this video was posted on youtube earlier today:

The truth is no islamic country will end forced marriages and child abuse until the pedophile king himself is discredited. In islam’s case culture and religion are to blame not economics.

So far our “aggression” has improved life in iraq and afghanistan maybe we should bomb a few more countries inside the ummah and see if we can continue the pattern.

We may have found a answer that does work.

“Voices are rising in society against this phenomenon and its catastrophes,” said Shawki al-Qadhi, an imam and opposition member in Parliament who has tried unsuccessfully to muster support for a legal ban on child marriage in Yemen in the past. “But despite rejections of it by many people and some religious scholars, it continues.”

What happens to the young child brides in Yemen is most certainly a result of abject poverty and a vicious circle of limited education.

To solely blame religion or Islam for such situations is taking a skewed perspective of the matter, especially by those people who have no actual concept of what life is like for people in those areas where child marriages take place.

It is this very ignorance and widespread poverty in countries like the Yemen that facilitates the continuation of this child abuse and a misapplication of religion by men in power.

Countries like the USA are pouring millions into warfare and active aggression against such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan (where the majority of people just want to live and get by).

What if those same resources were poured into education and social programs that empower the majority of the poorer sectors of these impoverished countries (of which Yemen is also an example)?

You don’t need to annihilate other people’s cultures and religions through ignorance, but if you can, you need to empower them with education and chances of a better life.

allowing girls to be married earlier as long as they did not move in with their husbands until they reached sexual maturity.

That change reflected the triumph of northern Yemen’s more conservative Islamic culture over the secular and Marxist south after North and South Yemen united in 1990. In South Yemen, the government had passed a law in 1979 setting the age of marriage at 16 for women and 18 for men.

But in Yemen, as in Afghanistan — another country where child marriage is common — the fight against Communism ended with the triumph of a hard-line form of Islam. After war broke out in 1994, Ali Abdullah Saleh, then North Yemen’s leader, sent jihadists to fight South Yemen. Critics say he has become politically indebted to conservative Islamists.

It’s in there. The author probably didn’t think he had to point out the obvious.

Agreed.