I don’t have much to add to this horrifying article from Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, which details how Yazidi women captured by ISIS fighters are turned into sex slaves. This has long been known, and in fact is part of the ISIS instruction manual, but there’s a bizarre twist: because ISIS’s interpretation of Islamic law forbids raping women who are already pregnant, the ISIS fighters give their slaves birth control pills, contraceptive injections like Depo-Provera, or even abortions.
It is a particularly modern solution to a medieval injunction: According to an obscure ruling in Islamic law cited by the Islamic State, a man must ensure that the woman he enslaves is free of child before having intercourse with her.
Islamic State leaders have made sexual slavery as they believe it was practiced during the Prophet Muhammad’s time integral to the group’s operations, preying on the women and girls the group captured from the Yazidi religious minority almost two years ago. To keep the sex trade running, the fighters have aggressively pushed birth control on their victims so they can continue the abuse unabated while the women are passed among them.
More than three dozen Yazidi women who recently escaped the Islamic State and who agreed to be interviewed for this article described the numerous methods the fighters used to avoid pregnancy, including oral and injectable contraception, and sometimes both. In at least one case, a woman was forced to have an abortion in order to make her available for sex, and others were pressured to do so.
Some described how they knew they were about to be sold when they were driven to a hospital to give a urine sample to be tested for the hCG hormone, whose presence indicates pregnancy. They awaited their results with apprehension: A positive test would mean they were carrying their abuser’s child; a negative result would allow Islamic State fighters to continue raping them.
Imagine the horror of being taken to the hospital to be tested, knowing that you were about to be sold to be raped by yet another man. Women have committed suicide rather than face this fate.
By several accounts, ISIS is losing its grip on the territories it captured, and the disappearance of this group of barbarians can’t occur too soon. But the tenets of Islam, however circuitously interpreted, play a role in all this rape. Even if you argue that all men in war often see sexual conquest as part of their due, Islam’s depriving men of premarital sex must surely contribute to their pervasive rape of women captives, even if they cook up religious “excuses.”
I’m not implying here that all imams would sanction this behavior, which is surely untrue, but simply that these religious tenets may contribute not just to sexual violence in the Middle East, but in the West as well, as in the multiple sexual abuse of women in the Cologne railroad station.
Sooo discouraging.
Indeed. 🙁
Michael Weiss has suggested that ISIS isn’t actually losing substantial territory. The votaries of theocracy remain amorphous in their ability to procure loyalty and quickly regroup whenever any controlled area is dismantled. It’s the anti-modernity virus that seems to be forever “trending” in the biosphere of barbarism.
It is certain that ISIS will not last and show signs now of slow destruction. It cannot happen fast enough and the repulsive religious causes of their actions and behaviors should be announced everywhere and often. Islam cannot get a pass on any of this.
Except we are so frigging naive about this – In a conference on Global international problems in India a former French Prime Minister blamed the problems in the Middle East on reaction to Western imperialism. Tarek Fatah a Muslim Journalist, reprimanded him in this and was applauded by the audience – Indians have far more reason to resent the West than the great majority of Muslims do
PS this just happened a day or two ago
Yes, time honored arguments about cause and effect. I would only be interested in the opinions of the many thousands of women who are subjected to this despicable behavior. What some politician or academic has to offer does not do much for me.
The only way you can persuade thousands of young men to adopt rape and murder as a way of life is to begin when they are very young – in the home and community – by instilling the notion that decent morality can be eclipsed by religious dogma established by the creator of the universe.
This is true too just in relation to the way we treat each other. If kids are taught things like that we’re all (men, women, etc) equal, treating one another with respect, treating others as you’d like to be treated, being kind, etc, it is more likely to make them grow up to be decent people.
Of course, I didn’t get much of that and I like to think I turned out alright anyway. And there are people who did get the right stuff and are still a-holes.
“I didn’t get much of that and I like to think I turned out alright anyway.”
Sounds like you had it a bit harsh. I know you well enough to agree – you turned out alright. The outcomes are always a complex mix of influences. There’s a lot of luck involved.
It wasn’t all bad, and there were good influences too. My siblings all turned out OK as well.
Then, it must have been the gods. It could only have been the gods. 😉
🙂
Islam certainly celebrated religious conquest by very young men
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/16/the-isis-army-that-s-still-unborn.html
even the Hanifa school Hidaya commentary of the Islamic laws is very frank about slavery e.g. book 5 of Vol 1 Baintner edition. Pregnancy means the master is supposed to maintain the child (unless he explicitly renounces the child as not his) if he acknowledges the child is his she is supposed to be made a wife and she is then not supposed to be sold til after his death
But I’m sure that Glenn Greenwald will blame this on US support for Israel.
Every time I bring up the sexual assaults perpetrated by Muslim men in Cologne, regressives tell me that I am being racist because ‘white men assaulted women at Oktoberfest’ and ‘why are you focusing on brown men’
As in, any criticism of Islamic culture is automatically racist because many Muslims are non-white.
And Muslim men only rape and mistreat women because of white capitalist patriarchy, dontcha know?
The fact that Muslim men have to be taught *not to rape* is very telling, imo. Case in point:
TEACH NON-MUSLIM MEN NOT TO RAPE OR WEAR OFFENSIVE SHIRTS. Express your outrage on social media but then ignore all of the examples i have given above and below. Blame it all on non-muslim men men!
Refugee teen charged with rape of social worker after finishing course on how to behave with women
A 16-year-old Afghan refugee, who had recently taken a course on how to behave towards women, has been charged with raping a female employee at a refugee shelter in Belgium. The center’s spokeswoman told RT he had had “an eye on her for quite some time.”
The incident took place in the Belgian town of Menan near the French border. The minor, who “has been staying in the center in Menan already for five months,” followed the “young cook into the basement,” where he allegedly raped her, An Luyten, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross Flanders, told RT.
She added that the teenager “apparently already had an eye on her for quite some time.”
Belgian prosecutors confirmed that the Afghan minor had attacked the young woman, who works for a catering firm providing services to the Menan refugee center, adding that a judge had ordered that the suspect be detained in youth custody until his next hearing.
According to the Red Cross Flanders, which runs the center, the “boy” had attended a course on how to behave towards women given by the organization just two weeks before sexually assaulting the young girl.
https://www.rt.com/news/333412-refugee-rape-woman-courses/
It isn’t Islamic attitudes towards women that’s the problem.
It’s non-Muslim men, specifically, white men, wearing offensive shirts.
——-
I believe that this is the point that Richard Dawkins made regarding Dear Muslima.
It is often the most privileged, western, white feminists who narrowly focus on what shirts men are wearing, and seemingly throw less privileged women under the bus. The women in Germany who are going to suffer sexual assault while merely walking to work are not members of the privileged feminist class. The privileged SJW feminists can signal their virtue by protesting ‘Islamophobia’ because they will never have to worry about being violently raped at the community pool.
WHO said that, please?
Maybe there are some websites of, what in US-English would be gamergaters or so?
The official Letter from Cologne admits, to my knowledge firsttime in mainstream media, that the existing rape laws in Germany are ineffective, and police often do not even what the law would allow.
German: http://www.ksta.de/koeln/koelner-botschaft-sote-wir-fordern-nach-silvester-uebergriffen-23469130-seite2
Official translation (about sexualized violence – this precise terminology is the only thing missing – middle of page):
http://www.ksta.de/koeln/-sote-koelner-botschaft-persisch-23475284
Even mainstream tv Tagesschau has an article very critical of THE VERY AVERAGE GERMAN LEGAL SITUATION AGAINST RAPE VICTIMS still online:
http://www.tagesschau.de/inland/silvester-uebergriffe-bka-101.html
Of course we do not put any trust in politicians – they withdrew each and any decent commentary long before it could effect law. BUT THAT APPLIES TO EACH AND ANY RAPIST.
And Belgium also has LATIN LAW – the thing the CHRISTIANS enforced upon us by witchburning.
We are no longer being burned on the stake, but we have usually to birth rapistweapons (one group of those gang rapists, in Kiel, were said to have been Serbs. If true, they are the products of German §218, the still existing abortionforbidding law, because several thousand pregnant refugees from the former Yugoslavia were denied abortions after they escaped to Germany. For now I can only proove that it is the age cohort)
If someone says that ALL religions are rapistapologetic, do you still deny it?
Or the power the vaticanlobby holds over Europe?
Yes white Germans rape German women, and its important to put pressure on the German authories – legislators and police to clarify the law and clean up their attitude about this. Point well made the Cologne affair should not be used as an excuse to ignore German shortcomings, religious influence and attacks on refugees.
Yes, also traditional Christianity needs a kick in the butt on its role in this (denial of abortion to refugee rape victims from the former Yugoslavia etc. etc.). However the article you cite makes no acknowledgement that borders matter at all – or that mass migration or integration is ever a problem. The sexual harassment and assaults on NY Eve were overwhelmingly done by North Africans that’s true. But they are Muslims likewise – however they are dismissed as just “criminals” and “criminal gangs” in the article with no allusion (as made in other articles) that some of them might have become so when they could not get jobs in high tech, high skill Germany.
Yes there is racism and appalling behaviour by Pegida in Germany. But the article referring to Middle Eastern refugees and North Africans coming from a “milieu” that doesn’t consider women equal is dishonest. That “milieu” is traditional Islam. And that “milieu” is qualitively more extreme in its misogyny than modern Christianity is allowed to be. For example “Female Islamic Professor [of Al-Azhar university] says Allah allows Muslims to rape non-Muslims in order to humiliate them”
http://fondamentalisme.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/female-islamic-professor-says-allah.html
Yes Nazi style atrocities went on in the former Yugoslavia (and the left reflexively damned the West for intervening to try and stop it). Yes Serbian men raped Muslim women and were war criminals. However Western European histoy, violent as it is, is less tortured than that of Eastern Europe, which was always something of a frontier by comparison, had much internal violence, and then was colonised by Muslims for hundreds of years – something they resent. The problem is the victimology game. Yes Muslims have some brief experience of colonisation or else interventionism by Europeans and Russia (but far far more by Mongols) But they colonised Spain and Portugal for 800 years (there was resistance to it all that time) and Eastern Europe, and took an estimated 2 million coast living Europeans as slaves operating from the Barbary coast. We can all be victims. It doesn’t excuse violent behaviour.
What the left simply doesn’t understand is that Islam as it continues to be constituted is a law and a political system not just a faith system and it is uniquely resistant to absorption of liberal values. If it doesn’t modernise it will eventually turn its own societies into Neanderthal encampments. If we refuse to criticise it and allow completely unregulated and ongoing movement of Muslims the reaction will be resurgence of Christian dominated state because virulent traditionalism is exactly what counters another virulent traditionalism if it becomes too big and too embedded in another culture. I suspect the current Pope intuitively knows that … it can be a little plan to “save” secular Europe, by impoverishing it and entrenching rival traditionalisms.
Somer,
your last sentences are interesting. From C-politicians and the pope it would be logical.
I did not try to say that
– Muslim men should NOT be educated about women´s rights, just that Christians need that edu too (most of them)
– and that to talk with too many (?) members of the left about that weird tebowing to ALL religions were not necessary. It is. Maybe I had my stint with Die Grünen and are burnt out.
Yes I agree – traditionalist Christianity is a huge problem I read translation of that why a “no” (still) not enough in Germany and its really disgusting Germany still has no decent anti rape law. Im sorry if I implied you are making excuses for religion – but some on the left have been because they believe modern secularism is too pro the prevailing international order – which is most of what they care about. I just feel that beyond certain stresses society starts becoming more conservative.
My feeling is that Christianity expects women to bear the burden of social sacrifice – where there is enough social tension over rival religious culture you will just encourage desecularisation of Europe – i.e. Europe will become more Christian in response to the other highly religious and inflexible culture. I do think Europe should be taking refugees – but it has a right to control the numbers and how it does so because there are real impacts.
The problem is that although the group might eventually disappear, the men that make up the group will simply take off the black outfits, slink back into society and wait until the next murderous bunch of raping Islamists fills the void. Take a bunch of immature boys and let them play with no adults and eventually they will start torturing animals in their own version of ‘Lord of the Flies’. Throw in some Islam and they will begin to compete for top dog by trying to show that they are the most pure Islamist. In the end nothing will change until we empower the other half of the human race.
Putin, I think, did a good job of putting ISIS on the run, and then getting out of Syria. The continual turmoil in Islamic regions and the perception that outsiders are at fault, certainly has not aided the advance of mutual understanding (i.e., tolerance) and civilization in the world.
Isis territory has been reduced 20% but it is very far indeed from being on the run.
Putin is just there to support Assad and has been bombing all rebels not just Isis.
Assad is as bad as ISIS wiping out whole sections of cities, torturing even children who protest the slightest allegiance against him, chemical attacks, deliberately starving people to death. The Americans have negotiated and supervised the removal of the chemical weapons. Putin enabled Assad to gain a lot more territory in the strategic places necessary to his regime. Russia blamed all Assads opponents, not just ISIS, and killed many civilians. Putin has not left – he has achieved his aims in the immediate strategic future and is withdrawing most forces to look good for the peace talks currently on. The Russians still have some planes and thousands of personnel in Syria and will no doubt start actively bombing again when it suits. It is particularly nasty fighting because it is actually largely in cities, where combatants can hide out in and around buildings and civilians get unavoidably hurt.
Assad is a sectarian Muslim (Alouite, sub sect of Shias) defending the survival of his sect against Sunnis. The divisions and hatreds of the ME are beyond belief but they all ultimately stem from violent sectarianism within Islam which, unlike Christianity, continued since it was founded. The West originally got involved in the ME for imperial reasons then after WW2 it was all to do with the superpower struggle – complicated also by oil and by Israel wanting Western involvement out of fear of the consequences. Add to that the complication of superpowers playing games and Turkey and Saudi being sympathetic to Isis or at least preferring Isis to independent Kurdish territory within Syria. Israel is keen for US not to disengage. Other Gulf states and Iraq support the Shia and non Isis Sunni rebels respectively. It is impossible to do anything militarily there without our allies say so and if we do it provides an excuse for our “allies” and “enemies” in the region to then morally attack us and covertly or not so covertly incite “terrorists” against us. Even Assad periodically trained ISIS people and sent them back to Iraq prior to the uprising in Syria as a way of dividing the Sunni community and showing his anti West credentials (the Shia are terribly keen to be seen to be real Muslims hence Iran’s obsession with threatening Israel). Now Islamising Turkey is blackmailing Europe to get into the EU and in the meantime have visa free access for its citizens. Its tempting to tell them to stop it or we’ll liberate them from NATO and they can complain to mother Russia but Im sure the Russians would simply love that. Might just mean the breakup of the EU instead, which the Russians would still like though not on the same level of excitement.
We are better staying right out of this ME mess, whilst preaching to the ME and elsewhere that the Muslim dream of turning the clock back to 7th C is just that. You can’t just wish globalisation away, but you can guarantee the Muslims are in for massive violence inflicted on each other, terrible poverty, and probably third world war with other superpowers from all the instability. They will become embarrassing and miserable neanderthals not a glorious civilisation unless they wake up and modernise their religion. They don’t need to have a bedouin family and social structure to survive in the modern world with the relatively liberal ones in the cities hampered by rural attitudes and power. All civilisations have done bad things at times, including the West but all civilisations can grow. We are not going to compromise our own survival in the West by de facto supporting them to attempt a time warp
Even in terms of getting the military power over other civilisations that the Islamists want would require Technological development and thriving economy/resource use capacity to a degree that is simply not possible without an innovation mindset. Having engineers, doctors etc knowing how to maintain the system is one thing. Having scientist innovators and cutting edge researcher who can adapt the system to shocks and challenges and expand knowledge is another -without that, the technology just dies, and this requires that society actually values an innovation mindset and free speech. At global level though we ultimately need compassionate tit for tat – working at cooperation not assuming violence as starting point and that is only possible with reducing hyper aggressive tribalist mindset. Modernisation involves dumping jihad mentality and also greatly weakening the virulent obsession with purity of lineage and controlling women’s bodies to ensure absolute control of them by male relatives, and everyone be reminded of the maintenance of this pure lineage community with rituals that are monitored by the community every day. The two are intimately linked – the lineage thing produces a pure community of authoritarian kin groups welded into a state unified by religion and the authoritarian ruler (who must uphold religion see Patricia Crone “God’s Rule”). Marriage is normally arranged and Muslim countries overall have the highest rates of consanguineous marriage.
http://www.consang.net/index.php/Image:Globalcolorsmall.jpg
http://www.consang.net/images/archive/0/0e/20150113013427%21Globalcolorsmall.jpg
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/children/11723308/First-cousin-marriages-in-Pakistani-communities-leading-to-appalling-disabilities-among-children.html
The penalty of such a model of unity is that such a clan based community tradition must keep directing hostility against non believers from other sects of Islam who have allegiance to another religious and political leaders and/or the community must fight peoples of other faiths living in other lands.
Within the overall orthodoxy there is some tradition of charity and focus on acceptance and love in Islam – some types of medieval Sufis, and some traditions of religious syncretism outside Muslim heartlands. Unfortunately as people become more and more literate and acquainted with what’s in their holy texts and orthodox traditions of jurisprudence, Islam has become more literalist and so the supposed uncreated, divine origin and ahistoricity of the Quran and sunnah needs to be questioned.
Islam needs to modernise itself and accept a secular state and non dictatorial social and state relations like Christianity has for the most part done in Europe. The way they do it is up to them but close off all options for them to transfer blame elsewhere. This also involves continuing to intellectually smack our noisy regressive Left who constantly supply excuses for Islamism. In today’s world there are plenty of Muslims who are models – threatened by leftists. I also think we risk seeing a major resurgent of conservative Christianity in Europe to counteract religious competition of intolerant communities if we allow western culture to be seriously weakened by this, and obvious consequences in the US too.
From the third paragraph on I mostly agree with you.
Great input, thank you!
“We are better staying right out of this ME mess.”
Agreed. But are you including Israel in the mess?
I certainly didn’t mean Israel is contributing to the unrest – but Israel tends to want the West to be involved in the Middle East – even with the Saudis because it is more scared of the Shia – who are ever keen to prove they are jihadist Muslims. The Saudis main enemy is always the Shia – who they see as the existential threat – and they will tolerate Israel
And presumably whilst the Saudis support Isis up to a point they are obviously afraid that if Assad is ousted and Isis is eventually unchallenged then their Royals will be declared unfit rulers and next targets of Jihad. One of the princes just announced giving billions more to worldwide “charity”. So ideally they’d like to use someone else to just keep Isis in check … whilst they spread their Salafism world wide and then deport or torture anyone who questions their leadership within their own borders. As far as Im concerned the Saudis just use us.
Oh, what a tangled web! And strange bedfellows…
This all makes the fairly recent past, with the less religious potentates–Mubarak, Saddam, even way back to the Shah–look like the good old days; at least they were mostly secular, and women had much more freedom. (And oh, do we miss Ataturk.)
Why do we hear so little about Jordan and Lebanon?
If we have to be in a war in the mid-east, why can’t we descend on these barbarians and rescue their victims, rather than preemptively invade a country to replace its government? (Not just Iraq–we can now add Libya to the list. Not to mention previous essentially preemptive actions.)
Every dog in the game has conflicting interests and we can’t afford to ignore our “allies” Turkey is just interested in bashing the Kurds and would rather Isis than their autonomy … and Saudi we all know.
Isis isn’t that pesky to Assad as it knows to keep the key parts of the border with lebanon clear for him given he actually helped them out with training etc a few years ago.
Russia is a superpower and its still got 4,000 military personnel there … plus I think they’ve just done a temporary strategic withdrawal for the peace talks and their intervention has really bolstered Assad’s territorial holdings along the crucial border with Lebanon and Jordan
Everytime we do anything in the middle east North Africa we get a massive backlash. So caught up in tribal politics unified by ruthless dictators plus sectarian hatreds alternately unified by hatred of infidels ..
Thank you for your responses. Yes, it’s a real quagmire over there, and actually I’m all for staying the hell out and letting the locals sort it out.
My question was meant to be more rhetorical than strategic, though.
Yes I know what you mean … you read these things and think this can’t be happening in the 21st C
Exactly!
True dystopia.
So much of Islam is concerned with ensuring patriarchal lineage.
The Hanifa school Hidaya guidance to the Islamic Laws I mentioned also states that female slaves can only be sold if they have never had child by the master. Free Females can have female slaves, but not male slaves. However it is lawful for the father of the master to have sex with the slave, and if she has child she becomes the fathers Umm Walad. If the female slave has had child by the master, (the term for this is Umm Walad) he can not sell her outright though she is still the property of the master and he can still hire her out to work, or contract her in marriage in which case the new owner has all the rights of her old. It is legally up to the master whether he wants to claim paternity (and therefore not be able to sell or reject) subsequent children of this slave. The text states Ch VII p 296 “Claim of offspring does not admit of division, as that is a branch of parentage, and … is indivisible”. The claimed child and the slave mother are only free on decease of the legal master.
I think the Quran itself states that woman who has been divorced cannot remarry until she’s had three periods – i.e. she cannot be pregnant.
The Hidaya state that a female slave has to be freed before the master can marry her because marriage of the woman and slavery are forms of “possession” (literally that is the term used) and you cannot have double forms of possession. The wife is defined as the one who serves and the husband as the person served. Divorce is available to the husband but very rarely the wife because marriage is supposed to impose “restraint” on the wife as the “possessed”, “For one of the requisites of marriage is, that the woman be as a servant, and the man as the person served”. Zina or whoredom (fornication) is defined in the Hidaya legal manual of the Hanifa school of Islamic law as:
“the carnal connection of a man with a woman who is not his property either by right of marriage or of bondage, and in whom he has no erroneous property …What is here said is the definition of whoredom with respect to a man; as to the whoredom of a woman it simply signifies her admitting the man to commit the act.”
This religion of peace seems more like a religion of gettin’ a piece.
Of course, this is all the fault of Western imperialism, right Greenwald?