Sunny Islam raped women to punish them for violating Islamic law by being out without a male companion.
At the height of the controversy over U.S. military intervention in Syria, as I noted last week, an Iranian official named Alireza Forghani issued a novel threat to the United States: if the U.S. entered Syria, he said, there would be “mass abductions and brutal killings of American citizens around the world and the rape and killing of one of Obama’s daughters should the United States attack Syria.” Forghani said that within two days of the beginning of the military action, a relative of every U.S. cabinet member, ambassador, and military commander around the world would be abducted and mutilated, all to be lavishly depicted in lurid YouTube videos.
As David Swindle noted right after the Boston Marathon jihad bombing,
We are now entering a new phase of the Islamic war to replace liberal societies with Sharia law. This is World War IV, a multi-decade conflict that will be for our generation what the war against Nazism and Fascism was for our grandparents. Except it will probably be worse.
Forghani’s threat illustrated just how much worse it could get. It is not outside the realm of possibility that his threat could come true, and that Islamic jihadis worldwide could begin raping, torturing and murdering Americans in large numbers, and filming the whole thing as they filmed the beheadings of Daniel Pearl, Nicholas Berg, Paul Marshall Johnson, and others. This could conceivably happen in the United States as well. Rape has always been a weapon of war; German women in Berlin as it was falling to the Soviets in April 1945 grew accustomed to regular rapes from the Soviet soldiers. This became so common that in their black humor they joked, “Better a Russki on the belly than an Ami on the head” – that is, better to be raped by a Russian than to fall victim to an American bombing raid.But it couldn’t possibly happen here, could it? Well, why not? It is already happening in Britain, where an appallingly large number of Muslim rape gangs have abducted English girls, gang-raped them, forced them into prostitution, and in some cases killed them. These gangs have frequently made statements that indicate that they see their actions as justified because their victims are non-Muslim; one Muslim who murdered his captive sex slave called her a “kuffar bitch” – that is, an infidel. Many of the captors have been noted for being particularly devout Muslims; one even raped numerous girls to punish them for being outside without permission of a male guardian, which is a crime in Islamic law. One judge told a captor, “You preyed on these girls because they were not part of your community or religion.”
This is happening because the Qur’an allows Muslim men to have sex with captive slave girls, the “captives of the right hand” (4:3; 4:23-4). Muslim clerics have also said that women who violate Islam’s dress codes and venture out uncovered deserve what they get. In Denmark, Mufti Shahid Mehdi said, “Women are not entitled to respect when they walk around without a hijab. They are to blame when they are attacked.” And the mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, gained international notoriety in 2006 by saying that victims of rape are at fault. Speaking to a Muslim audience in Sydney, he explained that rape (specifically, zina, sexual activity forbidden under Islamic law — a word mistranslated in published accounts of the sheikh’s words as “adultery”) is “90 percent the woman’s responsibility. Why? Because a woman owns the weapon of seduction. It’s she who takes off her clothes, shortens them, flirts, puts on make-up and powder and takes to the streets, God protect us, dallying. It’s she who shortens, raises and lowers. Then, it’s a look, a smile, a conversation, a greeting, a talk, a date, a meeting, a crime, then Long Bay jail.”
This might not seem to be the same thing as what Forghani was threatening, but in the essentials it is. The rape gangs in England felt free to prey on British girls because they were not Muslim and not adhering to Sharia codes, in accord with the Qur’an’s permission to have sex with slave girls. Forghani thinks it is permissible for Muslims to abduct and rape Americans because they would be attacking a Muslim country, Syria, and thus be subject to the Muslim rules of war, which allow for the capture and enslavement of non-Muslim women and are based on those same Qur’anic passages.
Jihadis have used rape as a weapon, according to Islamic tradition, back to the time of Muhammad. One tradition holds that after a successful battle, Muhammad tells his men, “Go and take any slave girl.” He took one for himself also. After his notorious massacre of the Jewish Qurayzah tribe, he did it again. According to his earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, after Muhammad killed between 600 and 900 of the men of the Qurayzah, he took one of the newly widowed women, Rayhana bint Amr, as another one of his concubines. Rayhana is not noted to have been asked for or to have given her consent to this arrangement, or to have sex with Muhammad.
Emerging victorious in another battle, according to another Islamic tradition, Muhammad’s men present him with an ethical question: “We took women captives, and we wanted to do ‘azl [coitus interruptus] with them.” Muhammad told them: “It is better that you should not do it, for Allah has written whom He is going to create till the Day of Resurrection.’” When Muhammad says “it is better that you should not do it,” he’s referring to coitus interruptus, not to raping their captives. He takes the rape for granted.
After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror noticed that the fourteen-year-old son of a Byzantine official, Lukas Notaras, was an exceptionally handsome lad. When the Sultan demanded that Notaras hand the boy over, the official (who had said before the conquest that Muslim rule was preferable to union of the Church of Constantinople with Rome – “Better the turban of the sultan than the tiara of the pope”) refused, whereupon Mehmet had the boy beheaded before his eyes.
In our own age, this barbarity is alive and well. Jihadis in Darfur in the early 2000s gang-raped their female captives, and women were even airlifted to Khartoum to serve as sex slaves. And when Islamic jihadists stormed a school in Beslan, Russia, murdering hundreds of children, they brutally raped many of the captive girls.
In light of those incidents, Forghani’s threat is not so far-fetched. Such incidents could become a feature of American life. But rather than prepare for this and work to stop the forces that would like to see it happen, our government and law enforcement officials are focused as steadfastly as ever on denying the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat. That denial may well come back to haunt them, when the jihadis whom they deny and appease arrive at their doorstep.
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image illustration via Shutterstock / Stokkete
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