Post by danceswithruskies on Feb 27, 2011 7:29:54 GMT 1
All around the world--people have different ways of doing stuff than we do-- some ways may are better --and some really make us wonder what is really going on in this mad world.
Makes you think that Human Rights have not reached everywhere!
Here is an example---
Pakistan: Murdering Uppity Women is "Tribal Custom"
In the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, three teenagers were buried alive because they committed the "crime" of wanting to make their own choices about whom they would marry. Their families disagreed and decided that it would simply be better to kill the girls rather than permit them so much personal autonomy. Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents the Baluchistan province in the Pakistani parliament, supports the families and insists that murdering uppity girls is a "tribal custom" which should be respected.
What this is, is a barbaric, immoral, and unconscionable practice and the fact that anyone would even think about trying to justify it as a "custom" is sickening. However, it's worth taking a step back to consider how much of a continuum there is between this sort of barbarism and some of the practices in the "civilized" West where it's long been "custom" for wives to be beaten or even killed by men who are able to evade justice if the circumstances are right. It's long been "custom" that men have the right to forcibly have sex with their wives, a practice better known as "rape" among morally mature adults.
The difference between "them" and "us" is more a matter of degree, not of kind.
"These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them," [Israr Ullah Zehri] said. "Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid."
Source: Telegraph
I would have had trouble believing that someone could have come up with a worse excuse for the abuse of power than "only those who have something to hide should worry about government invasions of privacy," but Israr Ullah Zehri sure managed to do just that here. Isn't it funny how the privileged and powerful always manage to find ways to blame the victims of their own abuse of power? If only they didn't engage in the flagrantly immoral practice of daring to presume civil or social equality, they might have been allowed to continue living as inferiors in a society set up to remind them of just how low they really are.
I wonder, though, why Zehri is pretending that these barbaric practices aren't fully supported by religious authorities and justified by centuries of religious tradition. It would of course be a mistake to assume that religion is the only factor in such violent misogyny, but it would be an even worse mistake to pretend that it's irrelevant.
You simply can't separate the second-class status of women in Muslim societies from traditional Muslim teachings about women: Islam helps provide a divinely ordained justification for treating women as less than fully human while the broader desire of those in power to treat women as less than fully human helps ensure that Islam doesn't change. Each feeds the other in a constant cycle that is very difficult to break out of — just look how much time and effort has been required for the little progress achieved by women in western societies.
Twisty Faster comments
The idea that cultural tradition might even fleetingly be construed by supposedly civilized beings as an excuse for ritual murder is the direct result of the same global misogynist paradigm that brings us “harmless” Western-style femininity, Jesus, the nuclear family, street harrassment, pornography, and rape culture. I am not moron enough to suggest that Western Internet-feminists can prevent barbarism through blogging, but we can damn well get the word out.
And we can damn well crank up our own resistance a notch. This may seem like a weird place to mention this, but if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you know that I see patriarchal oppression as a global continuum. Furthermore, I am a firm believer in the notion that it’s possible for feminists to ripple that continuum. Well, what I wish is, I wish that Western women could see the big picture from their privileged choice-feminism aeries and actually take a step towards women’s liberation by bagging femininity as a lifestyle choice. The cost would be little compared to what these Pakistani women suffered by daring to express an interest in their own futures, and it could change the world.
The revolution will not be wearing bustiers and nail polish.
Curiously, the link between misogyny and killings like these (though not necessarily these) may be a bit more complicated than it usually appears. What we tend to hear is that men have killed women in order to preserve the "honor" of the family, but the truth may be that the women are killed for entirely different reasons and "honor" is used to cover up motives that are regarded as worse.
This doesn't mean that misogyny isn't responsible or that religion isn't a significant factor, only that it's a more complicated relationship. It's still clearly misogyny when women are treated as easier to kill than men and that women would murdered in cases where the killer wouldn’t even think of doing the same to a male relative. Religion is also still a significant factor when it teaches that killing a woman — a wife, a mother, or a sister — is a more respectable when done for honor than when done for greed. Both are still true when the law allows killers to go free when they can claim "honor" as their motive.
Judges, lawyers, activists and experts agree that in most cases men exploit lenient laws to murder women for inheritance, settling family feuds or to hide other crimes. ...Judge Jehad Oteibi, spokesman for the Judiciary Council, said court records show that many "honour killings" are committed for reasons related to inheritance.
"Forensic tests prove that a lot of victims were virgins, which show that there are other motives behind the killings, including family problems. It's a very sensitive issue in our society," Oteibi said.
Even if the victims were not virgins that wouldn't justify murdering them — not in a civilized society populated by moral and mature adults. The fact that most of these girls were virgins, though, demonstrates that at the very least the killers were motivated by false beliefs about the girls, a fact which arguably makes the murders a little bit worse. Perhaps is it more likely, though, that the killers never believed what they claimed in the first place:
According to Human Rights Watch, 95 percent of women killed in 1997 in Jordan in alleged honour killings were later proved to be innocent. "Many women are forced to give up their rights or face death. Their families might kill them and allege it is related to honour, and not money," Oteibi said. "But we can't know the truth because the women are dead."
University of Jordan sociologist Seri Nasser blamed the legal system. "Most of the judges are males who use their powers to reduce the sentence. They forget that women are victims of their male relatives' greed," Nasser said.
Or maybe it's not so much that they forget, but just don't care. In a ruthlessly patriarchal society where a male can feel empowered to murder a sister or other female relative out of a twisted sense of honor, or merely believe that this excuse will cover up a murder committed out of greed, how easy can it be to produce judges who care very much about the lives of these women? Remember, the male judges and the male murderers are all male products of the same patriarchal system.
Not every male in such a system is a carbon-copy clone of the other, of course, but they are all partaking from the same stereotypes, assumptions, and norms regarding women. If men care so little for female relatives that they will murder them under such conditions, how often will complete strangers care enough to see that real justice is done? They are all part of the same system and the judges have been places in positions of power where they are responsible for defending that system.
In a system where living women count for so little, dead women will necessarily count for far less.
Please add your own stories and comments
Makes you think that Human Rights have not reached everywhere!
Here is an example---
Pakistan: Murdering Uppity Women is "Tribal Custom"
In the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, three teenagers were buried alive because they committed the "crime" of wanting to make their own choices about whom they would marry. Their families disagreed and decided that it would simply be better to kill the girls rather than permit them so much personal autonomy. Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents the Baluchistan province in the Pakistani parliament, supports the families and insists that murdering uppity girls is a "tribal custom" which should be respected.
What this is, is a barbaric, immoral, and unconscionable practice and the fact that anyone would even think about trying to justify it as a "custom" is sickening. However, it's worth taking a step back to consider how much of a continuum there is between this sort of barbarism and some of the practices in the "civilized" West where it's long been "custom" for wives to be beaten or even killed by men who are able to evade justice if the circumstances are right. It's long been "custom" that men have the right to forcibly have sex with their wives, a practice better known as "rape" among morally mature adults.
The difference between "them" and "us" is more a matter of degree, not of kind.
"These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them," [Israr Ullah Zehri] said. "Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid."
Source: Telegraph
I would have had trouble believing that someone could have come up with a worse excuse for the abuse of power than "only those who have something to hide should worry about government invasions of privacy," but Israr Ullah Zehri sure managed to do just that here. Isn't it funny how the privileged and powerful always manage to find ways to blame the victims of their own abuse of power? If only they didn't engage in the flagrantly immoral practice of daring to presume civil or social equality, they might have been allowed to continue living as inferiors in a society set up to remind them of just how low they really are.
I wonder, though, why Zehri is pretending that these barbaric practices aren't fully supported by religious authorities and justified by centuries of religious tradition. It would of course be a mistake to assume that religion is the only factor in such violent misogyny, but it would be an even worse mistake to pretend that it's irrelevant.
You simply can't separate the second-class status of women in Muslim societies from traditional Muslim teachings about women: Islam helps provide a divinely ordained justification for treating women as less than fully human while the broader desire of those in power to treat women as less than fully human helps ensure that Islam doesn't change. Each feeds the other in a constant cycle that is very difficult to break out of — just look how much time and effort has been required for the little progress achieved by women in western societies.
Twisty Faster comments
The idea that cultural tradition might even fleetingly be construed by supposedly civilized beings as an excuse for ritual murder is the direct result of the same global misogynist paradigm that brings us “harmless” Western-style femininity, Jesus, the nuclear family, street harrassment, pornography, and rape culture. I am not moron enough to suggest that Western Internet-feminists can prevent barbarism through blogging, but we can damn well get the word out.
And we can damn well crank up our own resistance a notch. This may seem like a weird place to mention this, but if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you know that I see patriarchal oppression as a global continuum. Furthermore, I am a firm believer in the notion that it’s possible for feminists to ripple that continuum. Well, what I wish is, I wish that Western women could see the big picture from their privileged choice-feminism aeries and actually take a step towards women’s liberation by bagging femininity as a lifestyle choice. The cost would be little compared to what these Pakistani women suffered by daring to express an interest in their own futures, and it could change the world.
The revolution will not be wearing bustiers and nail polish.
Curiously, the link between misogyny and killings like these (though not necessarily these) may be a bit more complicated than it usually appears. What we tend to hear is that men have killed women in order to preserve the "honor" of the family, but the truth may be that the women are killed for entirely different reasons and "honor" is used to cover up motives that are regarded as worse.
This doesn't mean that misogyny isn't responsible or that religion isn't a significant factor, only that it's a more complicated relationship. It's still clearly misogyny when women are treated as easier to kill than men and that women would murdered in cases where the killer wouldn’t even think of doing the same to a male relative. Religion is also still a significant factor when it teaches that killing a woman — a wife, a mother, or a sister — is a more respectable when done for honor than when done for greed. Both are still true when the law allows killers to go free when they can claim "honor" as their motive.
Judges, lawyers, activists and experts agree that in most cases men exploit lenient laws to murder women for inheritance, settling family feuds or to hide other crimes. ...Judge Jehad Oteibi, spokesman for the Judiciary Council, said court records show that many "honour killings" are committed for reasons related to inheritance.
"Forensic tests prove that a lot of victims were virgins, which show that there are other motives behind the killings, including family problems. It's a very sensitive issue in our society," Oteibi said.
Even if the victims were not virgins that wouldn't justify murdering them — not in a civilized society populated by moral and mature adults. The fact that most of these girls were virgins, though, demonstrates that at the very least the killers were motivated by false beliefs about the girls, a fact which arguably makes the murders a little bit worse. Perhaps is it more likely, though, that the killers never believed what they claimed in the first place:
According to Human Rights Watch, 95 percent of women killed in 1997 in Jordan in alleged honour killings were later proved to be innocent. "Many women are forced to give up their rights or face death. Their families might kill them and allege it is related to honour, and not money," Oteibi said. "But we can't know the truth because the women are dead."
University of Jordan sociologist Seri Nasser blamed the legal system. "Most of the judges are males who use their powers to reduce the sentence. They forget that women are victims of their male relatives' greed," Nasser said.
Or maybe it's not so much that they forget, but just don't care. In a ruthlessly patriarchal society where a male can feel empowered to murder a sister or other female relative out of a twisted sense of honor, or merely believe that this excuse will cover up a murder committed out of greed, how easy can it be to produce judges who care very much about the lives of these women? Remember, the male judges and the male murderers are all male products of the same patriarchal system.
Not every male in such a system is a carbon-copy clone of the other, of course, but they are all partaking from the same stereotypes, assumptions, and norms regarding women. If men care so little for female relatives that they will murder them under such conditions, how often will complete strangers care enough to see that real justice is done? They are all part of the same system and the judges have been places in positions of power where they are responsible for defending that system.
In a system where living women count for so little, dead women will necessarily count for far less.
Please add your own stories and comments
