Female Genital Mutilation Predominant Among Muslim Households

Just don’t point it out to anyone, lest ye be an Islamophobe, aargh!

(Sorry, my daughter is watching Captain Feathersword on “The Wiggles.”  Pirate speak is kinda’ infectious)…

Female Genital Mutilation on British Turf
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, March 20, 2009

Latest reports indicate that approximately 500 girls a year have their genitals mutilated in Britain.

It may come as no surprise to the knowledgeable political and cultural observer that the poor victims of these crimes are not from Christian or Jewish families, nor from Hindu or Buddhist ones. They are to be found predominantly in Muslim households. And being Muslim is a status that gives the victims, and all future victims, the unfortunate distinction of being part of a group that society can’t help, because the lib-Left has made sure that the Muslim culture can never be criticized and, therefore, that its sufferers can never be protected or saved.

Fact: female circumcision is illegal in Britain. But this doesn’t mean that British law enforcement is doing anything about this crime that Muslim communities are perpetrating against their little girls.

The reality: five hundred girls’ genitals are mutilated every year in Britain. Not one arrest. Not one incarceration.

You think protecting little girls’ genitals is more important nowadays than protecting oneself from the charge of being Islamophobic? Think again.

Islamic women haters, therefore, are reigning free in Britain. Enraged at even the thought of female sexuality, the self-appointed guardians of Islamic purity make sure to obliterate the clitorises of little girls before the girls begin to get the concept of their own human agency and the magic of love. In a fascistic effort to deny women even the possibility of personal happiness, individuality and sexual satisfaction, these mutilators start cutting girls at the age of seven or eight-before their menstrual periods begin-so that their sexuality will be amputated forever.

Despite its gruesome terror, this crime is widely practiced throughout world, for it is a crucial ingredient of Islamic gender apartheid and is known as female genital mutilation (FGM). Its ideological premise has been carefully constructed: a girl’s genital area is dirty and unacceptable. How much is amputated varies among cultures. In Egypt only the clitoris is amputated; in countries like Sudan the woman-haters are not so kind. In a savagery called infibulation, the girl’s external genital organs are completely removed: the clitoris, the two major outer lips (labia majora) and the two minor inner lips (labia minora). In Sudan, the term used for this is tahur-which means “cleansing” or “purification.”

More than 130 million women living today have been subjected to this horrifying practice, and more than two million girls are assaulted by it each year. That is more than five thousand girls every day. Many girls lose their lives during FGM, which is often done with broken glass. Most victims suffer from chronic infection and pain for the rest of their lives. The mutilation robs women of their ability to enjoy the fullness of their sexuality and, therefore, the fullness of their lives. Approximately 75 percent of women cannot achieve orgasm without clitoral stimulation; thus, the possibility of sexual satisfaction has been obliterated for millions of women in the Muslim world.

The Muslim communities who practise FGM will not easily abandon their barbarity. The Egyptian government, for example, banned FGM in 1996, but an Egyptian court overturned the ban in July 1997. The problem is that the clitoris mutilators point to traditional teachings that sanction FGM. Islamic tradition, for instance, records the Prophet Muhammad emphasizing that circumcising girls is “a preservation of honor for women.” A legal manual of the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, ‘Umdat al-Salik, which is endorsed by Al-Azhar University of Cairo — the oldest and most prestigious university in the Islamic world — states that circumcision is obligatory for both boys and girls.

Underlying this brutality is the obvious belief that the sexual mutilation of women will help keep the structure of Islamic gender apartheid in place. Keeping FGM legitimized and institutionalized is one of the most effective means to keep women subjugated and caged. The assumption is that amputating the clitoris will kill the woman’s sexual desire and thereby reduce the chances that she will ever toy with the notion of self-determination.

Thanks to the Left’s policy of multiculturalism, where no value can be said to be worse or better than any other (except, of course, if American society and culture is the subject of discussion), FGM is now being widely practised on Western territory. A study estimates that 66,000 women living in England and Wales have suffered FGM, most of them before emigrating from their home country. More than 7,000 girls in Britain alone, meanwhile, are at a high risk of being victims of the crime. At present, we know that more than 500 girls in Britain are being mutilated every year.

This horror show demands a certain question: Where are the leftist feminists in the West crying out in opposition to this crime against their sisters being carried out on their own shores? In what pages, in what demonstrations, are they denouncing the theology that serves as an inspiration to this crime and calling it to account? Where are the Women’s Studies Departments on Western campuses demanding that Islam be confronted on these grotesque elements of misogyny? Where are the columnists of the Nation Magazine, the supposed leader of the humanitarian Left, repudiating this practise and the texts on which is based?

The Left’s cries of indignation are not to be heard because admitting the inferiority of an adversarial culture might very well legitimize Western civilization, a recognition that no leftist can allow if he hopes to retain his identity and social belonging. That’s why the leftist forces in our society do their best to excuse FGM with the tired old mantra: it’s not only Muslims that do it – as if inaction to save human beings from evil is somehow justified because a sin might exist somewhere else.

Hypothetical question: if we could have saved the Jewish inmates from Auschwitz before they were gassed, would it have been right to abort the rescue operation upon discovering that someone, somewhere, in some other place, said or did something anti-Semitic?

Yes, there are non-Islamic parts of Africa whose cultural traditions also dehumanize women and practice FGM. But Muslims are the principal religious group that practices this sexual violence against women. In Egypt, 97 percent of girls are circumcised. And there is no greater revolting image than the smug leftist turning his back on these victims because a non-Muslim somewhere sliced the genitals off of a little girl. How does this self-satisfied inhumanity save the Muslim girls who will be mutilated in the future?

We know that it doesn’t. But alas, this is only another chapter of a long dark story – the story of the Left, with its hands drenched with complicity in human blood, sacrificing human beings on the altar of utopian ideals.

[Editors’ note: Jamie Glazov’s new book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, provides an analysis of the Left’s silence about Islamic gender apartheid. To order a copy, click here.]

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Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine’s editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. His new book is United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.

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