Sheikh Qaradawi contends that women bring sexual abuse on themselves if they fail to conform to Islamist conventions of modest dress. Shahid Mehdi, a top Islamic cleric in Denmark, has explained that women who fail to don a headscarf are asking to be raped, an admonition echoed by Sheikh Faiz Mohammed, a prominent Lebanese cleric, during a lecture he delivered in Australia.McCarthy closes with this:
The Koran pronounces that “Allah has made men superior to women” (Sura 4:34). As documented in “Sharia Law for Non-Muslims,” a study published by the Center for the Study of Political Islam, Mohammed declared that women are inferior to men in both intelligence and religious devotion (Bukhari hadith 1.6.301), and that women will make up most of those condemned to Hell. (Bukahri 7.62.132). Sexual abuse is encouraged not only by hadith but — as I related in discussing the recent case of a teenager flogged to death in Bangladesh — by sharia standards that make rape practically impossible to prove and subject women to a death sentence for adultery or fornication if they come forward with an accusation but cannot prove it.There is a fundamental chasm between the Western worldview and that of the Muslim world. It's a difference that cannot be bridged simply by dialogue. Indeed, it's a difference that probably can't be bridged at all inasmuch as Muslims demand that the West compromise its values and adopt theirs, and that until such a capitulation occurs there'll never be peace between the two worlds. In other words, there'll be jihad until the whole world is Islamic and living under a law that looks the other way when Muslim men rape women whose dress is insufficiently decorous.
Islamic scriptures endorse wife-beating (Koran 4:34 again). Female genital mutilation is rampant in the Muslim world and scripturally based.
As Caroline Glick notes, the World Health Organization reports that 97 percent of Egyptian women and girls have been subjected to this form of barbarism.
This despicable treatment is fortified by standards that treat women’s testimony as inferior to men’s, permit men to marry up to four women, and deny women the right to hold many public offices — particularly those that involve the construction of Islamic law and issuance of fatwas.
The unmistakable message at the core of sharia is that women, like non-Muslims, are less than fully human.
The Western world, stumbling along on the rapidly diminishing capital of its Christian heritage, still nevertheless places a premium on the values of love, forgiveness, and compassion. The Islamic world, on the other hand, values, or at least too often appears to value, hate, vengeance, and cruel punishment. It's unfortunate but it's hard to imagine how these twain could ever meet.
On a somewhat related note a representative of CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) took the occasion of a recent town hall meeting to challenge newly-elected GOP congressman Allan West (an Iraq war vet) to show where it says in the Koran that Muslims should kill Americans - a claim that West had allegedly made.
The man was posing a specious challenge, obviously, and West made light work of the fellow's pretension, to the great delight of the crowd at the meeting:
It seems that the November 10th election has ushered into political office an entirely new class of politicians, a group of men and women who are not inclined to be deferential to "aggrieved" minorities and who know how to exert leadership.
