Nikki Haley seemed to be competing for the Nice Woman Prize last night in her response to Barack Obama’s predictably tedious final State of the Union address. (When during his presidency has this man said anything memorable that wasn’t a lie [“you can keep your plan”], a slur [“clinging to guns and religion”] or almost deliberately clueless [“ISIS as JV team”]?)
Haley didn’t say much beyond pieties and a call to abjure the “angriest voices.” (I wonder who that was.) Most notably, as a woman, she missed a chance to speak about perhaps the most crucial issue in the world today and one that has turned conventional feminism into a reactionary force — radical Islam’s unrelenting assault on women. From the Middle East and Africa and now into Europe with outposts in the U.S., these attacks on half the human race have reached epidemic proportions, while feminists in our society say little or nothing for fear of being insufficiently politically correct. Yet this is a genuine “War on Women,” as opposed to a manufactured one.
It remains for people like supposed Dutch extremist Geert Wilders (actually he’s basically a libertarian) to speak out honestly on this horrifying situation. Wilders and Machiel de Graaf write today at the Gatestone Institute (“Give Women the Right to Defend Themselves”) :
“Cultural enrichment” has brought us a new word: Taharrush. Remember it well, because we are going to have to deal with it a lot. Taharrush is the Arabic word for the phenomenon whereby women are encircled by groups of men and sexually harassed, assaulted, groped, raped. After the Cologne taharrush on New Year’s Eve, many German women bought pepper spray. Who can blame them?
A culture that has a specific word for sexual assaults of women by groups of men is a danger to all women. The existence of the word indicates that the phenomenon is widespread. Frau Merkel, Prime Minister Rutte and all the other open-door politicians could and should have known this.
Where does this behavior come from? Well, partly from tribal culture but also from text, as Wilders and de Graaf specify:
The Islamic world is steeped in misogyny. The Koran explicitly states that a woman is worth only half a man (Suras 2: 228, 2: 282, 4:11), that women are unclean (5:6), and that a man can have sex with his wife whenever he wants (24:31). The Koran even says that men are allowed to have sex slaves (4:24), and that they have the right to rape women whom they have captured (24:31).
The hadiths, the descriptions of the life of Muhammad, the ideal human being whose example all the Islamic faithful must follow, confirm that women are sex objects, that they are inferior beings like dogs and donkeys, and that there is nothing wrong with sexual slavery and raping female prisoners.
I know — not very PC. And certainly not permissible language on our trigger-warning-happy college campuses. But recent events from Egypt to Austria to Sweden as well as Germany demonstrate the reality of the situation. To what extent will it come here? We know that on some covert levels it already has, but so far no taharrush. I think the vast majority of us would like to keep it that way.
The big question is how. The Obama method is to ignore it, focus on the putatively rampant Islamophobia and then continue his wide-open Muslim immigration. (He naturally ignores that there were considerably more hate crimes against Jews last year in the U.S. than against Muslims.)
At the very minimum, what should be done is a serious restriction on the entrance of young Muslim males, the only practitioners of taharrush and the leading practitioners of terrorism.
Whatever the solution, all women should be disturbed by this and start asking serious questions. Republican leaders like Haley should be leading the way. It’s nice to play nice and have good manners, but unfortunately it’s a luxury we can no longer afford.
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