[Via FrontPage Magazine]
In light of the ongoing nightmare that is the Islamic State, Foreign Policy, a magazine somewhat reflective of the establishment, has published an article that once again demonstrates why U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is a disaster: because analysts and policymakers, unable or unwilling to grapple with foreign concepts, opt to articulate them through familiar Western paradigms.
Titled “The Islamic State of Sexual Violence” and written by Aki Peritz and Tara Maller—“We both worked as CIA analysts focused on Iraq’s insurgency and counterterrorism during much of the war”—the Foreign Policy(FP) article opens with this telling sentence: “Of the many terrifying stories emerging from Islamic State-occupied Iraq and Syria, the violence directed toward women is perhaps the most difficult to contemplate.”
This is an odd assertion. Of all the atrocities committed by the Islamic State, is sexual violence against women really “the most difficult to contemplate”? After all, deplorable as sexual violence against women is, it is also one of the most common features of warfare since the beginnings of recorded history. It should not be too “difficult to contemplate.”
Instead, one would think that public beheadings and mutilations—with sadistic pictures of the victims posted online—would be more “difficult to contemplate.” One would think herding off 1500 “infidel” men and coldly shooting them in the head to cries of “Allahu Akbar” would be more “difficult to contemplate.” One would think that forcing religious minorities to convert to Islam or die—with Christians crucified for refusing to embrace Islam—would be more “difficult to contemplate.”
But in the very next paragraph we encounter the reason why FP highlights female sexual abuse while ignoring the truly more “difficult to contemplate” atrocities committed by the Islamic State: to exonerate Islam from the deeds of the Islamic State:
IS claims to be a religious organization, dedicated to re-establishing the caliphate and enforcing codes of modesty and behavior from the time of Muhammad and his followers. But this is rape, not religious conservatism. IS may dress up its sexual violence in religious justifications, saying its victims violated Islamic law, or were infidels, but their leaders are not fools. This is just another form of warfare….
That last sentence is what FP wants readers to leave with—“This is just another form of warfare.” The authors chose the most generic atrocity committed during war, one that is common to all cultures and civilizations—sexual violence, enslavement, and rape—to condemn the Islamic State with. The result is that the Islamic State looks like “just another” enemy combatant.
To demonstrate this, the authors proceed to invoke Western standards of “modesty and behavior” to criticize the Islamic State without letting readers know that Islamic notions of “modesty and behavior” differ significantly and are wholly based on Islamic law, not “natural” law or anything else.
Thus while the authors are correct in saying that the Islamic State is “dedicated to re-establishing the caliphate,” the follow up assertion, “and enforcing codes of modesty and behavior from the time of Muhammad and his followers” is immensely loaded and misleading. So is the statement “But this is rape, not religious conservatism.”… Keep reading

mortimer says
Gleeful sadists committing atrocities as a religious ceremony! How perverted real Islam is!
Mohammed clearly considered rape a normative part of jihad and practiced it himself.
Jaladhi says
Muslims commit rape and murder to please the demon Mo/allah and nothing of it!! They have no conscience and they can not distinguish right from wrong, good and evil, moral and immoral!!
yohanan says
Some feminists claim that war rape, sexual enslavement of women, bearing and raising children of their oppressors is the worst part of genocide. Obviously it’s another terrible, long term, unique aspect of genocides — in which first men are murdered then women are raped. However, the worst part?.
See for example the comments to the Armenia genocide documentary Suzanne Khardalian’s “Grandma’s Tattoos” (2011) http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/grandmas-tattoos/#disqus_thread (The author Raymond Ibrahim noted the Armenian genocide in his 24 April 2013 article for example http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/the-forgotten-genocide-why-it-matters-today/)
Raptio is term for the large scale abduction of women including for sexual slavery, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptio
Asides from an evolutionary relic of our primate background, sexual violence and raptio is part of genocidal methods to motivate murdering perpetrators and to further humiliate victims’ group.
In the Holocaust some German Nazi camp doctors castrated Jewish men and sterilized Jewish women — for racist genocidal ideology and not for any valid science. Indeed genocidal sterilization of women can be seen to be worse than genocidal castration men of men only in a narrow demographic sense. (Mass murder of children must be seen as far worse for any prospects of the victims’ group reproductive recovery.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation#Sterilization_experiments
Islamic jihadis’ rape and raptio are glaring reminders that genocide with the enactment law at Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946-47…
Shakespeare said it well in King Lear, one’s own hardship is hard to grade.“I am worse than e’er I was… And worse I may be yet: The worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’”– King Lear 4:1
Silvia says
“‘Just Another Form of Warfare’?”
It’s a form of GENOCIDE!
David says
The CIA analysts are assuming that Islam and Western societies have the same value system. They probably learned about Islam at some elite university where they teach this politically correct nonsense. There is nothing hard to understand about these rapes and they should surprise no educated person. This is what the Caliphate did for all of its existence when it engaged in wars. This behavior is nothing new and has been occurring since Islam began.
boakai ngombu says
in their article the analysts suggest:
“Sexual violence is an important metric for tracking and assessing intimidation and coercion. It also shows how well (or how poorly) a government maintains law and order…” and that such should be studied and evaluated rather than walled off into gender studies and women issues … that “Policymakers must internalize that sexual violence is a brutal weapon of war, just as corrosive to creating a stable society as murder and ethnic cleansing, …” this, in order to adequately describe how brutal IS is.
“We must highlight and call out this war crime at every turn, because the only group that benefits from ignoring this issue is the Islamic State.”
Angemon says
The muslims in the islamic state are directing violence against women because islam means submission, a muslim is someone who submits to the will of allah and allah sanctioned violence against women. They’re not doing anything that muhammad, which islamic orthodoxy praises as the perfect man and a role model to all muslims, didn’t (allegedly)do during his life.
GP says
IS LAM IS HATEFUL!
fair_dinkum says
every time. every time i read an article on this subject (or child brides or pack rapes in the west committed by moslems, or just the teachings of the koran)
i ask “where are you, feminists?”
youre powerful as a group, you are outspoken. your voice would help.
my God, what are you doing just tolerating this?
more food for thought. i cant read an article like this wondering how many men have been raped as well?
dumbledoresarmy says
In Islam, I think Eros has been wholly swallowed up by Thanatos.
Since Islam is a religion of War, and indeed not simply War, but Death, Rape becomes *the* governing paradigm for sexual relations; and not merely ‘ordinary’ rape, but gang-rape, rape-unto-death, and rape of children, of animals, and even of the dead; (The absorption and perpetuation, by a large subset of Islam, of the practice of female genital mutilation, “fits” with this destruction of Eros, because it destroys mutuality in sexual relations; it ensures that the man may experience pleasure but the woman will mostly experience only pain).
Similarly politics, in Islam, collapses into slavery, and below that, into periodic episodes of mass murder.