Horowitz and Darwish’s snuff movie
I came across a short film produced by the so-called David Horowitz Freedom Center, narrated by Nonie Darwish who is an anti-Islamic harpy who features on Townhall.com and a number of other American "conservative" websites. Entitled "The Violent Oppression of Woman (sic) in Islam", it consists of a laundry-list of the oppressions women face in various Muslim countries, or in the words of its promo article at FrontPageMag.com, "the fascist portions of the Islamic world — arcing like a crescent from sub-Saharan Africa, through Iran, to north-central Asia and reaching into hidden pockets of the United States". (HT: Islamophobia Watch; update 23rd Oct 1859 BST: the video has been withdrawn by YouTube for "terms of use violations", alhamdu lillah.)
The film is basically a snuff movie, showing a public execution of a veiled woman by the Taliban, several dead bodies including the decapitated body of a young girl who was supposedly the victim of an honour killing, mobile phone footage of a public stoning, and indecently-exposed pictures of victims of female circumcision. This last shows her lack of genuine concern for the victim; I wonder how she would like it if somebody took pictures of her with her genitalia exposed and published them on YouTube? Perhaps someone could ask her, if they show it at one of their college appearances – she's speaking at UC Berkeley today at 7pm. (I'm not linking to the film itself, because such pictures of children – as I suspect this victim is, because the operation is not performed on grown women – are illegal to produce or distribute in the UK. However, the Front Page article has a link to it.)
The wording of the film consists of a series of disconnected accusations: about how it's a "general practice of Mozlems to cut out the genitals of little girls", which is not true in most of the Muslim world; that most girls in Somalia are circumcised (actually, the number is declining even there), that Iran allows girls to marry at age 9 (as if most, or even many, actually do) and allows temporary marriage (she forgets to mention that most other Muslim countries don't); that in that country a man beheaded his 7-year-old daughter because he suspected she had been raped (accompanied by footage of the decapitated head of a Muslim woman, who looks a lot older than 7); that "over 90% of Pakistani wives have been struck, beaten or abused sexually for reasons like cooking an unsatisfactory meal or failing to give birth to a male child", with no reference at all to a source, or to the fact that pressure to bear male children is common throughout the Indian subcontinent, not just Pakistan, and in all religious communities.
This series of accusations and "facts" is set against a backdrop of lurid pictures of bloodied or abused women interspersed with innocent pictures of veiled women, or even unveiled women who we are expected to assume are Muslims, and a woman and two girls reading the Qur'an; oddly, a brief return to the subject of FGM is ended with a still of light-skinned, veiled and certainly not Somali, and very likely uncircumcised, Muslim women in hijab, sitting in what looks very much like a lecture theatre (3 minutes in). The last minute or so is taken up with a speech by the Iranian president, Mohammed Ahmadinejad, about how women are respected in Iran and how men kiss their mothers' hands. I'm not trying to whitewash Ahmadinejad or his regime, or pretend that bad things never happen, because we all know they do, but I'm sure that what he was describing is the norm in Iran and that murders of women or girls suspected of being raped are not.
I'm not sure I should be surprised by anything I see at Front Page, but this film shocked me. It's a highly amateurish affair, with the narration jumping from subject to subject and making bald, sweeping generalisations and unreferenced assertions, and I've written before about FPM writers making false claims and linking to the evidence disproving the claims, but the footage is a mixture of snuff and indecency. Any college which has a showing of this film scheduled should be tipped off about its content. If it was suspected that the girl depicted following an FGM treatment was American or British, this video would be pulled down; if only for that reason, it should be.
