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Showing posts with label genital mutilation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genital mutilation. Show all posts

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Muslim Misogyny

I spied a Muslim woman in a store recently, dressed in a black hijab. Over the years, I have beheld many Muslim women in major cities, but I remain disconcerted by the sight. This particular woman kept looking at me, wondering, I suppose, why I was peering at her every so often. I look because I am curious - and appalled.

Unlike countless people who preach "tolerance," I know too much about Islam, which has proved itself one of the most sexist and misogynistic ideologies human beings have ever conceived. In fact, the entire purpose of Islam often appears purely to repress and oppress women. An examination of the blatant sexism and misogyny within Islam would require an entire tome, such wretched perspective occurring so continually throughout Muslim doctrines.

I glance at these women because I am searching for a reason why, in a country as free as any on Earth, they would deliberately cover their hair - or worse, their faces. I frankly feel like walking up to them, pulling the hijab or burkha off them, and saying, "You're free now!" Unlike the deranged savages who exhort their followers to slap, beat, rape or kill uncovered women, however, I cannot engage in violence against another's person.

I also can't turn my face away from Muslim women, because I see such suffering there. In consideration of the disgraceful treatment of women within Islam, I do not think it too harsh to say that Islam is to women what Nazism is to Jews. To me, the hijab is equivalent to the yellow star. As but one sickening example of this horrid notion, every day the genitals of thousands of girls and women are hideously mutilated, per "traditions" largely but not exclusively found in Islamic countries. Each day, women are viciously killed in the name of "honor," completely destroying any meaning of that word. Millions of women are enslaved, beaten, abused in every way imaginable. And on and on it goes, unrelenting, with only a miniscule minority objecting.

Where is the humanity when this type of suffering goes on day in and day out? Why no outcry about this human rights violation? Does the silence exist because "God" is continually invoked in order to justify this vile behavior? What good is "God" then, if such obvious evil is allowed to flourish in "his" name?

As the Greek sage Epicurus (341-270 BCE) said:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
Humanity will only exhibit truly enlightened behavior when it ceases to allow criminal cowards to veil themselves with the patently unprovable and frequently puerile concepts of God. No matter how much one hides behind the sacrosanct concept of God, the fact will remain that abusing women is not religion.