When violence against women is 'honorable,' 'religious' and 'legal'

[Sapphire Blue]

When violence against women is 'honorable,' 'religious' and 'legal'
By Joan Chittister
Created May 24 2007 - 13:48

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.

(snip)

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.

(snip)

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.


Continued @ http://ncrcafe.org/node/1129/print

[Breeze54]

1. Thanks Sapphire Blue.. K & R'd

I hope you're feeling better. ;)

[noamnety]

2. This part here:

"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 reminds me of a recent thread of two identical twins who slept with a woman, and because the DNA couldn't prove which was the biological father, there was the chance (supported by some here) that both men would be absolved of all responsibility. And the woman and child, of course, would presumably go on in poverty, and that is considered right and just in our society. Natural, even.

In yet another thread, someone asked what the problem with liberalism is. I think that case, right there, spells it out very clearly. It's that false notion that all people are treated "fairly" by a system which is geared toward white males.

[LostinVA]

40. Good post n/t

[aquart]

3. When men feel helpless, they take it out on women.

I don't see a coherent premise in your post. Well, women have no rights in current Iraq. Uh huh. And...?

Are you asking me to wring my hands? Beat my breast? Write my congressman? Who can do NOTHING about it?

All the women in the house are murdered. Uh huh. And all the men outside are murdered. Reducing the enemy is a reasonable strategy in a civil war. Especially in an area that holds grudges for a thousand years or so. Ugly, isn't it? All on us, unfortunately.

If we don't like mass murder, we shouldn't invade non-belligerent nations. Our lamentations over lost women's rights sound simply ...ridiculous.

[mzteris]

5. And when men feel powerful -

they take it out on women.

You're missing the point.

[aquart]

6. PLEASE tell me what it is.

[mzteris]

7. like you'll get it anyway -

***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.***

[hfojvt]

24. stoning a girl for improper dating

goes a way beyond 'discrimination'.
Which change in the constitution? Something current, or pre-Saddam to post-Saddam? Kristoff did a column in the NY Times before the war where he wrote that secular Iraq was the most progressive country for women's rights. Amazing how that worked under the most evil of dictators.

It is not Democracy we should be trying to export, it is principles, the first being, 'that all people are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.'

[mzteris]

35. delete dupe

[mzteris]

36. did you mean this post for me?

or the guy to whom I was replying?

[Sapphire Blue]

14. "If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene."

The Perils of Indifference
Elie Wiesel

~ excerpt ~

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.

In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps -- and I'm glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance -- but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.

And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler's armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.

If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.


The full speech (text & audio) is available @ http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel.htm

[mzteris]

4. it's times like these

that make me hope there is a god who will punish bushco for all of the ills they fostered on the world.

It's a sad sad day when life under Saddam Hussein was preferable to that of GWB & Co.

[ismnotwasm]

8. How frightening

Why does history have to keep repeating and repeating?

I found this ugly CNN video of the event plus commentary. Grainy image. Still ugly

http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/world/2007/05/17/black.iraq.stoning.cnn

[tyedyeto]

9. Good luck getting every newspaper and TV station to report this sad story

It saddens me to think that this story will not be considered news, except for at a few online sources.

That's WTF is wrong with today's society. The few 'in power' of reportable news will never let this out to the mainstrean network or cable news.

:cry:

[Triana]

15. Women don't matter...that's why

not to the gov't, not to society, not to "newsmakers". We only matter as good little consumers and incubators and maids.

[tyedyeto]

18. Damn...your last sentence says it all n/t

[Jamastiene]

29. Bravo. Well said.

Too bad I can't recommend this post.

[hfojvt]

37. Really?

I think it's ridiculous. I don't know anybody who feels that way. I think it's horribly pessimistic and cynical.

[Tansy_Gold]

45. Which points out the place where I disagree with

Chittister -- It *IS* up to women to take back the nights and the days and the weeks and the years. Men will never do it, not as a group. Individual men may join the women's fight, but often they will be ostracized from the Community of Men.

As long as Men have a father-god to back them up, even a father-god so vague and amorphous and un-named as the one in whom we trust or who our republic is under, as long as that father-god operates as an underlying awareness and archetype, Woman will never be valued.

No offense to the people of faith on DU, but I happen to loathe religion, and especially religions that posit single omnipotent overtly male deities. I do indeed lay the blame for all this shit, all this misogyny, all this racism, all this agism, all this homophobia, all of this death-worshipping shit, at the feet of the imaginary all-mighty phallus. Whether it's "Gott mit uns" or "Allahu Akbar" -- in my opinion nothing has brought more sorrow and anguish and destruction onto the earth than monotheistic father-god religion.

And men, as a group, as a class, will NEVER turn their backs on that religion and on the inherent privilege it gives them. The men who murdered a girl in the name of their god are proof enough for me.


Tansy Gold

[Skittles]

54. I agree

I think religion is crap

[waiting for hope]

10. Hi SB!

So glad to see you here :) Hope you are okay. Great post - it's too inconceivable that this type of crime isn't being brought out into the light more, but, with the Cons still controlling the MSM, most of the public will never know.

K&R!

[Madspirit]

11. k&r...n/t

[Fleshdancer]

12. United we stand, divided we fall......

My mom and her mom and her mom before her concentrated on creating female equality in this country. Because of their actions I can vote, I control my reproduction, I own land, I am able to report a rape or act of domestic violence, I can speak out against job discrimination and sexual harrassment....in 2007, I still hope I'm taken seriously and yet I'm not 100% convinced I will be. If I am, I know who to give my thanks to.

What about the rest of the world? From sex trafficking of girls to acid splashing and genital mutilation, women are not respected. From controlling what a woman wears, what skin can show, or who she can be attracted to, a woman's choice is not represented. Baby girls die every day because they are born without a penis. Women are "honor killed" even though they are raped by men of absolutely no honor whatsoever. Where is the female representation? Where is the balance?

[AliceWonderland]

13. The article highlights crucial problems, but needs a broader framework

The 17 year old girl who was stoned was not a Muslim, but a Yezidi; this was a tribal honor killing that shows, very brutally, how societies rupture when they are destabilized. When the fabric of societies are torn apart by war, disease, drought, or environmental catastrophe, women are the most vulnerable to those effects. They tend to have less social and economic power and less mobility, among other things.

It's not enough, as this article claims, for "good men" to stand up. The connections between our lives and violence, our lives and war, are at the heart of the problem. There are structures that perpetuate the abuse of women, and they go beyond the individual standing-up of principled men. Fundamentalist religion is a source of structural violence against women -- diverse outspoken Muslim feminists will make that clear, as will women who hold other religious beliefs. There are other structures as well, such as socio-economic factors that encourage the abortions of female fetuses in countries like India and China.

This article brings up important points, though, and I especially appreciated that it didn't paint women merely as passive victims, but recognized that there are many brave voices that deserve attention and support. Thanks for posting.

On edit: the poster above mentioned the sex trade, and that's another important part of the interlinked chain. I remember a professor of international political economy who thought that international sex trafficking was unworthy of discussion -- not important like gold or oil or widgets. We brought him a stack of articles to change his mind. Didn't really work, unfortunately.

[hfojvt]

26. except that this happened in Kurdistan

which has been relatively peaceful.

As far as aborting female fetuses goes, I would think those societies would be good places to be a woman, at least if you were searching for a husband. There'd be no shortage of bachelors.

[raccoon]

31. Maybe if you managed to get yourself born. nt

[Tansy_Gold]

46. Although western marketplace logic suggests that a shortage

of women would make the women more valuable and therefore more valued, this does not in fact happen.

Men do not vie for the woman's attention and favor, because she has no value and no choice in the matter. Instead, they compete directly with one another, either financially in terms of offering her parents additional gifts, or physically in terms of eliminating rivals. In some cases, more than one man will share the services of a single "wife," which is not the same as a woman choosing to have more than one husband. The woman who is forced to service two or more "husbands" has twice (or more) the work, the risk, the forced sex.

There is no benefit to women under a system that does not value them, not even when they become "rare" or "scarce" commodities.


Tansy Gold

[nam78_two]

16. K&R.nt

[Critters2]

17. Joan Chittister rocks.

I wonder if always being insightful and prophetic ever gets old.

[riderinthestorm]

19. I am on dialup and avoid video at all costs but I watched this one

it took more than 30 minutes to upload a 2:32 video but I owe it to bear witness to this crime.

Thanks Sapphire Blue for your good work on spotlighting these important and overlooked areas.

Kick.

[EFerrari]

20. K&R

[nam78_two]

21. I didn't realise that we actually set women's rights back over there

I mean set them back legally with the new constitution.

http://english.aljazeera.net/English/archive/archive?ArchiveId=1696

Many Iraqi women have expressed fears that the rights they hold under Iraq's longtime secular system would be rolled back in the interim constitution being written by US-picked Iraqi leaders and their advisers, many of them Americans.

US lawmakers have urged the White House to prevent Islamic restrictions on Iraqi women.



I thought we weren't enforcing the laws -I didn't realize that the new constitution (which I confess to not having read though it was in the WaPo etc. in 2005 :blush:) under us, actually changes the secular constiution to a sharia one. I am confused -so does that mean these "honor" killings are actually legal? Because of us?

[Luna_C_06]

22. How, how can this happen?

She was only 17! How can "men" who consider themselves "honorable" do this?! I really hope there is a hell for people like this.

[Skittles]

55. religious brainwashing

that's how

[Swamp Rat]

23. k&r

[DarkTirade]

25. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner...

Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

[HardRocker05]

27. the women over there ought to start doing some 'honor killing' of their own. nt

[Jamastiene]

30. Sentiment seconded. n/t

[WiseButAngrySara]

28. KNR! thanks SB for opening up our eyes to another negative

aspect of this war.

[Marrah_G]

32. Thank you Sappire

To many times these stories are swept under the rug. We have come so far in our own quest for equality it is easy to forget there are women who's own struggle is not only being violently crushed but it is also going in reverse.

[DU GrovelBot]

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[Forkboy]

34. K&R...and good to see you around!

:hi:

[wicket]

38. K & R

:kick:

[LostinVA]

39. Or, as some posters like to say, "we need to respect their culture differences"

The fuck we do. Not about stuff like this, or child slavery, etc.

[etherealtruth]

41. ""we need to respect their (human rights abuses)"

is what they are really saying.

[LostinVA]

42. Exactly!!!

[distantearlywarning]

52. Agree totally. n/t

[MrPrax]

43. This is kind of offensive...?

This seems like a transparent attempt by religious ideologues (National Catholic Reporter) to appropriate 'secular gender politics' to essentially promote racism.

Firstly, without looking it up, we all know that TODAY the US/UK/CAN military have killed far more women than those guys in that village? So what point is being made here than couldn't be made with some ritual killing anywhere else, including the one involving the US marine corp IN Iraq...and including the napalm run in Vietnam.

Secondly, in both examples the direct and indirect harbringer of destruction to these women was NOT some patriarchy but the specific actions of the United States of America.
Do you see the irony here?
As has been pointed out, under the Ba'athist regime of Saddam, a woman could have gone without escorted to a bar in downtown Baghdad until about 4 hours before the United State of America, which presumably as some of you posters attest has a very high regard for women, starting killing Iraqi women on behalf.

Thirdly, keeping with this irony; women in the US have vastly different and dare I say lower public policy and specific rights. I don't understand why this writer would attempt to reach out to American woman by telling them about third world peasants instead of enlightening them to all the things they as American women are missing in comparison to other western countries.

Fourthly, that's the rub. If I, or anyone else want to know about the plight of women in the world, I am not likely to get that picture from the Catholic church. Their extremist view of not ordaining women is even more extreme than Fred Phelps?
That position is actually much closer to those 'guys' in that village who actually believe as well in the crude separation of the sexes, which isn't actually reflected anymore in their the west or in most other jurisdiction.

Fifthly, while gender might be an issue in many things, it still doesn't allow for women to avoid their responsibility for the bloodshed and murder done to women in their name. Attempting to pass the buck by suggesting a universal 'victim hood' of women (Mary Cult?) is cheap a substitute for avoiding class, power and privilege which characterizes ALL OF OUR relationships vis a vis the exploitation of women. To simply point out that Hillary Clinton is a woman, and to ignore the fact that that woman sat on the Board of Wal-Mart exploiting other women and consciously so...tends to avoid those issues that, say, liberation theologists tend to bring up.

[Tansy_Gold]

47. When women exploit women, it is *usually*

because the exploiters are operating within an androcentric structure that does not void their identity as women. The example you cite of Hillary Clinton sitting on the Wal-Mart board is somewhat -- not completely, but somewhat -- analogous to the women who perform genital mutilation on their own daughters and granddaughters -- the system and the structure assign them to a position where they hold (limited) power only by exploiting their own class. If they don't exploit, what limited power the Real Powers allow them to have will be taken away.

The same pattern applies to Jews who "helped" the nazis in the extermination camps, the Africans who sold fellow Africans to the European slavers, the "Indian scouts" who helped the U.S. cavalry wipe out other tribes. This kind of behavior is always thrown back at the Hillarys, the scouts, etc., as evidence of their unfitness to hold power, but the excesses of those who hold the vast majority of the power and who have NO excuse for their inhumanity never take responsibility at all. Indeed, they have so much power that they can
"justify" their actions within the structure of power and get away with it.


Tansy Gold

[MrPrax]

48. Very good point...

I personally don't subscribe to essentialism ('androcentric structure'!!? no dice)-- but if it works to put Hillary in the same category as the African Elders and their Rusty Scissors, then all power to it.

It does smack of the special role of women as taught by Catholicism through the pain of Mary. Is that where you figure the gender problem happened? The Church demonized the Northern 'pagan' feminine to promote the Spartan 'bull' culture of the Mediterranean and then after abolishing it, shamelessly re-introduced it in the form of a 19th century Mary Cult largely because of the pressure of liberal secularism?

But I digress,

...but to 'anthropomorphize' biological reproduction as a 'motivation' for corrupt behaviour of people forged collectively under the SAME system, really doesn't explain why Hillary thinks the way she does and why you think the way you do.

[Irishonly]

44. K&R

It's heartbreaking. It's hard to know where to direct my rage.

[Prophet 451]

49. The only time violence against women is honourable...

...is when she's actively trying to kill you. "Legal" is something different, "religious" I wouldn't know anything about but I'm partly Roma and like a lot of old cultures, we set a great store on personal honour. Outside of sports, violence is only honourable when it is forced on you. Acting violently to defend oneself or another from equal violence is honourable, visiting violence upon the helpless is not.

[Danger Mouse]

50. The poor girl. This is just plain disgusting.

More blood on the hands of America.
But by now, there's so much of it, we could be drowning in it.
Violence against women...makes me sick :puke:

[rasputin1952]

51. Just after WWII and the capitulation of the Japanese...

MacArthur did one thing that has changed the Japanese people into more of a just society. He insisted that in the new Japanese Constitution, that women be afforded equal rights and privileges. While many of the "Old School" Japanese fought this provision tooth and nail, virtually everyone in Japan now accepts that this was one of the most important provisions ever instituted in Japan.

Oddly, here in the US, while women are afforded some equality, they are still far from equal in many instances. (This also brings to mind another aspect of equality, few people realize that everyone in Iraq is afforded universal health-care at American taxpayer expense).

As for this incredibly horrid offense against this young woman shows us just how miserable the entire fiasco is. One cannot have a representative democracy under any form of religious dictates. our Founders realized this, and made provisions for it. In Iraq however, such provisions were surgically cut out of their constitution. This is further proof that religion and government do not interact well, as some would have us believe. The religion is irrelevant when it comes to a society that seeks a democracy it could be Islam, it could be Christianity, it could be Shinto...the base problem w/religion in politics is that it cannot avoid discrimination because of those who hold views that only "their" religion is the true religion.

To make matters worse, those who push for theocracy, seem to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the acts of themselves and others. For some insane reason, the vast majority of "religious" people we hear about all use fear to keep their followers in tow. It is a sad state of affairs for religion, when the only way you can keep followers is the treat of some "hell" they will face if they don't follow the dictates of those who have stolen the religion and used it for their own nefarious gain.

If the people that did this horrid crime realized that they have taken what may well have been an "innocent" liaison, (which was none of their business in the first place), realized that they have not just accused someone of a wrong, but now they have become murderers, they might understand just how incredibly foolish they are to listen to those who demand death and maiming for what ever reason.

Maybe if some of the "mullahs" actually gave themselves up for the "sins" they have committed, and were set to be stoned, they would realize the insanity of what they have laid upon the people as "justice". Want to bet they would be begging for their lives as granite bounced off their skulls?

[Lilith Velkor]

53. You can hide a lot of weapons under a burka.

It's up to women to enforce women's rights, as it always has been.