Islam: Good or Bad for Women (and Others)? Let History Judge.

aflc_islamandwomenRead this Hot Air blog article about Muslim women falsely claiming attacks by Trump supporters and the like: http://hotair.com/archives/2016/12/21/another-hijab-hoax-university-of-michigan-student-claimed-man-threatened-to-set-her-on-fire/

As many of you know, AFLC represents LA-based Urth Caffe—a hugely popular string of coffee cafés in Southern California serving its own organic/heirloom coffees and teas—in a preposterous lawsuit brought by 7 hijab-wearing young women claiming they were forced to leave the Urth Caffe in Laguna Beach (the newest of seven cafés) because they were “visibly Muslim.”  The claim is bogus; the women refused to abide by the café’s seating policy and were asked to leave after they caused a major disturbance.

CAIR LA, of course, got involved and orchestrated a lawsuit filed by a cheap-suit law firm with a hard-core leftist agenda.  AFLC filed a countersuit on behalf of Urth Caffe for trespass, and the court recently upheld the bona fides of the trespass claim and set a trial date for August 2017.

The nexis between the the linked article discussing the rash of bogus claims by young Muslim women falsely accusing Trump supporters of publicly attacking them and the Urth Caffe lawsuit is patent.  The Muslim Brotherhood types, like CAIR, and the hard-core Leftist Progressives, linked are-in-arm with the mainstream media and academia, promote at every opportunity the false meme that it is the West’s oppression of Muslims that is the contemporary scourge of civilized society and not the threat from Sharia-centric Islam.

President-elect Trump’s electoral victory is just the latest excuse to hype this false narrative.  In reality, these young Muslim women are merely pawns being exploited for political purposes.  In many ways, it is just an extension of Islam’s long history of its abusive and exploitive treatement of women.

N.B. The Left and Islam apologists will attack this last statement as historically false and yet another example of Islamophobia.  They will claim that the abuse of women and the treatment of women as chattel in every single Islamic country and in every milieu in which Islam plays a dominant role has nothing to do with Islam but rather the non-Islamic culture of the place.  They will “prove” this point by claiming that other religions and cultures also exhibit this denigration and exploitation of women, and they will then point to historical examples of such treatment in Western societies.

The logical flaws in these counter arguments are worth pointing out for heuristic reasons.  First, why is it that there are no exceptions?  That is, how is it that every Islamic environment—either in the the predominantly Muslim world or in the West—where Muslims congregate women are exploited and treated as chattel?

Second, Islam has now dominated the Muslim world for a millineum.  The only surrounding culture that exists in the Muslim world is Islamic.  Whatever existed in the pre-Islamic past is long gone.  If Islamic culture has “absorbed” this malady, it is Islam’s doing.

Third, the fact that other cultures also treat women poorly hardly suggests that Islam, which existed as an empire controlling most of the civilized world for centuries and still holds sway over more than 1.5 billion people, has been influenced by these other cultures.  If anything, the reverse would make more sense.

Fourth, there can be no debate that the treatment of women in the Judeo-Christian West has eliminated the vestiges of treating women as the property of men.  And while there is certainly room to assert that Western men and culture continue to treat women differently than men (and some have room to assert this is unfair or improper), there is simply no comparison between the claim of gender inequality in the West and the abusive treatment of women in Muslim environs.  That is, it is not a difference in degree but in kind.  Moreover, even if it were simply a matter of degree (i.e., the extent of the discrimination), why is it that the West has improved so dramatically while Islamic culture has remained steadfast in its abject abuse of women?

The same of course should be asked of Islamic culture along a host of such issues.  Why does Islam produce so many violent jihadists whereas the other dominant religions of the West (Christianity and Judaism) and the Eastern religions, so few?  Why are Islamic countries more prone to destructive and violent national, international, and regional conflict?  Why is it so much more effective to recruit violent jihadists among young Muslims—even in the West where they have all of the opportunities—than it is to recruit other “oppressed” populations?  Why do Islamic countries treat basic liberties—such as freedom of speech and of religion—as threats to society as opposed to Western societies that treat such liberties as foundational?

The Islam apologists will offer up rationalizations as “explanations” to each of these questions.  But their “explanations” will in fact only raise additional questions about why Islam requires such a strained defense in the face of a plethora of brute facts.  Occam’s Razor would suggest that Islam is sui generis among the major religions of the world.  We will leave it to you to determine if Islam’s unique qualities and manifestations are a good thing or bad.