Here is part two of Alyssa A. Lappen's interview of Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs at Right Side News (part one is here). In this segment they discuss a longstanding focus of Jihad Watch: Islamic law's institutionalized discrimination against women, and how it plays out in violent and oppressive behavior today.AAL: Why do you consider the situation of women so important within the Muslim war upon Western freedoms?
Atlas: This war is for women, and about women, and the ownership of women. You can judge the health of any society by how they treat women. And obviously in Islam, women are chattel.
I grew up in the Golden Age. I grew up in post World War II America. I was a post-boomer, what they called the generation Joneses. I grew up watching Andy Griffiths and I Love Lucy --- mindless, carefree, free. Freedoms were like the air I breathe. It was not until those freedoms were threatened that I realized how privileged I was and am and how I must do everything in my power to save it. No one stomps on my neck because I wear high heal shoes and low necked sweaters.
And now, the key to our freedom, believe it or not, is the freedom of women in the Muslim world.
AAL: Changing the situation for them seems like a very tall order, almost an impossibility.
Atlas: Women in the Muslim world have to be part of the effort, although they know nothing else and they live under fear and oppression. They have no one fighting for freedom. Their situation is like that of people who've had Stockholm syndrome for 1,400 years.
If you throw a frog in boiling water, he will jump out. But if you put a frog into warm water and turn up the heat until it gets hotter and hotter, that frog will be toast. That is what has happened to Muslim women, and it's why we have to work for them. We have to stop that, because it is already happening here.
People are auto-censoring themselves. There is double speak. People say what seems correct because they are afraid of the truth. Where you are not free to speak we are all in trouble. And the battle line in North America, first and foremost, is for Muslim women.
AAL: How can we show skeptics how difficult things have already grown in the West.
Atlas: Look, all you have to to is going onto YouTube to see videos on how to beat your wife without leaving marks, what tools to use, like they would beat a dog. There are Islamic clerics who teach men to beat their wives "gently."
The long and short of it is, in Islamic countries, women are slaves. And there is still slavery in these countries. They have human trafficking. It is not part of our culture; it is not part of our rules. Of course there is illegal human trafficking here, but it is not systemic. It is against the law. Slavery was abolished with the emancipation proclamation. Slavery is still very much a part of Islamic societies.
They consider it perfectly normal.
But we currently have a United Nations that has paid no attention to the millions of people murdered in the southern Sudan and Darfur genocides. These atrocities are of no consequence to them. So women's rights are certainly not even on the playing field.
AAL: How much of this happens in the West. Do we now have an epidemic in North America, too?
Atlas: So many people ask me how many women in the West are murdered in honor killings. I can't give them an answer. Part of the problem is that even when there's unquestionably been an honor killing, officials do not want to label it. This was the case when Yaser Abdel Said murdered his daughters Amina Said, 18, and Sarah Said, 17 on New Year's Day in 2008. They were gorgeous, vibrant, quintessential girls. But they were too Western and they were dating non-Muslims. They spoke to a teacher at school. They called social services. They totally invested themselves in the West. They took honors and advanced placement classes. None of that mattered. No one helped them. Finally they ran away. The West could not save them. Their mother Patricia and brother, Islam, lured them back to Texas, to be murdered on New Year's Day. Their father Yaser fled the country, probably to Egypt and the FBI issued a wanted poster. Their great aunt, Gail Gartrell, lobbied officials to designate the crimes honor killings, which they were.
Their mother, father and brother are still at large. And it took the FBI 10 months to add the words "honor killing" to the wanted poster. I called it a pig-flying moment, when the FBI finally acted, it was so rare. They called a spade a spade. But within days, the FBI caved in to pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood and revised the wanted poster, to exclude the truth.
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