Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “groom,” came with this note:
No, I know. It’s not funny. Story here: https://amu.tv/183096/
Click below to read the details. Western feminists should be up in arms about this stuff.
A few paragraphs from the story (it’s in Afghanistan). Bolding is the author’s
A six-year-old girl was married to a 45-year-old man in Helmand Province, local sources said, in a case that has sparked widespread condemnation after an image of the wedding circulated on social media.
The ceremony took place in Marjah District, where the child’s father reportedly arranged the marriage in exchange for money. The groom, according to local sources, already has two wives.
The union was set to be formalized on Friday with the girl’s transfer to her husband’s home. However, Taliban officials intervened and temporarily halted the process. The man was briefly detained but not prosecuted. Instead, sources said, the Taliban instructed him to wait until the girl turns nine before bringing her home.
Images from the ceremony, showing the man beside the visibly young girl, have provoked outrage online and among rights advocates, who say the case reflects a broader rise in child marriages in southern Afghanistan — particularly in provinces like Helmand, Kandahar, and Zabul, where the Taliban exert strong control.
And the strip, which is funny, but in a very dark way. Remember that Muhammad himself married Aisha when she was about six, and again the consummation had to wait until she was nine. There is general agreement about this among scholars of Islam, and is in the hadith.
Ugh. Nothing polite to say. There are some feminists who are in arms (JKR et al.)
JKR is upset by the marriage of a six-year old? JKR is always upset by something. Last time it was a male rapist being sent to a female prison. She should just be more ‘tolerant’ and ‘nice’.
Feminists (at least in my day) were often accused of having no sense of humour.
“Say what you like about the Taliban…” seems like a set-up for a myriad of double entendres.
(With assistance from an AI™):
Three Taliban walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “What will you have?” The first says, “I’ll have a glass of water, to purify my soul.” The second says, “I’ll have a sparkling soda, for the excitement”. The bartender then turns to the third member and asks, “And what about you?” He says, “I’ll have a shot of your strongest drink, something to fortify me against the unbelieving world outside that doesn’t appreciate us”.
(Yeah, maybe a C. Neither I nor the AI™ should quit our day jobs.)
Just read an interesting article on how the most recent release of ChatGPT has underwhelmed in sometimes hilarious ways: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/14/business/chatgpt-rollout-problems
A report from 2013 and the world still stands by and watches girls suffer. It’s barbaric.
“An eight-year-old Yemeni girl has died of internal bleeding on her wedding night after marrying a man five times her age, a social activist and two local residents said, in a case that has caused an outcry in the media and revived debate about child brides.”
“”On the wedding night and after intercourse, she suffered from bleeding and uterine rupture which caused her death,” Othman said. “They took her to a clinic but the medics couldn’t save her life.””
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/sep/11/yemen-child-bride-dies-wedding
That story made/makes me furious. It is instances like these that keep me from fully abandoning support for the death penalty. In 99.9% if cases I oppose but some people are so awful that they cannot continue to exist. I fully admit that it is simple revenge but I’m just a simple primate who wants the bad man to go away.
I am even against the death penalty for slime, like that. I’d rather he was thrown in jail with cockroaches and a slice of bread and water each day and made to think of the horrors he inflicted. Perhaps women can stand outside his prison cell and throw rotten fruit and vegetables in at him and spray sewage over him with a hosepipe. Of course that’s primarily revenge, and inhumane, but he can hardly complain about inhumanity.
This case exposes a culture that is too awful to continue to exist.
Wrong conclusion, in my view, though I share your feelings of outrage and disgust. One could just as easily argue that Western Civilization should cease to exist because of the dreadful prevalence of rape and rape culture.
I hope you were being sarcastic with that comment. Consider the rape stats in the UK where Pakistani and Afghani Muslim immigrants are over-represented by a factor of something like 20 as perpetrators. The Islamic texts condone rape of infidel women and taking them as sex slaves, as the religion’s founder did. In Islamic law it is impossible to convict a man of rape unless four reliable Muslim men testify that they witnessed the rape – otherwise the woman is deemed guilty of adultery and stoned to death. That is a real rape culture.
The bottom line on this particular case though is that raping 8 year old children is strictly illegal in Western culture but legal and acceptable in Yemeni culture. So tell me again which culture is more deserving of ceasing to exist.
Absolutely horrid, for certain.
I’m not entirely sure that “the world still stands by and watches girls suffer,” though. There are many national, UN and NGO efforts to combat the phenomenon (and the somewhat related FGM), which have yielded some (limited) successes, and of course some failures. I don’t know what else one can/should do. “Nation building” as per Afghanistan probably isn’t a viable solution, as women/girls there are as bad or worse off now than before the attempt.
Did you have some specific ideas joolz?
I’m no expert on politics, but many countries are still pandering to countries that oppress women and girls. We should make them pariah states. Stop the rich people there from being allowed to travel abroad until they sort out their countries. Block them from investing money in the west, which is how many of them make money. I’d even be happy to get money into the country if we could get it into the hands of women who would organise a resistance.
Many western politicians care more about themselves and appeasing horrible countries than looking at what is really happening. A prime case is the Lockerbie bombing. The bomb was put on the flight at London Heathrow, probably by Syria, but Syria was our ‘friend’ at the time and Libya wasn’t, so Libya got the blame despite there being no evidence apart from proven liar Gauci who denied Megrahi bought clothes from him in Malta, but then suddenly decided he did, after being paid some money by police.
Article 28 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says that children and young people have the right to education. Girls in many countries are being denied their human rights by oppressive and misogynist, governments. Not allowing girls to go to school, leaves them brainwashed and ignorant about the world. We should be pressuring our governments to act.
Joolz, Lockerbie interested me for years and I’m also very open to the idea that it was actually the Syrians.
Also Libya and Syria (Gadaffi and Assad) famously hated each other. As did Syria and Morocco. The Islamosphere and Arab would is hugely fractured and riven with infighting and mutual hatreds. Some quite bewildering and alliances change over the decades and administrations.
The west knows almost nothing about these dynamics. (And I suppose doesn’t really need to, but it is an interesting topic).
DavidAnderson_JD_NYC
@DavidandersonJd
Heathrow baggage handler John Bedford saw the Samsonite suitcase, that turned out to contain a bomb, an hour before the Frankfurt flight arrived there. It appeared in the luggage container while he was away on a tea break. The police never attached that suitcase to a passenger and Bedford was not called as a witness at the trial.
When the Frankfurt luggage arrived it was added to the container by Amarjit Sidhu. At court he insisted that he hadn’t moved any of the existing Heathrow luggage in the container and he just put the Frankfurt stuff on top. But the investigators state that the bomb was at the bottom of the container as the explosion was ten inches above the bottom of the container. Below the Frankfurt suitcases.
There was a break in at Heathrow airport the day before the bomb was put on the plane.
A scientist friend did a forensic analysis of the luggage locations and the damage to the container and wrote an excellent book concentrating on the luggage.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adequately-Explained-Stupidity-Lockerbie-Luggage/dp/1783062509
I have many links to the legal case flaws, but as it’s off topic, I probably shouldn’t keep going on this.
Private Eye magazine was very sceptical about the Libyan angle in the past: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/lockerbie
A look at the membership of the UN Human Rights Council (and the UN in general) pretty much tells us how serious they are about the actual rights of actual humans.
At least Aisha was 9 when her marriage to Muhammad was consumated
That is still too young, and the point is whether she actually consented to sex. If not then it was rape. It’s his word against hers. In a culture where women have no rights she probably wasn’t given the chance to say no, so it’s highly likely it was rape.
+1
AIUI, in Islamic law women are considered unreliable witnesses.
Just as in the Old Testament.
I tried looking that up and couldn’t find it. Numbers 30 (about vows) is related, but not on point.
Since a lot of Gabriel’s alleged revelations to Mo were plagiarised from the OT it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were some specific cite.
What would a 45-year-old man possibly get out of a marriage with a 6 year old? Another child to raise? Someone to take care of him in his old age? Obviously this would be a disaster for the six year old child and might, as in the case that joolz mentions above, lead to her death. But where do such rituals come from and what keeps them going?
“But where do such rituals come from and what keeps them going?”
A partial answer might be that child ‘betrothal’ has been practiced in many cultures around the world, often as part of political and/or economic relations between clans and lineages, but in fundamentalist Islamic cultures actual ‘consummation’ of the marriage adds and insures that the child bride is no longer sexually available to any other men. These practices are part and parcel of a range of customs, including female genital mutilation, that inhibit female sexual pleasure or even activity, especially outside of marriage.
“What would a 45-year-old man possibly get out of a marriage with a six year old?”
It’s simple and right in the title: pedophilia. Sanctioned by a sick cult and culture.
What would a 45-year-old man possibly get out of dressing like a woman and accessing women’s changing rooms to watch them undress?
What would a 45-year-old man possibly get out of organizing swimming pool parties for children without other adults present?
What would a 45-year-old man possibly get out of tweeting photographs of himself with his dick out in women’s toilets?
What would a 45-year-old man possibly get out of getting into a jacuzzi with an erection in a women’s naked spa, with a nine year old girl there?
These things have all happened. The majority of men wouldn’t dream about doing these things and find it hard to understand that there are a LOT of men who DO do these things. It’s why women are fighting so hard to keep men out of our sex based safe spaces.
Amen Sister.
This won’t be prevented until the culture changes, yet when religion and the social system are closely intertwined it’s simply not possible. The idea that all cultures are “equally valid” and “who are we to judge?” simply falls apart when faced with something so plainly wrong to liberal Western values.
+1
+2
So-called “multiculturalism” tends to work out OK until Islam shows up.
Exactly.
Yeah. As a native Angeleno, I have no problem with “multiculturalism” per se. I love living in a multicultural city. Different cultures can have very similar underlying values. It’s when the underlying values are starkly different that coexistence become unsustainable.
A few months ago the Iraqi parliament lowered the consent/marriage (the same thing there) from 16 to 9. 9 is important as it was when the prophet married Aisha (betrothed at 6, but actually married at 9).
In some Islamic countries there is no formal lower age limit.
DavidAnderson_JD_NYC
@DavidandersonJd
Jarred asked above for ideas to put pressure on them. I commented that western politicians don’t care. I found this comment on Google….
“The United States has provided Iraq with billions of dollars in aid, both for reconstruction and security purposes, since the 2003 invasion”.
We should stop funding them apart from humanitarian needs.
Iraq has thousands of millionaires and a few dozen billionaires. Blocking them from leaving the country or investing money abroad might make them think more carefully about how they treat women and girls.
The latest Youtube podcast from Yasmine Mohammed features an interview with Raymond Ibrahim. I recommend you watch it. It’s about how Islam got started. He said it was by taking all the tribal customs and behaviours, and “sanctifying” them into a religion. The example of a 6 year old bride is an object lesson: what probably could be an expected behaviour among warlords in 7th century Arabia, is today seen as pathological and abhorrent. But since the story of Aisha is “frozen” as a religious belief, the Muslim society is stuck with it until some reform finally puts it to rest. And it still can be revived by rolling back said reform.
Islam is reformed all the time. It’s just typically reformed to be more conservative. The entire slew of Islamic revolutions from 1979 to today is about a return to the roots, about rejecting modernity.
The few who try for a secular reformation either become apostates (are already apostates in the eyes of their peers, but eventually acknowledging it themselves, too), or they get murdered before that can happen.
This isn’t unique to islam, either. Most (though not all) religious reforms tend to be conservative. However, in the Christian & Buddhist spheres, a strong state tends to stomp when its authority is questioned.
And the state tried this in the islamic sphere, too, from circa 1920- present. Arguably during some parts of the pre-modern era, too. Somewhat uniquely, however, the states in the islamic sphere lost this contest.
Why this is is a good question which I cannot answer. But the reality is that islam is being reformed. By the conservatives, who over a conflict spanning over a century, thoroughly defeated secular ideologies and who are kept from taking over altogether essentially solely through western aid to ailing regimes.
AIUI the “golden age of Islam” resulted from a religious reformation; but unlike the Christian’s one, Islam’s counter-reformation crushed it.
Here’s a clip (starting at the relevant time in the vid) of two young Syrian fighters taking home their spoils of war. After killing the Druze men, they’re on their way home with an aunty, a young woman, a girl and a baby girl.
The subtitles say “concubines”…
What is the original Arabic for “douchebag”??
Who knows. Words have no meaning these days anyway.
Note how they call their victims ISIS. That’s right, just label them as a group you don’t like and let the violence begin. If I understand the sectarianism correctly, it’s Sunni Bedouins cleansing the Druze (an offshoot of Shia Islam, if that matters) yet ISIS is Sunni. My brain is melting trying to make sense of it all. Perhaps there is no sense to be made.
The BBC apologised after a recent “Thought for the Day” broadcast about xenophobia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1dxqwkwx5qo
I’m no fan of Conservative politician Robert Jenrick, but at a military base just a couple of miles away from here there was a ridiculous amount of trouble when men from Libya were housed there. Males from some cultures apparently just don’t know how to behave outside of them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassingbourn_Barracks#History
If saying so makes me a racist, shoot me now!
Edited to add: That kind of behaviour should have no place within those cultures either, if that needs saying.