Women are meat, says cleric

I contend that at the heart of many religions, particularly fundamentalism, there is a contempt for human beings. From the Calvinists with their belief in human total depravity to the Muslims. Perhaps I should not use the “from.... to” saying there as the Muslim fanatics and the Calvinists fanatics are a very similar bunch.

A Muslim cleric in Australia has unleased an outrage by blaming women, especially western women I think, if they get raped. If you think he is just a male chauvinist he was pretty contemptable about men as well.

In a sermon he preached “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden, or in the park, or in the backyard without cover, and the cats come and eat it... whose fault is it, the cats’s or the uncovered meats?” The cleric, Sheik Taj Aldin al Hilali made it quite clear: “The uncovered meat is the problem.” He says that if womam “was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.”

So not only did he compare women to hunks of dead meat tempting cats he compared men to animals who act on instinct and who can’t be said to possess moral abilities.

He is saying that woman who gets raped got raped because she deserved it. She was the uncovered meat tempting the helpless men who have no moral ability to choose good over evil. Perhaps this is how Muslim men act but it not how most men in the West act. But the West is civilized. Now if a non-Muslim portrayed Muslim men as being more inclined to rape women who don’t follow Islamic lunacy they would be accused of hate speech.
So what to do when a top Muslim cleric they says publicly something indicating that Muslim men can’t resist the urge to rape women who aren’t covered totally up?

Of course I’ve heard similar comments myself from fundamentalist Christians. Girls at the Christian school I attended would be hauled out of class and lined up in a hallway and told to kneel upright on the ground and then some school official would walk down the line with a ruler. A dress was not allowed to be more than two inches off the floor in an upright kneeling position. If it was 2 and one quarter inches off the floor she was sent home to change immediately and given demerits which, if accrued in sufficient numbers, would lead to his dismissal from the school.

The purpose of this dress code was to stop girls from “tempting” the boys. The meat can’t tempt the cats is how they saw it. But then their view was not about rape per se. They were horrified if a boy and girl merely held hands -- which was forbidden. Bob Jones University required male students and female students to remain more than 6 inches apart at any one time. No doubt any male who could boast of 8 inches of anatomy was highly in demand. But then I guess that doesn’t change even without the 6 inch rule.