Letter From America (About One of the Heroines of our Generation)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali fights radical Islam's real war on women

By Ashe Schow 
December 8, 2014
Washington Examiner

In early April of this year, Brandeis University, under pressure from student activists and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reversed its decision to give an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a global advocate for women’s rights. (Graeme Jennings/Examiner)

 

In early April of this year, Brandeis University, under pressure from student activists and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reversed its decision to give an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a global advocate for women’s rights. The decision was triggered by Hirsi Ali’s outspoken criticisms of Islam. The Somali-born activist has sounded alarms about the prevalence of extremism in Muslim countries and the misogyny that pervades even mainstream Islam. During the Brandeis controversy, a CAIR spokesman called her “one of the worst of the worst of the Islam-haters in America.”

But Hirsi Ali’s warnings about Islamic extremism were quickly supported by world events, as just a week after Brandeis rescinded her honorary degree, the Islamist terrorist organization Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls in the first of many such abductions throughout the summer. A few months after the kidnappings began, news spread that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, another terrorist group, was selling Yazidi women into sexual slavery. . . . 

The real horrors facing women in the world aren’t discussed in America, where those who try to point out what is going on in other countries or criticize the trivial nature of feminist obsessions are sidelined from the public debate.  Critics have attacked Hirsi Ali as Islamophobic and have argued that the portrait she paints is not representative of Islam at large. But her disagreements with Islam are rooted in her own East African upbringing.

Cavernous Sockets Instead of Seeing Eyes

Averted Eyes and Western Silence

Our previous post addressed the horrendous practice of female genital mutilation ("FMG").  We wish to follow this theme a bit further.  The practice is occurring in the West; however, it is largely ignored in the time honoured Nelsonian fashion of lifting a telescope to the blind eye. 

Why is the West failing miserably to confront, interdict, and punish this terrible practice?  May we suggest a number of likely reasons.  The first is the West will struggle to oppose this practice because to do so would be deeply hypocritical.  The West has championed the spurious "right" that of woman to her own body in the dishonest attempt to justify wholesale, industrial abortion.  If a woman has a right to kill her own unborn child because of a higher right to her body as her own selfish possession, then she must have a lesser right to submit to FMG.  It would, therefore, be entirely inappropriate to criminalise the choice of a woman to do so.  Does she not have a right over her own body to do with it as she will? Behold the cacophonous silence of Western feminists in contending against the horrific abuse of FMG. 

Of course there is the issue of consent.  Do young women really get to choose freely to genital mutilation, or is it forced upon them by their families?  But this is splitting hairs.

A Terrible Crime

Female Genital Mutilation in the West

A Creeping Crime Against Humanity

by Phyllis Chesler
Breitbart
November 19, 2014

Tomorrow, on November 20, 2014, an Egyptian doctor, Raslan Fadl, will for the first time in history be sentenced because his 13-year old patient died during a female genital mutilation (FGM) procedure; he claims she was allergic to penicillin. [update: Fadl was unexpectedly acquitted.]

This girl died—but she was probably viewed as among the lucky few who have real physicians perform the mutilation in a clinic, as opposed to a midwife or tribal elder who performs the mutilation on a mud floor and with a rusty knife or razor blade.

We know that this horrendous practice is pandemic in the Middle East and Africa. Some claim that FGM is not an Islamic practice per se but is, rather, an African and tribal practice. Thus, FGM is practised in Muslim Africa (Egypt, Somalia, Sudan) but also in pagan and Christian Africa, as well as nations that are a mix of Christian and Muslim (Nigeria, Sierre Leone, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Kenya). It is also increasingly practised in Muslim Indonesia.

Recently, a photographer was present at the FGM "ceremonies" of four teenage Kenyan girls of the Potok tribe. They look terrified.  According to UNICEF, 91% of Egyptian women have been genitally mutilated.  The practice is supported by both women and men who view women as unclean and unmarriageable if they have not been "cut." A number of brave and poignant memoirs have been written by women who have undergone this procedure. Dr. Nawal el-Sadawii, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Soraya Mire all come to mind.

But we also know that this practice flies under the radar in the West as well among immigrant communities, mainly from these regions. And we know that Western authorities have failed to stop it.