Iranian woman beaten for not wearing veil (click on image for more photos).

Denial is a defense mechanism for those who, when faced with a fact that is too painful to accept, reject it outright and insist that it cannot be true despite overwhelming evidence. This is most plainly seen among those of the Muslim faith. I will for a moment ignore the vile Muslim practice of willful deceit or al Taqiyya such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement yesterday, "If the US withdraws from Iraq, good things will happen. I believe that the Iraqi people can rule themselves." The Iranian President isn't in denial; he doesn't believe this any more than he believes in the Holocaust. Liberals, however, who believe his statement are, in fact, in denial.

A Muslim female reader left this response to my article The Subjugation of Jewish Women:

This is the most racist site i've ever seen! Muslim women wear hijab because they want to be seen as a person not a sex object! Another thing muslim women get a quarter of the inherittence because in islam the husband has to pay all the bills and barely has anything for himself. the wife can do whatever she wants with her money and doesn't have to get near the bills unless she wants too. your a racist bigot with a head full of shit, at least muslims don't massacer innocent children and infants! maybe you should actully ask a muslim if you have questions! Don't just swallow the garbage the media gives you! go to a masjid and you'll see that women get better treatment than men!

Not all Muslims are in such denial as this woman, for example, here is a Muslim-run website:

Islam For Today
Women, Shari'a, and Oppression - Where are the Voices of Conservative Muslims?

When presented with instances of women's oppression in the Islamic world, these Muslims, almost always men, respond defensively. They cart out examples of women's oppression in the Western world, or worse, they address the issue by lecturing the questioner about the virtues of the Ideal Place of Women in Ideal Islam. In other words, they treat the ideal that we are all aspire to as the reality on the ground. Pressed into taking a stand on real life issues, they retreat in anger. "That's culture, not Islam, it has nothing to do with me as a Muslim," they sniff.

Meanwhile, real Muslim women suffer at the hands of societies and governments who would harm them in the name of Islam.

At the time we began as a nation we had a discrepancy between the ideal and the real when our Founding Fathers asserted that "All men are created equal." It took America four score and seven years to begin the process of actualizing the ideal.

1400 years ago Islam made some assertions about women that were ahead for its time. Unfortunately in all the centuries since, Islam has not yet granted to women the bold freedoms promised; they yet remain as ideals. Here is a Muslim-run site that acknowledges the difference between the real and the ideal:

Submission.org
Are women and men equal in the sight of God?

Every Westerner thinks that Islam is very chauvinistic and oppressive towards women. In Islam of today as practiced by most traditional sectarian Muslims, this is very true. However, in true Islam (Submission), as revealed in the Quran, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Aside from flat denial, it should be noted that some Muslim websites admit the suffering of Muslim women but deny Islamic responsibility, instead placing the blame on the surrounding culture:

Islamic Research Foundation International
The deconstruction of the myth of the "oppresses Muslim women"

The question which still remains is; "is Islam inherently oppressive to women? What are the Islamic teachings concerning women? Is there consistency or contradiction between Islamic teachings and its manifested reality?

We would argue that there is definitely contradiction. Many of the rights of women stated in the Qur'an are not fulfilled in reality, mainly due to the inherent patriarchal structures, which throughout time have come to take on an Islamic guise. The denial of the intrinsic rights of women in many Islamic countries is argued by some scholars as being a consequential effect of suppressive cultural traditions.
Originally uploaded by sonyapryr So here is the problem, when I repeat what Muslims websites themselves recognize categorically that Islam oppresses women, I get comments calling me a racist, bigot, Islamaphobe, whatever. Perhaps when Muslim women read these same websites their eyes deny what they themselves read, much as some battered wives refuse to see themselves as abused women.

Indeed, the comment my reader left, "Muslim women wear hijab because they want to be seen as a person not a sex object!" is quite laughable in light of the recent reports in Iran that women wear the hijab because they will be beaten senseless if they do not and because there are Imams who declare that women who do not wear the hijab are like juicy steak and have themselves to blame if they are raped. That is why Muslim women wear veils, to avoid being beaten or raped. You are in denial, so spare me the lectures.