Dhimmitude and women: Women to fight "fundamentalism"

A silly story from Reuters, giving news about a silly women's group that is being created to combat "fundamentalism," Christian and Muslim.

Women's groups from Europe, North America, North Africa and the Middle East said they had founded an alliance to fight religious "fundamentalism", both Islamic and Christian, and what they called its oppression of women.

The new grouping, based in Geneva, will seek recognition as a non-governmental organisation (NGO) from the United Nations and campaign against hardliners of all faiths "seeking to deprive women of their human rights", a spokeswoman said.

"Today, threats by fundamentalists and extremists in different countries against the rights and freedoms of women have risen dramatically," it said in a mission statement.

"In some countries, the brutal suppression of women has become part of the law of the land."

Speeches at the founding conference of the body, the Women's International Federation Against Fundamentalisms and for Equality, focussed on women in Moslem countries and those in big Moslem communities in Europe.

"We will also be working against religious fundamentalism and its attack on women everywhere, including by Christian fundamentalist groups in the United States," founder member Margaret Owen, a British human rights lawyer, said.

Swell. I hope they will point out which Christian groups are advocating female circumcision, wife-beating, and stoning for adultery. Their assumption of the equivalence of Christianity and Islam is not only false: it is dangerously misleading in a world in which jihad terrorists are fighting to impose Sharia anywhere they can, and are willing to commit violence to that end.

Habibeh Nafisi, leader of an organisation of Tunisian women living in France, said women in Moslem communities there were under increasing pressure to conform to strict rules laid down by male religious leaders, including wearing "Islamic dress".

This included the hijab headscarf, which France is banning in schools from the autumn of this year despite protests from hardline Moslem leaders and some women who say the move is a violation of their rights.

Nearly 100 women from 18 countries, including Iraq where delegates said the position of women is worsening fast, attended the federation's conference in a Geneva hotel as the UN's Human Rights Commission was discussing religious freedoms.

Buried at the end of the story is a bit of information about a group that isn't silly at all: ex-Muslims who are asking for the freedom of conscience and freedom from coercion and fear that Islamic law denies them.

At a separate meeting, former Moslems who have abandoned the faith for other religions or for humanism, told journalists the world body had become "infused with political correctness" and could not openly discuss oppression in Islamic countries.

The group, including prominent writer on Islamic issues Ibn Warraq, is campaigning for the UN to condemn the practice they say still exists in some Moslem countries of persecuting or executing "apostates" who renounce the faith.

Posted by Robert on April 8, 2004 5:24 PM | 3 Comments
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3 Comments

Chaya | April 9, 2004 11:12 AM

Add Nonie Darwish to the list of former Muslims. She was raised in Gaza and subjected to the anti-Semitic/anti-Western brainwashing; but somehow she managed to escape from it and now lives in the States. She has her own website. I can't remember the exact URL but just Google: "Nonie Darwish" Also, check out Sarah Nasser.

Hugh | April 9, 2004 11:58 AM

Ibn Warraq, so piercing, so informative, so amusing, so altogether delightful, needs to be supported -- to the hilt. Will the American government take note? Is there a Maecenas who will comprehend the significance of his work? Who will support conferences at which ex-Muslims can testify as to Muslim doctrines, and Muslim practices?

The United States was not idle after World War II. Despite the fact that the Red Army had entered and seized most of Eastern Europe, had thrown Masaryk out of his Prague window, had driven Mindszenty and other clerics to seek refuge in embassies and churches, Communism was at the height of its prestige. The Communist parties of Italy and France were the largest parties in Europe. L'Unita and L'Humanite were actually read (by the late 1960s, they were mostly read by Western tourists in such Moscow hotels as the Gostinitya Berlin, with its lovely view of Lubyanka and Detskij Mir).

American subventions helped create the Congress for Cultural Freedom, supported De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats (not yet as corrupt as they would become under Andreotti), paid for editions of books by Russian emigre writers, supported Radio Liberty (with spectacular talks, by such figures as Wladimir Weidle, Nabokov, Stravinsky).

And the United States did not shirk from supporting in every way the testimony of ex-Communists. Alberto Moravia, Arthur Koestler, R. H. Crossman, and others not only had their books supported, but many found their articles published in Encounter, while it existed the best magazine in the Western world.

Among the most effective workers against Communist infiltration in this country, and publicists against it, were those who, like Jay Lovestone, had once been Communists.

Yet because we are afraid to see what is staring us in the face, an Islam which is not a "religion" but a "geopolitical cult," yet is treated with enormous and entirely unmerited respect, and with a regard for tender Muslim sensibilities which causes the non-Muslim world essentially to disarm itself in what is the main battlefield --- not arms, but ideas. Islam is a crazy and hostile and Manichaean doctrine; there are many who through no fault of their own grew up as Muslims, and fought their way to intelligent apostasy. They should be listened to, and Ibn Warraq is one of the most comprehensive, learned, and winning of that growing group of ex-Muslims. It is they, not those who keep pretending that "moderate" Muslims are most to be listened to -- those "moderates" will always fudge, always refuse to recognize the central tenets, always pretend that there are ways to "interpret" away certain phrases, and they will do either because they cannot face the truth themselves, or because they want to do nothing to constrain their own freedom of movement, or their own wellbeing, in the Lands of the Infidels. Their first task, in other words, is not so much to enlighten non-Muslims about Islam, but to soothe things over as much as possible, to pretend that some kind of modus vivendi is possible. This can only lead to a continuation of the unwariness that has been such a disaster so far.

And of course we have no way of distinguishing, in any case, the "false" moderate from the "real" moderate. It is the ex-Muslims, those who expressly reject Islam or those who, in every syllable of what they write, show that they reject Islam (no need to list them here; anyone born into the Muslim world, who persists in telling the full truth, qualifies -- Fouad Ajami and Magdi Allam are two examples).

We learned, from ex-Communists, from defectors, about the Comintern, Willy Munzenberg, Victor Serge, the Trest', Smert' shpionam, the Forest Brothers in Lithuania, the Cheka aka NKVD aka GPU aka KGB, about the second defenestration of Prague (Masaryk), about how Frunze died, and about the "Wreckers' Trials," about the forensic gifts of Andrey Vyshinsky, about Kolyma, Magadan, about Beria's sense of humor, and Stalin's, and about the uses of Peace Congresses in Finland ("Mostovkskiye vechera" etc.). Oh, we learned how front groups are used by Communists in Paris or Hollywood, in Manchester or Barcelona. Do we know how the Islamintern has infiltrated, and virtually taken over the U.N.? Or the BBC? Or Agence France Press?

One can imagine Ibn Warraq, and many Iranians in exile, along with representatives of the Copts, the Assyrian Christians, the Jews of Yemen, Morocco, even some secularized Kabyles (Berbers) flown in from Paris, Nigerian Christian clergyman (so very different from their appeasersand perhaps a lone billionaire, now in permanent exile from Kuwait (perhaps a Shi'a with his roots in the Behbehani district), or even a Saudi architect who has lived in the West, and knows the horrible ideology that his countrymen both endure, and promote -- -- yes, they could, under armed guard, testify before Congress. They could tell us a good deal about what the treatment of dhimmis, about what goes on in the madrasas of Pakistan, about what is said in the khutbas (why not publish a collection of representative khutbas, translated into five or six major languages, so that policymakers all over can acquaint themselves with what is learned, what is inculcated, among Muslims everywhere?

Ibn Warraq ought to be at the center of this. One hopes some powerful what Congressman will invite him to Washington to testify. Such an invitation will not be forthcoming, I'm afraid, from the current Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Lugar,judging by his speech at the Brookings Institution that won Saudi praise last week, which showed he knows nothing about Islam, or about Saudi Arabia.