Hurriyet reports that parents want a teacher of religion classes in northern Turkey to be fired for telling her female students that they “deserve rape” for not wearing hijab.
“You don’t cover your head anyway, so raping you or doing evil to you is permissible [in Islam],” the female teacher, identified by the initials L.Y.İ., told students at the Halil Rıfat Paşa Middle School in the province of Tokat on March 9, according to parents who spoke to Doğan News Agency.
That seems very harsh. It seems way out of proportion. Rape is a terrible thing to do to a human being; not wearing hijab is not a terrible thing to do to anyone, not even Mohammed or Allah. One of the things punishments should be is proportional.
According to the parents, the teacher also told the girls that they should have prayed for Özgecan Aslan – whose brutal murder in southern Turkey on Feb. 13 caused national outrage – instead of going to demonstrations to commemorate her.
Mahmut Demirbağ, the school’s headmaster, reportedly told the parents that the teacher “apologized” for the comments. However, some parents have continued to demand that she be dismissed, threatening legal action.
“She insulted 13-year-old girls for not wearing a headscarf during a Quran class, which is elective. This teacher cannot lecture my daughter,” a parent told the Doğan News Agency.
They’re not broken yet in Turkey. That’s good.
I think it is extremely charitable to interpret this statement as the rape is punishment for the offense of not wearing a hijab. Yes, as cruel and despicable using rape as punishment is, that is still the the charitable reading.
The only way I can read that statement is that the hijab signals belonging to the tribe and rape is only prohibited within the tribe. What this statement actually says is that by failing to signal the tribal belonging, a person reduced to a sub-human. It’s not just “do bad things and you’ll be raped”, it also that “bad things” include not being part of the group.
Turkey may not be broken yet, but seems to be headed in a bad direction under Erdogan. He reminds me a bit of Putin: One wants to be Tsar, the other, Sultan.
“You don’t cover your head anyway, so raping you or doing evil to you is permissible [in Islam],”
Islam is evil.