“I was raised as a Muslim girl I attended Quran School and according to the values
of my clan and my religion, I carried out backbreaking domestic labour.
Girls and women are there for marriage, for breeding and for household chores and nothing
else.
Clan life based on Islam was a life of violence I was beaten constantly as a
child and for many years I thought that this was normal.
Death was also normal people died all the time of violence and of
disease. From Allah we come and to Allah we return was a phrase I heard
constantly.
When I was a teenager living with my family in Kenya along came the Muslim Brotherhood, incidentally the Islamist group that spawned Hamas.
The Brotherhood offered something more it offered a life of service to Allah I felt a glorious purpose we had a
mission to convert people to the true Islam there was intellectual nourishment
or at least that's what I thought because we were required to study the Quran and the Hadith we were a community a true Brotherhood United with a Divine Purpose and Islamism went farther. I would be guaranteed a place in Paradise.
It was through clan life the Muslim Brotherhood and my Islamic schooling that I became an anti-semite.
The worst insult in the Somali community was to be called Jew, not that any of us actually knew
one! To be called a Jew was so abhorrent some felt justified in killing
anyone who so dishonored them with this slur.
I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques cursing Israels
peaceful two-state solution. We were taught to want to see
Israel wiped off the map the elimination of Israel was not a matter of if it was
a matter of when. For us as Muslims Israel did not
represent a territorial dispute, to want Israel's destruction was
an act of worship to entertain a two-state
solution was an act of sin a
transgression a betrayal of God, his prophet.
Our religious teachers described
Jews as physically monstrous with horns coming from their heads out of which
flew devils that would corrupt the world. Jews controlled
everything they told us, and it was the duty of Muslims to destroy them. We made no distinction between liberal and Orthodox Jews or between Jews who settled Palestine and those who opposed the settlements between religious or atheist Jews we also made no distinction between adult Jews and children, male, female, mothers, old and
young, to us Jews were Jews, all of them
evil and all of them enemies of Islam and all that's good true and
decent our mission was to single-mindedly destroy them through
prayer through propaganda and for those lucky enough to have the means, to kill
them. It was a lot to take in for a teenager who read Western romance novels
in secret but to my shame I believed those things”
She goes on to say
“the more the West tried to appease and collaborate
with Islamism the more the Islamists rewarded them with aggression and
terror”
