Here we have a Muslim woman who fled a male dominated Muslim society, to go and live in the western world that gives her all the personnel freedoms she will never get in a Muslim country, complaining about how nasty the infidels are to Muslim women.

It is all rather incredible.

If you love Islam girlie, go back and live in a Muslim country. The more Muslim it is, the worse it is for Muslim women. Unless they are like yourself, and they like being floor mats for Muslim men.

Your religion stinks. Almost all religions may be male dominated, but Islam takes the cake. It is a very violent and intolerant religion started by a genocidal paedophile, that treats women as minors and the property of men. If you are stupid enough to support it, you should have your head examined.

Where are you coming from here? Have you been associating with western lefties for so long that you think that reflexively attacking successful western societies as somehow evil, and always supporting the commissar, priest and mullah ridden failed states, is the fashionable thing to do? If so, could I suggest you keep better company?

If Islam is so bloody wonderful, why is every Muslim trying to flee the consequences of it and come to a western society? The most incredible thing about Islam from a western point of view, is how Muslims flee Islam only to support it in the western countries they flee to. It just goes to show how successful the mullahs have been brainwashing the lot of you.

Fifty years ago, people in socialist countries risked their lives jumping over the Berlin Wall to flee socialism, and those people became the most ardent anti socialists in the west. They hated the system which oppressed them. But now before the incredulous eyes of most westerners, we see Muslim people fleeing Islam who are Islam's greatest advocates.

Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuckoo.

No wonder Muslim countries are so dysfunctional when there are supposedly intelligent people like yourself who obviously can not think straight.

Mac,

Unlike Christianity and other belief systems Islam and Judaism are law-giving religions. They dictate personal and social behaviour beyond other religions.

However Indonesia,Turkey and Pakistan and many other countries (including Iraq) may be Islamic States but are not fundamentalist sectarian states and that is the difference.

History?
According to the media one would think that the cruel oppression of women and plans for world domination have been rampant in the entire Muslim world for the last 1400 years under our very noses but that was not the case.

Islam was not seen as a threat to until the rise of political Islamic fundamentalism when somebody decided to replace the democratically elected leader of Iran with the once-deposed Shah that resulted in the revolution that ultimately installed the repressive Ayatollah. Until that time Iran was a natural ally with Israel because they were the other non-Arab state in the region and even developed missile systems together.

The rise of Saddam Hussein was also the result of a Western sponsored overthrow of a democratic regime and we all know how well that ended up for everybody.

Likewise the West were happy to deal with the Taliban until they reneged on the construction of some oil pipelines and wanted to hand Bin Laden over to an International court rather than directly to the USA.

Strangely, Saudi Arabia - the sponsor of much of the current violence - seems to have fallen completely off the world stage.

The loyalty of Muslim women is, by definition, to Islam. Their values are those of Islam - of the Quran and hadith. They blindly accept the hate, violence and discrimination inherent in their religion. When I see a Muslim, male or female, question that hate and violence, or when Islamic societies change so that they accept basic freedoms of speech and religion, equality of individuals (including those 'lower than animals non-Muslims, as stated in the Quran), and the total separation of mosque and state, THEN and only then can we assume that Muslims -- male or female -- can live in peace with us. Don't hold your breath.

As noted in previous commentaries, it is a given that Muslims coming to the West will criticize any their hosts because some of them dare to say the obvious -- that Islam has serious moral and ethical issues. They flee/move to the West and then work to bring the all the evils they left behind to their new homes.

Alice, you and your ilk seem strangely silent on the real atrocities inflicted on non muslim women in other countries?

If recent events in Northern Nigeria had been limited to the forced removal in public of headscarves and spitting. All those kids kidnapped by your muslim brothers could now be sleeping safe at night in their own beds instead of having to tolerate repeated real rape at the hands of medieval miscreants, who claim to be the real face and intention of Islam?

The removal of a headscarf is just not as serious as you make it out to be and pales into insignificance besides acid thrown in the face of non compliant muslim women by muslim men or the forced removal of the head that might even be wearing one.

Here I reiterate and include all your muslim brotherhood. If you don't like us or our customs and freedoms? LEAVE! We'll help!
Alan B.

rache,

"According to the media one would think that the cruel oppression of women and plans for world domination have been rampant in the entire Muslim world for the last 1400 years under our very noses but that was not the case."

Well, with some qualifications, that actually is an accurate generalisation of Islam and its history.
Europe was subject to continual Muslim attacks from the 7th century onwards, first the Arabs and Berbers then the Seljuks and Ottoman Turks. North African Muslim pirates raided Southern and Western Europe for centuries and enslaved about a million Europeans. The Ottomans attacked and occupied the Balkans and massacred and enslaved millions, they besieged Vienna in 1683. Then of course there's the genocidal islamic conquest of India by Muslim armies. The Muslim threat disappeared, temporarily, when the West become far too powerful to attack. So they were at our throats, not under our noses.

BTW, I'd agree that most Western 'interventions' in the ME have been disastrous, the invasion of Iraq was a war crime and I have sympathy for the Palestinians and their cause. However that's a seperate issue from deluding ourselves about the true nature of Islam.

Hi Mac

I think John Howard was speaking specifically about Australian Muslims. All of the Australian Muslims I know, male and female, accept gender equality and other values of our culture like democracy and separation of religion and state.

Hi Rache

I agree that we need to distinguish religion from culture, but in cultures where Islam is the predominant religion, that religion is often used as a reason for limiting women’s rights and freedoms.

This is not unique to Islam. For centuries bible texts were used to justify unequal treatment of women. In the Catholic Church, and some of the more fundamentalist protestant ones, they still are.

Ephesians 5:22-33
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

1 Peter 3:1-5
Likewise, ye wives, [be] in subjection to your own husbands ….

1 Corinthians 14:34
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be submissive, as also says the law.

1 Timothy 2:11-15
Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.