Another reason to hate Islam

Steven M. Warshawsky has this observation about the larger implications of the treatment of women in Islamic nations:

It is often said that Jews are the canary in the coal mine of western civilization. When they start to be abused and mistreated, it is a sign that a poisonous atmosphere has developed that threatens to engulf all of society.

Well, women are the canary in the coal mine of lslamic civilization. And they are choking and dying across the Muslim world.

The most recent story, from Saudi Arabia, involves a 19-year-old woman who was kidnapped, beaten, and gang-raped by 7 men -- and then sentenced by a court to 90 lashes for the crime of being alone with a man not related to her. (See the Fox News report .)

This is utterly barbaric. Yet it is consistent with Islamic law (sharia) as practiced by the leading Sunni Muslim nation, the world's largest oil exporter, and America's "ally" in the Middle East. Equally revolting acts of sharia tyranny against women occur in Iran, Afghanistan, and throughout the Muslim world.

I submit that the single most important indicator of whether the Muslim world will be able to co-exist peacefully with the West is how they treat their women. So long as the Muslim world follows a religious code that reflects such a deep fear and hatred of women, it never will be able to embrace the core values and principles upon which a free, democratic society is based: the dignity of the individual, freedom of conscience, political and economic liberty, the principles of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity, representative government, and non-violent transitions of power.

When the Muslim world stops abusing and mistreating its women, we'll know they're ready for peaceful co-existence with the West. Until that day, we'd better keep our eyes open and our powder dry.

One quibble I have here is that I don't think that we need to just "keep our powder dry". I think that we need to realize that just as communism was the focus of evil in the world of Ronald Reagan's 1980s that Islam is the focus of evil in today's world. We need to take the same kind of steps to roll back its spread as Reagan did with communism.

Situations like the one in Saudi Arabia described above should be intolerable to the allegedly decent people who are supposed to make up the "enlightened" West. They/we should demand that our governments do everything in their power to end such barbaric customs and if Muslim governments are unwilling to enter the civilized world of their own accord then we should use the same tactics against the Muslim world that the North used against the South to end the abominable practice of human slavery.