Why Western Women Are Islamist's Target of Choice

Why western women are now the Islamists’ target of choice https://t.co/CihiowZyta

— Ƭαвιтнα Ɓℓιѕѕ ❤ (@BlissTabitha) September 7, 2017

There has been an unprecedented development this year in the Islamists’ war on the West. For the first time their foot soldiers are singling out women to kill. Women have been the victims of terrorism before, murdered by paramilitary organisations such as ETA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the IRA, because of their uniform or their beliefs, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but never solely because of their sex. 

In the era when Islamic terror groups hijacked aircraft it was rare that women were harmed. When a Trans World Airlines jet was hijacked in 1985, for example, the terrorists released all the women and children, including the Americans. When a similar fate befell an Air France airliner at the same airport in Algiers nine years later, the Islamists handed out veils to the females passengers but executed only male hostages. 

But this year Islamists are specifically targeting women. When Salman Abedi detonated his suicide bomb at the Ariana Grande concert in May, killing seventeen females (and five males), he did so knowing it would be full of teenage girls and young women. In July, two German women were fatally stabbed by an Egyptian man at the Red Sea resort of Hurghada. This attack bore similarities to Saturday’s outrage in the Finnish city of Turku, where an 18-year-old Moroccan allegedly stabbed eight women, two of whom died. Two days earlier, the only fatality in an Islamist attack at Cambrils was a 61-year-old woman. 

The Islamists are deliberately targeting women because in their minds they represent empowerment and enlightenment, and also immodesty. Three young women were among the eight people stabbed to death during the London Bridge attack in June, and many more were wounded, including an Australian, who recalled her attacker screamed “Stop living this life” as he slashed at her throat. 

In the hundred years since female emancipation began gaining momentum in the West, there have been significant reactions in the Islamic world. The first was the creation in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, its founder, Imam Hassan al-Banna, demanding an “Islamic renewal” faced with creeping Western influence. Al-Banna wasn’t a fan of the West, especially not Mae West, nor Jazz or bobbed haircuts, raging against the importation of “half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims.”