Foreign Policy Magazine Covers Up Syrian Sex Jihad

Foreign Policy magazine recently demonstrated why U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, is a disaster: because the establishment has a hard time factoring the foreign in their policies (more’s the irony).  Put differently, whatever information doesn’t comport with modern Western epistemology—our subjective worldviews—must simply be false, unreal, to be discarded from any consideration in Western foreign policy.

Absurd? Maybe. Real? Yes.

Other times, whatever information doesn’t comport with our subjective worldviews is intentionally dismissed as false, in furtherance of some Western foreign policy, for example, war in Syria.

Enter Foreign Policymagazine.  In an article titled “Are Young Women Really Racing to Syria’s Front Lines to Wage Sex Jihad” (originally published under the cutesier title “Sorry, the Tunisian Sex Jihad is a Fraud”), one David Kenner writes:

It’s the story that launched 1,000 headlines. And it’s not hard to see why: Tunisian Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou announced last week that Tunisian women were traveling to Syria to wage “sex jihad,” where they were having sex with “20, 30, [or] 100″ militants, before returning pregnant to Tunisia.

There’s only one problem: There’s no evidence it’s true. The Tunisian Interior Ministry has so far failed to provide any further information on the phenomenon, and human rights activists and journalists have been unable to find any Tunisian woman who went to Syria for this purpose.

Let’s consider the evidence surrounding the sex jihad for a moment: For approximately one year, a wide variety of Arabic and other foreign media, news channels, newspapers, and websites—both for and against the war in Syria—have been reporting on the sex jihad; I have personally watched several video interviews of many different men and women, of various nationalities, talking about their experiences with the sex jihad; Tunisia’s former Mufti created controversy by condemning it; and now a governmental official, the Tunisian Interior Minister, is formally on record mentioning it.

Normally, all the above would fit the criteria needed to verify any story.  For example, if many international media, video interviews, and governmental officials—none of which are connected to each other—said that, for example, Muslim men were traveling to Syria to wage jihad, no one would doubt it.

But because of the alien—or foreign—nature concerning this particular news, the Western mindset, finding it hard to believe, calls for impossible-to-fill criteria, even as one wonders what other type of evidence can be offered than the aforementioned? (For the record, the naysayers originally dismissed the sex jihad as all hearsay, but now that a governmental official has confirmed it, that too is still not good enough.)…  Continue reading