The scene was terrible, so much so that were the victim and victimizers reversed, the incident would’ve been front-page news. Instead, it was “Nothing to see here; move along.”
“It’s just another ‘infidel’ being forced to kiss some Muslims’ feet and then beaten.”
There’s truth to the above statement, too: The violence and humiliation, visited recently on a frightened, young Belgian boy and caught on video, was just one of many incidents involving an age-old Islamic method for asserting dominance and control.
In fact, points out Arab commentator Raymond Ibrahim, forcing non-Muslims to kiss Muslims’ feet is a practice seen across time and space — the only thing that’s different, now, is how the West responds.
This difference exists, too, because of what the West has become. In fact, in poetic irony, the incident involving the young boy (video below) occurred in Belgium, whose capital, Brussels, is 20 to 25 percent Muslim — and is also the unofficial capital of the European Union.
As mentioned, however, the poor kid is hardly alone. The above video was posted August 17, and just six days later similar footage appeared, this time of a Finnish girl being forced to her knees by a Muslim mob to apologize for some unknown “transgression.”
Moreover, these “two back-to-back incidents are hardly an aberration,” writes Ibrahim. “On December 1, 2022, two Palestinian teenagers accosted, threatened, and ordered a Jewish (Haredi) man to kiss their feet in Jerusalem’s Old City. They videotaped and posted the incident on TikTok, to the audio of an Arabic rapper who, among other vulgarities, employs the notorious Arabic insult kuss umak (“your mama’s va[***a]”), which was presumably directed at the Jew in question, as he kissed the hand and foot of one of the Muslims.”
Such incidents are hardly unheard of in the Holy Land. For example, Ibrahim quotes a 2022 Times of Israel article stating that the “phenomenon of Palestinians filming themselves assaulting or humiliating ultra-Orthodox residents sparked outrage and clashes last year, leading to several arrests.”
This behavior has been seen in the Land Down Under, too. As Ibrahim related last year, quoting The Age’s reporting on incidents in Melbourne:
A 12-year-old Jewish student was forced to kneel down and kiss the shoes of a Muslim classmate, while a five-year-old boy was allegedly called a “Jewish cockroach” and repeatedly hounded in the school toilets by his young classmates…. The older boy’s act of kissing another student’s shoes, under threat of being swarmed by several other boys, was filmed, photographed and shared on social media [image above]…. One of the boys who watched on was later suspended for five days for assaulting the Jewish student in the school locker room.
Many would chalk this up to Muslim grievances relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet while no doubt an exacerbating factor, Ibrahim points out that this doesn’t explain why this behavior has been witnessed the world over and over time. As he also wrote in 2022:
For example, in The Adventures of Thomas Pellow, an Englishman (d. 1747) who wrote of his experiences as an abducted slave in Morocco, references to European slaves being compelled to kiss their Muslim master’s feet are not uncommon.
Sultan Muley Ismail — who enforced sharia and regularly prayed — went one step farther, according to Pellow: slaves were required to “pull off their shoes, put on a particular habit they have to denote a slave, and when they approach him fall down and kiss the ground at his horse’s feet.” Those not conforming to such abject behavior — the “lucky” ones — instantly lost their heads. The rest were slowly tortured in ways that beggar belief.
This is the only “good news” to the recent foot-kissing incidents. As vile as it may be, it reflects an important fact: few things are as reliably consistent as Muslim behavior — particularly the sort we are regularly assured has “nothing to do with Islam.” Otherwise, why does one find the same “disquieting” behavior in regions that widely differ in both time and space, such as Israel, Australia, and Morocco?
Of course, whether or not this has something “to do with Islam” is a matter modern Westerners are wholly unfit to judge, being awash as they are in moral-compass-clouding relativism. And relevant here is a bizarre contradiction. When addressing religion in principle, secular moderns will often implicate it in many eternal woes, making claims such as, “It’s responsible for most wars in history!” (untrue; most conflicts have been caused by greed, power lust, etc.). But when addressing religion in the particular — and in particular when hearing criticism of Islam — some of the same people recoil at the proposition that one faith could possibly engender greater violence and may imply that all religions are equally peaceful.
Yet this is as supposing that all ideologies are equally peaceful (or equally violent); this comic-book conception of reality ignores that different religions/ideologies espouse different values. Hence, what’s the probability they’re all morally equal?
As for Islam, I’ve reported on how the Islamic canon (Koran, Hadith, Sira) contains far more violent injunctions than does the Bible; moreover, unlike the latter’s, they aren’t limited prescriptions but apply across time and space. Even more significantly, Jesus the “Prince of Peace” and the Muslim prophet Muhammad have something in common: Both are viewed by their followers as the ultimate role model (Muhammad is called “the Perfect Man”). But then there’s a difference:
Muhammad was a man of war, mass killer, employer of torture, and slave owner/trader.
And the above may explain, just a bit, the findings of a certain very interesting German study of 45,000 immigrant youths. Released in 2010, it found that while increasing religiosity among Christian youths made them less violent, increasing religiosity among Muslim youths actually made them more violent.
Yet being morally confused, the West won’t put its foot down but instead kisses feet, literally and metaphorically. This is even true, Ibrahim points out, of “the man who holds an office that for centuries sponsored Europe’s staunch resistance to Islam,” as Pope Francis “willingly prostrates himself before and kisses Muslim feet.” And of this one may ask: Is it at all possible that the message he’s sending is not the one they’re getting?
