If she was physically exhibiting signs of puberty at the time, would you still be insisting on calling it rape?
Because no rational person anywhere in the ancient or medieval world would agree with you that a man having sex with his acknowledged legally-betrothed bride as soon as she began to undergo puberty was raping her.
Now, I’m perfectly willing to agree that ancient and medieval ideas of gender roles and men’s “marital rights” were often quite shitty and oppressive by modern standards of consenting adulthood and gender equality. But that applies to the pre-modern world as a whole, not just Islam.
If you persist in complaining about how uniquely horrible Muhammad was for following basically the same marital/sexual norms that the vast majority of contemporary Christians, Jews and pagans also followed (modulo the polygamy issue), then, as I said, you’re a hypocrite.
Yes yes, “but what about other things that are also bad! You’re not allowed to dislike THIS pedophile until you personally have eliminated all child abuse from the world!” I’ve heard it before.
Judaism and Christianity are also stupid and authorize horrible things. The key differences are:
*This thread is about horrible Muslim things and is not the “stupid Jewish and Christian things” thread.
*Judaism and Christianity are rightfully looked upon as evil anachronisms by the progressive class, but when Islam does the same things a thousand times as often and a million times worse, the same lefties apologize for it.
*The ready comparison of what other people were doing in 1200 to what Islam is doing today says a a lot more about the fundamental problem with Islam than you think it does.
The point the rational posters in this thread are making about the “Muhammad-pedophile” controversy is not that modern societies “must accept” the practice of child betrothal nowadays.
Rather, the point is that you’re willfully ignoring the fact that other ancient and medieval societies engaged in exactly the same practices. Pitching a fit about, e.g., the acceptance of war-captive rape in Muhammad’s culture but not in Maimonides’ doesn’t make you morally superior: it just makes you a hypocrite.
You don’t even have to go that far back, when conservative evangelical Christians are, right now, in America, holding up stories like this as beautiful stories of proper Biblical courtship and marriage.
It wasn’t a case of “the police didn’t do anything out of fear of being thought racist”, but "the police didn’t do anything because they apparently just didn’t give a shit, and the people trying to deal with the problem in the face of this police inactivity and apathy were overwhelmed.
I’m amazed at your continued ability to bullrush ahead with your hateful nonsense even when actual facts keep contradicting you.
Or maybe Islam, even Sunni Islam, isn’t a monolithic block whose adherents, contrary to your bigoted worldview, don’t all believe lockstep in the exact same things.
My problem is with the acceptance of forced marriage and rape in Muslim society today. The fanatical veneration of a child rapist is merely a reason for the concrete problem.
Women and children are treated as animals for the abuse farm in Islam. You’d rather deny this than take even the minimal first step towards ending it, which is understanding why it is.
In societies descended from medieval Judaism and Christianity, we have taken great steps towards eliminating this problem, by discarding Judaism and Christianity. The Christian areas with the worst sex abuse problem are those where new religious fervor and true believers dominate. Religion is evil, and true believers do evil things. There’s nothing better about Christian beliefs, but there’s something better about formerly-Christian societies, and that thing is that they aren’t Christian anymore.
It is a human rights imperative that the Muslim world follow the lead of the West and give up on religion.
The popular Muslim pasttime of killing other Muslims is enough to demonstrate that.
Do YOU believe that Shiites are valid Muslims who are entitled to exist in your ideal Muslim-run world? If not, you shouldn’t cite them to show Muslim beliefs.
Alexis Jay is the same person whose report you quoted. I imagine that, like the hadith, he will exist in a state of Schrodinger’s infallibility, where questioning one part is bigotry but quoting another is also bigotry.
This is a problem within the Muslim world and elsewhere, and it’s reasonable to have a discussion about it. It’s even reasonable to point out that it seems to be more common in some Muslim countries.
But it’s not reasonable to malign all Muslims, since it’s not true for all Muslims.
Again, this may describe the beliefs of some Muslims but not all.
Some parts and some interpretations of Islam, not all.
I don’t believe you understand why it is. Bigotry is generally quite blinding towards actual searches for knowledge and problem-solving.
:dubious: Well, at least now you’ve come right out and admitted that this isn’t about any actual ethical or moral principles as far as you’re concerned. You don’t actually care what bad things any non-Muslims do, or what common factors across different ancient societies perpetuated those practices among Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
You simply want to use any accusation that you can think of as a justification to bash Muslims. And you’re frustrated because the rational people keep on interrupting your Muslim-bashing party by pointing out the factual and logical flaws in your bigoted generalizations.
Keep pretending that you actually object to having sex with nine-year-olds for any other reason than that it gives you an excuse to bash Islam. But you’re no longer fooling anybody, if indeed you ever were.
Yup, anyone who claims to oppose child rape is just one of those “Islamophobes” grasping at straws. No one REALLY thinks having a sexual encounter with a nine-year-old is a bad thing.
I’m beginning to suspect why you might be so attracted to Islam.
Opposing child rape is reasonable. Maligning millions because of the veneration of a figure who lived more than a thousand years ago who may, by some sources, have committed child-rape, is not.
In short, I don’t believe that you care that someone who has been dead for over a thousand years might have abused a child. This has nothing to do with any present or future children that might be abused, and everything to do with your bigotry against Muslims.
Most American Muslims, especially those in communities that formed prior to the rise of Islamism like Dearborn, are pretty reasonable. They came here because they looked at the backwardness of the Islamic world and said they’d prefer to live in the superior American culture, after all.
Dearborn Muslims do have occasional problems with arresting people for advocating non-Muslim religions and on one occasion even stoning them (must be a cultural thing) but in the big picture, we can all agree that Dearborn is, most of the time, a model for how more Muslims should be.
While your grudging acknowledgment that Islam is really no different from Christianity (not that your posts show that you actually believe that) is welcome, it’s cute how you think that the West has “given up on religion”.
I live in the secular, free United States, and yet despite the fearmongering about “creeping sharia”, there are more laws passed because of and more lawmakers promoting a specifically Christian-branded theocracy here than there will ever, EVER be that promote a Muslim-branded theocracy.
Yes, and I quoted the report, and not an op-ed column.
Here’s another quote from the report:
The report also notes that the victimizers exploited and abused vulnerable children from mostly broken and abusive homes, regardless of the ethnicity (or sex…a number of young male victims are described in the report) of the victims. The area they were in was something like 95% white, so if there were more white victims than non-white victims, that’s mainly because there were far more whites available to be victimized. But these gangs absolutely targeted Pakistani women and children in the community as well.
So your op-ed is, not to put too fine a point on it, wrong.
Actually, what’s really bothering you is that you can’t persuade other, more sensible people to hate an entire world religion indiscriminately with the same venomous bigotry that you enjoy feeling about it.
But sure, let’s pretend for the time being that you do in fact have a genuine moral objection to forced marriage and rape other than as a cover for hating Muslims in general.
So does everybody else around here. So does most of the rest of the world, including the majority of Muslims.
[QUOTE=Haberdash]
The fanatical veneration of a child rapist is merely a reason for the concrete problem.
[/quote]
What makes you think that this is true? After all, the majority of Muhammad’s marital history as recorded in Islamic sacred texts involves not his late relationship with a child bride but rather his quarter-century of devoted, monogamous and fruitful marriage to a twice-widowed prosperous businesswoman at least several years older than he was, who initiated the offer of marriage to him and supported him both not only personally but financially.
So if Muslims worldwide are allegedly so influenced in their own behavior by “fanatical veneration” of their Prophet, then we ought to be seeing the standard Islamic approach to marriage in the form of “cougars” acquiring younger trophy husbands.
Thus your attempt to blame sexual oppression in modern Islamic societies on the pernicious example of Muhammad’s own behavior is, like pretty much everything else you say about Islam, made-up bullshit. The fact of the matter is that modern Islamic societies, like all other societies in the world, have a long and complicated history that’s profoundly influenced by patriarchal structures that long pre-date not only Islam but recorded history itself.
So no, you can’t explain forced marriage and rape in Islamic societies today as a consequence of “fanatical veneration” of Muhammad. If modern Muslim men were really modeling their domestic relationships on the life of their Prophet, they’d be stampeding to marry older widows.