A US TV journalist attacked in Cairo’s Tahrir Square was stripped and beaten with fists and the poles of hand-held flags, US sources say.
Lara Logan, 39, a correspondent on the CBS News show 60 Minutes, was recovering in private with her husband, Joseph Burkett, their son and her stepdaughter.
Parts of her body were covered in red marks, a source said. They were originally thought to have been caused by bites, but on examination proved to have been made by aggressive pinching.
“Lara is getting better daily,” said a friend. “The psychological trauma is as bad as, if not worse than, the physical injuries. She might talk about it at some time in the future, but not now.”
ANDREW McCARTHY WRITES FOR NATIONAL REVIEW:
Sexual abuse is encouraged not only by hadith but — as I related in discussing the recent case of a teenager flogged to death in Bangladesh — by sharia standards that make rape practically impossible to prove and subject women to a death sentence for adultery or fornication if they come forward with an accusation but cannot prove it.
Islamic scriptures endorse wife-beating (Koran 4:34 again). Female genital mutilation is rampant in the Muslim world and scripturally based. As Caroline Glick notes, the World Health Organization reports that 97 percent of Egyptian women and girls have been subjected to this form of barbarism.
This despicable treatment is fortified by standards that treat women’s testimony as inferior to men’s, permit men to marry up to four women, and deny women the right to hold many public offices — particularly those that involve the construction of Islamic law and issuance of fatwas.
The unmistakable message at the core of sharia is that women, like non-Muslims, are less than fully human. It is a message we continue ignoring at the peril of tomorrow’s Lara Logans, and our own.
