….and blows himself up. Muhammad Shazzaf Al-Shehri is, or rather was, a TV comedian turned suicide bomber. At MEMRI TV there’s some old footage of him, leading a rousing Jihadi singalong (clip 1004):
Get up and shake off your slumber, because Islam is back. We have come for the sake of Allah, and we have declared Jihad. We have returned with sub-machine guns. We have the leadership today. We have awakened our generation, individually and as a whole.
Perhaps it loses something in translation.
And then there’s this chant:
We treat the woman like a protected pearl. In the West, the woman is degraded. We treat the woman like a protected pearl. In the West, the woman is degraded. A hidden pearl, a protected pearl.
It’s something of a bete noire with Islamists, this supposed degradation of women in the West, where they’re allowed to roam free, do what they want, and even – the wicked temptresses – flaunt their bodies. As Salman Rushdie argues, it’s important to realise the extent to which Islamic extremism is rooted in men’s fear of women’s sexuality:
Rushdie told German weekly magazine Stern that his latest novel, “Shalimar the Clown”, dealt with the deep anxiety felt among many Islamic men about female sexual freedom and lost honor.
When asked if the book drew a link between “Islamic terror and damaged male honor”, Rushdie said he saw it as a crucial, and often overlooked, point.
“The Western-Christian world view deals with the issues of guilt and salvation, a concept that is completely unimportant in the East because there is no original sin and no savior,” he said, in comments printed in German.
“Instead, great importance is given to ‘honor’. I consider that to be problematic. But of course it is underestimated how many Islamists consciously or unconsciously attempt to restore lost honor.”
When asked why he probed the issues in his new novel in the context of a love triangle, he said: “It has a lot to do with sexual fear of women.”
Rushdie, 58, said that much of the anger toward the West was provoked by that split on sexual issues.
Of all the corruptions from the decadent West that concern the Islamists – democracy, liberalism, commercialism – feminism probably offers the greatest threat.
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