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"Tradition?? The only good traditions are food traditions. The rest are repressive."

"There are two ways to think. The first is to trust to your ancestors, your religious leaders, or your charismatic professors. The second is to question, to challenge, to explore history for meanings, and to analyze issues. This latter is called Critical Thinking, and it is this that is the mission of my web site. "

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman  

November 2013

Why Some Women Love Violence.

There is an old joke (a John Wayne movie?) that tells of why women put up with violent husbands. “How else can I know he loves me?”

In the developed world, wife beating is no longer considered a sign of love; it is bullying, intimidating, and criminal, which means the batterer can go to prison. But in the modern world, where violence against women is no longer tolerated, it is a mystery why some modern women choose to convert to Islam where wife beating is common. Some not only convert, but also become violent jihadis themselves.

Women comprise 75% of the 5,000 converts to Islam in England, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Most of these converts do so after falling in love with a Muslim man. For most of them, their only association with violence is from their husbands or in-laws, but for some, the excitement and mindlessness of true belief leads to jihadi violence. Female jihadis, hidden in their hijab cloaks, can be very dangerous indeed. Two such carried out suicide bombings in Russia in October and there have been others before them.

Not only love, but mental laziness can contribute to a young woman rejecting the uncertainties and choices availed to modern women. It is much easier to select a life style in which one is not required to think, but only to obey hard and clear rules. Some say that they love wearing hijab so that they are not just sex objects; of course, the very notion of such cover is to prevent other men from seeing one's own private sex object.

The list of violent female converts is growing. Most recently noted is Samantha Lewthwaite, an Irish girl widowed of another terrorist convert; she is implicated in the recent Nairobi attack on a shopping mall. She was seen commanding gunners murdering shoppers at the mall. The first American to die fighting with the Syrian rebels this year was Michigan-born Lynn Mansfield. In 2005, Belgian convert Muriel Degauque blew herself up outside of Baghdad.

For “insulting Islam,” Colleen La Rose (Jihad Jane) and Jamie Paulin-Ramirez attempted to murder Danish cartoonist Lars Vilks for his “insulting” drawings of the Prophet Mohammad. Canadian Amanda Korody and her partner John Stewart Nuttail (converts) tried to make an explosive device in a failed attack on the British Columbian legislature last July. (See Abigail R. Esman, IPT News, October 17, 2013.)

Modern Muslim families range all the way from secular and no different from mainstream families in the West, to traditional and violent. The rash of honor killings show how violent such family life can be, including violence by mothers. Wife abuse, on the other hand, is so common that nobody thinks much about it in immigrant communities. This is just the way it is. But what about those who have no say in their choice of husband?

Recently in Yemen, a very little girl was handed over in marriage to a grown man and her wedding night rape caused her to bleed to death. Although this story is being disputed by local officials, whether true or not, 10 million young girls this year alone will be married to grown men (UNICEF). Traumatic genital injuries and fistulas are common in pre-puberty sex, according to the Hamlin Fistula clinics in Africa. Justification for such outrageous marriages come directly from the model of the Prophet Mohammad, who was married to a six-year-old girl and waited patiently until she was nine to consummate. This is not a good model.

In Muslim countries such as Yemen, clerics declare that opposition to child marriage makes one an apostate from Islam. The same declaration has come from Nigerian Muslims. When Australian Muslim immigrants declare that Islamic child marriages must be “respected” and forced marriage and spousal abuse understood as cultural, some naïve multiculturalists agree that culture must trump.

The one good thing coming from all this horror is that even in the traditional world, things that were once taken for granted are now publicized, and the glare of publicity is embarrassing to Islamists. Women tempted to convert: let the buyer beware.

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Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author of How Do You Know That? You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.

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