I wrote here about Obama adviser Dalia Mogahed's pro-Sharia appearance on a Hizb ut-Tahrir television show in Britain. Now, in "Does Sharia Law Promote Women's Rights?" in FrontPage (October 20), Cinnamon Stillwell reveals even more about the deceptions, half-truths and soothing fictions about women's rights under Sharia that Mogahed and Nazreen Nawaz peddled on that program:
[...] In delivering these outlandish pronouncements, Mogahed was soft-spoken and careful to confine her commentary to the results of her study. Not so with fellow guest Nazreen Nawaz, who took up the bulk of the interview expounding didactically on the benefits to be bestowed upon humankind by the revival of a Khilafah state, or caliphate. The caliphate envisioned by Nawaz is a mythical one, hearkening back to the so-called "golden age of Islam," where, according to the party line, all was progress and advancement and everyone lived in harmony. If we could only return to the halcyon days, she urged, all the considerable problems of the Muslim world would be solved. As she put it: "Islam came to solve human problems." These utopian beliefs reflect those Marxists who insist that "real communism" has not yet been implemented, Stalinism or totalitarianism is an aberration, and that the solution lies in implementing a "true" Socialist state.Claiming that the brutality of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the mullahs in Iran are distortions of sharia law rather than examples of its true implementation, Nawaz promised that under the proposed caliphate, rulers would be democratically elected and accountable to the people, while women's rights would be protected.
Demonstrating the utter delusion of a fanatic, Nawaz alleged that:
We know that sharia pioneered rights for women. This idea that women have the same rights of citizenship to a man, this was unheard of in empires or civilizations of the past. And we know that Islam brought this.Nonetheless, Nawaz conceded that "there is evidence from Islam that says the Muslim woman cannot be the ruler of a state. This is from the Islamic text," but managed to justify this exclusion by pointing to recent Muslim women leaders such as the late Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan who, she claimed, have "brought very little in terms of the lives and the standard of living of women in these countries."
She also defended Islam's "strict regulations in terms of social laws" and expressed admiration for precisely those features of Islamic law that most oppress women:
...men and women cannot socialize, they cannot be alone together...in terms of lowering the gaze, all of these things, the dress code, they're all there to insure that there's a healthy cooperation so that men and women can focus at the job at hand.In contrast, Nawaz condemned the West for allowing women too much personal freedom, citing the breakdown of the family and promiscuity as the results:
I think living in the West we see some of the fruits of this idea of liberty and this idea of freedom, where people are free to have any relationship they want to. I believe that it's caused a lot of problems in the social structure, you have adultery, you have problems of teenage pregnancies....These are indeed dire consequences, just not, as Nawaz believes, of personal liberty. Rather, they result from the dissolution of the moral framework that supports liberty itself. The struggle to maintain the family structure and women's dignity amidst growing libertinism is alive and well in the West. But when given the choice, who would trade liberty for the opposite outcome: totalitarianism?
Furthermore, Nawaz demonstrated a lack of understanding about how women's rights, and indeed human rights, have been achieved historically in the West:
Women have made a lot of progress in the West in terms of economic, political rights, education, and so on. But I would reject the claim that these values of secularism, and liberal values, and even in terms of democracy have, that they can claim victory for this progress. Because if we remember history, women actually had to fight against these values in order to secure their rights....And women even today have to fight in secular democracies against discrimination of these levels.In the face of this vigorous defense of sharia law and strident condemnation of secular democracy, Washington insider Mogahed said not a word. Only when prompted to comment directly on one of Nawaz's diatribes on the fictional caliphate did Mogahed finally speak, and then she restated the results of the Gallup poll in such a way as to provide backhanded support for Nawaz's Islamist views. As she put it:
What Muslims around the world tell us they believe is that the key to progress is attachment to their spiritual and moral values. They really do see, many of them, that Islam offers a solution for their problems and they see Islam as their society's greatest asset. When we asked people what they admired most about the Muslim world, what they tell us is their attachment to Islam, Islamic values, value of hospitality, the value of family. So I think that whereas people around the world do feel that the problems are diverse, many of them do mention Islam as a part of that solution, and when we ask people what can Muslims do to help themselves, one of the most frequent responses is for them to unify and another is for them to follow Islam and make it a greater and more authentic part of their lives.If making Islam a "greater and more authentic part" of Muslim's lives results in the implementation of sharia law, based not in mythology but in contemporary practice, the predictable outcome is the furtherance of backwardness, repression, intolerance, and inequality afflicting the Muslim world today. Is this really, as Mogahed would have it, what Muslims want?
Read it all.
Yeah, right. (rolleyes)
And Jim Crow promoted the rights of African Americans.
Nazism protected the rights of the Jews.
/end sarcasm
This is another "Goebbels Special." Tell a BIG lie. Tell it with a straight face. Tell it over and over. Never respond to legitimate criticism. Ignore valid evidence to the contrary. Do all that and many fools will believe you.
Isn't there some kind soul who could tell them the obvious:
Get rational, rid yourselves of superstition, assume responsibility for your own lives, stop blaming everyone else (Jews in particular) for your misery.
And tell them to read "Atlas Shrugged" rather than "Mein Kampf"...
Asking them to do more Islam renders them ungovernable.
Isn't there some kind soul who could tell them the obvious:
Be rational, rid yourselves of superstition, assume responsibility for your own lives, stop blaming everyone else (Jews in particular) for your misery.
And tell them to read "Atlas Shrugged" rather than "Mein Kampf"...
"Islam came to solve human problems."
Ok, so that's why the Islamic world is such a beacon of human rights, freedom and progress in today's world.
I get it.
djrz, I think we need to educate the fools, too. Much work at hand...
Dalia Mogahed's large government salary is paid by American taxpayers. She is, in essence, a full-time propagandist for Islam that we all pay for. Her propaganda, or her apologetics, are hidden behind those opinion polls -- she's a johnny one-note on this -- the ones she and her collaborator, the shamelessly venal and full-time apologist John Esposito, conducted. She never, ever, discusses the actual contents of Qur'an, Hadith, Sira, or the doctrine of Jihad; she doesn't have to, you see -- she's merely reporting vaguely the vague results of her vague opinion polls, making sure that she says nothing of substance, always reporting on "what Muslims want" or "what Muslims say" and as in the case above, when she reports that Muslims say that what they, the world's Muslims, can most do to "help themselves" is "to unify" and "to follow Islam and make it a greater and more authentic part of their lives" these are ways of saying -- how many non-Muslims will understand this -- for Muslim unity in the classic, desired way, with restoration of a Caliphate that will provide the right instrument for such a unifying, and for even more Islam, when we all know that the hopes of some of us, for coexistence in any reasonable fashion depend on Muslims being "moderate"which is to say, not taking Islam too deeply to heart, but ignoring a great deal of it. The rest of us, however, and all of the articulate apostates,know that this "moderate" Muslim business is a vague concept, one whose meaning has never been clear, and that there are so many examples of Muslims practicing "war is deceit" -- offering the "moderate" line at, for example, Interfaith-Healing meetings, and then either being arrested for involvement in unsavory activities or revealed to be up to their necks in preaching hatred of Jews and Christians, or even, on not a few occasions, simply disappearing from this country, and then surfacing in the Middle East, where they proceed to rip off the mask of "moderation" and say what they really think.
Dalia Mogahed has been given a high government job and visibility. But she will not explain, she will not even hint at the truth, about the ideology of Islam. Employed by American taxpayers, her loyalty is to Islam. How could it be otherwise? In her Community-Outreach -- explaining Muslim desires and needs to the Administration, it appears is all of it, and there is no concomitant explaining of the perfectly reasonable expectations of the government for which she works as to Muslim behavior and the inculcation of doctrines and attitudes somehow made less dangerous for non-Muslims, for American legal and political institutions and American civilization to which, pace Obama's grotesque assertion, Muslims have contributed exactly nothing, and if they had so contributed, it would be to change those legal and political institutions in ways that would make them more amenable to, consonant with, the Shari'a. And the imposition of the Shari'a, the desideratum of all Believers in Islam, or at least they must say it is, and many who may not be deep believers, even may secretly recognize what is wrong with the Shari'a, nonetheless act in ways that further its spread, for Muslim loyalty to Islam, blind and unquestioning, results in all kinds of amazing behavior and uncritical attitudes and confusions necessarily resolved -- save in the case of those who have made their way to the broad uplands of apostasy -- in favor of Islam.
But when given the choice, who would trade liberty for the opposite outcome: totalitarianism?
Unfortunately, too many people would gladly make that choice. What we call totalitarian they see as order. Freedom can be messy. They'll choose a little temporary safety over the chaos that can come with liberty. It has happened throughout history and will happen again, Benjamin Franklin notwithstanding. It could even happen here in America. We continue to surrender our liberty, bit by bit, in an attempt to buy security. We surrender our freedom to associate. We surrender our freedom to express our thoughts, lest we be charged with hate crimes. What do we expect to come from this? Peace and harmony? The joke's on us.
"The caliphate envisioned by Nawaz is a mythical one, hearkening back to the so-called "golden age of Islam," where, according to the party line, all was progress and advancement and everyone lived in harmony." -- from the article.
No doubt Marie Antoinette had a similar rosy view about how simply beautiful life was for her as a member of the pampered royal family.
There are many places Muslims can go where the umma is unified and Islam is the greatest authentic part of daily life. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan,Somalia, Indonesia, there are plenty of places where Dar al Islam exists. Go there and live your authentic life, stop trying to change my culture.