CNN is running a story written by Holly Yan, about the kidnapping of over 200 girls in rural Chibok, Nigeria, which was proudly “accomplished” by the radical Islamic terrorist group boko haram. The reason given for this horrific act was that the girls were in a school, and, according to Islam, girls cannot be educated.
Here are the first few paragraphs:
Oneyear ago this month, Boko Haram\’s leader Abubakar Shekau released avideo announcing a new, reprehensible front in its bloody attempt atforced Islamism: his fighters will begin abducting girls and sellingthem.
Thekidnappings, he said, were retaliation for Nigerian security forcesnabbing the wives and children of group members.
Andfor 12 months, the radical militant group has done just that — withNigerians treating the sporadic kidnappings with disgust butresignation.
Butthat\’s changed now.
“Whenthis first happened … what I was hearing from my friends and fromother people was like, \’Why do I care? Nigeria is done. Nigeria isgoing to disintegrate,\'” said Emeka Daniel, whose father waskidnapped in Nigeria in an unrelated incident.
“Irefused to believe that,” he said. “We can\’t let this bethe new normal.”
That last quote – “We can\’t let this be the new normal” – haunts me.
If the idea is that kidnapping young girls is in danger of becoming “the new normal” because it is happening so often in Nigeria, that is bad enough. But at least we can rationalize that it is only done by lunatics like the ones in boko haram.
If, however, the idea is that treating women as a sub-human species is in danger of becoming “the new normal”, it is too late. Way too late.
What CNN and the rest of mainstream media certainly know, but rarely acknowledge in almost any of their reporting, is that, in many Muslim countries, treating women this way is completely normal.
Illustratively:
-According to a Newsweek analysis, other than the remote Solomon Islands and the sick hellhole of Ethiopia (where more than 2/3 of all marriages are by abduction), every other one of the ten worst countries for women is Islamic.
-Virtually all countries where women cannot vote, and where women\’s charges of violent crime such as rape, are not given equal weight to those of men, are Islamic.
-To my knowledge, almost every country where men have full rights to divorce women but women do not have such rights is Islamic.
-And so-called “honor killings” of women for a variety of “crimes” – even for talking to a man in public – are vastly more likely to be perpetrated in Islamic cultures than anywhere else.
Does this mean all Muslims are bad people? Absolutely not.
Moreover, Muslims who live in free societies, not ruled by religious fanatics, are dramatically less likely to engage in the behaviors described above than those in countries where fundamentalist Islam is the law of the land.
As should be clear by now, my point is not to indict all Muslims. My point is to say, with great sadness, that, in many Islamic societies, treating women as lesser beings is not in danger of becoming “the new normal”, it is normal. And it is not new.
If we\’re going to be honest about what goes in in these places, that has to be said.
