Many battered women stay with their batterers because they have been warned that if they ever leave, turn to the police, or “tell” anyone what is really going on, their batterer will then be justified in killing them.
Cult members are routinely warned that if they break free and “tell” anyone about abusive cult practices, not only will they be shunned, stalked, and punished, but their relatives, including children, who are still prisoners of the cult, or true believers, will be punished too.
By now, many Westerners may believe this is true about batterers and about cults; but they will not believe that it is also true about fundamentalist Islam. Trained in favor of religious tolerance, concerned that if one religion is restricted that all religions might be; genuinely uninformed about non-western religions such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, etc., they assume that all religions are alike in terms of their virtues and that sinners of every religious persuasion exist despite—not because of–their religion.
When it comes to Islam such views may be wrong.
Many Muslims are not religious. Many Muslims who are religious are not fanatic fundamentalists or radicals and tend to lead (or would like to lead) quiet, peaceful lives. But an increasing number of Muslim religious and political leaders are quite hostile to human rights and freedom of religion as universal values. These leaders point to passages in the Qur’an or Hadith that justify cross-amputation, stoning to death, arranged child marriage, polygamy, and wife-beating as religious rights. They believe that infidels should either convert, be killed, or are to be held hostage and subordinated economically, physically, and psychologically—or are to be exiled, jailed, tortured or murdered.
Fundamentalist/political/radical Muslims are very clear that any Muslim who criticizes or exposes the truth about Islam must be intimidated, harassed, and attacked—and that any Muslim who actually converts to another religion must be killed, on sight, by any Muslim, or preferably by a member their own family, who is expected to cleanse their shame and restore their honor and the honor of Islam by murdering such an apostate.
As my studies in Middle East Quarterly have shown, Muslim girls are honor-murdered in the West (North America, Canada, Europe) for refusing to wear hijab, having non-Muslim friends, including friends who are boys, refusing to marry a first cousin, wanting to marry a non-Muslim. Imagine how much more grievous a sin it is for a Muslim to choose a Christian God.
In 2001, “Sabatina James” (a pseudonym) fled from Austria to Germany and went into hiding to escape being honor-murdered by her family after she converted from Islam to Christianity. Her family had immigrated from Pakistan. “Sabatina’s” troubles began when she was 15 years old because she dared to wear lipstick and blue jeans; she was mercilessly beaten for these crimes. When she rejected marriage to a cousin, “Sabatina” was sent to a Qur’anic school in Lahore, where she was repeatedly flogged. She finally agreed to the marriage—but only in order to be able to return to Austria. Then, when she was 19 years old, she fled.
“Sabatina James”
In 2002, Marlyn Hassan, who was eight months pregnant with twins, was stabbed to death in New Jersey by her husband for refusing to convert from Hinduism to Islam. Her husband also killed his mother-in-law and sister-in-law who were present at the time. They had all immigrated from Guyana.
In 2009, Iraqi-born Vian Bakir Fatah was stabbed to death by her Iraqi ex-husband in Norway. Her “crime”? She had converted to Christianity and had a new boyfriend. Her ex-husband murdered her in the presence of their four children.
Vian Bakir Fatah
We certainly know that Christians have been—and still are–being savagely persecuted in Muslim lands. I and many others have written about this often. Authors Nonie Darwish and Ibn Warraq have both spoken out about this burning issue. Darwish, a Muslim convert to Christianity, has challenged the major Muslim American organizations to denounce the Islamic belief in death-for-apostates. Thus far, no organization has done so.
While about 50,000 Christians convert to Islam in America each and every year, we know very little about the estimated 20,000 American Muslims who turn to Christianity each year. In 2002 (a lifetime ago), Julia Duin wrote a very informative article on this subject. She interviewed Muslim apostates and the pastors who converted them to Christianity and described the punishments to which they were all routinely subjected. At best, families disown them, they lose custody of their children, they must use pseudonyms, disappear, and in live in hiding, and can never safely see their relatives again.
Muslims who convert to Christianity in America do so secretly and usually talk to reporters using pseudonyms. Those who raise questions about Islam online report being hacked, sent viruses and death threats. Pastors who convert Muslims to Christianity report being “watched” by many mosques. Muslim converts in America who wear crosses are sometimes recognized on the street or at work by Muslims from their former circles who then verbally and physically attack them; they are also threatened with death.
According to several sorces, a Saudi princess who converted to Christianity in America was whisked away by limousine and never seen here again. Most Muslims who convert in America are pressured by their families who will travel here to apply pressure in person. In one instance, an Iranian male convert to Christianity has applied for political asylum “because he knows he can’t return to Iran and be safe…(but) people (in America) are in danger, including from family members, who shun them, disown them, and deprive them of any inheritance. And their family members still back in Iran get used as hostages.”
According to Mina Nevisa, an Iranian Muslim convert to Christianity who wrote a book about her experiences, both she and her female cousin were attending an underground church in Teheran. Nevis fled Iran together with her husband. Her cousin was not so lucky. “She was arrested on charges of apostasy and taken to Evin prison, where she was raped, tortured, and then killed by firing squad. The pastor was also killed.”
I hope that American judges, lawyers, mental health professionals, and immigration officials will educate themselves about this. Why? Because without doubt, they will soon be handling the cases for police protection, witness protection program status, and political asylum which Muslim converts to Christianity (apostates) are bound to bring in America.
I wish in all these discussions about Islam everyone would stop referring to it as a religion. Islam is not a religion but is a “Totalitarian system of suppression and submission” that has as its goal the total dominance of the world.Their Koran and Surahs along with Sharia law are direct orders to them on how to accomplish their mission. It is not a religion.
Ms Chesler is doing a great service to humanity by exposing Islam. I no longer believe Islam is, or ever was, one of the world’s great religions. It must be beaten back before millions more are forced to live under its diabolical influence.
You are absolutely right! The Koran and Surahs are nothing more than a 1500 year old version of Mein Kampf, those who follow Islime nothing less than the first Brown Shirts and the call to “prayer” an early version of “Horst Weissel.” The essence of the Nuremburg trials is that there is a higher law than that of any government; i.e., you can’t say it was okay just because you passed a law saying it was okay. Currently, the leaders of Islime offer the same lame excuse used by the Nuremburg criminals, except that they seem to be getting away with it. They should suffer the same fate as the Nuremburg criminals; hanged in a dungeon, with their bodies cremated and dumped in a muddy ditch during a thunderstorm. If that sounds a little too extreme, go back and re-read Phyllis’ articles, then remember that this stuff isn’t just happening in some far-away country whose name ends in “stan;” it’s happening in your town, in your neighborhood. Also, remember that they laughed at the Brown Shirts too, until it was too late. And read the Koran while your at it; know your enemy.
Bob – it *is* a religion. It’s just that – let’s stop pussyfooting around – in its pure, classical Quran-Sira-Hadith form, the form that the modern day jihad-wagers and sharia-pushers are trying to revive and practise everywhere – it’s an *evil* religion, a religion in which Murder and Lies are sacralised. It’s a religion like the Thuggee cult was a religion; like the Aztec cult was a religion; like the worship of Moloch was a religion, or the worship of Odin Glutter of the Crows (if you want to know about that, try finding out what the ‘blood eagle’ was; and reflect that Uppsala was once a centre of human sacrifice as vile as was Kumasi in West Africa). Think of that Muslim who murdered his trusting Jewish friend Sebastien Selam in Paris not so long ago: he told his mother, ‘I have killed my Jew, now I shall go to Paradise’. The core paradigm underlying that incident is this: *if I murder someone whom my cult defines as Designated Sacrifice/ Enemy Other, that act of killing, of murder, becomes my ticket to paradise*. In other words: get to Paradise by committing murder! Think of all those beheading videos where someone is beheaded to the accompaniment of chants of ‘allahu akbar’, and allow yourself to realize that what they depict is *a ritual of human sacrifice*.
The ritualistic and sadistic ‘honor’ murders of females within Islamic families should, I think, be seen as de facto human sacrifices. Sir Winston Churchill in The Story of the Malakand Field Force defined Islam as “the religion of blood and war”. I gather that Levi-Strauss – sorry I can’t give a more precise reference – referred to Islam as “a barracks religion”. Jacques Ellul stated that it is “fundamentally warlike”.
When I read Bostom’s Legacy of Jihad, after reading the umpteenth account of mass murders, I was eventually driven to conclude that Jihad is not just about using brutal means (like Genghis Khan did, say) to achieve ‘victory’. It’s *about* killing and laying waste as an end in itself. Every Muslim battlefield is a vast altar upon which the Muslims sacrifice the Designated Victims to their god, the more the better, in an ecstatic orgy of mass murder; there seems to be little or no internal braking mechanism to say, ‘better stop now or the damage to the conquered land/ conquered population will be so great that there will be nothing left worth ruling’.
“If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.”
It’s not a matter of a few scattered “passages,” as if they were bird droppings on a car, in the Koran and Hadith that encourage the conversion, subjugation, extortion, rape, enslavement and/or murder of unbelievers. These passages form a narrative in line with Mohammed’s documented trajectory from derided wannabe-poet to serial-raping, mass-murdering, slave-trading extortionist warlord of Arabia. It was his success at the latter activities, not his poetry or his compassion, that brought him recognition as a “prophet” from primitive thugs who enjoyed the stolen property and rape slaves that Mohammed provided them through his god.
Those Muslim “leaders” supposedly causing all the trouble are simply pointing out the core beliefs of Islam, demonstrated in full relief by the man who invented it. They are following his example, as the Koran exhorts them over and over to do. Their god himself alleges that Mohammed was the perfect man, an “excellent example of conduct.” Thus, Mohammed’s child molestations, rapes, slave-trading, torture, murder, extortion, armed robbery and the like become the Alice-in-Wonderland paradigm, the only acceptable framework, for “holy” behavior if one is a Muslim.
Those Muslims who do not follow such practices might very well be persons of good faith who have rejected the horrific example of their prophet — in which case one wonders why they remain Muslim at all. There must be *something* about this supremacist ideology of theft, brutality and inhuman injustice that appeals to some part of their character.
Of course, there are alternatives. These peaceful Muslims might be living in Western societies where they will be punished for following Mohammed’s/Allah’s orders and are canny enough to realize it. Or they might simply be “keeping their heads down” (and in the case of the females, with their shameful hair obediently covered) and letting “the radicals” do the dirty work, so they can someday wake up in the Shariah paradise of ignorance, slavery, and extortion that their prophet and god promised to the “best of peoples.”
Chesler is a filthy Jewish feminist.
Courageous commentary like that needs a name with it.
AFAIC, “filthy ” is the only insult there, and I’m sure she bathes.
a: It’s good to see you have the courage of your convictions.
it is beyond reason that we are allowing this scum free and unfettered access to our country. they are our enemies. furthermore, they are gaining adherents amongst the criminal element here and the thugs that roam poor neighborhoods. soon we’ll have no go zones. and, without a peep from congress. or, the president.
we will be fighting these nutjobs in the streets while the bankers and corporatists hide behind high walls and bodyguards. these guys are stuffing so much money up their butts they won’t even take a crap fearing they may lose a dollar.
and, the money is coming from the fanatical oil sheiks who encourage their despised moslem populations to continual rioting against the west.
if this were not the case, on 9/12 we would have obliterated several moslem countries out of existence. instead, the rat line got them here in our backyards.
Phyllis: You mention that about 50,000 American Christians convert to Islam each year, but you didn’t break it down as to “who” converts. This is a crucial issue because the majory might be Black Christians who convert to Islam of the Louis Farrakhan type (an American nativist version), or who convert to more traditional forms of Sulafi/Shiite/Sunni versions. [The little DC Hanafi sect was murdered years ago in an intra-Islamic fight between sects].
The next question is to whose loyality do these 50,000 Christian-to-Islam converts aver. If Louis Farrakhan gave an order to his followers to kill Christians, Jews, Glenn Beck, Joyce Behar, etc., would they follow it, or not? If even a small percentage of them would do it, then we have a domestic Moslem “fifth column” in our midst that is very large and widespread, including in the prisons.
America faces a lot of as-yet unaddressed internal threats as well as from without. We need to know more about the enemy within, or potential enemy within.
Hope you can do a column about this.
The issue of subversion is one that our society cannot bear to address. Look at the Zebra murders. More nihilism and blood lust than subversion but the truth of those murders isn’t close to being honestly dealt with. David Koresh go the full court press but our real homegrown crazy uncle in the attic gets a pass. The absolutely irreconcilable nature of Islam in a Western country is something that simply cannot be addressed. Hence, George Bush’s nitromethane, big-tire, blue-smoke rocket ride over to the Islamic Center of Washington on 9/12. “A big Yale howdy to my buddies!”
The ACLU’s response to a decent anti-subversive campaign would be, as it was during the Cold War, the ne plus ultra example of the adage, “Send a fool to close a window and he’ll close them all over town.”
I would be a lot more sympathetic to the plight of Moslem women who convert to Christianity, or Moslem women who wish to become more modern if it were not for the fact that these women largely remain just as anti Semitic as their traditional Moslem sisters.
Indeed, one of the foulest and most detestable anti Semitic Christian women in the world is Hannan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO and a Palestinian terrorist of the first order.
Not only is she a gross and disgusting Jew hater, she has never stood up for the rights of Christians, male or female, suffering and dying under Moslem domination anywhere in the Middle East.
Of course no other Christian group, sect, even the Catholic Church has ever bothered to protest the abusive, even sometimes murderous treatment of Christian Arabs by Moslems anywhere in the world, even in the West.
On the other hand most of these Christian groups have found their bete noir for their anger, and they liberally vent their wrath and their most bitter criticisms one state in the Middle East. That’s right, they hammer Israel, the only country in the Middle East where Christian Arabs enjoy all the rights and freedoms that Israeli Jewish citizens enjoy.
Whoa! I thinkin’ it’s time for a certain someone to take a nice cold shower.
Dr. Chesler mentions the tragic case of Sabatina James, who, in 2001 fled to Germany “and went into hiding to escape being honor-murdered by her family after she converted from Islam to Christianity.” A friend of mine is currently in Germany on a vacation and called several times to tell me that he spotted groups of Iranian women, dressed in full hijab and burka staging protests against the draconian dictates of the Iranian government as it pertains to the mass arrests, imprisonment, torture and murder of those who dared to take to the streets of Teheran after the last Iranian election. He also said they spotlighted the plight of Muslim women who are being honor murdered, not only in Iran, but throughout the Muslim world.
Clearly, these are exceptionally courageous women. Considering the egregious consequences that they could possibly face for such actions, at the hands of radical Islamists, the pain of their brethren and their own sisters takes precedence. My friend said that it is his hope that these kinds of protests will spread across Western Europe and in the Netherlands and that western feminists and human rights activists will throw their full support behind it.
Suppose a Muslim wants to convert for whatever reason, it already meant he has lost faith in Islam, so I don’t see why they can’t convert. After all, he has made up his mind which means he has nothing to do with Islam beliefs anymore, so why can’t he convert? What good is there to keep a person who has no more faith in it anyway? Makes no sense.
Three cheers for Phyllis Chesler. I cannot add better or more elequently what she has already written or spoken about this cluster of issues. Consider every outspoken Muzzie a wannabee Adolf. Listen to almost any Saudi male for long enough and you will see this truth. I roomed with one in the military at an officer’s school. You will not find a more effective orator, a more skilful manipulator of any truth, and a more inept individual in practical matters. Add to this, any Saudi seems to be able to run faster than anyone on his short legs, and is able to head hit a running jackrabbit with a large rock at a range of fifty meters…about a hundred and fifty or more feet. This is not a story, I personally witnessed all of this. Talk to Europeans, especially women, who returned from the ‘magic kingdom’, and they will tell you that all products made by Saudis are junk! There is a book called: ‘No dogs or fire engines…’ read it! If you can find it or the author if she is still alive.. she works IN the magic kingdom trying to help Saudi women kidnapped to Yemen, an even worse place for women. That is Guts with a capital G.