By Phyllis Chesler
They have dishonored our shores for quite some time and more keep coming our way.
I am talking about honor killings in North America. In The Death of Feminism, I write about honor murders in Missouri, Ohio, and in parts of New Jersey, New York, and Canada which took place during the last quarter-century.
By Phyllis Chesler
It was snowing in Teheran when they hung the twenty seven year-old mother of two children earlier today in the notorious Evin Prison. From the moment she was arrested, she had not been allowed to ever see her children again. Her name was Raheleh Zamani and she had been married off when she was only 15 years old. The political campaign to halt or commute her execution failed.
This tragic story could easily be one of the tales in Marjane Satrapi’s film, Persepolis.
By Phyllis Chesler
In a sense, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto is a political and cultural version of an honor killing. Bhutto was the first woman Prime Minister of a Muslim nation and she symbolized an unacceptably Western form of female ambition and achievement. She had attended Harvard/Radcliffe and Oxford. She spoke English—perhaps more fluently than she spoke her native Sindi or Urdu. She once dressed as Western women do. Indeed, many Muslim women from wealthy families, including educators and feminists, have done so for a long time. They cannot do so now.
By Phyllis Chesler
Yesterday, I wrote about societies choosing to jail anti-Islamist dissidents and innocent Muslim civilians who are being threatened with honor murder or with other atrocities. I asked how big the jail would have to be and whether societies could actually afford to protect the innocent from the fanatically murderous. Clearly, we can not afford to sacrifice them to a political death-cult either.
By Andrew Whitehead
The Council on American-Islamic Relations - Canada (CAIR-CAN) recently issued a press release calling for “zero tolerance” regarding domestic abuse in Canada.
http://www.caircan.ca/itn_more.php?id=2957_0_2_0_C
The press release involved a 16 year-old teenager, Aqsa Parvez, who was apparently strangled to death by her father for refusing to wear the traditional hijab outside her home. Her father has reportedly confessed to the murder.
By Phyllis Chesler
Aqsa Parvez, the tragic sixteen year old slain by her father in an honor killing in Canada, was buried secretly and privately. Her teenage friends arrived hours too late at the Islamic Center where they had been told her funeral would take place. The kind of family and culture capable of honor murder (she and her family are all Pakistani immigrants) is also quite capable of denying her Canadian friends the opportunity of paying their last respects.
By Phyllis Chesler
The sixteen year old was “too modern” for her fundamentalist Muslim family. She craved forbidden North American freedoms which, if practiced, would shame her immigrant family. The struggle over this issue was hot and abusive. The girl was continually attacked and closely monitored. Her own sisters envied and hated her not only because she was allowed to attend school but because her choice of modern dress could harm their own young daughters’ future marriage chances.
I am not talking about Toronto’s Aqsa Parvez who was just slaughtered by her father (may she rest in peace), but about another sixteen year old: Palestina Isa, who was honored-murdered by her father and her mother in St. Louis Missouri on November 5, 1989. Palestina (“Tina”) was murdered with primal ferocity. The forensic pathologist reported “thirteen wounds, six of them mortal. The worst one plunged into her chest wall, breaking her sternum and ribs and piercing her heart. A second gash ripped her left lung. Her liver had been slashed five times fatally.” Her breasts had been punctured seven times.
By Phyllis Chesler
Although I knew and admired the late, great Dr. Margaret Mead and other pioneer-anthropologists, (Ruby Rohrlich and Eleanor “Happy” Leacock for starters), my ardor for anthropology gradually dimmed as the discipline became increasingly politicized. Ironically, anthropologists have judged western culture harshly and moralistically as “sexist, racist, class-ist, and anti-gay”—but have refused to judge Third World cultures even slightly by these same standards. Indeed, what began as a valiant attempt to understand the “Other” and the ravages of both poverty and oppression has degenerated into a valorization of barbarism and a demonization of any western attempts to either intervene or to introduce any principles of universal rights.
By Andrew L. Jaffee
A girl from the Shiite minority was gang-raped 14 times — and what does the Saudi justice system do? It punishes the victim, sentencing the girl to 90 lashes. When the girl dared appeal the sentence, a court increased her sentence to 200 lashes. One may ask, “How could this misogynistic insanity get worse!?” Well, it has:
… On November 27, Okaz newspaper published an interview with Judge Dr. Ibrahim bin Salih al-Khudairi of the Appeals Court in Riyadh, in which he said that he would have sentenced her to death. …
Of course, this is all being done in the name of G#d:
… The Justice Ministry maintained, however, that the ruling was legal and followed the “the book of God and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad,” noting that she had “confessed to doing what God has forbidden.” …
Or, as Bob Dylan put it, “With God on Our Side.” Same song, different players…
By Phyllis Chesler
According to the Department of Justice (DOJ) a prostitute or a victim of trafficking is entitled to justice but only if she has been “forced, tricked, or coerced” into doing what the DOJ calls “sex work”—and if she can prove it. Today, according to U.S. governmental Trafficking Prosecutors, a rescue-worthy prostitute is someone who has been forcibly “trafficked” or “tricked” into sexual slavery. If she is from a Third World country, she commands more DOJ sympathy that does an American child who has escaped from an incestuous and dangerously abusive family in Iowa or Minnesota and who has ended up in the arms of a violent pimp or brothel-owner in another American state. In addition, the DOJ does not seem to count minor children who are used in “commercial sex acts” as trafficking victims because, by definition, they have not necessarily been “coerced” or “duped.”
by Adam Pechter*
On November 8, 2005, Syrian police arrested Syrian physician and political activist Kamal al-Labwani as he arrived at Damascus International Airport upon his return from a trip to France and the United States. In Washington, he had met with officials at the White House.[1] A Syrian court charged him with “communicating with a foreign country and inciting it to initiate aggression against Syria.”[2] While imprisoned, his fate remained uncertain pending sentencing. On December 13, 2006, President George W. Bush called for Bashar al-Assad’s regime to “immediately free all political prisoners” and named six imprisoned dissidents, including Labwani.[3]
By Andrew L. Jaffee
Our “friends,” the Saudis… This is their version of “justice” for women:
… the 19-year-old woman, who is from Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority, was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in Qatif in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago. …
The rape victim was punished for violating Saudi Arabia’s laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man.
On appeal, the Arab News reported that the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence. …
By Andrew L. Jaffee
Regarding my post, “Another Buddha Desecrated by Islamists,” several people have left comments which attempt to sound “enlightened,” but are in truth expressions of fear, and examples of submission to radical Islam, e.g.:
I am a Buddhist and yes I was offended for a short time. I then realized that they are just humans taken down an illusionary path and we must forgive them. It is ignorance and they experienced a bad upbringing of some sort. The buddha [sic] will still live in our hearts, a statue of the buddha [sic] will not be permanent anyways. We must stand strong and not give in to the ‘pain’ of a statue of Buddha being desecrated, for this world is only an illusion and anger brings us further away from enlightenment.
Hmmm… Sure, Buddha’s message was that life is transient (and life is suffering).
By Andrew L. Jaffee
… “He confessed to adultery with a woman and desecrating the Koran by placing it in the bathroom…”
The man in question was executed by Saudi authorities. It is unclear as to what exactly he did to deserve such an extreme punishment. When Saudi media first reported on the case of this Egyptian “sorcerer,” it stated that he “had placed copies of the Koran in washrooms. No accusation of adultery was mentioned at the time.” From Reuters:
Saudi Arabia executed on Friday an Egyptian man convicted of “sorcery”, desecrating the Muslim holy book and adultery, the official news agency said. …
It said Ibrahim had been accused by another foreign resident of practicing magic in order to separate him from his wife and said evidence had been found in his home, including books on black magic, a candle with an incantation “to summon devils” and “foul-smelling herbs”.
“He confessed to adultery with a woman and desecrating the Koran by placing it in the bathroom,” the agency said.
Saudi media first reported the case in April, saying mosque worshippers had complained that a pharmacist in the northern desert town of Arar had placed copies of the Koran in washrooms. No accusation of adultery was mentioned at the time. …
Executions are usually carried out by public beheading with a sword for murder, rape, drug smuggling and armed robbery.
Friday’s execution takes the total number of executions this year to well over 120, compared with a record of 192 recorded by Reuters for all of 1995. …
… as if this was a surprise.
By Andrew L. Jaffee
Amnesty International reports on the blood feud/turf battle between Hamas and Fatah:
… the situation in Gaza has deteriorated sharply since June when Hamas seized control by force. …
According to Amnesty, arbitrary detentions and the torture of opposition supporters have become widespread in the Gaza Strip where there have also been attacks on demonstrators and journalists covering such incidents.
But the report says human rights abuses are being committed in the West Bank too, by government security forces under the control of President Mahmoud Abbas against Hamas supporters.
Hundreds of Hamas sympathisers have been arrested and reports of ill-treatment and torture are frequent but much less publicised than Hamas violations, Amnesty notes. …
Good timing as, “…In its final months, the Bush administration has pushed Middle East peace to the top of the White House agenda…?“
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