Tariq Ramadan's Rape Trial: Blame the Victim

by Giulio Meotti • April 16, 2018 at 5:00 am

If defending Tariq Ramadan is regrettable, Western silence is worse.
There are also those who blame Ramadan's alleged victims. According to The New Yorker, "[Ayeri] is something of a heroine in the extreme-right circles of the fachosphère, where Islamophobia is a ticket of admission". So, the "real" problem is "Islamophobia," not the Muslim subjugation of women.
The three women who accused Ramadan of rape have been the subjects of intimidation, violence and threats.
"The blindness of the Anglo-Saxons on political Islam is frightening". — Pascal Bruckner, French philosopher.

(Ramadan image source: Internaz/Flickr)

"If you thought it was challenging for women to come forward and accuse Harvey Weinstein of rape, consider accusing the Islamic theologian Tariq Ramadan", wrote Sylvie Kauffman, the former editor of Le Monde.

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Bana, is a Swiss lecturer on Islam with millions of followers and one of Time Magazine's "men of the year". Accused of rape by three women, however, Ramadan is now in custody of the French police. In denying the allegations of sexual violence, his #MeToo case has turned into a political and religious affair.

The Algerian writer Kamel Daoud summarized the response of the Arab-Islamic world to the Ramadan affair: "Silence, discomfort, embarrassment and theories of mass conspiracy".

Continue Reading Article

Christian, Yazidi Women Still in ISIS Captivity

by Sirwan Kajjo • April 16, 2018 at 4:00 am

Despite losing control of Raqqa and other major strongholds in Syria and Iraq, ISIS continues to keep many of the women it kidnapped during its rise in 2014. The world seems to have forgotten about them.
Habib, traded four times during her captivity, witnessed many cases of Christian and Yazidi girls -- some as young as 9 years old -- sold, raped and tortured by ISIS members.
Currently, there are an estimated 1,500 Christian and Yazidi girls and women still in captivity, while 1,000 others are missing in Iraq and Syria. Others are believed to have been sold to sex traffickers in Turkey. It is an issue that the international community cannot ignore.

Islamic State jihadists laugh and joke about buying and selling Yazidi sex slaves, in a propaganda video.

After more than three years, Rita Habib, a 30-year-old Christian woman from the Iraqi city of Mosul, was recently reunited with her blind father in Erbil, the capital of Iraq's Kurdistan Region. She and her father are the sole survivors of a family whose members, like thousands of Christians and other non-Muslims, was murdered by ISIS in mid-2014. Habib was among hundreds of Christian and Yazidi women and girls abducted at the time and sold into the sex trade. She was one of the lucky ones to be rescued by the Christian advocacy group, the Shlomo Organization for Documentation, which paid ISIS $30,000 for her release.

Abu Shujaa, a Yazidi activist who has been involved in rescuing hundreds of Yazidi women from ISIS, helps secure their release in various ways, but said that all require money, which is hard to come by.

Continue Reading Article