All right, we’ve all heard the gripes about how ‘things’ are distorted and what ‘gets reported’ is not always a factual, unbiased account of the events. But this, this has got to be some of the most bizzare collection of distortions I have seen so far.
Or, at least, that I am aware that I have seen…
As far as I can piece this together (and I am NOT certain of the complete facts), it would appear that 13-year-old girl-child, Aisha Ibrahim Dhuhulow, was gang-raped. She went to register the crime with the courts, presumably expecting the police to find and arrest her rapists.
However, last August, Aisha’s home town of Kismayo – a port in Southern Somalia – had been taken over by Islamist forces and Sharia law had been imposed. When the child came to file her complaint with the police, she was asked ‘if she is sure this is what really happened’. Aisha confirmed that she had, in fact, been gang-raped and asked for justice.
This last bit came back to haunt her, her family, and anyone with a conscience! At this ‘admission of engaging in extramarital sexual intercourse’ and ‘demands to be punished’, the police officials had ‘no choice’ but to arrest her. The ‘Sharia Court’ (if you can call it a court) had heard the case and had ‘no choice’ but to sentence her to death by stoning. After all, she herself ‘freely admitted her guilt’ and ‘demanded justice to be done’!!!
Dressed in black, with a green veil (green – the colour of Islam and peace), she was brought into a large stadium filled with about 1000 people. Reporters, based on her ‘appearance’, guessed her age to be about 23 yearsof age, were forbidden to use their cameras, but radio broadcasts were permitted.
Here, the child was bound hand and foot and – while screaming and pleading for her life – Aisha was buried up to her neck in a hole in the ground.
It would appear that the crowd – or at least some of the people within the crowd – tried to intervene and save the unfortunate child. The ‘guards’ opened fire on the crowd, shooting a child dead.
50 men then started to throw stones at Aisha’s head (the only part of her above ground). When they thought she was dead, they dug her up – but a check showed she was still alive, so they burried her again and continued to throw stones at her. They had dug Aisha up 3 times to check if she is dead yet….and then burried her again to stone her some more…
Her family is distrought and angry. Her father confirmed her age to be 13 years.
This, in itself, is a horrible story. It is a nightmare!
I truly don’t know if there are words strong enough to express my anger and outrage!
But, it would appear, my reaction is not all that usual. At least, if one were to go by what is being said in the many ‘official’ reports of Aisha’s suffering and murder lawbreaking and execution.
Please, consider the following:
AFP (Agence France Presse), the oldest news agency in the world, carries this report:
MOGADISHU (AFP) — Thousands of people gathered Monday to witness 50 Somali men stone a woman to death after an Islamic court in the southern port of Kismayo found her guilty of adultery, witnesses said.
Aisho Ibrahim Dhuhulow, who had been found guilty of extra-marital intercourse was buried in the ground up to her neck while the men pelted her head with rocks.
“Our sister Aisha asked the Islamic Sharia court in Kismayo to be charged and punished for the crime she committed,” local Islamist leader Sheikh Hayakallah told the crowd.
“She admitted in front of the court to engaging in adulterous sexual intercourse,” he added.
“She was asked several times to review her confession but she stressed that she wanted Sharia law and the deserved punishment to apply.”
The execution was carried in one of the city’s main squares.
…
Did you notice the mention of the fact she was a rape victim? No, because this was not mentioned. But you might have noticed how her ‘demand for justice’ was explained by the local Islamist leader Sheikh Hayakallah!!!
Good reporting, AFP, making sure we hear the ‘proper’ side of the story! Good reporting, AFP, for ‘digging for the details of what really happened there’! Bang-up job, you are doning! Truly!
But they are not the only ones reporting on this murder of Aisha along these lines…
Surely, that ‘most extreme-right-wing-media outlet’, Fox News, will have done a bit of digging around to find out what was happening, right? If so, it was not mentioned in their article, ‘Somali woman stoned to death for adultery’!
No verification with her family, or Amnesty International, which also seems to have had no trouble learning Aisha’s true age – 13, not the 23 admittedly arrived at by a reporter’s ‘guess’….
No explanation that the ‘adultery’ in question consisted of being gang-raped….
WHAT THE F$*&Q^#$*&!!!!!!
How about other sources?
The ‘neutral’ and award winning Sky News reported: ‘Cheating’ woman stoned to death. I suppose the ‘Cheating’ – being in quotation marks – constitutes ‘neutrality’ (also in quotation marks). And, they do report that while the officials explained she demanded this punishment herself (!), they do quote witnesses that heard her scream and saw her struggle….and they hint that only the guns of the guards – who killed a child in the process – kept the crowd from freeing poor Aisha. But, not the correct age, not a peep about the fact that she had been the victim of rape….except those quotation marks around ‘cheating’, that is…
Why is it that one has to go to blogs (A New Dark Age Is Dawning) and non-mainstream media like ‘Islam: the religion of peace’ to find out information, and only then can kernels of it be seen in the ‘respectable news-outlets’ reports?
It was not until today, 5-or-so days after her murder execution, that there is even a peep about the true story…. CNN carried the little mention.
What are we doing? Are we ‘normalizing’ Islamist violence against women? Are we all headed for the burka?
Nike (among others!!!) is already working to normalize such attitudes!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
November 2, 2008 at 06:41
[…] update the post to link Xantippa’s post on this. I understand perfectly well why she is sooo angry. The question is why there are so very few […]
November 2, 2008 at 06:43
Have linked your post. It’s so outrageous, so wrong, I really get angry when I see Western behaviour towards these girls. 😥
November 3, 2008 at 21:15
[…] How a 13-year-old rape victim’s execution is being reported […]
November 19, 2008 at 13:23
[…] something wildly different – as happened in the case of the stoning of a 13-year-old-rape victim, Aisha Ibrahim Dhuhulow…..reported by the mainstream media as ‘23-year-old woman stoned for […]
June 20, 2009 at 04:23
Truly, upon hearing the news that a girl the same age as me living halfway across the side of the world, had been stoned to death for being raped made me cry. How truly despairing and dire this news is. How do they expect to have a peaceful country if their justice system condones rapists, and murders innocent children? If they only care about whether the men are satisfied in their pathetic Islam lives, and the dutiful f**king women are just accesories in their lives, for them to use and abuse? Some humans are not humans. They are worse than animals. They are worse than dog sh** on the side of the road. At least that can be cleaned up. You sick perverted men who caused the death of this beautiful life and many more like it, you will get your comeuppance. The day that you do will be one of joy for many people.
Xanthippa says:
Thank you for caring!!!
The story of Aisha has touched me, too – very, very deeply!
She no longer has a voice, nor do other girls who share her fate: she just happens to be the one we have heard about.
But – that IS the solution: we must make sure that everyone DOES hear about AISHA!!! We must scream at the top of our lungs about what happened to her, and we must not let ourselves be shut up!
Because if we don’t, many more girls – perhaps even our grand-daughters, WILL share her fate!
August 4, 2010 at 00:04
i want to ask here, how do u know that there are other girls that share her fate?
and maybe this is just another way to condemn Islam.. if we, humans keep on condemning other religion, where can we find peace?
and the video.. it is so wrong to have said that y nike must support hijab.. and also about the part where they said that hijab is a symbol of sexuality.. u guys are wrong.. try to learn more about Islam before u want to say anything.. don’t make such speculation..
u guys are just creating hatred among people.. i think this is so wrong..
Xanthippa says:
Dear Ann,
you suggest I learn more about Islam before I speak about it.
While learning ‘more’ about Islam is farz for Muslims and Muslimas, I have done some learning about it myself.
Had you (as I have) read the Hadith, you would know that the prophet Muhammad himself ordered stoning as a punishment for adultery. Though, ‘adultery’ is not an exact translation: the more accurate term is ‘sexual intercourse outside of marriage’ (zina). Therefore, this punishment necessarily includes all victims of non-marital rape – as all the leading Islamic scholars today openly agree.
And the evidence that many people (women and men of all ages) are facing stoning under Sharia after having been accused of adultery is not difficult to come by: just Google it!
To make it easier for you, here is a picture of one woman being burried in preparation for being stoned to death for adultery and, right beside it, of another woman who is dead from stoning. Beneath is an eye-witness account of a stoning of yet another woman.
And, here is a video of one such Sharia stoning – here, 4 men are stoned to death.
I believe the Islamic (sic) term is rajm.
If you would like to know more, perhaps you could learn about the case of Najat – a deaf girl who could not speak. One day, her brother was late picking her up from a shop and she had to wait out front for him. That was enough for the Saudi ‘morality squad’ to arrest her for ‘prostitution’. She was stoned to death.
Or, perhaps you ought to look up some information on Azar Bagheri. She was just 15 years old when she was accused of ‘zina‘ in Iran and put in jail. Because she is too young to be executed (under the laws of Iran), she has been kept in jail, awaiting her 19th birthday, so she may be stoned to death ‘legally’.
During these years of waiting for this horrible and gruesome punishment, Azar has been subjected to a number of ‘mock’ executions! They drag her out of her cell, tie her up, stick her in the hole in the ground and bury her up to her shoulders…..making her wait for the painful death.
But, go on! Look up more! There are many names people stoned to death under Sharia in the last few decades that only a few minutes of searching the internet will reveal – and there are many more whose names we will never know, whose tragic fate we will never learn.
Even more names of people who only escaped this cruel form of execution because of public outcry can be found in just minutes of searching…
And you say it is I – and others who speak our against such horrible torture – who are ‘spreading hatred’?!?!?
What is wrong with you?
November 29, 2011 at 10:37
Islam itself doesn’t condone this. Fucked up governments do. They’ve perverted religion to suit their ends, very similarly to how Christian nations perverted it to spread misogyny during the middle ages. You can read the old testament and see their condemnation of any sexual deviancy, witches, and homosexuality. I agree the implementation is horrible and that RADICAL islam has in recent years become ridiculous, but to say Mohamed himself advocated it is shaky at best. Mohamed didn’t even write the Quran.
Xanthippa says:
You are correct in saying that Muhammad did not write the Quran: he was illiterate.
However, Muslims do believe that Muhammad did, indeed, rule in this way.
Sharia – the ‘Islamic law’ – was founded by several centuries of scholars pouring over the Quran and the Sunna to derive a set of laws as closely based on what they believe Muhammad had preached as humanly possible.
…which, for all practical purposes, is close enough – at least in all ‘Islamic’ countries, designated as such since they base their legal code on Sharia!
January 25, 2012 at 16:03
“And you say it is I – and others who speak our against such horrible torture – who are ‘spreading hatred’?!?!?”
Yep.
I agree with the other poster, you’re basically spreading propaganda. All of the links you supplied as “sources” in your post either link to Wikipedia, non-credible news outlets, or are broken (or you don’t have a source at all, as is the case in this comment. I could learn about Najat? Really? Najat who? Where did you hear this story? Is this something I can find on Google, is there a book about her, what?). As far as your readers know, this could be something you read about in a chain-letter email and took off on with no further proof. You are vilifying an entire religion and culture while failing to examine parallels in the western world (i.e. of Christianity), and ignoring the plain fact that you cannot equate the actions of a few to the beliefs of MILLIONS of people worldwide. You also failed to address the incredibly racist comments that other people have left to agree with you.
IF this story is true, yes, it is incredibly sad. This shouldn’t happen to anyone. Unfortunately, horrific things happen on a daily basis in this world, and whether or not the individuals perpetrating those things want to use religion as the justification or not is a moot point. You should be speaking out against the actions of the individuals themselves – NOT the beliefs of millions of Muslim people who, if you actually bothered to speak to some of them, would probably agree with you! I know of plenty of Muslim individuals through the internet who are feminists and would agree wholeheartedly that this should never have been done, particularly in the name of Islam. Plenty of them blog about it, why don’t you try to open up this discussion for some of them, instead of advocating intolerance of a vast and diverse religion from the safety of your own website?
In addition, I wanted to respond to a comment made by another poster.
“How do they expect to have a peaceful country if their justice system condones rapists, and murders innocent children? If they only care about whether the men are satisfied in their pathetic Islam lives, and the dutiful f**king women are just accesories in their lives, for them to use and abuse?”
Please examine Rape Culture in America and other Western countries and tell me that this statement couldn’t be applied to all of them if the word “islam” was taken out of it. Women are treated like shit in ALL places in the world – and likewise, men and women both are treated violently in other countries, countries with different cultures, or war-torn countries, or poorer countries where people must resort to extreme measures just to survive. Just because women in America may be treated like pieces of meat without being stoned to death doesn’t mean that people of another belief, or culture, or country are suddenly less than human for acting on that oppression in ways that we don’t. What about the women in America and Australia who have had their rape cases thrown out of court because of the clothes they were wearing (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/rape-of-woman-in-skinny-jeans-not-possible-20100430-tzai.html) or what they had been drinking? What about the fact that most rapes DO go unreported because women here KNOW that they will be questioned before their rapist will (and 14 out of 15 rapists go free!) – and if they were drunk, if they flirted with the perp, if they were wearing ‘sexy’ clothing, or god forbid if they are married to them, they will be the ones charged with the blame for ‘letting’ it happen. What about that 10 year old girl who was gang raped, and her story was met with people blaming her parents for “letting” her wear revealing clothing or be alone, when something like 14 boys made the conscious decision to brutalize her? (http://abcnews.go.com/US/gang-rape-charges-18-men-sparks-racial-tensions/story?id=13095476#.TyBtbONWpqs)
(This article, too, could be an interesting commentary on your post. Because the perps in this case were all men of color, it sparked racial tension. I’m sure there are plenty of people who started blaming those terrible blacks for their violent tendencies. Obviously that is an incredibly racist, harmful view to have – but how is that any different than blaming Muslims for their violence, when it was only a few who actually did something wrong here?)
My point is this: this shit happens everywhere, regardless of where you live, regardless of your culture, and regardless of your religion. And yet you took the time to make a big long post about the awful nasty Muslims and their disgusting culture and blame ALL of them for it, and then drag in completely unrelated stuff (the burqa?? What does that have to do with men CHOOSING to rape a girl, and then other men punishing her for it??), ignore other relevant points made – yeah, you’re spreading hatred. Pretty much everything you have said is completely unnecessary, not to mention racist. And racism is hate, in case there was ANY misunderstanding about that.
Degrading an entire religion to stand up for the rights of one girl is not the way to get justice for her.
If you want to spread awareness and stand up for this girl, here is what you should do:
a) find some credible sources to prove that this event actually happened.
b) examine the way rape is treated in your own culture, and in other religions*, before you make villans of an entire (and extremely diverse) religion.
c) TALK TO MUSLIMS to see how they feel about this. Make your argument balanced. Googling sharia law does not make you an expert on Islam.
d) make an informed and rational post about what circumstances may have led to this situation and what could have prevented it. Open up a thoughtful discussion among your readers to see if they can come up with a solution, rather than condemning people based on a culture you probably have never been immersed in and know next to nothing about (except what you have heard secondhand from the media or the internet).
e) start a petition for that change and for awareness if you can’t find one already. Put global pressure on the people who are actually to blame for this so that they understand the world is watching and finds this unacceptable. Start a petition for a formal apology. Whatever might actually work, instead of just mentioning Amnesty International and finding out her age.
I’m not saying that what happened to this girl – or any other women stoned to death (as yes, I’m aware, that does happen) – is not an outrage. I just don’t believe anything you’ve said because you’ve failed to present this story in a convincing and logical way, and instead came at this with rage and racism. I hope you see this response not as an attack on you, but as an opportunity to look at this post with a critical eye and truly think about how you might be able to raise awareness for issues in the future, because I can assure you, this is not the way to do it.
April 11, 2010 at 23:09
+50
November 3, 2010 at 20:40
This proves that the hatred of Islamic fundamentalists towards women is truly satanic. Their view of rape is satanic. They knew good and well that Aisha didn’t commit adultery. In order to commit adultery, you have to do it voluntarily. Rape doesn’t count as adultery (at least not for the woman), because it’s not voluntary. The sharia people know this, but they pretend not to. They pretend all female sex (notice the rapists were not punished, although they had sex out of marriage) is voluntary.
Then they lied and pretended that she was 23, when they knew she was 13.
This is what Islamists in North America want their special courts for, and to have their own sharia here. This must not be allowed. Stories like Aisha’s show that sharia is from the devil. Jesus said by their fruits you will know them. This fruit of what they did to Aisha, executing a 13 yo rape victim, is truly satanic. If we don’t want this satanic stuff done on our 13 year olds in this country, we need to crush every attempt to establish sharia in this country.
May 21, 2011 at 02:08
This is immensely sick 😦 . Things muslim (islam moral heads) should understand.
1. Women are not peace of meat. just as men are created by almighty so are women, and above all women are more better, beautiful, intelligent creations of the same allah they worship.
2. if ur religion, cant protect, or give respect to women , it useless, moreover kuran never said to treat women like “objects” or “meat”
3. It is your lust that harms women of ur society not , that u are given rights to use women or women not covering their heads are “inviting u rascals for rape”.
who r u to decide this all? if u find my comments offensive, let them be.
This should be a global message, that “DUMP THEM WHO DIS-RESPECT, HARM, USE WOMEN.. AND UN-FOLLOW A RELIGION THAT SUPPORTS, COVERS, UP BRINGS SUCH A MENTALITY”
September 14, 2011 at 01:18
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September 25, 2011 at 10:02
This is sick people tortured/murdered ie stoned to death for nothing
September 25, 2011 at 10:06
The capital punishment or murder ie stoning to death is a painful agonizing death in some cases for nothing ie being raped standing about in streets waiting for a relative /friend
October 5, 2011 at 18:30
[…] FG: I feel so sick – I’ve just read this. […]
December 5, 2011 at 01:58
[…] […]
January 7, 2012 at 17:23
watch the movie, “the stoning of soryaya”.
May 15, 2014 at 06:22
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