Unfortunately that may have been the case as a result of the June 24th broadcast of Bill O'Reilly's ``The O'Reilly Factor' program on Fox News. The program aired a segment called ``Unresolved Problems: Rape in Kosovo' which discussed the FBI arrival in the Balkans to document Serbian war crimes, particularly the rape of Kosovar Muslim women. In O'Reilly's discussion of the rape of Muslim women, he invited a female guest, Parvin Darabi, author of the book Rage Against the Veil to discuss the impact of rape on a woman in Islamic society. What occured next shocked American Muslims as well as many American viewers.
Darabi began her discussion about the rape of Muslim woman with a twisted depiction of Islam as a religion which mandates suicide after the rape of a Muslim woman for the sake of restoring family honor. Her remarks were not only shocking to American viewers, who perhaps believed her, but also shocking and insulting to American Muslims. When asked to explain why it is difficult for a Muslim woman to come forth after she has been raped, Darabi replied, ``Well the problem comes from the Arab and Islamic tradition or culture that, if a woman gets raped, it is her fault because she provoked it or she was somehow involved in this....the thing is that the woman should have killed herself before she got raped because rape is considered the violation of the man's honor, man's dignity, man's socialist standing, and man's moral standing. Everything with the man has to do - is linked to the woman's vagina....'
O'Reilly then proclaimed that ``any clear thinking human being' would understand that it was not the woman who caused the rape to occur and that rape is not at all the fault of the woman, ``Surely they would know that.' Darabi then gave her most damning, most innacurate and unfounded remark, ``Well - but this is also in the Islamic tradtion. A woman that gets raped should commit suicide, and if she doesn't commit suicide, then she values her own life above the honor of the family.' O'Reilly then asked Darabi to reiterate her comment on a Muslim woman having to commit suicide when raped, to which Darabi continued to elaborate that suicide was necessary under Islam to restore family honor and widely occurs throughout the Muslim world and that Muslim women should ``protect their vagina...until the death.'
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