A Virginia imam is advocating for female genital mutilation, or FGM, despite the fact that the practice is illegal in the United States.
Imam Shaker Elsayed of the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, appears to believe that abusing women under the guise of religious purity codes is morally virtuous.
Mutilating a little girl’s genitals today can prevent “hypersexuality” in the future, says Imam Elsayed in a sermon to parishioners. After suggesting that the more extreme forms of mutilation may need to be avoided, the imam lectures his parishioners about seeking guidance from Muslim gynecologists familiar with the illegal procedure.
FGM is “the honorable thing to do if needed,” he preaches, detailing the supposed virtues of the horrifying practice. Imam Elsayed explains:
[Cut] the tip of the sexually sensitive part of the girl so that she is not hypersexually active…in societies where circumcision of girls is completely prohibited, hypersexuality takes over the entire society and a woman is not satisfied with one person or two or three.
The depraved talk was posted on YouTube and caught the attention of MEMRI, a watchdog group that monitors Islamist rhetoric around the world.
Watch:
Shaker Elsayed, Imam of Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque in Fairfax County, VA, Endorses FGM: It Prevents Girls from Becoming Hypersexually Active pic.twitter.com/DoMtvQHz9G
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) June 1, 2017
“Elsayed’s comments during a lecture on child rearing and family life last month sparked a brief controversy last Friday after a right-wing watchdog group circulated a video clip of his speech online,” reports The Washington Post.
The Board of Directors at the imam’s mosque only condemned their religious leader’s comments Monday after the public began voicing outrage over the leaked video. Representatives of the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center added that the brutal practice of FGM violates both U.S. and Islamic law.
However, the mosque failed to acknowledge that FGM is not all that uncommon in the Islamic world.
“FGM is practiced throughout the world, with an estimated 200 million women and girls having undergone genital cutting as a coming-of-age ritual, typically under age 15,” notes NPR.
Shockingly, FGM is practiced with increasing frequency in the United States. The high-profile arrests of three FGM-practicing Muslim doctors in Michigan recently introduced the topic back into the national conversation after complacency and naiveté fooled Americans into believing that such a horrific practice can only occur in third-world countries.
Cases of FGM in America have been skyrocketing, largely as a result immigration from FGM-practicing Muslim-majority countries like Somalia. The Daily Wire reported on the disturbing phenomenon in May:
The CDC states that the massive increase in the monstrous practice of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) is “wholly a result of rapid growth in the number of immigrants from FGM/C-practicing countries living in the United States.” Virtually all of the countries listed by the CDC were dominated by Muslims.
And that’s not even including Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation. The author of the 2016 study asserted that if Indonesia were included, the number of victims would increase by “several tens of thousands.” Recently-retired CDC researcher Howard Goldberg told The New York Post, “Indonesian figures became available after we wrote our paper, but it turns out that FGM was much more common in Indonesia than had been thought.”
As Paula Kweskin, a human rights lawyer and producer of the film Honor Diaries points out, “In the United States, 507,000 women are at risk or have undergone the procedure.”
In an op-ed for USA Today, Kweskin argues that the country shouldn’t turn a blind-eye to FGM or worse, defend and excuse it, due to fears stemming from political correctness or so-called “Islamophobia.”
“Culture is no excuse for abuse. No religion or culture should be the impetus for hurting, mutilating or abusing anyone, and our children should be protected. For too long, FGM has been practiced under the radar in the United States. … My hope for all women and girls is that we will stand for equality,” writes Kweskin.
In an effort to sanitize the brutal practice, Islamist-apologists, rearing their ugly heads in such platforms as The New York Times, have suggested that calling the mutilation of female genitals “mutilation” may be offensive to Muslims. Instead, these cultural relativists argue, the practice should be referred to as “cutting.”
Below is the World Health Organization’s (WHO) comprehensive classification of FGM. It’s important to note just how much damage this practice can do to young girls. Decide for yourself whether this sort of “cultural” practice should be tolerated, much less excused:
Type I — Partial or total removal of the clitoris and/or the prepuce (clitoridectomy). When it is important to distinguish between the major variations of Type I mutilation, the following subdivisions are proposed:
Type Ia, removal of the clitoral hood or prepuce only;
Type Ib, removal of the clitoris with the prepuce.
Type II — Partial or total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora (excision). When it is important to distinguish between the major variations that have been documented, the following subdivisions are proposed:
Type IIa, removal of the labia minora only;
Type IIb, partial or total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora;
Type IIc, partial or total removal of the clitoris, the labia minora and the labia majora.
Type III — Narrowing of the vaginal orifice with creation of a covering seal by cutting and appositioning the labia minora and/or the labia majora, with or without excision of the clitoris (infibulation). When it is important to distinguish between variations in infibulations, the following subdivisions are proposed:
Type IIIa, removal and apposition of the labia minora;
Type IIIb, removal and apposition of the labia majora.
Type IV — All other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, for example: pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization.
As WHO explains, the practice cannot be seen as anything another than a traumatic assault on the female body and a violation of basic human rights:
Female genital mutilation has no known health benefits. On the contrary, it is known to be harmful to girls and women in many ways. First and foremost, it is painful and traumatic. The removal of or damage to healthy, normal genital tissue interferes with the natural functioning of the body and can cause several immediate and long-term health consequences. For example, FGM can cause excessive bleeding, swelling of genital tissue and problems urinating, and severe infections that can lead to shock and in some cases, death, as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of perinatal deaths.
Communities that practice female genital mutilation report a variety of sociocultural reasons for continuing with it. Seen from a human rights perspective, the practice reflects deep-rooted inequality between the sexes, and constitutes an extreme form of discrimination against women.
No society, let alone a post-Enlightenment Western democracy, should tolerate this shocking level of cruel barbarity against women. There is no excuse. There is absolutely no justification for abusing little girls. Period. It’s evil. It’s vile. It violates every precept we hold dear as a civilized society. By tolerating such intolerance, we forfeit our own humanity.
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance,” wrote Karl Raimund Popper. “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”