Feminists Forget Their Muslim Sisters!
The movement has sunk into hypocrisy. By IDA LICHTER
An article in a Hamas daily accuses women of spreading a
recent outbreak of swine flu. The columnist blames women for being transmitters
of epidemics due to a predilection for congregating in groups to exchange news
and rumours.
He suggested that outbreaks could be averted if men imposed
more limitations on women’s movements. These claims might be dismissed as
laughable, but they are not isolated allegations of female culpability.
Iranian cleric Ayatollah Kazim Sadighi warned women who did
not dress modestly could promote adultery, which in turn increased earthquakes.
A Nigerian woman was brought before a sharia court and accused of initiating a
girl into witchcraft.
A Saudi cleric believes that women who wear a full veil with
slits for the eyes still look too seductive with eye make-up, and he ordered
that they cover one eye.
Claims that women are blameworthy also serve as pretexts for
Islamist extremists who wish to strengthen gender restrictions based on
religion.
Furthermore, the tribal culture favours boys over girls from
birth. Women must be contained to curb their potential for causing social strife,
and undermining the reputation of men. As men’s reputations are linked to the
sexual behaviour of their wives, mothers
and sisters, “honour” killings and domestic violence are treated leniently.
Widespread discriminatory laws give men privileges through
polygamy, forced marriage, CHILD MARRIAGE, TEMPORARY MARRIAGES, unilateral divorce, segregation of
women in the public space, regulated clothing, male guardianship and court
testament worth half that of a man’s, to name a few.
In Saudi Arabia and Iran, where religion is the principal
source of law, “morality police” have the power to enforce Islamic dress and
sexual segregation.
Misogyny is evident in the Islamist and culture-based
oppression of women in rural areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Women are
bartered like land or animals. In Afghanistan, they are targets of attack by
warlords and the Taliban.
Stoning to death for adultery, assassinations of reformers
and acid attacks on girls attending school still occur in Taliban controlled
areas.
Under Islamist occupation, women in Mali have suffered
flogging and gang rapes for not wearing a face covering. In Indonesia, the
Council of Ulema, one of the largest Islamic organizations, has rejected a UN
resolution to ban female circumcision, and in Aceh province Islamic regulations
demand that women are fully covered in public.
No similar discrimination in laws and cultural practice
would be acceptable in the West even though sexism is far from eradicated
there. The litany of restrictions would seem an obvious cause for feminist
campaigners.
However, the Western feminist movement that was once an
inspiration for human rights has become a shadow of its former self and, in its
postmodern form, third-generation feminists are silent on Muslim women’s
rights.
Instead, they are preoccupied with issues dear to the far
Left, such as radical versions of moral relativism, post-colonialism and
anti-Americanism.
The movement has sunk into hypocrisy and double standards.
It has allowed an alliance with the far Left to trump women’s rights.
Sadly, feminists have ignored the victims of patriarchy, and
abandoned the reformers battling to reinterpret religious texts in favour of
sexual equality.
Choosing to share their bed with Islamist misogynists,
feminists are betraying their Muslim sisters. At the same time, they forgo
historic feminist ideals based on absolute values and guarantees provided by
international protocols. Hillary Clinton has pledged continued support for
Afghan women’s rights. Perhaps she could also lead a new wave of feminism.
CHURCH USED “BLACKMAIL”, SECRECY
CLERGY ABUSE by Barney Zwartz: The Age
Newspaper 27/3/2013
Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church gets covered up through
a system of blackmail and ''sacred silence'', according to the founder of the
Broken Rites advocacy group, Chris Wilding.
She said sexual activity by priests and bishops set up a
pattern of institutional secrecy and a system of blackmail that reached the
highest corridors of the Vatican.
Ms Wilding told the Victorian inquiry into how the churches
handled sex abuse that celibacy was a myth, and that when a priest was promoted
his sexual partners could also advance.
''It is this system of blackmail that is central to the
response of bishops, locally and around the world, relocating paedophile
priests. If the bishop is compromised because he is known to be sexually
active, the predatory cleric resorts to blackmail,'' she said.
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Her testimony came as victims told of vicious cruelty and
sexual abuse in Catholic Church-run institutions.
Gordon Hill said he was first abused at St Joseph's Home in
Ballarat in the late 1940s when he was five.
''I was cleaning a staircase when I was pulled up by the
ears by a nun and taken to a room with a priest,'' he said.
Mr Hill said he was abused repeatedly until he went to a
different part of the home at 11, and was used as slave labour - sent out to
farms and once a pub to work for nothing.
He said he was punished by being stripped naked in front of
the whole school, spread-eagled by four bigger boys, and beaten on the back and
buttocks by a priest with a thick wooden rod. Because he bled on the floor he
was thrown in ''the dungeon'' - an underground punishment room where he slept
on a concrete block covered with hessian sacks - for a month.
He never set foot in a classroom except to clean it, and
taught himself to read and write after he was 18. His feet were deformed by
years of having only two right-shoes, and to this day he has to buy two pairs.
Ms Wilding also attacked Peter O'Callaghan, independent
commissioner of the Melbourne Archdiocese abuse protocol, as a ''Mr Fixit''
whose job was to ''snuff out the scandal, pay out the victims, shut them up,
deter them from reporting to police and at the same time gather the information
for the church''.
Ms Wilding said the church had the help of police, judges,
politicians and the media. ''The tentacles of bishops, archbishops and
cardinals reach into every agency of power. The crimes of clerical abuse could
not have been smothered and the spot fires extinguished without the
interference and willing co-operation of persons in other agencies of power.''
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