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Hugh Fitzgerald: Rahaf Mohammed, Linda Sarsour, and the Question of Apostasy (Part One)

Jan 23, 2019 10:00 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

The saga of the 18-year-old Saudi girl, Rahaf Mohammed, has ended. She is now safe in Canada, where she was granted asylum, and was even greeted at Toronto’s airport on January 10 by Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland. She had been on the run from her family who, she said, might well kill her. Her crime? Daring to think for herself. At the age of 16, she had apparently thought for herself, and decided to leave Islam. She did not announce it to anyone in her family, but from that time forth she began to plan her escape from Saudi Arabia. She was in touch by email with another Saudi girl, also an apostate, who had managed to make it safely to the West, and from whose example Rahaf took heart. She initially set her sights on Australia.

When the family traveled to Kuwait on vacation in early January, she saw her chance. Once they were in Kuwait, she managed to evade the rest of her family and returned to the airport, where she took a flight to Thailand. At the Bangkok airport, she was met by Thai officials working with the local Saudis. They took away her passport, but did not take possession of Rahaf herself. She checked into an airport hotel, where she locked herself in a room. Thai guards stood outside. An official of Kuwait Airways came to plead with her, through a closed door, to go back to Kuwait. Nothing doing. Meanwhile, Rahaf Mohammed was contacting her friends on her phone, social media spread the story, and her plight was picked up by major news outlets, including the BBC and CNN.

The huge international outcry led Thai authorities to grant UNHCR (United Nations High Commission For Refugees) access to her “to assess her need for international refugee protection,” the UNHCR said in a statement.

Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said: “Today really was a good day for the cause of human rights around the world, with Rahaf’s tremendous courage and resilience being met with a global surge of sympathy for her. It all came together to persuade Thailand to do the right thing.”

Rahaf was still in Thailand when her father and brother arrived in Bangkok. She refused to see them; she said she was in “fear for her life.” In any case, we can all imagine the kind of performance they would put on if she had finally consented to such a meeting. Aware that they were being filmed, the father would no doubt have promised, in the nicest possible way, not to harm her in the least “if only you come home now, my daughter, and stop making a spectacle that is hurting our family and our country.” His wary daughter didn’t give him that chance.

Rahaf’s public plea for asylum expanded to include Canada, the U.S., and the United Kingdom, as well as Australia. Canada was the first to respond, and now she is safe in Toronto.

It’s a very important case. Thanks to Rahaf Mohammed, the world has been given a good look at several aspects of Islam that deserve to be held up for inspection.

First, there is the demonstration that despite Qur’an 2:256, a favorite verse for Islamic apologists that says “there is no compulsion in religion,” the example of Rahaf Mohammed shows that there most certainly is “compulsion” in the religion of Islam. The threat of death for apostasy, which Rahaf Mohammed clearly fears, constitutes all the “compulsion” any Muslim needs to stay within the faith. As for non-Muslims, it is true that People of the Book, ahl al-kitab — Jews, Christians, and Sabeans — are permitted to remain alive, and even to practice their religions, but they can do so only as “dhimmis,” tolerated as long as they fulfill a long list of onerous and humiliating conditions, of which the most important is the Jizyah tax. And that explains why millions of non-Muslims have, over the centuries, converted to Islam, because they knew it was the only way to escape from the conditions imposed on them as dhimmis. That need to escape dhimmi status constitutes another kind of “compulsion in religion.”

Second, there is the treatment of this 18-year-old girl by her devout Muslim family, which has given the world’s Infidels a vivid idea of Muslim family relations, with a despotic father who exercises total control over his children, and where a brother can similarly act as an “enforcer” for a disobedient sister. For having her hair cut in a way her family did not approve — was it merely a matter of taste, or was it deemed un-Islamic? — Rahaf was locked in her room for six months. This is one example her own story has brought to the world’s attention, demonstrating  the kind of power wielded by Muslim males over an errant female family member. It’s a horrifying  picture.

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Filed Under: Apostasy, Featured, Hugh Fitzgerald Tagged With: Linda Sarsour, Rahaf Mohammed


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Comments

  1. Michael Copeland says

    Jan 23, 2019 at 11:21 am

    Remember a different Saudi teenage girl whose story was featured on JihadWatch a few years ago. She converted to Christianity. Her father, hearing of it, cut out her tongue, lectured her on the Koran, then poured gasoline over her and burnt her alive.

    • gravenimage says

      Jan 23, 2019 at 10:44 pm

      Yes–just horrifying.

    • JM says

      Jan 24, 2019 at 6:15 am

      Dreadful and barbaric beyond belief – which is what Islam is.

  2. Terry Gain says

    Jan 23, 2019 at 12:12 pm

    Second, there is the treatment of this 18-year-old girl by her devout Muslim family, which has given the world’s Infidels a vivid idea of Muslim family relations, with a despotic father who exercises total control over his children, and where a brother can similarly act as an “enforcer” for a disobedient sister.
    ……..

    I’ve heard rumors that Gillette will soon be putting out an ad that addresses toxic masculinity.

  3. eduardo odraude says

    Jan 23, 2019 at 12:33 pm

    I guess Rahaf was lucky. Seems a lot of things could have gone wrong for her during the course of her escape. Every decent heart should celebrate that she made it, and wish her a long and happy life.

    I wonder why she flew to Thailand. Was that the safest destination available from the airport where she left her family?

    Unfortunately for other Saudi ladies, I suppose it will now be a bit more difficult to manage an escape like this. Saudi families will become more vigilant and careful. Suggestion to Saudi ladies planning escape from Islam and Saudi Arabia: Behave as if you were super-devout, super-Islamic, so your family and no one else will suspect.

    • JM says

      Jan 24, 2019 at 6:14 am

      Good point. We all wish Rahaf well – a safe, happy life in the democratic country of Canada, free to make her own choices. She has a bright future ahead of her and deserves all our good wishes for her courage and steadfastness. However, it will now be even more difficult for other Saudi ladies to leave their horrible Islamic prison of a country. As you say, they will have to act very carefully in order not to arouse suspicion in their families.

      • Dave says

        Jan 24, 2019 at 8:50 am

        JM, at the moment, Canada is democratic, but for how long? Turdeau bends over backwards to appease muslims. This recent move is suspicious. Maybe she is not as safe as she has been lead to believe. Does she have any security supplied by the State?

    • jule says

      Jan 24, 2019 at 10:53 pm

      The article says ‘safe in Canada’ but I know she is not. Someone will always be planning to avenge Allah and do something to her.

    • Brian hoff says

      Jan 25, 2019 at 4:48 am

      You are assumed that all saudi woman ans girls want to leave Islam. I challenge than treacher who said pirminate man have no writen language. I said you are makeing than assume since we fround no written materials that they have no written language. If they wrote on bark and leafs or make ancient paper like the ancient Egyptian we would find any as they would destory thenself with the passage of time.

      • jule says

        Jan 25, 2019 at 3:45 pm

        The ASSUMPTION that the Qur’an/Hadiths and all the ancient warlord customs are commands of Allah instead of men is false. All these people living and fighting under false values set up to benefit warlord leaders & criminals is something that really should be studied. But then those who want to study it get imprisoned or killed, right? That right there should give a hint to their lies to control people.

      • gravenimage says

        Jan 26, 2019 at 11:14 pm

        The repulsive “Brian hoff”–really, “DefenderofIslam”–wrote:

        You are assumed that all saudi woman ans girls want to leave Islam.
        …………………………..

        No one has ever said that all Saudi women want to leave Islam–just that they should be able to without being threatened with death. Does “Brian hoff” have a problem with apostates from Islam being murdered? Not so he says…

        More:

        I challenge than treacher who said pirminate man have no writen language. I said you are makeing than assume since we fround no written materials that they have no written language. If they wrote on bark and leafs or make ancient paper like the ancient Egyptian we would find any as they would destory thenself with the passage of time.
        …………………………..

        Hey, the “Pophet” Muhammed was illiterate and “DefenderofIslam” has barely managed to adopt “writen” language himself, so his claim that “pirminate” man likely was literate does not hold much water…

  4. Or Else! says

    Jan 23, 2019 at 2:54 pm

    In any truly just world, there would be laws against ANY ideological software–including religious–that orders and results in DEATH to almost everyone that disagrees/differs/criticizes it.

    If trotted out as a brand new ideology today, Islam wouldn’t stand a chance. It’d be dismissed as a totalitarian, supremacist, misogynistic, homophobic, death/sex cult.

    And yet….even with 1400 (and counting) barbarous years on its resume–directly derived from its software–Islam still has apologists in Western civilization.

    ===============================================================================

    Christopher Hitchens, 2009: “This is very urgent business, ladies and gentlemen, I beseech you: resist it while you still can and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing. You will be told, you can’t complain – because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture, as if it’s an accusation of race hatred for example or bigotry; whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion.”

  5. dan christensen says

    Jan 23, 2019 at 3:48 pm

    The clever girl did not loose her head in a tight situation. Had she been sent back to her islamic hellhole, she surely and really would have lost her physical head.
    Good luck and happiness to the girl – finally free from religious oppression.

    • jule says

      Jan 25, 2019 at 3:50 pm

      I would say that she must look over her shoulder every day in Canada for the Muslim groups there who would avenge ‘Allah’ and hope to move Canada into Sharia, since anything other is seen as SIN against Islam. And they Do live in Canada too.

  6. Rarely says

    Jan 23, 2019 at 5:53 pm

    Hopefully she doesn’t give any media interviews. She could be persecuted under Canada’s new draconian hate speech laws and deported. And it wouldn’t be back to Thailand.

  7. Geoffrey de Brito says

    Jan 23, 2019 at 8:13 pm

    She won’t be safe until she’s put into a ‘witness protection program’ and given a new identity.

    • Wellington says

      Jan 23, 2019 at 8:44 pm

      I strongly suspect you’re correct and which serves as just one more example and condemnation (as if anymore were needed) of the worst religion ever created by man.

      Hey, Linda Sarsour, what do you say? How will you twist this poor young woman’s plight into demonstrating how wonderful Islam is and how Mo was a great human rights’ activist?

      • ElderlyZionist says

        Jan 24, 2019 at 8:48 am

        I’m sure that Linda Sarsour wouldn’t want to kill Ms. Mohammed. Linda would want to take her vagina away. I don’t know what she would do with it. Apparently Linda collects them.

    • Eagle says

      Jan 24, 2019 at 10:10 am

      https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/01/islamic-party-of-ontario-to-run-in-next-election-says-islam-is-canadas-native-religion-anti-hate-groups-silent
      The Islamic party of Ontario to run in next election could put her a risk.

  8. gravenimage says

    Jan 23, 2019 at 10:38 pm

    Hugh Fitzgerald: Rahaf Mohammed, Linda Sarsour, and the Question of Apostasy (Part One)
    ……………………

    Such a brave and resourceful girl. So glad she escaped.

  9. Eagle says

    Jan 24, 2019 at 10:05 am

    https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/01/islamic-party-of-ontario-to-run-in-next-election-says-islam-is-canadas-native-religion-anti-hate-groups-silent
    The Islamic party of Ontario to run in next election may put her at risk.

  10. Jack Cade says

    Jan 24, 2019 at 11:29 am

    Another incident proving Muslims have no claim to live in civilized countries. God bless this girl.

  11. Ed says

    Jan 24, 2019 at 11:33 am

    Will be interesting how this will play out in MSM, Liberal Government and Pro Muslim advocacy groups in Canada, including their influence of Government.

    Was Rahaf aware of 16+ mosques and 80,000+ Muslims poised in Ottawa (Canada’s Washington DC equivalent) to lobby pro-Islamic changes Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms or how quickly Canada is succumbing to Islam, i.e. making a mistake in choosing Canada as a country of refuge?

    Did Islamic interests influence Canada’s acceptance of providing asylum under the adage “keep friends close, enemies closer”?

    By keeping Rahaf alive, will she become Islam’s poster girl for apostasy – “see, there is no death sentence here!”?

    How will the Chairman of Canada’s anti-“Islamophobia” M-103 committee, Hedy Fry (who once said – “We can just go to British Columbia in Prince George, where crosses are being burned on lawns as we speak,” (sic) fame) apply their newly crafted recommendations on anything that comes out of Rahaf’s mouth? (Prince George is in British Columbia, Canada – not as implied being the other way around.)

    Will MSM simply be ordered to steer away from reporting anything on her?

    Will she suffer an unexplained accident subject to Terms and Conditions of the local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood? (Especially after Hillary et al seek asylum in Canada to avoid prosecution. Remembering Vince Foster.)

  12. Valerie Price says

    Jan 24, 2019 at 3:04 pm

    What I want to know is how she got a ticket to Bangkok? Who paid for it? Surely she didn’t have the cash or a Visa Card. There is something here that it not clear to me.

    • gravenimage says

      Jan 26, 2019 at 11:17 pm

      She did have a credit card. I don’t know if it was in her name, or belonged to a family member. Are you really upset that she may have cadged air fare when her life was being threatened?

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