Politically Unbalanced

Frank Crimi in FrontPage A year after she was pardoned from prison on the condition she agree to marry her rapist, a young Afghan woman, faced with distressingly few options, has now reluctantly wed her attacker. In 2009, Gulnaz, then 16 years old, gained international attention after she was raped by her cousin’s husband and sentenced to 12 years in an Afghan prison for “forced adultery,” during which time she gave birth to a daughter fathered by her defiler. Unfortunately, being imprisoned for having the temerity to be a victim of rape is not unusual in Afghanistan, evidenced by the fact that more than 50 percent of Afghanistan’s female prison population has been jailed for moral crimes, such as “forced adultery” or “zina” (extramarital sex). Yet, nevertheless, after spending two and a half years in jail, Gulnaz was offered a pardon in December 2011 by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, albeit on the condition Gulnaz marry her rapist. Karzai’s decision, however, wasn’t particularly surprising given that the Afghan police and judicial response to violence inflicted upon women — deeply rooted in

Frank Crimi in FrontPage A growing legion of Muslim men from the Mideast and Europe are scouring Syrian refugee camps in order to purchase underage girls, some as young as 12, as child brides, many of whom end up being sold for use in temporary “pleasure marriages.” For most of the Syrian women and girls who have fled the genocidal horrors of Syria’s civil war, rape — whether by pro-government or rebel forces – has been identified as one of the primary reasons for their exodus from that war-torn country. Now, having supposedly escaped that nightmarish reality, Syrian girls are being subjected to a new horror, being auctioned off by their families to unknown Muslim men for use as sexual toys in coerced and forced early marriages. These pleasure marriages, also known as “misyar” marriages, are legally nonbinding marital contracts which have long been used in Islamic countries to give religiously legitimate cover to a sexual relationship, especially those relationships involving underage girls. In fact, so popular are temporary misyar marriages among upscale Muslim men that a cottage industry has

Frank Crimi in FrontPage The Pakistani Taliban’s unending war on children continues unabated as the Islamist terror group in the past month has shot and killed 16 health aid workers for administering polio vaccines to children. The execution of the polio workers — mostly young women in their teens and early 20s — is the Taliban’s latest effort to forestall a United Nations-backed polio immunization drive in Pakistan, one of three countries (along with Afghanistan and Nigeria) where the disease still remains endemic. The most recent Taliban victims were six female health workers and a male doctor in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, all brutally slain when the van they were riding in was sprayed with bullets fired from automatic weapons wielded by Taliban gunmen. Their gruesome deaths had been preceded in mid-December when over a span of two days, Taliban gunmen in the Pakistani cities of Peshawar and Karachi killed 9 health workers, seven of whom were women. Those victims, one who was only 14 years old, were all shot in the head execution-style, including two women who were slain while

Frank Crimi in FrontPage Violence against Afghan females is rapidly escalating in both frequency and savagery, its latest victim a 14-year-old girl named Gastina who was nearly decapitated with a hunting knife for refusing a marriage proposal from her 25-year-old cousin. Gastina was walking to her home in Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz province when she was attacked by her cousin Sadeq and another male relative, both of whom proceeded to break her hands and feet before slitting her throat nearly to the bone. Gastina’s ghastly death sentence was carried out because her family had reportedly turned down Sadeq’s repeated marriage requests, claiming Gastina was too young for marriage. That rebuff was apparently so stinging that it necessitated Sadeq brutally murder the young teenager. It should be noted that such horrific acts of violence are unfortunately the norm throughout Afghanistan’s highly patriarchal society, where cultural and religious tenets have long allowed most Muslim men to treat women and girls little better than human chattel. As such, Afghanistan has been named the “world’s most dangerous country in which to be born a woman,”

Frank Crimi in FrontPage Al-Qaeda’s longstanding use of children to wage jihad was on display in a recent video showing boys as young as five training with assault rifles and handguns at a terrorist training camp. The video of the gun-toting, prepubescent jihadists was reportedly filmed by the al-Qaeda-linked East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) at one of the terror group’s training camps in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. Since 1990 the ETIM, which has been fighting to create an independent Islamic state in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, has not only committed more than 200 acts of worldwide terrorism but has trained scores of jihadists to fight alongside al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Like father like son, many of the young boys in the ETIM camp were reportedly orphans of slain al-Qaeda fighters coerced by their malevolent elders into carrying on their families’ jihadi business. It should be noted that the use of child combatants is a worldwide plague practiced by a wide array of government, militant, insurgent and terrorist forces. In fact, it is estimated that most of the 300,000 boys and