Profoundly Demeaning, Utterly Sexist, Male Primitivism

"We don't want a country with more violence."
"Tonight is not just about these 23 women. Tonight is about all of the women of our country who have rights and deserve respect."
Beauty pageant host, Peru

"I want to live to see political reform. I have no children and the country we live in keeps me from that dream."
"I want to have children and for them to live in a better Brazil than we live in today."
Rosie Oliveira, beauty pageant contestant, journalist, Brazil

Fifteen hopefuls gyrated their rotund rears as they competed for the crown    AFP

Brazil's 2017 Miss Bumbum beauty contest considered the derrieres of 27 contestants all eager to be named as winners in Sao Paulo. The search to identify the most perfect rear end in a country that leads the world in cosmetic buttocks lifts eventually resolved the issue when the crown was awarded to 28-year-old journalist and model from Amazonas, Rosie Oliveira. It is difficult to understand how any self-respecting woman would enter such a degrading contest. Even if it gave an opportunity to express political views not reflective of the mainstream.

South American males exemplify machismo and the objectification of women, rooted deeply within their patriarchies, where men feel entitled to demean and debase the humanity of half the world's population of females. A shocking degree of femicide takes place in South America. In Brazil, infamously, the most popular 'gift' given to young girls in their mid-teens is surgical cosmetics; breast implants.

The Miss Peru contest also took took place recently with 23 contestants lining up in glittering sequined mini-dresses, awaiting the opportunity to state their positions on public and social issues while vying for the title of Miss Peru. From various parts of Peru, the show began with a 'roll all' requiring the women to give their name, their region of the country, and their significant measurements of bust size, waist and hip measurements.

Clad in shimmering minidresses, the 23 contestants in this year's Miss Peru pageant each stated a fact about gender violence.  Alvaro Ugaz- Latina

"My name is Camila Canicoba Llaro" a woman from Lima stated. "My measurements are ... 2,202 cases of femicide reported in the last nine years in my country." Each of the women had their opportunity to list statistics highlighting the violence that women in their country face. "My measurements are 13,000 girls suffer from sexual abuse in our country", stated Luciana Fernandez. Another contestant noted that over 25 percent of girls and teens face abuse in schools.

Peru registered some 13,000 female trafficking victims up to 2014, pointed out another. Every ten minutes a girl dies as a result of sexual exploitation in Peru; 65 percent of university women face assault by their partners. Twitter was awash with the hashtag #MisMedidasSon (my measurements are) occasioning responses congratulating the defiant, accusing women.

The recently crowned Miss Bumbum was groped by a man at the contest who was under the influence of alcohol, following her victory. She slapped him, then turned to her interviewer to continue her statements: "What he did is machismo and that's exactly what I want to fight. Just because I'm Miss Bumbum doesn't mean I can be disrespected", she stated emphatically.

Unfortunately, however, it means just that.

Labels: Female Exploitation, Latin America, Sexism

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, November 09, 2017

Just Another Honour Killing

It is a case of honour killing. The couple were not beheaded, but were killed with the knives and had severe signs of torture on their heads."
Muhammad Pervaiz, Satrah, Punjab police chief

According to the FIR, the couple's family tied them up in public and beheaded them in a village near Sialkot.—File photo

"Their legs and arms were tied while their mouths were gagged with pieces of cloth. The father of the girl announced loudly that he was going to slit the throat of [his] daughter and her husband."
"He said they should learn what would happen to them [children urged to witness the murders] if they married someone of their own choice."
Muhammad Ijaz, neighbour

It was first reported that Sajjad Ahmed, 31 and his bride Muafia Bibi 17, had been beheaded in a grisly 'honour killing' that took place in Satrah, Punjab province in Pakistan. Neighbours have since denied the beheading; they were, they claim, stabbed to death in the presence of family and neighbours, including children whom the young woman's father who led the killing, insisted it would be instructive to the children to watch.

The young couple had their throats slit and onlookers watched as they then bled to death. This is Pakistan, after all, where honour killings are common enough that human rights groups claim 900 were reported in 2013, though it is generally believed that the number is grossly under-reported.

Residents of this town explained that relatives of the young woman had convinced the couple they supported the marriage, inviting them to the town. Once there, they were drugged.They hadn't long to live, after that. It was a particularly gruesome honour killing. Hundreds of which go virtually unnoticed every year, considered by authorities as representative of domestic accidents or suicides.

They were slaughtered to restore family honour. The young woman evidently married without the consent of her father. For that cardinal cultural social sin she paid dearly. Police are said to have arrested five people who were involved in the atrocity, which is to say 'honour' killing.

A Pakistani woman Nargas Bibi shows family pictures of her son Sajjad Ahmed and his wife Muafia Bibi, who were killed by Bibi’s parents, at her house in Hussain Abad village near Sialkot, Pakistan, Sunday, June 29, 2014. AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary

In an earlier well publicized case of a couple who had married without her father's consent and who had been bludgeoned to death by her relatives outside a courthouse on a busy Lahore street, Pakistan's prime minister demanded that police chiefs explain why they had done nothing to intervene.

Labels: Islamism, Pakistan, Patriarchy, Sexism

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, July 01, 2014

The World's Greatest Democracy

The cousins, two girls of the ages of 14 and 15, had no facilities in their homes where they or any other family members could perform the most ordinary of human functions; voiding their bladders, emptying their bowels, something most people are accustomed to performing in privacy, in their own home bathrooms equipped with toilets to carry the waste away. But they, like around fifty percent of people living in India, have no such facilities.

They must evacuate their bodily-waste products in public, and they do, for they have little other choice. People go out from their homes and take themselves into empty fields or railway tracks or any other relatively close outdoor space, and they perform their daily evacuation. And it is there, where they are most vulnerable, that girls and women are violated. Not just any girls and woman, but mostly those of the 'untouchable' class.

The Hindu caste system holds that there are the privileged, of high caste, and the untouchables, the low caste people who are considered little better than slaves at the disposal of the high castes. And so, their human rights are largely non-existent. They are preyed upon in this most vulgar and unjust of social-religious-cultural systems that victimizes them, even though in India this is now against the law. It is also against the law to force girl children into marriage, but it is also customary.

The two cousins will never have to worry now about being forced into marriage with an elderly cousin or a wealthy old widower. They were abducted in full sight of other villagers similarly occupied in a field close to their home in Badaun in Utter Pradesh state. When the father of one of the girls went to the local police station, he was turned away. When he went to the home of one of the men whom he knew had abducted the girls, he was refused his demand for their release.

BBC News

All this with imperious impunity, with the serenity of entitlement. The girls were raped, they were strangled, they were hanged from branches of a tree for the entire community to see that this could happen to any one of them, for they were lowly Dalit. In India, many upper caste men believe implicitly it is their right to have "first choice" of any Dalit girl.

BBC News

"Rape is loss of our reputation, livelihood, honour and the end of our future" said one woman whose 14-year-old daughter with three of her friends were seized by five relations and neighbours of their feudal landlord. The girls had been drugged and raped throughout the night before they were finally released to their families. This, a family with five children who farm rice and barley fields with no income to show for it, to service a generational debt they could never pay off to a high-caste family.

The murdered cousins were seen being led away by local high-caste farmers, by their uncle. When the uncle attempted to intervene, he was warned off, with a gun. One of the girls' father said the police had "refused to look for my girl". Had his pleas been answered by a search -- since they knew very well where the girls were taken, having confronted one of the abductors who admitted the girls were with him, but refused to release them -- the girls' lives would have been saved.

"If my daughter doesn't get married and suffers her entire life, wouldn't it have been better for her that she had been killed by those beasts?" said the mother of the young girl who had been raped along with her three friends. It is impossible to imagine the lifelong trauma suffered by these children. The mother feared as well, with the tarnishing of the family honour, that her older daughter too would now be unmarriageable.

The entire family was forced to flee their village after death threats from the upper caste Hindus who had banned them from sending their children to school, from visiting the local temple, or from buying food from the shops. They migrated, along with 80 others from their village to Delhi, where they live in unspeakable privation, on the streets.

Labels: Atrocities, Human Rights, India, Sexism, Sexual Predation

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, May 31, 2014

The Afghan madrassa accused of radicalising women

Malyar Sadeq Azad BBC Afghan A BBC investigation has found that the Ashraf-ul Madares madrassa in Kunduz province preaches that listening to radio, watching television and taking photos are un-Islamic activities and that women should not work outside their homes.

Activists say the school undermines women's rights, but the founders say they are providing badly needed religious education.

About 6,000 women and young girls are studying at the madrassa which was established by two influential mullahs in Kunduz four years ago.

Students from the madrassa are instantly recognisable because of their strict Islamic clothing.

The older students cover their heads, faces and eyes, and they also wear gloves and socks. Some wear a full body black chador, which has led to them being dubbed "tent-wearers" by some residents.
Kunduz city officials say the radical interpretation of Islam taught in the school - particularly over dress codes - is causing tension between seminary students and other local people.

"They tell them 'you are an infidel - why is your clothing un-Islamic, why don't you know how to pray?'" says an official from the Kunduz Women's Affairs Directorate.

Some of the seminary students also attend local government-run schools, and here too there have been confrontations.

"When [they] see students or teachers of ordinary schools wearing normal clothes or with their hair visible, they stop them and openly tell them: 'You have committed a sin by not wearing clothing to cover your entire body'," says Wazhma, a teacher at a government-run school.

The head of the madrassa, Mawlavi Abdul Khaleq, rejects the criticism.
He told the BBC the school's goal was to help young women achieve their full potential by understanding the history and basic teachings of Islam.

"In the beginning of Islam, Muslim girls used to take part in religious activities," he said. "They even used to participate in wars… but we Muslims have now lagged behind."

 
So what do the students themselves think? Although they've been warned not to talk to the media, one young woman agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.

"If a chocolate does not have a wrapper, every fly can sit on it, but if it has a wrapper, it can be protected better," she said. "So the hijab for women is like a wrapper for them."

She told the BBC that she had grown up as a refugee in Pakistan, and had previously attended a private university.

"I used to wear short, tight clothes which are not appropriate for a Muslim woman," she said. "But now I have been informed about the truth of Islam and I know it is not appropriate for a Muslim girl to laugh and joke at any party."

In government-run seminaries in Afghanistan, male teachers can instruct girl students face to face - as they do in ordinary schools and colleges.

But at Ashraf-ul Madares, male staff have to teach their girl students from behind a curtain or from inside a booth in order to avoid eye-contact.

"There should be partitions so that the male teacher can't see the girls, even if they wear hijab, because their eyes are open during reading," says Abdul, one of the seminary teachers.

The rules are less strict for the 200 girls under 10 who also study at the Ashraf-ul Madares.
Here the teachers sit among the children, wooden ruler in hand to enforce good behaviour.

"The madrassa discipline is military-style, and children will be punished if they don't learn well or are noisy," Abdul says.

So why go to an unregistered madrassa when there are more than 30 similar schools in Kunduz run by the Ministry of Education and already catering for some 2,000 female students?

Officials at the Ashraf-ul Madares argue that the curriculum provided by the Ministry of Education is not fully Islamic. They say they offer different teaching based on books brought in from Iran, Pakistan and some Arab states.

Afghanistan's deputy education minister Shafiq Samim, declined to comment specifically on the Ashraf-ul Madares madrassa, but acknowledges there is a problem in Kunduz.

"Students are told people who don't pray are infidel, while in Sharia law only unbelievers are called infidel," he said. "One madrassa student even told her mother that she was infidel because she did not pray for a few days."

Mawlavi Abdul Khaliq, the head of Ashraf-ul-Madares takes issue with this.
"Those who oppose this seminary are actually unaware of Islam or are influenced by countries that support non-Islamic ideas and values in Afghanistan and want a decline in Islamic values", he says. "In general, these kinds of people are provoked by outsiders."

Many of the school's critics also want to know how it is funded.
Mawlavi Abdul Khaliq says some costs were covered by donations from students.
"They sell their earrings, rings and gold to help," he said. "Once we were even able to buy land for around $20,000 and build on it, all paid for by these girls."

The madrassa has expansion plans, hoping to open branches in other Afghan provinces.
The Ministry of Education has confirmed that there are about 1,300 unregistered religious schools operating in the country, as opposed to 1,100 state-run madrassas.

Shahrzad, a civil society activist in Kunduz fears that the growing influence of conservative establishments outside government regulation could cost women in particular dear.

"When religion is misinterpreted, the first and biggest victims will be women," she says. "Their Islamic and legal rights, their rights to work, learn, train and join politics and their civil freedom will be restricted."

Labels: Afghanistan, Education, Fundamentalism, Human Rights, Islamism, Sexism

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, March 16, 2014

Pakistani Paradise

Pakistan and Afghanistan, neighbours where Islamic values inform the culture to a pathological degree, and Sharia law, which imprisons the faithful within the confines of mind-capturing rigidity, represent virtual cultural peas-in-a-pod. And both are afflicted with the ruinous rampages of the Taliban, tribal militias whose minds are frozen in the shadowy mists of a brutal, earlier era, making of the present an inferno of atrocities against human freedom.

In inflicting misery and wretched threats against human rights on millions of impoverished people living in the rural hill countries of the Hindu Kush mountain range separating the two countries, where tribal chiefs have traditionally refused to be governed by their nations' administrative bodies and security and justice systems, they impose their rigid mind-starving and oppressive doctrine on all those whom they are able to threaten.

Remember the girls of the Red Mosque - out terrorising the city with sticks - to instill Islamic law in Islamabad Pakistan's capital and the arsenal of the mosque

When President Pervez Musharraf was still in power in Pakistan he finally ordered his security police to empty the Red Mosque of its fanatics, fed up with their constant forays into the streets of Islamabad, beating people who were judged by their adherents to be inadequately and modestly dressed, unlike the women who frequented the Red Mosque, and in surrender to complaints by the owners of small video and music shops which Red Mosque members would raid to destroy the forbidden objects.

He is now being held for trial on charges of having been responsible for the deaths of people in the mosque who refused the authorities' demands that they exit the mosque and surrender to police. The siege of the mosque and its aftermath, with the death of those who preferred to die for their extreme fascist beliefs rather than surrender to authorities brought down on his administration the umbrage of the Islamist hill tribes, since morphed into the Pakistan Taliban.

Peshawar has now been targeted for reasons similar to the destruction of video shops in Islamabad back then. The city's last open  film theatre where men -- labourers and soldiers -- would go to smoke cannabis and view pornographic films was attacked with three grenades. One of the grenades blew in the front entrance and the other two exploded within the theatre where 80 people were viewing a film, called Yarna (friendship in Pashto).

The surprise really is that such an establishment would insist on remaining in a country like Pakistan, always rigid in its social constructs dedicated to fundamentalist Islam, and lately groaning under a backlash of Islamist venom against anything forbidden by the religion of peace. In the attack seats were torn from the explosive force of the grenades. "Terrorists threw three Chinese-made hand grenades into the cinema hall at 3:40 p.m. when the show was in progress" advised Peshawar's police chief.

This -- though no one has yet claimed responsibility for the deaths of the thirteen who succumbed from the force of the explosion -- while the government of Pakistan is engaged in peace negotiations with the Taliban. Hoping to end the violence that has been responsible for over 40,000 deaths in recent years. This is the Taliban that kills humanitarian aid and medical workers for attempting to inoculate Pakistani children against poliomyelitis.

In Pakistan, Sharia law is integrated into everyday experience; it is the law that authorizes the banning of alcohol, and restricts women to their homes, and ensures they may not appear in public without their smothering, dark burqas covering their bodies completely with no flesh showing at ankles or wrists, and faces well hidden but for eye slits.

Peshawar is on the main route from Pakistan through the fabled Khyber Pass to Afghanistan, where militants roam the mountainous tribal areas surrounding the city.  Last year leaflets were distributed to cellphone stores ordering an end to sales of ring tones and video clips. There was once a thriving film industry in Peshawar, but no more; now the films people view are mostly made in Lahore and even mainstream films feature vulgarity with young women in tight-fitting clothes dancing with older males.

In a society where women are kept as cloistered handmaids to the men who own them, those same men relish viewing young scantily and tightly-clad women, not to be considered chaste and pure and hidden like their own. A film director and cultural expert, Jehan Shah, explained that the Pashto-language cinema never had reflected the considered societal norms or culture prevalent in northwestern Pakistan.

Miss Pooja Last Movie - Ishq Garaari Box Office Verdict - Flop Critical Acclaim - Mixed Audience Response - Mixed Total Releases - 4

"Maybe the state allowed it as a safety valve, a way to keep the masses busy with something that titillates them". As though in validation of that insight, a man who was present at the cinema was asked his opinion and he responded that he could see no contradiction in the screening of pornographic films in an area acknowledged for its conservative values.

"These are not Pashtun women. These are Punjabi."

Labels: Culture, Islamism, Pakistan, Sexism, Taliban, Terrorism

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, February 13, 2014

Scandalous? Non!

"Everyone knows French presidents have affairs, Chirac did little else. Mitterand famously responded to questions about his illegitimate daughter with the classically French phrase 'Et alors?' -- 'So what?' What exactly has Ms. Trierweiler achieved with this dramatic flouncing off to hospital? Instead of acting like generations of French women before her, she has drawn attention to herself and her role as the victim."
"It's just not chic. As Coco Chanel said: 'A girl should be two things; classy and fabulous'. Ms. Trierweiler has shown us she is neither and most of the French public won't blame the president if he opts for the younger, less melodramatic option now that he has clearly been forced into a decision."
Helena Frith Powell, author of Love in a Warm Climate: A Novel about the French Art of Having Affairs

"If he switched 'first girlfriends' and moved Julie Gayet into the Elysee today, I'm sure he'd go up in the popularity polls.
"The majority of us don't give a damn about Hollande having an affair -- it's not really an issue. And the consensus is that since they are not married and don't have children, he is not committed to her. In any case, Gayet is much more presentable and this hospital thing is pure emotional blackmail -- forcing him to choose between the two before the presidential trip to America in two weeks' time."
Charlotte Andreu, French publishing executive

Well, there it is, the French female verdict on the histrionics of a French First Lady, that she is behaving in a counter-French manner, and she is no lady for her inability to react with a stiff upper backbone. French women, it would appear, are meant to be supine, accepting their debasement/abandonment at the hands of a bored lover or husband, choosing to leave her for someone younger, more vivacious, more attractive; she has lived out her usefulness.

French woman, considering themselves worldly, contemporary, stylishly glamorous and practical see themselves acceptably as an accessory to a man. And if the man chooses to change his accessories to match whatever he feels his appearance should reflect at any given time, it is his prerogative, and a woman must go gently into that lonely dark night to reflect on what it might possibly have been that she did wrong.

So Ms. Powell declares it is her opinion that "Madame Trierweiler has reacted in an extremely un-French manner to the whole thing", and no sympathy need be shed on her behalf. Because men, Frenchmen that is, do that kind of thing, it is expected, and evidently utterly charming, proving the man's virility, that a pompous little skirt-chaser is entitled to shabby treatment of a woman he courted while in a two-decades relationship with an earlier girlfriend who shared four children with him.

On the other hand, perhaps it is Ms. Trierweiler who is deserving of abandonment for her part in persuading her inconstant lover to leave his previous common-law wife, paving the way for her own denouement. Proving that tedious old sentiment: what goes around comes around. Still, there is something about this distasteful episode in the lives of people of celebrity status that sounds familiar; it is the woman and always the woman who suffers. He is celebrated for his presumed virility; she is criticized for her injured female vanity.

As for Ms. Gayet, the latest in French President Francois Hollande's charming little sex-nests, while his plummeted popularity may have enjoyed a slight perk, her perquisite to become a member of a prestigious cultural jury tasked to select artists to receive government grants to stay at France's Medici Institute in Rome was jeopardized. She had been nominated to the post, to be ratified by arts minister Aurelie Filipetti to 'please Holland'. But government officials rushed to deny her the post and her nomination was withdrawn.
Her reward no longer enticingly on the horizon, she is now set to sue French Closer for divulging her affair and in so doing breaching her right to privacy. The matter that remains unsettled of course, is the French taxpayer agreeing to support whoever turns out to be the First Lady once Mr. Hollande makes his final decision -- for the time being -- at an estimated $30,000 monthly. The two women involved each penalized, the man briefly admired and the matter dismissed as French business-as-usual.

Labels: France, Gender Equality, Human Relations, Sexism, Sexual Predation

posted by Pieface @ Monday, January 20, 2014

Deeply Concerning

"It is a deep concern of the Human Rights Council to save the life of this child because the situation in Helmand and in Khan Nishin district is not very safe for now."
Bilal Seddiqi, head, local human rights group, Afghanistan

Ah, not 'very safe for now'. When, one might enquire, might it be safe? The Taliban are poised to return in force, perhaps within a year, to take up where they left off before 2001's invitation to the United States of America to assemble their allies under NATO, with United Nations blessing, to invade the country. Which is when the Taliban hastily exited, along with their honoured guests, al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.


Much has happened since then. The Northwest Frontier in the Pakistan mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush saw the tribal communities with their own fierce fighting forces welcome their Afghan brethren along with the foreigners who shared their Islamist ideology. Seasonal forays back into Afghanistan to challenge the presence of Western military troops kept all concerned busy for a decade, while Afghan society was tasked and aided by humanitarian groups to recalibrate its values and lifestyles.

NATO members and the United States simply could not conceive of such intransigence and determination for the Taliban kept recruiting and reforming itself and learning new explosive techniques and guerrilla tactics to confront and bemuse their enemies who had in mind transforming a stone-age society into a modern one with the resolve to care for its people in a humane and equality-focused manner. Eventually the foreign invaders could no longer ignore the reality that transformation had to come from within.

They had to face the larger problem that Afghans were disinterested, but for the minority of progressive hopefuls and the women of Afghanistan, in altering their society to reflect the values and priorities of a more enlightened society. Women made great strides during the ten-year occupation and protective auspices of the foreign troops and diplomats and the hordes of humanitarian organizations elevated with the prospect of rescuing Afghanistan from itself.

A ten-year-old girl named Spozhmai is the latest incarnation of female worthlessness in an humanity-estranged society whose religion and culture mandates that women be neither seen nor heard, but managed in a husbandry of child-bearing and housewifery. Spozhmai is now in police custody, or in the custody of Afghan authorities, anxious to protect her now that world attention has focused on her plight.

Her father has also been taken into custody in this entitled patriarchal society, to be questioned how it could be that the girl's brother might have planned to outfit her with a suicide belt and promise her a living martyrdom with luxurious gifts to be presented to her on completion of her divine commission. She thought about the most generous offer from her brother and in the final analysis of her fervid imagination felt she would prefer to live than to die a glorious death.

She was unwilling to lend her life on a short fuse to her brother's plan as a Taliban commander to sacrifice his sister for the greater glory of Islam. The scheme to blow up a police checkpoint in southern Khan Nishin district was a failure. Young Spozhmai simply was uncooperative; she preferred life over death.Her brother's argument that she would survive the explosion caused by the belt she wore that would take the lives of those around her, didn't quite click.

"If I go back, they will do the same to me, they will make me wear the suicide vest. I won't go back there. God didn't make me to be a suicide bomber", she declared. Her case, according to Omar Zawak, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial governor, is being investigated "very carefully and seriously."

"The governor has appointed a team to investigate the exact information and details. We have arrested the father, and after we speak with him we will give you more details." Spozhmai's brother Zahir fled with the suicide belt. He may not be prepared to use it himself, as a Taliban commander, since the Taliban elite tend to generously offer that wonderful opportunity to become a shaheed to the naive, the youth among them.

AP/Abdul Khalij

Spozhmai has written a letter to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, bringing her plight to his exalted attention. She has asked him to find for her another place to live. She would like him to put her "in a good place". One that will safeguard her life and her future. Perhaps he will decline, politely pointing out that he hasn't the authority to send her abroad.

Labels: Afghanistan, Conflict, Islamism, Sexism

posted by Pieface @ Friday, January 10, 2014

Afghanistan pushes to stone adulterers? You shouldn't be surprised.

Triumphant coalition statements about how much Afghanistan has changed should be treated with skepticism. 

Human Rights Watch reports that a draft of the new penal code being produced President Hamid Karzai's justice ministry contains provisions for stoning people to death for the crime of adultery. Unmarried people found to have engaged in sexual relations will have it a little easier – 100 lashes.
The rights group's Asia director, Brad Adams, called the proposal "absolutely shocking" and added, "President Karzai needs to demonstrate at least a basic commitment to human rights and reject this proposal out of hand."

Perhaps Mr. Karzai will. But these kinds of practices are very popular in Afghanistan, and have remained so during the 11-year NATO war there. While press releases often toot triumphantly about gains in basic rights for women that have been accompanied by foreign aid and influence, claims of great progress often aren't seen much beyond the outskirts of Kabul.

Karzai is seeking to incorporate the Taliban, a movement that elevated stoning from an informal cultural practice to the law of the land when they began to rule Afghanistan in the late 1990s.
Karzai apparently doesn't see much of a problem for women in that incorporation. In October, he said that Afghan women have nothing to fear from the return of the Taliban. The country's legal system under Karzai has routinely violated the rights of women – for instance, the practice of jailing women for "adultery" (many of whom in fact are simply young women or girls trying to run away from arranged marriages) has been prevalent.

At least 172 women were in jail across Afghanistan in 2012. Of those, 101 were in jail in Herat Province. The significance of that? Herat's chief prosecutor is Maria Bashir, the only woman in that role in the country. She explained away her comparatively higher rate of prosecutions for adultery on the proximity of Herat to "permissive" Iran, the influence of which leads to more adultery in her province.

Ms. Bashir's standing is often cited as evidence for how much better Afghanistan has become for women since the Taliban were toppled in 2002. The Obama administration gave her an "International Women of Courage Award" and Time Magazine wrote in 2011 that Bashir is "establishing precedents that will become the foundations of a just and equal society."
Well, maybe.

But after a decade of war the argument that "not Taliban" equals "good for women" has been accepted far too readily. The Taliban were a catastrophe for women, of course, but the Taliban were also an organic, Afghan movement that ironically, perhaps, began in part to rise in the mid-1990s after lawless Afghan gangs began raping women across the country, willy-nilly, after the Soviets pulled out.

The Taliban attitudes toward women stem from widespread cultural beliefs, as Tom Peter pointed out last year after a mother-in-law strangled her daughter-in-law to death for giving birth to a daughter, rather than a son.

Many in the international community are quick to blame such behavior on the Taliban or its influence, but the group appears uninvolved. Mistreatment of women is common across Afghanistan's political and ethnic spectrum and incidents like the latest murder stem from traditional practices in Afghanistan that predate the creation of the Taliban. The recent conviction in Canada of wealthy Afghan immigrant Mohammed Shafia, who murdered three of his daughters for not following his strict rules, was another reminder of such traditions.
... While murders like the one in Kunduz are at the extreme end of the spectrum, violence against women is widespread. According to a recent report by Oxfam 87 percent of Afghan women reported experiencing physical, psychological, or sexual abuse or forced marriages.

Gains for women have not been the only "successes" that aren't all they are cracked up to be after further examination. Improvements in health care, for instance, have frequently been overstated.

But as the US and its NATO partners continue to lean on Karzai to approve a bilateral security agreement that would keep foreign troops in the country beyond 2014, they should remember that the government they support will frequently condone practices that their constituents at home find abhorrent.

Labels: Afghanistan, Gender Equality, Islamism, Sexism, Violence

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 27, 2013

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Labels: Islamism, Sexism, Turkey

posted by Pieface @ Monday, November 04, 2013

Licentiousness, Oh My!

One cannot have "licentiousness" breaking out in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi-brand Islamism deplores the very thought that women might feel entitled to behave in their country just as women normally do anywhere else in the world. Saudi women have accepted many insults to their human rights under the imprint of a Islamist-purist paternalism, demonstrating misogyny writ large.

They dress in dark, body-and-head-concealing garments, take care not to venture in public without male family members in attendance and seek written permission from their husbands or fathers to travel, have a bank account, marry or divorce. The 2009 Global Gender Gap Report produced by the World Economic Forum gave Saudi Arabia a 130 ranking out of 134 countries for gender parity.

In preparation for another one of those unsettling incidents by some young Saudi women bold enough to challenge the prevailing phallocentric society to their right as independent spirits to drive a vehicle rather than be seated quietly in the back seat while a male driver takes them about, Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Turki al-Faisal warned that cyber-dissident laws would be brought to anyone supporting the women-driving campaign.

A five year prison sentence could result from a conviction on such a charge, along with the imposition of stiff fines, according to a Saudi consultant on cyber laws. The authority of the kingdom is not to be flouted. In a clear demonstration of just how serious a violation of Saudi tribal norms was being proposed by those arrogant Saudi women insisting they have the right to drive themselves to appointments, 150 clerics and religious scholars waged a protest outside a royal palace.

They vehemently stated, with appropriate religious fervor, that women had no right to oppose laws they did not agree with. They complained that Saudi authorities were not adequately reacting to ban women from challenging the driving ban. After all, as one prominent cleric warned, driving threatened the propensity to corrupt female ovaries.

These challenges to male clerical authority are not new; back in 1995 during the first of such protests 50 women were jailed, had their passports confiscated, and lost their jobs.

Labels: Gender Equality, Human Relations, Hypocrisy, Islamism, Saudi Arabia, Sexism

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, October 27, 2013

Afghanistan's Future

Afghanistan is preparing to reinvent itself. Its current government cannot continue as it is. Since the Western-backed President Hamid Karzai must step down, having served out his two permitted terms in office. The country has a well-earned reputation for corruption. It exists everywhere at every level; it is an institutionalized way of life, however much it may be deplored by those who must, despite their meagre incomes, mete out bribes before they can expect the most basic of services.

Under Western tutelage and the funding that accompanied it, the status of women in the country has improved immeasurably. Women no longer must dress themselves in burkas, although many continue to do so. Women have been able to educate themselves because schools were built with the aid of the West, and girl children had a future to look forward to other than becoming child brides, young mothers and social prisoners held within their homes.

Medical clinics were opened and medical care offered to those who had been unable to access it previously, for male doctors were not permitted under the Taliban's Islamism to examine, let alone touch, diagnose or operate on female patients. Women were enabled latterly to undertake professional careers where previously they were unable to walk the streets of Kabul unescorted by a male family member, even clad face-to-toe in black chadores.

But now NATO and U.S. troops are preparing to leave the country, and leave its administration to the Afghan people. Who are, truth told, anxious to rid themselves of the presence of foreigners, never welcome to begin with, as interlopers, although vast financial influxes made their presence tolerable.
The government has been talking about sharing its functions with the Taliban. The Taliban will be prepared to discuss such options once the foreigners have finally left.

In the meanwhile, two former Afghan warlords have announced their plans to offer themselves for president and vice-president in the April 5, 2014 elections. Warlords, many with blood on their hands who increased their wealth substantially through graft, corruption, and the draining of international funding meant to trickle down to the population, are part of the current government. A matter of fact hugely repugnant to the several female parliamentarians who deplore their presence.

Not to worry; in the new parliament with the political resurgence of the Taliban, the outspoken women who have not yet been assassinated will have their voices silenced. Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf currently a lawmaker and a religious scholar, has registerted his candidacy for the presidency. Another warlord, Ismail Khan, plans to present himself as a candidate on the same ticket for first vice-president.

Mr. Sayyaf has the earned reputation of having invited Osama bin Laden to move to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996. Where the al-Qaeda leader remained under the protection of the Taliban until the U.S. persuaded both to leave in disarray, for the mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.S. 9/11 commission report named Mr. Sayyaf as the "mentor" of Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, whose name may be familiar to many, as the mastermind behind the attacks on New York and Washington.

Labels: Afghanistan, Conflict, Corruption, Human Rights, Sexism, Social Failures, Taliban

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, October 05, 2013

Violence and Hatred = Rape Entitlement

No one is entitled to rape another human being. Yet in some societies it is invasive, endemic, pervasive, part of the culture. Where men feel entitled to grab sex whenever and wherever they can, and woman become fearfully resigned to a situation they feel impotent to do anything about. Women live with caution and in fear, their lives circumscribed, and men have the attitude that what they do is part of normal life in the societies in which they live.

India most certainly presents as a case in point. Where to be poor and female can be a death sentence. At the very least it can be a realization that women and girls can be victimized and the larger society simply shrugs metaphorically and nothing is done. Actually, rape victims are advised to remain silent, if they survive the rape, rather than complain and subject their family to shame. The law may be invoked but it rarely responds because while controversial, rape and the violence that accompanies it is so common.

Reuters, Adnan Abidi

In New Delhi the men who had serial raped and mortally injured a 23-year-old university student who had been in the protective company of a male companion had the verdict of guilty as charged for the "murder of a helpless person", pronounced upon them by Judge Yogesh Khanna. They were convicted on all 11 counts; including rape and murder. They face the possibility of hanging.

Women in India endure constant sexual violence. Even though the brutal gang rape and horrible torture that the young woman underwent galvanized Indian society to protest vociferously against rapes and violence against women, those events continue; young girls abducted, raped, tortured, murdered. What they all have in common for the most part, is their poverty, their susceptibility as unprotected members of society, their vulnerability to brutality.

Women in Africa fare little better. It was widely considered that the rape of a young girl would represent a cure for AIDS. Rape of women and girls in African countries is commonplace. A new survey of six countries in Asia: Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea, concluded with the findings that one in ten men admit to raping a woman, that number increasing when wives or girlfriends are included; then that number is fully one-quarter of all men.

Ingrained sexist attitudes are cited as contributing factors in rapes. With additional factors thrown in for good measure, such as poverty, or having been emotionally and/or physically abused as children. Previously a report from the World Health Organization found one-third of women worldwide claim to have been victims of domestic or sexual violence.

In new research conducted by South Africa's Medical Research Council published in the journal Lancet Global Health, men were asked if they had ever forced sex on a woman when she was unwilling, or if they had forced a woman too drunk or drugged to consent. Between six and 8% of men raped a woman not their partner. When wives and girlfriends were included the figures rose to 30 and 57%.

The lowest rates of coerced sex were in Bangladesh and Indonesia; the highest in Papua New Guinea. Over 70 percent of men claimed "sexual entitlement" as their motivation. Almost 60% claimed they were bored, wanted to experience some fun. And 40% said they were angry, they wanted to punish the woman.

Labels: Crime, Culture, Sexism, Societal Failures

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, September 12, 2013

In Self Defence

"You took 11 years of my life away. I spent 11 years in hell, now your hell is just beginning."
Michelle Knight, kidnapping victim, Cleveland

"These people are trying to paint me as a monster. I'm not a monster. I'm sick."
Ariel Castro, kidnapper, tormentor, rapist, misunderstood

"These people" to whom Ariel Castro, 53, refers represents the three women who as young and trusting girls he abducted and kept prisoners for over a decade of their lives -- tormenting and repeatedly raping them, ravaging the dignity and promise of life from them, transforming them into struggling, pleading captives from whom the spark of life was slowly being extinguished -- now standing in judgement of him.

He has been spared the death penalty for his mind-numbingly chilling strike against humanity. But he asks for understanding and compassion from the media, from the public, from his accusers. He kept three young girls manacled, half-starved, beaten into compliance, hidden and continually abused in the most atrocious conditions, while going about what appeared to his brothers who occasionally visited his home, a fairly normal life.

Among society's most trusted members are surely those who come in contact with children. Ariel Castro worked as a school bus driver. How many parents have it pass their minds that the usually older man or woman working as a school bus driver might conceivably be someone who harbours ill will against their vulnerable children?

How many employers looking for reliable drivers are capable of peering into the dark mind of a viciously depraved sexual deviant?

This man who feels pity for himself and a confusion of hurt pride that the three women he so horrendously abused feel no measure of compassion for his plight, when he evinced none for them in their long years of miserable captivity, contends that he was himself a victim of sexual predation.

He did to others only what was visited upon him by others. And he chose a 14-year-old girl who was a close friend of his own daughter.

Taking 14-year-old Michelle Knight into captivity in 2002 and devouring her childhood into a ghastly world of violent bondage. One victim would not suffice; he captured another, Amanda Berry at 16, and then another, 20-year-old Gina DeJesus. He constructed an alarm system, chaining them into bolted bedrooms, the windows boarded up, doorknobs replaced with locks.

The women were so beaten and battered, psychologically defeated, that one feared exiting her assigned bedroom, even at the sight of her liberation from the place that had become her prison. Police had to promise and convince her that she was free, no longer a prisoner, free to take up her life before it had been taken from her. Free to become a normal person again, if she could surmount the horrendous damage done her.

Court documents cited diary entrances of the women's treatment. Including an allotment of one meal daily, along with a litany of basic hygiene routines that were denied them. "The entries speak of forced sexual conduct, of being locked in a dark room, of anticipating the next session of abuse, of the dreams of someday escaping and being reunited with family, of being chained to a wall, of being held like a prisoner of war ... of being treated like an animal."

All three must have had constant thoughts of their families, mourning them as dead. They must themselves have thought from time to time that they might be better off dead than living through the constant violent assaults, the utter degradation, with no hope for the future other than the bleak realization that they might never have any future different than the life they had been forced into.

It is now their tormentor's turn to experience what it is like to live a long, agonizing period of living death, incarcerated for a period of time extending long past where any human can expect biological longevity to take them.

Labels: Atrocities, Crime, Human Relations, Justice, Sexism, United States

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 03, 2013

The Irony of Hypocrisy

"Three years ago I was a single workaholic, travelling the globe with an amazing job at the U.S. State Department. I could not have imagined how much my life would change in three short years.
"For years I spent my professional life at the back of the room, far from the stage or the microphone. I kept my personal life private, even as the people I was close to lived in the public eye. But all that changed two years ago and Anthony and I have spent these past few years working through the very private challenges we faced on a very public stage. So when people tell me they're surprised to see me out on the campaign trail, I understand because, trust me, no one is more surprised than I am. 
"So why am I doing this? Because Anthony has always been a smart, caring, and dedicated person, and while he's the same public servant who wants what's best for the people he represents, he is now something else -- a better man. New Yorkers will have to decide for themselves whether or not to give him a second chance. I had to make that same decision for myself, for my son, for our family. And I know in my heart that I made the right one."
Huma Abedin, New York City

Kathy Willens/The Associated Press

Now what's a smart, beautiful young woman with personal ambition doing standing steadfastly alongside someone like her husband, Anthony Weiner who appears functionally incapable of reining in his adolescent hormones, anxious to share his sexuality with any woman who might conceivably find him as irresistible as he believes himself to be? His wife, Huma, admittedly has a mentor, yet another intelligent woman no longer young, but who also famously chose to stand by her man.

Even when as he so often occasioned to release his imposed inhibitions sufficiently to allow himself to step out of his adult persona to take on that of an arrested juvenile, besotted with his ego and charm so enticing to women prepared to surrender their dignity and their bodies for the brevity of satisfying his appetite. Ms. Abedin has worked for years alongside Hillary Clinton, and was an invaluable assistant to her when she held the post of Secretary of State. She has been around, she knows politics.

And she knows, without a shadow of a doubt that what she wrote for Harper's Bazaar, repeated above, is pure claptrap, useful propaganda for her husband's mayoral campaign for the New York City campaign. Ruefully, for no woman willingly seeks to forgivingly overlook a husband's infidelities when she knows by experience that they will be repeated, despite interregnums of tearful apology, and repeated yet again.

Anthony Weiner's flaunting of his belief of self as super-stud Carlos Danger, and his mock regret for political advantage in meeting the forgiving acceptance of New York voters is a telling tale of the sordidness of politics in an era of lost expectations of character. "I love him, I have forgiven him, I believe in him", pledged his wife courageously, willing to soldier on and permit the man who fathered her son to teach him how to be a good boy and then a responsible adult.

She must know, because women in these circumstances do know, that what her errant husband needs is a sound spanking and to be sent up to his bedroom without dinner to think deeply about his lack of remorse and his inability to school himself away from a salacious addiction that enhances his life far more than the willingness to become a dependable and loving companion to a woman who deserves just that, and a child who requires a father he can model himself after.

Labels: Family, Fidelity, Human Relations, Hypocrisy, Sexism, Social Failures, United States

posted by Pieface @ Friday, July 26, 2013

Going Against Islamic Law

"Every Nigerian should bow his or her head in shame because instead of crushing the head of the lustful beast that seeks to fornicate with our children, to steal their virtues and to destroy their future, what the Senate did the other day was to compromise with and cater for the filthy appetites and godless fantasies of a bunch of child molesters and sexual predators."
Femi Fani-Kayode, traditional chief, former cabinet minister, Nigerian government

Shariah law has been used as a heritage-honoured reason to ensure that a constitutional amendment on the age of consent for girls would not pass in Nigeria. An amendment to set the age when Nigerians could lawfully renounce citizenship, with more far-ranging implications because of its  implied link to the legally-supported marriageable age appropriateness for Nigerian girls.

The Nigerian Senate had voted to approve an amendment that would set the age at 18, bringing the clause in line with laws that legally set the age of consent for marriage and for voting; the age of majority. Senator Sani Ahmed Yerima protested the amendment, claiming it to assault Islamic law. "By Islamic law any woman that is married, she is of age, so if you now say she is not of age then it means that you are going against Islamic law", he claimed.

He forced a second vote which nullified the first, passing the amendment. Senators who had previously voted "yes" in agreement with setting the age at 18 experienced a sudden change of heart and the amendment failed in the final vote, to pass. Leaving the situation at an impasse; a Nigerian male must be 18 to legally renounce his citizenship. A Nigerian girl, married at 14, is legally entitled to renounce citizenship.

Had it gone the other way, the reverse would have resulted; it would have been illegal to force girls to marry before the age of majority; 18 years of age. "The government needs to stick with the age of consent being 18 and to work with communities in recognizing that a child is a child", insisted Iheoma Obibi of the Nigerian Feminist Forum which lodged a protest with the Gender and Constitutional Reform Network.

It is believed that over 50% of girls in the Muslim north of the country are forced into marriage at a young age, sold by their indigent parents in rural communities. Senator Yerima, 49, married the 14-year-old daughter of his Egyptian driver. He paid $100,000 for the child. Since Islamic law permits four wives at a time, he divorced a 17-year-old whom he had married at age 15. Activists demanded he be investigated and discharged from Parliament.

The National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons questioned him but concluded there was a lack of evidence to charge him. Besides, he had paid handsomely for the girl. It was recommended that the justice minister and attorney general investigate Senator Yerima for his violation of the country's 2003 Child Rights Act. "But nothing was done, he has got away with it", said Ms. Obibi.

The government's own statistics produce a high percentage of young girls suffering physical damage during childbirth. Maternity wards in the mostly Muslim north full of young mothers whose vaginas, uteruses and anal passages have been ruptured. Nigeria, according to the UN Children's Fund has 2% of the world's underage marriages, while 10% of girls suffer vesicovaginal fistula, leaving them incontinent, dripping urine and feces.

Their impairment results in divorce and abandonment, leaving them to beg on the streets, or to turn to prostitution to enable them to fend for themselves. An online petition has been initiated by a human resources manager to overturn the Senate vote, at #ChildNOTBride.

#CHILDNOTBRIDE

Labels: Child Abuse, Human Rights, Hypocrisy, Islamism, Nigeria, Sexism, Social Failures

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, July 25, 2013

 Being Happy

"I am very, very happy", said the young woman. Who might ever imagine a woman visiting a foreign country and being raped by a collegial conference attendee, reporting the outrage to authorities and being summarily arrested for a grave offence according to that country's domestic laws, might confess to being "happy". No woman is "happy" after being raped, and no woman could ever be anything but aghast that her appeal to the authorities results in her being charged with a criminal offence.

Clearly, Marte Dalelv, 24 years of age, and of an obvious ambitious and confident nature in setting out to assert herself professionally in the United Arab Emirates, was "happy" because the authorities in Dubai relented, allowing her to depart the country, dropping the 16-month sentence levied against her for outraging the nation's expectations on the behaviour of all those who live within its confines. She may have been a victim of rape but she was also convicted of engaging in sex outside marriage.

This is, needless to say, Islamic Sharia law where women are never innocent of anything, particularly when an outrage is committed against them, forcing sex upon their bodies by men incapable of resisting a woman's clear invitation to availability through the medium of social relaxation. Marte Dalelv knows her human rights in Norway where she was born and raised, she obviously had no idea of her lack of human rights in Dubai.

That gap in her education has now been closed. Ms. Dalelv had the experience of having sex forced upon her after an evening out with acquaintances who had attended a business conference. After cocktails, she was raped by a co-worker. She fled to the hotel lobby, asking that police be summoned. The hotel staff asked, was she entirely certain she meant to involve police?

"Of course I want to call the police. That is the natural reaction where I am from", she responded. Which led to this naif being held in custody for four days, and finally the indignity of  sentencing to a sixteen-month confinement in prison, as just punishment for illicit sex outside marriage, and just incidentally consumption of alcohol, technically illegal in Islamic societies.

Her attacker, a 33-year-old Sudanese man was charged with an identical offence and received a lesser sentence. And he was cleared by a pardon, which goes a long way to restoring confidence in the judicial system in the UAE. Ms. Dalelv's Qatar-based employer, Al Mana Interiors, fired her after having claimed she "ceased communications" with the company following her unfortunate run-in with the law in Dubai.

And then reversed itself, when Thomas Lundgren, owner of The ONE, the Dubai-based company whose franchise Al Mana represents explained that the firing represented "a mistake". Ms. Dalelv is free to return and take up her position with the company, should she so desire.

Labels: Human Relations, Islamism, Justice, Middle East, Sexism

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Slightly Underdone and Overdue?

Anyone who takes it upon themselves to reveal or to receive confidential information or documentation in Vatican City can henceforth, with the tightening up of rules, anticipate severe penalties attached to the violation of trust. The risk may be six months to two years in prison. A fine of $2,500 further attests to the seriousness of the matter. The matter being betrayal of the "fundamental interests" of the Holy See -- or its diplomatic relations.

Is it remotely possible that Pope Benedict XVI was moved to abdicate the Throne of Saint Peter
in the despairing emotional turmoil of his betrayal by his butler, Paolo Gabriele who chose to purloin the pope's personal papers, handling them to a journalist to do as he might? Now pardoned, Paolo Gabriele stands as a symbol of unfortunate human fallibility. But can the Vatican survive too many similar aggravations?

Ugly in their revelations of the back-stabbing, the petty turf wars, the all-enveloping dysfunction, corruption and above all, homosexual liaisons besmirching the highest levels of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the Holy See would far prefer to set aside the degradingly scandalous revelations that reflect how even the faithful regard the curia.

This is a new chapter in the book of the Vatican, presided over by a vastly different kind of overseer, humble in demeanour and stern in expectations that those who flaunt their station and preen themselves as representing an elite inner circle of the Holy Spirit's confidantes given leave to act as they will, cease and desist.

Pope Francis, much preferring a rude willow chair to a sumptuous throne, setting the stage for this new theatre of accountability and responsibility has taken his own initiative finally to re-write governing laws of the Vatican. And none too soon. Information leaks pertaining to sexual violence, prostitution and possession of child pornography; vicious crimes that have no place among the messengers of the spirit will be severely punished.

Ah yes, to be sure, the leaks of information may not be pursued without certain retribution by an offended Catholic Church. But the degrading and atrocious acts themselves? Completely extirpated, rooted out, those who indulged those fantasies of Sodom and Gomorrah, are they now to be constrained in the future, abiding by their oaths of office?

Clergy and the laity, those who live and work in Vatican City are all blanketed by this altered legislation. Pope Frances anticipates by this little bit of patchwork perhaps, that he can respond with prideful certainty that the Holy See under his tutelage can assure the United Nations the guarantee that no longer will priests abuse vulnerable children, nor the Church give them haven.

This is the Vatican catching up to its solemn pledge when it ratified and signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990. With the fresh new changes to a penal code based on the 1889 Italian code, the Vatican under Pope Francis' guidance has finally altered legislation to reflect some of the core provisions of the treaty it solemnly signed two decades ago.

Labels: Child Abuse, Crime, Human Relations, Sexism, Social-Cultural Deviations, Vatican

posted by Pieface @ Monday, July 15, 2013

If you congratulate people for speaking out against the gang-rape of children, your society may be in something of a mess.

Last week in the UK, a gang of seven men from Oxford -- British Muslims of largely Pakistani descent -- were sentenced to a total of 95 years in prison for the sexual exploitation of a number of girls as young as 11. The gang had subjected their victims to harrowing years of ordeals including gang-rape. Though responses to these outrages was universally, "Horrified!" the events did not, sadly, come as a surprise. On the contrary this is just the latest in a set of similar cases that have come to light in the United Kingdom in recent years. In each case -- in Derby, West Yorkshire, Rochdale and Telford -- the victims have been underage white girls, generally from disturbed backgrounds and often from children's homes. The perpetrators have been Muslim men, overwhelmingly of Pakistani heritage.

It seems that for years nobody wanted to do anything about this. A police force and prosecution service, terrified of accusations of racism or "Islamophobia," failed to act; as a result, many more girls were assaulted than they might otherwise have been. Even now, in reporting the case, there seems a desire to overlook what links these cases lest anyone feed into savory peoples' unsavory ideas. People are rightly careful to stress that we are talking about a minority of Muslim males. And they are rightly eager to stress that most of the Muslim communities in the UK are also horrified by such cases.

That the girls were selected by their abusers because of their different racial and religious background is not in doubt; it has even been confirmed by the sentencing judges.

But until now -- amid the outrage -- there has been among many people an unmistakable element of denial. Although there have been good, outspoken individuals, certain Muslims have been uncomfortably over-fulsomely praised for their "courage" in speaking out against the crimes -- as though it were something remarkable for a Muslim to speak out against a rape-gang. What a low place to put the bar of praise. If you congratulate people for speaking out against the gang-rape of children, your society may be in something of a mess.

Alyas Karmani of "Together Against Grooming". (Source: taguk.org)

Abysmally, until now there has been no serious attempt to engage with the underlying issues -- until this past week, that is. Last Friday, an organization calling itself TAG [Together Against Grooming] arranged for 500 mosques across the country to read the same Friday sermon. This was a wholesale condemnation of the act of child-grooming. Written by a Bradford-based imam and local councillor called Alyas Karmani, the sermon condemns the "disgraceful actions" of the convicted men and calls for other British Muslims to condemn the actions of the men. Part of the released text of the sermon reads:

"Allah commands us to undertake all matters to the highest standard of excellence. As Muslims we are commanded to be just, fair and shun evil, wrongdoing and all forms of indecent and immoral behaviour. Failure to remember and act on this results in the society that we are part of declining in social and moral terms. Addressing every man today, I will speak to you of sexual grooming.

"There has been a lot in the news recently about men of Pakistani and South Asian backgrounds in Derby, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford and West Yorkshire who have been convicted of this evil and wicked crime. These actions are reprehensible and we condemn those involved and support the victims who are innocent children.
"Islam is a religion of mercy and compassion and places a strong obligation on safeguarding and protecting the weak and vulnerable from abuse - particularly women and children."

All this strikes me as rather good news, in a period fairly lacking in the same.

Unfortunately not everybody who could have done with getting involved in this initiative actually did so. Oxford's local paper, the Oxford Mail, did some solid investigative reporting and discovered that a number of mosques in the area -- precisely the area which the latest rape-gang had come from -- failed to read out the sermon.

For instance, at the Central Oxford Mosque, instead of reading out the message categorically condemning the abuse, the imam apparently spoke about "Ramadan and charity." According to one of those involved, the TAG-proposed sermon was a "publicity stunt" which merely fed into a "far-right agenda." He went on to say, "I have always felt it is not a race or religious issue. They are talking to the converted. Every single Muslim knows it is abhorrent."

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Madina Mosque was quoted as saying that it was unnecessary to address the problem in mosques. "It is not a specific subject that you need to talk about in the mosques. As far as grooming issue [sic] is concerned I think that is now history. This pattern of child abuse has finished. This sentencing I am sure has assured that." Other mosques in the area had the same resistance to the anti-rape sermon and refused either to read it out or address the issue.

It is a good thing that TAG got any mosques at all to unite in reading out the same condemnation at the same time across the country. That is how one would want any Muslim-led campaign to look. Of course there are others who would rather this did not happen.

Labels: Britain, Child Abuse, Human Relations, Islam, Justice, Sexism

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, July 13, 2013