I recently discovered Yasmine Mohammed through a Sept. 12 article published by The Free Press and written by Madeleine Kearns. Born in 1974 to an Egyptian/Palestinian family in Vancouver, B.C., Yasmine was treated truly horrifically by her Muslim fundamentalist parents. Now a writer, university instructor and human rights activist, she is a wonderful validation of the Humanist belief that it is our Inner Self that defines us rather than the superficial determinants embraced by the Neo-Marxist Left.
When Yasmine, as a young girl, began spelling her first name with a J, her father, fearing she was becoming “westernized,” hung her upside down by her ankles to teach her a lesson. Reticent to continue wearing a hijab, her mother threatened to kill her at one point. In 1993, at the age of 19, she was forced to marry Essam Marzouk, an apparent Al Qaeda terrorist who had just fled Pakistan. She has since put all this behind her, having severed ties with both her immediate family and her now ex-husband.
In 2019 Yasmine published her book “How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam.” Having spoken with hundreds of Muslim girls here in the West who say they were similarly abused by their parents, she is convinced such abominations are allowed to continue because today’s “liberals” are paralyzed by the absurdity of their Identity Politics which forbids them from rebuking anyone of a non-White, non-Western identity. Undeterred by such fatuousness, she has declared her outrage that in Afghanistan the Taliban recently denied Females the right to express themselves in public. Even more disgusting, she suggests, is the fact that the rulers of Iraq are presently attempting to legalize marriage for girls as young as the age of Nine! An active promoter of Women’s Rights, her organization “Free Hearts, Free Minds” focuses particularly on inciting free thinking amongst the Muslim Women of the world who might thereby liberate themselves from the tyranny to which they have traditionally been subjected.
The issue of the suppression of “free thinking” in countries like Afghanistan, of course, leads those of a “conservative” mindset to the irony of the fact that the “progressive” elites of the West, while not nearly as vile as Islam’s various tyrannical regimes, are themselves not particularly tolerant of anyone who does not agree with them. I can think of several rational, “conservative” views whose expression is nevertheless consistently greeted with derision and threats of cancellation or imprisonment by the “compassionate” Left. Were a White, Western Male to express the same outrage with traditional Islam as Yasmine Mohammed, he would be denounced as a Racist, Islamophobic, White Supremacist Jerk! The true beauty of people like Yasmine is that they prove the superficiality of a World-View based on Identity by highlighting Man’s transcendent capacity for Intelligence and Integrity!