Tahrir Square British Sex Assault Victim: "I Know This Is Not Islam - I Love Egypt - It's Okay"

Natasha Smith

Denial is a very powerful psychological phenomenon.  It’s a state of mind wherein one who has experienced some traumatic event, such as a rape, cannot come to terms with the intent and mindset of the perpetrator.  Or, for another example, a wife who is married to a chronic alcoholic batterer, rejects the idea that her spouse is an alcoholic who will beat her again if she goes back to him – as she sits up in a bed at the hospital emergency room, where she’s been treated for multiple injuries inflicted by her drunken husband.

At the present time, we are an entire nation in a state of denial about Islam’s doctrinal position and practices with regard to raping women.  A most telling example of this malaise is the CNN report by Dan Rivers, relating the abduction, stripping and violent sexual molestation of a female British student journalist by a frenzied mob of men in Tahrir Square, during the recent election celebrations.  Victim Natasha Smith’s blog about the incident is here.  Rivers’ complete CNN report of his interview with her is here.

…Smith was on her first international assignment, shooting a documentary on women’s rights in Egypt as her final college project. A doctor who treated Smith and a British Embassy official who met her at the hospital corroborrated her account for CNN…

…”Men started ripping off all my clothes,” she [Smith]told CNN. “First of all, it was my skirt, and that just went straight away, and I didn’t even feel my underwear being removed. Then my shoes went and clothes on my upper half were just being ripped off me, and that was quite painful.”

During the assault, “I was just in this weird, detached state of mind, and I just kept saying, ‘Please God, please make it stop. Please, God, make it stop.’ “…

…On her blog, she wrote that an ambulance pulled up at one point, but it was forced to leave when it “was invaded by tens of men.” Even after being escorted to a medical tent by volunteers who formed a cordon around her, her attackers surrounded the tent. Women who assisted her told her the attack “was motivated by rumors spread by troublemaking thugs that I was a foreign spy, following a national advertising campaign warning of the dangers of foreigners.”

“Arab women, Muslim women were all around me, just crying, saying ‘This is not Egypt! This is not Egypt! This is not Islam! These are thugs!’ ” she told CNN. She said she responded, “I know, I love Egypt, I know this is not Islam, it’s OK.

“And they were stunned, ’cause they thought I was going to be so full of hate and so full of fear. But from the very beginning, I don’t blame Egypt for this. This is not the workings of the Egyptian people. This is not representative.”…

Of course it’s not representative of Egypt.  The attack, and others like it, really didn’t happen in Egypt.  And the men who savaged her were surely not Muslims, doing what Muslim men regularly do to non-Muslim women in Shariah-compliant states.

For her finale in a rather perverse defense of Islam, Smith gives us a sort of obtuse indictment of the entire world of males, inferring that what happened to her could have happened to any woman in any country, in any culture – because men are just men, no matter where you go.  We’re all the same here, aren’t we.

…Smith said her case will get attention “because I’m British and I’m young and I’m a girl,” but she said other Egyptian women “will often suffer these attacks and worse attacks and there’ll be no justice done.”…

And why is that, I wonder?  Could it have anything to do with the institutionalization of rape in Islam?

…”There’s been an outpouring of support, and I’m so grateful for that,” she said. But she said she wished that support could be shared with “all women, of all nationalities, wherever they are.”

“I’ll be so happy if this could make any difference to other women who are in this situation, not just in Egypt, not just in the Middle East, but everywhere,” she said.

Perhaps at Times Square in New York on New Year’s Eve?  Or at an NFL game in Denver?  Or perhaps at the next major rally for either of the American political parties?  Don’t frenzied mobs of non-Muslim American men make a practice of forcibly violating women in situations like that?  What happened to Natasha Smith, Lara Logan, and Mona Eltahawy in Egypt just cannot have anything to do with doctrinal Islam. No.

So, let’s talk about something else, shall we?

(With thanks to Drudge for the link to the story.)