No One Would Riot for Less: Ferguson as Jesus' Israel under Roman Occupation

The people of Ferguson live in times comparable to the Palestinians under the Roman Empire where Jesus was born.

A woman's parking ticket in Ferguson, which began as a $151 fine (plus fees), ballooned to more than $1,000 after she failed to appear in court several times. Court records show that she twice attempted to make partial payments of $25 and $50, but the court returned those payments, refusing to accept anything less than payment in full. This woman is now making regular payments on the fine. As of December 2014, over seven years later, despite initially owing a $151 fine and having already paid $550, she still owed $541. She has essentially become an indentured servant.

According to a Department of Justice report, the charge for “Weeds/Tall Grass” is as little as $5 in a neighboring city but, in Ferguson, it ranges from $77 to $102. 21,000 residents have a staggering 16,000 open arrest warrants. That is three out of four of every residents, seventy-six percent. The police brutality is severe. When the small group of rioters began their mayhem during peaceful protests, citizens were met with overwhelming force. The National Guard and police response were criticized, of all people, by the U.S. military.

Tactics of overwhelming force and tricks like the ballooning debt of the first woman, and tall grass citations, are like those of how the Romans used to oppress and trap Palestinians and squeeze their land and resources out of them. Peasants were taxed at extortionate levels (between 30-70% of their income), and people had to borrow money to pay taxes, using their land as collateral. They ended up becoming farmers for absentee landlords, as well as becoming day laborers, beggars, and bandits just to survive. Structural state violence, that is, the exploitation of people within a nation to sustain government, was used to enforce this order of the 95% exploited by the top 5%. As banditry became the only option for many, it also became a crime against the state, treason, punishable by crucifixion. Thus Jesus was posted up on the cross next to two oppressed people who felt forced to become "thugs." Masters expected their slaves and servants to keep their plantations profitable and in good order:
Parables in the Gospel attest to this: "The Wicked Tenants," (Matthew 21:33-41), "the Talents" (Matt 25:14-30) "the Vineyard Workers (Matt 20:1-16)," "the Doorkeepers and the Overseer" (Matt 24:45-51)

What happens when white people become an occupying force, like the Romans?

When white fans of Kentucky State's team lost, they rioted, torching cars. There was no mass outrage, the kind of which we saw post-Ferguson.
When the Black citizens of Ferguson's team lost (a human soul named Michael Brown), despite the fact that Officer Wilson had been a part of a special police force that was so racist and corrupt it had to be disbanded, and has been caught being disrespectful and having disregard for the law in prior interactions with citizens ("put the camera away or I'll put your ass in jail") and exaggerating the police report to make himself look better, they had a greater reason to riot than the Kentucky basketball fans given the systemic racism and extortion by the criminal justice system they were going through.

The Department of Justice showed that the municipal court system of Ferguson was dependent upon the exploitation of Ferguson's citizens for its cash-strapped system. To read e-mails between the police chief and the court system about increasing revenue through tickets, click here for the DOJ report on the Ferguson criminal justice system, and use Ctrl+F to find the key words "revenue" and "safety." The former clearly came at the expense of the latter, the report shows. The municipality literally said out loud to choose money over fair judges:

One 2011 internal report in Ferguson notes that Judge Brockmeyer "does not listen to the testimony, does not review the reports or the criminal history of defendants, and doesn’t let all the pertinent witnesses testify before rendering a verdict.”

The Council member then addressed the concern that “switching judges would/could lead to loss of revenue,” arguing that even if such a switch did “lead to a slight loss, I think it’s more important that cases are being handled properly and fairly.” The City Manager acknowledged mixed reviews of Judge Brockmeyer’s work but urged that the Judge be reappointed, noting that “...it goes without saying the City cannot afford to lose any efficiency in our Courts, nor experience any decrease in our Fines and Forfeitures.”

This is part of a larger epidemic that makes white people into the occupying, exploitative force.  One team of journalists "visited four separate St. Louis-area municipal courts in a span of four nights last week: Pasadena Hills, Jennings, Country Club Hills and St. Ann. Two court sessions took place in municipal buildings, and two took place in residential homes that serve as courtrooms and city hall. In every single court session, the court officials, police officers and lawyers were overwhelmingly white, while the defendants were overwhelmingly black." Blacks have been targeted, and I believe it is because white people believe that they can get away with this extortion if they target people who are Black and/or poor. The whole County of St. Louis is complicit, as I shall explain.

Coliseum on the Basketball Court

An ambitious politician-general named Herod conquered Jewish Palestine in what the historian Josephus called a "butchering" massacre due to the Roman army being so infuriated that they had to fight the Jews for so long. Whole towns were wiped out in this collective punishment akin to Officer Wilson's elite squad of racist police collectively punishing Black people just because a few commit crimes. Herod bribed his way to the top and was crowned King of the Jews by the Romans (he was essentially a Roman puppet) after, Herod went on a spending spree. He build temples and coliseums and dedicated them to Caesar all over Palestine, and they were often made of extravagant white stone and involved humans fighting lions. He also rebuilt the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, but he did not respect it. Like the above courthouses, he chose people to serve important positions (like priests) based on whether or not it served his purposes, not on morality. Many of the priests were just friends of his who were known for their immoral behavior even after becoming a priest.

The Jewish people were not only tithed by the priests to pay for their lifestyle, and taxed by the Romans, but now had a third tax to pay from Herod for all his expensive projects, many of which were not even built in Palestine. Even those that were- such as the Second Temple- were sacrilegious, because Herod had the audacity to place a golden eagle statue above the entrance to the Temple- a symbol of Roman domination and a graven image. Emotions reached a boiling point. Josephus, the historian, states that some of the most revered teacher-lawyer Pharisees encouraged their students to tear down the eagle statue when word got out that Herod was ill. There were mass demonstrations held by Jewish peasants as power transitioned to a new king because, as Josephus states, Herod's taxes had bled the people dry and caused mass poverty. A Roman delegation to Caesar complained that Herod had earned real resentment against the Roman Empire in Palestine.

A 2014 Washington Post expose on St. Louis County's municipal court system shows the insanity: people spending three days in jail for a speeding ticket, courthouses violating the Missouri Constitution, overcrowded courthouses being held instead on basketball court in a school gymnasium, $10 fees being added to every ordinance in order to raise funds to build a new courthouse, fines for giving the middle finger to another driver on the road, and police manually turning yellow blinking lights into red while people were in the middle of the intersection, and then giving them tickets. And it is on the backs of the poor and Black population:

"In 2013, the St. Louis County and City municipal courts acquired more than $61 million in fines and fees. This accounted for almost 50 percent of all fines and fees collected by the municipal courts in the state of Missouri, even though just 22 percent of the state resides in the St. Louis County area. Overall, St. Louis County is 24 percent black and 11 percent of its population lives below the poverty line, but the top 21 municipalities in the area collected one-third of their revenue from court fines and fees. They were 62 percent black on average, with 22 percent of the population living below the poverty line."

Civil rights is just a rumor to them. And the pattern of abuse in enforcing municipal (minor) violations by police has led to an expose by comedian journalist John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight, showing that this is not just happening in Missouri. Most of the time, the targets are living in low-income reservations- er- neighborhoods of minority folk.

Empires change their name, but their tactics stay the same.

What you can do: Support the ArchCity Defenders, who recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of 11 people who claim that they were locked up, sometimes for up to two weeks, for being too poor to pay their fees. Let's fight this debtor's prison system.

Good news: It's worth it to kick and scream and shout. In late August, 2015, Ferguson announced amnesty on arrest warrants for municipal violations.

The Jewish uprising against the Romans, which resulted in the destruction of the Jews' beloved Second Temple.

The new Roman war-horses protect their cherished modern temples, Walmart and McDonalds

From 1st Century Palestine to Ferguson to modern Palestine, an open air prison. Compare the picture of the destruction of the Second Temple to the following; look closely.

Harlem’s “Black Mecca,” and Muhammad’s Heijra

As of Thursday, this year signals nearly 1437 years since Muhammad made his flight from Mecca to Medina, and is the start of the Muslim calendar. In Mecca, Muhammad went from an orphan boy to a Prophet. Why did he feel forced to flee to Medina, the place that would become the Muslim capitol?

Mecca was a grubby trading city in the desert, not an agricultural oasis. Meccans used a “fresh air fund,” where they sent their children to live in the cleaner rural oases. It would be like a Black family in a city like Newark or New York sending their child back to be raised by relatives in a small Southern rural town in states like Georgia or North Carolina, to get a sense of “authentic” Black culture, rather than a fast-paced city upbringing assimilated to Northern white speechways and other cultureways. According to the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Story of America’s Great Migration, most African-American families in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Oakland can trace their origins back to the South. It is no coincidence that Harlem was called the “Black Mecca” and had all sorts of clubs based off of states they fled from: “the Sons of Georgia/Virginia/South Carolina,” and the like. Though if it were trying to be historically accurate, commentators would have called Harlem “Black Medina.”

Nervousness about becoming “citified” is a common theme here: the ethics and values of Mecca disturbed many of those living there. The rampant capitalism and competitiveness created conditions that tore families apart. The inheritance of widows and orphans was preyed upon constantly. The sense of family and solidarity that had sustained the Bedouin in the rural and desert steppes was being broken down by the ethos of the new wealthy elite. A parallel to this could be the Black landlords who learned from white landlords how to prey upon their own people to extract maximum profits from tenants, to try and make it from Harlem’s 5th and 7th Ave to Edgecomb Ave or “Striver’s Row,” the street of the new Black elite.

- Even though the people of Mecca had left the nomadic Bedouin life behind, they still regarded the Bedouin as the guardians of authentic Arab culture. As a child, Muhammad had been sent to live in the desert with the tribe of his wet nurse in order to be educated in the nomadic Bedouin ethos. It made a profound impression on him.

- Karen Armstrong 

Don’t we, in our own time, still believe that city life, or middle-class life, is counter to our authentic culture? Rough rider President Theodore Roosevelt spent his formative years on what was called a "Dude Ranch," a place out in some Western plains or desert where well-heeled (high class) urban socialites would go to learn how to become a man through rugged individualism and manual labor. The Great Migration to Northern cities from the American South highlighted the dichotomy between "citified" "city slickers" often equated with being effeminate due to not working with their hands, and farmer “real” men. The South was "authentic" Black and white culture that had Southern slang, food, and emotional preaching styles and embodied the American dream of the family on a small farm in Middle America (think Little House on the Prairie). Parallels now exist between ghetto Blacks as "authentic" and middle-class Blacks as "acting white," though in reality the differences are regional (Southerners who moved to Northern cities are now seen as "authentic Blacks," even though Northern Blacks have always been more urbane and compartmentalized- Solomon Northup (from 12 Years a Slave) and w.e.b. DuBois being perfect examples).

The pain of the Jim Crow South is well-known to Americans, but the details are being lost to history. The early 1900's experienced the second coming of the KKK, land grabs that decimated the Black farmer, urban assaults that destroyed Black Wall Streets, and lynchings. Lynching did not simply mean a noose around your neck, but often being stripped, sexually molested, tortured, and burned alive. Blacks could be sent to jail for "crimes" like "insulting gestures," where they would be sold to the highest bidder and sent off to work for a corporation on a chain gang. Through this terror and use of the criminal justice system, whites were trying to force Blacks to see themselves as a servant-class of whites, but a new generation of Blacks who had never been slaves and never knew that mindset were restless. W.E.B. Du Bois observed, "The South laments to-day the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of Negro-- the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his dignified...humility." Here is a letter written to the newspaper, the Chicago Defender, from a Southerner inquiring about jobs in the North "where a man can be a man" and avoid police terror:

"Dear Sir: I am writing you for information to come north [and] to see if there is any way that you can hep me by giving me the names of some of the firms that will send me a transportation as we are down here where we have to be shot down lik rabbits for every little orfence as I seen an orcurince hapen down here this after noon when three depties from the shrief office...come out and found me some of our raice mens in a crap game and it makes me want to leave the south worse than I ever did." Macon, Georgia, April 1, 1917

 Islam initially attracted the outcasts of society: servants and women. Many of these servants were persecuted through "beatings, heat exposure, and deprivation of food and water." Two famous martyrs stand out: Bilal, the African slave, who had a heavy stone placed on his chest and was told, "You will continue this way and die or deny [the God of] Muhammad and worship al-Lat and al-Uzzah [the pagan gods]." He did neither, and became a leading companion of Muhammad. The first Muslim to die as a martyr was a woman, Sumayya bint Khayyat, who was, like Bilal, a slave. She was beaten and then stabbed by the leading antagonist to Islam in Mecca.  

Being a Muslim and being Black are two greatly different things; lynchings were not issues of martyrdom. Even today, as a white Muslim I feel much safer praying in public in America than a brown Muslim, so it's difficult to say Islamophobia today exists apart from racism. However, at the time, the cultural attitudes of Arabia, broken down by urban and rural, and the reasons for becoming refugees, have striking similarities.

The Stigma of the Rural/Southerner/Bedouin: Just as America seems to have a love/hate relationship with its rural folk, simultaneously exalting rugged farmers and foresters while calling them rednecks and hillbillies, a Muslim friend of mine told me that in standard Arabic if you wish to say someone is crude and / or lacks manners, you might say "inna inti bedu!" or "Ya badawi!" or something like this (apparently, there's a zillion of these), "Surely, you are one who lives in the desert!" The rural/urban tension remains in the works artists from the South, such as Mississippi transplant Muddy Waters, who sang, "I'm just a country boy, and I don't know right from wrong." The author of The Warmth of Other Suns discusses why many Blacks today are not aware of their own parent’s origins from the South. Aside from the fact it may have been too painful to discuss, 

Some felt shame or embarrassment over being southern and rural now that they were living in big, sophisticated cities. Like immigrants who change their names or choose not to teach their children the language of the old country, some migrants created new northern identities for themselves and didn't pass along their stories to their children and grandchildren or take their children back to their homeland.

 However, others “surrounded themselves” with people and things which would evoke the spirit of back home, creating a synthesis of rural and urban culture that today is seen in many Black enclaves in urban areas across the country. Cue Lauryn Hill, "you know it's hot, don't forget what you got/ lookin' back, lookin' back, lookin' back, lookin' back."  Zora Neale Hurston, the acclaimed author, was said to be "Striding fashionably late into drawing rooms in her red scarves, shamelessly brandishing her black Southern accent and regaling listeners with electrifying renditions of folktales straight from the mouths of poor Southern blacks." She refused to change the speechways of her characters to make them "proper" (Northern) English, at a time when "many black middle class intellectuals shamefully distanced themselves from their cultural heritage." In an excellent interview that discusses similarities between the Southern white murder ballad and the hardcore rap song, Killer Mike says,

"the people I’m supposed to mistrust, have always been my neighbors. And for most of my life, we’ve been really nice to each other. That’s my honest experience with whites in the South, and I think a lot of times when people say ‘Southerner’ or make those crass jokes, I, as the black guy, am supposed to excuse myself from the joke.

“But we’re all Southerners. We all talk with these drawls and twangs. We all go to the race track on Sunday. We all go fishing. I don’t have a Dixie flag on the back of my pickup, but it still has mud flaps and big tires. So you’re talking about me, too. I am that redneck guy you’re talking about. I’m not him, racially. He’s not me, racially. But culturally, in the geography of where we’re from, our grandfathers did the same things. They did the same shit. I fiercely identify with being a Southerner because I value that culture. Everybody else thinks we’re country as shit, anyway. So why not just be who I am? I am Southern. I rap. I wear cheesy jewelry. I bounce around on stage. But when I take that shit off and go home, I fish. And I’m your neighbor. I do the same things you do.”

A short article I read today, about a Black son's response to his close friend who told him he wanted to fly the Confederate flag on his truck, captures this interracial solidarity among Southerns by highlighting the best qualities of being "country": down to earthness, reliability, hospitality. Ironically, hospitality is the genius of the desert of the Bedouins, the same peoples dismissed as crude with a "Ya badawi!"

In an essay titled Black Rednecks, the author argues that the “authentic” Black persona today is the transplant of the Southern redneck to the city, and painstakingly shows how white rednecks’ culture is exactly what we see as “Black,” just with a different skin color. Though the author seems to ignore structural racism and classism "in an attempt to get Blacks to reject ghetto gangsta culture as not authentically black, but a borrowing from poor white trash" (thus, he can only focus on the negatives of ghetto Blacks, redneck and Appalachian culture, and his own version of Blackness becomes somehow the only worthy one, as if he were Professor Higgins from My Fair Lady), the book works best in showing similarities between BET and 17th-to-20th century rural Southern whites. Even the word “axe" (supposedly the definitive marker between acting white and acting Black is the use of this word) instead of “ask” is a Southern speechway. The South (as well as the Caribbean) copied high-class British speechways (like “dahnce” instead of “dance”); “axe” used to be the language used in high society:

The poet Chaucer used "ax." It's in the first complete English translation of the Bible (the Coverdale Bible): " 'Axe and it shall be given.'” 

picture from Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

All over the world, the city folk and the rural folk discredit each other, as my loved ones with families from Guatemala and Liberia have told me, and as studying the cultural regions of Turkey have taught me. Yet we cannot deny how much we benefit from each other; truly, the Other is in the Self, and the Self is in the Other. While the Amish in Pennsylvania depend on less-orthodox Mennonites to use automobiles to transport their goods to urban markets in New Jersey, as just one example of rural as being sustained by urban in a way which preserves their unique culture from homogeneity, the urban owes a debt to migrations from the South (yes, American rock music was formed in this mass movement):

Among the children of the Migration are: Toni Morrison, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Magic Johnson, Bill Cosby, Nat King Cole, Michael Jackson, Prince, Tupac Shakur, Whitney Houston, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Oprah Winfrey, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the broadcaster Bryant Gumbel, the astronaut Mae Jemison, the producer Sean "Puffy"Combs, the leading neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson, the artist Romare Bearden, the playwright August Wilson and many others. Each of them grew up to become among the best in their fields...They were among the first generation of blacks in this country to grow up free and unfettered because of the actions of parents or grandparents who knew it was too late for themselves to truly benefit from the advantages of the north but knew it was not too late for their children."

"One such parent, an ambitious sharecropper wife in Alabama, convinced her husband that their family should migrate to Cleveland in the 1920's. The father was so worried that, as they were packing, he had to steady himself on the shoulders of his nine-year-old son. The boy felt the father's hands shaking and only then realized the gravity of their situation. The boy's first day at school in the North, when the teacher asked his name, he told her it was J.C., which was short for James Cleveland. The teacher couldn't understand his southern accent and just called him Jesse instead. From that day forward he was known, not by his birth name, but by the one he had mistakenly acquired - Jesse Owens. He went on to win four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Berlin becoming the first American in the history of track and field to do so in a single Olympics and disproving the Aryan notions of his Nazi hosts."

Though the persecution driving the movements of the Muslims and African-Americans were horrible, these names of people signifying their contributions to civilization entreat me to say: Salam Hijrah

Dispatches from a Muslim at the Pope's Philly Visit, World Meeting of Families 2015

Dispatches from my pilgrimage to see the Pope in Philly on Saturday:
Islam:

There were two artsy videos about the power of love and marriage played on the Jumbotrons for everyone to see; they looked as pretty and expensively made as Superbowl ads. One of the marriage videos actually quoted the Qur'an! It was a video in dozens of languages that, I soon realized, was quoting random sacred verses and poems about love, without showing their sources. I read the subtitles- 
"And among God’s signs, God created mates for you from among yourselves so you may dwell in tranquility with them and find love and mercy between your hearts; these are Signs for those who reflect."
I was like HOLD UP! I had just posted that quote on my Facebook about LGBT love recently.

There were so many women wearing the veil, nuns in Black habits, nuns in blue habits, West African Christians with headwraps. Jordanian Christian refugee family got to address the pope, and greeted him with a "Bismillah." In fact, I felt surrounded by Muslims in spirit- people who want to transcend dunya, who fell in love with God and felt a calling to imitate the life of Jesus.

A few days earlier, for the weeklong festival, there was a Muslim speaker from New Jersey, Suzy Ismail, who gave a talk about the interfaith imperative to aid families. She is a marriage counselor who has authored books on Muslim families and navigating the American workplace as a Muslim. But alas, on Saturday, I was the only Muslim there, and I was the only person out of the hundreds I saw who was visibly praying.

Praying on my prayer mat in front of thousands of Catholics, and at two train stations made me feel self-conscious. Praying indoors at NJ Transit station near midnight for Isha near a security guard's desk in Trenton undoubtedly made me feel awkward at first, but I eventually felt serenity. When I began praying, the homeless man across from me was asleep; when I finished, with a smile on my face, I noticed he was staring at me with an interested expression.

Magrib prayer came at the exact moment the Pope went by on his popemobile, and I was thinking "what timing! Dang it. I waited here for hours and now I will miss my chance to catch a glimpse of the guy. Oh well." I prayed as everyone around me began screaming and running towards the fences, and it felt like a wind stirring the souls of the people around me. With my eyes closed and my mind focused, I could almost feel the uplift in hearts around me, the spirits vibrating at higher frequencies. It felt like God lit a lamp in Jesus, who lit a lamp in St. Francis, who lit a lamp in the Pope, who lit the lamps of the people surrounding me. That, plus Beatlemania.

Coming soon- more dispatches from the Pope's visit, what I saw regarding
- race
- gender
- lgbt
- class
- spirituality
- immigration/American ideology
and of course, Aretha Franklin

"Muslims" Killing Christians: Islam is Really About Peace

"Let there be no compulsion in religion" (Qur'an 2:256)

Based on this quote alone, I will refer to ISIS as Muslims with quotation marks around the word Muslim, because that's what they call themselves and I'll play along, as when someone sheepishly wants to talk about a problem they have but present it as, "I have this 'friend' who has a problem with carrying around tiny scissors and uses it for stealing locks of pretty people's hair..." and you're like "Okay, tell your 'friend' that..."


But Islam does have to do with violence. It has a lot to do with violence. That is, Islam came at a time when the commercial city of Mecca was oppressive to those who were left behind in the sudden influx of vast wealth that came in Mecca's relatively recent turn into a trading post empire. The idea of the powerful looking out for the poor and vulnerable, a tribal ethic most Arabs had outside of this city, had been fractured. And the deserts outside of this city were not faring much better; they were locked in a series of wars over the control of wells, which were few and far-between, as well as grazing-land rights.

Islam has to do with transforming this, and all, fractured societies.
Part 1- Humanity Was About War
Part 2- Making War: Non-Aggression and Chivalry
Part 3- Making Peace: Reconciliation and Forgiveness
Part 4- Last Resort: A Mass Killing
Part 5- Treating Captives/Slaves

Part 1-

Humanity Was About War

According to the book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, in pre-state societies, when people were still tribes, villages with chiefs, and loose alliances of confederacies, prisoners of war and raids were either slaughtered while their women and children were taken as slaves, or the men were taken as slaves too. Torture, mutilating bodies, trophies from dead bodies, even cannibalism. This happened world over, including in Europe.

Islam Was and Is About Peace

Part 2-

Non-Aggression

 In Islam, war is seen as abhorrent in itself and should be done only in self-defense. In those days, you needed a guardian the way someone in Italy or Spain needed a don- for protection; since there was no government, and prisoners were turned into slaves, crimes were policed the old-fashioned way. If you were killed, your guardian had the right to avenge you by taking the life of one of the enemy; as it happened, this system itself was enough to deter people from murdering others, lest a retaliation go out of control and spiral into a cycle of endless retaliation, which no one could afford.

Muhammad was born in Mecca, and the city watched him go from an orphan to a Prophet. It did not comprehend to most of them that he could speak with the authority to condemn their ways, so they mocked him and, when his guardian (his beloved uncle Abu Talib) died, a hit was put out on him by the city elite. He and his followers were marked men, and he narrowly escaped assassination as he fled to the city that we now call Medina. Here, the trouble did not end. The elite of Mecca would send wave after wave of army, and as the time for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca came around, Muhammad worried that he and his army would have to defend themselves violently in order to perform his duty to God.

It is in this context that Allah gives a beautiful verse summing up Islamic war theory. It calls for self-defense only, and for restraint; if your attacker stops fighting, you must stop:

[2:190] You may fight in the cause of GOD against those who attack you, but do not aggress. GOD does not love the aggressors. [2:191] You may kill those who wage war against you, and you may evict them whence they evicted you. Oppression is worse than murder. Do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque [Mecca], unless they attack you therein. If they attack you, you may kill them. This is the just retribution for those disbelievers.[2:192] If they refrain, then GOD is Forgiver, Most Merciful.[2:193] You may also fight them to eliminate oppression, and to worship GOD freely. If they refrain, you shall not aggress; aggression is permitted only against the aggressors.

Chivalry

 Islam began with a progressive dream:

In one hadith (a narration from the Prophet), Prophet Muhammad comes across a slain woman while riding in battle, and he frowns with anger.
According to the American Army's Strategic Studies Institute, (the college for U.S.soldiers)

His attitude prompted a distinct code of conduct among Islamic warriors which includes:

• No killing of women, children, and innocents―these might include hermits, monks, or other religious leaders who were deemed noncombatants;

• No wanton killing of livestock and animals; 

• No burning or destruction of trees and orchards; and,

• No destruction of wells.

As this one article puts it, "In short, Muhammad wanted his armies to fight like freaking hippies. During the fucking Dark Ages. And they did.

"But the biggest territorial gains were made after Muhammad's death, right? Maybe that was when Islam earned its bloodthirsty reputation? Not exactly. His successor codified the existing rules and made them the standard for his army."

The Muslim army "exhibited a degree of toleration which puts many Christian nations to shame," argues one expert, Dr. Danial bin Zainal Abidin in his book Islam: The Misunderstood Religion. Forgiveness played a big role in this code of chivalry. The Prophet(P) refused to kill a woman who did intentionally try to poison him-

Narrated Anas bin Malik: A Jewish woman brought a poisoned (cooked) sheep for the Prophet who ate from it. She was brought to the Prophet and he was asked, “Shall we kill her?” He said, “No.” I continued to see the effect of the poison on the palate of the mouth of God's Apostle.

Part 3:

Making Peace: Reconciliation and Forgiveness

If the Meccan elite had won the battles they launched against the Muslims who fled as refugees to Medina, it would have been a genocide. And yet, all the pictures you see of Muhammad on horseback with a sword raised in the air, lacking this context. These were battles of self-defense, as the Meccan army came with their women to fight the Muslim militia, which had assembled to save their own lives.

There were losses on the Muslim side, and the dead soldiers would be mutilated by these Meccan women, though Muhammad forgave them. And after winning the war, he also forgave the actual leaders of the war campaign against his followers- even though they had been on his "hit list" originally. He never refused their pleas for mercy, even if one woman (the body-desecration) was short with him in her plea.

In fact, reconciliation was key for Muhammad (PBUH), who formed alliances with tribes he formerly fought with, by having political marriages with the women of conquered tribes whose fathers were key leaders. This would help to ensure peace. The Holy Qur'an says:

"Perhaps Allah will put, between you and those to whom you have been enemies among them, affection. And Allah is competent, and Allah is Forgiving and Merciful." (Qur'an 60:7)

War and hatred thus do not go together; war is only done out of necessity in self-defense- never contempt.

Check out this article to read about Muhammad and the Golden Rule

As the time for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca came around, Muhammad worried that he and his army would have to defend themselves violently in order to perform his duty to God. Muhammad entered Mecca warily, and decided to try something extraordinary: he had all his men lay down their arms in the one of the greatest acts of non-violence in history. The Muslims walked right in to Mecca, the enemy's stronghold, unarmed as pilgrims. Muhammad was asking to pray in the area where he once denounced the stone gods. It was crazy enough to work- the Meccans actually surrendered to this large army of unarmed Muslims and admitted they had lost the war against Islam.

After this non-battle, word of a twenty-thousand man army had amassed at the nearby oasis of Ta'if to fight Muhammad. Muhammad battled two tribes here- one of which, the people of Hunayn, lost and joined Muhammad's confederacy. The city itself could not be secured by the Muslims, but with the loss of their ally the Hunayn, they were so isolated that they gave up a year later. When Muhammad divided the booty of the Hunayn, he gave most of it to his former enemies at Mecca- Abu Sufyan, Suhayl, and Safwan. These were the very people who had put the hit out on Muhammad in the first place. One of them, Safwan, was so moved by this gesture that he said:

"I bear witness that no soul could have such goodness as this, if it were not the soul of the Prophet." He converted on the spot, and became one of many former enemies that converted due to either hearing the words of the Qur'an or being moved by Muhammad's actions.

Part 4:

Last Resort- A Mass Killing

The only time Muslims went old-school on their attackers was during a siege in Medina when the Meccan elite, that is, the Quraysh, had surrounded the Muslims. The Muslims ingeniously built a ditch around their stronghold which their attacker's camels would not dare cross, and set up archers too. (The Quraysh probably saw this as poor sportsmanship.) Then there was word of betrayal: one of the tribes in Medina had made a deal with the Quraysh to put an end to the community of Muslim refugees once and for all.

This wasn't the first time Muhammad faced betrayal in which the town of Medina, which had accepted Muhammad as a Prophet and an arbitrator in their disputes in return for his allegiance in case they ever had to fight a war. The allegiance was mutual; the people of Medina were obligated to protect him from the mighty Quraysh of Mecca, who had come to see war as a kind of sport.

The last two tribes that had turned traitor on Muhammad before this- including one that had an assassination attempt against him - were merely exiled from Medina. No killings at all. And the exiled tribes simply set up camp nearby. Feeling scorned, they plotted to ally with the Quraysh to kill the Muslims. Muhammad, knee deep in a defense known as the Battle of the Trench, surrounded by the enemy, had to make a decision on how to deal with this betrayal. Would he exile them, like the others? He was likely afraid the third exiled tribe would form an alliance with the first two and become an unstoppable Muslim-butchering regime.

It was more than bad news that one of the tribes of Medina had double-crossed Muhammad and defected to ally with the attackers- and this left the Muslims vulnerable to imminent death. If a rainstorm hadn't driven the Quraysh away, it might have been over for the Muslims. After the Quraysh left and the Prophet was sure of this scheming tribe's plans, he asked a local chief to judge the traitor's fate for this breach of allegiance. The judgment was to go traditional on them- that all the men be killed and the women and children sold as slaves. Muhammad reportedly said, "You have ruled as if a king," which may have been a compliment (one of Allah's characteristics is The King), or a criticism at the despotic nature of the ruling (it is said in Islamic tradition that a caliph is a true human leader of men, as opposed to someone being a king, which is but a power-hungry lover of riches).

It is clear that Muhammad preferred violence only as a last resort, then. The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah was drafted by Muhammad with Quraysh, when they were ready to negotiate. So willing was he to make peace, that Muhammad's treaty with his enemies seemed to his followers disadvantageous and lopsided: the Muslims could go on the pilgrimage to Mecca but could not enter the main prayer grounds until next year; any Muslims who defected to Medina to join the Muslim community had to be returned if they had left without the permission of their guardian. However, the terms were not mutual- the Quraysh would not have to return any Muslims who defected to Mecca. The Quraysh didn't like how the treaty referred to Muhammad as a prophet, so Muhammad rubbed the words out himself since no other Muslim wanted to do it. If all this was the only way to secure peace, so be it; the Qur'an had said that if the enemy wants to negotiate, you have to prevent yourself from warring with them.


Part 5:

Treating Captives/Slaves:

When Islam was revealed to Prophet Muhammad, slavery was a worldwide common social phenomenon; it was much older than Islam. Slavery was deeply rooted in every society to the extent that it was impossible to imagine a civilized society without slaves. Today's economy still works this way.

It says in the Qur'an, slaves (which were P.O.W.s directly or indirectly) and concubines (slaves that acted as midwives, bearing their captor's children) could not be refused their freedom ( Noble Verse 24:33), must be treated with dignity (no overworking, no separating mothers and small children, no mistreatment, etc.) and wear and eat the same things as anyone else in the family. The penalty of hitting a slave was the slave's immediate freedom.

If this was not enough, in the Qur'an's very definition of righteousness, the freeing of your own slaves or buying other slaves / P.O.W.s to free them was actively encouraged as the righteous duty of a Muslim. Noble Verse 2:177 states: "Righteousness is not that you turn your face to the east or west (during prayer), it is...for giving wealth, in spite of love for it, for freeing slaves."

The biggest proponent of reforming slavery was 'Umar, Muhammad's successor and companion. A conversation between he and a man named Naafi, after the Muslim conquest of Mecca: "Who have you appointed as your deputy over the people of the valley (i.e. Makkah)?” asked Naafi. “One of our freed slaves,” replied Umar.
“Indeed your Prophet (salallaahu `alaihi wassallam) said: Surely Allaah raises people by way of this Book and makes others lowly by way of it.”

and,

"One day ‘Umar ibn al-Khattaab passed by and saw some slaves standing and not eating with their master. He got angry and said to their master: What is wrong with people who are selfish towards their servants? Then he called the servants and they ate with them."

This stands in contrast to the Quraysh who fought the Muslims- they put heavy stones on the slave Bilal that crushed him painfully as the stones absorbed the scorching Arabian heat, all because he converted to Islam. Slave women were sexually harassed on the street, and Muhammad's wives were harassed in Medina under the pretense that, "Oh, sorry, I thought they were slaves," leading to the revelation about Muhammad needing to veil his wives and daughters and local harassed Muslims who went out traveling, so that others no longer had the excuse to treat them like prostitutes. Without Islam, slaves were treated like dirt, it is shown.

Conclusion

There are examples of early Muslims breaking the hinges of the institution of slavery, and we know that after a while caliphs got drunk with power when Islamic empires became the biggest slave traders in the world, with Muslims having racist views toward Black slaves specifically, but we should know that is about power, not religion. In fact, the current people killing Christians in Iraq are doing it out of power, too:

"The Isis demand for a caliphate is about power, not religion," writes one Middle East scholar.

Cultural practices and power plays have hijacked Islam, just like how power plays have turned president Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel into Pharaoh, in a land where Jews were once oppressed. With his human rights abuses and war crimes against the Palestinians, Netanyahu and the religious right of Israel, has thus turned Israel anti-Jewish the way in which ISIS's "Islamic State" is actually anti-Muslim. ISIS is "Muslim" in the way that Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda is "Christian," as they go around forcing children to be their soldiers so they can force Uganda to become based on the 10 Commandments; or the way some Christians in the Central African Republic are lynching and eating body parts of Muslims because they believe it brings them special powers.

The Muslim response to the rebellious terrorists in Iraq who call themselves "Muslims" has been swift and forceful. The terrorists have been called heretics. The International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) issued a condemnation of the forced expulsion of Iraqi Christians. The terrorists are not only killing Christians, but these Sunni extremists started out killing Shi'a Muslims and any Sunni Muslims who got in their way (Sunni and Shi'a are the two main sects of Islam).

Yet the fact that ISIS is anti-Islamic doesn't help the arguments of people like Pam Geller and Ayan Hirsi who believe that Islam is inherently violent. Here is a photo of soldiers fighting these terrorists:

 Left to Right: I am Sunni, I am Shi'a, I am Kurdish, I am Christian

Five Ways We Contribute to Rape Culture Without Realizing It

What is rape culture? You might hear about a scandal in the news- say, for instance, that the U.S. air force reports that of 170,000 people surveyed in 2014, 20,000 men and women reported receiving unwanted sexual contact, many of which included violent, probing sexual assaults. Out of the 20,000, for half of those women and 34% of those men, the assaults involved penetration of some sort (sometimes with an object).

It is safe to say that there is an “epidemic” of rape- the air force calls the number of assaults “appalling.”

In December 2013, six school officials at Steubenville High School plead not guilty to charges  that basically amounted to creating a path of least resistance for rape culture to thrive: "allowing underage drinking," "contributing to delinquency of a minor," "obstructing justice," and "failure to report child abuse or neglect" are just some of the few. Given the turned heads, and even the encouragement of adults, young male athletes that represented the pride of their town were given free reign to drink their inhibitions away and engage in date rape.

It is easy to see how this contributes to rape culture, but what are some everyday things that other bystanders did to contribute? And are currently turning our heads more than we should be for the youth on our own communities? Should we hold the school officials accountable without wondering if our own local heroes are doing the same thing, and we are, by our attitudes, actions, and even inaction to our sisters, daughters, and mothers, contributing to a climate where a girl blames herself or would not want to disclose she had been raped? Serena Williams wondered aloud  about the Steubenville girl's lack of responsibility for "putting themselves in that situation." Does that sound like you? What does that have to do with contributing to rape culture?

So we click off the TV and imagine that “Rape culture” is often a term associated with specific subcultures of America, such as fraternities, athletic teams, the air force; basically ones that has gotten a lot of news coverage lately. This serves a purpose to highlight places of highly concentrated sexual assaults, but can also serve to mask the fact that America itself is a rape culture.


Wait, what?
How could that be? Nobody is pro-rape. You do not sit around in front of the evening news with a foam finger and leap up to celebrate every time a rape is mentioned; in fact, the truth is likely to be quite the opposite. Most men surveyed in a study believe that rape should be met with severe punishment.

Yes! Throw the rapist in the alligator pit!! Yeeaahh! That's a mighty fine way to castrate!

Yet the conviction rate for rape is between two and four percent.  And this is coming from the FBI, where the "F" does not stand for “Feminist.” Victims of sexual assault are the least likely to get a conviction out of all victims of violence, and it has nothing to do with women lying, but everything to do with our beliefs about the world.

1. You Want Rapists to Look a Certain Way

Wait, what about my beliefs?

This appallingly low conviction rate is partly explained by the fact men believe the rape myth that “real rape” is a man jumping out of the bushes and forcefully raping a stranger, a belief which persists despite the fact that most rapists are acquainted with their victims. If rape is evil and should be punished, but most rapists know their victim, and, according to the Department of Justice, rape happens every two minutes (!), then there is a large amount of friends, boyfriends, husbands, peers and co-workers out there who are evil and should be put away for a long time.

Not pictured: reality

But they are not, and that is the fault of ignorant and fearful men who do not believe that most men accused of rape fit the profile of a rapist. Police officers were asked in a study to take a survey called the “victim credibility scale,” and about 20% said they were unlikely to believe a married woman who claims she has been raped by her husband . Most men fear being unjustly accused, causing a huge gulf between societal attitudes on the one hand and societal actions on the other likened to a “sexual schizophrenia.”  Thus, there is enough cognitive dissonance between our beliefs/feelings and our actions as a society about rape to keep a modern-day Freud busy for the rest of his life.

2. You Believe That Women Lie About Rape

FOX News and men's rights groups have argued that a discussion of alleged-Rape Culture needs to be balanced out by noting the rate of false accusations of rape. The men's rights argument goes like this: These instigating attention whores are vindictive, they might argue, and while a man might ruin a woman’s inner life by raping her, a woman can ruin a man’s inner and outer life (social life/career) merely by accusing a man of rape, forever tarring his image.

In other words, they argue "Those feminists are hiding from the fact that the FBI crime index counts 8% of rapes as unfounded, compared to just 2% of other crimes that turn out to be unfounded." 

Thank you for being so fair and balanced! This is big news!

Even scholarly reviews of the literature on false rape allegations note that most studies average out to a count of between 2 and 8%. FOX News (in a video I now cannot find) called the differences between the conclusions of the different studies in literature reviews irreconcilable and said because of this, we cannot learn anything from them. So, time to wipe off our hands and walk away from irrelevant feminism, and to conclude that the idea of Rape Culture is questionable at best.

Lauren Nelson, an author on rape culture, laid the smackdown in her criticism of this. Essentially saying, “Okay let’s go with the conservative estimate of 8% false rape accusations and go from there,” she proceeded to remind us how many flaws there are with using this number as the actual number.

The FBI says that rape is seriously underreported. Nelson takes an even more conservative estimate of reported rapes at 37 percent (32 is the current FBI number), and then computes the actual number of rapes into the equation of unfounded rape reports. This shows that 3% of rapists are falsely accused, more in line with the average of other falsely reported crimes listed in the FBI crime index. 

Because her math is a conservative estimate, the reality might be 2%.

Then she went further and looked at how most rapists get freed before a conviction is made, and how some police departments giving FBI their data use questionable standards for rape victims. 

Given the fact that some police documented a rape report as false if the victim did not appear disheveled in one study, this is not unwarranted. Nelson concluded that 1.5% of all rapes, then, are false reports.

The reality is that because most rape victims are acquainted with their attacker, the attacker can rely more on psychological control, such as intimidation or manipulation of family and friends, rather than force. If a victim knows their attacker, they might be unaware of the fact it was rape, have very complex emotions to process, and very heavy decisions to make about getting out of their attacker’s lives before they report the rape, due to fear of retaliation. The lack of physical evidence of force, and the fact that a woman waited a long time to disclose and report the rape might damn her in the face of family, friends, police, prosecutors, judges, and juries who are afraid they may judge and convict an innocent man.

The desire not to falsely convict someone of rape is all well and good. However, take a look at the next infographic and wonder if our caution does not have very unbalanced consequences:

Sources: FBI and Dept. of Justice

In the final analysis, men actually have a higher chance of getting sexually assaulted themselves than of being falsely accused of it.

3. You Believe that the World is Predictable and Just
 

So your friend tells you they have been raped. One of the first things you might do is feel confused and want to make sense of it, and after a bit, feel horrified and want to stop thinking about it because it is too heavy.

But be careful- when someone discloses a rape to you, do not minimize, downplay, deny, or imply that the women did something to provoke it. This is not the time to play Devil’s Advocate or pseudo-marriage counselor, you know the suggestion- “I think you both made a mistake.” This is not the time to think about the sanctity of marriage or your family’s reputation if this ends in divorce. But chances are, you might end up thinking “This would have never happened to me, I did the right things to avoid a situation like this.”

"I told you never to move to the city! At least I can say I did all I could."

We take for granted certain things about the world: random acts of violence do not just happen, and good things happen to good people. Researchers call this “Just World Theory,” and belief in it explains much of the victim-blaming that goes on in cases of rape.

So rape victims break some kind of predictable rule of safety in order to get raped. Yet a vast amount of women would all have to have been acting like “bad people” if that were the case- remember, because as the FBI stats earlier showed, one woman is raped every two minutes. The notion that these women were acting out of some bounds is likely easier for men (and women) to believe than the notion that bad things could happen to anyone at any time, outside of our control. Yet the comfort people get from this core belief happens at the expense of the women whose reputations are put on trial when they charge their attackers with rape.

Studies have reported that men believe rape myths at higher rates than women, though some women who have disclosed rape to their own mothers have been told to “stop being such a nag” and “be a better wife to your husband." It is hard enough for women to press charges against men, knowing chances of getting a conviction are slim and that their character will likely be questioned. Family and friends should not make things worse by interrogating or criticizing the victim.

"I don't get it! You said you were dressed in a sweater and jeans, and watched your drink all night. You're not telling me everything, young lady!"

Not long ago, there has been controversy in the media about Serena Williams’ comment on the Steubenville Rape Case. She had implied that the rape had been a mix of boys acting stupid, bad parenting and girls who should have known better.

Even though she said the bulk of the blame should go to the men, she spent some time chastising the rape victims for putting themselves in a vulnerable position.  This is something which women are who are sexually assaulted are often familiar with: a counterfactual thought.

Counterfactual thoughts routinely begin with “If only I…” and end with “…this event wouldn’t have happened.” Women who go this route with their thoughts after a rape tend to blame themselves, and this often leads to depression. The problem with these kinds of thoughts is that rape is assumed to be a predictable and unchanging part of the background of everyday life, while women’s actions are seen as changeable (especially in hindsight).

But what Serena and others downplay is the fact that both men and women’s actions are mutable. There is no threshold of sexual arousal beyond which men cannot control how they act on their urges. Both genders are capable of change, and yet women are forced to do all the work. One third of women in a study reported that fear of being raped was ever-present, and another third reported altering their lives to take precautions. In essence, the big double standard of our Rape Culture is that rape-fearing women are asked to accommodate for rapists, to do all the rape-prevention work, while men who are worry-free about getting raped feel little to no push to organize against rape. This is male privilege. 

Pictured: The Rape-Prevention Industrial Complex

4. You Believe that Rape is a Woman’s Issue
 

Rape is part of the background of life, it will always be there, and so women must accommodate rapists. Everyday men have no responsibility. These are typical assumptions that play out in places like college campuses. A cross-cultural study turns the first assumption, that of rape being an inevitable part of society to look out for, on its head: some cultures have so few rapes each year that they were basically rape-free.  The study's author compared these societies to those he labeled "rape-prone," and discovered that "Rape is interpreted as the sexual expression of these forces in societies where the harmony between men and their environment has been severely disrupted." There is something unique about campus culture: about one in four college women have reported surviving a rape or attempted rape, while by comparison, one in six women in the general population have. College-aged women are four times more likely than other women to experience date rape. 

What about the assumption that everyday men have no responsibility to prevent this? While 99% of incidents at college are involve men raping women, sexual assault prevention has typically focused on ways for women to prevent rape. Has any university really asked why sexual assault prevention has focused on women instead of men? Even asking the question of why women are the targets of rape in significantly most cases, as opposed to men being the targets, asks the question of what many men must be thinking about women. If our actions are the results of our thoughts, then rape is the product of men’s mental content.

Why is rape a woman’s issue, then? If attacks on the United States lead to the U.S. sending soldiers and spies into the Middle East to fight terrorists instead of simply training Americans how to spot and stop a terrorist, then why are attacks on women seen as the victim’s issue, with all the resources devoted to educating and training women rather than sending resources to the battlefield of men’s minds? And what little resources women get at best: violence against women is prosecuted at the lowest rate compared to other forms of violence, as rape is prosecuted at a rate of 2 to 4 percent.

Terrorism works by making people afraid to go out and participate in daily activities of society. Rape is sexual terrorism. Women worry about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the essence of terrorism is that you never know when that is. 

If a man wants to take a walk in a woman's shoes, he might experience it more as jumping in a woman's shoes.

Rape is sexual terrorism because many women are left feeling less free than men to do the same exact things that men do, such as being in a self-service laundromat or apartment laundry room at night, and not any irrational fear, given the once-every-two-minute frequency of rape which the FBI estimates. 

And of these women, some will have internalized notions that rape is not random but happens to “certain kinds” of women. Rape myths like this, and myths that “good things happen to good people” so if someone gets raped they must have done something wrong, work together. They create a path of resistance against women who try and come forward after having been raped. The path of least resistance, then, becomes to “know her place,” and accept the inevitability of rape or some “failure” on her part to prevent it. And so in resignation women silence themselves before their family, friends, and the court system get a chance to silence them. Out of all campus rapes, only 5% of them will be reported to the police, a number far below the 40% of all sexual assaults which the general population reports to the police.

5. You Get Defensive For Your Tribe

Whether you are a sports fan, a fan of a celebrity, or there is a star teacher or other public favorite in your life, you are at risk for getting defensive for your tribe. Also, it may be especially hard to identify yourself as part of Rape Culture if you are in a historically oppressed group. Jewel Woods, a black feminist, writes that when he engages people in conversation about items on the Male Privilege Checklist (see part 1 of 3 in this blog series), he encountered the most resistance from black and brown men. Indeed, he says, some items on the Male Privilege Checklist did not apply to men of color. He created the Black Male Privilege Checklist, which is here:

http://jewelwoods.com/node/9

"If it look as though I have something profoundly interesting and enlightening I'm about to say, it's because I do."

The truth for many people of color is that of intersections in their oppressed identities- for example, a Black woman may feel pressure to keep domestic violence a non-police matter, due to the way the criminal justice system treats Black people in this country. Note the following on Jewel Woods’ list: “I do not have to worry about being considered a traitor to my race if I call the police on a member of the opposite sex, (number 75)” and “I don’t have to choose my race over my sex in political matters (number 1)”. 

In addition to this, whether you are black, brown, LGBT, Muslim, or Jewish, you might know and respect the person a woman is accusing of rape- maybe he is even a community leader or a “symbol of strength” and you don’t get how they could rape anyone. Maybe you are at a gay-friendly event where the leader of the event is well loved by all, but sexually harasses you. Maybe you do not wish to “air our dirty laundry,” and reinforce negative stereotypes about homosexuals as promiscuous. But Male Privilege, Sexism and Rape Culture wins every time a woman or man is silenced because she feels as though she has to choose her minority group over her sex.

The straight white Christian majority is in on this, too, and have the media as a powerful psychological tool. Nearly everyone loves athletes and soldiers, which is why so many people are quick to defend them, and may be why rape is so extraordinarily prevalent in college fraternities, school and professional sports teams, and the armed forces: no one wants to believe anything bad about their tribal heroes, whether that tribe is Duke University, Steubenville High School, or the symbolic vanguards of America itself- the troops.

At the outbreak of the Kobe Bryant alleged-rape case, a team of researchers at Aurora University in Illinois counted the number of online articles from ESPN and CNN to local and regional newspapers (156 in total). They then tallied how many articles presented rape myths without challenging them, and how many presented them and then challenged them. The alleged victim in this case might have guessed it: the majority of the articles (there were 102) contained at least one myth-endorsing statement that went unchallenged. The researchers also documented that the media made more positive comments about the athlete ("the boy next-door") than about the victim, and more negative comments about the victim than about the athlete. As the alleged victim backed off moving forward with the trial, the attorneys said "that she believed she could not get a fair trial after all of the leaks and errors in this case." This influential media bias is the kind of resistance we give to people who go after our favorite athletes, our symbols of strength and hope.  

===========

Conclusion

Whoever we are, internalized myths and male privilege push as along the path of least resistance that keeps the Monopoly game of sexism operating. In essence, by assuming women are lying, or by trying to explain away their rapes as something that could have been prevented if they had done something differently, we are acting as gender police who keep women as a group down below men in society’s hierarchy. You do not need a law to dictate how women should dress in order to pressure women to conform. All you need are the unwritten laws of the game of Male Privilege to create resistance. All you need is the smug thought "I never would have put myself in that position," and for that attitude to be read loud and clear.

Link to part 1- "Three Reasons Men Are Sexist  and White People Are Racist Without Realizing It" 

http://opensystemtoj.blogspot.com/2015/06/three-reasons-men-and-white-people-are.html

Link to part 2- "Three Reasons We Are All (Gender) Police"

http://opensystemtoj.blogspot.com/2015/06/three-reasons-we-are-all-gender-police.html