Iraqi Women In Constant Fear
So what exactly have we done for these people? Read here:
The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion -- some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.
The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other "rules" that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.
"Fear, fear is always there," says 30-year-old Safana, an artist and university professor. "We don't know who to be afraid of. Maybe it's a friend or a student you teach. There is no break, no security. I don't know who to be afraid of."
Her fear is justified. Iraq's second-largest city, Basra, is a stronghold of conservative Shia groups. As many as 133 women were killed in Basra last year -- 79 for violation of "Islamic teachings" and 47 for so-called honor killings, according to IRIN, the news branch of the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs...
After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Sawsan says, the situation was "the best." But now, she says, it's "the worst."
"We thought there would be freedom and democracy and women would have their rights. But all the things we were promised have not come true. There is only fear and horror."
by MG at 6:37 PM
10 Comments:
yep
and shithead, i mean, the honorable he Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams has stated that sharia law should be at least partially recognized, as "parts of it are inevitable".
"Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion."(BBC)
what happened to INTEGRATION???
is this the 21st century? it doesn't look like it.
lets see the ruling class try "sharia" on the native population of Canada or Australia; see how far that gets...
Read again - Williams is acknowledging that Christian-based laws aren't respected within some British Muslim communities. He suggests that it might be preferable to allow British Muslims to voluntarily base certain civil contracts on Sharia law. Nothing to do with imposing. Nothing to do with "native populations" of anywhere. Except the native British Muslims.
That said, I'd much prefer if Sharia law, along with Judeo law, Christian law and every faith-based law with which we've been unfortunately burdened, be flushed down the toilet of history, along with the superstitious horses they rode in on.
" lets see the ruling class try "sharia" on the native population of Canada or Australia; see how far that gets... " - The Bench
Don't even joke about that. Not too long ago the government of Ontario was considering allowing the fairly large Muslim community to decide some of their own cases under this medieval theocratic model. Fortunately someone schooled Premier Dalton McGuinty and he changed his mind on this.
Sometimes the interpretation of multiculturism goes WAY too far in this country. In my view it's a simple fact that if you value tolerance you shouldn't tolerate intolerance.
(Background story)
That said, I'd much prefer if Sharia law, along with Judeo law, Christian law and every faith-based law with which we've been unfortunately burdened, be flushed down the toilet of history, along with the superstitious horses they rode in on.
- Groucho
Groucho, you took the words right out of my mouth!
Nice catch your moxieness. ;^)
From the video to this story at C&L: "For all its horrors, the Saddam era gave Iraqi Women broad rights under a secular constitution. Now women ... feel they have less freedom than ever."
But we're making progress, or so the Republicans and their mouthpieces at Faux News like to say repeatedly. If this is progress in Iraq, I hate to think what it'll be like in after the 100 years of US occupation that McCain is campaigning on?
"Williams is acknowledging that Christian-based laws aren't respected within some British Muslim communities."
again, i ask, "what happened to INTEGRATION???"
"Nothing to do with imposing."
i must ask if you are truly aware of what sharia law is, and how it comes to be the law of whatever land it's in.
there are good reasons why people leave the country of their birth to come to Britain/Canada/the US/Australia. backwards as we tend to be, we seem to treat people as people, most of the time.
Williams, despite his intentions, has given proponents of sharia law a certain legitimacy they do not deserve by his comments.
As far as faith-based laws being flushed... yes and no. the moral base we have in the west stems from a judeo-christian background. as much as i have little use for organized religion, i'm glad we have that basis, rather than a few others of note. until 'common' sense prevails in the human world, i'll accept what we have and push for sense and justice at every turn. for everyone. this means (for me) not giving the bastards any inch i can keep from them. including not supporting those who don't do anything to actually help the people on the ground ( like those MG is talking about)
Another cogent question to be asked and answered is who exactly has Pres. Bush, Sen. Clinton, Sen. McCain, et al. empowered in direct but inadvertent response to the horrific attacks of 9/11?
The answer is al-Dawa (party of al-Maliki) and the SCIRI (party of al-Hakim)
Who are they?
Both groups originated in Iran decades ago as opposition groups hostile to Saddam Hussein.
Neither one has a history of being pro-American, etc.
Read for yourself:
a) KUWAIT ROUNDS UP BOMBING SUSPECTS. Chicago Tribune. Jul 13, 1985.
The outlawed Iraqi Al-Daawa Party, which professes allegiance to Iranian
leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was blamed for bomb attacks on the
U.S. and French Embassies and on four economic targets in Kuwait in
December, 1983. Five people were killed and 86 injured.
b) 'Walk Free' Prediction Gets Puzzled Reaction. San Francisco Chronicle.
Jul 15, 1987.
State Department officials indicated yesterday they were perplexed by
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North's assertion that 17 men convicted in
Kuwait of bomb attacks on the U.S. and French embassies will eventually
"walk free." .... The 17 are mainly Iraqi Shiites identified as members
of the underground Al-Daawa Party, which is pro-Iranian.
c) Warships in Gulf Convoy. LAT, Oct 1, 1987.
Three pro-Iranian Shia Muslim organizations in Lebanon warned Tunisia against executing seven fundamentalists convicted earlier this week of trying to overthrow the government of President Habib Bourguiba. The groups-Hezbollah (Party of God), the umbrella organization for those
holding Western hostages in Lebanon; the Daawa Party, a Hezbollah ally,
and the Islamic Coalition-warned of a confrontation and a "sweeping
storm" if the "unjust death sentences" are carried out.
d) The Man Who Would Be Feared. By YOUSSEF IBRAHIM. NYT, Jul 29, 1990. [snip]
A few years ago, Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz was asked why his
Government was so ruthless with its adversaries - executing, for
example, all the leaders of the Iraqi Islamic fundamentalist movement
known as Al Daawa, or the Call. Mr. Aziz paused and then said, ''It is
because we don't have the time.'' The Baath party, he said, was
modernizing Iraq and unifying a tribal country divided along religious
and ethnic lines. Unlike Europe, he said, Iraq could not afford a
freewheeling democratic exercise; ''reactionary forces,'' he said, might
drag the nation back into religious fundamentalism. It is for that
reason, Mr. Hussein and Mr. Aziz have argued, that Iraq went to war
against Iran in 1980.
e) The Victor?
By Peter W. Galbraith
NYRB, Volume 54, Number 15 · October 11, 2007
[snip]
In the January 2005 elections, SCIRI became the most important component of Iraq's ruling Shiite coalition. In exchange for not taking the prime minister's slot, SCIRI won the right to name key ministers, including the minister of the interior. From that ministry, SCIRI placed Badr militiamen throughout Iraq's national police.
In short, George W. Bush had from the first facilitated the very event he warned would be a disastrous consequence of a US withdrawal from Iraq: the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia. And while the President contrasts the promise of democracy in Iraq with the tyranny in Iran, there is now substantially more personal freedom in Iran than in southern Iraq.
Iran's role in Iraq is pervasive, but also subtle. When Iraq drafted its permanent constitution in 2005, the American ambassador energetically engaged in all parts of the process. But behind the scenes, the Iranian ambassador intervened to block provisions that Tehran did not like. As it happened, both the Americans and the Iranians wanted to strengthen Iraq's central government. While the Bush administration clung to the mirage of a single Iraqi people, Tehran worked to give its proxies, the pro-Iranian Iraqis it supported—by then established as the government of Iraq—as much power as possible. (Thanks to Kurdish obstinacy, neither the US nor Iran succeeded in its goal, but even now both the US and Iran want to see the central government strengthened.)
Since 2005, Iraq's Shiite-led government has concluded numerous economic, political, and military agreements with Iran. The most important would link the two countries' strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to providing extensive military assistance to the Iraqi government. According to a senior official in Iraq's Oil Ministry, smugglers divert at least 150,000 barrels of Iraq's daily oil exports through Iran, a figure that approaches 10 percent of Iraq's production. Iran has yet to provide the military support it promised to the Iraqi army. With the US supplying 160,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to support a pro-Iranian Iraqi government, Iran has no reason to invest its own resources.
Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran's strategic victory is the most far-reaching. In establishing the border between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire in 1639, the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin demarcated the boundary between Sunni-ruled lands and Shiite-ruled lands. For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran's allies.) The 2003 US invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini's army could not. Today, the Shiite-controlled lands extend to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bahrain, a Persian Gulf kingdom with a Shiite majority and a Sunni monarch, is most affected by these developments; but so is Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, which is home to most of the kingdom's Shiites. (They may even be a majority in the province but this is unknown as Saudi Arabia has not dared to conduct a census.) The US Navy has its most important Persian Gulf base in Bahrain while most of Saudi Arabia's oil is under the Eastern Province.
The Boston Globe has This Related Story from Britain in today's edition.
If you've been worried about the creeping Christianist theocratic tendencies infiltrating the country, I would suggest that the Islamists make even Fred Phelps look relatively benign.
Great post, MG...
Groucho, you said it.
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