Free Republic

Hillary, our dear friend. A few days ago, you expressed your deep concern about harm to the status of women in Israel, which you said reminds you of the events in Iran. The truth is you surprised us. Really. We did not think that in the midst of a range of international disputes, along with the reversal of the Arab Spring that now turns out to be winter, Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and other real and tangible threats, you would still manage to find time to deal with the status of women. But we certainly agree with you –...

The woman of Afghanistan are facing a crisis which threatens to roll back many of the advances in equality and human rights that the West promised after the fall of the Taliban. Brothels in Kabul continue to service NATO officials and contractors, burkas are once again becoming the norm, and Afghan women continued to be legally viewed as mere property of their families and husbands, with criminal penalties for failing to act as property. As one of her supporters, this author expected more from First Lady Michelle Obama. While she has won praise for her excellent fashion sense and her...

When Shehlla Khan's husband became ill, it fell on her to take their three children to the pool. But for Khan, who is Muslim, the task was difficult. The Columbia resident said she was concerned about people watching her swim in the conservative, cover-all dress required by Islamic dress codes, and thinking: "What's wrong? Why can't you take it off?" So Khan, 39, brought the issue up with members of her Dar Al-Taqwa mosque in Ellicott City. The mosque, along with members of a faith-based county group, People Acting Together in Howard, met with the Columbia Association to create a...

Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider. This, we are told, is intolerable. This is a deformation of American democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action. What action? The rich must pay their fair share. Though the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50 percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more. That's an appealing argument to many, but one that would...

"Women's activist Mavis Leno and CNN Muslim producer dialogue in Dallas," by Dina Malki for the Examiner, October 24: At the 26th annual Dallas Women’s Foundation’s luncheon, Mavis Leno, wife of talk show's comedian Jay Leno, shared with the audience accounts about her journey into activism to help empower Afghani women and girls under the Taliban regime.... When asked about the role of Islam in the status of women in Afghanistan, Leno confirmed that “the Quran is more liberal with women than the Bible.”

Women are to be allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia. K ing Abdullah bin Abdulaziz announced the change yesterday and also said women would be allowed to run in elections. However, the new law will not come into force until 2015. In a speech, the king said the move was in accordance with sharia law.

A Look at the Burqua: Simple Yet Controversial, Repressive Yet Expressive, Modest Yet So Revealing.

Population: The vice president gives a thumbs up to Beijing's policy of sustainable growth through forced population control. This is no gaffe. The White House endorses this policy. Just ask the president's science adviser. We are used to the "mouth that roared" putting his foot in it. But Vice President Joe Biden's remarks at Sichuan University in China clearly embrace the progressive belief that people are a plague on the Earth — not its greatest resource. "Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I'm not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you're...

<p>CANNES, France (AP) — In a remote village in North Africa, women use the only weapon they have — sex — and go on a "love strike" that challenges traditional gender roles.</p> <p>Director Radu Mihaileanu says he sees the fictional gender revolt depicted in his new movie "The Source" as crucial to the success of popular uprisings that have toppled dictators in Tunisia and Egypt this year and still smolder across the Arab world.</p>

Freedom of speech and women's rights just took a major hit in Denmark earlier today when the public prosecutor found Lars Hedegaard, the President of the Danish (and International) Free Press Society, guilty of "hate speech" under section 266b of the Danish penal code. Hedegaard's crime was to note "the great number of family rapes in areas dominated by Muslim culture in Denmark." ...

Women advocates, both liberal and conservative, are frustrated by the media’s fascination with the narrative that for the first time in American history, women, not men, were supposedly key in pushing for the use of military force against a foreign government. Reports highlight that the three-woman diplomatic team of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the Office of Multilateral and Human Rights Director Samantha Power pushed the male-dominated administration to take military action against Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi. Many women are not impressed, believing that it is somewhat sexist and condescending to be surprised that a...

In the America I grew up in, I was raised to respect women and protect them. In that regards, there was certainly nothing unusual about my upbringing. My father and mother stubbornly drilled those concepts into my stubborn head. I was taught to open the door for a woman. While sitting on a bus or in a doctor’s waiting room, I was instructed to give up my seat to a woman. It is a practice I continue today.

The UN has quietly made way for Iran to join the global body's Commission on the Status of Women Friday, just days after very publicly suspending Libya from its Human Rights Council. The Islamic Republic — which last year sentenced a supposedly adulterous woman to death by stoning and deploys police to harass women not deemed to be sufficiently covered — became one of the commission's 45 members as part of a group of 11 incoming countries. As many countries left the commission at the close of its 55th session on Friday, opening those slots for the new members, each...

Afghan women's shelters face new rules Published: Feb. 10, 2011 at 10:22 PM ArticleListenComments (0) KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- The Afghan government is considering new rules that would require women to get permission from a government committee to live in a shelter. Women would also have to be examined to make sure they are virgins before they could enter shelters, The New York Times reported Thursday

Making the rounds on YouTube these days is a film of a group of manly looking women preparing for and conducting a "flash dance" in a Philadelphia food store. The crew of ladies, dressed in tight black clothes and sequined accessories, arrives at The Fresh Grocer supermarket, breaks into a preplanned chant ordering shoppers not to buy Sabra and Tribe hummus and telling them to oppose Israeli "apartheid" and support "Palestine." From their attire and attitude, it is fairly clear that the participants in the video would congratulate themselves on their commitment to the downtrodden, the wretched of the earth...

Excuse me people, I'm going to talk with strong words about women's issues. I realized that violent is not only coming from men but also coming from women themselves like mother to her daughter , or sister to her sister..but the worse one is that coming from the other gender (male), the problem here in our community especially in those closed-minded societies; that woman is a piece of furniture & if she will ask for her rights they would be judge her as a bad person, that she wouldn't obey to manly societies!!! [...] When I talked to women who...

Referring to the anonymizing invisibility of the burqa, Sihem Habchi, president of Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS) declares: I’m Muslim and I can’t accept that because I’m a woman I have to disappear. She was commenting about the fact that the French have banned the Mohammedan custom of making women wear bags over their heads. We can expect leftists all over the world to rise up in outrage over this assault on a woman’s basic freedom to be forced to wear a bag over her head. Most particularly, we can expect establishment femisogynists to rush to the defence of Muslim...

I believe humans have rights & this is who I am first and I am Iraqi second. We should treat other people by humanity in first place. I respect what others believe, their cultures, societies but I will take what is good for my believes & traditions. This is what they call to be "open minded", always we live in close boxes never accept others, even don't listen to them, I learned to "Think outside the box!". I'm tired of living in fears, fears from tomorrow, from others re-actions on this & that. I'm tired of living in fear's tornado,...

Another day and I'm sitting here without anything to do. I'm searching for a good channel to watch but as usual, nothing really captures my interest. Sadly, television is the only entertainment women really have and nothing good is on. It's 120 degrees outside and I'm thankful for the few hours of power a day we get so I feel cool (Baghdad only averaged 5 hours of power per household for the entire month of July.) But our lives are so drab and boring, even monotonous. All the luxuries of the west are missing in our democracy. The movie theaters,...

When women’s rights activist Wajiha Al-Huwaidar flew out of Saudi Arabia last week for a holiday in Italy with her family, she was hoping for a brief respite from what she describes as the ‘gender apartheid kingdom.’ As she left, her husband received an automated SMS text message from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informing him that his wife, legally considered his ‘dependant’ under Saudi Arabia’s strict gendered guardianship system, had left the country. “I am an adult woman that has been earning my own income for over a decade now but according to the Saudi government, I am a...

The United Nations has elected Iran to the Commission on the Status of Women. According to their own website, the Commission is "dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women.” If so, Iran would seem beyond just a curious choice as a member. Current legal code in Iran actually defines the sexes as unequal. Men’s rights are codified as superior to women. According to Nobel Peace Laureate Shrin Ebadi, the first women judge in Iran before the 1979 revolution and imposition of the current Islamic law, "The criminal laws adopted after the revolution unfortunately took away a woman's human...

Tim Pawlenty, the pro-life Minnesota governor and potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate, is drawing cheers and jeers from pro-life and pro-abortion groups for declaring April as a month to help women negatively affected by their abortions. As LifeNews.com first reported two weeks ago, Pawlenty and Texas Gov. Rick Perry both declared April as Abortion Recovery/Awareness Month. Lisa Dudley, Director of Operation Outcry, a group that helps women who regret their abortions speak out, told LifeNews.com at the time that Pawlenty's move showed he has an "understanding of the consequences of abortion" and a " willingness to protect women and the...

From the day the founding Fathers risked their liberty and life by signing the Declaration of Independence, there has been those who have wanted to sink this great ship called the United States of America. Well 143 years later the good ship America took a torpedo hit that at the time seemed like just another glancing blow. What many still consider the greatest step forward in equality for the sexes, was more then just a glancing blow however. It was in fact a deadly strike that entered the very heart of the ship and has been smoldering since. The...

You’ve got a long way to go, baby. And don’t you forget it. This oasis of freedom and equality we call the United States? It’s all a mirage, says leftist feminist Jessica Valenti. In fact, “We’re suffering under the mass delusion that women in America have achieved equality.” Well, thanks for the armchair diagnosis, Jessica, but I won’t play a victim character in the live action role playing game you call feminism. And that’s exactly what leftist feminism is: an elaborate fantasy world spun from ginned up scare-tistics and cherry-picked anecdotes. Like Trutherism and Birtherism, it provides participants with the...

The New York State Senate on Tuesday night expelled a senator convicted of assaulting his companion, the first time a member of the Legislature was forced from office in nearly a century. Hiram Monserrate, a Democrat from Queens, was convicted last fall of misdemeanor assault after a fight with his companion, Karla Giraldo, that left her with a deep gash on her face, though he was acquitted of more serious felony assault charges. Rather than bringing a close to Mr. Monserrate’s legislative career, the expulsion could be the beginning of a lengthy fight that would play out in the courts...

A Warning to America's Parents MUSLIMS IN 21ST CENTURY AMERICA: HARSH TREATMENT OF MUSLIM WOMEN By Frosty Wooldridge thelastcrusade.org Part 6: how Muslim men treat their women, clashing cultures of Middle East and West, silent-assertion’s ultimate dilemmaUnfortunately, Islam abhors equality for women. Each year, in alliance with Sharia Law, thousands of Muslim husbands and sons kill their wives and daughters in accordance with “honor killings.” They behead them, strangle them, stone them and shoot them. If a Muslim woman suffers rape, Muslim men blame the woman. Then a father, husband or son may kill that woman for dishonoring the...

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....