European Journal: Germany: The Problem of Forced Marriages in the Muslim
community 28.07.2004 22:30
http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,3065-184710-220045_A_1277818_1_BT,0
0.html
Forced marriages are not uncommon in Germany's Muslim community. Up to
30,000 mainly young Muslim women are thought to have been coerced ...
even beaten ... into marriage by their fathers or brothers. Most of them
originally come from Turkey, Morocco and Kosovo. The police are
powerless to do anything unless the women make an official complaint.
But many young women just go along with it because they're afraid or
because they want to protect their family's honour.
How dirty muslims rape young girls "Down Under"
Or what happens when Australia banned guns
PROTECT THE 2nd AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION!
Janet Albrechtsen. The Australian. 7 July 2002.
THE French call it tournantes or "take your turn" -- the French term for
the pack-rape of white girls by young Muslim men.
For 20 years the French ignored the ethnic causes of these barbaric
crimes for fear of offending multicultural man. Along the way, more
innocent young girls were pack-raped. Xenophobia divided communities.
And finally, voters punished a Centre-Left government for assuming that
the electorate was not grown up enough to discuss race without being
racist.
Last year Sylvie Lotteau, a magistrate from Bobigny, a northern Paris
suburb, described tournantes: "Their technique was to pick up a young
girl -- a white girl -- and once she had become the girlfriend of one of
the members, he would allow his mates to make use of her."
Now it's in Australia. Last week two Muslim brothers were found guilty
of the gang-rape of a young Australian girl. The victim knew one of the
brothers. She was invited for a drive but taken to a secluded park and
gang-raped while 14 Muslim boys watched.
Racially motivated gang-rape first hit the radar screen in August last
year. After the first trial, ethnic leaders such as Sheik Tajedinne
Hamed el Hilaly, imam at Lakemba mosque, said the ethnicity of the
rapists was irrelevant and simply incited racist attacks on Muslims.
But the Muslim community flogged the wrong racists -- those Muslim
rapists played the race card in the most horrific and demeaning way,
taunting victims with "you deserve it because you're Australian" and
threats to "f--- you Leb style".
And when the judge in the first trial, Megan Latham, tried to douse the
flames in an increasingly heated debate about ethnic crime with her
gratuitous comments about there being "no racial element", she simply
turned up the heat.
Since then, evidence on ethnicity-based gang-rapes has mounted. Horrific
attacks across Sydney's southwest reveal the same modus operandi as the
French tournantes. Our reaction? Like the French, we pander to
sensitivities about race and cultural issues. And so we extend the
social and political nightmare of race-based gang-rape.
A year ago the barbaric French phenomenon looked vaguely relevant. Now
it looks scary and prophetic. When 11 young Muslim men were accused of
pack raping a 14-year-old French girl in a cellar, politicians, judges
and sociologists finally began to expose and explore the terror of
tournantes.
"It's the group effect. They can't let themselves down in front of their
friends, who are urging them to commit the act," said a police commander
of a northern Paris suburb.
Pack-rape of white girls is an initiation rite of passage for a small
section of young male Muslim youth, said Jean-Jacques Rassial, a
psychotherapist at Villetaneuse University. "Fraternal bonding now
dominates. It is the law of the gang, shorn of any sexual morals," he
said.
Denmark presents a similar story. Last year, Flemming Balvig, a
criminologist at Copenhagen University, confirmed the French experience
of this barbaric rite of passage into manhood for some of these young
men.
French and Danish experts say perpetrators of gang-rape flounder between
their parents' Islamic values and society's more liberal democratic
values falling back on the most basic pack mentality of violence and
self-gratification. The progressive Danes offer immigrants advice about
the nature of Danish culture and how Denmark's liberal sexual attitudes
cannot be equated with Danish girls "asking for it".
Even the wider Arab world is confronting the costs of a culture that can
treat women as second-class citizens. Two weeks ago a ground-breaking
report by Arab scholars, commissioned by the UN, revealed that half of
all Arab women can neither read nor write. The Arab Human Development
Report 2002 found that Arab women's participation in political and
economic life rates the lowest in the world.
Transplanted to countries such as Australia, a culture which places so
little value on gender equality was always going to have problems when
faced with women who not only read and write but think and assume
control of their lives. Each of those barbaric gang-rapists showed utter
disdain for their young Western victims.
Yet in Australia racially motivated gang-rape is met by gutless
censorship from multicultural man. And like our Muslim leaders,
Australian feminists have been unusually quiet on this gender issue.
Ignoring it exacerbates it. A large group of Muslim boys involved in
these gang-rapes is still at large. The Muslim community's refusal to
acknowledge cultural issues spells disaster for more innocent young
women terrorised by Muslim boys hiding behind their ethnicity. Silence
also spells disaster politically. Suppressing frank discussion gives a
free kick to the next Jean-Marie Le Pen or Pauline Hanson.
At the community level, ignoring the link between crime and ethnicity
raises the red flag to rednecks who wish to blame all Muslims for the
barbarity of a few. This undermines a peaceful, tolerant future for the
vast majority of immigrants who embrace Australian values.
Discussing race or ethnicity is neither racist nor xenophobic. Tackling
problems head on can only encourage further immigration; ignoring them
will be immigration's death knell. Our tolerance of these Muslim
pack-rapists simply feeds their intolerance of us. It took the French 20
years to work that out. How long will it take us?
Miranda Devine. "Racist rapes: Finally the truth comes out." The
Sun-Herald. July 14 2002.
So now we know the facts, straight from the Supreme Court, that a group
of Lebanese Muslim gang rapists from south-western Sydney hunted their
victims on the basis of their ethnicity and subjected them to hours of
degrading, dehumanising torture. The young women, and girls as young as
14, were "sluts" and "Aussie pigs", the rapists said. So now that some
of the perpetrators are in jail, will those people who cried racism and
media "sensationalism" hang their heads in shame? Hardly.
The journalists, academics, legal brains and politicians who tried to
claim last August that the gang rapes of south-western Sydney were just
a run-of-the-mill police blotter story being beaten up by racists,
scaremongers and political opportunists don't ever want to acknowledge
the truth about that ugly episode in Australian history. They don't want
to acknowledge the fear and tension that ran through a part of Sydney
they rarely visit and can never understand.
This newspaper was the first to report the story, which had been common
knowledge in police and media circles, and it has never censored the
race element.
Even last week, with the conviction of two brothers for their part in
the gang rape of Miss D, who was 16 when she was held at gunpoint in a
Greenacre park, there were media outlets that downplayed the story and
air-brushed race from it.
Yet the victims have been crying out for the truth to be told. In court
on Friday, one victim gave another a card on which she had written
In August, when Judge Megan Latham handed out laughably lenient
sentences to three men in one gang rape case, which were later more than
doubled on appeal, she made a special point of debunking the race link:
"There is no evidence before me of any racial element in the commission
of these offences," she said. "There is nothing said or done by the
offenders which provides the slightest basis for imputing to them some
discrimination in terms of the nationality of their victims."
Except that later one of the victims complained her victim impact
statement had been "censored" of any "ethnic" references by prosecutors
intent on a plea bargain. She was convinced she was raped because of her
ethnicity. "You deserve it because you're an Australian," the rapists
told her during the five-hour attack.
It's just so inconvenient of the victims to insist on telling the truth.
"I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference," one
18-year-old victim, codenamed Miss C, told the court, remembering one of
the 14 men who called her "Aussie pig", gang raped her 25 times over a
six-hour period in Bankstown and Chullora, and then turned a hose on
her. "I'm going to f*** you Leb style," he said.
Fourteen gang rapists have been convicted, or pleaded guilty, thanks to
the courage of seven victims who testified for days in court as their
tormentors smirked nearby, the men's families threatened them and
defence lawyers suggested they had enjoyed the rapes.
"They're very brave, very strong and very courageous young women," said
Salvation Army Major Joyce Harmer, who held the hands of many of the
victims through the trials. "They knew this was something they had to
do."
These were racist crimes. They were hate crimes. The rapists chose their
victims on the basis of race. That fact is crucial to this story. If the
perpetrators had been Anglo-Celtic Australians, the furore would have
been enormous. No newspaper would have left out that fact and you can
bet the guilt and shame would have been spread far and wide.
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