On November 2, 2004, Theo van Gogh -you can find his picture on the homepage of this site- was murdered. Because of that, five years later, I completed my first book: ‘Islamofobie? Een nuchter antwoord’. Yes that is Dutch. (Hier kan het nog steeds besteld worden).
‘Islamophobia? A down to earth answer‘ seems to me to be the best English translation.
In the preface I indicated that although I had studied a lot to write it, I did not want to call it a scientific treatise.
It was the first Dutch book with the word ‘Islamofobie‘ in the title. Books with that word in the title that later appeared in The Netherlands were much more than mine, totally politically motivated. There is really no trace of curiosity in some of them.
A turnaround
My last two blog posts and podcasts were each about two related events; In October and November 2023 respectively.
Hamas’s major terror attack against Israel took place on October 7, and national elections were held in the Netherlands on November 22.
The internationally most famous and still living Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, achieved a major election win and became by far the largest party in our ‘House of Commons’.
Taken together – this deserves some emphasis – this makes me, as the author of that cautionary book, more optimistic than I have been since its publication.
But I’m not completely reassured.
Worldwide, hatred against Jews has increased sharply.
And I fear that real Islamophobia has increased rather than decreased.
People who, despite the courage required to do so, point out the resilience of Mohammedan fundamentalism are certainly not afraid and are definitely not pathologically afraid as the term Islamophobia suggests.
Real Islamophobia can be found in the West among people who accuse rational, level-headed critics of the teachings of Mohammed of this.
People who are terrified and bury their heads in the sand. They want to deceive themselves and they want to kowtow towards Muslims – no matter how fundamentalist – in the hope that when Islam comes to power in their country, they, as critics of Islam’s critics, will be treated more kindly than atheists, Yazidis and Hindus.
My main fear is that it has become easier for these people through all kinds of ‘erasing of history‘ (see the link further down). That all kinds of information is now more difficult to find.
I have therefore carried out a kind of ‘review’ on the notes in part of my book ‘Islamophobia? A down to earth answer‘.
The elephant in the living room
My book, in Part II, contains 20 chapters and sections whose titles begin with ‘Fear: …‘.
The longest two of these were about (the origins of) Turkey and Israel, respectively: both covered 20 pages and included over 40 notes. Titles: ‘Fear: Turkey and Europe‘ and ‘Fear: Peace with the Palestinians is Impossible‘.
If I were writing the book now, the longest chapter would be on women’s rights: the chapter called “The Elephant in the Living Room” in the published version.
Of the 30 notes in it, half contain references to URLs; in other words, online sources. I checked those carefully.
Sentenced to gang rape and therefore suicide
Notes 20 to 23 are about a young Pakistani woman named Mukhtar Mai. The culture in parts of Pakistan rivals that in eastern Congo for the title of most misogynist in the world. In 2003, the world was introduced to the phenomenal resilience of a young, divorced woman from a poor family: Mukhtar Mai.
The part about her is one of the most gruesome, perhaps the most gruesome, in the entire book. The title of that piece is not immediately clear to those who have not or hardly entered the Islam file: ‘Koran versus hudud?‘.
The elders of her village had not even accused the young woman of any behavior that would be reprehensible according to their Mohammedan views. Let this sink in!
Only her brother was accused of something: the 12-year-old boy was said to have spoken (!) to the 20-year-old young woman from the wealthiest family of the village. The village council then decided that Mukhtar should be raped by a number of relatives of that rich daughter as retaliation (!) and immediately after that ‘verdict’ this was carried out. Although this was actually expected of her in this culture and she initially intends to do so, Mukhtar does not commit suicide. She fights back and wins. Some time later she manages to flee the country to the US.
Note 20 mentions that the fate of Mukthar Mai was unfortunately not a unique occurrence in Pakistan. More women are being raped as punishment.
The link I provided in that note no longer works. The site in question still exists: www.monstersandcritics.com.
Searching on that site works -quickly and well- but does not search further back than 2014. You could think of ‘Erasing history‘: not as some conspiracy, but as a result.
If you wish, see these recent articles on the OldDutchPainter on that subject: Non self-reading & tangible mail and Erasing history and repairing the past.
It sounds unlikely, but that statement by those chiefs and that series of rapes themselves were not the most shocking aspects of the story about Mukthar Mai. These were statements made by the disgusting president of Pakistan in 2006. When asked why he initially did not want to give permission for her fleeing to the US, Musharraf said that
.. rape had become a lucrative business. People say if you want to go abroad and become rich, let yourself be raped.
When attacked for this disgusting suggestion, he complained that:
… Pakistan is alone under attack for something that is happening worldwide.
The URL that I gave in note 21 led to an article in the NewStatesman in 2009. That link is now dead. That site still exists. Searching that site does yield a working link to an interview with Mukhtar Mai, but that is an account that a certain Samira Shackle only had with Mukhtar Mai in 2012 (that serial rape took place in 2002).
Not more shocking, but more painful, is part of the sequel to the story that can be found in a book that Mai herself wrote together with a certain Marie Thérése Cuny (ISBN 1844084094, published early 2007).
In that book you can read that the raped, semi-illiterate woman earned money by giving Qu’ran lessons …
Unfortunately, my country is still ruled by those barbaric traditions that the state is unable to eradicate. Depending on their views, the judges waver between the official law of the Islamic (!) Republic of Pakistan, which moves too slowly towards real equality between men and women, and the hudood laws, which mainly penalize women.
Hudood, also written as Hudud, are the rules that most directly arise from Mohammedan thought. Including the Qu’ran. Hence the strange title: ‘Quran versus hudud?‘.
Women are delicate creatures
Note 6 refers to a BBC article about Aceh, a province of Indonesia with some extra fame in the Netherlands because of the so-called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aceh_War Aceh War and because of the special Dutch Islam researcher Snouck Hurgronje.
The piece was dated September 14, 2009 and was about ‘sham floggings’.
On page 208 I wrote:
The Indonesian province of Aceh is increasingly falling under the control of organized Islam. That grip is not yet so strong that public corporal punishment can be carried out. As a result, people now make do with ‘pretend corporal punishment’ for women who are guilty of walking alone on the street at night. They are publicly humiliated, including ritually waving sticks, but not (yet) actually beaten.
However, the piece stated that:
Married people convicted of adultery can be sentenced to death by stoning. Unmarried people can be sentenced to 100 lashes with a cane.
And also:
The legislation was passed unanimously by Aceh’s regional legislature, said assembly member Bahrom Rashid.
However, the governor blocked that law. But this was not yet certain when that article was published! At the library of the US Congress I found more about the follow-up to that unanimously passed law. The title of this paragraph is also derived from that piece: They are delicate creatures. About the ban on sitting as a female passenger on the back of the man’s motorcycle with one leg on each side.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8254631.stm The BBC URL I mentioned still works! Even at the beginning of 2024 you can still read that the piece ends with all kinds of more or less reassuring comments.
And with this, in my opinion, extremely disturbing, highlighted sentence:
Those reassurances were inappropriate.
In January 2021, the Australian ABC.net wrote about two men who were caught having sex and recieving corporal punishment: 77 lashes. The article also mentions ‘Key Points’ (see image) and links to related posts. One of them really stands out: “Indonesian cleric who helped draft caning law, Mukhlis bin-Muhammad, flogged for adultery”.
Priority on freedom to stone
Note 1 was also about stoning. A link that referred to a publication of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (when the C in the abbreviation still stood for Conference). (http://www.oic-oci.org/oicnew/english/conf/fm/31/31/%20icfm-fc-en.htm The dead link. Or am I blocked there somehow?
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/68977/Rape-victim-13-stoned-to-death This link still works today (January ’24). I found it with a search “2008” somali girl stoned to death: A 13-year-old girl who said she had been raped has been stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery by Islamic militants (Sat, Nov 1, 2008 ).
With the same search I also found messages referring to Unicef protest against the stoning of a girl because she had been raped. Also a BBC article is can still be found that way.
From the latter:
The witness said people crowding round to see the execution said it was ‘awful’.
People were saying this was not good for Sharia law, this was not good for human rights, this was not good for anything.”
But no-one tried to stop the Islamist officials, who were armed, the witness said. He said one boy was shot in the confusion.
According to Amnesty International, nurses were sent to check during the stoning whether the victim was still alive. They removed her from the ground and declared that she was, before she was moved so the stoning could continue.
The OIC is the most disgusting of the bigger international organisations. Literally, at the time they did not write about ‘freely stoning‘ but about foreign interference. In a sense it was; At least an attempt to do so. The fact that that organisation issued such a message about it illustrates the priority it placed on stoning.
Attacking girls’ schools
Note 2 dealt with two other hotbeds of Muslim extremism: Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to Unicef, 256 schools were attacked in Afghanistan and in 2008 alone, killing 58.
The Unicef link I supplied is dead. The Unicef annual report for 2008 (in PDF) makes no mention of it. That report actually reads like boasting about their own organization.
I found that dead Unicef link through ‘Oneworld‘ which no longer works either. There is no longer a similar item on that entire site.
I also found it at the time with the organization DAWN. That link has also disappeared and can no longer be found with all kinds of searches: neither via google nor with search on that site itself.
That site has no “about us. It does have an extensive piece similar to it, called ‘comments policy’:
Our goal “Dawn aims to encourage readers to discuss and debate the content we publish. At the same time, we want to ensure that our platform is an inclusive and safe space [my emphasis of course] where our readers come to seek intelligent commentary and discussion.
Safe spaces: that special form of Erasing history …
Polygamy
Note 5, on page 208, was about polygamy.
I wrote: “The most ambitious fundamentalists use the possibility of polygamy as their spearhead. Also as a lure for a certain type of men.
To illustrate, I referred to an Australian newspaper that wrote:
Recognize polygamous marriages’, says Sheikh Khalil Chami. Islamic Friendship Association of Australia president Keysar Trad said recognizing polygamous unions wou;d help protect [!] the rights of women in the relationship.
The relevant link is now dead While searching for it, I did come across an article about a (different) pathetic sheikh from 2014:
Amost 20 years on, Sheik Ahmed Abdo still clearly remembers his first encounter with the police when, as a bright high school student in Sydney’s southwest he was the victim of ongoing bullying. ‘honorary role’ after spending 10 years studying the Islamic faith in South Yemen.
Yes, you can really learn a lot there in Yemen…
This sheikh is a ‘modern’ one. He has a real Instagram profile. There you will find gems like the ones pictured here:
Mohammed as “the best of creation”.
Mr. Keysar Trad can no longer be found on that Australian site.
Many articles about polygamy can, however. Almost all about cults in the US. Except for one: with an image of the Koran and the text:
Animal sacrifice and Sharia law have been used to approve Australian citizenship for a Pakistani boy from a polygamous Islamic marriage.
Note 10 was about an ‘interesting’ twist of that plea for polygamy for Muslim women: it was about the necessity/self-evidence for polygamy for black women in the USA.
The link with ‘content/view/743/41’ of the organization muslimbridges no longer works. The site still exists, but I cannot reach it. Maybe blocked, I can’t see it right away. That’s okay because they also have a working YouTube channel: the most fundamentalist channel imaginable.
That YouTube channel has not been supplemented in recent years, but it is still an example of surrealism. You will find titles such as “Can Islam diminish violence in America?”
This one is highly recommended. It’s called: ‘Barack Obama — Muslim Edit – Yes We Can‘. It is a quite remarkable speech by Obama, accompanied by music…
Barack Houssein says, among other things: “We are no longer a (just) Christian nation.”
No white person in the US would have had any chance of becoming president after such a speech, BTW.
Speaking of creepy: Do you know this video in which Obama talks about his own politically inspired conception?
Mohammedan women and Catholic nuns
There were, and still are, people who let Islam propagandists get away with comparing the Muslim obligation to veil with the costume of Catholic nuns. Like one Abdel Azim, or Azeem, from Queens University (!) in Canada did at the time. He gave his story this title: ‘Women in Islam versus Women in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition – The Myth and the Reality‘.
In it he wrote, among other things:
It is one of the ironies of today’s world that the same headscarves that were looked upon with reverence as a sign of ‘sanctity’ when worn by Catholic nuns, are reviled as a sign of ‘oppression’ when worn by Muslim women with the an eye to modesty and PROTECTION.
The site that I referred to in note 11 -www.islamcity.com- no longer exists at all.
But the text of this Sherif Abdel can still be found in many places. Just search for ‘women in Islam versus women in the Judaeo-Christian tradition’. That idiot himself published a book with that title: Here is the Amazon-link
I emphasized that word ‘protection’. After all, it refers to the infamous Qu’ran verse 33:59, which is about the why of the Mohammedan veil: “… that they should be known (as such) and not molested.” It is about the villainous non-followers of Mohammed who must be constantly monitored otherwise they will harass Muslim women…
Did he change his mind?
Note 13 concerned the foreman of the Gülen movement who fled to The USA: Fethullah Gülen. He used to be close pals with the Turkish ruler, but that has changed completely.
In the English Wikipedia text I consulted before 2011, there was a note about this man in which he was quoted saying that he considered terrorism as bad as atheism. Fourteen years later, in that very same Wikipedia entry, it reads:
He teaches that the Muslim community has a duty of service (Turkish: hizmet) to the common good of the community and the nation and to Muslims and non-Muslims all over the world; and that the Muslim community is obliged to conduct dialogue with not just the ‘People of the Book’ (Jews and Christians), and people of other religions, but also with agnostics and atheists.
In theory, of course, Gülen could have changed his mind after his flight to the USA.
Or he may have become even more opportunistic.
To simply assume without question that first possibility is extremely naive.
Sex with slaves, is that still allowed under Sharia law?
Note 24 of the chapter on misogyny is in a passage about an Egyptian woman -a conservative Muslim woman in full hijab, hostess of the television program “Iqra”- named Basma.
She asks two men, one of them the former Grand Mufti of the famous Al-Azhar University, Sheikh Gamal Qutb, to explain Quranic verse 4:24.
That verse reads:
Also ˹forbidden are˺ married women-except ˹female˺ captives in your possession.
She thereby refers, without naming that man, to a Coptic priest who has also asked for a ruling on the matter. Qutb angrily storms off the stage. Later he returns, but not to answer directly. About the Muslims listening to that priest-Zakaria Botros is his name-he exclaims:
Bad luck for them. When my son is sick and goes to a mechanic instead of a doctor, that’s his problem.
Also that link I mentioned in this note is dead, but searching the name Botros within the website of the indefatigable Robert Spencer yields no less than 36 articles. This is the one that -in slightly different form- is about that remarkable ‘conversation’.
Yes, her book is published by now!
Notes 25 and 26 – and to a certain extent also note 27 – are about Mrs. Azizah Al-Hibri: a Mohammedan professor of Islam in the USA. Both links that I provided led to the site Karamah.org, of which she was the leader and at least still was in 2015. Both links are now dead. One was about ‘marriage contracts‘, the other to the ‘about us‘ page. In it she spoke highly of the Qu’ran verse 17:70. That ‘about page’ now has a completely different content!
In that text by Hibri about marriage contracts, which I read well before 2011, it stated that she was writing a book herself on that subject. On the Karamah site you can find no fewer than 88 articles with the search term marriage contract and 107 with Al Hibri!
However, the oldest of these is from 2014!
Older pieces can be found in other categories. Including eleven pieces about Obama.
Thanks to one of them, we know that Hibri still praises that same Koranic verse. At least: that’s what Barack Houssein Obama says about it in a speech!
That book has now actually been published; In 2015. It can be purchased via Amazon, among others. Here is a link to that book by Al-Hibri that still works in 2024.
It has 0 reviews there. Amazon also lists that book’s place on two “bestsellers” lists. In the general list it is ranked 6,135,680. I can’t help but compare it to my best-selling publication there: 4,062,768 (Islamophobia: Defying the Battle cry).
In the category in which her book has the highest rating (‘Islam’), the book ranked 1253. ‘Defying’ is in my ‘best category’ (Censorship) at position 586…
The previously reliable Amnesty International
In note 29, I gave a link to a text from Amnesty International on misogyny in Saudi Arabia. That link is dead.
Searching the then title -‘Saudi Arabia: End secrecy End suffering: Women‘ returns 0 results.
You can search on their site for much older texts though (from 1990 even!). “Saudi Arabia” returns more than 20000 search results! Of those, 437 results for “Saudi Arabia women.”
The piece searched for is listed here: In an article about the year 2000.
Starting on page 5 (out of 13) you read:
Women in Saudi Arabia who walk unaccompanied, or are in the company of a man who is neither their husband nor a close relative, are at risk of arrest on suspicion of prostitution or other “moral” offences. Nieves, a Filipina who was working as a maid in Riyadh in 1992, was invited by a married couple to celebrate the wife’s birthday at a restaurant. She and a female friend decided to go. At the restaurant they were joined by a male friend of the couple. A group of mutawa’een (religious police) entered the restaurant, saw the group and arrested them. They suspected Nieves of being there for an introduction to the male friend of the couple. Nieves denied the accusation, but was deceived into signing a confession written in Arabic which she understood was a release order. That confession was the sole basis of her conviction and sentence — 25 days’ imprisonment and 60 lashes which were carried out. Women in Saudi Arabia, whether Saudi Arabian or foreign, emerge time and again as victims of discrimination and human rights violations because of the gender bias in law, social mores and traditions. While women have gained some ground in terms of economic rights, their civil and political rights are systematically violated.
But no: such a text no longer fits Amnesty International in 2024 …