The UN has set a ridiculous target of ending female genital mutilation by 2030, and it’s time to get honest: If you can’t end the practice, at least end that target. In the few countries where the village butcher faces possible (faintly possible) criminal charges, much of the activity has simply been medicalized: doctors do it in their offices, like America’s own Hopkins med grad, Jumana Nagarwala, who did it right here, in and around Detroit, and who, with the help of Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, beat the charges against her, and I assume is still at it.
Hell, Gambia almost legalized it last year. Entire religious communities in Africa and Asia make FGM the very core of their tribal practice: No initiation without it. European countries with significant immigrant/Muslim communities are always putting this and that set of parents in jail, or deporting this or that young man found to have transported his twelve year old bride to be back to the homeland for cutting. It don’t make no nevermind – the global slashing at clitorises and vaginal lips and surrounding tissues thrives.
And yes, yes – keep funding grassroots efforts… But UD wonders whether an additional effort might be a good idea. Among Western elites, a depraved form of relativism, plus an understandable eagerness to look away – far away – from this repellent and disturbing behavior, has meant that people with money and power have long since backed off from FGM. Of course they don’t want to think about the fact that huge, huge, numbers of people in the world believe female sexuality to be an unspeakable abomination which must be rooted out, dug out, ground out, gutted, at the cost of lifelong pain/debility and grotesque deformation. And the sooner the better – there is no lower age limit to the practice. Britain has seen several cases of parents slashing their infants.
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It’s I dunno you know just really uh icky … almost kind of unbelievable that hundreds of millions of men in the world think the possibility of women deriving sexual pleasure is a demonic nightmare which must be fought with every sharp stone we can muster. Think of Norman Bates slashing at Marion Crane, only for Marion Crane substitute an unanesthetized splay-legged eight year old being slashed repeatedly between her legs. Yuck. You and I live in a pretty world where we’d really rather not…
What if the anti-FGM forces targeted us? Made a real effort to make us care?
They gave this fucker four years for conspiring to commit female genital mutilation, but under the Unduly Lenient Sentence (ULS) scheme it’s been increased to seven years. I trust England will deport him after he’s served his sentence.
And because countries are slashing children at younger and younger ages (an ironic result of the success of anti-FGM campaigns in reaching older girls), it’s not unusual to see mutilated infants in Europe and America.
Somalia (99 percent), Guinea (95 percent), Mali (85 percent), Sudan (87 percent), Egypt (87 percent), Sierra Leone (83 percent), and Eritrea (83 percent).
Note Egypt. There goes the argument that it’s confined to chaotic third world locations.
These are countries where people think God commands them to bloody and disfigure infants. I know you’re too disgusted or morally relative or in denial or indifferent to think it happens here, but I’d ask you to recall Hopkins-educated Dr Jumana Nagarwala, who along with other slashers continues to bring the benefits of FGM to all parts of this great nation.
It’s normal, he explained in his defense against a criminal sentence for planning a child’s genital mutilation and then forced marriage to him (he’s 47; his would-be slave is described only as a child, but knowing this world as UD does after years of blogging about it, I’m gonna guess she’s around nine), normal to perform sexual amputation of a child and then marry her.
Can you imagine more total possession of a slave? And of course he’s right. Hundreds of millions of little girls around the world have their sex organs pulled off and are then married off. 230 million have had FGM done, in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Well, but Europe. Hm, Europe. Everybody knows it goes on in certain neighborhoods, but it’s hard to prove if the child-slayers don’t leave chatty messages about it on their phones, the way this guy did.
America? Remember Johns Hopkins’ finest – Jumana Nagarwala. And we couldn’t even convict her. I’m sure she’s long since sharpened her scalpel again.
Elimination of FGM has primarily focused on the role of traditional cutters—community elders with no medical training. What has been largely ignored in FGM elimination campaigns is the increasing role played by trained medical professionals. An estimated 52 million girls and women have been subjected to FGM at the hands of health-care workers—one in four cases. This medicalisation is gaining traction. Sudan, Egypt, and Indonesia have some of the highest percentages of medicalised FGM. The involvement of health-care workers not only promotes the false belief that FGM is safe, but also normalises and thereby perpetuates the practice, hindering elimination.
So ladies, take your pick: Filthy slashers, or killer docs.
“We are clear that the fact that FGM is considered appropriate within such cultures can be of no relevance to the seriousness of the offence. The practice is criminalised by UK law.”
And with that, a British court tossed out a mutilator’s attempt to shorten her seven year sentence for taking a THREE YEAR OLD overseas to have her clitoris sawed off.
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And see the reason the judge’s comments went to culture is that the woman’s attorney said you know I mean in her culture I mean it’s absolutely fine to do this to babies! She had to or she’d have been ostracized! It’s that important.
So if it’s that important you shouldn’t mind spending a few years in jail for it. I mean, you must be really popular in your baby clit slitting culture now.
This year’s Templeton Prize winner is an African woman who has made it her life’s work to destroy this scourge. Her against-all-odds life story is every bit as inspirational as you’d imagine. At age 85, she’s busy training hundreds of midwives at the hospital she founded.
Color UD mildly shocked but pleased to see this quite explicit article. Reading its concern about how best to have a clitoris, and then enjoying the sometimes hilarious comments on the piece (“Yes, yes. But what about inflation?”), UD kept thinking about the simple solution to the problem offered all over the world to more than two hundred million women.
Haha, I mean not offered; imposed. When they’re children.
As long as we have people like Alan Dershowitz in the United States (and, on the other side, Ilhan Omar), female genital mutilation will continue to be a popular option among some groups even here. England’s got a rampant case of it.
Entire religious groups, like India’s Dawoodi Bohra, make it the centerpiece of their spiritual practice.
It’s nice that the 164.8 million women in the US get to live in a country whose paper of record cares about their sexual pleasure. It’s disgusting that 200 million (and growing) women – children – outside the US endure the forced amputation of sexual pleasure.
I don’t get it either. The stories he can tell around the dinner table!
So they like do it under cover of night and lie to the little girls that they’re going for a trip to an amusement park or whatever haha. And then the doctor ties her down because you know she’s gonna bolt when she figures out… Hey why aren’t you guys laughing?
In the wake of Ghislaine Maxwell’s resounding guilty verdict, most people have their eye on the fate of sketchy Prince Andrew; but people like UD, who write about universities, are more interested in Jeffrey Epstein’s stable of Harvard girls (see this brief discussion), prominent among whom is the most peculiar Alan Dershowitz, Harvard’s highest profile emeritus, and a man accused of having sex on several occasions with an underage Epstein slave.
A most peculiar man. My headline is a sentence from the beginning of his book The Vanishing American Jewand ya know it makes me wonder what’s goin on what’s goin on…
On the simplest level, given Dershowitz’s lifelong gnawing ambition, you could argue this is a clever thing to say if you want to launch a best-seller that appeals to Jews of all stripes – the sentence squeezes into itself, and allows Dershowitz to identify with, every possible iteration of “Jew.”
You could be less cynical and applaud the man’s ecumenicism or something… But if you’re secular and you make a point of joining a raft of religious congregations it’s …. peculiar. Why does he do that? Does he actually attend (on a revolving basis?) each of them? Is he, at this late date (he’s 83) still at sea, bobbing from one religious practice to another?
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If you look at the ferocity with which he has, in his legal practice, defended female genital mutilators, and, more to the point, in his writing, defended male genital mutilators (he calls people opposed to circumcision Nazis), it’s clear that he’s really not out to sea at all; far from being secular, he fervently defends the most grotesque and fundamentalist of religious practices.
I mean, this isn’t just defense for the sake of money or attention – his heart’s really in it. Religious people who want to nick away at infant clitorises deserve the highest possible representation.
It’s hard to imagine a truly secular person convincing herself that female genital mutilation is a defense-worthy form of religious freedom. And since most decent people find FGM appalling, it’s hard to imagine any respectable attorney taking on the vile Dawoodi Bohra sect and its ways. But Dershowitz calls the millions of decent people opposed to male baby mutilation Nazis, and the millions of decent people opposed to female baby mutilation enemies of religious liberty.
No one with these views – views he forcefully writes about/acts upon – can comfortably be called secular. Not to mention his membership in four Jewish congregations.
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Most peculiar. And not to put too fine a point on it, but – does the fact that he stands accused of child sexual abuse seem not entirely out of line here?
Now that we’re done with Ghislaine Maxwell, we may be able to answer this question… “Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz vehemently denies wrongdoing but he has questions to answer. His primary accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, stands by her story that she was required to have sex with him on multiple occasions.” Oh, and plus: I hope someone somewhere at Harvard is beginning to think about damage control.
You got our traveling band of secret clit slashers out of trouble once; but now the feds are after us again with a whole new set of charges! Alan, as pious as we, understands that God wants – demands! – circumcision as much for our girl babies as for our boy babies, and he put his whole heart and soul into our first trial. Our worry is that Alan’s personal struggle against sex trafficking charges will make him less available than he was before. But our hope is based upon thefervency of his defense of child circumcision.
[Dr. Morissanda]Kouyaté said he’d noticed the misconception that FGM is embedded in African culture and has seen that belief perpetuated even in academia.
