Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker responded to recent migrant sexual assaults by advising her female constituents to keep strangers “at an arm’s length” and “stick together in groups” even when they’re “in the party mood.” |
Are Western women responsible for provoking Muslim men into raping them? Some Europeans certainly seem to think so.
Recently, a 20-year-old Austrian woman waiting at a bus stop in Vienna was attacked, beaten, and robbed by four Muslim men from Afghanistan. From her statement:
So how did Austrian police respond? They told the victim to dye her hair:
Indirectly that means I was partly to blame for what happened to me. That is a massive insult.
She is not the first European victim of Muslim attackers to be blamed. According to FrontPage Magazine editor Jamie Glazov:
Reker has vowed to make sure that women will change their behavior, so that they don’t provoke Muslims to sexually assault them again. There will now be published “online guidelines” for women to read so they can prepare themselves ...
Oslo Professor of Anthropology Dr. Unni Wikan’s solution for the high incidence of Muslims raping Norwegian women is not for the rapists to be punished, but for Norwegian women to “take their share of responsibility” for the rapes because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative.
Norwegian women, she has counseled, “must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”
These responses overlook the fact that, since the dawn of Islam 14 centuries ago, European women -- even nuns -- have always been portrayed as sexually promiscuous by nature. This is easily discerned by examining medieval Muslim perceptions of Byzantine women. (Islam’s initial contact with Europe in the seventh century was through the Christian empire of Byzantium. This contact came to represent white/European women in Islam.)
Consider the following excerpts from Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs by Nadia Maria el-Cheikh:
For centuries, European Christian women have been portrayed in the Islamic world as sexually promiscuous.
This view traces back to Muhammad. He once asked a new convert, “Would you like the girls of Banu al-Asfar?”
Muhammad was including the possibility of capturing “yellow-haired” women to entice the convert to join the jihad on Byzantium. Muhammad also asked the following of another potential jihadist: “O Abu Wahb, would you not like to have scores of Byzantine [fair] women and men as concubines and servants?”
Wahb responded: “O Messenger of Allah ... if I see the women of the Byzantines, I fear I will not be able to hold back. So do not tempt me by them.”
This predilection was not limited to Arab Muslims. Of the Turks, Bernard Lewis writes in Islam and the West:
Europeans saw themselves primarily as Christians threatened by a new assault from the old Islamic enemy ... Among the faults and vices ascribed to the Turks, two themes dominated: arbitrary power and unbridled lust.
So universal were these themes and so striking the terms in which they were presented, in both letters and arts ...
Our sources show not Byzantine women but [Muslim] writers’ images of these women, who served as symbols of the eternal female -- constantly a potential threat, particularly due to blatant exaggerations of their sexual promiscuity.
Muhammad also asserted that there is no “fitna more harmful to men than women.” El-Cheikh explains:
Fitna is a key concept in defining the dangers that women, more particularly their bodies, were capable of provoking in the mental universe of the Arab Muslims.
"[Byzantine women] find sex more enjoyable, they are prone to adultery.”
"[A]dultery is commonplace in the cities and markets of Byzantium ... [even] the nuns from the convents went out to the fortresses to offer themselves to monks.”
Concludes the author of Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs:
Their depictions are, occasionally, excessive, virtually caricatures, overwhelmingly negative. ...
Such anecdotes [of sexual promiscuity] are clearly far from Byzantine reality and must be recognized for what they are: attempts to denigrate and defame a rival culture through their exaggeration of the laxity with which Byzantine culture dealt with its women. ...
In fact, in Byzantium, women were expected to be retiring, shy, modest, and devoted to their families and religious observances. ...
[T]he behavior of most women in Byzantium was a far cry from the depictions that appear in Arabic sources.
Little has changed some 1400 years after the founding of Islam: European women continue to be seen as naturally promiscuous and guilty of provoking Muslim men into raping them.
After the endemic sexual abuse of native British women at the hands of Muslims was revealed, a Muslim imam in the UK confessed what Muslim men are taught:
[What imams preach] denigrates all women, but treats [non-Muslim] whites with particular contempt.
Last December in the UK, a Muslim father of four “dragged a young pub worker off the street and raped her for three hours, while telling her ‘you white women are good at it.’”
Another Muslim called a 13-year-old British virgin “a little white slag” -- British slang for “loose, promiscuous woman” -- before raping her.
This mentality is hardly limited to Britain. A Muslim man who almost killed his 25-year-old German victim while raping her -- to shouts of “Allah!” -- asked if she enjoyed it afterwards.
Another Muslim migrant said that “German girls are just there for sex.”
In Austria, an “Arabic-looking man” approached a 27-year-old woman at a bus stop, pulled down his pants, and “all he could say was sex, sex, sex,” until the woman screamed and he fled.
The ancient Islamic motif concerning the alleged promiscuity of European women is alive and well, and continues justifying the Muslim rape of Western women.
And even on this issue, Islam can turn to its leftist allies for cover.
Just as the left has struggled long and hard to portray Islamic intolerance, violence, and terrorism as the West’s fault (because of the Crusades, colonialism, Israel, cartoons, freedom of speech, etc.), the left now adds “Western promiscuity” to the list of things that provoke Muslims to acts of violence, and worse.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Judith Friedman Rosen fellow at the Middle East Forum and a Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
