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Alan, aka DudeInMinnetonka's avatar

Years ago I remember the horror I felt reading of the betrayal that the women felt as their grandmothers & aunts held them down for FGM, fwiw that's not even Islamic supposedly more African cultural but to inflict that on your female offspring knowingly because Allah says

Ein milim.. Hebrew for no words

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Karen Hunt aka KH Mezek's avatar

Your writing always challenges the mind. Thank you!

I don't see how Islam can be modernized, in order to do that, it would have to disavow its core teachings, the very purposes of Islam, and at that point Muslims might as well call themselves something else, start a new religion because it won't be Islam. To un-condition the minds of Muslim girls, they have to stop being taught the Quran. They have to stop being Muslims. I really don't see any other way.

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Pablo Naboso's avatar

Unfortunately many things that are incompatible with Western values can be derived directly from Quran. Christianity could modernize and many times did, because controversial things stemmed from tradition rather than directly from Christ’s teaching. In Islam they are hard coded into the definition of what Islam is.

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Karen Hunt aka KH Mezek's avatar

True. Personally, I'm not a religious person. I am a follower of Jesus. Christianity doesn't need to be modernized, yes, there is something to be said for traditions and churches but any large institution eventually becomes corrupt, although there will always be good people doing their best within those institutions. But that's why I stick with the simplicity of Jesus’ teaching, his life, death, resurrection. Unlike Islam, the best thing we can do is go BACK to the heart of Christianity, which is the love and self-sacrifice of Jesus. Jesus said love your enemies. Islam says kill your enemies.

As a child, I had the honor of meeting a true Chrsitian martyr, Richard Wurmbrand, a Jewish Christian pastor who spent 14 years in prison in communist Romania for refusing to give up his faith. My father was Christian author Dave Hunt and he was a friend of our family. Wurmbrand described how he was filled with love for those who persecuted him. A Christian martyr is tortured and killed for refusing to deny their faith and they pray for their tormentors. A Muslim martyr kills himself and tries to kill as many others in the process. Anyway, so many differences…

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Hāns's avatar

I tend to agree, there's no easy answer. There is no place in a society with democratic values for a population who want to assert dominance through threat and fear

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Terry Kayser's avatar

The only way this will ever end is through the total eradication of Islam, there is no other way.

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Charlotte's avatar

A great piece on intergenerational trauma, the roots of narcissism, and the role of women in perpetuating the dark side of Islam. Across all societies, men usually get full blame for their bad behaviour. I have long been saying that male violence does not evolve in a vacuum. It is borne of a system of family and societal dysfunction. No better example than Palestinian extremists.

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Shadow's avatar

I agree with you. Women know the violence thy experience would only get worse or even be murdered if they tried to teach children differently or even leave their situation. A civilization that promotes murder, beheading, raping of children, chaos, violence, terrorism, war, and the lack of humanity can never change. It’s their everyday life.

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KK's avatar

Brilliantly written piece that every student participating in protests and supporting terrorism ought to read. The expression, “there are only 2 ways to engage in this world: from love or from fear” comes to mind. To have a massive and growing society built on fear is pretty overwhelming.

Thank you for sharing.

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Carey Fried's avatar

It’s reality that Islamic societies don’t want to progress. They fight any modernization or update to their primitive principles. What mother doesn’t want better for daughter? Mothers that are traumatized, degraded, depressed, resigned, powerless, disenfranchised.

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Pebbles's avatar

Astutely observed and put into plain language for everyone to understand. Thank you.

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Pablo Naboso's avatar

Thank you. The most important point of your story is that it is the women themselves who perpetuate the oppression of women in Islam. I have observed this a lot and agree. I met countless people who do not comprehend this, and I was not able to explain. Now I am going to show them your article.

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Rachael  Morgan's avatar

It continues to blow my tiny mind that Western people who are ‘pro Palestine’ cannot see this!?!

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Jeff G's avatar

Hmmmm, well… other than that everything is fine amirite? 🤢

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Shelah Horvitz's avatar

To be honest, conditions for women in the west were very close to conditions for women in Muslim countries until very recently. Read European literature. Read Shakespeare. They couldn't own land or even have their own bank accounts. It was considered "asking for it" if they walked out of the house unaccompanied by a man. Even in the US, it was legal for a man to rape his wife until the '90s in most states. I recognize we're talking about degrees here. Things in the west are far better than they are in Muslim countries, but until a couple of hundred years ago it not unheard of for a father to kill his daughter if she didn't marry as he insisted. We have been told since the 1960s how liberated we are in the west. We never got liberated, we just dropped the chains. We may or may not bring in a decent living (we still make a fraction of a man's salary for the same work) and we still do most of the housework and child care, and because we are women we usually are not given plum assignments at work and as a result are held back, both in terms of prestige and financial reward, and that cost expands logarithmically over the course of our lives. We are not equal to men, at all, and we are told that in subtle ways pervasively throughout our lives, and the staunchest enforcers are other women. There is still very much a culture of "know your place," at least in the US.

BUT in the west, women can be educated, hold jobs, they can have their own money, own property, call their own shots. The world finally believes that if they disobey their husbands, they are not entitled to be beaten for it.

That said, it has taken us generations to come so little. We are not equal, but we are also not enchained.

If the sharia law these immigrants insist on were to become the law of the land, our very fragile gains will evaporate overnight, as they did for Iranian women. We cannot let that happen.

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XxYwise's avatar

Most of the sexist stuff in Islam was inherited directly from Judaism, the first religion ever to purge the feminine element from divinity. You ought to try reading the Torah (aka Old Testament) sometime... the misogyny practically leaps from the page!

Judaism has become a vastly more dangerous and destructive religion than Islam ever was. This much is readily obvious from its grotesquely rape-obsessed people's enthusiasm for duplicity, dehumanization, and death.

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Jean O’Regan's avatar

Very sad and challenging. Our precious sisters, only Truth will break them free from their chains

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DEMedia is Propaganda's avatar

Islam Can't Advance. It can't be reformed.

Islam is Islam

Islam is the Quran.

And of course it is False. (See Late Great Chris Hitchens on why it is if one doesn't already know)

Islam like Collectivism is Inherently Evil.

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William “David" Pleasance's avatar

No, lay it at the feet of Mohammad’s (false) revelation. I like to hold the source accountable, to the degree I can, when it comes to bad ideas.

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