Justifying Rape through Cultural Relativity

The sordid story of "Yusuf Ali Bey Sr." finally hit the big-time media today, with a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times. Most of the news about the former Yusuf Ali Bey Sr. is old hat – the "Your Black Muslim Bakery" and other businesses, the weekly cable television program, the run for mayor of Oakland, Cal., the anti-white and anti-Jewish tirades, the criminal and civil charges that he had repeatedly raped underage girls, including his own daughters, and the decades of his over-awing anyone who challenged his integrity until one of his victims finally got the police to listen to her.

All that, as I say, has been available in the San Francisco-area media for months, for example in a three-part series in the East Bay Express in November 2002 and June 2003. What caught my eye in today's paper, however, was the justification proferred for Yusuf Bey's serial rapes by one Maleek Al Maleek, described as a 62-year-old mathematician:

He was a born leader in the sense of an African chief or a Muslim caliph. What is prohibited here is not prohibited in East India, where there are child marriages. I can show you chiefs in Africa who have 30 wives ….The ways of the high priests are not shared by the commoner.

In addition to waving away the rapes, what so impresses me about his statement is the casual willingness to import the standards of East India or Africa to the Bay area. Another benefit of multiculturalism? (December 30, 2003)

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