Free Republic

The joy of tennisCan someone tell me why end of season women tennis championship is held in Doha?? Ah yes, that is to "further women's rights" in Qatar and supposedly in the Middle East in general.For the uninitiated, the girl on the left is Caroline Wozniacki, Danish tennis star. On the right is a lady whose rights are about to be furthered by the said event. Utterly ridiculous. posted by Bravecat @ 2:27 PM 2 Comments: At 28/10/09 22:52, Snake said… It is her "choice" to wear what she is wearing right now. At 28/10/09 22:59, Bravecat said… Yep....

The Left, champions of strict separation of church and state, have come out in support of an American theocracy. How can this be? Could this possibly be the same political machine that ritualistically goes from town to town scanning courthouses for explicit references to God, or even worse, the Ten Commandments? Or the establishment telling little Susie she cannot pray at school? Or the organization forbidding the reading of scripture, even on a purely non-sectarian, academic basis? Surely we can't be talking about the same ideologues. But there is no mistake. The Left supports theocracy, as long as it is...

Rifqa Bary's upcoming hearing in FL on August 21 Is anyone considering a demonstration on this poor girl's behalf? Would I have any takers to come be seen and heard with me? I'm in Jacksonville, and I feel so strongly about this case. Should I call my local news station or anything? Help me, Freepers!

A BRISBANE woman was jailed for eight months in the United Arab Emirates for claiming she was raped by three men after her drink was spiked in a hotel bar. The woman, identified only as Amanda, said she ordered one drink from the bar in the United Arab Emirates hotel she was staying, but then remembered nothing until waking up the next afternoon. Amanda...was arrested after reporting her rape to police and later sentenced to 11 months' jail for having illicit sexual relations and one month for consumption of alcohol. Amanda said she had extensively researched the customs of the...

The strictures on women as nurses stems from the province’s strong tribal society and its puritan reading of Islam. But al-Hadithy, a 49-year-old mother-and-child care specialist, doesn’t accept it. ‘This is ignorance, not Islam,’ he said. ‘Nowhere does Islam say: ‘Let your wife die.” It is worse than ignorance, it unequivocally shows that women are regarded as being a few degrees less than human. You can be sure that few if any Iraqi men would have a problem being treated by a female doctor and/or nurse.

Appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show in 2001, Jordan’s westernized Queen Rania claimed that women in Islam are equal to men, and that we in the West have serious misconceptions on the role of women in the Islamic world. At the time she said: “Islam views women as full and equal partners to men, so rights are guaranteed by Islam.” Islam views women as full and equal partners to men, so rights are guaranteed by Islam. Really?!?!? Does Her Majesty actually believe that, or does she wish to believe it? Is she just saying it because she is talking to...

JEDDAH – Women’s coffee shops are no longer just meeting places for friends or refuges for a moment’s escape from the daily routine. Instead, according to some, they have become the haunts of university students and schoolgirls playing truant to indulge themselves in smoking shisha pipes and cigarettes, with women using the locations as impromptu job agencies, and matchmakers seeking willing bribes. Behind the walls of women’s coffee shops, some say, all sorts of things go on. Salwan Abdullah, a 24-year-old university student, recalls the first time she was invited by a student friend to go to an all-female coffee...

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey is smoothing out differences over a plan to ban bare-it-all bikini waxing. The state is reversing course on the proposal after angry salon owners complained about losing business ahead of swimsuit season.

Right Side News series on the Evils of Islamic Political Ideology and how it is threatening the West, and moving in the USA. Long before the U.S. declared itself a nation, however, America gave women at large great respect. The Uxbridge, Mass. town fathers in 1756 granted the young widow Lydia Taft the right to vote in local matters, for example. America again showed its respect for women in 1789 when the states ratified the U.S. Constitution, inferring rights to women amongst "We the people of the United States," when early 19th century suffragette Abby Kelley Foster first sought votes...

WHY WE DON'T CELEBRATE 'HISTORIANS DAY'February 18, 2009Being gracious winners, this week, liberals howled with delight at George Bush for coming in seventh-to-last in a historians' ranking of the presidents from best to worst. This was pretty shocking. Most liberals can't even name seven U.S. presidents. Being ranked one of the worst presidents by "historians" is like being called "anti-American" by the Nation magazine. And by "historian," I mean a former member of the Weather Underground, who is subsidized by the taxpayer to engage in left-wing political activism in a cushy university job. So congratulations, George Bush! Whenever history professors...

One must wonder at the perverted mind of this Muzzammil Hassan creature, on the one hand he wants to appear moderate and improve the image of Muslims in the American mind on the other hand he acts in the most extreme manner by decapitating his wife, by broadcasting Wahhabi anti-Christian and anti-Jewish sermons from Saudi TV broadcasts, including English subtitles. If that is someone’s idea of moderation, if that is how someone aims to improve the image of his people, it shows both a serious disconnect between the Western mind and those of the worst elements of IslamFascism. There is...

A female journalist who reported on women's rights and spoke out against the dowry system in southern Nepal was killed by a group of attackers, an official said Monday.

Pro-abortion forces that are so transfixed on preserving the status quo that they overlook statutory rape in our own country might want to avert their hyper-focus to help combat a truly inhumane custom practiced in other nations that was shown in disturbing photos in the Washington Post today. The tragedy of female genital mutilation (FGM) was captured in horrifying pictures that should be burned into the brain of anyone who wants to protect women worldwide from oppressive practices and rituals based in ignorance and male domination. Often forgotten is that the battles fought in Afghanistan and Iraq have led to...

In view of last week’s horrific events in Mumbai, in view of the siege of a Coptic Church by 20,000 Muslims in Egypt a few days earlier, one may ask what is it about these terrible events that they are usually perpetrated by those who allege theirs is the Religion of Peace?

The Dutch parliament is considering whether protecting unborn children should supersede the rights of parents to procreate Women in the Netherlands who are deemed by the state to be unfit mothers should be sentenced to take contraception for a prescribed period of two years, according to a draft bill before the Dutch parliament.The proposed legislation would further punish parents who defied it by taking away their newborn infant. "It targets people who have been the subject of judicial intervention because of their bad parenting," explained the author of the bill Marjo Van Dijken of the socialist PvDA. "If someone refuses...

AHMADINEJAD'S NEW ENEMY: WOMEN By AMIR TAHERI September 6, 2008 -- IN one of his last sermons before his death, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini warned of "three threats" to his vision of Islam: the US, the Jews and women. Two decades later, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks he has the United States and the Jews in hand - and is moving on the third "enemy." Women were the first to demonstrate against Khomeini's regime with a mass rally in Tehran on March 8, 1979 - less than a month after the mullahs had seized power. Over the next decade, the authorities...

Al Shura Assurances by: Rachel Paulk, June 25, 2008 A member of the Al-Shura Council (the Saudi equivalent to the U.S. Congress) recently gave a lecture elaborating on the political, social, and economic reforms in development in Saudi Arabia today. Osama bin Mohammed Al-Kurdi, a prominent Saudi leader, stated the following on the progress of women’s rights in the country: “…we have started to create the legal environment in which women can be parties of, and that is already happening. Resolution 120, in my opinion, is the single most important set in formalizing women’s empowerment in Saudi Arabia. Resolution 120...

Sister of Barred Iranian Feminist Accepts Palme Prize March 07, 2008 AFP The Local Iranian feminist Parvin Ardalan's sister accepted a major Swedish rights award, the Olof Palme Prize, on her behalf on Thursday after she was prevented by Tehran from attending the ceremony. Mikael Näve, a secretary at the Olof Palme Memorial Fund, told AFP that Shirin Ardalan had accepted the prize in the presence of about 150 people. A figurehead of the Iranian women's movement, Parvin Ardalan, 36, had been due to accept her award in person but Iranian authorities ordered her off a flight preparing to take...

Keeping women veiled and walking three feet behind a man with no voice, vote, or murdering them before they have a chance to breathe, dooms the society they could have contributed to and condemns the men that perpetuate those philosophies. A 21st Century Society that punishes women by relegating them to a subservient role deserves neither the woman or the future they could have created. Whether it's Christianity, Islam, Catholocism, or Libertarians, Democrats, and Republicans, religions and political systems that attempt to keep women marginalized will ultimately fail. If the 21st Century is anything, it is the Woman's Century. The...

Ten more "official" executions last week bring the number to 50 or the same pace of one a day since January 1st, 2008. Perma Link http://terrornewsbriefs.blogspot.com/2008/02/iran-executions-continue-at-one-day.html Also look at the video article asking to compare 30-yeafrs of the Mullahs with about that of the Monarchy and deciding which you rather have now in Iran.

Suspicious Death in Iran Prison January 22, 2008 The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) FIDH The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the Iranian League for the Defence of Human Rights (LDDHI) urge the Iranian authorities to investigate the death in prison of Mr. Ebrahim Lotfollahi. FIDH and LDDHI furthermore express their deep concern over the increasingly frequent arrests of student activists and women’s rights defenders over the past months. Mr. Ebrahim Lotfollahi, a Kurdish law student, died in the prison of Sanandaj, in Iran’s Kurdish northwestern region, on January 15th, 2008. Mr Lotfollahi was arrested, for unknown...

THANDEESWARA, India -- ...In late 2003, Sharifa Khanam had made headlines with the announcement that she intended to build a women's mosque in a country where women are banned from most Muslim places of worship. Now she eyed the tall weeds poking out of the halted construction. "I feel as though we are in a boat with waves crashing against it," the 41-year-old activist said... The frustrated effort...exposes the Achilles' heel of India's highly touted secular democracy: the abysmal socioeconomic status of Muslims. This became quickly clear to me when I went to Mumbai on a reporting fellowship...to chronicle the...

She is short, powerful and understated. And at one time, she was underestimated. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made clear her perspective on some issues when she spoke Sunday at an Atlanta synagogue. It matters that women and minorities are on the high court — if only for the public get equal access to the bathroom, she said in one of the lighter moments of her talk. The court itself, while collegial, has entered a period of turbulence with a series of 5-4 decisions that started with Bush v. Gore, the decision that ended the 2000 presidential election...

No reader would be faulted for thinking that the title of this column is a spoof. After all, Reform Judaism, like liberal Christian denominations, is exquisitely sensitive to women's equality. Thus, Reform Judaism was the first major Jewish denomination to ordain women, and the first to have its seminaries discourage referring to God as "he." One would think, then, that the last thing the head of a movement devoted to women's equality would endorse is the covering of women's faces with a veil. This is one of the most dehumanizing and degrading practices that has ever been foisted on women....

Iran: Feminists Face Flogging July 26, 2007 Adnkronos International AKI Tehran -- The trials of 31 feminists arrested on 3 March for having organised a sit-in in front of the Revolutionary Court of Tehran have resumed in the capital. The womens' rights activists are this time being tried individually and accused collectively of "seditious meeting" and "plotting against state security". The first ten have been given jail terms of between six months and five years, of whom three are also to be flogged. Most of the women received suspended sentences. Only one woman, Behareh Hedayat, remains in jail but not...

RUSH: Kim Gandy, who is the president of the NAGs -- the National Association of Gals -- has written a piece. It's on the NAGs' website: www.NAG.org. She writes this. "Try to put yourself in this picture: Imagine you are a woman with two children, and you live in perpetual fear. Your husband hits you frequently, and threatens to put you on the street if you ask for money to buy groceries or clothes for the kids. As primary caregiver to your kids, and due to lack of money and other resources, going to school is not an option. You...

During my three years as a columnist for my college newspaper, I’ve resisted frequent requests that I explain my opposition to feminism. Apparently, a lot of people are shocked to discover a female college student who does not spend her days singing the praises of the National Organization for Women. Feminists fight for my rights, my readers tell me – so why am I constantly criticizing them? I usually decline to answer because I think my columns speak for themselves. However, since I’m currently working on a book about this subject, I’ve decided to answer the question I hear most...

In a debate where "equal" means repressive and "right" means agenda, Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-New York) is leading the charge to demand a constitutional amendment that will "finally guarantee women equality." The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) endeavors to remove all differences - social, biological and sexual - between males and females, while granting enormous flexibility to increasingly activist judges to interpret the amendment as they deem appropriate. Several states that have already ratified a state ERA are finding that they've done little more than pave the way for homosexual marriage, federally funded abortion, the inclusion of women in the...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Equal rights for women is a concept Americans would easily support. But, a constitutional amendment Congressional Democrats have reintroduced to enshrine it is nothing more than a phony attempt to promote abortion, pro-life groups say.Leading abortion advocates, including Sens. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California as well as Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jarrold Nadler of New York, are joining with the Feminist Majority Foundation to reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment today.The ERA passed Congress in 1972 but lapsed in 1982 when it fell three states short of ratification. The lawmakers will reintroduce the...

A 19-year-old Saudi woman who was kidnapped, beaten and gang raped by seven men who then took photos of their victim and threatened to kill her, was sentenced under the country's Islamic-based law to 90 lashes for the "crime" of being alone with a man not related to her. The woman is appealing to Saudi King Abdullah to intervene in the controversial case.

In a landmark religious decision, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Dr. Ali Gomaa, has upheld a fatwa (religious opinion) he issued a year ago stating that, according to Islamic law, women in contemporary Islamic societies have the right to become heads of state and lead nations based upon the legal reasoning of Imam Al-Tabari allowing women to serve in political positions as well as judges. The Grand Mufti, who is the highest ranking Islamic jurist in Egypt and one of the Muslim world’s most influential scholars, reiterated his position in response to reports published in the Egyptian and international press...

Two years ago, movie director Theo van Gogh’s throat was cut on a street in Amsterdam in the name of radical Islam. I had partaken in his last work, Submission, where we represented, in the most accurate way possible, the condition of Muslim women: tyranny, humiliations, violence. In this film, we showed Muslim women who had finally rebelled, talking to God in a tone of defiance. It made Imam Fawaz of the Hague scream with hate during the delivery of a vengeful sermon. My friend Theo, the “criminal bastard”, was subsequently riddled with bullets and stabbed to death with a...

Rape is a four-letter word. When police get a report of one, it flies to the top of their priority list. Even, police say, when that reaction is exploited. Sexual assaults, like other crimes, are sometimes falsely reported. People pretend to have been raped for reasons ranging from a cry for attention to hiding an infidelity. In a recent Grapevine case, police believe a woman who reported being raped in her apartment may have been looking for an excuse to break her lease. After committing more than a week of resources to the investigation, Grapevine officers concluded that the evidence...

Supporters of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf rallied Friday to back amendments to the country’s rape laws that drop the death penalty for extramarital sex and revise a clause on making victims produce four witnesses to prove rape cases. More than 10,000 members of Mutahida Qami Movement, an ethnic-based party supporting Musharraf, marched through Karachi, some carrying signs praising the bill as a ‘‘victory for women.’’ Pakistan’s lower house of parliament approved the amendments Wednesday and Musharraf urged the Senate to approve the amendments within days. Sher Afghan, federal minister for parliamentary affairs, has said that the government-controlled Senate will approve...

SYDNEY, Australia - Australia's top Islamic cleric, under fire for comparing women who go without head scarves to "uncovered meat," ignored his promise to refrain from preaching and delivered a sermon to the applause of hundreds of supporters Friday. Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali, mufti of Australia since 1989, had apologized last week for any offense he caused to women and then agreed with the Lakemba Mosque's administrators to take three months off from preaching as outraged politicians called for his resignation. But the 65-year-old native of Egypt appeared for noon prayers at the mosque Friday, Muslims' sabbath, and preached for...

Muslim women from around the world are gathering in Spain Friday for a three-day conference focusing on the problems of Islamic law and family codes in the Islamic world. The Muslim Feminists meeting aim is to promote the rights of Muslim women. The Barcelona meeting marks the second international conference of what organizers are calling Islamic Feminism. The participants come from around the world, and many of them are well-educated women, versed in the Koran. They argue that the Muslim holy book and Islamic sharia laws do not put women on a lower footing than men. Rather, they argue, the...

The UN flaunts national sovereignty and international law in its effort to mandate leftist policies.Last week, a well-respected insider and two stalwart outsiders stood up against the United Nations’ (UN) bullying. They’ve had their fill of the UN forcing nations into compliance with non-binding treaties engineered by the left to impose their views on the rest of the world. The UN, through scolding, pressure, criticism and warnings, coerces member nations into supporting actions and ideology that often are contrary to their national interests and, sometimes, even their country’s laws. Thus, the UN flaunts national sovereignty and international law in its...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Her father said it would be a two-week holiday to learn about her Pakistani heritage. But the British woman soon found herself captive in a remote tribal village for over a year and promised in marriage to a first cousin she'd never met. With the British High Commission's help this month, the woman escaped Pakistan shortly before her planned wedding, avoiding the phenomenon of forced marriage that befalls scores of foreign women, including Americans, annually in this deeply conservative Islamic country. -snip- Malik described forced marriages as "despicable" and contrary to Pakistan and Islamic law. She said...

The man accused of killing Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh confessed to a Dutch court that he acted out of his religious beliefs, saying he would do "exactly the same" if he were ever set free. "I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion," 27-year-old Dutch-Moroccan national Mohammed Bouyeri told the court in Amsterdam on the final day of his trial. Prosecutor Frits van Straelen demanded a life sentence for Bouyeri for killing Van Gogh on an Amsterdam street on November 2, 2004. He recalled the particular brutality of the murder in...

Islamabad, 22 August (AKI/DAWN) - The government of Pakistan seeking to pass a Protection of Women Rights Bill met fierce resistance from its opponents when it was tabled in parliament and later referred to an all-party select committee for scrutiny. The Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) alliance of six Islamic parties rejected the bill as "un-Islamic", vowing on Monday to resist it inside and outside parliament and many of its members tore up copies of the draft bill after it was introduced in the house by Pakistan's law and justice minister Mohammad Wasi Zafar. The MMA staged a token walk-out in protest...

Fact Sheet Bureau of Public Affairs Washington, DC August 4, 2006 The Iranian Regime: Human Rights and Civil Liberties Under Siege “Let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free democratic Iran.” ( President George W. Bush ) The Iranian people call out for freedom and respect for their human rights. Courageous voices that speak out risk suppression, imprisonment, and violent government crackdowns. The...

BATMAN, Turkey For 17-year- old Derya, a waif-like woman, the order to kill herself came from an uncle and was delivered in a text message to her cellphone. "You have blackened our name," it read. "Kill yourself and clean our shame or we will kill you first." Derya said her crime was to fall for a boy she met at school. She knew the risks: Her aunt had been killed by her grandfather for seeing a boy. But after being cloistered and veiled for most of her life, she said, she felt free for the first time and wanted to...

Iran Police Beat Women Activists June 12, 2006 BBC News BBCi Police in Iran have beaten a small group of women activists trying to hold a protest for greater legal rights in the biggest square of the capital. Several people were arrested by the security forces who moved in almost as soon as activists started gathering. About 20 women sat on the grass in Haft-e Tir Square in central Teheran and began to sing a feminist song. They were calling for equal divorce and custody rights and a ban on polygamy. The BBC's Frances Harrison in Tehran says the police...

Iranian police with batons and shields beat women's rights demonstrators in a downtown Tehran square Monday, injuring one protester and detaining 20. The injured woman was taken to a hospital with wounds to her face and head. Her identity and further details were not immediately available. The protest by about 200 women was organized by a previously unknown group calling itself the Labor and Communist Party. An invitation delivered to The Associated Press on Sunday demanded equal rights for women and the nullification of a law allowing Iranian men to have four wives. "We are women, we are human, but...

CARACAS, Venezuela - In the land of beauty queens, there seems to be little justice for women. In 2001, Linda Loaiza Lopez, then 18, was tied up, tortured and raped repeatedly during a four-month captivity. In the aftermath, Lopez weathered nine surgeries to repair her damaged face and body, a legal process that went through the hands of 59 judges and six prosecutors, accusations of prostitution against her and a hunger strike to force a trial of her assailant. But despite the evidence against the man, Luis Carrera, and suggestions that he may be a repeat offender, a judge dismissed...

A statement from Yale University, defending its decision to admit former Taliban spokesman Ramatullah Hashemi, explained that he had "escaped the wreckage of Afghanistan." To anyone who is aware of the Taliban's barbaric treatment of the Afghan people, such words are offensive--as if Mr. Hashemi were not himself part of the wrecking crew. It is even more disturbing to learn that, while Mr. Hashemi sailed through Yale's admissions process, the school turned down the opportunity to enroll women who really did escape the wreckage of Afghanistan. In 2002, Yale received a letter from Paula Nirschel, the founder of the Initiative...

Women, Who make up the Majority of the Democratic Party, are being Stabbed in the back, by a Few Senate Leaders, a Governor and a whole bunch of spineless Women's Organizations. Democratic women are about to be stabbed in the back. It started out as a plan by Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Ed Rendell. They saw that Bob Casey, jr., son of a former PA governor, polled well against Santorum. So they made up their minds that THEY would decide who would be the Democratic candidate to run in the 2006 PA senate race. There's one problem with that....

Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, the Iranian regime has increased its oppressive tactics at home. The government is indeed tightening its fascist fist around the Iranian people, particularly women. It plans to segregate Iran’s pedestrian walkways on a gender basis, according to a deputy in Iran’s Parliament. Early this March, security forces removed several hundred women spectators from an indoor stadium by force as they were watching athletes performing in the 2006 Gymnastics World Cup tournament being held in Tehran, eye-witnesses have reported. A few days earlier, State Security Forces attacked female soccer fans in Tehran after they held a defiant...

NEW YORK - Contending that women have more options than they do in the event of an unintended pregnancy, men's rights activists are mounting a long shot legal campaign aimed at giving them the chance to opt out of financial responsibility for raising a child. ADVERTISEMENT The National Center for Men has prepared a lawsuit — nicknamed Roe v. Wadefor Men — to be filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Michigan on behalf of a 25-year-old computer programmer ordered to pay child support for his ex-girlfriend's daughter. The suit addresses the issue of male reproductive rights, contending that lack...

Tackling Afghanistan's maternal mortality rate, among the highest in the world, is a priority in the country where women suffer abuses ranging from forced marriage to honor killings, says Women's Affairs Minister Massouda Jalal. More than 1,600 of every 100,000 Afghan women die giving birth. With each having on average more than six children, a woman's risk of maternal death is one in about 10, according to official statistics. "If they lose their lives, we cannot talk of other rights so for us it is a priority that the maternal mortality rate should be decreased," Jalal told AFP in an...