Unlearn the Lesson of Obedience

The following was written by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. The piece was originally published on her Facebook page and her blog.

Last night at the TED conference, I wept while listening to Ziauddin Yousafzai speak about his daughter, Malala.

You have have heard of Malala Yousafzai. She is the brave young Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for speaking up on behalf of education for girls.

Her father began his extraordinary speech by saying that in tribal and patriarchal societies, a man is known by his sons. "But I am one of the few fathers who is known by my daughter," he said. "And I am proud of that."

He spoke about how, in rural Pakistan, when a girl is born, it is never cause for celebration, but rather shame. As she grows up, she is taught only one virtue: Obedience.

Yousafzai refused to follow suit. He celebrated his daughter from the day she was born, and wrote her name in the family tree — a 300 year-old document that had never mentioned a female. He put Malala in school — not only so that she could know her own potential through education, but also for the mere political defiance of writing his daughter's name on an enrollment form, thus signaling her very existence as a human being. (He had never seen the names of any of his 5 sisters on any document whatsoever; they simply did not exist within their own country.)

And most of all he said, "I taught her to unlearn the lesson of obedience."

Which was such a shocking transgression that a Taliban gunman shot her for it. (I always think it's particularly telling that she was shot in the head — shot in the MIND. Anything to shut down that female brain.)

She survived, famously, and still fights for education for girls. (She spoke last night to us from a video feed — she couldn't come to the conference because she's in SCHOOL — and she dazzled.)

This girl is extraordinary; this father is extraordinary.

He finished his speech by saying that people always ask him what he did to make Malala into such a strong warrior. He says it's not what he did; it's what he DIDN'T do: "I didn't clip her wings."

I was so honored and emotional to be there last night to hear this, and wanted to share it with you all.

Unlearn your obedience, women.

Teach your girls to unlearn their obedience.

And let a star shine in the crown of this father, and all parents, who guide their daughters to grow strong.

Onward,
LG

This is the video Gilbert was referring to: Ziauddin Yousafzai: My Daughter, Malala.

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Women's Rights is the "Decisive Point"

Using the strategy of "concentrating forces at the decisive point," which you can read about here, the question is, "What is the decisive point?" In a military battle, one good criteria for a decisive point of attack is where the enemy is weakest. In our goal of marginalizing, discrediting, and disempowering orthodox Islam, what is the biggest weakness of Islamic doctrine?

Answer: Women's rights.

In the time and place we now find ourselves, the most effective place to attack — the most effective place to discredit orthodox Islam — is on the topic of human rights for women. Islamic doctrine, as applied in Muslim-majority countries all over the world, and even as applied by immigrants in free countries, measurably and inhumanely restricts women's rights. Islamic fundamentalism and human rights for women are incompatible. Where you have one, you will not have the other.

But when we concentrate our forces on this decisive point, we must do it in a way that unites a huge majority of us, including some of those who still naively think Islam is just one of many similar religions. So this has to be done skillfully.

I believe that's what Ayaan Hirsi Ali has done with the documentary, Honor Diaries. The production value of the film is very high. The women chosen for the film are acceptable to mainstream multiculturalists. The film doesn't feel anti-Islam. I think most of the people who see this film wouldn't feel it attacks Islam. And yet it effectively exposes orthodox Islam as a cruel, outdated, extremely misogynistic ideology that should be marginalized, discredited, and disempowered wherever it shows its ugly head.

In other words, Honor Diaries has the potential to push a major axiom of the counterjihad movement into the mainstream. The film may cause this fundamental position of the counterjihad community to shed its "fringe" stigma forevermore.

The approach is brilliant and the film is outstanding. We should use it as a weapon against the ignorance that now keeps our population vulnerable to creeping Sharia.

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"We Can't Go to War With 1.3 Billion Muslims!"

This is another installment of the series, Answers to Objections. This objection is not usually spoken out loud, but it's a central fear lurking behind much of the resistance you get when you talk about Islamic doctrine.

When you're talking to people, you want them to accept the simple fact that orthodox Islamic teachings are very straightforward, and they call for intolerance and violence toward non-Muslims and an unrelenting effort to make the world submit to Shari'a law.

Some people you talk to will put up every objection they can think of because they don't want to accept this premise.

If they articulated their fear, it would sound something like this: "For God's sake, that CAN'T be true, because it would mean we would have to go to war with 1.3 billion Muslims, and we can't do that!" Some people actually say it out loud.

Like many of the objections, this one is a great opportunity to insert a little more information into a brain that is likely almost entirely empty of any facts about Islam. Here are some possible responses you can give:

1. Luckily, we don't have to go to war with all of them. Most of the people who are now Muslims never chose to be so. Their ancestors were almost all forced to be Muslims. Their ancestor's whole country was conquered and Shari'a law was imposed. Shari'a puts pressure on everyone to be Muslim, and not just in name only. It is against Shari'a law to skip the five prayers a day or skip fasting during Ramadan or skip paying zakat (alms to the mosque). In other words, the practice of orthodox Islam is enforced by law, so after a few generations, it would be hard to think outside of being a Muslim, especially when the penalty for leaving the faith is death.

But what this means is that many of them would choose to live their lives without the constant domination of Shari'a if they had the option. So even if it came to war, we wouldn't have to go to war with 1.3 billion.

2. What would you go to war to do? I mean, why would you think a war would be necessary?

3. We don't need to go to war, we only need to change some of our own laws and some of our own foreign policies. And sometimes we wouldn't even have to change them, we would only need to start enforcing them. For example, it is illegal to try to overthrow the government or to even plot to do so. It is sedition. It's already against the law. And yet in three-fourths of the mosques in the U.S., jihad is being preached. Jihad means "the struggle to bring everyone on earth under the law of Allah." In other words, preaching jihad is sedition.

And jihad is an essential element of Islam. It is a core tenet. This isn't some fringe teaching that nobody cares about. This is a central purpose of Islam.

If we want the orthodox Muslims in our country to stop working to undermine and overthrow the government, we will have to make a distinction between the political aspects of Islam and the religious aspects of Islam, and we'll have to stop people from committing sedition. We don't need to go to war. We only need to educate enough non-Muslims so that no more politicians ignorant of Islam are voted into office. The one thing that needs to happen is education.

4. The problem is not with Muslims, so we don't have to go to war with them. The problem is not even with Islamic doctrine. Our problem is the abject ignorance of the majority of non-Muslims. Because of this ignorance, the West is conceding its freedoms. Let me illustrate the principle with victims of sociopaths. In the comments on an article about sociopaths, most of the commenters are victims of sociopaths, and they tell their stories about what happened to them — they were conned out of their life savings or they were married to someone who abused their children or one of their parents deliberately drives them crazy, etc. But two of the people who have commented are themselves sociopaths, and their comments illuminate an important principle.

The point of view of most of the victims is that they don't understand how sociopaths can be so mean or cruel or heartless. The point of view of the sociopaths is that they don't understand how normal people can be so naive as to trust everyone, so foolish as to never protect themselves from someone who has already proven to be dangerous, or so stupid as to sign over the deed to their house!

Same with non-Muslims dealing with orthodox Islam. Okay, so it's a Muslim's duty to strive for the political goal of establishing Shari'a law throughout the world. That's what they do and the "true believers" will never stop trying. But we don't have to allow it! They are only making progress toward their goal because we let them. We trust them. We make treaties with them. We allow them to immigrate. We make assumptions about them (like they must be just like us, their religion must be similar to other religions we know about, etc.). We are conceding our freedoms. They are not taking our freedoms. We are forgoing our own self-preservation. We are voluntarily giving away our ability to defend ourselves.

The problem is not with them, it's with us. We don't need to go to war. We need to stop being stupid, and that can't happen until more people know some basic facts about Islamic doctrine.

Most of the people commenting on that sociopath site said they were surprised to find out there was even such a thing as a sociopath. The phenomenon of "everyday sociopaths" is not very well known. People know about psychopathic serial killers, but most people don't know there is such a thing as people walking around in ordinary lives who have no empathy for others and cannot develop it, people whose only goal in life is to win and dominate, people who feel no pity or remorse and who have no emotional conflict when they are cruel.

Some of the people who told their sad tales were married to a sociopath for years without ever realizing such a person could exist, so they were totally frustrated, anguished, and confused by their spouse's behavior, and of course, in their ignorance they made one stupid, self-defeating mistake after another.

The free world is doing the same thing with orthodox Islam's relentless, self-serving aggression — making one stupid, self-defeating mistake after another (read more about that here). The stupidity must stop. The only thing missing is enough people who have at least a passing familiarity with basic Islamic teachings.

Okay, that's four possible answers to the objection, "But we can't go to war with 1.3 billion Muslims!"

I would appreciate it (and so would future readers) if you could come up with better answers than these, and post them in the comments below this article. We can pool our resources, pool our intelligence, and help each other do the one thing that must be done: Educate our fellow non-Muslims.

The above was excerpted from the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam.

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The Struggle to Reach People

I received a letter from a woman named Cheryl who lives in Wales, UK. She only recently found out about orthodox Islam's supremacist agenda and I asked her what caused her to awaken. I am intensely curious about the circumstances that lead to an awakening, and if you would like to write to me about how you came to realize Islam has not been "hijacked by extremists," I would love to hear it. Write to me here.

I asked Cheryl if I could excerpt some of her letter in an article, and she said yes. Here's what she said:

The first time I became aware of things was when some people at Mass at my church said the UK would be Islamic within 50 years, the way things are going. After hearing this a few times I began looking it up on the net, being skeptical but just wanting to see why they said that, and to prove them wrong. Well of course I soon found that there was no real counter-argument and that in fact it's a lot more like 10 years. Maybe less.

I then took a deep look at the history and teachings of Islam itself. By this time I had joined the British National Party and was receiving relevant material, videos, etc., from them and other websites like JihadWatch and LionHeart.

When I told my daughter we are in danger of becoming Islamic she said, "So what?" She didn't even want to know about how it isn't exactly the picnic she imagines. She accused me of racism and is disgusted at my nationalist leanings. She's 21 and at college.

My son is 23 and has a six-week old baby girl, who is a real blessing and a joy. First of all, my son was interested in all this but very surprised at my views, and said that if civil war broke out the police and MI5 would look after us. For a time I was comforted by that. But then I began to see that these people who we've traditionally relied upon will in fact not help us, though I do believe MI5 are trying to foil bomb attacks, but I have no faith in the police. I don't know about the army.

But it seems to me no one would do anything much to stop us being killed. I showed my son a film called Islam's Not For Me but very soon, he got fed up, said it was all hate propaganda and he didn't want to discuss this whole topic any more. It depressed him, and even if I'm right, he said, the problem seems so advanced and the odds stacked so heavily against us that we may as well just enjoy however many years we have left, and stop worrying, otherwise "the Muslim bastards are winning now, robbing us of our peace and happiness."

I am now banned from any Muslim conversation with my family. They feel sorry for me, that I'm in this state of worry. All my family are clueless about Islam. They think it's a bunch of guys who worship a guy called Mecca who lives in Mohammed.

Mind you, I've no room to talk...I knew very little about Islam either. I had the usual vague idea that it was similar to Judaism and Christianity. Even while staying in Egypt and Turkey, I never bothered to look into it.

I actually studied theology at university but Islam wasn't covered in that. Maybe it would have been in comparative religion, I don't know. Anyway, although I've looked at many religions and cults, for some reason I never looked at Islam. Obviously, I have now and I can see how it's unlike any other belief system. I actually think it's demonic and a counterfeit Christianity.

Some of my friends think I've been brainwashed and Islam will never take hold here. One friend believes that even if I'm right, God will stop this happening. This friend has a sense of peace about it all and is sure I'm worrying unnecessarily. He doesn't see it being resolved by war or violence at all. He lives in London and is surrounded by Muslims but really feels that, in some way we can't begin to imagine, just like a few years back we couldn't have dreamed what's happening now, the situation will change in our favour. He thinks they might convert, or return to their own lands due to something we can't see yet, or maybe they'll all die from some plague or virus through their dreadful halal meat. He doesn't give them the satisfaction of worrying. As for making plans to move to a remote part of Scotland or something, he thinks that's crazy.

But this same friend cannot accept that Muslims hate us and deceive us. I have another friend, from Ireland who thinks the whole thing will dilute, as many young Muslims, especially women, enjoy the freedoms they have here and want to keep the Western way of life. They like our clothes and don't want to wear the burqa. They will see that their religion is junk. Actually, a lot of them here say they do see that, but how can you trust them?

Some people I've spoken to agree with me, but they already had that view. So in other words I'm not conveying the message very well.

I moved to North Wales a long time ago from Manchester. There are many English people here but it's still a Welsh place, with Welsh being spoken and still some very anti-English attitudes. There are, by comparison with other areas of the UK, very few Muslims. However, there are some. An extended family from Pakistan have bought at least 12 convenience stores, sometimes with post offices as well, all across the area in different villages.

I think the main hurdle I had, in coming to grips with the Islamic situation, was that I couldn't understand their hatred for us. I actually felt a sense of of personal hurt, and then outrage when I realised how they've conned us.

Some Muslims can now have 4 wives here and dozens of children, all sponging off our welfare. If these marriages happened in Islamic countries we have to recognise them.

At this point, Cheryl went on to discuss other matters. The reason I wanted to publish Cheryl's letter is because her description of the responses she has gotten from the different people in her life seem to correspond with the whole gamut I have personally experienced, as well as the experiences I have heard about from other people who have written to me.

In other words, when someone first hears about basic Islamic teachings, they have one of several different kinds of reactions:

1. They might be interested and curious, realizing that they really don't know anything about Islam. This is a very rare response unless you are very good at presenting the information.

2. Like Cheryl's daughter, they might wonder what difference it would make. This stems from an ignorance of both Islamic law and our own culture.

3. Like Cheryl's son, they might think the experts — the military, the police, the politicians — will take care of it, so we don't need to worry about it.

4. And also like Cheryl's son's second response, many people want to write it off as "hate propaganda." Or the subject is so depressing, they want to avoid talking about it. Or that our best response is to ignore it, because if it bothers us "then the terrorists win."

5. Like one of Cheryl's friends, another response you'll get is the belief or hope or ardent wish that God will take care of it. Or that luck or fate will intervene and save us.

What all of these responses have in common (except the first one) is a desire to avoid having to deal with it. People are hoping it's not true. They want to write you off. They desperately desire to ignore this issue because they've got a life to live, and nowhere in their plans have they included time spent dealing with such an unpleasant topic.

On top of that, the underlying belief in all the responses except the first one is that there doesn't seem to be anything we can do about it. Worrying certainly doesn't help. What else can we do? They don't know. And because they don't know, and it seems to them (in their haste to write it off and stop thinking about such a distressing subject) that nothing can be done about it, what's the point of being upset just to be upset?

But all of these notions contain thought-mistakes. The hopelessness is mistaken. The feeling of helplessness is mistaken. We are not helpless in this, and that is the message we must hammer home when we talk to people. Address the issue directly. We've got to continue to try to reach these people, constantly improve our delivery, and turn them around. Failure is not an option.

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Chime For Change, Fight For Freedom

In a previous article (here), we mentioned that Chime For Change is helping to marginalize, discredit, and disempower orthodox Islam without attacking Islam directly. It's an organization dedicated to empowering women globally. The official byline is: "Chime for Change promotes education, health and justice for girls and women everywhere." So, of course, what they end up exposing and working to change most of the time is the application or promotion of Sharia law around the world. They never say it like that, and that's probably a good thing because it can penetrate our overly-sensitive society without any resistance or stigma.

A good target to aim at when talking with your friends and family is to get them to sign up for Chime for Change's free updates here. It always helps to have a specific target in your conversations — something you're persuading toward. It makes you more persuasive. And a small expression of commitment (like signing up for free updates) makes people more committed to the cause (read more about that here). Taking the small action of subscribing will influence your friend's feelings toward our cause because of the principle of commitment and consistency.

Recent updates at Chime for Change included the following articles:

Getting Away With Sexual Abuse in Jordan
I Am Nirbhaya (about a movement in India to stop rapes)
Kashmiri Women Claim Their Rights
Acid Attack Survivor Wins Millions on Quiz Show
Rising Up Against FGM in Kenya

The organization and the stories are not anti-Muslim. They are pro-women's rights. But, of course, without ever focusing on it, the things they focus on inevitably run up against the biggest barrier to the positive goals: Sharia law. Even though the stories are not focused exclusively on Sharia or Islam, but are focused on women's rights around the world, what the organization is mostly fighting against is orthodox Islam.

We urge you to get involved with this organization. Share their articles with your friends and family. Encourage them, at the very least, to sign up for the updates. Help nudge your friends and family to make this small commitment to the principle of women's rights. It could very well grow into an explicit commitment to stop the spread of Sharia. But even if it doesn't, any actions taken to give women rights will weaken Sharia's ability to spread.

Chime for Change has a lot of celebrity involvement, including Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, and Salma Hayek, which always helps appeal to a certain segment of the population, giving it a very mainstream (rather than fringe) appeal. Let's use this organization to get more of our fellow citizens involved in the cause of freedom.

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