Taking a secondary role in the formation of Allah, Inc., must have been difficult for Ishtar. Her name isn’t on the label, and besides, women generally don’t get much respect in Islam.
On the other hand, Ishtar and her other incarnations—mainly Inanna (Sumer), Astarte (Canaan), and Atargatis (Syria)—didn’t conform to gender roles or stereotypes, so maybe this is a better fit than it appears at first look. She was, after all, the goddess of carnal sex and bloody violence, and Islam has inspired plenty of both.
We’ve already discussed the long history of war since Muhammad led his first caravan raid, so we won’t cover that again. No doubt the spirit behind Ishtar was all in with that business model. It’s her other aspect, and the perverse sexuality that she’s inspired among the followers of Muhammad, that we will discuss here as delicately as we can.
One of the most disturbing episodes of America’s seemingly never-ending war in Afghanistan was revealed by the New York Times in 2015:
In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”[1]
The Times went on to reveal that a former Special Forces captain had been relieved of his command for beating up a US-backed militia commander “for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave.”[2] The soldier had left the military by the time of the article’s publication. Worse, the Army tried to forcibly retire a second soldier, a decorated Green Beret sergeant, who assisted his captain in that thrashing,[3] presumably to make sure the message was received: Rape the boy again and things will not go well for you.
Maybe the war in Afghanistan is still simmering after more than seventeen years as of this writing because our so-called allies treat the locals worse than the Taliban did.
It’s not like this has been a secret. Less than five months after the United States invaded Afghanistan, the Times reported that it was this homosexual abuse of young boys that helped the Taliban come to power.
Back in the 19th century, ethnic Pashtuns fighting in Britain’s colonial army sang odes talking of their longing for young boys.
Homosexuality, cloaked in the tradition of strong masculine bonds that are a hallmark of Islamic culture and are even more pronounced in southern Afghanistan’s strict, sexually segregated society, has long been a clandestine feature of life here. But pedophilia has been its curse.
Though the puritanical Taliban tried hard to erase pedophilia from male-dominated Pashtun culture, now that the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is gone, some people here are indulging in it once again.…
An interest in relationships with young boys among warlords and their militia commanders played a part in the Taliban’s rise in Afghanistan. In 1994, the Taliban, then a small army of idealistic students of the Koran, were called to rescue a boy over whom two commanders had fought. They freed the boy and the people responded with gratitude and support.[4]
In January 2018, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published the results of an investigation into allegations of child sexual abuse in Afghanistan launched after the 2015 article in the New York Times. The report was released internally in June 2017, but it had been considered so toxic that it was originally classified SECRET/NOFORN (“No Foreign”), with a recommendation that it not be declassified until 2042.[5] While the report released to the public is heavily redacted, it does reveal that SIGAR found “no evidence that U.S. forces were told to ignore human rights abuses or child sexual assault.”[6] Further, SIGAR reported:
On 5,753 occasions from 2010 to 2016, the United States military asked to review Afghan military units to see if there were any instances of “gross human rights abuses.” If there were, American law required military aid to be cut off to the offending unit.
Not once did that happen.[7]
What a relief. We’d hate to think the seventy-one billion dollars given by the United States to Afghan security forces[8] had ever been misused.
Or maybe the Inspector General decided there weren’t any “gross human rights abuses” because “it’s their culture.” The practice is so widespread that a powerful CIA-backed warlord ran for president in Afghanistan’s 2014 election even though many believe he’s a pedophile.[9]
The practice is called bacha bazi. Roughly translated, it means “boy play.” It is exactly what your imagination tells you it is—the enslavement and rape of young boys.[10]
It’s difficult to say with absolute authority, but a culture that prevents men from ever seeing anything but the feet of wives or close female relatives might have something to do with it. How did this culture come about?
Well, there are well-known verses in the Quran hint at “boy play” as one of the rewards for the faithful in paradise.
There will circulate among them [servant] boys [especially] for them, as if they were pearls well-protected.
Surah At-Tur 52:24, Sahih International
There will circulate among them young boys made eternal. When you see them, you would think them [as beautiful as] scattered pearls.
Surah Al-Insan 76:19, Sahih International
Those verses don’t specifically say what the young boys are for, but they’re ambiguous enough to keep good lawyers employed for years.
To be fair, the Bedouin culture that produced Muhammad and his companions was very similar to the Amorite milieu that surrounded Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,[11] or the people of Midian with whom Moses sought refuge when he had to get out of Egypt.[12] While Bedouins protect the honor of young ladies, the old custom of allowing wealthy and powerful older men to take multiple wives and concubines makes it more difficult for single young men to find available female partners. You can see how this might encourage the practice of homosexuality in early Muslim society.[13]Scholars of literature have noted “an unusually rich and varied body of homosexual love poetry” from the early years of Islam.[14]
This culture endures to the present day. It’s not unique to Afghanistan. Several news organizations have reported that sexual abuse of boys is common in Pakistan, especially among professional truck drivers. Boys employed as truck cleaners in Pakistan told researchers that sexual abuse by truckers is “part of the job.”[15] A 2014 British documentary, Pakistan’s Hidden Shame, revealed the shocking extent of the practice; it’s estimated that 90 percent of the street children in Pakistan, most of them boys (parents, not surprisingly, tend to keep little girls at home), have been victims of sexual abuse. A survey of 1,800 Pakistani men found that one-third believe that raping young boys isn’t even immoral.[16]
No less an authority than the would-be Mahdi of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, advised his followers via a fatwa posted to Twitter that “it is permissible for the mujahid [jihadi] to enjoy young boys in the absence of women.”[17]
Nice. And the abuse isn’t limited to young boys.
The influx of Pakistanis into England in recent years recently forced the British government to confront an unpleasant reality: About fourteen hundred girls in the northern town of Rochdale, some as young as 13 and most of whom were white,[18] were groomed, abused, and trafficked by what the media usually described as “Asian” men. That editorial choice concealed, for a while, the fact that most of the men in the grooming ring were, in fact, Pakistanis—and Muslims.
Nine men were eventually convicted and jailed, and three ringleaders, convicted of conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children under the age of 16 and trafficking for sexual exploitation, were stripped of their UK citizenship in 2018.[19] It would be nice to report that these men were outliers, evil exceptions to the Muslim rule. But they’re not.
Even liberal media in the US couldn’t ignore some of the Islamic State’s most outrageous behavior, like auctions of women and girls as young as eight captured from Christian and Yazidi communities in Iraq and Syria.[20] But this wasn’t out of character for historic Islam. On the contrary, it was a return to historic Islam.
Starting in the mid-600s and for nearly three centuries thereafter, “Viking raids were elicited by the Muslim demand for white-skinned European slaves.” Indeed, it is “impossible to disconnect Islam from the Viking slave-trade,” argues M. A. Khan, a former Muslim from India, “because the supply was absolutely meant for meeting [the] Islamic world’s unceasing demand for the prized white slaves” and for “white sex-slaves.” Emmet Scott goes so far as to argue that “it was the caliphate’s demand for European slaves that called forth the Viking phenomenon in the first place.”[21]
Get your head around that. The Vikings who terrorized Europe for centuries were motivated by the Muslim demand for European slaves, especially sex-slaves.
The Hudson Institute reported in 2015 that girls age nine and under drew the highest prices at ISIS auctions.[22] Should this be a surprise? It’s well known from Muslim sources that Muhammad’s third wife Aisha, his favorite, was six years old when they married and nine when the marriage was consummated.[23] Muslim apologists have tried to whitewash this over the last century or so, but this information comes from the hadith, sayings attributed to Muhammad or his companions, and Aisha herself is the one who remembered being married off as a nine-year-old.
ISIS didn’t hijack Islam. They’re trying to return it to its roots. Rather than admit that Muhammad had serious issues with sexuality, some Islamic scholars tie themselves into moral knots justifying deviant behavior—including necrophilia.[24]
If we’re brutally honest, the biggest change from the earliest days of Islam is that instead of buying sex slaves from Europe, Muslim men, thanks to the EU’s open-minded immigration policies, are now being imported by Europeans to pick out their own victims. On New Year’s Eve of 2015, Germany was shocked when some twelve hundred women were assaulted by about two thousand men in Cologne, Hamburg, and Frankfurt,[25] including twenty-four alleged rapes in Cologne.[26]
Even more remarkable has been the response. First, the German authorities misleadingly reported merely a small handful of attacks by German-speaking men with no evidence of immigrant involvement. Then social media, and the Breitbart news website, started to report the victims’ graphic testimony and a very different picture emerged. In Cologne women were sexually assaulted and both men and women robbed by a throng of migrants a thousand strong. The victims identified virtually all these attackers as of north African, Arab or “dark” appearance.[27]
We could belabor the point, but you get it. The roles of men, women, and children in Islam are fundamentally different than those described in the Bible.[28]
There is no question that Christian societies have never been free from the evil of sexual perversion, including abuse of children and violence toward women, but it’s also clear that the Bible instructs men to protect and cherish women and children. While women are instructed to respect their husbands, men are commanded to love their wives the way Christ loved the church.[29] That means being prepared and willing to give up everything—including our lives.
Since Jesus defined adultery as simply lusting after a woman who is not a man’s spouse, the type of abuse suffered by women and children at the hands of men—Muslim, Christian, or other—cannot be reconciled with the teachings of Jesus.
And that’s the point. Through the perversion of sexuality, Allah, Inc., has been deconstructing the divine order God decreed at Mount Sinai—the foundation of human society, and the smallest battle formation in the spiritual war, the family.
[1] Joseph Goldstein, “U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies.” The New York Times, September 20, 2015 (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html), retrieved 1/18/19.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Kyle Jahner, “Green Beret Who Beat Up Accused Child Rapist Can Stay in Army.” Army Times, April 28, 2016 (https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2016/04/29/green-beret-who-beat-up-accused-child-rapist-can-stay-in-army/), retrieved 1/18/19.
[4] Craig S. Smith, “Kandahar Journal; Shh, It’s an Open Secret: Warlords and Pedophilia.” The New York Times, February 21, 2002 (https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/21/world/kandahar-journal-shh-it-s-an-open-secret-warlords-and-pedophilia.html), retrieved 1/18/19.
[5] Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, “Child Sexual Assault in Afghanistan: Implementation of the Leahy Laws and Reports of Assault by Afghan Security Forces.” PDF document (https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/inspections/SIGAR%2017-47-IP.pdf), retrieved 1/18/19.
[6] Ibid., 3.
[7] Rod Nordland, “Afghan Pedophiles Get Free Pass From U.S. Military, Report Says.” The New York Times,January 23, 2018 (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/world/asia/afghanistan-military-abuse.html), retrieved 1/18/19.
[8] Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, op. cit., 2.
[9] Nordland, op. cit.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Clinton Bailey, Bedouin Culture in the Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2018), 113.
[12] Ibid., 219–220.
[13] James Neill, The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies (Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland & Co., 2009), 301.
[14] Ibid., 303.
[15] Jan Willem de Lind van Wijngaarden & Bettina T. Schunter, “‘Part of the job’: Male-to-male Sexual Experiences and Abuse of Young Men Working as ‘Truck Cleaners’ along the Highways of Pakistan.” Culture, Health & Sexuality, 16:5 (2014), 562–574.
[16] Ruth Styles, “The Bus Driver Who Has Raped 12 Little Boys (and Doesn’t Think He’s Done Anything Wrong): Why Thousands of Pakistani Children Are Falling Prey to Paedophiles.” Daily Mail, September 1, 2014 (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2739799/Why-millions-Pakistani-children-falling-prey-vicious-paedophiles.html), retrieved 1/18/19.
[17] Raymond Ibrahim, “‘It Is Permissible for the Mujahid to Enjoy Young Boys in the Absence of Women.’” Jihad Watch, June 2, 2015 (https://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/06/it-is-permissible-for-the-mujahid-to-enjoy-young-boys-in-the-absence-of-women), retrieved 1/19/19.
[18] Shabnam Mahmood. “Yorkshire Muslim Girl Speaks of Grooming Ordeal.” BBC, November 24, 2014 (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30152240), retrieved 1/19/19.
[19] Frances Perraudin, “Judges Uphold Decision to Strip Grooming Gang Members of Citizenship.” The Guardian, August 8, 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/aug/08/judges-uphold-decision-to-strip-rochdale-grooming-gang-members-of-citizenship), retrieved 1/19/19.
[20] James Novogrod and Richard Engel, “ISIS Terror: Yazidi Woman Recalls Horrors of Slave Auction.” NBC News, February 13, 2015 (https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-uncovered/isis-terror-yazidi-woman-recalls-horrors-slave-auction-n305856), retrieved 1/19/19.
[21] Ibrahim, Sword and Scimitar, 49.
[22] Nina Shea, “The Islamic State’s Christian and Yizidi Sex Slaves.” Hudson Institute, July 31, 2015 (https://www.hudson.org/research/11486-the-islamic-state-s-christian-and-yizidi-sex-slaves), retrieved 1/19/19.
[23] This is recorded in a number of hadiths. For example, Sahih al-Bukhtari, Volume 5, Book 58, Nos. 234, 236; Volume 7, Book 62, No. 64.
[24] Raymond Ibrahim, “Islamic Necrophilia: Or, “Every Hole Is a Goal.” RaymondIbrahim.com, February 15, 2019 (https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2019/02/15/islamic-necrophilia-or-every-hole-is-a-goal/), retrieved 2/16/19.
[25] Rick Noack, “Leaked Document Says 2,000 Men Allegedly Assaulted 1,200 German Women on New Year’s Eve.” Washington Post, July 11, 2016 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/10/leaked-document-says-2000-men-allegedly-assaulted-1200-german-women-on-new-years-eve/), retrieved 1/19/19.
[26] Liam Deacon, “Spate of New Year’s Eve Sex Attacks in Berlin and Cologne.” Breitbart News, January 2, 2018 (https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2018/01/02/spate-new-years-eve-sex-attacks-berlin-cologne/), retrieved 1/19/19.
[27] “The Times: Breitbart London Brought the Truth About Cologne to the Global Public.” January 8, 2016 (https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2016/01/08/the-times-breitbart-london-brought-the-truth-about-cologne-to-the-global-public/), retrieved 1/19/19.
[28] Matthew 5:27–28.
[29] Ephesians 5:25.