• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Female Genital Mutilation, Islam and Leftist Silence – by Jamie Glazov
Posted byJamie Glazovon Oct 2nd, 2009 and filed under  FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through theRSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entryJamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with aspecialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of CanadianPolicy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s LeftIllusions. His new book is United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror.Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.My recent NewsReal blog on  Naomi Wolf and female genital mutilation(FGM) – also  posted atFrontpagemag.comand Jihadwatch.org— has triggered a heated debate in the  blogs’ comments sections on all three sites. The key arguments in these three sections personify some of the Left’s key tactics inits romance with tyranny and terror . It iscrucial to shed light on these arguments in order to crystallize the maliciousness,dishonesty and heartlessness which lie at the center of the leftist agenda. It also helpsstrengthen our efforts to fight on behalf of tyranny’s victims, which, in this case, are thehundreds of thousands of young girls who face the barbarity of female genital mutilationyearly around the world.
 
The recent controversy surroundsa Frontpage interview I did with Ines Laufer, an anti- FGM activist. Along with Lucy Mashua, a Kenyan victim of FGM, she is presentlyleading a new campaign,sponsoredgirl.com,to protect girls from this barbarity. In my NewsReal blog, I raised the question of whether Naomi Wolf, who postures as afeminist concerned with women’s rights, will be at all interested in joining Laufer’s andMashua’s campaign. The issue at stake here is that leftist feminists pretend they careabout women but when it comes to women who suffer under adversary cultures, theyrefuse to act, since doing so will legitimize their own societies which they despise andwork to destroy. Thus, millions of women under Islamic gender apartheid have beenabandoned by leftist feminists, whose devotions lie with their anti-Western and anti-American faiths. The scholar and
true feminist 
Phyllis Chesler has documented this phenomenon powerfully in her book 
The Death of Feminism
.To stress the main essence of this problem regarding Wolf and the hypocrites in her “feminist” camp, I asked in my blog:
 
“Will Naomi Wolf join the battle? For instance, will she denounce the Islamic theologyand teachings that lead to the mutilation of Muslim girls in Islamic countries?”My critics who seek to delegitimize my main point have now come forward and think they are scoring a powerful blow against me by, typically, pointing out that FGM is notexclusively Muslim. This is a key traditional tactic of the Left. In order to whitewash the barbarity of adversary cultures, they consistently exonerate it by equivocating about howsome kind of injustice exists somewhere else — and, especially, of course, how it existsin our own society and civilization.Thus, some of the critics revel in how Lucy Semiyan Mashua, who is leading the newcampaign against FGM, is from Kenya and comes from the Massai, a Christian Africantribe. This is how their mental gymnastics work: FGM is not just an Islamic practice, sowe can’t say anything critical about Islam when it is connected to FGM. This way wecan’t say that anything is really better than anything else, and we especially can’t say thatour civilization is better than Islam’s or that we have anything to teach Islamic societies.This kind of thinking deliberately incapacitates any action that could be implemented on behalf of Islam’s victims. If you try to do something on behalf of the victims, which begins with honesty about who is perpetrating the crime and why, the critics comeforward and say: “Hey, but it isn’t just Muslims that do it.” Then the critics feel reallygood about themselves for pointing this out and, yes, go home and do nothing about thesubject at hand. So in the case of FGM, the leftist feels self-satisfied that he’s pointed outthat it’s not just Islam that does it, he engages in no action to help the victims and themutilation of girls under Islam continues. Naturally Muslims are not the only ones who perpetrate FGM. Of course, FGM is practised outside of Islam, including under non-Islamic African tribal cultures. I never said anywhere that FGM is only practised by Muslims. But the key issue here is that
 
Muslims
are the principle religious group
that practices this sexual violence againstwomen. And the reality is that if you are a victim of FGM, then the chances are very highthat you live in a Muslim household and in a Muslim culture. Now within the context of 
 Islamic
FGM, the barbarity is kept alive and legitimized byIslamic theology. This is the case in Egypt, where this crime against girls is waged on amassive level. The Egyptian government banned FGM in 1996, but an Egyptian courtoverturned the ban in July 1997 because of the ferocious uprising of the Islamic clerics,who fervently pointed to Islamic teachings to re-implement this war against women’ssexuality. The Muslim mutilators pointed to traditional Islamic teachings that sanctionFGM, which include the Prophet Muhammad’s instruction that circumcising girls is “a preservation of honor for women.” Also, a legal manual of the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence,
‘Umdat al-Salik,
which is endorsed by Al-Azhar University of Cairo — the oldest and most prestigious university in the Islamic world — states that circumcisionis
obligatory
for both boys and girls.Keeping FGM institutionalized also helps the Islamic mutilators keep the structure of Islamic gender apartheid in place. Keeping FGM legitimized and at work is one of themost effective means to keeping women subjugated and caged. After all, the strategy behind amputating the clitoris is clearly to kill the woman’s sexual desire and pleasure,which, in this diseased misogynist mindset, reduces the chances that she will ever toywith the notions of autonomy, equality and self-determination.Question: How can we possibly help Egyptian girls, and other girls who are targeted for FGM under Islam, if we do not confront the philosophy behind the institutionalization of this violence? You cannot save Muslim girls from FGM without crystallizing what it iswithin the religion that gives fertile soil and legitimation to FGM. The way to savehuman beings from this violence is to isolate those teachings and to have them nullified – and this involves confronting certain Islamic teachings. Nowhere am I saying that we don’t work against FGM in non-Muslim environments. Wedo that too. We do it all. But we can’t save the victims of Islamic mutilation if we are nothonest about the Islamic impulses for that mutilation.So the main point of my Newsreal blog, where I asked whether Naomi Wolf would jointhe battle against FGM, was to point out the hypocrisy of the Left’s silence on this matter.It’s a silence that stems from the fact that leftists like Wolf know that admitting theinferiority of an adversarial culture will legitimize Western civilization, a recognition thatthey cannot make without risking their entire identities and social belongings. That’s whythe leftist forces in our society do their best to excuse FGM with the tired old mantra:
it’snot only Muslims that do it 
 – as if inaction to save human beings from evil is somehow justified because a sin might exist somewhere else.What a revolting image: the smug leftist turning his back on the victims of Islamic FGM because a non-Muslim somewhere perpetrated FGM. How does this self-satisfied
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...