Ramadan Kareem...

An Indian Muslim father holds the hands of his daughter in his palms and prays before breaking fast on the first day of holy month Ramadan at the Jama Mosque in New Delhi, India, Monday, June 30, 2014. During this month the world's estimated 1.6 billion Muslims will abstain from food, drink and other pleasures from sunrise to sunset. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

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Comparing International Beauty Standards...

U.S.-based journalist and photographer Esther Honig came up with an interesting photo project that answers a difficult question in an ingenious way – how can we compare standards of women’s beauty world-wide?

Honig’s solution was brilliantly simple: she sent a portrait photo of herself to freelance Photoshoppers in countries around the world with one request – to make her “beautiful.” Each Photoshopper, be they a professional or an amateur, took their own spin on the assignment, giving Honig (and us) a glimpse at what at least one person in each of these countries considers to be beautiful. Honig’s face subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) shifts, changing form and color as it travels around the world.

http://www.estherhonig.com/#!before--after-/cvkn

A Statement To Humanity...

In the last few weeks we have seen a horrific onslaught of violence against women on every continent on this planet. In fact, the only continent that it seems you can be a woman and feel safe in is Antarctica.

We have been chronicling, filing reports, and following up on the over two-hundred girls who have been abducted in a war on women and girls in Nigeria. These victims remain in the company of their abductors, and by no means should this egregious crime against humanity fall into the darkness of a twenty-four news cycle filled with tripe jive and bickering over who wore what to where. Yet still, it has taken a back seat to a culture of narcissistic trifles. Where is the free- the- two -hundred- plus- Nigerian- girls concert? Where are the artists writing songs of fire to ignite the stove which boils the pressure of the collective conscience? Silence…

We have been on the streets painting our tears into screams of outrage for our sisters, our fellow human beings, who were lynched in the prime of their fourteen and fifteen -year – old lives. The blood they left on the mangoes reminds us the fruit of nourishment, the dreams of tomorrow, are being cut down, suffocated, beaten, in a hateful war on women. What do the so-called experts illuminate-”65% of the women in Uttar Pradesh don’t have access to proper sanitation?” I’m serious, this is what so-called experts offered as a solution following the gang rape of two girls who were lynched- lynched and displayed hanging from a mango tree. The people who killed these girls took the time to not just murder them but to hang them from a tree. Then we have politicians, the so-called voice of the people, following the incident with remarks like, “Rape is sometimes right, sometimes wrong;” or “No one commits rape intentionally, it happens by mistake…” It gets better, or I should say dumber: “Boys make mistakes, why hang them?” These brokers of hate should be hung. In the country I inhabit almost everyone, almost everyone, has access to toilets and sanitation. This country I inhabit also has one of the highest number of rapes in the world. Toilets, or lack of toilets do not make people rape, but misogyny synthesized with entitlement does. Dehumanizing women as products-inhuman, inferior, insulated by caste, prefaced by a worn out hateful predisposition enacts violence. I can go outside almost anywhere in the world and release myself and the fear of being raped will be the last thing on my mind. Silence…

We remain in the streets, burning candles for the innocent lives cut down at UCSB in a shooting rampaged by-I must stop in this case and preface my remark by saying the shooter was actually sick, he was suffering from the age-old disease of white entitlement, one of the world’s largest killers, diluted by the silence of media.

We are trying to get more information on the health and well-being of a young girl in Malaysia who was raped by 38 men. She wasn’t on her way to a bathroom, drunk, or any of the other victim blaming, social stigmas baptized in ignorance to avoid actually having a conversation, one which would ultimately indicted society and most of the people who work in this building, and other governmental buildings around the world.

We continue to illuminate the baffling ignorance and inaction of governments to follow through with strategic planning to prevent these crimes. In fact, the people of the communities around these crimes are doing more to fight back, to raise their voices, to demand change, than the governments. This is including inaction, real thoughtful, progressive, strategic action, on the parts of the intergovernmental organizations, like the one I am standing in right now.

We see more ridiculous comments, more victim blaming and impunity than action; action for progressive justice, not retroactive-it’s-too-late justice.

Retroactive justice doesn’t bring the girls lynched in Uttar Pradesh back to life.
Retroactive justice, so-called courtroom justice doesn’t put the bullets back in Elliot Rodger’s gun.

Retroactive justice doesn’t reverse a rape.

It doesn’t take back the harassment the girl raped at Columbia University experienced, nor does it take back the harassment she was subjected to by the New York Police Department, the very people who should have been protecting her in the first place.

Retroactive justice doesn’t annul a child sold into marriage because her chances are better at surviving, as she lays starving in a refugee camp in Syria, while a war criminal remains in power, uncharged.

Retroactive justice doesn’t bring back to life, or return the lost, missing, murdered indigenous women in Canada.

We want proactive justice.

We want an international anti-misogyny treaty. This means money allocated to doing whatever is necessary to uproot misogyny.

We want money which would have been spent on arms, spent, on books, desks, clothes, and food so every girl on this planet is in school. Yes, if you can do it, the money is there, it is the weak will and lack of imagination that is absent.

We want women’s education which teaches men the her-story that has been omitted from text books in order to prop up his-story.
We want every boy and man to know when he dream of university, when he steps foot in a university, it was a woman who was the architect for the very first university on this earth. Yes, a Muslim woman. So, all the centers of knowledge on this earth today, every advancement in research today, can be traced back to the will of this founding Muslim woman. Her name should be some where on the foots paths of every university on this planet, so every girl, knows…My her-story was a part of creating a hub of intellectualism which has fueled advancement.

When they walk out on the farmlands, when they are involved in agriculture, we want them to know that in ancient Egypt men and women had equal land rights. The cradle of civilization, the dawn of organizing, offered women more rights than many countries offer women today.

We want them to know who Merit-Ptah-one of the first chief physicians was, and that she operated in ancient Egypt.

We want them to know that women were educated in the early Vedic period, that Rigvedic verses suggest that women married at a mature age and were probably free to select their own husbands.

We want proactive justice that teaches equality.

We want proactive justice that teaches children how man has constructed a million centers of hate to achieve the subjugation of human beings for his own benefit. We want them to learn that race, gender, sexuality, that these were tools used to marginalize people and justify greed which brought diseases, upheavals, and violence.

We want them to know that man’s social-Darwinism has been exposed as lies based on pseudo science funded by rich white men, to keep rich white men in power, which gave rich white men the means to enact plans that has ushered destruction everywhere.

We want them to know that knowledge propels change, and stagnation, inaction, in the face of knowledge is hateful, violent and oppressive.

We want proactive justice that teaches conflict resolution.

We want children taught that there is more so be achieved by not fighting, cooperating, working together, than there is by violence, verbally, physically, or structurally.

We want proactive applied learning. As each rudiment of this education to dismantle misogyny and patriarchy is assembled, later it needs to be practiced. We want cross community integration of applied assignments requiring students to mix with communities outside of their own identities, to see that they can work together on a common goal, be graded on the outcome, and build friendships, that will give way to a generation of love and understanding.

We want a streamlined World Health Organization mandated universal gender education, put together by scientists and doctors elected from diverse regions, alongside social scientists.

This is the beginning of proactive steps toward gender justice.

Now, the first thing the so-called pragmatic man views is currency signs and conflict.

Well, if every country appropriated less, spent less to fund the weapons which annihilate the garden, and spent more in growing the garden of equality, the children of tomorrow, girls and boys, would walk forever in the richest gardens.

Proactive justice is less costly over time than retroactive justice, it cost less lives, fewer resources, and less gun powder, so consider it an investment in the future.

Consider it an investment in changing mindsets, in dismantling hate and greed.

Proactive justice will do much more to create peace, than any gun, bomb or worn out rhetoric attacking identities, victim blaming, ever has, or will, while summoning the greatest will, the human will to do better, go further and achieve what was once called impossible

So, we say to those who are stealing from the here and now of women and girls, who are looting our garden “you can cut down the flowers, but you’ll never stop the coming of spring.”

#PriceOfSilence #BlurredLinesOfJusice #BringBackOurGirls #BringBackOurHumanity #SurvivorPrivilege #womensrights #NoMore #NoCaste #NoEast #NoWest #UCSB

Statement by: JJ, Artistic Director of Price of Silence

For more info on Price of Silence, please contact pos.theatre@gmail.com

Sectarian Monster Reawakened...

“Labeiki ya Zaynab,” chanted Iraqi Shia fighters as they swayed, dancing with their rifles before TV news cameras in Baghdad on June 13. They were apparently getting ready for a difficult fight ahead. For them, it seemed that a suitable war chant would be answering the call of Zaynab, the daughter of Imam Ali, the great Muslim Caliph who lived in Medina 14 centuries ago. That was the period through which the Shia sect slowly emerged, based on a political dispute whose consequences are still felt until this day.

Dark Forces of Sectarianism

That chant alone is enough to demonstrate the ugly sectarian nature of the war in Iraq, which has reached an unprecedented highpoint in recent days. Fewer than 1,000 fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) advanced against Iraq’s largest city of Mosul on June 10, sending two Iraqi army divisions (nearly 30,000 soldiers) to a chaotic retreat.

The call to arms was made by a statement issued by Iraq’s most revered Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and read on his behalf during a Friday prayer’s sermon in Kerbala. “People who are capable of carrying arms and fighting the terrorists in defense of their country (..) should volunteer to join the security forces to achieve this sacred goal,” the statement in part read.

The terrorists of whom Sistani speaks are those of ISIL, whose numbers throughout the region is estimated to be at only 7,000 fighters. They are well organized, fairly well-equipped and absolutely ruthless in their conduct.

To secure their remarkable territorial gains, they quickly moved south, closing in on other Iraqi towns: They attacked Baiji on June 11. On the same day, they conquered Tikrit, the town of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, where they were joined by ex-Baathist fighters. For two days, they tried to take over Samarra, but couldn’t, only to move against Jalawala and Saaddiyah, to the east of Baghdad. It is impossible to verify reports of what is taking place in towns that fall under the control of ISIL, but considering their notoriously bloody legacy in Syria, and ISIL’s own online reporting on their own activities, one can expect the worse.

On June 13, a United Nations spokesperson said hundreds of people were possibly killed in the fighting, many of whom were summarily executed. ISIL’s own gory propaganda video footage and pictures give much credence to the claim.

Within days, ISIL was in control of a large swathe of land which lumped together offers a new map fully altering the political boundaries of the Middle East that were largely envisioned by colonial powers France and Britain nearly a century ago.

Ongoing US War

What the future holds is difficult to predict. The US administration is petrified by the notion of getting involved in Iraq once more. It was its original meddling, at the behest of the notorious neoconservatives who largely determined US foreign policy during George W. Bush’s administration that ignited this ongoing strife in the first place. They admitted failure and withdrew in Dec 2011, hoping to sustain a level of influence over the Iraqi government under Shia Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. They failed miserably as well and it is now Iran that is aninfluential foreign power in Baghdad.

In fact, Iran’s influence and interests are so strong that despite much saber-rattling by US President Barack Obama, the US cannot possibly modify the massively changing reality in Iraq without Iranian help. Reports in US and British media are pointing to possible US-Iranian involvement to counter ISIL, not just in Iraq, but also in Syria.

History is accelerating at a frantic speed. Seemingly impossible alliances are being hastily formed. Maps are being redrawn in directions that are determined by masked fighters with automatic weapons mounted on the back of pickup trucks. True, no one could have predicted such events, but when some warned that the Iraq war would ‘destabilize’ the Middle East for many years to come, this is precisely what they meant.

When Bush led his war on Iraq in order to fight al-Qaeda, the group simply didn’t exist in that country; the war however, brought al-Qaeda to Iraq. A mix of hubris and ignorance of the facts – and lack of understanding of Iraq’s history – allowed the Bush administration to sustain that horrible war. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis perished in an immoral military quest. Those who were not killed, were maimed, tortured, raped or fled into a borderless Iraqi odyssey.

The Americans toyed with Iraq in numerous ways. They dissolved the army, dismissed all government institutions, attempted to restructure a new society based on the recommendations of Pentagon and CIA analysts in Washington D.C. and Virginia. They oppressed the Sunni Muslims, empowered Shia, and fed the flame of sectarianism with no regard to the consequences. When things didn’t go as planned, they tried to empower some Shia groups over others, and armed some Sunni groups to fight the Iraqi resistance to the war, which was mostly made of Sunni fighters.

And the consequences were most bloody. Iraq’s civil war of 2006-07 claimed tens of thousands to be added to the ever-growing toll caused by the war adventure. No sham elections were enough to remedy the situation, no torture technique was enough to suppress the rebellion, and no fiddling with the sectarian or ethnic demographics of the country was enough to create the coveted ‘stability’.

The ISIL-War Connection

In Dec 2011, the Americans ran away from the Iraq inferno, leaving behind a fight that was not yet settled. What is going on in Iraq right now is an integral part of the US-infused mayhem. It should be telling enough that the leader of ISIL, Abu Baker al-Baghdadi is an Iraqi from Samarra, who fought against the Americans and was himself held and tortured in the largest US prison in Iraq, Camp Bucca for five years.

It would not be precise to make the claim that ISIL started in the dungeon of a US prison in Iraq. The ISIL story would need to be examined in greater depth since it is as stretched as the current geography of the conflict, and as mysterious as the masked characters who are blowing people up with no mercy and beheading with no regard to the upright values of the religion they purport to represent. But there can be no denial that the US ignorant orchestration of the mass oppression of Iraqis, and Sunnis in particular during the 2003 war until their much touted withdrawal was a major factor in ISIL formation, and the horrendous levels of violence the extremist group utilizes.

While the Sunni-Shia strive is rooted in over 14 centuries of history, modern Middle Eastern states, with all of its corruption and failures, did manage to neutralize much of the violent manifestation of the historical dispute. The Bush administration had insolently re-centered the conflict into the heart of Arab history. Iran exploited the situation for various reasons for sheer political and territorial interests, coupled with the hope to redeem what many Shias perceive as past injustices.

When al-Qaeda was ostensibly driven out of major Iraqi cities by 2008, they simply regrouped. The Syrian civil war, which started three years ago, created the kind of security vacuum which allowed them to make their move. But al-Qaeda itself began to splinter, to a ‘central command’, operating via decrees from Afghanistan and Pakistan, an Islamic Front that hosts several al-Qaeda-affiliated groups, and ISIL, which had its own calculations that go beyond Syria.

ISIL believes that the only way to redeem the honor of Muslims is to re-establish the Caliphate, an Islamic state. The heart of that state, as it has historically been is Sham (Levant) and Iraq, thus ISIL’s name.

Redrawing Iraq

It is unclear whether ISIL will be able to hold onto the territories it gained or sustain itself in a battle that involves Shia-controlled Baghdad, Iran and the US. But a few things are also clear:

The systematic political marginalization of Iraq’s Sunni communities is both senseless and unsustainable. A new political and social contract is needed to re-order the mess created by the US invasion, and other foreign intervention in Iraq, including that of Iran.

Violence is a dark and destructive energy force that doesn’t evaporate on its own. The current violence in Iraq is the reverberation of the US and Iraqi violence used against millions of Iraqis who refused to embrace the occupation and accept the status quo. Justice in Iraq should supersede any haphazard reconciliation that merely reinvents the present circumstances.

Iraq was allowed to ache in untold pain for over a decade, which itself followed a decade of an earlier US-led war and sanctions. During all of those years, starting in 1991, the only answer to Iraq’s woes has been nothing but violence, which has consistently generated nothing but more violence. The US must not be allowed to once again determine the future of Iraq.

The nature of the conflict has become so convoluted that a political settlement in Iraq would have to tackle a similar settlement in Syria, which is serving as a breeding ground for brutality, by the Syrian regime and opposition forces, especially ISIL. That factory of radicalization must close down as soon as possible in a way that would allow Syria’s wounds, and by extension Iraq’s, to heal.

Those who insist on the violent options are holding onto the same foolish assumption that violence can ever be a harbinger of lasting peace in the Middle East. Even if ISIL scampers back to Syria or disappears into some other opportune landscape in Iraq itself, the fight will not end without a political settlement that confronts the outcomes of the US war, free of the formula of triumphant Shias and perpetually suppressed Sunnis. In order for Iraq to reunify its fragmented territories, it needs to first unify the very identity of its own citizens, as Iraqis first and foremost.


http://defence.pk/threads/sectarian-monster-reawakened.319761/
Ramzy Baroud is the Managing Editor of Middle East Eye. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).

Yesterday Was World Refugee Day...

The Female Sufi Mystics Of The Pankisi Gorge...

DUISI, Georgia — The adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, is rarely heard in Georgia. In this fiercely religious Christian nation, minority religious practice is often suppressed: Last year, citing import laws, local authorities in Georgia’s Samtskhe-Javakheti region dismantled a mosque in the village of Chela. Resisters were beaten or detained. But here in the mountainous Pankisi Gorge, approximately 100 miles by road from the Chechen border, the adhan echoes five times daily; Arabic is taught alongside Georgian and English in village schools; and pigs — common on rural Georgian roads — are notably absent. And unlike in other parts of Georgia’s Kakheti province, where viticulture drives the local economy, no families sell wine here.

The residents of Pankisi have historically been Kists, ethnic Chechens who migrated to the region in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the aftermath of the 1999 Second Chechen War, however, an influx of Chechen refugees — estimates put their number at 7,000 — temporarily doubled the region’s population. Today, between two and three hundred refugee families remain.

The government’s presence is minimal here, but this is less a testament to tolerance than to suspicion. In recent decades, Pankisi has acquired a reputation as a lawless corridor to the North Caucasus for arms smugglers and would-be jihadists, a reputation that has repeatedly prompted American as well as Russian calls for intervention in the region. Though Georgian military action in 2003 reportedly cracked down on militancy in the region, among Georgians, Pankisi still has a reputation as a dangerous place, full of aspiring terrorists.

But nothing could be further from the truth, says village elder Makvala Margoshvili, who goes by her childhood nickname, Badi. Most Kist Muslims identify as Sufis, practitioners of a mystic brand of Islam. Of these, most consider themselves to be Hadjiists, followers of the 19th-century Chechen Sufi mystic and pacifist Kunta Hadji-Kushiev, who preached a doctrine of brotherly love and nonviolent resistance. Their religious rituals center around the Hadjiist version of the zikr. Literally translated as “remembering,” the zikr is an ecstatic communal recital of the names of God that takes the form of song, dance and, here in Pankisi, the call for “marshua kavkaz”: peace in the Caucasus.

Marshua Kavkaz is also the name Badi gave to the nonprofit she founded in 1999, just after the outbreak of the Second Chechen War. She wanted to promote Chechen and Kist culture and its legacy of peace both in Georgia and abroad, and foster tourism in Pankisi. “I wanted to go against the war with peace,” she says through a translator, “to tell the world that [we] want peace in the world and in Chechnya. These songs are words of peace.”

The songs of the zikr are usually performed privately, in single-sex groups. (Traditionally, says Badi, men practiced the zikr, but around the turn of the 20th century, female-only groups began cropping up in Grozny, Chechnya's capital). Practitioners begin by sitting in a circle in a darkened room, chanting the names of God with increasing intensity, until they are inspired to start moving, first by stamping and clapping along with the music, then by running in ecstasy, singing over and over, “La ilaha ilallah” — there is no God but God.

But Badi saw in the songs and prayers of the zikr an opportunity to present a different face of Chechen culture. Soon after the war began in 1999, Badi approached a village elder, a woman, for permission to publicly perform some of the zikr music, to demonstrate to the world that there was more to Chechnya than violence. Permission was granted, and Badi created Ensemble Aznash, a group of all-female vocalists, which has since performed at festivals of sacred music in Poland, Turkey and Morocco, among other places.

Badi’s desire for peace, she says, was instilled in her at an early age. As a child during the Second World War — in which a disproportionate number of Pankisi men were killed — Badi saw firsthand the effects of violence. She found solace in song. “At school I was very shy,” she says. “I couldn’t say a word. But I was always singing.”

But it was not until the 1990s — a decade that saw war not only in Chechnya but also between Georgia and the separatist regions of Abkazia and South Ossetia — that Badi began writing songs herself, crafting lyrics to go along with traditional Chechen religious music. “Let’s entreat the High God to annihilate the war’s sorrow,” one poem goes, “to establish in the world/Peace and friendship together.”

Although the zikr remains popular in Chechnya, only a few men still practice it, Badi says — though a few do attend small Monday sessions. Women tend to be more interested, perhaps unsurprising in a region where women’s options for activities outside the home remain limited.

But the zikr seems less popular among the young of either gender. Of the 13 women who attend Friday’s noontime session in the annex of the old mosque in Duisi, Pankisi’s largest village, only one looks to be under 60; the rest are far older. When their chanting reaches a fever pitch and the women push aside the carpet, racing in ecstatic circles around the room, more than a few are forced to temporarily rest against the walls; others have difficulty sitting or kneeling, and must use small stools for support.

Badi dismisses the notion that younger people are less interested in the zikr, citing space constraints to explain the low attendance. But among the younger generations, new ways of understanding Islam are taking hold; what locals here call “traditional” Islam, a religion suffused with Chechen and Kist cultural traditions, is dying out. What is taking its place is a more pared-down, Quranic approach to religious practice. Omar Alkhanashvili, a Duisi local who identifies as an adherent to this more modern form of practice, explains that under the repressive Soviet regime, his elders had little information about Islam. Few knew Arabic; fewer still could read the original Quran. Now, as young men learn Arabic, the Islam they practice is more in line with strict Quranic teaching, in which customs like the communal zikr are discouraged in favor of private worship. As 19-year-old Nona Margoshvili, a distant relative of Badi’s, puts it, “Twenty years ago, people had cigarettes, they were drinking. They did not have [much] information about Islam.” Her community’s elders have been slow to change. “Old people don’t listen,” she says, laughing.

The shift has had a palpable influence in the community. A new mosque, called the Wahabist mosque by locals and built with Saudi money, dominates Duisi’s main road; the young men who spend their days outside it — unemployment is rife here — sport long beards, while most older men are clean-shaven. It was once customary for girls to keep their hair uncovered, as Nona does, until marriage, but now about half of female children wear headscarves. Rumor has it one young man recently chastised a local shopkeeper in the village of Jokolo for selling beer. Alarmed, community elders notified the Georgian police. And a few of the men who tell their families they have gone to study Arabic in Saudi Arabia end up in Syria; only last year, two brothers returned in body bags.

But both Badi and Omar insist that Pankisi is a peaceful community; differences in religious outlook are largely theoretical rather than practical. “My father practices the zikr,” Omar tells me. “I do not.” Older people may practice what they see as a more “traditional” — that is, traditionally Chechen — form of Islam, “but we are all Muslims. God will know who is right.”

For her part, Badi, curious about the younger generation’s perspective, set out to find a definitive answer on matters of doctrine and practice. As a child during the Soviet era, she says, she had little access to information about Islam. But she remembers hearing about the sultan of Brunei’s religiously motivated anti-alcohol stance. As a publicly Muslim figure, “he may know better,” she reasoned.

About five years ago, she sent him an email from Tbilisi to ask whether it was true that the zikr was un-Islamic. She didn’t have Internet access at home in Pankisi, she says, so she doesn’t know if he ever answered.

As the interview with Badi comes to a close, she asks if she, along with three other members of Ensemble Aznash, can perform a song. They sing one about life and death, and the life to come.

When they finish, Badi has tears in her eyes; this song always moves her. When the ensemble performed it in Germany, she says, “[We] were all crying; we could not stop.”

They conclude with another song, the one with which they begin nearly all of their public performances: “Marshua Kavkaz,” the prayer for peace.

http://america.aljazeera.com/features/2014/6/the-female-sufi-mysticsofgeorgiaspankisigorge.html

World Cup Blues...

Of The Neoliberal Feminist...

When Lynndie Rana England, along with eleven other American military personnel, was convicted of sexually assaulting and torturing detainees in Abu Gharib, a peculiar stance surfaced in the contemporary discourse of feminism: Among liberal feminists and a certain strata of radical feminists, this comparatively young, white and Western woman was being heralded as righteous harbinger of justice against the specter of the bearded and brown Muslim man. We were told – aggressively and indignantly – that the acceptable strength of womanhood lies in utilizing the liberal state’s apparatus in spreading ‘democracy’ abroad – specifically in the scary Muslim majority East. It was insisted that England was a feminist icon – just like Laura Bush – for hauling Iraqi men around on a leash and assisting the strappado hanging of Manadel al-Jamadi that led to his death. Conveniently omitted from this prototypical account of American justice was the fact that another female American soldier had also recorded the ‘corrective’ rape of an Iraqi teenage boy.

Back home in the United States, Laura Bush was less a feminist and more of a sidekick of her husband. While terming the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan as a feminist attempt to rescue women from local patriarchal violence, Bush occupied both countries but what he did not mention was how on his very first day in the Oval office, he cut off monetary funding to all international family-planning organizations that offered abortion services to the economically abject and counseling to women suffering domestic abuse. This was nothing new: Former heads of neo-colonial and imperial states have normally hijacked feminist rhetoric for their own nefarious goals. One only needs to throw a cursory glance over the ‘gender egalitarian’ rhetoric of generals from the British Empire that aspired to ‘save’ women from colonies while neglecting the gender violations within their own lands. What did raise eyebrows, however, was the increasingly complicit silence Western feminists displayed while the often-male, often-white heads of states would engage in repressive foreign policy as well as cementing prison industrial complexes in their own countries, which specifically targeted men belonging to the lower socio-economic strata of society.

The theft of feminism is nothing nascent to anyone studying the chronological order of feminist waves but in the past decade – or more now – one cannot help but notice that female liberation has become ensnared in a perilous liaison with neoliberal efforts to construct a free-market society. This is what we call neoliberal feminism; a feminism that finds nothing inherently depraved with the mechanism of neoliberalism. It is not limited to willfully adopting cutthroat capitalist ideals of power that throw families on the fringe of social institutions but it is also, in Foucauldian terms, a ‘conduct of conduct’ that remains pathologically obsessed with individualist achievements attained primarily in the center of neoliberal bureaucracy. The male is, as the author of Saving the Muslim Woman Basuli Deb explained brilliantly, normative in neoliberal feminism and nothing is changed. Under neoliberal feminism, women aspire to corporate ideals of success that – like it or not – largely infringe upon the basic rights of the working class. 

There is a reason why young women are being purposefully advised by the likes of ex- State Department officials such as Sheryl Sandberg to ‘lean in’ instead of critically questioning the dynamics of elite liberal feminism.


Furthermore, this (quite literally commodified) brand of feminism is produced as the faux discursive modality to portray the West as the bastion of progression and freedom when it is anything but. Let us take into consideration the harrowing fact that the United States is the world’s leader in incarceration with at least 2.2 million people present in the nation’s prisons or jails. Under this neoliberal democracy, a 500% increase over the last forty years has been witnessed as the prison industrial complex grows like a cancer. Absent from the analysis of American liberal feminists fixated on ‘saving women in the Middle East,’ through M16s and missiles is the state-sanctioned precarity that black and brown American women become victims of. You will not hear Laura Bush, or any First Lady of a neoliberal empire, raise this contention and bring international focus – let alone humanitarian intervention – to it. Of course, it gives a bad impression but most importantly, it reveals how hollow the feminist rhetoric of neoliberal feminism is as it only upholds the security of the upper and upper-middle classes while throwing the poor man – and woman – under the roaring bus.

Some would argue that the demise of feminist politics began when Reagan and Thatcher collaborated to promote privatization and deregulation for the sake of safeguarding the freedom of the individual to compete and consume without interference from the state. What many present-day activists for women’s rights forget – or choose to remain blind to – is the mode through which capitalism co-opts all sorts of opposition to its own ends. It’s a slippery and ugly slope. An example of this distressing reality is the emergence of pseudo-emancipating ‘feminists’ who state that pornography – a male-dominated, for-profit exploitative industry built on the flesh of women including underaged girls – is a medium through which women can ‘reclaim’ their sexuality. The irony renders one nauseous but even worse: This liberal understanding of a lone individual’s ‘empowerment’ becomes a tool in the destruction of lives on a macro-social level. Stoya and Sasha Grey, we are told, are the real feminists of modern age while women who refuse to become traumatized objects for male consumers are prudish and ‘anti-liberation.’ Yet again, neoliberal feminism partakes in the physical, sexual, mental and economic abusive profiteering of a woman and her rights.


Material feminism – one that is cognizant of the effect of class on a woman’s life – is vital. A bourgeois variant of feminism serves the bourgeois woman alone, no one else. We have seen the outcome of the imperial feminist and her entrepreneurial sister – both often the same person – and we know what good is the stance to drop bombs on women to save them and the stance that bellows of empowerment meanwhile employing child labor for domestic work. If young feminists of today seek a better tomorrow, they must materialize efforts on collective social justice – instead of individualist advancement – that is exceptionally compassionate to the needs of the overburdened and impaired. It is the only way forward. There is no other way.

http://www.nation.com.pk/columns/12-Mar-2014/of-the-neoliberal-feminist
March 12, 2014 
Mehreen Kasana

Renewable Resources ...

Hatred Of Women, Not Islam, Fuels Pakistan’s Honour Killings!

On Tuesday afternoon, another gruesome chapter was written in Pakistan’s history. As 25-year-old Farzana Parveen was walking towards the Lahore courthouse on one of the city’s busiest streets, her brother fired a shot at her. Having missed, he then smashed her head with a brick. As she lay wounded, the rest of her family bludgeoned her to death, her loud cries echoing through the street were dozens of people, including the police, looked on.

Farzana Parveen’s life was taken because she married a man of her own choosing, rather than the cousin selected by family elders. The honour killing set off a fury of rage among elite Pakistanis. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called it a “brutal killing” and demanded an investigation. The chief minister of Punjab called it an act of terrorism. The Dawn newspaper, an English daily, called it “particularly horrific.” The Urdu papers responded more tepidly, while Ms. Parveen’s father pathetically muttered that his daughter had “insulted” the family, declaiming that he felt no regret over participating in his own daughter’s murder.

The practice of murdering daughters and sisters who defy familial wishes and supposedly muddy the ‘honour’ of the family is practically a social institution in the tribal belts of South Asia and the Middle East. But before the reflexive Islam bashers begin clearing their throats, it is useful to remember that such crimes have no basis in Islam, which teaches that marriage is a consensual and equal partnership.

The tribal practice is grounded instead in an antediluvian, violent hatred of female sexuality. Not a fear of sexuality, mind you, but a deeply entrenched loathing of it; where the clan’s entire sense of esteem is defined by the chastity of its women. Thus, the woman’s right to self-determination must be negated. Her genitals must be controlled. Her sexuality must be denied. She is to abide by the dictates of her father and brothers or face violent punishments. What we call ‘honour killings’ – a placid and useless term – should actually be called human sacrifice, because such murders-of-shame are relics from our premodern days when humans sacrificed one another based on various superstitions. Notice the almost universal correlation today between honour killings and illiteracy or general lack of education.

The extreme patriarchy of Parveen’s father and brother – of countless fathers and brothers around the world – is rooted in a fundamentally totalitarian understanding of male-female relations. For ultratraditional, ultraconservative men like Parveen’s father, only absolute dominion over the daughter’s reproductive choices will suffice. Anything short of this is warrant for murder. The logical conclusion of this grotesque thinking is genital mutilation or murders so horrific one wonders how such crippling inhumanity poisoned the patriarch’s mind in the first place.

It is self-assuring and self-satisfying to write off honour killings as merely isolated acts of lunatics. They are nothing of the sort. According to Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, nearly 900 women were murdered last year for crimes of dishonour. When unreported murders done in the penitentiary of the patriarchal home are counted, the actual number is in the thousands. These men are not insane. They are behaving according to centuries of ossified tradition. And, even if they were insane, then what of the large mobs who watch in silence?

A common counterargument relativizes these kinds of crimes. It posits that the deadly beating of a woman outside of a bustling courthouse in a major city in Pakistan is no different than various examples of Western patriarchy. It is true that the West is infected by rape culture and is in denial about its own crimes against women. But to be morally serious about what is happening in Pakistan and elsewhere requires noticing the difference in degree. The patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism polluting the minds of too many South Asian males are particularly absolutist. I say this as a man of Pakistani heritage. We have a problem in our culture. We see some of our male figures of authority mistreat their wives and daughters and we adopt such frameworks consciously and unconsciously. We arrange our daughters to be married without their consent and then lash out when they demand equal treatment. We adopt extremely conservative mores towards our sisters and allow our brothers to be liberal and libertine.

What are we afraid of? Can we, for one second, acknowledge that there is a cultural problem here, or will we continue to sanctimoniously blame all of this on ‘those other men over there?’ Within five kilometers of my home, I can think of at least two cases of such extreme, impenitent misogyny. In one case, a Pakistani father beat his daughter after he discovered her long-distance relationship. In another, the case of Aqsa Parvez, her brother strangled her to death with the father’s consent because she objected to wearing the hijab. Everywhere there is an honour killing – a human sacrifice – there is a woman breaking off the chains of tradition. There is a woman demanding the right to live as she wishes, and in her way is a man demanding she get in line.

These women are the real freedom fighters in the Pakistani and wider South Asian and Middle Eastern community, not the cowardly males who use their physical advantage to assault women in the name of some illusory honour, or their supporters in the West and throughout South Asia who rationalize their decisions. One crime too many has been committed against women by the insecure, ignorant, hate-filled mob that is their own family. It is time that we be honest about the causes of such barbarity and begin seriously combatting it, or Farzana Parveen’s name may soon be forgotten like the many women who were sacrificed before her.

OMER AZIZ

The Globe and Mail, Friday, May. 30 2014, 9:48 AM EDT

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/hatred-of-women-not-islam-fuels-pakistans-honour-killings/article18919949/

A Dinka Woman From East Africa

US deploys Special Forces to train military units in North and West Africa...

The New York Times published a front-page article by Eric Schmitt on Monday detailing an Obama administration program aimed at establishing new elite military units in four African nations.

According to the Times, the “secretive program, financed in part with millions of dollars in classified Pentagon spending and carried out by trainers, including members of the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, was begun last year to instruct and equip hundreds of handpicked commandos in Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali.”

Although the ostensible purpose of the program is to combat terrorism, the new detachments are being set up to aid US imperialism in its drive to gain control of natural resources and establish positions of strategic geopolitical importance on the continent.

The Times reports that a total of $70 million is being spent on training and the purchase of weapons and spy equipment for “counterterrorism battalions” in Niger and Mauritania, where, according to senior Obama administration officials, the new units are in their “formative stages.” Though funding for the new military programs has not yet reached Mali, an additional $16 million has been spent to establish two companies of elite soldiers in Libya, where the Obama administration has, according to the Times, “tapped into a classified spending account called Section 1208, devised to aid foreign troops assisting American forces conducting counterterrorism missions.”

The move comes as the US and its Western imperialist rivals—France, the United Kingdom and Germany—are intensifying the neocolonial drive to carve up the African continent. Following the 2011 bombing campaign against Libya, the major imperialist powers have undertaken a series of new military adventures.

The French government under President François Hollande has waged war in Mali and the Central African Republic and the US has expanded its military presence on the continent. As of May 21, US soldiers were officially engaged in military operations in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti. (The US has a permanent military base in Djibouti). Prior to 2011, the US officially had troops on the ground in only four of the above-listed countries.

According to the US African Command (AFRICOM), military exercises and training partnerships have also taken place in South Africa, Morocco, Ghana, Tunisia, Botswana, Senegal, Liberia, Cameroon and Gabon in the last two years.

Details surrounding the new program underscore how American efforts to outstrip Washington’s rivals, including China, in the race for control of the continent have placed US imperialism in league with the exact forces it claims to be opposing.

Libya, one of the four countries where the US military is attempting to establish loyal elite units, is the prime example of US alignment with Islamic fundamentalist forces. A December 2013 report by the Times detailed how the forces that attacked the US consulate and a Central Intelligence Agency outpost in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 had previously been in the pay of the CIA. Such examples of “blowback” are evidence of the connections between the US and terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, which arose from anti-Soviet Islamist forces that were financed and armed by the US prior to and during the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

In Monday’s article, the Times made oblique references to US links to Islamist terrorist forces in Africa. It quoted AFRICOM Commander Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahue as saying: “You have to make sure of who you’re training. It can’t be the standard, ‘Has this guy been a terrorist or some sort of criminal?’ But also, ‘What are his allegiances? Is he true to the country, or is he still bound to his militia?’”

Such statements by US military officials shed light on the events at a former American training camp outside of Tripoli, where the government says Libyan forces receiving US military training were overrun by Islamic militias in the summer of 2013. A report by the Daily Beast published at the end of April revealed that the former US base is now an operating center for Al Qaeda and serves, according to an anonymous US Defense Department official, as part of “a major thoroughfare, the I-95 for foreign fighters into Syria from Africa.”

The Times article references “the collapse of the American counterterrorism training mission last August at Base 27,” and cites it as a “sobering reminder” of the risks associated with the establishment of US-backed elite units. TheTimes cites American military officials who suspect that the raid of Base 27 was “an inside job in which a Libyan officer or soldier tipped off some local Tripoli militia members about the material stored at the base.”

The Times and its military sources have every interest in papering over both the proximity of the connections between the CIA and Al Qaeda-linked forces and the US government’s knowledge of those ties. Whatever the exact details of the working relationship between the US and terrorists, the comment from Donahue and the calls by a former US Special Operations officer cited by theTimes for “more adult supervision” of US-backed elite military units is an acknowledgement that US imperialism chooses to work with forces that pose the danger of “blowback” and against which the “war on terror” is supposedly being waged.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/28/afri-m28.html

By Eric London 
28 May 2014