Whatever he may claim about his own religious beliefs, Barack Obama has made his sympathies abundantly clear.
When an explosion in Pakistan killed scores of women and children, and wounded hundreds more on Easter Sunday, Obama made boilerplate references to terror and victims. It didn’t actually matter that the Taliban took credit for it and went out of their way to announce that Christians were explicitly targeted.
There was no reference to the faith of the victims, or the cowardice of their murderers intentionally choosing Easter to stage such a slaughter among unsuspecting victims.
At the same time, he wastes no opportunity to praise Islam as a great and noble religion. He’s incorporated it into NASA’s official objectives, he is expected to attend the official opening of the nation’s largest mosque next week, and he categorically refuses to associate terrorism to the Koran.
Whatever his motivation, he is incapable of seeing shortcomings within Islam, but at the same time is very prepared to publically dump on the Christianity he claims to profess. And, of course, ignoring any lessons from Paris or Brussels, he has once again expressed his intent to accelerate the influx of refugees.
However well he protected himself from any accusations of “Islamophobia” he has — in the process — opened himself up to a different sort of criticism.
You see, the problem with the treatment of women within Islam is not limited to events like the New Year’s Eve assaults in Cologne. Or rape gangs in the UK. Or flinging homosexuals to their deaths from tall buildings. Or one in a long list of other atrocities.
Islam — at least some versions of it — are just as harmful to those within Islam. You could point to the practice of so-called “honor killings” where a woman is killed for “bringing shame” on a family. We have even seen high-profile cases of parents charged right here in North America for such murders.
There is the physical abuse of their own daughters. Just to pluck news stories from this weekend, I can provide two horrifying examples.
The first is that various news sources are indicating that perhaps as many as 1/2 million young girls will have the external parts of their genitals removed in an unimaginably painful way.
But you probably know about that already. Maybe you have explained it away somehow. Or, unable to process such a grotesaqe thought, you push it away, or maybe even you are just in denial about it ever happening here.
Let’s go to another story. Girls in the UK as young as 10 are suffering a procedure called “breast ironing” using crude tools including heated stones, to intentionally damage a girl’s femininity to make her less likely to draw dangerous male attention. Not surprisingly having them beaten and burned is not just painful, but also damages the breasts, creating additional medical problems down the road.
These are not the marks of a religion with a healthy respect for the natural differences between men and women. While not all sects of Islam practise such things, the fact that it even happens at all sorely needs addressing.
If any such mistreatment of women were prevalent in, say Christianity, Obama would not hesitate to denounce them, rightly calling it a war on women that needs to stop.
Well, Mr President, do you truly care about women? If 500 thousand girls are at risk of having their sexuality carved away with a razor blade, should you remain silent? And if stay silent, can you possibly claim to defend women?
The obvious answer is no.
