Next Target Iran.

[Hamiltonian]

All you need to know about terrorists and the peaceful followers of Islam

You're still avoiding the question. It can't be that hard to answer a question. What, do you think that by not joining the army you are emboldening the terrorists?

 

[roadhouse158]

We live in a very similar world to most of them. Most muslims are peaceful, industrious family folks like you and me.

And these same Muslims are the exact ones that we are not fighting against. These are the Muslims that we are fighting with.

 

[maineman]

And these same Muslims are the exact ones that we are not fighting against. These are the Muslims that we are fighting with.

the problem, of course, is that we are the ones who are fighting, and the peaceful muslims are trying to avoid the fight altogether.

 

[José]

Peaceful, secular arabs are too enraged by the racial dictatorship created by the West in Palestine 60 years ago and now a client state of the US to give a rat's ass about american skyscrappers being knocked down by fundamentalists.

America is too radioactive in the Middle East to get any support from the vast majority of secular arabs.

You can't preach democracy for arabs living in Iraq and jewish racism for arabs living in Palestine and still expect to be taken seriously in the Middle East.

 

[red states rule]

Peaceful, secular arabs are too enraged by the racial dictatorship created by the West in Palestine 60 years ago and now a client state of the US to give a rat's ass about american skyscrappers being knocked down by fundamentalists.

America is too radioactive in the Middle East to get any support from the vast majority of secular arabs.

You can't preach democracy for arabs living in Iraq and jewish racism for arabs living in Palestine and still expect to be taken seriously in the Middle East.

No, the peaceful Muslims are scared to speak out because they will be murdered by the Muslim terrorists

 

[maineman]

No, the peaceful Muslims are scared to speak out because they will be murdered by the Muslim terrorists

peaceful muslims are simultaneously frightened by radical islamists and repulsed by American imperialistic hegemony.

 

[red states rule]

peaceful muslims are simultaneously frightened by radical islamists and repulsed by American imperialistic hegemony.

I figured you would slander America - nothing new. For a correct view of Muslims and Islam, look how women are treated. I would have thought the libs would be speaking out more about this.

 

[maineman]

I figured you would slander America - nothing new. For a correct view of Muslims and Islam, look how women are treated. I would have thought the libs would be speaking out more about this.

for a correct view on Iraq and women, consider that women had a higher rate of literacy and of job equality in pre-invasion Iraq than anywhere in the middle east.

 

[red states rule]

for a correct view on Iraq and women, consider that women had a higher rate of literacy and of job equality in pre-invasion Iraq than anywhere in the middle east.

Oh really? I bet the women of Iraq loved the idea of being kidnapped off the streets by Saddam's sons and raped. If they (or their family protested) they would be killed. As far as the rest of the peaceful Muslim areas........


Women and Islam
By Cathy Young | October 23, 2006

BRITAIN HAS been in turmoil over veils in recent days, after a school in Yorkshire suspended a Muslim teacher's assistant for wearing ``niqab" -- a form of the traditional veil that leaves only a slit for the eyes. Further stoking the flames, House of Commons leader Jack Straw revealed that in meetings with constituents, he had asked niqab-wearing women to remove their veils for better face-to-face interaction

The niqab controversy has focused on thorny questions of cultural integration and religious tolerance in Europe. However, it is also a debate about women and Islam.

For Westerners, the veil has long been a symbol of the oppression of women in the Islamic world. Today, quite a few Muslims regard it as a symbol of cultural and religious self-assertion and reject the idea that Muslim women are downtrodden. In our multicultural age, many liberals are reluctant to criticize the subjugation of women in Muslim countries and Muslim immigrant communities, fearful of promoting the notion of Western superiority. At the other extreme, some critics have used the plight of Muslim women to suggest that Islam is inherently evil and even to bash Muslims.

Recently, these tensions turned into a nasty academic controversy in the United States, as the Chronicle of Higher Education has reported. In June, Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-born professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, published an article in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram attacking Azar Nafisi, Iranian émigré and author of the 2003 best seller ``Reading Lolita In Tehran." Nafisi's memoir is a harsh portrait of life in Iran after the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution, focusing in particular on the mistreatment of women, who were stripped of their former rights and harshly punished for violating strict religious codes of dress and behavior.

Complaining that Nafisi's writings demonize Iran, Dabashi branded her a ``native informer and colonial agent for American imperialism." In a subsequent interview, he compared her to Lynndie England, the US soldier convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

While Dabashi's rhetoric is extreme, it is not unique. Even in academic feminist groups on the Internet, criticisms of the patriarchal oppression of women in Muslim countries are often met with hostility unless accompanied by disclaimers that American women too are oppressed.

A more thoughtful examination of Islam and women's rights was offered earlier this month at a symposium at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. The keynote speaker, Syrian-American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, an outspoken critic of Islam, described an ``honor killing" of a young Middle Eastern woman that occurred with the help of her mother. In a later exchange, another participant, Libyan journalist Sawsan Hanish, argued that it was unfair to single out Muslim societies, since women suffer violence and sexual abuse in every society including the United States. Sultan pointed out a major difference: In many Muslim cultures , such violence and abuse are accepted and legalized.

Yet the symposium's moderator, scholar Michael Ledeen, rejected Sultan's assertion that Islam is irredeemably anti-woman. He noted that the idea that some religions cannot be reformed runs counter to the history of religions. Several panelists spoke of Muslim feminists' efforts to reform Islam and separate its spiritual message from the human patriarchal baggage. Some of these reformers look for a lost female-friendly legacy in early Islam; others argue that everything in the Koran that runs counter to the modern understanding of human rights and equality should be revised or rejected. These feminists have an uphill battle to fight, and they deserve all the support they can get.

Meanwhile, using the language of tolerance to justify oppressive practices is a grotesque perversion of liberalism. The veiling debate is a case in point. No amount of rhetorical sleight of hand can disguise the fact that the full-face veil makes women, literally, faceless. Some Muslim women in the West may choose this garb (which is not mandated in the Koran), but their explanations often reveal an internalized misogynistic view of women as creatures whose very existence is a sexual provocation to men. What's more, their choice helps legitimize a custom that is imposed on millions of women around the world who have no choice.

Perhaps, as some say, women are the key to Islam's modernization. The West cannot impose its own solutions from the outside -- but, at the very least, it can honestly confront the problem.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.

 

[maineman]

the fact is: women's literacy and job-pay equity in Iraq prior to our invasion was higher than anywhere else in the Islamic world.

 

[red states rule]

the fact is: women's literacy and job-pay equity in Iraq prior to our invasion was higher than anywhere else in the Islamic world.

if they lived long enough to collect. Of course you supported the rapist Clinton, why not support the rapists in Saddam's family?

 

[maineman]

and your article - again - has only tangential relevance. It has nothing to do with Iraq whatsoever.

You really are pathetic in your apparent pathological fear of writing your own thoughts....or perhaps it really is nothing more than an inability on your part to do so.

 

[maineman]

if they lived long enough to collect. Of course you supported the rapist Clinton, why not support the rapists in Saddam's family?

do you have any data to support your assertion that the mortality rate for women in Iraq was statistically higher than any other country in the region?

I didn't think so.

 

[red states rule]

and your article - again - has only tangential relevance. It has nothing to do with Iraq whatsoever.

You really are pathetic in your apparent pathological fear of writing your own thoughts....or perhaps it really is nothing more than an inability on your part to do so.

It is always great to see the libs speaking out against the mistreatment of people. Oh, the women are not in America so that is why you do not give a shit. What fun is it if you can't bash America?

 

[maineman]

It is always great to see the libs speaking out against the mistreatment of people. Oh, the women are not in America so that is why you do not give a shit. What fun is it if you can't bash America?

where have I ever not condemned the mistreatment of people?

find a quote from me that would support such a bizarre assertion on your part.

I'll wait.

 

[red states rule]

where have I ever not condemned the mistreatment of people?

find a quote from me that would support such a bizarre assertion on your part.

I'll wait.

You were saying how good women had it in Iraq,

Of course there are more examples of how the oh so peaceful Muslims treat their women

The Fight for Muslim Women
A feisty memoir from a controversial champion of female rights.

Reviewed by Anne Applebaum
Sunday, February 4, 2007; Page BW05

INFIDEL

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I am Ayaan, the daughter of Hirsi, the son of Magan."

In the first scene of Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a child of 5, sitting on a grass mat. Her grandmother is teaching her to recite the names of her ancestors, as all Somali children must learn to do. "Get it right," her grandmother warns. "They are your bloodline. . . . If you dishonor them you will be forsaken. You will be nothing. You will lead a wretched life and die alone."

Thus begins the extraordinary story of a woman born into a family of desert nomads, circumcised as a child, educated by radical imams in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, taught to believe that if she uncovered her hair, terrible tragedies would ensue. It's a story that, with a few different twists, really could have led to a wretched life and a lonely death, as her grandmother warned. But instead, Hirsi Ali escaped -- and transformed herself into an internationally renowned spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women.

The break began when she slipped away from her family on her way to a forced marriage in Canada and talked her way into political asylum in Holland, using a story she herself calls "an invention." Soon after arriving, she removed her head scarf to see if God would strike her dead. He did not. Nor were there divine consequences when, defying her ancestors, she donned blue jeans, rode a bicycle, enrolled in university, became a Dutch citizen, began to speak publicly about the mistreatment of Muslim women in Holland and won election to the Dutch parliament.

But tragedy followed fame. In 2004, Hirsi Ali helped a Dutch director, Theo van Gogh, make a controversial film, "Submission," about Muslim women suffering from forced marriages and wife beating. Van Gogh was murdered by an angry Muslim radical in response, and Hirsi Ali went into hiding. The press began to explore her past, discovering the "inventions" that she had used to get her refugee status. The Dutch threatened to revoke her citizenship; the American Enterprise Institute offered her a job in Washington. And thus she came to be among us.

Even the bare facts of this unusual life would make fascinating reading. But this book is something more than an ordinary autobiography: In the tradition of Frederick Douglass or even John Stuart Mill, Infidel describes a unique intellectual journey, from the tribal customs of Hirsi Ali's Somali childhood, through the harsh fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia and into the contemporary West. Along the way, Hirsi Ali displays what surely must be her greatest gift: the talent for recalling, describing and honestly analyzing the precise state of her feelings at each stage of that journey.

She describes how she felt as a teenager, voluntarily wearing a hijab, a black cloak that hid her body: "It sent out a message of superiority: I was the one true Muslim. All those other little girls with their little white headscarves were children, hypocrites." She writes of meeting her husband-to-be's family: "I concentrated on behaving properly: Speaking softly, being polite, avoiding shame to my parents. I felt empty."

She also describes how horrified she felt as an adult after Sept. 11, 2001, reaching for the Koran to find out whether some of Osama bin Laden's more blood-curdling statements -- "when you meet the unbelievers, strike them in the neck" -- were direct quotations. "I hated to do it," she wrote, "because I knew that I would find bin Laden's quotations in there." And there were consequences: "The little shutter at the back of my mind, where I pushed all my dissonant thoughts, snapped open after the 9/11 attacks, and it refused to close again. I found myself thinking that the Quran is not a holy document. It is a historical record, written by humans. . . . And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war."

That moment led Hirsi Ali to her most profound conclusion: that the mistreatment of women is not an incidental problem in the Muslim world, a side issue that can be dealt with once the more important political problems are out of the way. Rather, she believes that the enslavement of women lies at the heart of all of the most fanatical interpretations of Islam, creating "a culture that generates more backwardness with every generation."

Ultimately, it led to her most controversial conclusion too: that Islam is in a period of transition, that the religion as it is currently practiced is often incompatible with modernity and democracy and must radically transform itself in order to become so. "We in the West," she writes, "would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life." That sentiment, when first expressed in Holland, infuriated not only Hirsi Ali's compatriots but also Dutch intellectuals uneasy about criticizing the immigrants in their midst, particularly because both Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh went further than the usual criticism of radical, political Islam: Both believed that even "ordinary" forms of Islam, such as those practiced in Hirsi Ali's Somalia, contain elements of discrimination against women that should not be tolerated in the West. Thanks to this belief in female equality, Hirsi Ali now requires permanent bodyguards. But having "moved from the world of faith to the world of reason," Hirsi Ali now says she cannot go back.

Still, she describes herself as lucky: "How many girls born in Digfeer Hospital in Mogadishu in November 1969 are even alive today?" she asks rhetorically. "And how many have a real voice?" To that, it's worth adding another question: How many women with Hirsi Ali's experience of radical Islam have emerged to tell their stories? And how many can do so with such clarity and insight? Infidel is a unique book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a unique writer, and both deserve to go far. ·

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for

The Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020102307.html

 

[maineman]

oddly enough. your article has nothing to do with Iraq....

can you EVER argue a point with your own words instead of hiding behind words of others that clearly do not deal with the issue at hand?

 

[red states rule]

oddly enough. your article has nothing to do with Iraq....

can you EVER argue a point with your own words instead of hiding behind words of others that clearly do not deal with the issue at hand?

Well, since you said how great life was for women in Iraq (as long they were still breathing) I was pointing out how peaceful Muslms treat their own

 

[maineman]

Well, since you said how great life was for women in Iraq (as long they were still breathing) I was pointing out how peaceful Muslms treat their own

I pointed out that women in pre-invasion Iraq had higher literacy and higher wage equity than other women in the Islamic world. Do you care to comment on that FACT, or just spew bullshit and tapdance around it?

I'll wait.

 

[red states rule]

I pointed out that women in pre-invasion Iraq had higher literacy and higher wage equity than other women in the Islamic world. Do you care to comment on that FACT, or just spew bullshit and tapdance around it?

I'll wait.

Iraqi Women Speak Out about Life under Saddam's Dictatorship, October 4, 2002

(National Press Club audience hears accounts of Saddam’s persecution)

By Lindsey Brooks Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- In 1991, Sabria Mahdi Naama and her children found themselves fleeing for their lives from their native land, Iraq. Her husband, Abbas Kareem Naama, had been gone for months and she had no idea if he was alive or dead.

Naama brought a National Press Club audience to tears October 4 as she recounted her family's arduous journey to freedom after months of hiding from Saddam Hussein's security forces.

The mother of five was part of a panel called, "The Unheard Voices of Iraqi Women," sponsored by the International Alliance for Justice, a network of 275 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from over 120 countries. The group sought to put a spotlight on human rights violations that continue to be a hallmark of Saddam's rule in Iraq.

Naama and her husband, a former general in the Iraqi army, are Shiites, a Muslim majority in Iraq. After the Gulf War, General Naama participated in an uprising against Saddam Hussein in the southern part of the country, along with a few other senior military officials. Eventually, her husband was forced to flee their village to save his life, she said.

For months, Naama said she feared her husband had been executed by Saddam's regime. But, an even greater dread was that if he were alive, the Iraqi dictator would order the arrest of her children as a means to lure the general from hiding. Finally, Naama herself was forced to flee with her children.

"I bitterly left my homeland when it was absolutely unsafe for my kids and my family to stay even one day more," Naama said. She spoke in Arabic, and her daughter, Ersa, translated into English.

"Our guilt was that we protested the destruction of our life and the death of two members of our family ... We participated in the uprising to defend our life and our kids. When at last we arrived at the Rafha camp in the Saudi desert we were ghosts in the shape of human bodies," Naama said. "My kids were at the edge of death."

General Naama had been able to escape to the same camp and their family was reunited. After living in the desert camp for two years, they were moved to San Diego, California with a group of refugees.

Along with Naama, six other women from various regional, ethnic and religious backgrounds in Iraq shared their experiences living under Saddam's dictatorship.

Safia Al Souhail, the advocacy director for the Middle East and Islamic world at the International Alliance for Justice, said, "We, the women of Iraq, for the last three decades have suffered under an extraordinarily brutal regime, everybody in this panel has lost loved ones in various wars launched by Saddam…in the most aggressive and inhuman ways possible."

Al Souhail said Saddam's operatives in Beirut assassinated her father, Sheik Taleb Al Souhail, chief of the Bani Tamim tribe in Iraq, in 1994.

"We are here because of our common wounds and common aspirations, which is to see our country free from the repression of Saddam Hussein and his regime. Iraq under Saddam's regime has become a land of hopelessness, sadness, and fear. A country where people are ethnically cleansed ... rape is systematic . . . congenital malformation, birth defects, infertility, cancer and various disorders are the results of Saddam's gassing of his own people ... the killing and torturing of husbands in front of their wives and children occurs ... Iraq under Saddam has become a hell and a museum of crimes," Al Souhail said.

Nidal Shaikh Shallal related some of the ways Iraqi women have suffered at the hands of Saddam.

"The Iraqi woman has lost her loved ones -- husbands, brothers and fathers," Shallal said. "The Iraqi woman has endured torture, murder, confinement, execution, and banishment, just like others in Iraqi society at the hands of Saddam Hussein's criminal gang."

"The heads of many women have been publicly cut off in the streets under the pretext of being liars, while in fact they mostly belonged to families opposing the Iraqi regime. Women, especially dissident women, have been raped by members of Saddam Hussein's gang ... The wives of dissidents have been either killed or tortured in front of their husbands in order to obtain confessions from their husbands . . . Women have been kidnapped as they walk in the streets by members of the gangs of Uday and Qusay [Saddam’s sons] and then raped," Shallal said.

On a personal level, Shallal and her husband had their possessions confiscated and were expelled from their home by the Iraqi regime. She was fired from her government job and her husband was jailed for four months and tortured by Iraqi military intelligence.

Shallal's brother was arrested in 1980 and her family still does not know what happened to him. Several of her cousins have been executed and as many as 882 male relatives and tribal members, the Jibour tribe, have been arrested and their fates are unknown, she said.

The panel at the news conference also included four Kurdish activists: Zakia Ismail Hakki, a lawyer and former president of the Kurdish Women's Foundation who became the first woman judge in Iraq; Hetau Ibrahim Ahmad; Paiman Halmat; and Dr. Katrin Michael. The four spoke of Saddam's persecution of the Kurdish population.

Halmat, a teacher, said, "It has been the Iraqi regime's policy to change the demography of Iraq, by eradicating the Kurdish population from areas that are deemed important in the north of the country. The regime has done this through forced deportation, arbitrary arrests and systematic torture."

Michael said, "In 1987 I was in the Bahdinan region when the government bombed us with chemical weapons. I am still suffering from that bombing to this day."

Michael said she has a vision of an Iraq without Saddam that would have a developed civil society that enshrines equal rights under the law; equal wages for men and women; and protection for women against violence and rape.

The women who spoke out at the National Press Club hope that their stories of life under Saddam will help the rest of world understand the suffering that Saddam’s regime has imposed on Iraqis. They also hope that the rest of the world will understand their yearning for a different, and much better, future for all Iraqis.

http://www.usembassy.it/file2002_10/alia/a2100906.htm