Young Girls Are Mutilated, In The Name Of Religion

I have felt bone-chilling fear twice in my life.
The first occasion was while filming a television report about little British-born girls from London’s Somali community being sent abroad to have their genitals mutilated.
They call it female circumcision – an inadequate description of the radical and primitive surgery they’re forced to undergo.
Teachers in their schools had wept as they described bright young pupils of five or six coming back at the end of the holidays in agony and in deep shock, no longer able to manage the lavatory without crying out.
The local Imam, when I challenged him about such a barbaric practice, which he justified as a religious and cultural necessity to ensure their purity at marriage, had steely eyes which bored through me.
‘In the not too distant future’, he intoned, ‘all British girls will be circumcised when Islam rules this country’.
(Jenny Murray)