by Phyllis Chesler

Freedom of speech and women’s rights just took a major hit in Denmark earlier today when the public prosecutor found Lars Hedegaard, the President of the Danish (and International) Free Press Society, guilty of “hate speech” under section 266b of the Danish penal code.

Hedegaard’s crime was to note “the great number of family rapes in areas dominated by Muslim culture in Denmark.”

The prosecutor’s crime is far greater. Now, courtesy of this prosecution, it is officially “racist” to tell the truth about sexual violence against women in Denmark, at least when that violence is perpetrated by Muslim fathers, uncles, or cousins.

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by Phyllis Chesler

One cannot tell the truth or venture one’s opinion about Islam or about Muslim behaviors without risking being slandered, heckled, censored, sued, impoverished, physically attacked, and, more rarely, murdered.

And that’s for those of us lucky enough to be living in the free West. What happens to dissident and feminist thinkers and writers in Muslim-majority countries is far worse; their bravery continues to inspire me at a very dark moment in history.

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by Phyllis Chesler

Hina Jilani is a Pakistani women’s rights activist, an advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, a  former U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Human Rights Defenders, and a co-author of the Goldstone Report.

Dear Hina Jilani:

Greetings! I am familiar with and an admirer of your work as a Pakistani feminist and human rights lawyer, one who has gone on record opposing both honor killing and rape and the inadequate legislation against such crimes in Pakistan.

In 1999, you handled one very high profile honor killing case, that of a Pakistani woman, Samia Imran (aka Samia Sarwar), whose physician mother and politically powerful father arranged that she be shot to death in your office because she dared to seek a divorce from a dangerously violent Pakistani husband. I wrote about this case in 2004-2005 and have written about it again any number of times since then.

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by Phyllis Chesler

Arizona Judge Roland Steinle has just sentenced Faleh Almaleki to 34½ years in prison. According to live reporting from the courtroom, the judge noted that Almaleki showed no remorse after the murder, that he did not forgive his daughter, that he did what suited his own purpose. The judge also said this was the hardest case he had to face in his six years on the bench. He found no mitigating factors and sentenced Almaleki to 34 and 1/2 years: 15 years for the aggravated assault of Khalaf, 3 and 1/2 years for leaving the scene of an accident, and 16 years for the second-degree murder of his daughter. He was facing a maximum total of 46 years.

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by Phyllis Chesler

Earlier this week, France put its 2010 law banning the veil into effect, spurring angry demonstrations in both Paris and London. Two women were arrested, not because they were wearing burqas but because they participated in an illegal demonstration. Parisian police arrested 61 people this past weekend for holding an outlawed protest on this issue.

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by Phyllis Chesler

We are drowning in anti-Israel propaganda, and still it never stops coming.

Simultaneously, the “Palestinian narrative” appears to us as if in a dream, over and over again, always slightly surreal and yet overly familiar. By now the “Palestinian narrative” is a brand and we have all been hypnotized.  This is not surprising.

For more than 40 years, the Soviet, Arab, and Saudi Lobbies, eventually joined by the Iranian Lobby, have funded the demonization of Israel and the popularization of Palestine. The condemnation of Israel for crimes it has never committed (”ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” “apartheid”) and the call for a Palestinian one-state solution is echoed, similarly, in films, books, poems, academic papers and lectures; we see and hear this on television, at conferences, at campus demonstrations, in the halls of the United Nations, the European Union, in Parliaments, and, of course, in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

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By Fern Sidman

Graphic depictions of the most egregious forms of human rights abuses against women in Iran took center stage at a special seminar in New York City on March 3rd. Sponsored by “Iran180″, an organization dedicated to spotlighting the litany of human rights abuses that take place on a daily basis in Iran, the seminar was entitled, “Securing Gender Equality: Iran and the CSW”. Held at 777 UN Plaza, a building directly across the street from the United Nations, the objectives of the gathering included raising awareness of Iran’s violations of women’s rights and the staging of symbolic protests against the welcoming of the Islamic Republic of Iran as the newest member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women at its 56th session.

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by Phyllis Chesler

The Bloody Beast is really back. Only the willfully blind can deny it.

Let me spell it out, let me risk, yet again, being accused of “Islamophobia” (which does not exist), and of “racism” which very much does. Let the record show: I am not a “racist.”

The Beast is radical, fundamentalist, “Islamist” Islam; the beast is anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-Hindu and anti-Jewish Muslim supremacists, who are now also terrorists/jihadists. They — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Moammar Gaddafi, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah — are not wrestling with themselves quietly, spiritually, to overcome lust or hatred. Oh the contrary. They are blowing people up, sending weapons, employing mercenaries, twisting minds, spewing hatred.

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by Phyllis Chesler

In the midst of a Middle East meltdown, in the midst of the most dangerous mayhem and madness, can a feminist and human rights revolution really be brewing in…Saudi Arabia? We know that Saudi Arabia is exceptionally barbaric towards its women and to all progressive thought. Women are not allowed to drive, and they cannot travel, accept employment, or open a bank account without the approval of a male relative. In addition, Saudi women must be fully veiled from head to toe and from front to back, and they must submit to arranged child marriage and to polygamy.

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… Authorities had characterized the crime as an “honor killing” to punish the daughter’s behavior. …

Finally, Muslim honor killings have been called what they are, “honor killings” — psychopathic, intolerant, control-freakish, homicidal refusals to peaceably assimilate into modern civilization. Politicians, law authorities, and reporters have been trying to sweep these crimes under the rug to appease Stone Age Muslims by using the term “domestic violence.” From Reuters:

Iraqi guilty of murder in daughter’s “honor killing”

An Arizona jury on Tuesday found an Iraqi immigrant guilty of second-degree murder for running down his daughter with a Jeep because she had become too Westernized.

Faleh Hassan Almalelki struck and killed his daughter Noor Almaleki, 20, in a Phoenix valley parking lot in October 2009, and also injured her boyfriend’s mother Amal Khalaf.

After four days of deliberation, the six-man, six-woman jury at Maricopa County Superior Court also convicted him of aggravated assault for crashing his vehicle into Khalaf, and two further counts of hit and run.

He faces 12 years to 54 1/2 years in prison, officials said.

Police said Almaleki told detectives and witnesses after the October 2009 incident that he was angry at his daughter because she was “too Westernized,” defying Iraqi and Muslim values.

The daughter had shunned an arranged marriage, and was living with her boyfriend and his mother, police said. Authorities had characterized the crime as an “honor killing” to punish the daughter’s behavior. …

Following his daughter’s death, Almaleki fled to Mexico and later to London, where he was taken into custody upon his arrival.

If he were so remorseful, why did he run away? Coward.

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by Phyllis Chesler

Something is very wrong with the mainstream American media. By now, we all know that CBS did not find it newsworthy that, on February 11, 2011, their own chief foreign correspondent had been gang-raped by a mob of 200 men on the Muslim “Sabbath” — on the very day that President Mubarak stepped down. Instead, they spent four days continuing to celebrate the freedom fighters in Tahrir Square.

Only after CBS finally broke this story did other American media networks come forward with news of their own: Apparently, CNN’s Anderson Cooper had also been beaten up by the brave pro-democracy freedom fighters in Tahrir Square and ABC’s Brian Hartman had been threatened with beheading in that same allegedly pro-democracy uprising. Even Christiane Amanpour had to be hustled away to safety by her handlers.

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Will Egypt’s “revolution” change anything for women? Can misogynists be democratic? Is democracy possible in the Muslim World? All are important questions highlighted by the sexual assault on CBS chief foreign correspondent, Lara Logan, during the recent Cairo demonstrations against former President Mubarak, and given the historically ugly treatment of women in Egypt:

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by Phyllis Chesler

Islamism seems to be winning the day in the Middle East and in central Asia. Today, the Obama Times has a highly sympathetic article about how shelters for battered women as well as for women who are at risk of being honor murdered are themselves “under siege.” The shelters are seen as encouraging forbidden female flight and independence and as exposing and tarnishing Afghanistan’s reputation.

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by Phyllis Chesler

1. When Is The Aggressor Not The Aggressor? When He Has Been Forced to Defend Himself and His Lost Honor

On February 12, 2009, immediately after stabbing his unarmed wife 40 times with two large hunting knives and then brutally beheading her, he became calm, relieved. For the first time in years, he felt “peaceful.” Only then did he feel “safe from the Evil Dragon Terrorist” which is how he referred to Aasiya Zubair Hassan, the wife he had viciously battered for seven years.

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by Phyllis Chesler

America has a long, proud history of immigrants who came to America to escape persecution. They arrived here both with high hopes of retaining their ethnic and religious identities but also of becoming something new: Americans.

However, something new is now afoot among some of these new American immigrants and citizens. Although it is hotly denied, Americans, like Europeans, are now experiencing a new kind of immigrant, one for whom tribal, cultural, or ethnic loyalty trumps his allegiance to American law and to western concepts of individual human rights.

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