By Phyllis Chesler
There was a time when feminist groups did high concept performance art/political theatre as a way of shocking, enlightening, and entertaining us all. That time has not passed. In the past, the late, great art critic, Arlene Raven, kept me apprised of whatever Suzanne Lacey and others were doing—and they did great things.
By Andrew L. Jaffee
Islamists have proven once again how anti-social, anti-Western, and anti-education their “movement” really is:
Gunmen have attacked the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Gaza City and blown up its library, burning thousands of books, its director says.
Eissa Saba said 14 men overpowered the centre’s two security guards before placing bombs in the library and main office. The latter did not explode.
The guards said the gunmen had asked them why they worked for “infidels”. …
Keeping the people dumb in the name of Islam?
by R. John Matthies*
If the practice of stoning (lapidation) exists across the Islamic world — most visibly in Afghanistan, Iran, Nigeria, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates — it speaks much to Western forbearance that this same penalty, though reviled, can make the fortune of one who commends the practice. Consider the case of Hani Ramadan and the state of Geneva.
by Michael Rubin*
On April 9, 2007, Iranian security forces arrested Mahmoud Salehi, the former president of the Bakery Workers’ Association in Saqez, a town in the Kurdistan province of northwestern Iran. They transferred him to prison in Sanandaj, the provincial capital, where he remains.[1]
by Steven Shamrak
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” - Edmund Burke
“…Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.” - Pastor Martin Niemöller
In his book “My Life”, Adolf Hitler clearly described his vision of the future of the Jews in Europe. By 1939 his anti-Semitic and xenophobic vision became reality. Concentration camps were built to detain communists, socialists, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others. Disabled children and adults were ‘relieved’ of their lives as a part of the systematic campaign of German national purification. (Please visit and view the chronology of the Holocaust.)
By Andrew L. Jaffee
The worst economic/political experiment in human history — communism and Nazism (National Socialist German Workers Party) — was great at killing millions of poor souls. Now the Chinese version of the über-nanny-state wishes to extend its control to… life after death:
A SENIOR Tibetan lama and Chinese government advisers have defended contentious rules banning reincarnations of “living Buddhas” without approval.
The rules are apparently aimed at empowering China to name the next Dalai Lama when the 14th and current Dalai Lama dies.
Last July, China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs issued regulations banning reincarnations of living Buddhas, or holy monks, who failed to seek government approval, ostensibly to manipulate the centuries-old practice and legitimise future appointments by the atheist Communist Party. …
By Canadian Coalition for Democracies
Ottawa, Canada - The Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD) and members of the Kenyan-Canadian community applaud Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier and International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda for their initiative during the post-election crisis in Kenya, and commend the Government for its initial offer of financial assistance to the people.
“We are thankful for Canada’s contribution of $1 million to the Kenyan Red Cross,” said Tegi Obanda, International Coordinator of the Coalition for Constitutional Reforms Kenya (CCR-K). “It is a good start, but more must be done.”
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.
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