Michelle Malkin has given us a link to a story that we hear all too often about abuse in Islamic societies.  See this for a story on the execution of a teenage girl in Iran, and then this for a barbaric practice that might be coming to an Islamic neighborhood near you.  Oh, by the way, it is not true that this practice is merely societal.  It occurs everywhere there is Islam.  It was prevalent in Afghanistan, for instance, when the U.S. first arrived to clean out the Taliban.  This post is updated to link to and address Malkin’s post.  The abuses described here go hand-in-hand with the abuses described below, and provide further testimony to the nature of radical Islam.

In this time of seeing pictures showing the damage inflicted on sourthern Lebanon by the Israeli military, listening to the media coverage of the daily bombings in Baghdad, and hearing the constant drum beat of the left in the U.S. and abroad, if it is easy to forget who the enemy is and why there is a conflict across the globe, it pays to remember our enemy.

Seeing the tears of the afflicted is personally disturbing to me.  War is an ugly business, and having to engage in it is a last resort.  People die as a result of conducting war, and these deaths will always include innocents.  It is in times like these that we need more than ever to remember who the enemy is and why the innocents are harmed.  In order to remind my readers, I will cite a few instances, from several years ago to more recent.

From Gene Edward Veith:

In Meerwala, Pakistan, an 11-year-old boy walked unchaperoned with a girl. This was a violation of Islam. A tribal council was called.

The boy’s father pleaded that since he was too young to have sex, the girl was safe and no harm was done. The council disagreed. But instead of punishing the boy, it decided to punish his whole family by punishing his 18-year-old sister.

In order to shame the family, the council sentenced the teenage daughter to be gang raped. Four members of the council took turns forcing themselves upon her in a mud hut, as hundreds of villagers laughed and cheered.

“I touched their feet,” said the girl to an Associated Press reporter. “I wept. I cried. I said I taught the holy Qur’an to children in the village, therefore don’t punish me for a crime which was not committed by me. But they tore my clothes and raped me one by one.”

From Newsweek, watching soccer is outlawed as being against the religion of Islam.

The Taliban use women and children and human shields:

TALEBAN fighters used women and children as human shields as they tried to escape into the mountains of Afghanistan, British troops claimed yesterday.

The tactics were revealed in the first account by those who fought in one of the main battles faced by the men of 3 Para and the Royal Gurkha Rifles in Helmand province, where 3,300 British troops are stationed.

The Taleban’s use of human shields happened during a six-hour battle that began when British troops arrived in a remote area to flush out a suspected Taleban hideout.

An Australian Jihadist wanted to kill thousands in the name of Allah:

SUBURBAN Islamic cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika wanted to kill 1000 Australians to “please Allah” and had the support of a blond recruit who had pledged violent jihad during a meeting with Osama bin Laden. 

A Melbourne court heard yesterday that a witness would reveal that Shane Kent, 29, received weapons and explosives training at the Taliban-run al-Faruq training camp for foreign jihadis in Afghanistan.

And at a meeting with bin Laden in that country, Mr Kent, from Meadow Heights in Melbourne’s north, allegedly committed himself to violent jihad. The alleged Melbourne terror cell’s spiritual leader, Mr Benbrika embraced Mr Kent as part of his clique, the court heard, saying: “He’s good, and he doesn’t talk too much.”

Mr Benbrika encouraged his devotees to plan a large-scale terrorist attack, which police foiled during its “developmental stages”, the court heard during the opening day of the committal hearing of 13 suspects yesterday.

“If you kill, we kill here 1000,” Mr Benbrika allegedly said in a conversation covertly taped by police. “Because if you get large numbers here, the government will listen.”

The court was told that Mr Benbrika encouraged his adherents to follow in the footsteps of one of the masterminds of the 2002 Bali terrorist attack. He allegedly told two of them that when they were captured “they should do like Amrozi (bin Nurhasyim) and tell the judge, ‘You can kill me, but there will be others coming after”‘. 

We learn recently that Hezbollah members have used non-combatants as human shields in the battle for southern Lebanon:

“Hizbullah members don’t discount any means to kill or injure, including the use of civilians as a holy human shields. If there will be no choice, we will hit every place from which they shoot at our forces,” a military source told Ynet.

The woman who was raped by her tribal elders is not our enemy.  The people used as human shields are not our enemy.  The people who were shot because the watched world cup soccer are not our enemies.  Our enemies are the perpetrators of these heinous acts.