By Stephen Brown
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, October 24, 2008
Besides their well-known penchant for anti-Semitism, misogyny and nihilistic violence, Muslim extremists are also gaining a disturbing reputation among British security agencies as collectors of child pornography.
According to a report on The Times website last week, police in Great Britain are discovering that their investigations into Muslim terrorism are leading them into the depraved world of child sexual exploitation. The reverse is also occurring with child protection officers encountering people who are “preparing to carry out terrorist acts.”
At one time, the link between the two deviant behaviours was considered so strong that security officials considered establishing an anti-terrorism project involving child welfare experts, but never followed through because Scotland Yard’s hands were too full with other terrorist investigations.
But demand is growing in Great Britain for the setting up of such a task force that could help security agencies understand the terrorist mindset and prevent future attacks.
“This is an important development,” said Labor MP Andrew Dinsmore. “We have to do more than just police work. It needs child protection, criminological and psychological work. It could become a very important weapon in the fight against terrorism.”
Police say they are already noticing a similarity in methods Muslim terrorists and paedophiles use in manipulating and grooming young people for their corrupt purposes. This usually involves introducing them to their deviant behaviour and then convincing them over time that it is normal.
British security personnel first became aware of a connection between Muslim extremism and child pornography in 2006. When investigating the terrorist connections of an east end London mosque preacher, Abdul Makim Khalisadar, a former primary school assistant, the 26-year-old’s DNA was found to match that of an unsolved rape case of a woman. Upon his arrest, police discovered Khalisadar also had a large amount of hardcore child pornography material on his computer.
In the same year, police made a similar discovery after raiding a suspected Muslim terrorist’s home, looking for a chemical bomb. While no explosive device was found, police did discover 44 “indecent” pictures of children on the 23-year-old man’s home computer and cell phone. Child porn, The Times reports, has been found “during investigations into some of the most advanced suspected plots.”
European security officials first discovered child porn images in a Muslim extremist’s possession when they raided a mosque in Milan, Italy, in 2001. Embedded in the disturbing images, though, they found hidden messages sent by fellow Islamists, causing Italian security agents to believe the terrorists were copying a clandestine method paedophiles use in communicating with one another. At that time, police believed this form of communications camouflage (called steganography) accounted for the child porn’s presence in the mosque.
But other, less doubtful, cases have cropped up since then. When arrested, Abdelkader Ayachine, a suspected Muslim terrorist currently awaiting trial in Spain, possessed almost 40,000 child pornographic movies and images, a number far exceeding any need for encoded communications. Ayachine was connected to the Casablanca bombing terrorist group that killed 45 people in 2003 and stands accused in the Spanish court of inciting jihad and recruiting fighters for the Iraq war. Prosecutors say his child pornography collection consisted mainly of “minors having sex, among themselves and with adults.”
Muslim extremists’ attraction to child pornography has been attributed to cultural factors. An Italian magistrate involved in the Milan mosque case said possession of child porn by Islamists did not necessarily indicate paedophilic tendencies, but rather was the result of cultural differences. Girls, he stated, often become wives in the Muslim world at age 11 and 12.
The Islamists’ interest in boys as sex objects is generally owed to their beliefs and social milieu. Their strict religious convictions do not allow them to be with a woman outside their own families, let alone touch one, before marriage. Moreover, in some Muslim countries, males can’t even catch a glimpse of the demonized female form because of the body-encompassing clothing she is forced to wear. In such a gender segregated environment, homosexual behavior develops, especially towards boys.
Even the Taliban, which executed homosexuals when it ruled Afghanistan, could not eradicate the sexploitation of boys, even in its own ranks. Among the 30 commands it issued to its fighters, Rule No. 19 forbid them from taking young boys without facial hair into their barracks. After the Taliban regime fell, a Fox news report indicated pederasty in Afghanistan returned to its previous place as an accepted social norm.
Sexual exploitation of boys in Muslim countries also has a long history. The Asia Times columnist, Spengler (an anonymous pseudonym), wrote in his column, Sufism, Sodomy and Satan, that, in the High Middle Ages, Sufism, Islam’s mystic branch, “is the only case in which a mainstream current of a major world religion preached pederasty as a path to spiritual enlightenment.” He then cites a German historian who claims this Sufi practice “persisted in many Islamic countries until very recent times.” The 2007 movie, The Kite Runner, located in Afghanistan, showed a “last vestige” of Sufism’s pederast side when dancing boys appeared in female dress.
Perhpas not altogether insignificant in this grotesque phenomenon is that the Koran itself promises to put pre-pubescent boys at the service of jihadi martyrs not interested in the female virgins awaiting them in paradise. The boys will be like “scattered pearls” of “perpetual freshness” (Suras 52:24, 56:17, 76:19).
The consequences of Islamist misogyny, gender segregation and sexual abuse of Muslim boys are far-reaching. Besides growing up to be sexual deviants who collect child pornography and may victimize other children, such sexually traumatized Muslim boys are predisposed to become involved in terrorism as a way of expressing their sexual rage. It therefore comes as no surprise that one anti-terror source told the Times: “A way of finding who the extremists and terrorists are is to go through the child porn sites.”