Ilhan Omar’s brushoff of Maryum Saifee’s urgent and pertinent question about female genital mutilation earned Saifee an NPR interview, during which she pointed out that since plenty of children in Omar’s own district suffer this abuse, it’s kind of rich of her to get all huffy and refuse to deal with the issue. Here’s more of what Saifee said:
[We need to be willing to talk about] misogyny within our own community… [N]obody talks about FGM. [It’s a ].. squeamish topic.
[Also problematically,] it is politicized as an anti-Muslim issue. [But this] doesn’t give the community a free pass not to talk about it. [In any case, FGM is not merely a local issue; it is an international] human rights issue. [It is] systematized child sexual abuse with a sharp object…
[There’s] very low literacy on this issue, [and people need to be educated about it; silence of Omar’s sort is just the opposite of what’s needed].
Pennsylvania is about to become the 34th state to ban female genital mutilation; the law passed unanimously in the Senate and in the “House by a vote of 196-1, with only state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, D-Philadelphia voting against it.”
Yes, Kenyatta alone stood up against the crowd for the right of seven year olds to have their clitorises and vaginal lips chopped off and then to have what’s left bleeding between their legs sewn up by some random person. Every girl deserves the right to sexual numbness and a lifetime of pain and infections, and Representative Kenyatta is working hard every day to make sure that right is protected.
If you’re one of his constituents, be proud. You have voted into office the only politician in Pennsylvania with the guts to go to bat for the forced amputation of female genitals. UD thinks the guy should run for president:
America Needs an Infibulation
Leave No Clit Behind
Yes We Can Cut!
… Alan Dershowitz’s work is never done. Having finished advising for the defense team of a notorious alleged clit-slasher, he now moves on to his own defense in a defamation/sex trafficking case.
[W]hy are we so reticent about the clitoris? Why is … mention of it … deemed too sordid for BBC news?
The big difference here seems to be that while the vagina has an obvious functional utility, the clitoris exists entirely for female pleasure. It seems that the issue stems, not from the provocative nature of a word, but our continued societal taboo regarding women daring to enjoy sex. Sure, we can see depictions of women shrieking with pleasure plastered all over any porn site. But that is exactly the point. Female sexual enjoyment remains exclusively in the realm of the forbidden.
Lucy McCormick, The Guardian
Australia this time, with a mother feeling for some reason compelled to lie through her teeth about having arranged a procedure she thinks comes “from God.” The jury found her guilty in a matter of minutes. Send enough mutilators to jail and the baby-slashing rate will go down.
Yes. Britain finally sends a child-slasher – make that baby-slasher – to jail.
— because they’re never too young!
… Your divine appeal?
The feds will continue to go after America’s Super-Clit-Slasher herself, the pride of Johns Hopkins medical school, Jumana Nagarwala. Will she wield her well-trained knife once again, against the joy, integrity, and welfare of our nation’s children? Stay tuned.
The first American surgeon to open a reconstructive surgery clinic has called for Super Clit-Slasher Jumana Nagarwala to lose her medical license. UD has called on Johns Hopkins University, which awarded her the MD degree, to make a public statement condemning her, and to revoke her degree.
My Country
We’re proud to acknowledge that it’s
A cultural mandate to blitz
The joy of our girls
By taking their pearls
And blasting their pleasure to bits
God sayeth Lo cut off their clits!
Uncastrated woman commits
A sin in my sight!
Under cover of night
Take babies and rip out their slits!
We’ll tell it to the UN, we’ll tell it to the world! We’re here, we’re clit-slashers, get used to it.
As UD anticipated, not a thing has been done by whatever they’re calling a government in Somalia these days about the deaths of little girls from mutilated genitals. And of course
It is clear to those of us who have worked on the issue for years that the recent deaths we have heard about in Somalia and elsewhere are not uncommon.
‘If you’re like me, contact your local Dawoodi Bohra chapter.’
Sponsored by Twitter.
We’ll never know how many children in the world have bled to death because their local village butcher, cheered on by their mother, slashed so deeply at their genitalia with a shard of glass that the butcher, instead of just destroying their lives, killed them.
A handful of people have ever cared about this outcome… Have ever allowed themselves to imagine the agonizing death of a six-year-old without access to painkillers, let alone medical care, as she bleeds out…
And after all, if these children hadn’t been witches they wouldn’t have died.
*************
As the latest FGM deaths in Somalia actually manage to make the world news, people are allowing themselves to wonder whether this country, where 98% of little girls are slashed, might actually start protecting its children from this practice. But:
1. Somalia has no law against FGM and isn’t in the business of getting one.
2. Even if there were a law, people would ignore it.
3. The government of Somalia claims it’s going to find and prosecute the people who created the three latest child corpses, but go ahead and ask UD if she thinks that that spectacularly failed state will find and prosecute anyone.
4. The butchers are people in high standing in the community, with a serious financial investment in FGM. (When you’re finished imagining the children’s deaths, imagine an impoverished local family working themselves to the bone to scrape up enough money to pay for their daughter to be eviscerated.) No one will go against them.
**************
And 5.: What’s the problem here? Cutters have been at it in England for decades, and everyone knows it, and there’s a law against it, and not one prosecution has been successful. In America there’s a bunch of cutters on trial in Detroit as we speak, and no less a figure than Alan Dershowitz has come to their defense.
***************
UPDATE:
“I believe that the [Somali Attorney General] was [speaking harshly about the practice] for press. When the cameras are not there, I doubt there is much interest in [this] case or any others,” [a British Somali activist] says.
Johns Hopkins med school grad Jumana Nagarwala has really done the place proud, huh? And let’s figure you and I – via our taxes, whatever – helped pay her way through one of America’s greatest schools of medicine so that she could mutilate thousands of three-year-old American girls (Nagarwala’s only 45, and if found innocent of female genital mutilation in her upcoming trial, has many more years of baby-clitoris-slashing ahead of her).
Thousands of people compete every year for a coveted place at Hopkins, and someone there reviewed her application, which I’m guessing didn’t say I want to be a doctor because I want in secret in the dead of night to force screaming little girls to have mutilated sexually pleasureless lives, and decided to put her out there in our country with certification as a medical doctor.
Nor can she be the only one.
The sect she belongs to is as we speak defending castration of the innocents most passionately in front of the Indian Supreme Court because of course they are doing God’s will… And this is why Nagarwala, if freed, will return to her butchery at once: Slashing genitals is the best, most pious, most godly thing, she does. It is a commandment from the lord and cannot, will not, be disobeyed.
Since the particular sect to which this woman belongs is high-profile and unapologetic about its barbarism, UD proposes at the very least that when a medical school in this country receives a viable application from anyone they are able to identify as a member of the sect, the admissions committee have a nice long talk with the applicant.
We must do what we can, as a country, to defend our children against attack. We must certainly do what we can to avoid educating and then letting loose in our cities another Jumana Nagarwala.