generalspeaking

Slaughtering Defiant Activists and Beauty Queens in Iraq

"I was threatened with murder. My life was in danger. The killing of this many people scared me."
"I wasn't comfortable living there [Iraq] any more and that is why I left Iraq and came to Jordan."
Shimaa Qasim Abdulrahman, former Miss Iraq beauty queen

"These harrowing crimes are worrying us.":
"There are groups that want to terrify society through the killing of popular women and activists ... and to tell other women to abandon their work and stay at home."
Hana Adwar, Iraqi human rights activist

"A security team was formed to arrest those involved in Fares' murder."
"[Justice will prevail to] bring perpetrators of Fares' murder to justice to be tried in front of the Iraqi people."
Iraqi Interior Minister Qasim al-Araji

"I'm not doing anything in the dark like many others; everything I do is in the broad daylight."
"I'm not afraid of the one who denies the existence of God, but I'm really afraid of the one who kills and chops off heads to prove the existence of God."
Tara Fares, Iraqi beauty queen, social media star

Tara Fares was 22 when she was shot dead on September 27 in Baghdad while driving her Porsche, targeted by an assassin who shot her three times, fatally. Suad al-Ali a woman's rights activist in Basra was gunned down walking to her car, several weeks before Tara Fares was murdered. And then there was Dr. Rafeef al-Yassiri, a plastic surgeon whom authorities stated died from a drug overdose, not poisoned. She operated a medical centre offering cosmetic surgery and treatment for war victims along with those suffering from birth defects.

She had posted photographs of herself wearing makeup and high-fashion clothing. She had over a million followers on Instagram. Everything she did and stood for, in other words, offensive to the Iraqi culture of Islam. Shimaa Qasim Abdulrahman's flight for safety to Jordan seems a questionable choice. Jordan is infused with the presence of Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood is well established in Jordan, why would she think she would be safe there, when the same ethos that deems such women as she an insult to Islam?

The murder of Iraqi women who distinguish themselves through their clear and unequivocal rejection of stultifying, suffocating, insulting restraints on their human rights and freedom to chose their own way in life says much about Islam. The reality is that in Islam women have no rights, no freedoms, no choices they can make of their own free will. For in Islam there is no free will just as human rights is an unknown and unacknowledged concept; surrender to Islam means to be a slave to an inhuman and inhumane set of rules dictating every moment of one's life.

In Islam, there are three low categories of humans; slaves, non-believers and women, in that sequence of order. Women are men's playthings, not to be trusted, believed or given free reign, in recognition of their corrupt nature. They have their uses; above all, to bear the next generation, and to make men comfortable, seeing to their domestic duties. They are proscribed from appearing in public other than under a voluminous garment covering all but their eyes. Their lives are lived under the 'protection' of men; fathers, husbands, sons, uncles, any of whom has the right to end their women's lives.

Iraqis viewed the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant jihadis with awe and revulsion; awe at their indomitable power of instilling terror in their focus on fanatic dominating conflict, and revulsion at the chosen methods of killing their opponents, even though under Sharia law they are honoured as jihadists responding to the Koran's injunction to the faithful to engage in jihad. Their methods of slaughter were no more than Islamist states practise in capital punishment: public beheading, crucifixion....

Ironically, Saddam Hussein's Baathist Islam steeped in a brand of Marxism, oversaw a more liberalized society whose laws seemed almost progressive for women and the family, even while it practised searing styles of conflict and eradication of ethnic and sectarian groups it viewed as inimical to its governing plans. With the removal of Saddam Hussein and his restraining effect on Islamofascism, powerful religious groups emerged, engaged in extremism. Islamic State may be dying, but not the Medieval pathology of pure Islam that gave birth to it.

The dead Fares won a beauty pageant, became a darling of social media, posting photographs of herself in tight jeans, cleavage, and tattoos, elaborately made up to present herself as the idealized woman of free agency. She had 2.8 million Instagram followers, over 120,000 followers on a YouTube channel. Her popularity and defiance marked her for death.

An Iraqi woman at the grave of slain model and Instagram starlet Tara Fares in the central holy shrine city of Najaf on Oct. 2, 2018. Haidar Hamdani/AFP/Getty Images

Labels: Activism, Assassins, Iraq, Terror, Women

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, October 11, 2018