Open Gay Pedophilia Is Rampant In Afghan, Islamic Culture

"You had me at Allahu Akbar"

Is anyone really surprised about Afghanistan's dirty little secret?

Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy's father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to "touch and fondle them," military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. "The soldiers didn't understand."

All of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery. Her report, "Pashtun Sexuality," startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked - and repulsed.

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means "boy player." The men like to boast about it.

The sexual repression, and codified persecution of women, within Islamic societies is not only stifling, it is unnatural. When one is surrounded by barbarism and the unreasonable religious restrictions placed on mankind's most basic of needs, one should expect barbaric solutions to satiate those needs. What is repulsive to a healthy society is considered normal is a sick one.

Make no mistake, Islam is, indeed, at the root of this sickness:

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are "unclean" and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli's team "how his wife could become pregnant," her report said. When that was explained, he "reacted with disgust" and asked, "How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?"

That helps explain why women are hidden away - and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. It's not homosexuality, they aver, because they aren't in love with their boys.

The sad truth is that this practice is not restricted to Afghanistan; it is a common practice in Islamic countries, and the more fundamentalist the country, the more pervasive the pedophilia.

Much like the unrelenting violence and brutality, as well as the horrific treatment of women, the widespread practice of pedophilia is glossed over by those who who defend Islam as "just another religion". It's not. It is a monstrous ideology, wrapped in a religion and drenched with the blood and agony of countless innocents.

These aren't random acts of individuals; these are the acts substantial populations of countries that have been seduced by unspeakable perversions in the name of Islam.

What kind of society has so little regard for the gift of life that they gladly sacrifice theirs, and sometimes that of their children, in the interest of taking the lives of innocents?

What kind of society has so little regard for their sons that they gladly allow them to become objects of sexual gratification for adult men?

What kind of society has so little regard for women, that they engage in genital mutilation, beatings, stonings, honor killings and the institutionalized persecution of their daughters, wives and mothers?

Islam is a scourge, with violence, brutality and deviance at it's heart. It could certainly be correctly argued that Christians as well as Jews have also engaged in violence, brutality and moral deviance at points in their long history. The difference is that both Christians and Jews abandoned their religious warfare centuries ago, while Muslim violence continues on a daily basis. As for the depravity of pedophilia, this is no moral lapse of a few individuals; it's emblematic of the toxicity of Islam.