It’s interesting to compare traditions from different religions that cater to the baser instincts of their adherents. So, for example, the Jewish tradition requires that on Purim, which celebrates Queen Esther saving Persian Jews from the death sentence imposed by Haman, Jews get so drunk that they are unable to tell the difference between the villainous Haman and Mordechai, the heroic uncle of Queen Esther. The general hilarity is enhanced by the fact that we are dressed up in outlandish costumes and twirl noisemakers whenever Haman’s name is mentioned. Think of it as Halloween for adults.
My Irish-Catholic husband of over 30 years loves this holiday, in which he happily participates. For my part, I love the tradition of the Irish wake. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with the family and friends of the deceased. It’s just that there is something so satisfyingly cathartic about spending a night drinking and crying with a group of people. You don’t even need to know them to share in this bonding experience. After all, we’ve all known grief, and here is an opportunity to express it openly and without embarrassment.
The Koran endorses something more sinister for its male adherents: the sexual enslavement of women captured in war. Quran, chapter 4 (An-Nisa), verse 24. Muhammad Qutb, brother of Muslim Brotherhood founder Sayyid Qutb, writes—approvingly—that “Islam made it lawful for a master to have a number of slave-women captured in wars” and compares it favorably to western licentiousness which allows a man to have sexual relations with any woman who is willing. (Qutb, Muhammad, Islam, the Misunderstood Religion, Markazi Maktabi Islami, Delhi-6, 1992 p.50) More recently, a prominent Saudi cleric urged Palestinian men to enslave Jewish women: “Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don’t you enslave their women?” I’ve often wondered how Palestinian women felt about their husbands, fathers, and brothers being encouraged to do this.
Today, we see this Islamic law being complied with throughout the Middle East and Africa. “After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State’s authority to be divided as khums,” writes the Islamic State. “Khums is a traditional tax on the spoils of war,” explains Newsweek. These women are sold in as chattels in open markets.
In an editorial, The Horror of Boko Haram, the Wall Street Journal writes about the especially high price paid by Nigerian women and young girls for Boko Haram’s depredations.
“One woman said Boko Haram fighters would enter her house weekly to rape a younger woman who lived with the family,” Daniel Eyre, a researcher with Amnesty International who has interviewed victims, told us. Some 2,000 people have been kidnapped since 2014. Forced marriages and impregnations are common.
You need to know that these “marriages” are not real. To make rape kosher, Islamic men must go through a form of “marriage” which is dissolved as soon as the “husband” has tired of his “wife,” who is then “married” to another man. And then another and another.
“Washington has resisted offering military training and hardware to Abuja over concerns about Nigeria’s human-rights record,” notes the WSJ editorial, which goes on to urge the Obama administration to provide aid to the Nigerian government notwithstanding this record. “Foreign policy rarely offers perfect choices,” notes the editorial, but helping Nigeria to destroy Boko Haram is an “easy call.”
A curious mind might seek to better understand the nature of the Nigerian human rights abuses which so vex our State Department that it has denied aid to the government of Goodluck Jonathan, the current Nigerian president whose terms ends Friday, to fight these monsters. According to Nigerian Bishop Emmanuel Badejo, “The United States actually said it would help Nigeria with Boko Haram only if we modify our laws concerning homosexuality, family planning, and birth control.”
In the eyes of the Administration, the enslavement of women and girls, and the mass rapes, take a back seat to the holy rite of abortion.Or maybe Obama is recalling the Rape of the Sabine women by the Romans 2700 years ago. It’s like the Crusades to him—something that excuses the modern-day atrocities of Islamic fanatics.
Hillary Clinton’s State Department Budget for Fiscal Year 2012 included “$626 million for Family Planning and Reproductive Health—much of it to promote abortion overseas,” writes Kenneth R. Timmerman in his book Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi.To put this into perspective, the budget allotted only $250 million to secure all of our embassies in more than 28 countries in the Middle East. And Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has said that the administration is not sharing information with the Nigerian military (such as that picked up by our drones) that would help it to fight Boco Haram because “we don’t like some of the social policy of the Nigerian government.”
So we can sympathize with Bishop Badejo when he says that he “was alarmed when [he] heard Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, say that the United States government was committed to anything that would push the population control agenda [in Africa].” Seems Obama and Clinton are committed to reducing the African population, be it by abortion or murder.
As an aside, Goodluck Jonathan is a Christian, and I have previously written about the administration’s efforts to have him defeated in Nigeria’s recent elections. The president elect, Muhammadu Buhari, is a devout Moslem. It will be interesting to see if he will adopt the social policies the administration is pushing. Somehow I doubt it.
Lest we in the West feel smug and morally superiority to Africa and Islam, we should take a good look at ourselves and be admonished by Bishop Badejo’s words:
If the West cherishes freedom for gays and homosexual unions and abortion and contraception, suppose Africans are not wired that way. For the African, life is sacred. And that the world can watch hundreds of people dying in Nigeria every day and look away: it shows that even what we call Western civilization today is sick. What we say about human dignity and human rights is mere hypocrisy. There is a diminishing sense of the respect for the sanctity of life. And all of this is to be imposed on Africa, at whatever cost: we think that it is immoral and that it is unjust.
Yes, amen to that.
