Replies to post #9842 on OU Zone

[BullNBear52]

I posted this elsewhere...

I believe there will come a time when the women of the world will say enough is enough to the men and tell them they will not allow their children to be used as suicide bombers or terrorists. That they will not have borne their children to be used as pawns in the war between grown men who behave like schoolyard bullies.

Naive? Yes.

Possible? The wives in Lysistrata thought so.

Only in comedy was a woman's assertiveness considered humorous, like the angry wives in Lysistrata who refuse their husbands sex and child care to force the vote for peace.

" All the long time the war has lasted, we have endured in modest silence all you men did; you never allowed us to open our lips. We were far from satisfied, for we knew how things were going; often in our homes we would hear you discussing, upside down and inside out, some important turn of affairs. Then with sad hearts, but smiling lips, we would ask you: Well, in today's Assembly did they vote peace?-But, "Mind your own business!" the husband would growl, "Hold your tongue, please!" And we would say no more. …But presently I would come to know you had arrived at some fresh decision more fatally foolish than ever. "Ah! my dear man," I would say, "what madness next!" But he would only look at me askance and say: "Just weave your web, please; else your cheeks will smart for hours. War is men's business!" "

---Aristophanes, Lysistrata.

One small step toward that end.


Sentenced to Be Raped
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: September 29, 2004

MEERWALA, Pakistan — I'm still trying to help out President Bush by tracking down Osama bin Laden. After poking through remote parts of Pakistan, asking for a tall Arab with a beard, I can't say I've earned that $25 million reward.

But I did come across someone even more extraordinary than Osama.

Usually we journalists write about rogues, but Mukhtaran Bibi could not be more altruistic or brave, as the men who gang-raped her discovered. I firmly believe that the central moral challenge of this century, equivalent to the struggles against slavery in the 19th century or against totalitarianism in the 20th, will be to address sex inequality in the third world - and it's the stories of women like Ms. Mukhtaran that convince me this is so.

The plight of women in developing countries isn't addressed much in the West, and it certainly isn't a hot topic in the presidential campaign. But it's a life-and-death matter in villages like Meerwala, a 12-hour drive southeast from Islamabad.

In June 2002, the police say, members of a high-status tribe sexually abused one of Ms. Mukhtaran's brothers and then covered up their crime by falsely accusing him of having an affair with a high-status woman. The village's tribal council determined that the suitable punishment for the supposed affair was for high-status men to rape one of the boy's sisters, so the council sentenced Ms. Mukhtaran to be gang-raped.

As members of the high-status tribe danced in joy, four men stripped her naked and took turns raping her. Then they forced her to walk home naked in front of 300 villagers.

In Pakistan's conservative Muslim society, Ms. Mukhtaran's duty was now clear: she was supposed to commit suicide. "Just like other women, I initially thought of killing myself," said Ms. Mukhtaran, now 30. Her older brother, Hezoor Bux, explained: "A girl who has been raped has no honorable place in the village. Nobody respects the girl, or her parents. There's a stigma, and the only way out is suicide."

A girl in the next village was gang-raped a week after Ms. Mukhtaran, and she took the traditional route: she swallowed a bottle of pesticide and dropped dead.

But instead of killing herself, Ms. Mukhtaran testified against her attackers and propounded the shocking idea that the shame lies in raping, rather than in being raped. The rapists are now on death row, and President Pervez Musharraf presented Ms. Mukhtaran with the equivalent of $8,300 and ordered round-the-clock police protection for her.

Ms. Mukhtaran, who had never gone to school herself, used the money to build one school in the village for girls and another for boys - because, she said, education is the best way to achieve social change. The girls' school is named for her, and she is now studying in its fourth-grade class.

"Why should I have spent the money on myself?" she asked, adding, "This way the money is helping all the girls, all the children."

I wish the story ended there. But the Pakistani government has neglected its pledge to pay the schools' operating expenses. "The government made lots of promises, but it hasn't done much," Ms. Mukhtaran said bluntly.

She has had to buy food for the police who protect her, as well as pay some school expenses. So, she said, "I've run out of money." Unless the schools can raise new funds, they may have to close.

Meanwhile, villagers say that relatives of the rapists are waiting for the police to leave and then will put Ms. Mukhtaran in her place by slaughtering her and her entire family. I walked to the area where the high-status tribesmen live. They denied planning to kill Ms. Mukhtaran, but were unapologetic about her rape.

"Mukhtaran is totally disgraced," Taj Bibi, a matriarch in a high-status family, said with satisfaction. "She has no respect in society."

So although I did not find Osama, I did encounter a much more ubiquitous form of evil and terror: a culture, stretching across about half the globe, that chews up women and spits them out.

We in the West could help chip away at that oppression, with health and literacy programs and by simply speaking out against it, just as we once stood up against slavery and totalitarianism. But instead of standing beside fighters like Ms. Mukhtaran, we're still sitting on the fence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/29/opinion/29kris.html

[originunknown]

Thanks Hoople for sharing that with us.

[BullNBear52]

Muslim School in Netherlands Bombed
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: November 8, 2004


Filed at 10:29 a.m. ET

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- A bombing before dawn Monday blew the front door off a Muslim elementary school in a southern town and extensively damaged the building in what police suspect was a revenge attack for the killing of a Dutch filmmaker last week.

No one was injured in the attack on the empty school, which came days after the arrest of a Muslim radical accused of killing filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh, a distant relative of Vincent Van Gogh, released a film titled ``Submission'' in August that was critical of how women are treated under Islam.

The Tarieq Ibnu Zyad Islamic elementary school in Eindhoven, about 75 miles south of Amsterdam, is run by the al-Fourqaan Islamic Center, which oversees the town's al-Fourqaan mosque.

Dutch intelligence officials have had the center under observation since reports it hosted an Islamic seminar in 1999, said to have been attended by Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers, and Ramzi Binalshibh, the suspected liaison between al-Qaida and three of the hijackers who were based in Hamburg, Germany.

The mosque was frequented by two Muslim youths killed in Kashmir in January 2002 in an alleged suicide attack on Indian troops. And the school was the target of two minor arson attacks last year.

Van Gogh's killing Tuesday shocked the Netherlands and sparked several other anti-Muslim attacks including two weekend attempts to burn down mosques.

It was not immediately clear who carried out Monday's attack or what type of explosives were used, police spokesman Henrie van Pinxterens said. The powerful blast did substantial damage to the facade and interior of the building and scattered debris across the neighborhood.

Spokesman Cees Dekkers said police suspect the bombing was a retaliation for Van Gogh's murder.

``Eindhoven is shocked, very shocked, by a cowardly deed in the middle of the night when normal citizens are sleeping,'' Mayor Alexander Sakkers told reporters.

Sakkers said police would introduce round-the-clock surveilance of Islamic sites in the town of about 200,000 which has five main mosques.

Interior Ministry spokesman Frank Wassenaar said the government had spoken to authorities about whether more security was needed following Van Gogh's slaying, but said ``there is no indication that local police cannot deal with this themselves.''

The mayor met with parents of the school's students later on Monday.

``It is essential that we stick together,'' he said. ``One single person who pulls off such an idiot act'' should not affect Dutch society.

Van Gogh, an outspoken satirist and columnist, was shot Tuesday while riding his bicycle and then stabbed. His throat was cut and a five-page letter quoting from the Quran and threatening attacks on Dutch politicians was left on his body.

He will be cremated Tuesday in a public ceremony in Amsterdam.

Ten suspected Islamic extremists were arrested in the murder but four of them have been released.

Among those arrested was Mohammed Bouyeri, 26, the alleged killer who is suspected of links to a terrorist group, police said.

Mainstream Muslim groups condemned the killing but nevertheless have been the target of anger in the Netherlands.

Dutch Interior Minister Johan Remkes has said the killing should not be blamed on the Muslim community.

Vandals threw red paint Saturday night on a social center that helps Muslim immigrants in Amsterdam.

In the town of Huizen, police arrested two men they said were caught preparing to ignite a fire at the An-Nasr mosque Friday night, national news service NOS reported. A mosque in Breda sustained minor fire damage in another reported arson attempt.

Earlier this week, a small fire was set at a mosque in Utrecht, and a pig's head was left in a plastic bag outside a mosque in Amsterdam.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Netherlands-School-Explosion.html