Lara Logan’s rape as a symbol of Islam’s “silent scandal”
**Posted by Phineas
“Silent scandal.” Those are the words former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy uses to describe the miserable condition of women under Islam, in which inferiority to men is theologically sanctioned and non-Islamic women — or a Muslim woman who doesn’t behave as she should — are open targets for beatings, rape, and even death.
While horrific crimes against women occur in all parts of the world, it is only under Islam that these receive religious sanction. As McCarthy relates in “Who Attacked Lara Logan, and Why?”
Tahrir Square is also the place where, in the frenzy after Hosni Mubarak’s fall, CBS news correspondent Lara Logan was seized and subjected to a savage sexual assault by an Egyptian gang. Coverage of the attack has been muted. There have been testimonials to Ms. Logan’s courage, and one anti-American leftist lost his comfortable fellowship at NYU Law School for failing to conceal his glee over the atrocity. We have heard much about the attack, but have heard next to nothing about the attackers. You are just supposed to assume it was a “mob” — the sort of thing that could have happened in any setting where raw emotion erupts, say, Wisconsin’s capitol.
Except it doesn’t happen in Madison. It happens in Egypt. It happened in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, in the riots that led to Suharto’s fall — as Sharon Lapkin recounts, human-rights groups interviewed more than 100 women who had been captured and gang raped, including many Chinese women, who were told this was their fate as non-Muslims. It happens in Muslim countries and in the Muslim enclaves of Europe and Australia, perpetrated by Islamic supremacists acting on a sense of entitlement derived from their scriptures, fueled by the rage of their jihad, and enabled by the deafening silence of the media.
As Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer has detailed, al-Azhar University endorses a sharia manual called Umdat al-Salik. It is quite clear on the subject of women who become captives of Muslim forces: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” This is so the woman can then be made a concubine of her captor.
This arrangement is encouraged by the Koran. Sura 4:23–24, for example, forbids Muslim men from consorting with the wives of other Muslims but declares sexual open season on any women these men have enslaved. (“Forbidden to you are . . . married women, except those whom you own as slaves.”) Moreover, Mohammed — whose life Muslims are exhorted by scripture to emulate — rewarded his fighters by distributing as slaves the women of the Jewish Qurazyzah tribe after Muslim forces had beheaded their husbands, fathers, and sons. The prophet himself also took one of the captured women, Rayhanna, as his concubine. And, as Spencer further notes, Mohammed directed his jihadists that they should not practice coitus interruptus with their slaves — they were encouraged to ravish them, but only in a manner that might produce Muslim offspring.
Emphases added. Be sure to read the whole thing, because McCarthy is one of the few willing to speak bluntly about this problem, rather than turn a multicultural blind eye. The sum, as he and other writers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali have noted, is that Islamic law reduces women to a less-than-human status, encouraging such abuse, and the silence of Western liberals and leftists only abets it.
via Patrick Poole, who notes that the Umdat al-Salik, mentioned above, received a disturbing endorsement from an American imam.
LINKS: Phyllis Chesler on jihad by rape and liberal blindness. Power Line on “no-go zones” in France and the catastrophic failure of European multiculturalism. Jamie Glazov on Muslim rape and feminist silence (Disturbing photo warning). Bruce Bawer on the challenge posed by fundamentalist Islam in Europe and tolerating intolerance .
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)