Where are the right-on lobby groups and hashtag mobs when a leading Muslim says it’s OK to mutilate girls?

WELL, so much for ‘MeToo’. So much for ‘TimesUp’. So much for all the tub-thumping, hand-wringing and supposed ‘awakening’ of all decent folk to the casual degradation of women for generations.

So much for the rights and equality of Irish women. So much for their sacred autonomy over their own bodies, the current battle hymn of the liberal choir, with politics and media and right-on lobby groups happily chorusing the same tune. Until, that is, it gets a little bit awkward.

Women’s rights are all well and good until they run up against one particular culture which has been deemed untouchable. Then suddenly child marriage, domestic violence, female subjugation, and the denial of personal freedoms, education and career opportunities to women in certain communities are not just defended but actively supported as expressions of cultural heritage.

If you can fly the ‘cultural’ or ‘religious’ (so long as it’s not the Catholic religion, obviously) flag of convenience above your abuse, assault, domestic slavery or discrimination, you can pretty much do as you please in this country.

The liberal media will roll over and play dead, the politicians will be strangely silent, and the likes of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties will hear or see no evil at all.

Last week, Ali Selim, a Trinity College lecturer and spokesman for the Islamic Cultural Centre in Dublin, stated his support for what he called ‘female circumcision’.

At this point it is worth noting that there is no such thing as ‘female circumcision’. Instead, there is the repulsive Muslim practice of lopping off a young girl’s external genitalia, stitching up the remaining flesh and leaving a small opening, to be cut open with a blade, by her new husband on her wedding night. That is what Selim likes to call ‘female circumcision’, and that is what he blithely advocates on Irish television, for Irish girls.

According to Dr Peter Boylan, of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, what Selim advocates is ‘basically a sexual assault’. There is no medical juslated tification for the procedure, which is designed to deny women any sexual pleasure for the convenience of inadequate men. It is banned in this country, and parents who take their daughters abroad to mutilate them in this savage manner will be prosecuted here. And, as Dr Boylan added, ‘it is very disturbing that this is being advocated by a mosque with a school on its grounds’.

Traveller

A few years ago, when I wrote a column condemning so-called ‘feud-related’ Traveller violence, after an Olympic athlete had both his legs broken with a nailstudded club, the ICCL tried to have me jailed for inciting hatred against Traveller culture.

Around the same time, its then chairman Mark Kelly described Ali Selim as a ‘moderate’ Muslim in a Drivetime interview. Kelly was actively supported in his efforts to jail me by his sidekick at the time, now head of the Transgender Equality Network of Ireland, Stephen O’Hare.

So it was with great interest, as you can imagine, that I checked to see what action these great civil libertarians were seeking against Ali Selim for advocating the sexual assault, in Dr Boylan’s words, of young Irish girls.

Stephen O’Hare was busily tweeting about transgender voice therapy in Galway. And the ICCL is getting its knickers in a twist over the Public Services Card, and how it’s a ‘threat to your privacy’. It seems that is much more important than little Irish girls having their genitals muti- at the urging of a prominent poster boy of the Irish liberal community.

Surely, I thought, the Ombudsman for Children will be alarmed enough to issue a press statement on this outrage? Alas, no. The last press statement on the Ombudsman’s website was from January 15. Civil liberties, you see, are less fixed beacons than virtue signals, and are only as strong as the culture they challenge is weak or unfashionable.

If a Catholic bishop advocated mutilating women to render them more biddable, he would be talking to the gardaí by now. However, when a leading Muslim does it, there’s a mildly embarrassed silence.

Of course the ‘liberal media’, those bastions of ‘intellectual thinking’, sidestep Selim’s comments. Yet tens of thousands of words were devoted to excoriating George Hook for criticising rape victims – but he’s not a Trinity College lecturer, nor a spokesman for a particular faith.

Where are all the Trinity students whose protests ran the Israeli Ambassador off the campus last year, as they demanded Justice for Palestine? How about looking for an end to barbarity a little closer to home, guys?

Where are all the Repeal the Eighth campaigners – aren’t Irish Muslim women entitled to bodily integrity too?

Where are all the women who outed Michael Colgan, or hounded the so-called ‘Irish Weinstein’ on social media? Surely having your clitoris cut off and the ragged wound stitched tight is slightly worse than being told you’re fat?

Apart from the doctors and campaigners against female genital mutilation, the only one to take a stand against Selim has been the truly admirable Shaykh Umar Al-Qadri, chairman of the Irish Muslim Peace and Integration Council. Dr Al-Qadri, who is genuinely committed to those twin aims, accused Selim of ‘a highly toxic attitude towards women’ and demanded that he be sacked from both his roles. ‘Those who hold such damaging and harmful views,’ he said, ‘should not be normalised or offered shelter by their presence in our public bodies.’

Yet when it’s a choice between protecting vulnerable women and signalling your liberal virtues, then the likes of Selim and his poisonous bane will be sheltered by silence every time.