Terra Incognita 93 News from the Islamist world

Terra Incognita
Issue 93

“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

July 22, 2009



4) An extraordinary religion: Our Shariah loving friends: A few cases of Islamist evil, murdering of rape victims, acid burning of women and the other typical run of the mill stories remind us once again of Islamism’s evil but it also reminds us of the way in which westerners collaborate with it.


An extraordinary religion: Our Shariah loving friends

Seth J. Frantzman

July 19, 2009

New stories from the Muslim world continue to make us happy to know that one day all of the leftist feminists in our own societies, who so hate the freedom granted them by our nations, will one day live under the regimes and culture they find exotic. Consider an interview with a member of Iran’s Basij militia. In Iran it is illegal for women to be executed as virgins so women who are executed must first be married. But sometimes women end up on death row without having been married. In this case, the militia member related, it was his job to arrange temporary “marriages” for them with guards who would then rape them the night before their execution.

But he relates more details from the Islamic republic, the republic loved and supported by many in the West (consider for a moment the story of Filicia Langer, German-Jewish woman who claims to be Holocaust survivor, recipient of Germany’s highest civilian honor the Federal Cross and who uses this status as an excuse to hate Israel and who praises Ahmadinjed and claims he is mistranslated in the press). The Basij militia member relates that in Iran a woman is considered responsible for her actions at 9 but a man is only considered responsible at 13. Not a surprise. This part of the larger Islamic legal view that men have no responsibility and that women who are raped at age 10 should be stoned for “adultery.”

In another story we learn of Yusra al-Azami a 20 years old student was gunned down in Gaza in 2005. But recently more discussion of this has come out. Lynn Welchman has published an article in the Palestinian nationalist Journal of Palestine Studies arguing that the case of her murder and subsequent judgments are part of the “overlapping normative frameworks” of Islamic law in Gaza. So let’s learn more. She was driving in a car with her sister and two men in April of 2005 when Hamas gunmen from a morality police unit followed them, pulled her from the car and shot her to death for violating Islamic “honour.” It turned out that the men she and her sister were with were in fact their fiancés and they were to be married in coming days. The five men implicated in the murder were taken before an Islamic judge who was supposed to enforce “God’s law.” The judges ruled that the five men should be “censured” for their behavior, that “the shooting was not intended to kill…the shots occurred randomly to different places.” Therefore the men should pay a fine to the woman’s family of 25,000 Jordanian dinars, 1,000 American dollars to the owner of the car (it too had been shot, like the woman) and 1,000 dollars for causing emotional harm to the other three people in the car.

In a second case the female author of this article, Welchman, tells us about situating it in the “political context of competing normative discourses.” In this case however we hear of an Arab woman who a man attempted to rape and who was saved by two local Bedouin. In this case the judge ordered the family of the woman be paid 200,000 dinars for the dishonor caused by the conduct of the man who attempted rape. Nothing was to be given to the girl, except much of the calculation of the money owed was due to her having lost her sandals and headscarf in the event.

In another story from 2007 we hear about Zahra al Azzo, a 16 year old girl who was murdered by her brother to cleanse the family’s honour. How had she dishonored the family? She had been kidnapped and raped. The killer get a few months in prison. According to Syrian law a man who admits he killed a woman to preserve family “honour” cannot receive more than a year in prison and the average was six months. A recent initiative to abolish Article 548 of the penal code in that country will supposedly ensure men are sentenced to a minimum of two years. The need t murder women for the “crime” of having been raped, while the rapist goes free says much about why women must remain in Purdah or “exclusion” in Muslim countries. If they are allowed out every man knows he can rape them and not be punished and in fact it will be her crime for having been raped. But then again, Human Rights Watch raises money in those very countries where women are whipped and murdered for being raped. But in Pakistan they do things differently: there they just burn women with acid for such “crimes” as refusing to marry someone. 200 cases have been reported from April to June this year.

In the end what we can learn from these stories of women forcibly raped before execution and money paid to compensate for a woman’s murder is more about the treatment of woman in Islamic society. But we can also learn a lot about our society, about our secularism, our freedom and our intellectualism. Consider that the leading leftist Israeli daily, Haaretz, reported the murder of the girl as an “attempted robbery” which reflected the original Hamas press release. The Jewish Israeli leftist author, Arnon Regular, doesn’t quote Hamas as saying it was a robbery but actually claims it was himself (although he is based in Tel Aviv, not Gaza). According to Arnon “The gunmen, who apparently were attempting to rob the couples–two brothers and their girlfriends–suddenly opened fire at the car.” Remember he wasn’t there but he gives Hamas the benefit of the doubt.
We learn much from these stories. We learn that it is so important that a woman be de-virginized before death that she is forcibly ‘married’ and raped before being executed in Islamic countries. We learn that “progressive” journalists in our society excuse the murder of young women. They go even further than Islamism for the Islamic judge admitted that the murder of the girl was a crime, he just valued the girl at 25,000 Jordanian dinars. We learn that to murder women in Islamic countries is not seen as a harm to a person, but a harm to a family for which money is paid, much as it was in the case of the attempted rape. We learn that intellectuals and scholars in the West turn the brutality of murder in “normative discourses.”

What we see here is the typical story of evils of Islamism and the way in which the West’s best intellectuals and people excuse its evil. It reminds one of the famous dispute between Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish philosopher, and Millan Astray, a Francoist Spanish general at the University of Salamanca in October of 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil war which pitted radical militant liberalism and communism against Spanish nationalism and fascism. In a dialogue condemning the Falangist belief in “Long live death (Viva la Muerte)” Unamuno was shouted down by a crowd and Astray with the words “death to the intelligentsia.” Unamuno objected that while the nationalists would win by brute force they would not convince without having “reason and right in the struggle.” Indeed in the war against Islamism, whose motto is “long live death” and the war against the intelligentsia in the West that excuses Islamism it is obvious that those who oppose both are right. The question is how to reason against the twin evils that threaten the soul of humanity? These stories should help to answer that question.