Chesler Chronicles

May 27th, 2009 9:33 am

Finally! Western Law Remedies Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman Among Muslim Immigrant Communities.

In 2001, the mother of an 11-year-old girl spirited her out of Gothenburg, in Sweden, and back to Somalia where she had her brutally genitally mutilated (and without anesthesia). The mother and two other women held her down while a man made sure that she would never experience sexual pleasure and would instead, experience a great deal of pain for the rest of her life. According to the English language Swedish media,

“For several years after the violation the girl was subjected to repeated examinations by her mother who forced her fingers into her vagina to check that her virginity remained intact. She also repeatedly assaulted her daughter with various implements including books, a curtain rail and a belt.”

Yesterday, eight years later, the girl, now 19-years-old, won a lawsuit in which she was awarded a monetary compensation from her mother for the “abuse and gross violation of (her bodily) integrity.” Damages for pain and suffering are yet to be decided.

In Somalia, the girl would not have such legal recourse. My congratulations to the Swedish, Western legal system and to the bravery of this plaintiff. May we soon see many more such lawsuits and victories as well.

Also this month, in Manchester, England, a “wicked and cruel mother” has been jailed for three years after forcing her two young daughters to marry their cousins in Pakistan in 2007. The mother had “hoodwinked” her daughters, aged 14 and 15, into going on a family holiday. Once there, she not only forced the marriage upon them—she also threatened to “tie (her elder) daughter to the bed, blindfold her and strip her and watch to make sure she had sex with her new husband.”

The girls confided in a teacher after returning to the UK. My congratulations to the British, Western legal system and to the bravery of these two sisters who may now have to live in hiding or face death.

A victory of sorts in both these cases was possible due to European laws and to the willingness of law enforcement officials to use them to prosecute “customs” which are, essentially, crimes and human rights violations in the West. These two cases also show how barbaric a mother can be to her own daughter—in the name of family honor, religion or “custom.”

This phenomena does not surprise me. I spent twenty years writing a book Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman which is appearing this month in a new edition with a new Introduction. Such inhumanity is not confined to the Third World but is also alive and well in the West. Like men, women are capable of kindness and cruelty; they are as close to the apes as to the angels. In addition, like men, women also internalize sexism–and are permitted, even expected to be aggressive, either directly or indirectly, but mainly towards other women, not towards men.

There is nothing “indirect” about female-female aggression in the Third World. Earlier in the twentieth century, anthropologists began documenting the dangerous, often deadly Third World rivalries that took place between co-wives, between wives and concubines, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, and so on. By the late twentieth century, human rights activists, academics, and journalists added to this work.

Thus, we learned that women, like men, felt loyalty not to other women but rather to their own race, ethnicity, tribe, class, family, etc. Thus, the Western feminist view that women are more peaceful or more compassionate than men would not pass muster with the Western female inmates at Auschwitz (mainly Jews, Gypsies, and politicals), who were tormented and guarded by women who did far more than just “follow orders”; or with the German, Polish, and Austrian Jews, whose female neighbors envied them and coveted their apartments, clothing, and furniture and who happily turned them over to the Gestapo; or with the black African girls and women of Darfur today, whose brutal and public gang rapes by ethnic Arab Muslims are accompanied by the rapists’ women cheering them on while they, the presumably gentler sex, hurl racist insults at the rape victims.

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23 Comments

1. MiamaMan:

My dear Phyllis,

Let the Mother give you quiet in the mind. purity, calm, and peace.

May I state that I wish you the best? Please allow me.

Let the love of that: The Prince of Peace, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the One without a Second…Adonai, Elohim, bless your every step.

May I sing? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ION6weLGCPI

May 27, 2009 - 10:39 am 2. Greenconsciousness:

Thank You for this article. I am so glad that somewhere in the world the torture of women is being recognized for what it is :torture. In the US, immigration authorities do not consistently recognize female genital mutilation as grounds for staying under the political persecution;they do not recognize fear of torture or death grounds for women. Canada is deporting a woman whose husband was in writing promised to honor kill her as soon as she steps foot in Pakistan.

I question whether US western law would allow any child to collect from a parent for childhood abuse. I don’t think it has ever happened although some children have been awarded property when one parent killed the other parent. Interesting subject for research.

May 27, 2009 - 10:55 am 3. Vicky deStephano:

Dear Phyllis,

Thank you for writing both Women and Madness and Women’s Inhumanity to Women.

Women and Madness was really eye opening in that I and a fellow inmate were recently reading it discussing how we still see the effects of the asylum in the “recovery movement” and in the prison system. I was there as a direct effect of being a powerful female voice. I really understand what its like to have all of your expressions outside of what a wife should be talking about pathologized.

Second, Women’s Inhumanity to Women brings a real understanding to internalized sexism. It also raises a consciousness about women not really knowing what it is to be a woman and to bond with one another. It is one of the best books I’ve read on female behavior. I’ve always felt that with a man around I’m usually not listened to and thoughts or needs sold out for the sake of them in a moment’s notice. I’d like to say I haven’t done the same thing; I haven’t since I read that book.

May 27, 2009 - 1:00 pm 4. MiamaMan:

How many times I have woken up in the middle of the night after hearing the cries of the lambs?:

Shema Yisrael! Shema Yisrael!

Oh, it hurts! For dabbling in these studies, I have met the soul of Satan.

For every blow that occurs, reverberates right here. Are we two, or are we One?

Year ago when my friend French Swami Sarveshwarananda played that Hebrew song on his guitar:

Haaah, Hashivenu, haaah Hashivenu, aaaa Adonai Elecha…
Vena Shuva Vena Shuva
Kadesh Kadesh, Ya Menuke Kedem.

We all cried, and cried…

May 27, 2009 - 1:05 pm 5. Louis Santacroce:

Of course, I join in with the rejoicing over the Swedish court’s verdict. But, let me sound a word of warning: it may be the last such verdict that country sees. Many muslims in Sweden wear tee shirts proclaiming “2030.” It’s a public warning, similar to Hitler’s in “Mein Kampf,” of what they plan to do in the very near future; to wit, multiply to such an extent that, in that year, they will be able to take that country, not by force, but by ballots. Yes, there will simply be so many of them that they will be able to go to the polls and force the entire country to live under muslim law. How long before they do the same thing here? How long before we stop letting them?

May 27, 2009 - 1:58 pm 6. Kate Sullivan:

Thank you for this great article. I don’t
think women who hurt other women are exercising “internalized sexism”. I think that women, like the other half of the human race, are capable of great good and great evil. We all need to stand up in the face of it and this is not easy. It is easy to
not “get involved” and avoided bringing the trouble to our own door, but it has to be done in a free society.

May 27, 2009 - 3:00 pm 7. Marion L.:

Dear Dr. Chesler:

You have hit a home run with this column! And it is so tragic that such columns still need to be written.
And as you know, we disagree on some points.
However, my hat is off to you on this one.
When will women and girls finally be spared such misery? When will we finally live in a world where the full humanity of women and children is respected?

I suppose I can quote Bob Dylan for the answer: “The answer is blowing in the wind.”

May 27, 2009 - 4:04 pm 8. David Thomson:

“But, let me sound a word of warning: it may be the last such verdict that country sees.”

That’s also how I see it. The Muslim extremists are taking it for granted that they will soon have the larger population. These jackals are simply biding their time. The odds are on their side. It’s going to get very ugly in Sweden and most of the rest of Europe. Blood will inevitably flow in the streets.

May 27, 2009 - 11:55 pm 9. Pajamas Media » Woman on Woman Violence in the Third World:

[...] the rest of the story here [...]

May 28, 2009 - 12:44 am 10. Kelly:

I hope women and men will share this information, but so many people do not see brutality for what it is unless they themselves have had to experience it. And regarding Sweden – how many unaware people still see them as some “ideal” country? I hope that everyone will share the information regarding the 2030 t-shirts in Sweden and the sentiment behind them. This is something all too many people think “could never happen to us” and yet we watch it happening in other countries and simply shrug?

May 28, 2009 - 6:47 am 11. Blackwater:

I’ve actually seen more girl fights than guy fights. My old girlfriend in highschool got in a vicious fight with another girl I was friends with because she thought I was cheating on her with my friend. It went from the hallway into the girls bathroom. They slammed each others heads into lockers and the floor and kicked down bathroom metal doors to get at each other. That was the most vicious fight I’ve ever seen. It lasted atleast 20 minutes. And it wasn’t hair pulling and scratching. It was full on punches to the head over and over again.

May 28, 2009 - 5:04 pm 12. Susan Everett:

Just finished reading 2009 version of WITW, and was so sad. Also white hot angry at having allowed myself (a 65 yr old female) to have grown up in both Canada and the U.S. and to have succumbed to female hidden cruelties (shunning and excluding, mostly), and my own English mother’s “pronouncements” on the worthlessness of females. Even when she died, she “got me” — leaving each of my brothers 40 % of her assets, and me 20 %.

I have been sickened by the still ongoing female genital mutilation activities. I am wondering, has anyone ever asked a Muslim man if he knows what the pleasure is like when he has sex with a fully functioning woman, especially if she likes or loves him? There are so many subtleties in the movements of a woman’s body when she is happy and eager to have sex with a man. She can make sex exquisite for him, and for herself. Don’t Muslim men know what they are missing? So why do they insist on this butchery? Or are the older women doing it acting in fury and revenge at their own experiences, and wanting their daughters to suffer as well? I keep wanting to write a book addressed to Muslim men asking them why they are choosing to miss out on the pleasures of life, which would definitely include women. I cannot believe there is a God in this universe who wishes to subject half the human race to the other half. And the women who agree to this travesty need some serious protection so they can resist without death threats!

May 28, 2009 - 5:10 pm 13. Lauren:

In reading your article (of which I agree with and applaud) I cannot help but wonder what your thoughts on circ. are because there seems to be a huge movement to discredit this procedure and call parents that have this done to their baby boys mutilator and butchers. They make the tie to female mutilation in many of their arguments and it concerns me. I never quiet know how to answer to this. I’d love your thoughts.

May 29, 2009 - 5:30 am 14. John P.:

This is a wonderful article covering topics most feminists simply refuse to address.

One rarely sees this degree of honesty on the part of feminists when writing about Third World women and the issues they face.

May 29, 2009 - 9:19 am 15. Post-feminist man:

Susan Everett,

Don’t Muslim men know what they are missing? So why do they insist on this butchery? Or are the older women doing it acting in fury and revenge at their own experiences, and wanting their daughters to suffer as well?

-I’m no Muslim but maybe the problem is that if your prophet was a man who, or so the sacred stories go, had a healthy sexual appetite that he licensed with multiple marriages, child brides, rape and enslavement of captive women, easy divorce, etc.; and if you in turn model your desires on this man, then maybe it becomes paramount to build social order on control of women, to limit their exposure to the other man’s competitive desires. With polygamy, access to sex begins to appear a zero-sum game limiting social progress as we might imagine it.

In other words, a free-wheeling sexuality would be a deadly two-edged sword in a Muslim social context, especially if female sexuality is included in the freedom. If you are one of these thugs who goes around thinking you have divine approval to rape “uncovered meat”, the last thing you want is for your own women to enjoy sex, should you care about keeping the only kind of family order you know and to maximize your own reproductive chances.

If you can rape Swedish girls and get away with it, you know there is something wrong with today’s Western culture, and with men and women and governments who no longer think they have a duty or the courage or resolve to admit the problem and protect women from the immigrant/Muslim rapists or from their own political ideologies that embrace the immigrant, however he acts, whatever he believes, as an equal child of the Great Mother multicultural state. Maybe great sex requires great and monogamous marriages, in the long run if not (also) the short, and an insistence on maintaining the cultural superiority of certain forms of marriage and family life, even at the expense, for any Muslim who aspire to great sex, of destroying what “Islam” has traditionally been about, for the most part.
Unless a Muslim believes his future and his stake in it lie with a Western-style nuclear family and the accompanying value system, he may well be suicidal (and family-destroying) to want what we consider good sex.

And, by the way, it is time for Western feminists to stop their mindless finger-pointing at “patriarchal” culture. Traditional Western families are patriarchal in the sense that male sexuality and responsibility is disciplined along with the female by idealize a certain kind of father figure. This father figure (rooted in a vision of a loving but demanding God who wars with the easy-ways-out of human sacrifice) is made sacred for both boys and girls in learning about certain human realities.

The need for some such father figure is essential to overcoming the kind of barbarism this article talks about. Matriarchal (mother-sacred) culture is not inconsistent with male violence towards women and male control of politics; and Islam, with its fearful and humiliated mother figures, is more matriarchal and less patriarchal than Judeo-Christian culture, as its accent on holding sacred strict and limiting notions of mother and her sexuality make clear.

Freedom for both men and women involves growing beyond the warm maternal embrace and its difficult relationship to irresponsible and deadly men, and the attendant political ideologies that seek protection from harm, often through forms of appeasement and moral blackmail, before they seek any serious essaying of hard anthropological and natural realities that is necessary to the revelations that build responsible family men. In Europe the welfare state (which we need in some limited form) has become, among many things, a tool funding and encouraging irresponsible men, including men who engage in rape, and also women who engage in woman-on-woman violence which surely grows with uncertainty about male resonsibility; this as the patriarchal household has declined.

Western patriarchy has of course led to many justified resentments among feminists but the better response for women’s freedom, I’d argue, is to reform it, to realize one’s stake in it, and not to war with it in the name of some impossible Utopia.

May 29, 2009 - 1:47 pm 16. MiamaMan:

12. Susan Everett:

“I am wondering, has anyone ever asked a Muslim man if he knows what the pleasure is like when he has sex with a fully functioning woman”

“Don’t Muslim men know what they are missing?”

Sure they do, that’s why the keep a concubine or go to a prostitute. There is always the option of a camel, or more hidden, pedophilia, especially with boys, which is endemic in Islamic countries.

How better the world would be today if a certain frustrated Mohammed Atta would have been given a good b… j..? As he believed in the story of the virgins waiting in Paradise for him (blow up dolls, as they have no soul).

May 29, 2009 - 4:30 pm 17. David Thomson:

Muslim theology is inherently anti-nuclear family. Ironically, both the ideological feminists and Islamic mullahs despise the conventional concept of one man and one woman raising their children. The conventional Muslim view of marriage inevitably destroys a viable social order. This is one of the primary reasons why Islamic cultures are normally poverty stricken—are prone toward violence.

May 30, 2009 - 10:52 am 18. Kat:

“the black African girls and women of Darfur today, whose brutal and public gang rapes by ethnic Arab Muslims are accompanied by the rapists’ women cheering them on while they, the presumably gentler sex, hurl racist insults at the rape victims.”

Citation? Just curious. I wondered about many uncited details here, but this one caught my eye in particular. Any references would be appreciated. Thanks.

May 30, 2009 - 2:42 pm 19. harmonicminer » Woman on woman violence in Islam and the third world:

[...] Western Law Remedies Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman Among Muslim Immigrant Communities. In 2001, the mother of an 11-year-old girl spirited her out of Gothenburg, in Sweden, and back to Somalia where she had her brutally genitally mutilated (and without anesthesia). The mother and two other women held her down while a man made sure that she would never experience sexual pleasure and would instead, experience a great deal of pain for the rest of her life. [...]

May 31, 2009 - 9:22 am 20. Linda Mae:

But liberals will tell us that there’s no problem – we are just trying to put Moslems down.

Imagine this article without the word “Moslem” in it. That is what may happen with the new UN mandate that one cannot portray Moslems in a bad light.

Fundamentalism can be ugly, however, no matter the religion. What is done in the Middle East – honor killings – just boggles the mind. It is considered racist to try to stop it.

One would think Obama could speak out against this while in Egypt. He has 2 daughters – would he submit either of them to genital mutilation?

Whenever I see a woman in her black robes in the middle of the hot summer (although it’s been rather cool – global cooling?) and the husband is wearing a short sleeved shirt then I know what a horrendous place women Moslem women find themselves.

I really wonder why the ultra liberals who parade in the street for Palestinian “rights” refuse to stand up for the women who have none. It’s called good PR.

Each reader of this article should send it to at least 10 women they know who have minds open to education and fairness.

May 31, 2009 - 9:30 pm 21. Smilla:

Thank you Phyllis. This catalogue of atrocities is something many of us have known for a long time. I still wonder why so many fake feminists refuse to see the truth. I know why, but I still wonder.

Jun 7, 2009 - 1:57 am 22. Why Has Obama Got It In for Muslim Women? « ACT Northern Virginia/Richmond/DC Metro Chapter.:

[...] Shabnums, countless Aishas in the West, as well as in Muslim countries, as the writings of Phyllis Chesler testify. And every one of them would happily have her father, mother, or brothers “impeded … [...]

Jun 11, 2009 - 10:14 am 23. Sweden: Finally! Western Law Remedies Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman Among Muslim Immigrant Communities — by Phyllis Chesler :: Responsible for Equality And Liberty (R.E.A.L.):

[...] (Sweden) Finally! Western Law Remedies Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman Among

Jun 15, 2009 - 12:25 pm