Sex Slave Jihad

While the article is three months old, it is worth taking another look at my friend Donna Hughes' article "Sex Slave Jihad" that appeared in Frontpage Magazine.

Professor Hughes sums up well what we are fighting against -- not some principled religious theocracy -- but a bunch of sleazy thugs who care nothing of the pillars of Islam, but use those pillars to their worst ends, in this case, to trample on the human rights of tens of thousands of young girls and women by forcing them into sexual slavery in order to make a profit.

As the debate over pre-9/11 intelligence continues, and the feckless continue to imply (but never quite say it) that the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq were better off with their authoritarian leaders, we all will be reminded by reading Hughes' article about how fundamental a sea change the Bush Administration has caused in the Middle East.

For those among the American Far Right (i.e. Pat Buchanan and The American Conservative crowd) who criticize the Bush Administration's foreign policy, in my estimation what is at root is a fundamental meeting of the minds between their worldview and that of the Taliban/Wahhabites. Both sects purport to believe that Western modernity and the values of the Enlightenment -- life, liberty and the pursuit of property -- have caused our moral decline, yet never mentioning the moral failings of those times they romanticize, such as the Middle Ages. In reality though, as Professor Hughes markedly shows, such demagogues prey upon the goodwill and good hearts of the religious faithful to impose their will and their crooked ways.