Garbanzo Toons

International Women's Day? Not in Islamic Countries

Over at Mere Rhetoric, there is an interesting article on the contrast between International Woman's Day practices in Israel and some of the other countries - which just happen to be Muslim.

A few highlights:

Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia police are shutting down women's only parks because - seriously - there were reports of singing. That's a particularly interesting case because orthodox Jewish law also has qualms about exposing men to the dulcet tones of the female voice. The issue actually came up at an Israeli film festival last year, where the planners were asked by the filmmaker to ban men out of the screening. Being citizens of a modern democracy, the planners responded with a very firm hell no

and

Like Saudi Arabia, Iran also recently imposed the sharia-mandated "100 lashes for adultery" penalty. Only instead of lashing a besotted girl they tortured a woman who had been forced into prostitution by her husband. This was in between enforcing their new law banishing women to the back of the bus.

and

In Bangladesh women are being declared too dirty to walk past mosques:

and

In Pakistan 60 year old sisters are being hacked to death by their brothers, 45 year old mothers are being killed by their sons, and 26 year old brides are getting shot by relatives. For the sake of honor, you see. And that's before we get to the Taliban-controlled parts of Pakistan:

There's more. Go read it. And then we can ask once again, where are the women's groups and other so-called human rights organizations who spend endless hours condemning the sins, both real and imagined of Israel and the United States, but especially Israel? Why do they ignore the documented abuse of women and religious minorities in Islamic countries? And how do they expect anyone to take them seriously in their stated mission of preserving human rights when the only rights they try to preserve are the rights of Muslim men to abuse and murder their women and children, and the rights of these same men to murder Jews - uh I mean Zionists - oh no, wait - I do mean Jews.

Best line in the piece:

In related news, Yakin Erturk, the UN's rapporteur on violence against women, recently noted that "Islamic countries have become stigmatised as being mysogynist societies which are inherently anti-women."

I keep reading that Islam has also been stigmatized as being prone to terrorism. For the life of me, I can't figure out why. Oh wait again, yes I can.

And just because I became curious and followed another link, here's another report guaranteed to turn your stomach.

DHAKA (AFP) – At first glance, Bably Akter looks like any other nine-year-old Bangladeshi girl, dressed in a brightly coloured pink and turquoise skirt and top trimmed with silver sequins.

A matching headband conceals her left ear, badly deformed and the only obvious sign she is the victim of an acid attack, a practice rampant in the impoverished country, used mainly in domestic disputes and against women and children.

As her mother, Parul, recounts the story of how Bably's father put drops of acid on different parts of her body every day for five days when she was a baby, the little girl lifts her skirt to reveal a large scar on her legs and feet.

"Her father wanted a son. He'd been violent towards me before Bably was born but it was not until day five, when he actually fed her acid I realised something was seriously wrong," Parul, 26, said.

She complained to the police but charges were never laid.

"We ran away and spent two years at the Acid Survivors' Foundation (ASF) hospital where Bably had a lot of plastic surgery on her mouth. She still needs more operations."

To answer some of the apologists of Islam; yes I know, these can be called "isolated incidents", except for the fact that they're not all isolated. Many have the support of Islamic governments and religious leaders. And even if they were isolated incidents, how many of these disgusting episodes do we need before we admit that there is a pattern here? Yes, abuse of women happens in every society. In Islam, though, it's codified in Sharia law.

My final question for the organizations that claim to advance human rights: Are you actually trying to advance human rights or are you, with your misleading titles, actually trying to press the rights of Islam to subjugate the rest of us?

UPDATE: Here is another - not quite uplifting piece on how life has changed for women in the Swat Valley since Pakistan has surrendered it to the Taliban.

Labels: human rights, International Woman's Day, islam, Israel

posted by Harry @ 8:00 AM