Chris Cuomo: Rape isn't the problem, bad stereotypes about ISIS are the problem

We’ve had fun with Chris Cuomo before here at RedState and his Twitter feed is a never ending source of fun. The crap he comes up with is so bizarre that even the left knows he’s a moron. He is also an inveterate defender of radical Islam. The previous link contains a Chris Cuomo tweet, since deleted, in which he insists that the attack on Pam Geller’s “draw Muhammad” exhibition in Garland, TX, fell within the “fighting words” defense.

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Now he’s back at it again.

Late last week the story broke that the young American woman who had been kidnapped by ISIS, Kayla Mueller, had been held as a sex slave by the ISIS leader:

The leader of the Islamic State personally kept a 26-year-old American woman as a hostage and raped her repeatedly, according to U.S. officials and her family.

The family of Kayla Mueller said in an interview Friday that the FBI had informed them that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, had sexually abused their daughter, a humanitarian worker.

Mueller’s parents said the FBI first spoke to the family about the sexual assault in late June and provided more details two weeks ago. The bureau pieced together what happened to the American from interviews with other hostages and the captured wife of a senior Islamic State figure.

The disclosure that Mueller was raped by Baghdadi adds to the grim evidence that the exploitation and abuse of women has been sanctioned at the highest levels of the Islamic State. The sexual enslavement of even teenage girls is seen as religiously endorsed by the group and regarded as a recruiting tool.

It isn’t unusual for conflicts between ethnic groups to involve the use of rape as an instrument of war. The Serbs, during the fighting that followed the dissolution Yugoslavia, were famous for it. ISIS is not only involved in a politico-religious conflict but it promotes significant elements of ethnic cleansing and genocide. It seems to have made rape a governmental action, a fact that has evaded the Tumblr feminist community:

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In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.

A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.

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Enter the deep-thinking Chris Cuomo:

CUOMO: Just to be very clear, they sell it to themselves as something that is somehow purifying for them and legitimate. But the cost on these young women, often girls, is forever. And let’s take one sound from – one piece of sound from the Frontline documentary just so you get a sense of what these young women have to deal with.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): They did everything to me, that’s why I’m still in pain. I can’t sleep. I wake up at 3 a.m. because I remember their smell. Their smell makes me brush my teeth more than 10 times a day. It will stay with me forever.

CUOMO: Let’s finish this part of the discussion on a point that you feel often needs to be made. This feeds the impression that these Muslims are animals, savages and their faith makes them that way. And it feeds an impression of what Islam is. What is your response to that?

That’s right, Cuomo believes that rape is bad but the real issue that needs our attention is that a multi-national movement based on a fundamentalist form of Islam and has institutionalized rape may feed into a negative stereotype.

What Cuomo doesn’t seem to understand is that this is not a stereotype any more than complaining about genocide being an unfair stereotype of Nazis. It is a fact and he’s unable to accept that because the facts are contradicted by his ideology.

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