F
FACE
Guest
This is an aspect of the "religion of peace" for which the West provides
a seemingly endless supply of apologists, most of whom dwell in a
twilight of ignorance of the kind of barbarity that they apologize for.
It is always interesting to see the complete absence from the grounds by
the multitude of "women's rights" criers and groups when the issue of
women under islam comes up..........
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/e.../2007/12/23/the_islamist_war_on_muslim_women/
The Islamist war on Muslim women
Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / December 23, 2007
THE "QATIF GIRL" won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia's
King Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200 lashes
and six months in prison after she pressed charges against seven men who
had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeks earlier,
Sudan's president extended a similar reprieve to Gillian Gibbons, the
British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her 7-year-old
students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had been sentenced to
prison, but government-organized street demonstrators were loudly
demanding her execution.
In January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after a
death sentence against her was revoked. She had originally been
convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two others
attempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to the
rapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging in
nonmarital sex.)
The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and it was
not coincidental that each case had triggered an international furor.
But for every "Qatif girl" or Nazanin who is saved, there are far too
many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance never comes.
No international furor saved Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto teenager, whose
father was charged on Dec. 11 with strangling her to death because she
refused to wear a hijab. "She just wanted to look like everyone else,"
one of Aqsa's friends told the National Post, "and I guess her dad had a
problem with that."
No reprieve came for Banaz Mahmod, either. She was 20, a Kurdish
immigrant to Britain, whose father and uncle had her killed last year
after she left an abusive arranged marriage and fell in love with a man
not from the family's village in Kurdistan. Banaz was choked to death
with a bootlace, stuffed into a suitcase, and buried in a garden 70
miles away.
More than 25 such "honor killings" have been confirmed in Britain's
Muslim community in recent years. Many more are suspected.
There has been no storm of outrage about the intimidation and murder in
Basra, Iraq, of women who wear Western-style clothing. Iraqi police say
that more than 40 women have been killed so far this year by Islamists;
the bodies are often left in garbage dumps with notes accusing the
victims of "un-Islamic behavior."
By Western standards, the subjugation of women by Muslim fanatics, and
the sometimes pathological Islamist obsession with female sexuality, are
unthinkable. Time and again they lead to shocking acts of violence and
depravity:
In Pakistan, a tribal council ordered a woman to be gang-raped as
punishment for her brother's supposed liaison with a woman from another
tribe.
In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after she uncovered
her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor at a friend's
wedding.
In Tehran, a father beheaded his 7-year-old daughter because he
suspected that she had been raped; he said he acted "to defend my honor,
fame, and dignity."
In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic police prevented schoolgirls from leaving a
burning building because they were not wearing headscarves and abayas;
15 of the girls died in the inferno.
The president of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, a renowned center of
Islamic learning, described the proper method of wife-beating in a
television interview: "It's not really beating," Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb
explained on Egyptian television. "It's more like punching."
When the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 1996, the repression
of women was among their first priorities. They issued a decree
forbidding women to leave their homes, with the result that work and
schooling for women came to a halt, destroying the country's healthcare
system, civil service, and elementary education.
"Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, and seven
out of 10 teachers were women," Lawrence Wright observed in "The Looming
Tower," his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Al Qaeda. "Under the
Taliban, many of them would become beggars."
Women are not the only victims of this rampant misogyny. Mohammed Halim,
a 46-year-old Afghan schoolteacher, was dragged from his family and
horribly murdered last year - disemboweled and then dismembered - for
defying orders to stop educating girls.
All these are only examples - the tip of a dreadful iceberg that will
never be demolished until Muslims by the millions rise up against it. As
for the rest of us, we too have an obligation to raise our voices. It
took a worldwide outcry to spare "Qatif girl" and Nazanin. But there are
countless others like them, and our silence may seal their fate.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com
~~~~
FACE
a seemingly endless supply of apologists, most of whom dwell in a
twilight of ignorance of the kind of barbarity that they apologize for.
It is always interesting to see the complete absence from the grounds by
the multitude of "women's rights" criers and groups when the issue of
women under islam comes up..........
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/e.../2007/12/23/the_islamist_war_on_muslim_women/
The Islamist war on Muslim women
Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / December 23, 2007
THE "QATIF GIRL" won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia's
King Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200 lashes
and six months in prison after she pressed charges against seven men who
had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeks earlier,
Sudan's president extended a similar reprieve to Gillian Gibbons, the
British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her 7-year-old
students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had been sentenced to
prison, but government-organized street demonstrators were loudly
demanding her execution.
In January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after a
death sentence against her was revoked. She had originally been
convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two others
attempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to the
rapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging in
nonmarital sex.)
The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and it was
not coincidental that each case had triggered an international furor.
But for every "Qatif girl" or Nazanin who is saved, there are far too
many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance never comes.
No international furor saved Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto teenager, whose
father was charged on Dec. 11 with strangling her to death because she
refused to wear a hijab. "She just wanted to look like everyone else,"
one of Aqsa's friends told the National Post, "and I guess her dad had a
problem with that."
No reprieve came for Banaz Mahmod, either. She was 20, a Kurdish
immigrant to Britain, whose father and uncle had her killed last year
after she left an abusive arranged marriage and fell in love with a man
not from the family's village in Kurdistan. Banaz was choked to death
with a bootlace, stuffed into a suitcase, and buried in a garden 70
miles away.
More than 25 such "honor killings" have been confirmed in Britain's
Muslim community in recent years. Many more are suspected.
There has been no storm of outrage about the intimidation and murder in
Basra, Iraq, of women who wear Western-style clothing. Iraqi police say
that more than 40 women have been killed so far this year by Islamists;
the bodies are often left in garbage dumps with notes accusing the
victims of "un-Islamic behavior."
By Western standards, the subjugation of women by Muslim fanatics, and
the sometimes pathological Islamist obsession with female sexuality, are
unthinkable. Time and again they lead to shocking acts of violence and
depravity:
In Pakistan, a tribal council ordered a woman to be gang-raped as
punishment for her brother's supposed liaison with a woman from another
tribe.
In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after she uncovered
her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor at a friend's
wedding.
In Tehran, a father beheaded his 7-year-old daughter because he
suspected that she had been raped; he said he acted "to defend my honor,
fame, and dignity."
In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic police prevented schoolgirls from leaving a
burning building because they were not wearing headscarves and abayas;
15 of the girls died in the inferno.
The president of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, a renowned center of
Islamic learning, described the proper method of wife-beating in a
television interview: "It's not really beating," Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb
explained on Egyptian television. "It's more like punching."
When the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 1996, the repression
of women was among their first priorities. They issued a decree
forbidding women to leave their homes, with the result that work and
schooling for women came to a halt, destroying the country's healthcare
system, civil service, and elementary education.
"Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, and seven
out of 10 teachers were women," Lawrence Wright observed in "The Looming
Tower," his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Al Qaeda. "Under the
Taliban, many of them would become beggars."
Women are not the only victims of this rampant misogyny. Mohammed Halim,
a 46-year-old Afghan schoolteacher, was dragged from his family and
horribly murdered last year - disemboweled and then dismembered - for
defying orders to stop educating girls.
All these are only examples - the tip of a dreadful iceberg that will
never be demolished until Muslims by the millions rise up against it. As
for the rest of us, we too have an obligation to raise our voices. It
took a worldwide outcry to spare "Qatif girl" and Nazanin. But there are
countless others like them, and our silence may seal their fate.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com
~~~~
FACE
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