[Dialogue] This is sobering and hard

Sun May 27 12:16:22 EDT 2007

And the Taliban is managing to ascend in Afghanistan
again, shedding their poison on women and women's
rights again. Pain, pain, pain!
Doris Hahn

--- Janice Ulangca <aulangca at stny.rr.com> wrote:

> What we already know about this war is bad enough. 
> But it's important to understand this as well. Start
> with the paragraph in red if you want a short read.
> 
> I tried to eliminate the request for funding, but
> could not. 
> 
> Janice Ulangca
> 
> 
> When violence against women is 'honorable,'
> 'religious' and 'legal' 
> By Joan Chittister 
> Created May 24 2007 - 13:48 
>         From Where I Stand by Joan Chittister, OSB
> March 16, 2007    
>          Vol. 5, No. 4   
> 
> All right, now we've seen it with our own eyes. So
> now what?
> 
> The picture of a small girl, naked and screaming,
> running down a dirt road in Vietnam covered with
> U.S. napalm all over her tiny body galvanized this
> country against the Vietnam War. For the first time,
> we could see exactly what was happening there,
> exactly to what lows the God of War had taken us.
> 
>            
> 
>            
>      
> After that picture ran in every newspaper in the
> country, it became even more difficult to excuse
> that war on the grounds of our political ideals. It
> became all the more difficult to go on driveling
> about the glorious service we were doing for the
> people there. It became all the more impossible to
> go on congratulating ourselves for what we were
> doing for the simple people of another country. It
> became impossible to applaud ourselves for the great
> sacrifices we were making to destroy that country.
> 
> The poetry of war had been particularized in all its
> horror, in all its excess, in all its bloody
> sinfulness in one tiny little girl.
> 
> Now we have another picture to deal with.
> 
> This girl is 17. She is being stoned to death,
> half-naked, by the men of an Iraqi village for
> fraternizing with a boy from another religion. And
> all the while it is happening other men look on
> cheering and take pictures of the carnage with their
> mobile phones. The police stand by and do nothing
> while other men disrobe and dishonor a woman for the
> sake, they say, of restoring their own.
> 
> By the end of the television news report, the girl
> is not writhing anymore. She is dead. And not one
> man did one thing to stop it.
> 
> People watched speechless at the sight.
> 
> But not all.
> 
> Instead, women everywhere are standing up, speaking
> out, screaming "Stop!"
> 
> The only problem is that they have been shouting
> that for years: Stop looking the other way when
> we're beaten or raped. Stop paying us less for the
> work we do as well, or better, than you do. Stop
> leaving us out of your deliberations about our
> lives. Stop telling us what our relationship with
> God is supposed to be and start asking us to tell
> you what it is. And now, stop murdering us for your
> pleasure, for your sense of proprietorship, for your
> honor and, finally, finally, recognize our own.
> 
> Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of
> Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), in an interview with
> Women's Human Rights Net highlighted the effects of
> this war on women
> (whrnet.org/docs/interview-yanar-0603.html [1]).
> 
> The list is a long one: They are homeless, alone,
> destitute, raped, beaten and inmates of refugee
> camps as dangerous as the streets.
> 
> Most of all, they are prey.
> 
> Mohammed, in a CNN interview, May 19, 2007, made two
> points no U.S. citizen wants to hear.
> 
> First, she said, the number of honor killings in
> Iraq have increased by the hundreds since the
> invasion.
> 
> Second, she went on, 10 years ago, long before the
> country was "freed," honor killings did not exist.
> 
> Pressed by the CNN reporter to explain the
> difference, Mohammed was short and to the point:
> "Someone came in from the outside and gave us
> "democracy," she said. The problem, she went on, is
> that the new democracy became Islamic -- not
> secular.
> 
> Now, she reports, men come to a house, bang on the
> door, say "This is a whorehouse" and murder all the
> women there. 
 It is sectarianism hiding behind
> religion."
> 
> The situation is even worse than that, however. With
> the change in the Iraqi Constitution, articles that
> protected the rights of women were eliminated. Now
> discrimination against women is, indeed,
> "honorable," is "religious," is legal.
> 
> In the new constitution, she says: "Islamic Sharia
> was considered the base source of legislation. This
> automatically aborted decades of feminist struggles
> in Iraq. It was an enormous setback in women's
> status and made Iraq into a country ruled mostly by
> religion. With the current government, the resulting
> family law will be one that legalizes polygamy,
> disciplining of women, stoning of adulteresses and
> sexual apartheid. The first results were clear in
> the recent days, when the current Al Jaafari's
> government passed a resolution of segregating sexes
> in the universities and colleges.
> 
> The temptation, of course, is to say something like,
> "You know how those people are" or "What kind of a
> religion is that?"
> 
> But not so fast:
> 
> Not too many years ago, in our own country, when
> high school girls became pregnant, they were not
> permitted to graduate from our high schools. The
> boys who impregnated them, on the other hand, walked
> proudly across the stages to pick up their diplomas.
> We never said a word. That had something to do with
> honor, too. His, of course, not hers.
> 
> That was a kind of stoning, too.
> 
> Not too many years ago, those same boys walked away
> from the baby, no proof of paternity, no financial
> obligations attached, while the woman and the child
> went on in poverty. In fact, in some states today,
> men can still walk away from obligations that are
> not being enforced.
> 
> That is a kind of stoning, too.
> 
> And in our time, women can get jobs but, unlike
> women in many other countries, have no access to
> state-supported child care.
> 
> That is a kind of stoning, too.
> 
> The stoning of 17-year-old Dua Khali Aswad is not a
> woman's issue. It is a human issue. It is simply the
> rawest indicator of the mindset that underlies any
> society that privileges men over women in any
> socially structured ways at all.
> 
> The truth is that this is as much a male issue as it
> is a female issue. It is, indeed, dishonorable --
> but not of women. It dishonors governments that call
> themselves honorable. It dishonors the men who can
> stand by while women are stoned -- one way or
> another -- and say nothing. It dishonors the
> religions that dare to justify such stonings in the
> name of God.
> 
> It is time for men to stand up, too, to call their
> own systems, to stop hiding behind the women who are
> risking their lives to save other women, to stop
> calling a human issue a woman's issue.
> 
> >From where I stand, the picture makes it all too
> clear: Women of courage are not enough. We need men
> of conscience, as well, if the human race is ever to
> become fully human.
> 
> **************************
> Janice Ulangca
> 3413 Stratford Drive
> Vestal, NY  13850
> 607-797-4595
> aulangca at stny.rr.com
> ***************************>
_______________________________________________
> Dialogue mailing list
> Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
>
http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
> 