Category Archives: Feminism

Traditional marriage Islam style.

Posted on by

If you guessed this won’t read like fun for the women, you would be right…

H/T Gates of Vienna:

From Pakistan’s Daily Star:

Killed over dowry
Mother of 2 beaten up, ‘forced’ to drink poison
A Correspondent, Narsingdi
A 29-year old woman lost her life in Narsingdi yesterday after her dowry demanding husband beat her up and allegedly forced her to drink poison.

Suraiya Akhter, 28, a mother of two from Joshor village under Shibpur upazila, died on the way to the local hospital.

Relatives said that Suraiya’s husband Anwar Hossain, 32, of the same village has long been torturing his wife for dowry from her parents. He wanted Tk 1 lakh in cash.

As her parents were not able to cough up this amount, Anwar regularly tortured his wife.

On Friday night, an argument broke out between the husband and wife again over this matter, and Anwar mercilessly beat his wife and later tried to strangle her with his own hands.

As she struggled to breathe, Anwar allegedly forced her to drink poison before taking her to the hospital.

She died on the way, and Anwar told everyone that Suraiya had committed suicide. Suriaya’s relatives refuted this, citing the regular beatings she received at his hand for dowry.

When they confronted Anwar and accused him of murdering Suraiya, Anwar and his brother Iqbal attacked Suraiya’s relatives with a daa (curved chopper), seriously injuring Arun, Al Amin, Sohrab, Saidur, Khokan and Shamim.

The injured men were admitted into different clinics.

A case has been filed in this regard with Shibpur thana.

Police sent the body to Narsingdi Sadar Hospital for an autopsy.

Jamie Glazov: Interview on FGM and surrounding myths

Posted on by

ainahH/T jdamn

Frontpage Interview’s guest is Ines Laufer, founder of the Task Force for Effective Prevention of Female Genital Mutilation, a network of Human-Rights-organisations and activists that is committed to measurable, broad prevention of genital mutilation among migrant girls in the EU. With the Task Force’s prevention-programme, for the first time true protection of minor girls from this violence comes into reach.

FP: Ines Laufer, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to build on our last interview about how European politics give a helping hand to Female Genital Mutilation.

Let’s talk a bit about the myths, lies and errors about FGM.

Laufer: Sure, thanks Jamie.

Today, after 30 years of widely unsuccessful efforts for an end of the torturing mutilations, the time is overripe to identify, name and overcome all the fatal myths, lies and fundamental errors which continue to be spread even by so-called scientists and even most “activists”.

To reveal all those myths is about much more than being right or wrong; it’s about explaining WHY most strategies in the fight to end FGM until now are predestined to fail – and to be not much more than a waste of money, time, energy and resources – while millions of little girls continue to be maimed every year.

It’s about going to the roots and finding out the baleful mechanisms that lead to the continuation of this violent practice.

Finally, it’s about reforming the approaches and strategies, it’s about effective investment of resources and it’s about measurable results.

It’s about leaving worn-out paths which do only lead into a dead-end-street.

FP: Indeed, so let’s start with some of the myths. The first one is, obviously, that FGM has nothing to do with Islam, right?

Laufer: Right.

Myth #1: FGM has nothing to do with Islam as it is not mentioned in the Koran.

As soon as it comes to discussions about the influence of religion on the worldwide perpetration of FGM on little girl-children, most “activists,” organisations and politicians are very anxious to explain that genital mutilations have nothing to do with Islam, that they are not mentioned in the Koran, and that there are followers of other religions, especially Christians and Animists, who also submit their female members to FGM.

Of course, FGM is prevalent among other religious groups than Islam – but it is mistaken to reason that there would not be a very close and very fatal link between Islam and FGM.

The truth is: Today, the vast majority of FGM-victims are Muslim girls and women. This is not even a surprise – because regardless the fact that FGM is not mentioned in the Koran, Muslim clerics widely propagate FGM and publicly legitimize this violence and instigate it. They do not even need to cite the Koran, because they simply refers to the Hadith of the prophet Mohammed.

It is hard going to argue if the FGM-concerned Hadith are “weak” or “strong”.

The only thing that counts is the social reality: In the 21st century, Islam is the only religion that is systematically being exploited by male authorities to make sure that women and their sexuality are brought under male’s control by destroying the most sensitive sexual part of the body, the clitoris.

But until now, the highest Islamic authorities deny their active participation and responsibility in spreading the mutilation-practice all over the world and strictly encourage its continuation – not only in African, Arabian or Asian countries, but also in Europe.[1]

FP: And the places in Africa that FGM is most prevalent are Muslim.

Laufer: Right. If one has a look at the FGM-practicing countries on the world-map, one can hardly elude from the following cognition: In Africa, the countries where genital mutilations have been adopted, all belong to the “belt of Islamisation”. This fact – as well as hints which indicate that in Western-Africa, FGM does not date back more than 500 years – allows the assumption that FGM has been spread to Middle and Western Africa by Islamization. Continue Reading →

Protester in Iran dies on Camera. This is hard to watch. Be warned.

Posted on by

I am so awfully sorry to post this. Deep condolences to anyone who may be related or know this beautiful young Persian woman. I hope if nothing else her death protesting for freedom in Persia will inspire others to go the distance and not stop until the ruling theocrats are ousted and Persia is once again a nation of free and enlightened people removed from the curse that is Islam.

Muslims cancel debate on tolerance because UK refused to seperate men and women

Posted on by

H/T GOV

Scuffles as extremist Muslim group orders men and woman to be segregated at public meeting. Daily Mail.UK

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:59 AM on 18th June 2009

A public debate organised by banned Islamic sect Al Muhajiroun was cancelled today after an angry confrontation broke out over the segregation of men and women.

Management at the meeting’s venue said ‘fundamentalist thugs’ forced the event to be called off after they physically prevented men and women sitting together.

Giles Enders, Chairman of the South Place Ethical Society, which runs Conway Hall in Holborn, London, said scuffles broke out over the group’s heavy-handed approach.
Douglas Murray and Anjem Choudary confront each otheDouglas Murray and Anjem Choudary confront each other after the South Place Ethical Society banned the pracher’s group, Al Muhajiroun from the hall.
The meeting came as the group’s new leader, Anjem Choudary, issued a challenge to the Government to ban the group after it emerged it was reforming.

Al Muhajiroun has sparked controversy after he said he wanted Sharia law in Britain and called 9/11 terrorists as the ‘Magnificent 19’.

The group was hoping to hold its first public meeting in five years but Mr Enders said the group had broken the terms for its hire of the hall. Continue Reading →

In Saudi Arabia women are not even people to an extent barely comprehensible

Posted on by

In this absurd story I ask you to notice a single sentence in the middle of the article…”

However, camera phones that did not contain any violating pictures were handed back to the guardians of the female owners of the phones after making the women and schoolgirls sign a pledge not to violate the regulations”

So property randomly seized from females found to not be in violator of any Saudi rule (as absurd and totalitarian as they may be) where not even given back to the women who owned them but to their ‘guardians’. Why? Because clearly in the KSA women are not even people enough to be the rightful owners of material goods. That it must be thought of as the property of the male who owns the women and up to him if he will entrust the phone back to the women or not. As this article states, this isn’t just for the students, this applies to the female teachers as well.

From The Saudi Gazette: (By way of The Religion Of Peace)

DAMMAM – Women teachers and schoolgirls in Al-Ahsa were taken aback by a surprise inspection tour of their schools and the confiscation of their camera phones by the Eastern Province’s General Administration for Education.
Dr. Muhammad Al-Milhim, Director of Girls’ Education Administration in Al-Ahsa, said these inspection tours came after the administration had received a number of complaints from the guardians of schoolgirls and women teachers regarding violations taking place in schools including the taking of pictures by some female students and teachers.
Al-Milhim pointed out that education inspectors confiscated the camera phones of schoolgirls and women teachers in schools. He added that only camera phones having women’s pictures were destroyed. However, camera phones that did not contain any violating pictures were handed back to the guardians of the female owners of the phones after making the women and schoolgirls sign a pledge not to violate the regulations.
Al-Milhim added that if schoolgirls and women teachers are caught in possession of camera phones, the penalty for the student might be dismissal from school while a deduction would be made from the salary of the teacher. He stressed that all must abide by the regulations.
Al-Milhim said his administration would continue to carry out inspection tours. He warned against camera phones being taken into girls’ schools in order to protect the interests and rights of both teachers and students. – Okaz/SG

Ayaan Hirsi Alli weighs in on Obama’s speech.

Posted on by

One of my very favorite human beings offers an opinion on Obama’s speech in Cairo. As I would have expected, one of the best analysis I have read so far. If anyone has not yet read her book ‘Infidel’ do not waste another moment, go buy it and read it now. Everyone I have convinced to read this book has found it fantastic and has convinced others to read it as well.

From The New Majority:

AYAAN HIRSI ALI: OBAMA LET DOWN MODERATE MUSLIMS

Friday, June 05, 2009 1:25 PM

In an exclusive interview with NM’s Jeb Golinkin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the bestselling author of Infidel and Islamic reformer — gives us her quick take of the President’s address to the Muslim world.  Here are excerpts:

ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS:

President Obama’s speech didn’t do much for Muslim women.  He defended their rights in Western countries to wear the hijab. He didn’t touch on Muslim women being confined, being forced into marriages or being victims of honor killings:  These traditions and principles in the Koran and in Islam are being practiced in the West.  He didn’t address that.

I think he was just appeasing the Muslim world because they perceive–they have these notions that Muslim women in Western countries–are not allowed to wear the headscarf or cover themselves.  I mean you can wear whatever you want in the United States.

In Egypt where he spoke, women who do not wear their veil in public are subjected to very obscene remarks on the street and even sexual assault. Nowadays, even if they are covered they become victims of the same things: That is, in public, in Egypt, as a woman, you run 80% of the time the risk of being assaulted simply because you are a woman walking down the street. They are forced into marriages; their testimony in countries where Sharia is law is just half of that of a man.  They can be divorced with no rights.  They need guardians, a married guardian or they cannot sign any legal papers. The President simply did not address Sharia or Islamic law in relation to women.

ON ISLAMIC EXTREMISM:

Who is a real reformer?  Obama’s message is that all of this [violence] has nothing to do with Islam. He says that progress and human rights are perfectly reconcilable with Islam.  “Islam is peace.”  He sticks to the line that there is nothing to reform in there. According to the President, we are only fighting a very small number of extremists, but it’s not Islam, so if that’s the case then there really isn’t much to reform.  The true reformers — the moderate Muslims — take away from the speech that they can’t depend on the Obama administration to criticize Islam. Between the lines it’s as if he is saying that he will prevent Islam from negative stereotyping or something like that, which is ridiculous because he can’t do that. But most Muslims as we know, believe that negative stereotyping is equal to criticizing Islam.

Obama said “let’s speak plainly to one another”;  I would have liked him to have added, “and that means let us face some of your religious principles and how they are radically different from American principles.”  That’s what we need to talk about. His plain speaking went as far as saying we have a right to be in Afghanistan because Al-Qaeda attacked and keeps trying to attack us… but what inspires Al-Qaeda? Why are people we call moderates not facing up to Al-Qaeda?  What is it about Islamic values that causes this?  His plain speaking ended exactly where George Bush’s and all the Presidents that came before him… and Tony Blair… ended: with the selective quoting from the Koran.  It’s like Hillary Clinton putting on the headscarf as a “sign of respect.”

That said, some of the speech’s passages were tough. I liked it the way he told them that “we are in Afghanistan and we are not leaving,” and I liked what he said about Holocaust denial.  But overall, the speech just didn’t go far enough.

ON OBAMA’S “NEW ERA”:

Obama has now clearly defined that he is different from the previous administration.  So far, that clearly has been his goal: To show the Muslim world that they are different, and that this is the beginning of a new era, etc. I think once he has succeeded in creating the image that he is different, then I hope he will say look, I am different but — and this was a statement I really liked — I will always protect the security of Americans.

American security is going to repeatedly be attacked in the name of Islam.  When that happens, he can always point back to this speech and to negotiations with Iran and say “I came with outstretched arms, I tried to include you… I told you some things about how fabulous you are.”  And when all of that is rejected, then that’s when he can say “Now lets really discuss what is wrong with your religion, and where do our [American] values clash with Islamic values?  Will he do that? That’s That’s the real question. But I don’t know if he will do it.  George Bush never did it.  He used the term “Islamofascism”; once but quickly took it back.  So I don’t know.  We will see.

UK to publish book on religion and women despite fear of Muslims

Posted on by

It is sort of interesting I suppose that the publisher even considered not printing this book. A sign of the times indeed. It is perhaps also surprising that contrary to most headlines these days the publisher decided to go ahead and publish despite the fact that they know for an absolute certainty that some Muslims will use this book as an excuse to be violently offended. Is the worm turning? We shall know soon.

H/T Gates of Vienna

From The Times Online UK:

Female Palestinian Muslim worshippers pray at the Dome of the Rock Mosque

Christine Toomey

An academic book about religious attitudes to women is to be published this week despite concerns it could cause a backlash among Muslims because it criticises the prophet Muhammad for taking a nine-year-old girl as his third wife.

The book, entitled Does God Hate Women?, suggests that Muhammad’s marriage to a child called Aisha is “not entirely compatible with the idea that he had the best interests of women at heart”.

It also says that Cherie Blair, wife of the former prime minister, was “incorrect” when she defended Islam in a lecture by claiming “it is not laid down in the Koran that women can be beaten by their husbands and their evidence should be devalued as it is in some Islamic courts”.

This weekend, the publisher, Continuum, said it had received “outside opinion” on the book’s cultural and religious content following suggestions that it might cause offence. “We sought some advice and paused for thought before deciding to go ahead with publication,” said Oliver Gadsby, the firm’s chief executive. The book will be released on Thursday.

A recent novel that also dealt with Muhammad’s relationship with Aisha provoked an outcry. The Jewel of Medina caused such anger that a Muslim extremist was convicted earlier this month of trying to firebomb the office of its publisher. Continue Reading →

Sadiqi gets life for femicide of sister

Posted on by

Canada adds another point in the growing list of reasons to be proud of being Canadian today as judge and jury find that being Muslim is not an excuse for murder. Today is a good day to be Canadian.

Eeyore for Vlad

From the Ottawa Citizen:

Hasibullah Sadiqi has been found guilty on two counts of first degree murder. The jury deliberating a verdict delivered their decision Saturday morning. The decision carries an automatic sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for 25 years.

Hasibullah
Sadiqi has been found guilty on two counts of first degree murder. The
jury deliberating a verdict delivered their decision Saturday morning.
The decision carries an automatic sentence of life imprisonment without
the possibility of parole for 25 years.

The Ottawa Citizen

A “twisted sense of values” led an Ottawa man to murder his sister and the man she loved, the judge in an honour killing trial said Saturday.

“You put your own self-esteem over those of your own sister and the young man she had chosen to become her life partner,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Douglas Rutherford told an expressionless Hasibullah Sadiqi. “And consigning them to partnership in death has shocked and bewildered every community in the nation’s capital. The forfeiture of your liberty for the rest of your life seems only just.”

Minutes earlier, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on two counts of first-degree murder against 23-year-old Sadiqi, who gunned down his 20-year-old sister, Khatera, and her fiancé, Feroz Mangal, 23, in the early hours of Sept. 19, 2006 while the couple was sitting in her parked car.

Continue Reading →

A challenge to artists world wide.

Posted on by

I have written on this many times in the past year on Vlad but now I am making a direct challenge to artists who think they are ‘risque’ and so dangerously counter culture.  You know who you are. You did the ‘Piss Christ’ and made millions for something as banal as putting a crucifix in what looks like a jar of urine. You must feel so very brave when you insult millions of people you know won’t ever actually do anything beyond write an angry letter to the gallery, galleries which we know will benefit massively by the publicity.

pisschrist

It’s about as brave as lampooning the Dalai Lama. Reminds me of when I see a brave soul at a bar with a T shirt that has a picture of Jesus on the cross and it reads “Jesus. He did it for the chicks”. That isn’t even funny which is the only actual crime here. Before 9-11 an ex girlfriend of mine had the idea to do a T shirt with a Jesus on the cross wearing nike’s. The top would read,

Nike

And the bottom would say ‘The Original Cross Trainer’

I don’t know if she ever made that shirt but at least it’s funny. Would still be gutless in the cold and fading light of the age of reason but at least its funny.

But on to my challenge.

Hey artists out there who have enough track record that a gallery will actually take  you seriously. Yes I know how it works in the art world, it has sweet fuck all to do with how good you are but how much street cred you have because you offended the ‘right’ people. Yes by that I mean offended the ones who won’t do anything to harm you and represent anyone who has actually accomplished something on this earth. So long as you have offended them while promoting the most base and counter civilized impulses you probably can get tons of government money from various art galleries.

So let’s see if you have any real balls.

Let’s see if you will make something like this:

the-burka-bacon-burger2

Art work by Tundratabloids.

The Bacon Cheese Burka. Why not actually do an art piece offensive to the one religion which really does subjugate women to second class status? more accurately to non person status altogether actually.

Why not show us how brave and counterculture you are by making a sculpture of a twice life size women in full Bacon cover with a cheese veil demonstrating the utter horror that is life in the Islamic world.

Think of it as a cross between the Piss Christ and the Meat dress. You can’t go wrong! You may even be as famous as that Canadian asshole who does the blood X. I say asshole because he actually sprayed blood from a squeeze vial from his rectum to make an X on real works of art which require actual talent and skill, something anathema to the post modernists.

Artists show some real balls and in the process, actually do what artists are supposed to do.

Social commentary to achieve greater freedom for all humanity.

Special thanks to the artist who actually did do this artwork for me over at Tundra Tabloids

Women of the world…..

Posted on by

Dear people of planet Earth who have two X chromosomes,

I have a question for you.  There is a trial going on in Ottawa and many more across the Western world. Grace has written beautifully on it here on Vlad.  The potential exists for a judge in Canada – as judges have now in Germany, England, and many European nations – to accept an argument that reduces the sentence of men who have murdered women in a premeditated fashion for failing to be obedient to tribal codes, and, more accurately, for being autonomous human beings.

To be even more clear, as in Germany and other Western nations, a judge is about to reduce the value of a woman’s life because she failed to be less than a human being. If this Sharia defense is accepted and the sentence is reduced all the gains women have made in law will be not only be destroyed, but also set back centuries and in some Western nations such as England, millenia.

My question is as follows:

Remember when you, XX people, were marching in the streets by the tens of thousands, burning bras for some slight, real or imagined, about equality in the work place, leaving toilet seats up?   How about the annual women’s marches over the Muslim immigrant known as Marc Lepine (whose father was in fact an Algerian Muslim) who shot up a women’s technical school in Montreal because he felt that women had no place doing anything other than servicing men?  (This action, by the way, was nothing less and nothing other than Canada’s first Muslim terrorist act demanding Sharia law).  Women inexplicably marched, trying to gain political advantage over men overall.

Well, here we have a situation which has already happened in Germany, etc., in which women’s lives are to be extinguished or pawned off at the whim of Muslim men and it may well happen here in Canada this month.

Why are you not marching?  Why are you not gathering en masse 24/7 in front of the federal court on Elgin St. with pitchforks and torches demanding that this man not be able to get away with anything other than two counts of first degree murder?

Have women in Canada abandoned all sense of equality before the law where it actually counts: when their very lives are on the line?  Or are you more concerned about not offending the multiculti sensitivities of Afghans, Saudis, and the ‘poor,’ ‘weak,’ ‘oppressed’ 1/6th of the world’s population that controls over a third of its land mass and a disproportionate amount of its oil?

I wish I had the words to express the rage I feel at this time, to have grown up seeing women protesting against every conceivable slight and win the points. Things as absurd and impossible to define as demanding ‘equal pay for work of equal value’ yet failing to make a peep to stop it from being ok to just slaughter women and little girls for picking their own friends and lovers.

I am apoplectic.

Ladies, this is it. If you fail yourselves now, you may have to wait a thousand years before you can begin to worry about whether or not you have a right to sue for sexual harassment at the workplace because the geeky guy in the cubicle next to you asked you out in exactly the manner you wished the hot guy down the hall would. Before you get to concern yourselves over why the city of Ottawa allows men to go topless and women must cover up – a stupid fight, which, by the way, women sort of won (I say sort of because women are in fact now allowed to go topless in Ottawa unless they actually do, as happened at Ottawa football games a few years ago when city council decided Mardis Gras nights where exploiting women and made it illegal again) – you need to fight for your right to bare your face in public, because that’s what Sharia has in store for you, girls.

Ladies, march now or forever be cut into pieces.

Eeyore for Vladtepesblog.com

Phyllis Chesler on the Ottawa honor killing trial

Posted on by

From Pajamas Media:

In the fall of 2006, in Ottawa, Canada, an Afghan brother, Hasibullah Sadiqi, shot his 20 year-old sister, Khatera Sadiqi, and her fiance, Feroz Mangal, while they sat in a parked car. Both victims died.

Now, three years later, Sadiqi is on trial. According to the Ottawa Citizen, “The defence is expected to advance the argument of provocation, which could reduce a murder charge to manslaughter…The Crown, meanwhile, intends to prove that Sadiqi’s actions were planned and deliberate.”

In other words: Sadiqi will argue that the alleged “dishonor” his sister brought upon her family by choosing her own husband was a “provocation.” This is similar to Zein Isa, the Palestinian terrorist father who, together with the sixteen year-old girl’s mother, Maria, stabbed their allegedly “too-western” teenage daughter, Palestina, to death in St. Louis in 1989. Zein Isa insisted that he did this in “self-defense.”

Tellingly, Hasibullah shot his sister Khatera “in the head and torso” while he shot her fiancée, Feroz, “in the neck and chest.” True, Hasibullah did not behead Khatera, but he did shoot her—and only her–in the head. This suggests that he wanted to assassinate her way of thinking; it also suggests that this was a political execution.


Feroz Mangal and Khatera Sadiqi

In 2006, another news source, CBC, quoted Khatera’s boss at a clothing store in a Mall. “Her manager, Jenny Jeffrey, said the young woman was gorgeous, both in looks and personality. She was fun. She was bubbly. She was pleasant. It was a real shock that something could happen to somebody that’s so young,” she said.

Khatera was not cowering, she was not cowed, nor was she obedient and subordinate. She grasped her happiness with both hands. For this, her brother, (and perhaps her family), decided she deserved to die.

In the photos of honor murder victims, (I keep the smiling photos of the Said sisters, Amina and Sarah, near me), the young girls seem so vivacious, so alive, so lively, so happy, that perhaps, this very fact offends and threatens the same people who are offended by the pro-life vitality of Israelis and Westerners.

Continue Reading →

For the second time, a sharia defence is used in Canada for pre meditated murder

Posted on by

Not long ago, a Canadian defence lawyer used Islamic religious freedom as a defence in a terrorism trial arguing that a defendant was within his religious rights to council advise and commit terrorist acts. Now we have honor killing being used as an actual defence in a Canadian Murder trial in Ottawa. Both of these cases are of extreme importance as they may set precedents which allow Islamic values to be mitigating factors in serious crime and hence make sharia a de facto law of the land. This, as is the previous case, is serious.

From the Ottawa Citizen May 8 2009: Hat tip Grace

Not a whodunit, so much as ‘why did he do it?’ defence says

Lawyers to argue Ottawa man not guilty of 2006 murder of sister, fiancé because he was provoked

By Neco Cockburn, The Ottawa CitizenMay 8, 2009

The flashes were quick, far in the dark distance at the rainy shopping plaza parking lot where Khatera Sadiqi would soon be found barely breathing, slumped against her fiancé in a car.

There are four flashes on the video footage caught by a bank’s ATM camera, then a pause as a car’s headlights sweep a nearby area. Then another flash. All within 37 seconds.

The footage was played during the first day of the murder trial of Hasibullah Sadiqi, where assistant Crown attorney Mark Moors told a jury they are expected to hear that the now 23-year-old man killed his sister and her fiancé in an “honour killing” rooted in anger over their engagement.

Sadiqi’s defence lawyers have indicated they will not dispute that Sadiqi was responsible for the killings, but will argue that he is not guilty of murder because he was provoked.

During his opening statements, Moors told the court that Sadiqi shot his 20-year-old sister, Khatera, and her fiancé, Feroz Mangal, with a .44 Magnum revolver while they sat in a parked car at the Elmvale Acres shopping plaza, at St. Laurent Boulevard and Smyth Road, just before 1 a.m. on Sept. 19, 2006.

Sadiqi, a Canadian of Afghan descent, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder. The court is expected to hear he was upset because his sister got engaged without the permission of their father and had moved in with Mangal’s family, Moors told the five-woman, seven-man jury. Continue Reading →

Phyllis Chesler: Islamic Gender Apartheid.

Posted on by

My Speech for the Human Rights Rally Against Radical Fundamentalist Islam Today in Times Square, New York. From Pajamas Media:

Radical, fundamentalist Islam is the world’s largest practioner of both gender and religious apartheid.

Others are speaking here today about Islamic religious apartheid. I have been asked to focus on Islamic gender apartheid.

We who live in the West, and who have learned how to analyze and protest gender inequality here, simply have no idea how much free-er and safer women are in the West than in Muslim countries.

I once lived in the Islamic world, in Afghanistan. What I learned in Kabul rendered me immune to the romanticization of the Third World or to the glamorization of tyrants and terrorists that defined my generation of 1960s and 1970s radicals.

Being born female and Muslim, especially today, under radical Islamic rule, is potentially a capital crime. The warnings and the punishment begin early on and are both relentless and normalized.

Women are viewed as sub-human, half-demon, dangerous, sexually “wild”—by men whose own lust and progeny knows no bounds. While there are many exceptions, in general, Muslim (and Arab) girls are despised and routinely cursed, beaten, treated as servants or slaves by their fathers and older brothers. Women are hidden, literally suffocated under face and body veils, shrouded, visually buried alive while still alive.

Continue Reading →

Dr. Phyllis Chesler’s April 21, 2009 Speech about Muslim Women’s Rights

Posted on by

From Pajamas Media. Bookmark this site and read it at least twice a week. This is liberalism as it was meant to be, and must be made to be again.

For many years, the United Nations has conducted itself in ways that range from the ridiculous to the surreal. They have been utterly ineffective in all things save one: the legalization of Jew-hatred. That grim project continues to gather force and is now a potentially genocidal one. The current Durban II conference is more of the same diabolical Mad Hatters party. But make no mistake: The UN and the Organization of Islamic States take themselves very seriously. They think there is nothing illogical, biased, perverted, or even “racist” about their condemnation of the Jewish state.

The failure to stop Durban I not only led to Durban II. It played a role in the escalating and never-ending intifada against Israel and in the “hate Israel” mob demonstrations in the Islamic world and in the West, including on American and European campuses that have taken place ever since.

Let me suggest that President Ahmadinejad means exactly what he says. He does plan to implement another Holocaust against the Jews. We deny this at our own peril. And, Amadinejad does plan to “play,” shame and, if possible, defeat America in terms of Iran’s obtaining and using nuclear power. The arrest of Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Sabari, as an American “spy” is only the first of many steps in response to President Obama’s open hand and conciliatory tone.


Dr. Phyllis Chesler speaking at the Durban II Counter Conference, April 21, 2009, Fordham Law School, NYC

I have just returned from speaking at the second day of the Durban II “Counter-Conference” in New York City, organized by the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (AAJLJ) and co-sponsored by an additional twenty six Jewish organizations , including NYC’s The Jewish Week. I hope that someday soon, many Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim groups will organize similar counter-conferences along with Jewish groups.

The “Counter-conference” took place at Fordham University Law School and is running for five days to parallel Durban II in Geneva. Many good people are speaking here including Hon. Scott Stringer, Hon. Carolyn Maloney, Ambassador Richard Schifter, Hon. Jerahmiel S. Grafstein, Samuel M. Edelman, Ali H. Alyami, Andrew Apostolou, Jacqueline Murakatete, Ambassador Daniel Carmon, Hon. Irwin Cotler, Charles Asher Small, Michael Meyers, etc.


Some audience members at the Durban II Counter Conference

It is hard to know what to do when evil gets up on it’s hind-legs and preaches to the crowd. Keeping away is one sane approach and I am very glad that a number of governments, our own included, decided to do that. Getting up and walking out is nice too–that’s what some European countries did but they knew all along what kind of speech Amadinejad was going to make and they came anyway. (America only pulled out of Durban II at the very last possible moment). Demonstrating outside the forum held hostage to evil and hate speech is another chosen path. That is happening in Geneva as well. Finally, organizing a counter-conference elsewhere is also an honorable thing to do, which is why I agreed to speak.

Let me say that it is an outrage for America to pretend that the United Nations, as we know it, is worth funding. The organization has embarked on a very dangerous course which we, in the democratic nations, will have to stop, sooner or later. Sooner is always wiser. Continue Reading →

Another major attack on women’s rights in Swat

Posted on by

Sometimes the most vicious attack on a people’s rights are the most subtle. While Vlad has in sadly much gory detail written about attacks on women to enforce barbaric policies, this next story I feel in an important way is considerably more serious.

Notice that I did not use the adjective ‘primitive’ to describe the Taliban’s treatment of women as frankly, there are many if not all societies that predate the Taliban and indeed predate Islam altogether where women had more value to society as well as power. Ancient Rome Greece and Egypt all have records of powerful women and while they may not overall have had the rights of men, certainly life would be better for them than it is under ‘true Islamic states’.

Now the story from Hindustan Times:

The Pakistani Taliban in the troubled Khyber tribal region have warned authorities not to issue national identity cards to women, saying the practice is un-Islamic.

Omar Farooq, the commander of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan in Khyber Agency, warned the National Database and Registration Authority that its offices would be attacked if it issued identity cards to women.

Farooq told reporters on phone from an unknown location that making identity cards for women went against Islamic rules. The Taliban will not allow women to obtain these cards, he said.

He also warned women that they would have to face the consequences if they went to NADRA offices to get themselves registered for the identity cards.

The Taliban in Swat valley of the North Western Frontier Province and parts of the restive tribal have banned girls education and barred women from visiting markets unless they are accompanied by male relatives.

This story quite literally seeks to officially remove the actual status of women as human beings by the state. Women will not be able to have identity cards symbolically of course meaning they can have no identity as individuals but practically, no access to the state whatsoever. Imagine yourselves with no legal papers. I feel this story is considerably more important than the western media does clearly as there appears to be no reports on it whatsoever.

I humbly beg you all to please forward this link to the original source on this, the Hindustan times to any and all media you may know. This cannot go unnoticed and keep in mind. if Obama is to be taken at his word, these are the people he suggested reaching out to.