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Sharia and Rape
by Fjordman

It caused headlines when the Norwegian woman Marte Dalelv (24) received a prison sentence of sixteen months in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), after reporting a rape. The interior designer was convicted of having illegal sex after she reported being raped. She appealed her jail sentence and has warned other Western women about the Islam-based legal system of the Emirates. The billionaire Wissam Al Mana, husband of the American pop star Janet Jackson, reportedly fired Dalelv from her job after she reported being raped.

The incident in question occurred in March 2013 and was first mentioned by Norwegian media on 17 July 2013. The story soon became international news, cited in major Chinese, French, German, Russian and other news outlets. As the newspaper USA Today explained, under United Arab Emirates law, sex outside of marriage is illegal. Rapists can only be convicted if either the perpetrator confesses or if four adult Muslim males witness the crime and testify. Researcher Anne Bang commented that similar, sharia-inspired laws exist in other Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and to some extent Oman.

In the UK, the Mail Online noted that Marte Dalelv is unfortunately not the only Western woman to have experienced such an ordeal in the Emirates. The Australian citizen Alicia Gali, another young white woman in her 20s, was thrown in a Dubai jail for eight months after she reported being drugged and gang-raped.

In Norway, Erna Solberg, the leader of the Conservative Party (Høyre), dubbed the treatment of this Norwegian rape victim “medieval,” and called upon Norwegian authorities to deal more forcefully with the matter. This is strange, given that she herself, while serving as a government Minister some years ago, suggested that Norway should establish an official sharia council with public approval, so that Muslims can follow sharia in family matters.

Erna Solberg, Norway’s likely new Prime Minister after the general elections in September 2013, thus thinks that Islamic sharia laws are primitive and backward when applied in the Middle East, but she wants to import them to her own country in Europe. This seems to be emblematic of the attitudes of the political elites and mass media in general. Conservative Party leader Erna Solberg stated in 2011 that Muslims are now being harassed in the same way as Jews were in the 1930s, during the rise of the genocidal Nazi regime in Germany.

One of the reasons why I am being branded an “extremist” and a borderline or full-blown “Nazi” by the ruling establishment is that I do not profess belief in the existence of a moderate Islam. That’s because I still haven’t seen any convincing explanation of what this so-called moderate Islam should consist of. The term “Islamism” is a very recent innovation which does not make much factual sense. The rape case of Marte Dalelv in glitzy and allegedly moderate Dubai proves the point made by me and other critics of the term “Islamism.”

A rape victim requires four adult male witnesses to the attack against her. This has been sharia law and practice for centuries. It does not represent any recent introduction or innovation. This isn’t “radical Islamism” in action, it’s actually “Islam light”. The woman is lucky not to be stoned to death, as she might have been elsewhere.

Andreas C. Halse, the leader of SU, the youth organization of the Socialist Left Party (SV) in Norway, wrote a commendable article, given that it came from the political Left. He pointed out that there is a double standard on display in the way Westerners associate with certain Islamic authoritarian regimes. We rarely criticize oil-rich Arab countries and conduct extensive trade with them despite the fact that these “uncivilized” Islamic dictatorships in part base their laws on “religious superstition.” As Halse noted, we’re talking about some of the world’s “most reactionary, authoritarian and misogynistic regimes” that have virtually made a sport out of violating basic rights. At the same time as Western governments are quick to point out human rights violations in many other countries, states such as the Emirates and Saudi Arabia are for some reason treated differently.

What is lacking from the political elites in reaction to this case is questioning what to do when these same Islamic attitudes are imported to the West as well. Marte Dalelv has learned from bitter experience not to travel to Muslim countries that do not respect her rights. Yet what’s worrisome is that Western authorities are in the process of mass importing this same mentality to our countries, too, with Muslim and Third World mass immigration. Europeans can avoid Muslim majority countries if they choose, but do we have to avoid Western countries, too, in order to be safe? If so, where are we supposed to go to? Mars?

Martine Vik Magnussen, another pretty young Norwegian woman in her early 20s, was raped and murdered by a Muslim man — but in London in what used to be England, not in the Middle East. She was found dead in March 2008 from compression to the neck due to strangulation. Farouk Abdulhak, the son of a billionaire and one of Yemen’s wealthiest men, is the only suspect in the case. He escaped to his home country.

At the think tank Gatestone Institute, the excellent writer Soeren Kern in July 2013 warned against a wave of rapes in Britain, even targeting women using taxis. Similar stories could easily be told about France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany or Sweden. Many of these taxi drivers have a Muslim immigrant background:

“Great Britain is in the throes of a rape and pedophilia epidemic unlike anything the country has experienced in living memory. Many of the sex crimes are being perpetrated by Muslim child grooming gangs responsible for drugging, raping and torturing hundreds and possibly thousands of British girls. But another wave of sex crimes involves predatory Muslim taxi drivers who are raping female passengers. The number of so-called taxi rapes is snowballing to such an extent that a British judge has issued a warning that no woman can expect to be safe while traveling in a cab.”

The list of recorded incidents of taxi rapes goes on and on. Not surprisingly, more and more women-only cab firms are springing up. Yet a women-only taxi service has yet to arrive in Bristol, England. There the BBC radio host Sam Mason, a single mother, was fired after she called a taxi company and requested a “non-Asian” driver to take her 14-year-old daughter to her grandparents’ home; preferably a female driver. The operator refused, and said, “We would class that as being racist.” Mason responded, “It’s not your 14-year-old girl.”

The BBC was alerted to the conversation after it was recorded and sent to The Sun newspaper. Mason was subsequently fired from her job. A BBC spokesman said: “Although Sam Mason’s remarks were not made on-air, her comments were completely unacceptable and, for that reason, she has been informed that she will no longer be working for the BBC with immediate effect.”

The internationally influential British state broadcaster BBC thus supports the mass importation of Muslims and other hostile ethnic groups, but will ban even its own employees from protecting their daughters against the increased risk of rape resulting from this policy. At the same time, the BBC and other mass media have vilified brave men such as Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll of the English Defence League (EDL) for protesting against Muslim men routinely drugging, abusing and gang raping native white girls — some of them children as young as ten years old — in cities across Britain.

Also in the summer of 2013, Vidar Enebakk, the curator at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo, has been a driving force behind getting the traveling exhibition Sultans of Science to Norway. The exhibition is intended to “reveal the remarkable achievements of Muslim civilization.” It originated in the United Arab Emirates, a country without any significant home-grown scientists but with lots of oil enabling it to hire cheap foreign laborers who enjoy few rights and who risk being deported for little or no reason.

The exhibition Sultans of Science originally began at the Ibn Batuta mall in Dubai. The same MTE Studios that created it also boasts of having made the Museum of Science and Technology in Islam at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is an extremely intolerant sharia-ruled state where individuals run the risk of being beheaded publicly for criticizing Islam, where slavery is still practiced secretly and where the practice of all other religions except for Islam is strictly prohibited and harshly punished.

These authoritarian Gulf Arab countries have high levels of corruption and low levels of transparency. It is not quite clear how the this institution is funded, but its many exhibitions and meetings with senior officials not just in the Emirates, but also in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar, indicate very good political connections. MTE Studios seems to enjoy a very close working relationship with a number of wealthy and sometimes repressive Arab Muslim governments. For example, it runs the Bahrain Science Centre on behalf of the Bahraini state and represented the United Arab Emirates at a 2010 conference in Malaysia on Islamic science.

When asked about this exhibition of so-called Islamic science (which usually wasn’t very Islamic in real life) by a national newspaper, the curator Vidar Enebakk at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo started talking about how it was supposedly “documented” that the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik had been influenced by anti-Islamic think tanks in the USA. Was this exhibition in Oslo partly intended to combat alleged Islamophobia? If so, this can hardly be referred to as objective science or research, and is highly problematic, considering that the museum has also received funding from the Norwegian state.

Vidar Enebakk has a history of being a left-wing radical activist, fighting for Socialism from below. Apparently, the way to promote tolerance and fight for the poor and oppressed these days is to promote propaganda exhibitions developed in Islamic dictatorships ruled by sharia apartheid laws where the extremely wealthy Arab ruling class routinely exploits foreign workers who are often summarily deported without warning.

In late July 2013, Norwegians can celebrate the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan by visiting a exhibit of propaganda about the glories of Islamic culture, which was developed in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates at the same time as a Norwegian woman in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates has been sentenced to prison as a punishment for being raped.

Will the Islamophobia never end?

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Postscript: Due to the international outcry over this case, which threatens Dubai’s reputation as a modern tourist destination, it is possible that Marte Dalelv will not have to serve her initial sentence. If so, that is good for her, but it does not change the underlying mentality nor the problem of sharia-influenced laws in Islamic countries.

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