Mona Eltahowitzer is back!
Muslim Women Must Speak for Ourselves
By MONA ELTAHAWY, NOV. 19, 2017
“Many Muslim women have been reluctant to discuss this Tariq Ramadan case because in part they don’t want to feed into elements of the media’s Islamophobic and racist framing of these allegations,” Shaista Aziz, an Oxford-based freelance journalist, told me. “This does nothing to encourage women to report sexual violence.”
The hard place is a community within our own faith that is all too eager to defend Muslim men against all accusations. Mr. Ramadan’s defenders have dismissed the complaints against him as a “Zionist conspiracy” and an Islamophobic attempt to destroy a Muslim scholar. Too often, when Muslim women speak out, some in our “community” accuse us of “making our men look bad” and of giving ammunition to right-wing Islamophobes.
Muhammad ordered kids to throw rocks at Jews, according to PA-funded PLO magazine for children
A poem in the Palestinian youth magazine Zayzafuna teaches children that throwing rocks at Jews is something mandated by Muhammad, Islam’s prophet. The funders of the magazine include the Palestinian Authority. (More below the fold)
Libya migrant ‘slave market’ footage sparks outrage
The African Union (AU) has expressed outrage after footage emerged appearing to show sub-Saharan migrants being sold at slave markets in Libya.
On the video, released by CNN this week, young men are seen being auctioned off as farm workers.
The following lines were part of the poem printed in the magazine’s October issue together with the image above of a kid throwing rocks:
“O children of my country, sing to the occupied homeland so it will be liberated…
[Zayzafuna, October 2017]
That Jews are the intended target is clear from the reference to the Gharqad tree – “the tree of the Jews.” According to Muslim tradition Jews will try to hide behind the Gharqad tree when the Muslims come to kill them on Judgment Day.
The story of a stone or tree beckoning a Muslim to kill a Jew appears in numerous Islamic texts. One example is the following Hadith from the Sahih Muslim book of Hadith:
“The last Hour will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them until the Jews hide behind a stone or a tree, and the stone or a tree will say: ‘Muslim, or servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him’; but the Gharqad tree will not say [this], for it is the tree of the Jews.”