Posted By Bernard Gaynor on Friday, September 26, 2014 10:57 am | 9 comments

There is a bleeding-heart webpage called the Anti-bogan.

Now, this may come as a surprise, but some of the activity that the Anti-bogan page ‘outs’ I also agree is wrong. Which means that even I think bleeding-hearts can be right sometimes.

However, most days the writers at the Anti-bogan page simply spend their time labelling people that they don’t like as ‘bigots’. Which basically means that the Anti-bogan page aligns neatly with the dictionary definition of the word.

Good for it.

But, just for the record, it is not bigotry to express strongly held views. Nor is it bigotry to explain why the strongly held views of others are flawed or incorrect. It is bigotry to completely reject other people’s views out of hand, without offering any reason why.

Bleeding hearts do this all the time. They engage in a special form of bigotry masked behind completely unfounded ‘tolerance’. In order to feel good, they reject the nasty truth without any reason or justification. And when it comes to Islam, this bigotry of nice is actually suicidal. Australians will die because of it.

The Anti-bogan webpage perpetuates this suicidal and irrational view of Islam. It’s gone into overdrive in the last week to defend the ‘Religion of Peace’. And it’s been doing it for quite some time.

Hence its decision to publish this open letter to Bendigo City Councillor, Elise Chapman, earlier this year. Suleiman Ali Baig wrote it to express his ire about comments she made regarding her concern about rape and Islam.

And in this letter were the following words:

‘rape is categorically forbidden in Islam’

Now that came as a little surprise to me. Because rape is not categorically forbidden in Islam.

At least, it’s not categorically forbidden in the ‘categorically forbidden’ kind of way, but in the ‘it’s ok to keep a sexual slave’ kind of way.

And don’t take my word for it. Take an Islamic scholar’s viewpoint. Like Muhammad Saalih Al-Munajjid. He’s a shaykh and he runs the website islamqa.info, in which curious Muslims ask him tricky questions about all sorts of moral issues.

And one of them has just happened to raise the curly issue of whether a Muslim man could still have sex with his wife if he was also having a good time with his slave girl.

It’s really not a bad question. It’s also particularly relevant, considering that the United Nations believes the Islamic State has taken 1,500 women captive and turned them into sexual slaves. And female British jihadis have wasted no time in setting up brothels where these captive women relieve the stress of the men after they take a spot of leave from the frontline. One does need to recuperate after a hard day’s work hacking heads off.

And the answer of the good Shaykh Al-Munajjid is good news for the boys.

In short, it is this: the wife has no right to object to her husband owning female slaves or to having intercourse with them. And I’m not making that up. It’s a word for word quote from an Islamic scholar who is alive and well today.

In a rather longer explanation, Shaykh Al-Munajjid reasons that Mohammad had a slave girl called Mariam and that she bore him a son. He goes on to say that as a result the ancient Islamic scholars are unanimous in their agreement that it is fine and dandy to own female slaves. And to sleep with them. In fact, anyone who says otherwise is a sinner.

I guess that means Suleiman Ali Baig has committed a heinous crime against the Islamic faith by writing to Councillor Chapman to state that rape is categorically forbidden in Islam.

Of course, I’m sure that somewhere in the back of a dusty Sharia lawbook some other Muslim scholar will bring forth a handy get out of jail free card. Presumably on page 782 it says that sleeping with slave girls is not rape. Probably because slaves girls are slaves and therefore not entitled to the protection against rape that Muslim women ‘enjoy’.

But that doesn’t actually make it ‘not rape’. Even if Allah knows best.

Slave girls are slaves. That means that they have no freedom. Including of their own body. They certainly can’t say no to their bearded master when the time comes. In fact, they technically don’t even have the power to say yes either. They are denied both dignity and the opportunity to love.

They just have to submit themselves sexually whenever the call arises, regardless of whether they want to or not.

That’s not just rape of the body. It’s rape of the mind as well. And Islamic scholars old and new all categorically state that this is lawful because they redefine rape to mean whatever they want it to mean.

Now, lest anyone jump to bigoted conclusions, I’m not suggesting that all Muslim men engage in rape. In fact, the vast majority of them don’t.

But those who believe that Mohammad’s example is worth following necessarily must accept the idea that the keeping of sexual slaves is permissible. As a result, it is perfectly reasonable for Councillor Chapman to express her concern about rape and the growth of Islam in the town she represents.

And conversely, it must be noted that those ‘Muslims’ who reject these beliefs regarding sexual slavery are actually rejecting Mohammad and Islam. And to the extent that they do, they are not actually Muslim at all. Happily, it seems that Suleiman Ali Baig is well and truly down this path, even despite his misguided but understandable desire to protect his cultural heritage, flawed as it may be.

Let’s hope he keeps walking down that path.

By the way, if you want to see Shaykh Al-Munajjid in action talking about the sexual duties of the wife, click on the video below.

Granted, it might not be rape. But it’s not respect either.

And given that this is the attitude towards the wife, one can only pity the sexual slave.