim countries. In countries with a Judeo-Christian heritage,
killing your child because the child might embarrass you is not supported by
the wider society. Some cultures provide guardrails and tools that can be used
to dismantle human dysfunction. Other cultures provide scriptures that uphold
hate and abuse.
Not just honor killing
oppresses Muslim women and girls. Clitoredectomy, child and forced marriage,
and polygamy are all part of day-to-day life. Sharia dictates that women
inherit half of what men inherit, and the testimony of two women equals the
testimony of one man. Women cannot pray when they are menstruating. In a
hadith, Mohammed himself cited the ban on women praying during their
menstruation as proof that women are "deficient in religion" and make
up the majority of the damned in Hell. A woman, Mohammed insisted, must satisfy
their husband's demand for sex, even while riding on a camel's back. One could
go on. Denigration of the value of the lives of girls and women is deeply
embedded in the Koran and hadiths.
Rodney Stark ended his
book The Victory of Reason with a quote he attributes to a Chinese scholar. "One of the
things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact,
the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could
from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first,
we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we
thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on
your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the
heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is
so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was
what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful
transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this."
I hope (and pray) that the
aversion that immersion in Islam taught ex-Muslims to feel for all religion
does not blind them to the impact of the Judeo-Christian tradition on what they
value in kuffar society – including the right to self-identify as an atheist,
and not be killed for doing so.
Yasmine Mohammed's book is
receiving terrific reviews on Amazon. Yasmine deserves more. Krista Tippett
hosts On Being on National Public Radio. Tippett markets a
soft-focus, touchy-feely Islam. Terry Gross
frequently features memoir authors on Fresh
Air. Tippett, Gross, the New York Times, all should
provide Yasmine Mohammed with a platform. Truth and courage demand it.
Danusha Goska is the author of God
through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
THE KORAN
BIBLE OF THE MUSLIM TERRORIST:
“The Wahhabis finance
thousands of madrassahs throughout the world where young boys are brainwashed
into becoming fanatical foot-soldiers for the petrodollar-flush Saudis and
other emirs of the Persian Gulf.” AMIL IMANI
Koran 2:191 "s lay the unbelievers
wherever you find them"
Koran 3:21 "Muslims must not take the infidels as friends"
Koran 5:33 "Maim and crucify the infidels if they criticize Islam"
Koran 8:12 "Terrorize and behead those who believe in scriptures other than the Koran"
Koran 8:60 " Muslims must muster all weapons to terrorize the infidels"
Koran 8:65 "The unbelievers are stupid, urge all Muslims to fight them"
Koran 9:5 "When the opportunity arises, kill the infidels wherever you find them"
Koran 9:123 "Make war on the infidels living in your neighborhood"
Koran 22:19 "Punish the unbelievers with garments of fire, hooked iron rods, boiling water, melt their skin and bellies"
Koran 47:4 "Do not hanker for peace with the infidels, behead them when you catch them".
Koran 3:21 "Muslims must not take the infidels as friends"
Koran 5:33 "Maim and crucify the infidels if they criticize Islam"
Koran 8:12 "Terrorize and behead those who believe in scriptures other than the Koran"
Koran 8:60 " Muslims must muster all weapons to terrorize the infidels"
Koran 8:65 "The unbelievers are stupid, urge all Muslims to fight them"
Koran 9:5 "When the opportunity arises, kill the infidels wherever you find them"
Koran 9:123 "Make war on the infidels living in your neighborhood"
Koran 22:19 "Punish the unbelievers with garments of fire, hooked iron rods, boiling water, melt their skin and bellies"
Koran 47:4 "Do not hanker for peace with the infidels, behead them when you catch them".
Duping Americans on Sharia
A detailed look at how
Islamic apologist extraordinaire John Esposito whitewashes Islamic terror.
January 14, 2020
Raymond Ibrahim
Raymond
Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Does Islam itself promote
hostility for and violence against non-Muslims, or are all the difficulties
between the West and Islam based on secondary factors—from “radical”
interpretations of Islam, to economics and grievances?
This is the fundamental
question.
Obviously, if “anti-infidel”
hostility is inherent to Islam itself, then the conflict becomes existential—a
true clash of civilizations, with no easy fixes and lots of ugly implications
along the horizon.
Because of this truism, those
whose job it is to whitewash Islam’s image in the West insist on the
opposite—that all difficulties are temporal and not rooted to innate Islamic teachings.
Enter Shariah: What Everyone Needs to Know,
co-authored by John Esposito and Natana J. Delong-Bas. The authors’ goal
is to exonerate Shariah, which they portray as enshrining “the common good (maslahah), human
dignity, social justice, and the centrality of the community” from Western
criticism or fear, which they say is based solely on “myth” and
“sensationalism.”
In their introductory chapters
they define Shariah as being built upon the words of the Koran and the Sunna
(or example) of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as contained in sahih (canonical)
hadiths. They add: “Shariah and Islamic law are not the same thing.
The distinction between divine law (Shariah) and its human interpretation,
application, and development (Islamic law) is important to keep in mind
throughout this book…. Whereas Shariah is immutable and infallible, Islamic law
(fiqh) is
fallible and changeable.”
Next the authors highlight how
important Shariah is to a majority of Muslims. They cite a 2013 Pew Poll
which found that 69% of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa, 73%
in South Asia, and 55% in Central Asia believe that “Shariah is God’s [Allah’s]
divine revelation.”
Even larger numbers “favored
the establishment of Shariah as official law”: 99% in Afghanistan, 84% in South
Asia, 74% in the Middle East and North Africa, and 64% in sub-Saharan Africa.
So far so good. The
authors’ introductory claims (that Shariah is fundamental to Islam) and
statistics (that hundreds
of millions of Muslims revere and wish to see it implemented)
are correct.
But they also beg the
aforementioned question: is Shariah itself behind
the intolerance, misogyny, violence, and terrorism committed in the name of
Islam?
Here, the hitherto objective
authors shift gears and take on the mantle of apologists. Their thesis is
simple: Any and all negative activities Muslims engage in are to be pinned on
anything and everything—so long as it’s not Shariah.
In order to support this
otherwise unsupportable position, and as might be expected, the remainder of
the book consists of obfuscation, dissembling, and lots and lots of contextual
omissions and historical distortions.
A small sampling follows:
Shariah on Women
The authors quote and discuss
at length many Koran verses about women that seem positive (Koran 30:21, 3:195,
and 2:187), without alluding to counter verses that permit husbands to beat
their wives (4:34) and treat them as “fields” to be “plowed however you wish”
(2:223). Nor do they deal with Muhammad’s assertions that women are
“lacking in intelligence” and will form the bulk of hell’s denizens, as
recounted in a canonical hadith.
They partially quote Koran 4:3:
“…marry those that please you of other women, two or three or four. But if you
fear that you will not be just, then marry only one.” This suits the
authors’ purpose, which is to present the Koran as implicitly recommending only
one wife, since it acknowledges the near impossibility for a man to treat all
wives equally. Yet the authors deliberately cut
off the continuation of that verse—which permits Muslim men to copulate with an
unlimited amount of sex slaves (ma malakat aymanukum) even if they
are married.
They also dissemble about child
marriage, saying “classical Islamic law” permits it, but only when “the child
reaches a mature age.” Yet they make no mention that, based on
Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha—that is, based on his Sunna, which is immutable
and part of Shariah—nine is considered a “mature age.”
Freedom of Religion and
Non-Muslims
The authors claim that “There
are more than 100 Quranic verses that … affirm freedom of religion and
conscience.” They quote many at length and assert that “The guiding
Shariah principle … underscored by Quran 3:28, 29:46, and 60:89, is that
believers should treat unbelievers decently and equitably as long as the
unbelievers do not behave aggressively.”
Yet they fail to mention or
sideline the many contradictory verses that call for relentless war on non-Muslims—who
are further likened to dumb cattle in Koran 25:44 —until they surrender, one
way or another, to Islam (e.g., 8:39, 9:5, 9:29).
They fail to quote the verses
that form the highly divisive doctrine of al-wala’ w’al bara’ (“Loyalty
and Enmity”), including Koran 5:51, which forbids Muslims from befriending Jews
and Christians, and Koran 60:4, which commands Muslims to harbor only “hate”
for non-Muslims, until they “believe in Allah alone.”
Needless to say, they ignore
Koran 3:28, which permits Muslims to feign friendship for non-Muslims, whenever the former are under the latter’s authority (such is
the doctrine of taqiyya;
see here, here, here, here, and here for examples).
It is, incidentally, because of
all these divisive Koran verses—because
of Shariah—that the Islamic State forthrightly explained, “We hate you, first and
foremost, because you are disbelievers.”
The closest the authors get to
address these issues is in a section titled, “Can Muslims in the West be Loyal Citizens.”
They respond with a yes—but the evidence they cite are polls (based on wishful
interpretations), which of course tells the reader little about the topic they
purport to “de-mythologize”: Shariah.
Jihad
As might be expected, when the
authors reach the topic of jihad, their dissembling reaches a new level.
They repeatedly insist that jihad, as enshrined in Shariah, is simply the
Muslim counterpart of Western Just War theory, which teaches that war and
aggression are permissible, but only in defense or to recover one’s territory
from occupiers: “The lesser or outer jihad involves defending Islam and
the Muslim community.” As usual, they spend much time quoting and
elaborating on Koran verses that comport with this position, while ignoring or
sidelining the many contradictory verses. In reality, mainstream Islam
holds that the Koran’s “Sword Verses” (especially 9:5 and 9:29) have abrogated all the peaceful
ones, thereby making warfare on non-Muslims—for no less a reason than that
they are non-Muslims—obligatory.
Consider Koran 9:29:
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what
Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth
[Islam] from the People of the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay the
jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.”
What, exactly, is “defensive”
about this verse?
Similarly, they claim
that dar al-harb,
or “abode of war”—Islam’s designation for all those non-Muslim territories
(such as Europe) that Muslims were historically in a permanent state of war
with—“applied to other parties with whom Muslims were in conflict.” Again, they
fail to mention that the primary reason Muslims were “in conflict” with them
was because they were non-Muslim,
and that all non-Muslim territories were by default part of the “abode of war,”
except when treaties advantageous to Islam were drawn.
Instead, the authors say, “The
territories classified as the abode of war were those that refused to provide
such protection to Muslims and their clients”—thereby implying Muslims were
hostile to, say, Europe, because Europe was first hostile to Muslims.
(Reality, as chronicled in Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and
the West, was the exact opposite.)
Miscellaneous Subterfuge
One can go on and on; the
authors engage in other forms of subterfuge to exonerate Shariah. They
frequently project a Western veneer to Islamic terms and concepts, saying for example
that Shariah is ultimately about “promoting good and preventing evil”—which
sounds admirable—without pointing out that, based on the Koran and Sunna (that
is, Shariah),
conquering non-Muslim territories is about “promoting good” and keeping women under
wraps and indoors, beating them as required, is about “preventing vice.”
While admitting that Christians
and other non-Muslim minorities are currently being persecuted, not only do the
authors insist that this has nothing to do with Shariah, but they invoke
relativistic thinking: “Just as Muslims living in non-Muslim countries are
often concerned with their rights and civil liberties as minorities,” they say,
“so some consider the rights and status of non-Muslim minorities living in
Muslim countries to be a parallel issue.” In other words, because some
Americans view Muslims in their midst with suspicion, the ongoing enslavement
and slaughter of Christians—more than 6,000 in Nigeria alone since
January 2018—and ban on or destruction of churches is a sort of tit for tat, a
“parallel issue” that can only be solved when the West becomes less critical
about Islam.
Relativism is also invoked during
the authors’ brief treatment of apostasy in Islam: “Historically, apostasy was
sometimes punishable by death in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” They
claim that apostasy is still a major issue in Islam due to “radical”
interpretations or politics—bolstering their position by again quoting the same
Koran verses that seem to support freedom of religion—without mentioning, say,
the canonical hadith (meaning part of Shariah) where Muhammad said, “Whoever
leaves his religion [Islam], kill him.”
Such is how Islam’s skilled
apologists dupe the West: they admit to some of the more controversial aspects
that many other apologists shy away from—namely that Shariah is indeed
foundational to Islam and that hundreds of millions of Muslims revere and wish
to see it implemented—but then, having established trust with the reader, they
slip back into the “game,” portraying all the intolerance, misogyny, violence,
and terrorism daily committed in the name of Islam as products of anything and
everything—fallible Muslim interpretations, self-serving clerics and
terrorists, socio-economic pressures, Western criticism or encroachments—never
Shariah itself.
Contrary to its subtitle, then,
John Esposito’s and Natana J. Delong-Bas’s Shariah is not “what everyone
needs to know”; rather, it is what non-Muslims need to believe in order to
give Shariah—which is fundamentally hostile to all persons and things
un-Islamic—a free pass.
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