RAPES IN BESLAN: IN MUHAMMAD’S FOOTSTEPS by Srdja Trifkovic
RAPES IN BESLAN: IN MUHAMMAD’S FOOTSTEPS
by Srdja Trifkovic
The media in the United States have been oddly fastidious in failing to report one aspect of last week’s horror in Beslan: that several Russian girls were raped by Muslim terrorists in front of their parents and classmates. The failure to report rapes in the Russian school was at odds with the eagerness of American journalists, a decade ago, to report ad nauseam on the entirely fictitious "rape camps" supposedly run by Bosnian Serbs in which Muslim women were allegedly subjected to similar degradation.
That Muslim propagandists and their Western abettors should have resorted to this particular whopper is especially galling in view of Islam’s encouragement of violence against women in general, and its explicit blessing of rape of captive non-Muslim women by Muslims in particular. The behavior of Chechen terrorists in Beslan, disgusting in every gory detail by the standards of civilized humanity, was justified by the tenets of Islam and by the personal example of the cult’s inventor, Muhammad.
Having established himself as the ruler of Medina, Muhammad attacked the Jewish tribe of Banu-‘l-Mustaliq in December of A.D. 626. His followers slaughtered many Jewish tribesmen and looted thousands of their camels and sheep. They also kidnapped 500 of their women. The night after the battle Muhammad and his brigands staged an orgy of rape. As one of the brigands, Abu Sa’id Khudri, later remembered, a legal problem needed to be resolved first: In order to obtain ransom from the surviving Jews for the captive women, Muslims had pledged not to violate them:
We were lusting after women and chastity had become too hard for us, but we wanted to get the ransom money for our prisoners. So we wanted to use the Azl [coitus interruptus]. We asked the Prophet about it and he said: "You are not under any obligation not to do it like that."
Having ethnically cleansed and robbed of property all but one of three Jewish clans in Medina, in A.D. 627 Muhammad decided to deal with the last, Banu Qurayzah. He offered the men conversion as an alternative to death. Upon their unsurprising refusal, some 900—exact numbers are unknown—were decapitated, one by one, in a ditch surrounding their encampment, in front of their women and children. Muhammad’s Einsatzgruppen worked hard: Torches had to be lit so that the slaughter could be accomplished in one day. The women, thus widowed or orphaned, were raped that same night. Muhammad chose as his concubine one Raihana bint Amr, whose father and husband were both slaughtered before her eyes only hours earlier. (Such treatment of the victims had been duly sanctioned by a prophetic revelation in the Kuran.)
In his early years, as a powerless and often ridiculed outsider in Mecca, Muhammad had enumerated the series of temptations which could enslave human beings: The passion for women, the desire for male children, the thirst for gold and silver, spirited horses, and the possession of cattle and land (Kuran, 3:12). Once enthroned in Medina as the head of a theocratic statelet, he wanted to possess them all. Muhammad freely admitted that two things in the world, women and perfume, attracted him—so much so that he departed from his own laws in pursuit of both. Contrary to his own regulations he had at least 15 wives (some sources claim up to 25). The youngest was Aisha, who was seven years old when Muhammad—44 years her senior—"married" her. Two years later, 53-year-old Muhammad consummated this liaison and raped the girl of nine left under his control.
The sordid story of Muhammad’s "marriage" to Aisha reflected a mind-set and a lifestyle. Rape of enslaved women came naturally to Muhammad. A Christian slave woman by the name of Maryah aroused his passion for nights on end, which provoked a rebellion in his harem. Divine assistance was, in the end, needed to restore order in the household, with the Kuranic verse duly advising Muhammad not to restrain himself from "that which Allah has made lawful" (66:1–3).
Even more scandalous was the case of Zeinab, the wife of Zayd, Muhammad’s adopted son. Lusting after her, Muhammad ordered Zayd to divorce her and took Zeinab as yet another wife. The deal was soon sanctioned by another revelation from Allah: "there should not be any fault in the believers, touching the wives of their adopted sons, when they have accomplished what they would of them" (36:37).
These examples indicate that the status of women in Islam is comparable to that of the human rights in Cuba: theoretically exalted, deplorable in practice. The sources of true Islam—the Kuran and Hadith—provide the basis for theory and subsequent Shari’a practice regarding the role of women. When a judge in Pakistan recently sentenced a young woman to death for "adultery" by stoning after she had been raped by her husband’s brother, he had merely followed the Kuranic law. The fact the woman, Zafran Bibi, was raped was of no consequence: She was still guilty of "having intercourse outside of marriage."
Violence against women is also condoned, even mandated, in Islam. Allah mandates that the disobedient wives are to be beaten (4:34). As the authoritative Azhar University scholars in Cairo explain, "the Qur’an bestows on man the right to straighten her out by way of punishment and beating, provided he does not break her bones nor shed blood." Physical violence against one’s wife is divinely ordained and practically advised in Islam. In Muhammad’s rendering of the story of the righteous Job, Allah ordered him to beat his wife: "Take in thine hand a branch and smite therewith and break not thine oath" (38:44).
Some Muslim apologists claim that the Islamic teaching and practice is in line with the findings of clinical psychology. Beating is beneficial to them, we are told, because "women’s rebelliousness (nushuz) is a medical condition" based either on her masochistic delight in being beaten and tortured or sadistic desire to hurt and dominate her husband. Either way,
beating is her remedy. So the Qur’anic command: ‘banish them to their couches, and beat them’ agrees with the latest psychological findings in understanding the rebellious woman. This is one of the scientific miracles of the Qur’an, because it sums up volumes of the science of psychology about rebellious women (The Australian Minaret, Australian Federation of the Islamic Councils, November 1980, p.10).
Islam stands or falls with the person of Muhammad, a flawed man by the standards of his own society, as well as those of the Old and New Testaments (both of which he acknowledged as divine revelation). He was flawed even by his new law, of which he claimed to be the divinely appointed medium and custodian. The horror unleashed by Chechen terrorists on Russian children in Beslan, and the rape of adolescent girls in particular, is the fruit of Muhammad’s example.
Following is taken from Robert Spencer's article "The Rape Jihad"
There are two things the massacre in Beslan have in common with the ongoing massacres in Darfur: both, no less than the 9/11 attacks, are examples of Islamic jihad terrorism, and both are characterized by rape.
The jihadist element has been made clear by the ringleaders of both atrocities. Sudanese General Mohamed Beshir Suleiman recently declared: “The door of the jihad is still open and if it has been closed in the south it will be opened in Darfur.” In southern Sudan, of course, the jihad was waged against Christians; in Darfur, the targets are black African Muslims whose Islamic bona fides don’t satisfy Khartoum. As for Beslan, the Chechen jihadist leader Shamil Besayev warned the Russian government last winter: “Praise Allah, we are dreaming of dying in jihad, we are dreaming of dying on the way of Allah, so that we could earn paradise and mercy of Allah.”
What does rape, then, have to do with these religious conflicts? Unfortunately, everything. The Islamic legal manual ‘Umdat al-Salik, which carries the endorsement of Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” Why? So that they are free to become the concubines of their captors. The Qur’an permits Muslim men to have intercourse with their wives and their slave girls: “Forbidden to you are ... married women, except those whom you own as slaves” (Sura 4:23-24).
After one successful battle, Muhammad tells his men, “Go and take any slave girl.” He took one for himself also. After the notorious massacre of the Jewish Qurayzah tribe, he did it again. According to his earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad “went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for [the men of Banu Qurayza] and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches.” After killing “600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900,” the Prophet of Islam took one of the widows he had just made, Rayhana bint Amr, as another concubine.
Emerging victorious in another battle, according to a generally accepted Islamic tradition, Muhammad’s men present him with an ethical question: “We took women captives, and we wanted to do ‘azl [coitus interruptus] with them.” Muhammad told them: “It is better that you should not do it, for Allah has written whom He is going to create till the Day of Resurrection.’” When Muhammad says “it is better that you should not do it,” he’s referring to coitus interruptus, not to raping their captives. He takes that for granted.
RAPES IN BESLAN: IN MUHAMMAD’S FOOTSTEPS
by Srdja Trifkovic
The media in the United States have been oddly fastidious in failing to report one aspect of last week’s horror in Beslan: that several Russian girls were raped by Muslim terrorists in front of their parents and classmates. The failure to report rapes in the Russian school was at odds with the eagerness of American journalists, a decade ago, to report ad nauseam on the entirely fictitious "rape camps" supposedly run by Bosnian Serbs in which Muslim women were allegedly subjected to similar degradation.
That Muslim propagandists and their Western abettors should have resorted to this particular whopper is especially galling in view of Islam’s encouragement of violence against women in general, and its explicit blessing of rape of captive non-Muslim women by Muslims in particular. The behavior of Chechen terrorists in Beslan, disgusting in every gory detail by the standards of civilized humanity, was justified by the tenets of Islam and by the personal example of the cult’s inventor, Muhammad.
Having established himself as the ruler of Medina, Muhammad attacked the Jewish tribe of Banu-‘l-Mustaliq in December of A.D. 626. His followers slaughtered many Jewish tribesmen and looted thousands of their camels and sheep. They also kidnapped 500 of their women. The night after the battle Muhammad and his brigands staged an orgy of rape. As one of the brigands, Abu Sa’id Khudri, later remembered, a legal problem needed to be resolved first: In order to obtain ransom from the surviving Jews for the captive women, Muslims had pledged not to violate them:
We were lusting after women and chastity had become too hard for us, but we wanted to get the ransom money for our prisoners. So we wanted to use the Azl [coitus interruptus]. We asked the Prophet about it and he said: "You are not under any obligation not to do it like that."
Having ethnically cleansed and robbed of property all but one of three Jewish clans in Medina, in A.D. 627 Muhammad decided to deal with the last, Banu Qurayzah. He offered the men conversion as an alternative to death. Upon their unsurprising refusal, some 900—exact numbers are unknown—were decapitated, one by one, in a ditch surrounding their encampment, in front of their women and children. Muhammad’s Einsatzgruppen worked hard: Torches had to be lit so that the slaughter could be accomplished in one day. The women, thus widowed or orphaned, were raped that same night. Muhammad chose as his concubine one Raihana bint Amr, whose father and husband were both slaughtered before her eyes only hours earlier. (Such treatment of the victims had been duly sanctioned by a prophetic revelation in the Kuran.)
In his early years, as a powerless and often ridiculed outsider in Mecca, Muhammad had enumerated the series of temptations which could enslave human beings: The passion for women, the desire for male children, the thirst for gold and silver, spirited horses, and the possession of cattle and land (Kuran, 3:12). Once enthroned in Medina as the head of a theocratic statelet, he wanted to possess them all. Muhammad freely admitted that two things in the world, women and perfume, attracted him—so much so that he departed from his own laws in pursuit of both. Contrary to his own regulations he had at least 15 wives (some sources claim up to 25). The youngest was Aisha, who was seven years old when Muhammad—44 years her senior—"married" her. Two years later, 53-year-old Muhammad consummated this liaison and raped the girl of nine left under his control.
The sordid story of Muhammad’s "marriage" to Aisha reflected a mind-set and a lifestyle. Rape of enslaved women came naturally to Muhammad. A Christian slave woman by the name of Maryah aroused his passion for nights on end, which provoked a rebellion in his harem. Divine assistance was, in the end, needed to restore order in the household, with the Kuranic verse duly advising Muhammad not to restrain himself from "that which Allah has made lawful" (66:1–3).
Even more scandalous was the case of Zeinab, the wife of Zayd, Muhammad’s adopted son. Lusting after her, Muhammad ordered Zayd to divorce her and took Zeinab as yet another wife. The deal was soon sanctioned by another revelation from Allah: "there should not be any fault in the believers, touching the wives of their adopted sons, when they have accomplished what they would of them" (36:37).
These examples indicate that the status of women in Islam is comparable to that of the human rights in Cuba: theoretically exalted, deplorable in practice. The sources of true Islam—the Kuran and Hadith—provide the basis for theory and subsequent Shari’a practice regarding the role of women. When a judge in Pakistan recently sentenced a young woman to death for "adultery" by stoning after she had been raped by her husband’s brother, he had merely followed the Kuranic law. The fact the woman, Zafran Bibi, was raped was of no consequence: She was still guilty of "having intercourse outside of marriage."
Violence against women is also condoned, even mandated, in Islam. Allah mandates that the disobedient wives are to be beaten (4:34). As the authoritative Azhar University scholars in Cairo explain, "the Qur’an bestows on man the right to straighten her out by way of punishment and beating, provided he does not break her bones nor shed blood." Physical violence against one’s wife is divinely ordained and practically advised in Islam. In Muhammad’s rendering of the story of the righteous Job, Allah ordered him to beat his wife: "Take in thine hand a branch and smite therewith and break not thine oath" (38:44).
Some Muslim apologists claim that the Islamic teaching and practice is in line with the findings of clinical psychology. Beating is beneficial to them, we are told, because "women’s rebelliousness (nushuz) is a medical condition" based either on her masochistic delight in being beaten and tortured or sadistic desire to hurt and dominate her husband. Either way,
beating is her remedy. So the Qur’anic command: ‘banish them to their couches, and beat them’ agrees with the latest psychological findings in understanding the rebellious woman. This is one of the scientific miracles of the Qur’an, because it sums up volumes of the science of psychology about rebellious women (The Australian Minaret, Australian Federation of the Islamic Councils, November 1980, p.10).
Islam stands or falls with the person of Muhammad, a flawed man by the standards of his own society, as well as those of the Old and New Testaments (both of which he acknowledged as divine revelation). He was flawed even by his new law, of which he claimed to be the divinely appointed medium and custodian. The horror unleashed by Chechen terrorists on Russian children in Beslan, and the rape of adolescent girls in particular, is the fruit of Muhammad’s example.
Following is taken from Robert Spencer's article "The Rape Jihad"
There are two things the massacre in Beslan have in common with the ongoing massacres in Darfur: both, no less than the 9/11 attacks, are examples of Islamic jihad terrorism, and both are characterized by rape.
The jihadist element has been made clear by the ringleaders of both atrocities. Sudanese General Mohamed Beshir Suleiman recently declared: “The door of the jihad is still open and if it has been closed in the south it will be opened in Darfur.” In southern Sudan, of course, the jihad was waged against Christians; in Darfur, the targets are black African Muslims whose Islamic bona fides don’t satisfy Khartoum. As for Beslan, the Chechen jihadist leader Shamil Besayev warned the Russian government last winter: “Praise Allah, we are dreaming of dying in jihad, we are dreaming of dying on the way of Allah, so that we could earn paradise and mercy of Allah.”
What does rape, then, have to do with these religious conflicts? Unfortunately, everything. The Islamic legal manual ‘Umdat al-Salik, which carries the endorsement of Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” Why? So that they are free to become the concubines of their captors. The Qur’an permits Muslim men to have intercourse with their wives and their slave girls: “Forbidden to you are ... married women, except those whom you own as slaves” (Sura 4:23-24).
After one successful battle, Muhammad tells his men, “Go and take any slave girl.” He took one for himself also. After the notorious massacre of the Jewish Qurayzah tribe, he did it again. According to his earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad “went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for [the men of Banu Qurayza] and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches.” After killing “600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900,” the Prophet of Islam took one of the widows he had just made, Rayhana bint Amr, as another concubine.
Emerging victorious in another battle, according to a generally accepted Islamic tradition, Muhammad’s men present him with an ethical question: “We took women captives, and we wanted to do ‘azl [coitus interruptus] with them.” Muhammad told them: “It is better that you should not do it, for Allah has written whom He is going to create till the Day of Resurrection.’” When Muhammad says “it is better that you should not do it,” he’s referring to coitus interruptus, not to raping their captives. He takes that for granted.
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