[...] Many of the pointy-hatted sorcerers who roam the streets this Oct. 31 will be carrying broomsticks or besoms. But few likely know the murky tale of how witches came to be associated with those familiar household objects.And guess what they do with those broomsticks?
The story — full of sex, drugs and Christian inquisitors — starts with poisonous plants like black henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), sometimes called stinking nightshade. [...]
I had never wanted a gun. Now I own a Smith & Wesson revolver. Why?
[...]
Home invasion robberies no longer seemed quite so abstract after a friend down the street was burglarized one day at noon, while she was in the shower.
[...]
Having accepted the reality of a gun in the house, I began to envision dark scenarios. A potential intruder, once an abstraction, became a real force to be vanquished. My husband and I began discussing strategies, defensive positions, reaction times, risks we would have to take. To every new defense, I realized, there is a corresponding new risk.
As we talked, one thing became obvious: I would never be able to defend myself if my husband wasn't home. I'm too small and the shotgun he purchased is too large, too heavy, too awkward.
"We should have a pistol," I finally declared. "Something I can use."
Still, I wrestled with the idea of whether I could become someone else, someone capable of violence. Was I really prepared to kill someone who threatened my property or my life?
Reluctantly, sorrowfully, I found my answer.
And that is how I came to be standing at the counter last week in the gun shop, talking to the salesman, Walt. "I want a revolver," I explained. I had tested several handguns at the range a few days earlier and had realized that semiautomatic pistols are activated by slides that are impossible for me to pull back. The spring is too strong. The only alternative was a revolver, which needs to be cocked and aimed — after loading, of course. The revolver holds six bullets while the semiautomatic pistol uses a clip with nine or 10 bullets. "Six should be enough to stop anyone," I was told.
I had already proved, at the range, that I could pull back the trigger and hit a target. I knew how to assume the proper stance. So when Walt handed me a Ruger, I pointed it at the wall to see how it felt.
Walt, a patient man with gray hair and bifocals, watched as I tried various revolvers before finally settling on a Smith & Wesson, which has a smaller grip than the Ruger and is more in sync with the size of my hand.
It was only when I'd made my decision that I looked around at my fellow customers. I had imagined they would be skinheads or slick-haired, oily types who would poke at each other in amusement at my questions, my stance, my purchase.
Instead, there was a clean-cut fellow wearing shorts and a Polo T-shirt. Several older guys were talking about deer and moose and elk. Everyone spoke softly. They were intent on business. Yes, one man did have a tattoo. But there was also a very nice-looking girl in her 20s, wearing one of those long black summer dresses with the little straps, looking quite glamorous. I saw her examining a Beretta. Obviously, her hands are stronger than mine, I thought, watching her pull back the slide. I resolved to exercise my hands — 20 minutes at the piano playing scales and Bach fugues every morning.
Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years. Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban - and how they fear a Taliban revival. (See pictures of Afghan women and the return of the Taliban.)
I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of TIME. First, I wanted to make sure of Aisha's safety and that she understood what it would mean to be on the cover. She knows that she will become a symbol of the price Afghan women have had to pay for the repressive ideology of the Taliban.
[...]
But bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening - and what can happen - in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban's treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan. (See the cover story "Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban.")
The much publicized release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate about the war. Our story and the haunting cover image by the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber are meant to contribute to that debate. We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground. As lawmakers and citizens begin to sort through the information about the war and make up their minds, our job is to provide context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our time. What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead. [...]
At 16, her father promised her hand in marriage and she was handed over to a large family, who she claims were all members of the Taliban in Oruzgan province. "I spent two years with them and became a prisoner," she says. Tortured and abused, she couldn't take it any longer and decided to run away. Two female neighbors promising to help took her to Kandahar province. But this was just another act of deception. When they arrived to Kandahar her female companions tried to sell Aisha to another man. All three women were stopped by the police and imprisoned. Aisha was locked up because she was a runaway. And although running away is not a crime, in places throughout Afghanistan it is treated as one if you are a woman. A three-year sentence was reduced to five months when President Hamid Karzai pardoned Aisha. But eventually her father-in-law found her and took her back home. That was the first time she met her husband. He came home from Pakistan to take her to Taliban court for dishonoring his family and bringing them shame. The court ruled that her nose and ears must be cut off. An act carried out by her husband in the mountains of Oruzgan where they left her to die. But she survived. And with the help of an American Provincial Reconstruction Team in Oruzgan and the organization Women for Afghan Women (WAW), she is finally getting help. The United Nations estimates that nearly 90 percent of Afghanistan's women suffer from some sort of domestic abuse. "Bibi Aisha is only one example of thousands of girls and women in Afghanistan and throughout the world who are treated this way. Aisha is reminded of that enslavement every time she looks in the mirror. But there still times she can laugh. And at that moment you see her teenage spirit escaping a body that has seen a lifetime of injustice. [...]
It was a scene Saudi women’s rights activists have dreamt of for years.
When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.
But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.
A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.
For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.
According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.
“To see resistance from a woman means a lot,” Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, a Saudi women’s rights activist, told The Media Line news agency. “People are fed up with these religious police, and now they have to pay the price for the humiliation they put people through for years and years. This is just the beginning and there will be more resistance.”
“The media and the Internet have given people a lot of power and the freedom to express their anger,” she said. “The Hai’a are like a militia, but now whenever they do something it’s all over the Internet. This gives them a horrible reputation and gives people power to react.”
[...]
The decision last year by Saudi King Abdullah to open the kingdom’s first co-educational institution, with no religious police on campus, led to a national crises for Saudi Arabia’s conservative religious authorities, with the new university becoming a cultural proxy war for whether or not women and men should be allowed to mix publicly.
A senior Saudi cleric publicly criticized the gender mixing at the university and was summarily fired by the king.
[...]
"There is some sort of change taking place," Nadya Khalife, the Middle East women’s rights researcher for Human Rights Watch, told The Media Line. "There is clearly a shifting mentality regarding to the male guardianship law and similar issues. More women are speaking out, there are changes within the government, there is a mixed university, the king was photographed with women, they want to allow women to work in the courts and there are changes within the justice ministry. So you can witness some kind of change unfolding but it’s not quite clear what’s happening and it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight."
Look at this brave Iranian lioness, first she swing kicks and then she side kicks the neanderthal truncheon wielding riot guard! She gets a few baton strikes but this is the price for freedom and she cares not.
Blessed is our motherland Iran, for having such daughters.
The fear is gone and the momentum continues. [...]
The can's this guy is being forced to suck on are used in toilets. His crime? Wearing Western style hair and clothes.
Note the Iranian News logo on the photos. The government wanted these photos to be seen in the local press, to intimidate the populace.
TABRIZ, Iran (AP) — Presidential hopeful Mir Hossein Mousavi waited in the wings as his wife warmed up the crowd. Zahra Rahnavard quickly had them roaring in approval — and her husband beaming — as she ticked off her demands for women's rights and other reforms.
"We love you, Rahnavard!" shouted the Tabriz University students, as Mousavi clapped.
While the political power couple is a common fixture in the West, Rahnavard is rewriting the role of political spouse in conservative Iran — and could give a boost to her husband's candidacy in the June 12 presidential election.
With her sharp wit and fluid oratory, Rahnavard has fast become a political draw on her own, as well as an important asset to her husband's campaign as the main pro-reform challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Masoud Heidari, a rights activist, said the country "needs to respond to accumulated demands from women and Rahnavard is playing a deservedly good role in that direction."
She brings a rare mix: the liberal cry to fire up reformers, paired with the revolutionary credentials that bring grudging respect from hard-liners.
Even her outfit gives a nod in both directions — an ultraconservative head-to-toe black chador, with a colorful head scarf peeking out and a bag made by traditional village weavers.
[...]
"Rahnavard is reviving hopes that women will get part of their social rights ... Women's rights and freedoms went backward during Ahmadinejad's four years in office. We hope a reformist win will create new hopes for greater freedoms for women," said a supporter, Sima Honarvar.
Rahnavard is not the first high-profile woman in Iranian affairs. Human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 and Masoumeh Ebtekar was a vice president in Khatami's government.
But Rahnavard is the first spouse to take a major campaign role — and promise to keep her public voice if her husband becomes president. By comparison, Khatami's wife was only rarely in the public eye and almost nothing is officially known about Ahmadinejad's wife.
In almost every campaign rally, Rahnavard speaks before her husband.
In Tabriz, 300 miles northwest of Tehran, she questioned why students are imprisoned for expressing their opinions and why liberal-minded professors are forcefully retired.
"It was expected that our universities would be independent. But they are not. Why are students jailed for speaking their minds?" she asked, prompting chants of "political prisoners must be released."
Iran's third-largest city, Tabriz is populated mostly by Iran's Azeri minority. It is Mousavi's hometown, and both he and his wife began their campaign appearance by making a few remarks in the local Azeri-Turkish language before switching to Farsi. [...]
[...] It is almost unbelievable that this should occur in a modern, democratic, Western country, and, moreover, under a government that claims to be liberal, and to care about the right of women and homosexuals among others. But, tracing the actions of the pro-Islamic Labour Party, and of modern liberalism more generally, it should have been predictable. Modern liberalism is not a force for human rights and equality (though it still uses these terms where they can be of use in breaking down British tradition); it is a selfish urge for freedom for one’s own self – others be damned. Multiculturalism frees the liberal from the demands of ‘culture.’ Mass immigration frees him from the need to know his history. Invoking the Inquisition of three hundred years ago frees him from having to confront the reality of Islamic fundamentalism. The establishment of sharia law no doubt frees him from holding any position whatsoever.
I have pointed out before, that the Labour government has colluded with extremist Muslims, even employing a Holocaust denier as an advisor on Muslim affairs. Ken Livingstone, the former Left-wing Mayor of London, has also openly embraced Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a man who believes that wives can be beaten into submission, that homosexuals should be executed, and pregnant Israeli women should be murdered. The UK’s Left-wing Respect Coalition Party asserts that opposition to radical Islam is “the new racism,” and this dangerous sentiment is now received wisdom among those closer to the center of the political spectrum. But Islam is neither a race nor ethnicity, but a religion, and one that has Asian, Black, and White followers. A 2006 UK government report entitled ‘Young Muslims and Extremism,’ notes that a significant number of White Britons were being drawn into Islamic terrorism, and we have seen a few example of White Muslim jihadis since then.
The sharia courts operating in Britain, will hear and pass legally binding judgment on cases involving divorce, financial disputes, and even domestic violence. But, it will not end there. According to the Daily Mail, sharia court officials have said, that they hope, “[…] to take over growing numbers of 'smaller' criminal cases in future,” and extremist clerics have already asserted their aims to establish sharia law for everyone in Britain.[...]
[...] Conservatives and Christians have criticized the so-called “gay lifestyle,” and liberals have always furiously denounced those conservatives and Christians for saying this. But liberals are those who have remained utterly silent when extremist Muslim clerics have called for the execution of homosexuals or the beating of women. The liberal establishment generally, and the Labour government in particular, has betrayed their professed belief in human rights and equality, and are ushering in extremism and intolerance. [...]
Socialism has plenty of dangers inherent to it in it's own right. But what if it were infiltrated and used by a third party, one with no interest in using Socialism as a stepping stone to Communism, but as a stepping stone to an Islamic Sharia-law state? Recent election results in European countries indicate this may be happening on a larger scale than anyone imagined, as Socialist parties there make large gains by running Muslim candidates to gain Islamic votes. [...]
An article from AJM (Alain-Jean Mairet) reveals the collaboration of Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey with Iran. When I first saw the photo above I had trouble grasping who or what that was on the left. But it is indeed Mme Calmy-Rey, looking like a mummy with tissue paper on her head and concluding a deal with the president of Iran to purchase cheap Iranian gas.
The American Embassy in Bern has expressed “disappointment” over the deal and has told the Swiss authorities that this type of agreement sends a “false message”, at the very moment when Tehran “continues to defy the Security Council resolutions ordering the suspension of programs for the enrichment of uranium.” [...]
Male and female police officers clashed with women who were not dressed according to the Islamic dress code.
The clashes, which took place at Haft Tir Square in Tehran, came during the current Iranian security forces campaign to enforce the dress code.
One girl who refused to get into the police car was beaten by police, and removed from the area by civilians who were called to the scene.
Source: Rooz, Iran, May 21, 2007
[...] The Iranian blogosphere is all over this...
Will America ignore this brutality?????????? [...]
[...] today's leftists are neither feminist nor progressive as they seethe and fume and argue for a complete abandonment of the women who are beaten, imprisoned, murdered and disappeared not only in Iran, but throughout the barbaric Islamist world.
I suppose when the world, even the United States, gives you a pass for murdering innocent civilians worldwide, beating up and murdering your own women becomes that much easier. [...]
#1445 - Iranian Police Enforces "Islamic Dress Code" on Women in the Streets of Tehran.[...]
Dress code enforcer: The manteau you are wearing is tight and has a long slit. Don't you think it violates our society's norms? You live in an Islamic country, right? Your head is completely uncovered as well. Your make-up is too heavy.
Dress code enforcer: As an Iranian citizen, do you think the way you are dressed is appropriate?
Woman: My trousers aren't short, and nor is my manteau.
Dress code enforcer: But your head is uncovered, and that scarf you are wearing – do you think it is appropriate?
Woman: So the problem is only with my hair?
Dress code enforcer: Of course. Your head is uncovered. Please rearrange your scarf. What you are wearing is a sarafan. In the Islamic dress code, this is not acceptable as an appropriate covering.
Woman: Why not? It has sleeves, and it is not short...
Dress code enforcer: No, what you are wearing is a sarafan. Do you admit that it's a sarafan?
Woman: So what's the difference between a sarafan and a manteau? It's got sleeves like a manteau.
[...]
Dress code enforcer: Come here, please. Good day. You are an Iranian citizen and a resident of Tehran, just like me. Don't you think that what you are wearing is problematic with regard to the Islamic social norms? What do you think, dear lady? Is it or is it not problematic? Do you agree that it is problematic? Your scarf is too thin, your hair is showing, and your manteau is short and tight. Please be more careful. When you go out, make sure you follow the social norms of this country.
Dress code enforcer: Please wait here for a few moments. Your hair is showing from the back. Your manteau is... Your trousers are too short. Please come with us into the bus. We have some things to discuss with you...
