OPINION:
Linda Sarsour, one of Islam’s greatest propagandists and, oddly enough — given the Muslim religion’s overall doggy way of treating women — one of Feminist World’s emerging heroines, has been accused of bullying a sexual abuse victim into silence.
Well now, isn’t this a twist on the whole sexual harassment atmosphere that’s swirling about America.
Here’s what it’s about, according to The Daily Caller: Asmi Fathelbab, who worked as a contractor for Sarsour’s organization, the Arab American Association of New York, in Brooklyn in 2009, reported that a man in the office rubbed his crotch against her numerous times.
So Sarsour, the great liberating feminist and mouthpiece of the great liberating feminist-loving Islam religion, raced to the rescue, fired the guy and supported the claimant by issuing stern warnings and behavioral guidelines to the rest of her staff, right?
Wrong.
“But when Fathelbab reported the abuse, Sarsour … fat-shamed the woman and threatened [to] blacklist her from political jobs,” the New York Post wrote, citing the woman’s statement’s to The Daily Caller.
Two sources reportedly corroborated Fathelbab’s statements.
She named the man, Majed Seif, and said he began stalking her almost as soon as she started work with Sarsour’s outfit.
“He would sneak up on me during times when no one was around,” Fathelbab said to The Daily Caller. “He would touch me. You could hear me scream at the top of my lungs. He would pin me against the wall and rub his crotch on me. … It was disgusting.”
And here’s Fathelbab’s account of what Sarsour did when the abuse was reported. It goes like this: Attack the victim.
“She called me a liar because [she said], ’Something like this didn’t happen to women who looked like me,’ ” Fathelbab said. “She told me I’d never work in NYC ever again for as long as she lived. She’s kept her word. She had me fired from other jobs when she found out where I worked. She has kept me from obtaining any sort of steady employment for almost a decade.”
These are just allegations — nothing proven.
Yet they raise an interesting dynamic to the sexual harassment that’s been coming to light in companies across America — the treatment of Islam toward women.
Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life conducted a survey in 2013 about the role of women in Muslim society, and to put it mildly, it’s pretty bleak on the old freedom front.
“In nearly all countries surveyed, a majority of Muslims say that a wife should always obey her husband,” Pew reported.
Half of the countries surveyed didn’t think Muslim daughters and sons should hold equal inheritance rights, a good percentage of the countries that see Sharia law as the way to go think women have no rights to demand divorce and at least half in the 11 countries surveyed on the morality of polygamy say it’s A-OK by Islam beliefs — for men.
And then there’s this tidbit: “The survey asked Muslims whether honor killings are ever justified as punishment for pre- or extra-marital sex. In 14 of the 23 countries where the question was asked, at least half say honor killings are never justified when a woman stands accused,” Pew found.
That’s a bit backward. That’s reporting the non-news. The real news is this: In 14 of the 23 countries where the question was asked, at least half say honor killings of women are in fact justified.
Women’s rights under Islam?
They don’t exist, at least not in the way Americans, guided by a Constitution and decades of legal rulings regarding civil and human rights define them.
So yes, while the accusations of Sarsour basically telling a sexual abuse victim in the workplace to “shut up and take it” are just accusations — unproven — they nonetheless remind of a good reason America ought not take lightly the statistical creeps of Islam into U.S. society: The religion doesn’t mix well with the Constitution.
And it certainly doesn’t bode well for women’s rights.
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