From Big Peace:
Talk about a “War on Women”: this past week, the White House welcomed members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamist organization whose Freedom and Justice Party won the largest number of seats in that country’s parliamentary elections and which may take the Egyptian presidency as well.
The Brotherhood remains staunchly anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Christian, anti-Jew — and anti-woman [and may I add anti-gay, the dead kind of anti]. In an interview posted today by Kerry Picket of the Washington Times, a member of the Brotherhood’s delegation confirmed that sharia, or Islamic law, would guide all lawmaking in Egypt under his party’s rule.
Since its origins in Egypt in the 1950, the Muslim Brotherhood has established branches throughout the Middle East, and contacts in the West as well. It has carried out and supported countless acts of terror and murder, and spread the radical Islamist ideology that sustains public support for terrorism.
Al Qaeda itself was inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood and its leaders. The current leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, began his terrorist career in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood. There are alarming connections between the party taking over in Egypt and the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
Yet President Barack Obama has decided that the United States should “engage” the Brotherhood, apparently believing that doing so will deter the Brotherhood from its radical course, and grant the United States a voice in the new Egyptian government–as it once had in the dictatorial regime of ousted president Hosni Mubarak, the man Obama abandoned during the so-called Arab Spring. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision; Obama was always pro-Muslim Brotherhood, going out of his way in February 2009 to finagle invitations for them to his Cairo speech.
I have mentioned this liberal/egalitarian inconsistency in the past, but it never gets old.
Melanie Phillips in her most excellent book explains well why the Left in our country continuously supports such horrible regimes:
These curious coalitions are frequently explained as merely opportunistic alliances, where certain groups make common cause with ideological opponents in pursuit of the shared aim of bringing down Western society. This explanation surely is only partly correct. What these various movements have in common goes much deeper: they are all utopian. Each in its own way wants to bring about the perfect society, to create a new man and a new world.
Each therefore thinks of itself as progressive; the supporters of each believe themselves to be warriors in the most noble of causes. The greens believe they will save the planet. The leftists believe they will create the brotherhood of man. The fascists believe they will purge mankind of corruption. And the Islamists believe they will create the Kingdom of God on earth.
What they all have in common, therefore, is a totalitarian mindset in pursuit of the creation of their alternative reality. These are all worldviews that can accommodate no deviation and must therefore be imposed by coercion. Because their end product is a state of perfection, nothing can be allowed to stand in its way. This is itself a projected pathology. As Eric Hoffer suggested in The True Believer, the individual involved in a mass movement is in some way acutely alienated from his own society, an alienation to which he is completely blind. Projecting his own unacknowledged deficiencies onto his surroundings, he thinks instead there is something wrong with society and fantasizes about building a new world where he will finally fit.” This belief that humanity can be shaped into a perfect form has been the cause of the most vicious tyrannies on the planet from the French Revolution onwards.
As Jamie Glazov notes in his book United in Hate, the totalitarian believer publicly denies the violent pathologies within the system that he worships. Privately, however, these are what drew him towards that system in the first place because he is aware that violence is necessary to destroy the old order so that utopia can arise from its ashes. Pretending he is attracted to “peace,” “justice” and “equality,” he actually stands for their opposite. He needs to empathize with the”martyrs” and the downtrodden in order to validate himself vicariously. The Third World, intrinsically noble since it is uncorrupted by the developed world, provides an apparently inexhaustible supply of such validation. That’s why the image of the Palestinian youth armed with only a slingshot touches the radical soul so deeply, and why the radical does not want to hear—why he even denies—the guns that are ranged just behind that youth as he throws his stones.”
Later, after following through with the history of the coining and idea behind the term “Westoxification,” she has a fabulouse paragraph that puts in a pretty bow why the Progressive Left so often finds solice in these radical views you would think it would reject:
The Islamists committing mass murder in New York’s Twin Towers or a Jerusalem cafe really do believe they are fighting for justice and to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. The communists and the fascists really did think they were ending, respectively, the oppression and the corruption of man. The environmentalists really do think they are saving the planet from extinction. The radical left really do think they will erase prejudice from the human heart and suffering from the world. And those who want Israel no longer to exist as a Jewish state really do believe that as a result they will turn suicide bomb belts into cucumber frames, and that they are moving in the way that history intended.
Atlas Shrugs has a great post dedicated to listing some of the male mysogeny/murder in the Ilsamic culture, this story talks about some of the happenings in Egypt:
Woman thrown into river over divorce UPI
CAIRO, March 28 (UPI) — A fisherman saved the life of a young Egyptian woman after her parents threw her into the Nile River for divorcing an abusive, elderly husband, police said.
Women’s rights groups in Egypt said they are working with authorities to gather more information about the attempted honor killing, Bikyamasr.com reported Wednesday.
“If this is really what happened, then it shows there is a lot of work to counter honor violence in this country, where women and girls are killed because, simply, they are women,” said Nora Tarek, a women’s rights researcher in Cairo.
The young woman initially refused to marry the elderly man but later bowed to family pressure, Bikyamasr.com reported.
Her parents tossed her into the river when she returned home after divorcing him.
Last year, a 22-year-old Egyptian woman was found dead on a coastal road with a noose around her neck. A family member said the woman was killed by her brother for leaving home with a stranger. Read the rest.
Take note also this imperative in Islamic Scripture/tradition from The Religion of Peace:
Question:
Why are rape victims often punished by Islamic courts as adulterers?
Summary Answer:
Under Islamic law, rape can only be proven if the rapist confesses or if there are four male witnesses. Women who allege rape, without the benefit of the act having been witnessed by four men who subsequently develop a conscience, are actually confessing to having sex. If they or the accused happens to be married, then it is considered to be adultery.
The Qur’an:
Qur’an (2:282) – Establishes that a woman’s testimony is worth only half that of a man’s in court (there is no “he said/she said” gridlock in Islam).
Qur’an (24:4) – “And those who accuse free women then do not bring four witnesses (to adultery), flog them…” Strictly speaking, this verse addresses adultery (revealed at the very time that Muhammad’s favorite wife was being accused of adultery on the basis of only three witnesses, coincidentally enough) however it is a part of the theological underpinning of the Sharia rule.
Qur’an (24:13) – “Why did they not bring four witnesses of it? But as they have not brought witnesses they are liars before Allah.”
Qur’an (2:223) – “Your wives are as a tilth unto you; so approach your tilth when or how ye will…” There is no such thing as rape in marriage, as a man is permitted unrestricted sexual access to his wives.
From the Hadith:
Bukhari (5:59:462) – The background for the Qur’anic requirement of four witnesses to adultery. Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was accused of cheating [on her polygamous husband]. Three witnesses corroborated the event, but Muhammad apparently did not want to believe it, and so established the arbitrary rule that four witnesses are required.
Additional Notes:
Rape is virtually impossible to prove under strict Islamic law (Sharia). If the man claims that the act was consensual sex, there is very little that the woman can do to refute this. Islam places the burden of avoiding sexual encounters of any sort on the woman.
A recent fatwa from a mainstream Islamic site echoes this rule and even chides a victim of incest for complaining when she has no “evidence”:
However, it is not permissible to accuse the father of rape without evidence. Indeed, the Sharee’ah put some special conditions for proving Zina (fornication or adultery) that are not required in case of other crimes. The crime of Zina is not confirmed except if the fornicator admits it, or with the testimony of four trustworthy men, while the testimony of women is not accepted.
Hence, the statement of this girl or the statement of her mother in itself does not Islamically prove anything against the father, especially that the latter denies it.
Therefore, if this daughter has no evidence to prove that her accusations are true, she should not have claimed that she was raped by her father and she should not have taken him to the court. (IslamWeb.net, Image)
Since it is incredibly unlikely that a child molester will violate his victim in front of “four trustworthy men”, Islamic law amounts to a free pass for sexual predators.
Islamic law rejects forensic evidence (such as DNA) in favor of testimony. An interesting situation thus sometimes develops in cases where a victim alleges rape and the man denies that sex even took place. In the absence of four male witnesses, rape cannot be proven. The woman’s testimony then becomes a “confession” of adultery. She can be stoned, even though the male is unpunished, since he never “confessed” to a sexual act!
Also, there can be no such thing as rape in marriage, even if the husband has to hit the wife in order to bring about her submission. Another recent fatwa reminds a woman, she “does not have the right to refuse her husband, rather she must respond to his request every time he calls her.” (Islam Q&A, Fatwa No. 33597).
Keep in mind that most Muslim countries do not operate under strict Islamic law, but rather under legal codes imported from the West. Therefore rape victims in these countries can and often do receive justice under more reasonable standards of proof.
(See also Did Muhammad Approve of Rape?)