The UN says militant Islamist group Isis has ordered all women and girls in Mosul, northern Iraq, to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM).
UN official Jacqueline Badcock said the fatwa, or religious edict, applied to females between the ages of 11 and 46.
She said the unprecedented decree issued by the Islamists in control of the city was of grave concern.
Iraq is facing a radical Isis-led Sunni insurgency, with cities in the north-west under militant control.
I hope Christian “liberals” will think twice and three times about alleged traditionalist “subjugation” of women when they read news like this. These Iraqi women will be subjected to an intensely personal violation and a painful mutilation which will, even if it has no more serious consequences (as it often does), render the women essentially unable to enjoy sexual relations with their husbands. This is the purpose of the brutality. Besides the pain and suffering of the women, this practice emphasizes the distorted and sick nature of strict Islamist treatment of women, of marriage and family life.
Katherine–What I really don’t get is how the left, which adores radical feminism and all things LGBT, also loves Islam which mutilates women and stones gay people. This story actually makes me sick; but becasue I oppose gay marriage and abortion on demand, my opinion doesn’t really matter.
David Keller, the idea I have about leftist support for radical Islamists is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The left despises what it considers to be a corrupt and oppressive state of things in the West (even though they’re largely in charge of it these days). Islamists despise the West, too. David Horowitz, a red diaper baby converted into a conservative, says that leftists believe that, once Western civilization is destroyed and the new socialist order erected, Islamists will naturally become secular leftists too because it will be, they believe, so much better than Islamic society.
The other point is that Islam is “the Other” and leftism reveres “the Other” without looking too closely at it.
There is also the idea that American policy in the Middle East is the cause of this atrocity. The famous Cairo speech said as much. And then there is the belief that the three religions which descended from Abraham really have much in common.