PART II: ALYSSA LAPPEN INTERVIEWS ATLAS: ISLAM’S WAR ON WOMEN

Here's part II of journalist Alyssa Lappen over at Right Side News — it's lengthy; what follows is a small excerpt. If you missed part one, go here.

The Evils of Islamic Political Ideology, Suppression of Women

Part Two:
How Muslim Theory Suppresses Women
By Alyssa A. Lappen

U.S. women received universal suffrage in 1920 with passage of the 19th Constitutional Amendment, avowing that neither the federal government nor any state could deny or abridge the right of U.S. citizens "to vote … on account of sex." Article II granted Congress the right to enforce the amendment legislatively.

Long before the U.S. declared itself a nation, however, America gave women at large great respect. The Uxbridge, Mass. town fathers in 1756 granted the young widow Lydia Taft the right to vote in local matters, for example. America again showed its respect for women in 1789 when the states ratified the U.S. Constitution, inferring rights to women amongst "We the people of the United States," when early 19th century suffragette Abby Kelley Foster first sought votes for women, and in 1869 when Susan B. Anthony's formed the National Woman Suffrage Association.

Voting rights would never have accrued to American women, moreover, without their basic and universal right to free speech and their right "peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances," as guaranteed in the First Amendment, drafted and ratified in 1791.

Nowhere in the world, by contrast, does Islam grant such rights to women, either political or religious. Far from it. Current Islamic teaching more or less parallels that of the 7th century original. In October 2006, for example, former Australian Mufti Sheikh Taj Aldin al-Hilali described women as "uncovered meat" in a sermon at Sydney's Lakemba mosque. Similarly, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual chief Yusuf Qaradawi, widely recognized as Islam's "greatest" living scholar, in the Status of Women in Islam derides any woman having "free rein to assert herself, promote her personality, enjoy her life and her femininity… mix with men freely, experience them closely where they would be together and alone, travel with them, go to cinemas or dance till midnight together."

Moreover that theme—of women as not only chattel, but actually meat—is embedded in Islamic tradition, as stated by Second Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab (634-644). Umar stated, "innamaa al-nisaa' laHm `alaa waDam illaa maa dhubba `anhu" (Women are only meat on the butcher's block, except for any parts that have dried up), according to a medieval Arabic text cited in 1937 by the great Islamic scholar, Georges Vajda. [1]

This might be unbelievable but for the fact that Islamic law, as cited in the Hadith (traditions of Mohammed) ascribes to women's testimony just half the value given to that of men. Muslims consider the accounts of Sahih al-Bukhari unassailable. And according to Sahih al-Bukhari (3:48:826), Mohammed said, "This is because of the deficiency of the women's mind." Presumably for the same reason, Islamic law historically accepts accusations of rape only when there are four witnesses (not including the victim), an intentionally impossible benchmark. Three quarters of women imprisoned under Pakistan's hudud laws, not surprisingly, are reported to be rape victims.

The global Muslim war on free speech is best exemplified by verbal and legal attacks on Dutch freedom fighter and Member of Parliament Geert Wilders, who has for years required non-stop personal security protection, now faces trial at home for his truthful statements quoting the Qur'an, and was recently barred entry to the U.K. This is all the work of advocates for global shari'a rule.

As we've previously noted at Right Side News, several large North American Muslim organizations also advocate global imposition of Islamic law, which prohibits "defamation" of Islam and Mohammed. For Muslims who leave the faith or "blaspheme" against Islam or Mohammed, the punishment is death, a statute on the books in several Muslim states, and widely enforced by mob rule in others. Non-Muslims may not criticize Islam or Mohammed, either. Pakistan's hudud code enforces shari'a laws on everyone, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan also enforce hudud laws. According to Islamic scholars, these statutes apply to all of mankind.

"Shari'a is barbaric, hateful, imperialistic, and unjust," says ex-Muslim Abul Kasem, who no doubt voices the thoughts of tens of thousands of former Muslims. But the situation in which shari'a places women, both in Islamic countries and the West, is by far one of most intolerable created by the code. In Women in Islam: an Exegesis Kasem, a contributor to Leaving Islam, Ibn Warraq's superb collection of essays by a host of former Muslims, challenges readers to imagine their mothers and sisters imprisoned under such shari'a.

"Men are in charge of women," asserts the Qur'an in Chapter 4, verse 34. Other Qur'anic edicts concerning women are also especially harsh, and they are all based on the Qur'an, as well as other traditional Islamic sources. Kasem also asks readers to find a single Western law as misogynist as the following two Haditha, which equate a woman with a rib, and therefore crookedness.

From Bukhari Volume 7, Book 62, Number 113, as narrated by Abu Huraira:

"Allah's Apostle said, 'The woman is like a rib; if you try to straighten her, she will break. So if you want to get benefit from her, do so while she still has some crookedness'."

From Shahih Muslim, also narrated by Abu Huraira Volume 8, Number 3467,

"Women were created crooked; if you try to straighten her you will break her and breaking her is divorcing her…"

One of the foremost U.S. advocates of equal rights for Muslim women, in North America and worldwide, is AtlasShrugs.com editor and publisher Pamela Geller.

Here, in the second installment of an exclusive four-part Right Side News series on the Evils of Islamic Political Ideology, investigative journalist Alyssa A. Lappen focuses the discussion on the plight of Muslim women worldwide.

AAL: Why do you consider the situation of women so important within the Muslim war upon Western freedoms?

Atlas: This war is for women, and about women, and the ownership of women. You can judge the health of any society by how they treat women. And obviously in Islam, women are chattel.

I grew up in the Golden Age. I grew up in post World War II America. I was a post-boomer, what they called the generation Joneses. I grew up watching Andy Griffiths and I Love Lucy — mindless, carefree, free. Freedoms were like the air I breathe. It was not until those freedoms were threatened that I realized how privileged I was and am and how I must do everything in my power to save it. No one stomps on my neck because I wear high heal shoes and low necked sweaters.

And now, the key to our freedom, believe it or not, is the freedom of women in the Muslim world.

AAL: Changing the situation for them seems like a very tall order, almost an impossibility.

Atlas: Women in the Muslim world have to be part of the effort, although they know nothing else and they live under fear and oppression. They have no one fighting for freedom. Their situation is like that of people who've had Stockholm syndrome for 1,400 years.

If you throw a frog in boiling water, he will jump out. But if you put a frog into warm water and turn up the heat until it gets hotter and hotter, that frog will be toast. That is what has happened to Muslim women, and it's why we have to work for them. We have to stop that, because it is already happening here.

People are auto-censoring themselves. There is double speak. People say what seems correct because they are afraid of the truth. Where you are not free to speak we are all in trouble. And the battle line in North America, first and foremost, is for Muslim women.

AAL: How can we show skeptics how difficult things have already grown in the West.

Atlas: Look, all you have to to is going onto YouTube to see videos on how to beat your wife without leaving marks, what tools to use, like they would beat a dog. There are Islamic clerics who teach men to beat their wives "gently."

The long and short of it is, in Islamic countries, women are slaves. And
there is still slavery in these countries. They have human trafficking. It is
not part of our culture; it is not part of our rules. Of course there is illegal
human trafficking here, but it is not systemic. It is against the law. Slavery
was abolished with the emancipation proclamation. Slavery is still very much a
part of Islamic societies.

They consider it perfectly normal.

But we currently have a United Nations that has paid no attention to the
millions of people murdered in the southern Sudan and Darfur genocides. These
atrocities are of no consequence to them. So women's rights are certainly not
even on the playing field.

AAL: How much of this happens in the West. Do we now have an epidemic
in North America, too?

Atlas: So many people ask me how many women in the West are murdered
in honor killings. I can't give them an answer. Part of the problem is that even
when there's unquestionably been an honor killing, officials do not want to
label it. This was the case when Yaser Abdel Said murdered his daughters Amina
Said, 18, and Sarah Said, 17 on New Year's Day in 2008. They were gorgeous,
vibrant, quintessential girls. But they were too Western and they were dating
non-Muslims. They spoke to a teacher at school. They called social services.
They totally invested themselves in the West. They took honors and advanced
placement classes. None of that mattered. No one helped them. Finally they ran
away. The West could not save them. Their mother Patricia and brother, Islam,
lured them back to Texas, to be murdered on New Year's Day.
Their father Yaser fled the country, probably to Egypt and the FBI issued a wanted poster. Their great
aunt, Gail Gartrell, lobbied officials to
designate the crimes honor killings, which they were.

Their mother, father and brother are still at large. And
it took the FBI 10 months to add the words "honor killing" to the wanted poster.
I called it a pig-flying moment,
when the FBI finally acted, it was so rare. They called a spade a spade. But
within days, the FBI caved in to pressure from the Muslim
Brotherhood and revised the wanted poster, to exclude the
truth. 

AAL: That's horrible. But this is anecdotal. To play the devil's
advocate, how do we know the problem is so huge, even in the U.S.

Atlas: For one thing, there is a fear of labeling. It took the FBI 10
months to call those murders honor killings. After 10 months, the wanted poster
finally said:

Yaser Abdel Said is wanted for murder. On January 1, 2008, Said took his two
teen-aged daughters for a ride in his taxi cab, under the guise of taking them
to get something to eat. He drove them to a secluded park in Irving, Texas,
where he allegedly shot both girls to death. They died of multiple gunshot
wounds. The 17- and 18-year-old girls were dating American
boys, which was contrary to their father's rules of not dating non-Muslim boys.
Reportedly, the girls were murdered due to an "Honor Killing." Said may have
fled to New York or Egypt."

Go: there's more.

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