Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who Taliban miscreants shot in the head last week, has once again galvanized worldwide public opinion against Muslim extremism.
The Taliban boasted about the shooting, saying this young girl’s education advocacy was a deviant symbol of “Western culture in the area.” God forbid!
Now she’s an icon. But if you don’t follow this issue closely, you may be surprised to learn that Muslim extremists injure and kill innocent little girls all the time.
For years now in Somalia, for example, al-Qaida has been kidnapping little girls, some as young as 7. They’re chained to beds, “educated” to embrace Islamic extremism and then sent out to be suicide bombers.
In Afghanistan several weeks ago, the Taliban beheaded a 7-year-old girl. She did nothing wrong. These degenerates killed her and a young boy to demonstrate their anger at recent Afghan police actions they didn’t happen to like, police said.
Then, last week, Ramadan Salem, an Egyptian reprobate, shot and killed 16-year-old Eman Mostafa. Her crime: After Salem groped her ― a common practice among Egyptian men ― she dared to spit at him. Now she’s dead.
Millions of Egyptian women, young and old, are furious about the direction their new Islamic government is taking. A constitution-drafting committee just made public drafts including one on women’s “rights.” Article 36 says the state will ensure equality for women as long as it doesn’t conflict with “the rulings of Islamic Sharia.” That’s like saying, you have full equality ― inside your jail cell.
Human Rights Watch, writing to the committee, demanded that it “delete the term ‘rulings of Sharia’ to ensure a clear commitment” to “gender equality.”
For Islamic extremists, abusing and killing children is hardly a new phenomenon. In Afghanistan, the United Nations documented attacks on more than 100 schools last year. Razia Jan, who founded a girl’s school just outside Kabal, told CNN: “The day we opened the school” extremists threw hand grenades in a girls’ school, and 100 girls were killed.
“Every day, you hear that somebody’s thrown acid at a girls’ face,” she added, or “they poison” the school’s water.
A newer trend is releasing some sort of poison gas in girls’ schools. In one case last summer, after 39 girls fell ill, Afghan police arrested two of the girls and charged them with poisoning themselves and the others. Go figure.
Every religion has its extremists. Ultra-orthodox Jews, Opus Dei Catholics, Buddhist and Hindu activists. Most of them try to live pious lives according to the codes of their faiths but seldom try to force their views on others. Some of them do fight wars ― Burmese against the nation’s non-Buddhist minorities; Hindus against Pakistanis. But none of these other religions try to impose violent ancient customs by force on the rest of the world.
On a popular TV talk show in Egypt last month, Dr. Zaghlul al-Naggar, who chairs a scientific committee of the government’s Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, touted the practice of administering camel urine as a medicinal treatment for various ills. Of course, he got a lot of push-back from callers. But not only did he staunchly defend his stance ― all because the Prophet Mohammed had recommended this as a treatment 1,400 years ago ― but announced that a medical center in Marsa Matrouh, on the Mediterranean coast, actually specializes in treating patients with camel urine.
Hadiths are codified practices or sayings of the Prophet Mohammed. No. 1:234 recalls his recommendation to a traveler who’d fallen ill that he should drink camel urine.
That’s the best indication I’ve seen to explain why Islamic extremists behave the way they do. Every religion carries forward traditions from its founders. Jews and others try to live by the Ten Commandments Moses is said to have found 3,500 years ago. Christians embrace the sayings of Jesus, like: Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
But Islam is the only faith whose extremists try to impose a seventh-century lifestyle on the world ― including all the ignorant medical treatments, violent justice and extreme prejudice against women and people of other faiths.
All of that was perfectly normal in 600 A.D. But trying to carry those barbaric practices into the modern era and force them on the rest of the world is not.
Can’t these extremists sit down, look around and see that their task is a ridiculous impossibility? And as long as they continue pursuing it, seriously besmirching the entire Islamic faith, they will remain the most reviled people on the planet.
By Joel Brinkley
Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. ― Ed.
(Tribune Media Services)
