Islam, 'Honor' Violence, and the Silence of the Progressives

"HONOR DIARIES" might not be coming to a theater near you, at least not if CAIR gets its way. The award-winning documentary about "honor" violence against girls and women in much of the Muslim world was released last month in honor of International Women's Day, and it didn't take long for the Council on American Islamic Relations to slap its all-purpose "Islamophobic!" label on it. The film has been shown in dozens of venues, but CAIR has raised enough of a stink to get screenings cancelled on several college campuses, including the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois.

CAIR — a front group for Islamist extremism that masquerades as a civil rights organization (its first executive director, Nihad Awad, was an open supporter of Hamas) — is good at raising stinks. Last week Brandeis University caved in to demands that it rescind its offer of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a heroic defender of women's rights in the Islamic world. With a life story that reads like a screenplay, Ali has personally experienced many of the evils she fights, including genital mutilation, forced marriage, and savage "honor" crimes. Her remarkable accomplishments should easily merit the honor of any university that upholds reason and intellectual diversity. But Brandeis apparently has different priorities now, like giving CAIR and the Islamophobia-phobes a veto over honorary degrees.

Ali was involved in making "Honor Diaries," which goes out of its way to convey respect for moderate Islam. It spotlights nine eloquent women with roots in the Islamic world, several of whom are devout Muslims — "Islam is my spiritual journey," says one — and all of whom are passionate about exposing the terrible abuses women and girls in many Muslim cultures suffer in the name of family honor. None thinks such horrors should be excused or neglected out of a misplaced cultural sensitivity or political correctness.

But it happens routinely. People prepared to label opposition to employer-paid contraceptives a "war on women" are generally much less willing to channel their outrage at the savagery of honor killings or child marriages in non-Western societies. "They fear treading on cultural toes," saysJasvinder Sanghera, one of the film's featured advocates. "We're constantly having to remind them that cultural acceptance does not mean accepting the unacceptable."

For Sanghera, who fled a forced marriage as a young teen, this is no abstract theory. She is haunted by the memory of her sister, Ravina, who committed suicide rather than "dishonor" her family by leaving the husband she was forced to marry. Also highlighted in the film is Raquel Saraswati, who embraces Islam as a source of strength and peace in her life, yet feels "afraid all the time" of the backlash against those who challenge "honor-based" violence against women.

Efforts by CAIR and its ilk to squelch honest discussion of such grave human-rights issues — and to demonize as "haters" and "Islamophobes" those who do — encapsulate the very perversity "Honor Diaries" seeks to expose: valuing the honor of a community more than a woman's life or voice. But does CAIR's shrill protest reflect what average citizens in Muslim countries think of such a documentary? Or does the "Honor Diaries" Arabic Facebook page, with 95,000 "likes" — and climbing?

I put that question to Nazie Eftekhari, an immigrant from Iran and another of the women "Honor Diaries" focuses on. A successful Minnesota health-care entrepreneur, Eftekhari unhesitatingly describes herself as a "bleeding-heart liberal" and a longtime Democratic Party voter, loyalist, and fund-raiser. She is as mystified as I am.

"The biggest human-rights crisis of our generation is the treatment of women in Muslim-majority countries, and we've applied a gag order to ourselves," she replies with unmistakable distress. "We won't talk about it. Where are my fellow liberals? Where are the feminists?"

In theocratic Iran today, Eftekhari says, the legal age of marriage for girls has been lowered to 9. Men can now marry their adopted daughters. "How can President Obama, who has two young daughters, not be making a huge issue of this?" she wants to know. "It's not marriage, it's statutory rape."

Eftekhari can't understand why so many progressive voices fall silent on an issue she thinks they should be raising the loudest. And she has only contempt for anyone who thinks it progressive to snub those — like Ayaan Hirsi Ali — who so bravely speak out: "Ali needs no degree or honor from Brandeis; she is a guiding light for the women who respect and honor her. But where will Brandeis go to get its respect and honor back?"

Islamists are rising in America while we sleep

By Allen West
4/11/2014

http://allenbwest.com/2014/04/islamists-rising-america-sleep/

This week we covered two key stories that I’m quite certain aren’t getting much play: the rejection of Muslim women’s advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Brandeis University and the Muslim Brotherhood forming a political bloc in America.

We are indeed witnessing the rise of Islamists in America.

How has it come to this, that such a small minority has gained such a powerful political voice and influence? How is it that an organization like the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is even allowed to exist in our Republic?

It’s simple, we have become so damn politically correct that a vile organization that was an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest Islamic terrorist funding case in America can thumb its nose and by intimidation and coercion deny free speech and freedom of expression in our country. We have fallen under the spell of the bumper sticker “coexist” and have failed to heed the lessons of history.

What is even worse, we have failed to even take this enemy — yep, I mean it –enemy to heart for what they have openly stated their objective to be. Just read the Strategic Memorandum discovered in 1991 if you still have any doubts.

However, most importantly, we have seen a class of political cowards who castigate those of us who recognize this enemy as “Islamophobes” and “extremists.”

And why is that possible? Because we refuse to develop our own energy independence so that we can tell OPEC and the 56 nations of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to get bent. Instead, they use our petrodollars to hold us hostage, fund their Islamic terrorism, export their materiel propaganda, and worst of all, buy off American political cowards.

We need to follow the money in America from these Islamist organizations to any politician and defeat them. We then need to find courageous men and women who will be relentless in identifying these Islamist infiltrators and their enablers, and ban them from operating in our country.

If the Egyptians can categorize the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, so should the United States of America.

And in turn, classify those groups associated and listed in the Strategic Memorandum of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations and cease their operations in America.

This is no laughing matter. It is not about “freedom of religion” — as a matter of fact, Islam stopped being a religion in 622 when Muhammad decided to undertake the “”hejira” (migration) and departed Mecca for Medina.

When he returned to Mecca in 628 iit was after breaking the Treaty of Hudaibiya and massacring the occupants of Mecca in the Battle of the Trenches. Thus began the violent march of the theocratic-political totalitarian system, a global scourge for the past 1400 years known as Islam. America battled this enemy in the Barbary Wars, first from1801-1805, and then in 1815. The specter of the past has returned, but do we have a Jefferson and Madison who will give the order to crush this enemy — or will we continue down the path with feckless, accommodating, and acquiescing leadership which offers the throat of our Republic to this rabid barbaric foe?

If there is one thing that is bipartisan it is the failure of Democrat and Republican senior elected officials to confront this enemy — and therefore they exploit this weakness.

I cannot say this often and enough: When tolerance becomes a one-way street, it leads to cultural suicide.

Sorry, I ain’t going down this way, and to Nihad Awad, Ibrahim Hooper, and all the other Muslim Brotherhood facilitators and Islamists in America — enjoy it for now, but your dawg don’t hunt!

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