If you want to know just how bizarre the Moslem clerical view of women is, consider this concise item from the Associated Press:

  

CAIRO, EGYPT — Al-Azhar University, one of Sunni Islam’s most prestigious institutions, ordered one of its clerics Monday to face a disciplinary panel after he issued a controversial decree allowing adults to breast-feed.

  

Ezzat Attiya had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying adult men could breast-feed from female work colleagues as a way to avoid breaking Islamic rules that forbid men and women from being alone together.

  

In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers. It means the child could not marry the nursing woman’s biological children.

  

Attiya — the head of Al-Azhar’s Department of Hadith, or teachings of the Prophet Muhammad — insisted the same would apply with adults. He argued that if a man nursed from a co-worker, it would establish a family bond between them and allow the two to work side-by-side without raising suspicion of an illicit sexual relation.

  

You wonder what the La Leche League has to say about this, or whether too little time at mama’s breast really could cause psychosexual frustration, but that aside, the brouhaha over the “Lactation Fatwa” conjures a disturbing picture of what Moslem men think of their women, and what those women face in their quotidian intercourse with those men, social and otherwise.

  

One example of what Moslems think of women is the so-called honor killing, the murder of women who disgrace a Moslem’s family. This estimable practice, occurring with alarming frequency in Islamo-Europe, has Western elites wringing their tremulous, uncalloused hands. On one hand, they fear offending the feminists seeking justice for their Moslem sisters. On the other, they fear offending an unassimilable racial and religious minority that is demanding, and getting, all manner of “rights,” not least of which is the “right to castigate” a disobedient wife.

  

Given the refusal of Moslems to assimilate, as well as the range of successful Moslem demands upon European elites for heretofore unimagined “rights” and public and corporate policies, one wonders when Christendom’s benighted lands will relent and sanction not only honor killing but also bride burning, genital mutilation and the other merry folkways the Islamic horde brought with them.

  

Honor Killings And Other Islamic Practices

  

An honor killing involves the brother, father or uncle of a girl killing her for besmirching the family “honor.” The possible list of offenses inviting a young woman’s murder is a long one. It includes trying to flee an arranged marriage to an older man, often a cousin or other relative, merely writing love notes to a boy in class, and falling in love (or merely conversing) with an unapproved suitor. A pregnancy out of wedlock demands swift and brutal retribution. Worse yet, other women, typically mothers and mothers-in-law, often help the men commit murder.

  

On Feb. 7, 2005, The Boston Globe reported last year, 23-year-old Hatun Sucuru was standing at a bus-stop in Berlin when her brother walked up and shot her to death. Her crime? She fled her husband, an older cousin in Turkey whom her parents forced her to marry, and returned to Germany with their son. And, “further enraging her family,” the Globe reported, “she abandoned the hijab — the traditional head scarf worn by some Moslem women — in favor of earrings, makeup, and blue jeans.” The German cops charged her three brothers with the murder; the youngest had pulled the trigger. At a largely Moslem school outside Berlin, the Globe reported, “students greeted news of her slaying with loud approval. Her brothers were hailed as local heroes.” In its article on the subject in 2005, Der Speigel put an even finer point on schoolboys’ approving these killings. “One boy said, ‘She only had herself to blame,’ while another insisted, ‘She deserved what she got. The whore lived like a German.’”

  

Another infamous honor killing occurred in London in 2004. Holding his daughter over the bathtub, Iraqi Kurd Abdullah Yones slashed his 16-year-old daughter’s throat because she’d written love letters to a classmate. In Birmingham in 1998, 19-year-old Rukhsana Naz, pregnant by her lover, made the mistake of trying to leave an arranged marriage. Her brother strangled her with a jump rope while her mother held her down. In 2002 in Stockholm, Rahmi Sahendal shot his 26-year-old daughter, Fadime, in the head because she too refused an arranged marriage and instead planned to marry a Swede.

  

Such honor killings are so prevalent among Moslems in Europe that police met in the Hague in 2004 to discuss the matter. As Der Speigel reported, women are dying by the dozen: “The Turkish women’s organization Papatya has documented 40 instances of honor killings in Germany since 1996. Examples include a Darmstadt girl whose two brothers pummeled her to death with a hockey stick in April 2004 after they learned she had slept with her boyfriend. In Augsburg in April [2005], a man stabbed his wife and 7-year-old daughter because the wife was having an affair. In December 2003, a Tuebingen father strangled his 16-year-old daughter and threw her body into a lake because she had a boyfriend.” Last year’s article in the Globe disclosed that police in Germany and England are reopening suspicious cold-case murders. Eight women were murdered in Berlin in 2005, with some 47 slain in the six years before the Globe article was published. Also in 2005, British police reclassified 18 of 22 reviewed murders as honor killings: “Scotland Yard has reopened probes into 109 suspicious deaths, covering a 10-year span, that seem to have been family conspiracies to kill Moslem women.” In 2004, the BBC reported that London’s metropolitan police were combing decade-old files to investigate 52 murders in London and 65 across England and Wales.

  

Yet Moslem women aren’t the only victims of Moslem men. White Swedish women are suffering a wave of unprecedented rape and mayhem at the hands of their country’s Mohammedan guests. Unsurprisingly, an Islamic mufti’s comment about it jarred the Swedes. Women who don’t wear headscarves, he averred, are “asking to be raped,” a view prevalent among the young Moslem predators teeming in Sweden’s streets. But the Swedes didn’t get beyond a little indignation. Neither have the Dutch. After a Moslem murdered Theo Van Gogh because he directed a film called Submission about misogynist Moslem violence, the authorities wanted to sweep the connection to Islam under the prayer rug.

  

But even worse is the German judge who refused to give a horribly abused Moslem woman a divorce because the Koran sanctions wife-beating. As Srjda Trifkovic of Chronicles magazine reported, the judge cited the “right to castigate” in refusing the divorce, and even used a few lines from the Moslem holy book to justify the decision:

  

Men have the authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.

Unsurprisingly, the paper of record was quick to exonerate Islam as the fountainhead of misogyny among Moslem men.

  

The New York Times had a bone to pick with the German judge mainly because of her suggestion that Islam justified violence against women. It stated matter-of-factly: “While the verse cited by Judge Datz-Winter does say husbands may beat their wives for being disobedient—an interpretation embraced by fundamentalists— mainstream Moslems have long rejected wife-beating as a medieval relic.”

In reality “mainstream Moslems” do nothing of the sort. New York Times’ claim notwithstanding, the original sources for “true” Islam — the Koran and Hadith — provide ample and detailed evidence on Islamic theory and the sources of Shari’a practice that remains in force all over the Islamic world today.

Truth is, the Koran is explicit on the subject of disciplining women in general and wives in particular, as critics of Islam, former Moslems in particular, observe. And while the Koran may not suggest “honor killing” per se, Islamic societies and culture, as well as its men, have absorbed its sacred injunctions on the subject of women. No wonder a “French” Moslem gouged out his wife’s eyes for refusing sex.

  

The Western Response And The Death Of The Faith

  

The New York Times and others—quick to assert that Islam does not sanction such violence, which is a falsehood—wish to explain away honor killings, the rape wave and the Islamic domestic violence that has beset Europe. It’s a crime problem. Or their host societies refuse to “integrate” them. Or whatever. It can’t possibly be the fault of the resentful, alien host that sent Paris up in flames two years ago.

  

The reason the Western elites, particularly the media and politicians, refuse to condemn these explicitly Islamic outrages is the fear of being called “racist” or “Islamophobic.” As one Moslem woman explained to Der Speigel, “People were afraid they would be called Nazis if they dared to bring up issues of human rights in the Turkish community.”

  

Serap Cileli, a Turkish writer and filmmaker, “forced into an arranged marriage” at just 15, couldn’t get published in Germany. “Everything I wrote from 1994 to 1999 was rejected, even by newspapers,” she told the magazine. “They told me I was writing about a minority issue and they were afraid of appearing racist.” There you have the cult of diversity: suppress the truth because it might inspire a charge of racism. These same anti-Christian elites love nothing more than ridiculing evangelical Christians or devout Catholics and do not fear being called “Christophobic,” but in any event their infatuation with diversity came with a stiff price: Their fear of criticizing Islam precludes them from defending the sisterhood. A Swedish feminist has said women must bow to the wishes of Moslem men and dress more modestly. Thus does Islam’s war against Christendom, as Trifkovic observes, inspire the silence of those who would otherwise condemn Islam’s inherent misogyny:

  

Such treatment of women might be expected to make Islam abhorrent within the cultural milieu epitomized by the equal-rights obsessed European Union and the neofeminist New York Times, but this has not happened. There is a reason for this. It is the refusal of Islam to accept the wife as her husband’s closest and inseparable loving partner and companion. Islam therefore challenges Christian marriage in principle and in practice. Moslem teaching on marriage and the family, though “conservative” about “patriarchy,” denies the traditional Christian concept of matrimony. Islam is therefore an “objective” ally of postmodernity, a few beatings here and a few rapes there notwithstanding.

  

In other words, the leftist, feminist elites of the West will not oppose Islam because it helps undermine Christian marriage, itself as much an institution of patriarchal oppression as Islam. That is a lie, of course, and those elites now know what they have permitted to enter their house, even if their pusillanimity in the face of name-calling, or worse, riots and wanton murder, offer psychological refuge for their denial.

  

The question is who, or what, opened the door. Pope Benedict answers indirectly, or perhaps not, when he calls for a restoration of faith and fecundity in Europe. The inevitable Islamic conquest of Europe and its affiliated horrors would never have been possible had Europe remained true to its Catholic faith, the bulwark that stood firmly against Islamic conquest for 10 centuries. Islam’s triumph first required the repudiation of the Faith and its traditions, as well as the steady dissipation of Europe’s Catholic culture, which not only included chivalry, or defending the honor of women and assuring them an esteemed place in home and hearth, but also elevating the most admirable and worthy of the fairer sex to sainthood, a practice that finds its spiritual apex in devotion and prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary. That mighty edifice of the Church Militant in Paris, Notre Dame, arose for a reason. Clearly, one faith cannot live comfortably next to the other. Part of Trifkovic’s point is that Islam is the anti-Christian elite’s ally in the latter’s quest to destroy the Faith they hate but which gave them everything they have. The late atheist Oriana Fallaci recognized this truth, which inspired her to spend her final years denouncing the coming Islamic conquest of Italy.

  

The likelihood is that anti-Christian elites would be more explicit about helping Islam conquer Europe were honor killing and rape not part of the bargain. This brings to mind such neocon allies as Christopher Hitchens, one of the leftists who think a good reason for going to war in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East is liberating the Arab sisterhood. The Hitchensians would use the American military to establish “women’s rights” in a part of the world that has never known them or indeed ever known women as anything but domestic slaves and fertile soil for the seed corn of Mohammed’s future disciples. It sounds chivalrous, but don’t be fooled. This, too, is anti-Christian in its motive. Feminism is an appendage of atheist leftism, an enemy of Islam and Christianity. Indeed, that Americans are fighting against Moslems in Iraq and Afghanistan, not as Christians but as secular democrats, is the principal reason Hitchens and his anti-Christian, neocon tribe can support the Bush Crusade in Iraq. They wish to defeat Islam not because it is anti-Christian, but because it strives to destroy leftist secular democracy in the West, which dethroned the Christian polity, culture and religion they so despise.

  

Thus, unlike Fallaci, who, while an atheist, understood that the Church built Western Civilization, the Hitchensians see the global projection of American power as a means to spread anti-Christian democracy and further undermine the Faith. If they don’t wish Islam to succeed, it is only because one oppressive religion, in their view, would replace another. But secular democracy cannot defeat Islam. Only the Faith can. Then again, as Bush clearly says, the war in Iraq is not a war against Islam, a “religion of peace,” but a “war against terror,” which cannot be won because a tactic cannot be defeated. Either way, the war in Iraq is lost.

  

Which leaves just one observation. Until the West awakens from its spiritual slumber and raises the Cross, it will continue losing the fight not against “terror” but against Islam itself. Until then, the honor killings, rapes and riots will continue with customary ferocity. Brothers shooting sisters. Fathers slashing throats. Husbands gouging out eyes. Mothers strangling daughters. Next to these, grown men suckling a co-worker’s breast is but a mild indignity.

  

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans To Know And Admire (Cumberland House). His articles appear regularly in The New American and Chronicles. His last article for Taki’s Top Drawer was “Cowards, Bullies and Killers.”