Influential Pukhtun (Pashtun) Women: Honoring Dr. Shaheen Sardar Ali

[photo of Dr. Shaheen Sardar Ali is from here. This image also appears on a site linked to in this post]

Just below is a website created to celebrate the courage and lives of great Pashtun women who have, each in their own ways, fought for human rights. These are women who have fought hard to have their voices heard. Some of these women continue fighting for dignity, safety, and liberation. Tragically, not all of them have survived the battle.

[24 March 2011 UPDATE: I'm taking this sentence out. It appeared at the end of the paragraph above. For the reason why, please see Serenity's comment below. Thank you Serenity!! This is the sentence: And men's war against women goes on uninterrupted by other men.]

I posted in July about one of the women, Malalai Joya, whose bravery has been recognised at this website (an album).

Here I will copy and paste information about the courageous work of another great woman, also pictured in the album:

Dr. Shaheen Sardar Ali author of the book "Gender and Human Rights in Islam and International Law: Equal before Allah, Unequal before Man" is a very accomplished woman who has through her distinguished career gained international respect and admiration. She also holds the distinction of being the first female minister from the conservative NWFP when she served as Minister of Health, Population Welfare and Women's Development in 2001, which makes her one of a handful of high-ranking female officeholders in Pakistan.

Contributing on a regular basis to radio and television programs and facilitating discussions as commentator/discussant on current affairs/Islamic Law/Muslim World/Pakistan/South Asia/Human Rights she has become the face and voice of not only the Pukhtun woman but of also the Muslim woman.

In 1974 a young, pretty Pukhtun woman made headlines when she became the first female gold medalist at the University of Peshawar when she did her BA with distinction. This is the woman who not only my mother named me after (because I was born the same day as the headlines), but many other mothers named their daughters too. There were many girls named Shaheen in my class. Dr Ali went to on to graduate from Law school in 1976 and was not only awarded another gold medal but also received the prestigious Presidential Award for outstanding performance. In 1985 she received another gold medal for her Masters in Political Science from the University of Peshawar, Pakistan.

Dr Ali went on to earn her PhD in1998 at the University of Hull, England where she had also earned her LLM in 1991 with distinction. In 1993, she earned an advanced Diploma in Human Rights at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, University of Lund, Sweden.

Due to world wide admiration for her work in gender equality and human rights, she was awarded Honorable mention in the UNESCO Prize for development of the teaching of Human Rights in 1992. She has also served as the Chair of National Commission on the Status of Women of Pakistan.

Starting her career as professor at the Faculty of Law in Pakistan's University of Peshawar 1984-1995, she is currently teaching at University of Warwick, as well as Visiting Professor at the Women’s Law Institute, University of Oslo, Norway since 1996. As a Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, (January-February 2005), she has taught a course on Gender and Human Rights in Islam.

Dr Ali has been a consultant for a range of international bodies, including DFID, NORAD, UNICEF, UNIFEM, to name a few. Being a member of the British Council Task Force on Gender and Development and she has served on the National Commission of Inquiry on Women as well as the Prime Minister's Consultative Committee on Women in Pakistan. She is also one of the founding members and coordinator of the South Asian Research network on Gender, Law and Governance (SARN). She is also the founder and Core Group Member of the Human Rights Study Centre, Faculty of Law, University of Peshawar, Pakistan established in collaboration with NORAD and the Institute of Women’s Law, University of Oslo, Norway.

Professor Ali’s areas of teaching include Islamic Law, Islamic Jurisprudence, Comparative Perspectives on Gender, Law and Development, International Law of Human Rights, and Constitutional Theory. She has authored five books and more than two dozen articles as well as fifteen chapters in books. Topics include human rights, family law, alternative dispute resolution, women’s rights, and ethnic minority issues in Pakistan, and gender, law and development.
(Source for the information above can be found here)

END OF POST.

Jennifer Drew on The War Against Women and Men's Refusal Stop Men From Perpetuating It

[image is from here, at a blog called The Kitchen Table. That blog is now archived only and I link it on the right side of this page in the blogroll]

The above image appears on The Kitchen Table blog in a post which contains a link to an article from the NYT. The New York Times piece doesn't show the image above, however. Instead, the NYT shows a different image with a story about Afghan women protesting in their home country, against laws that would make men's violence against women, and other means of subordinating women, much more "legal". I wish I had more information about the women in the image above, and chose it as a visual reminder that women are struggling to survive men's war against them, globally. It's rather telling of the conditions of women in patriarchies across the Earth, that when I see an image of women in protest, it is generally depicting an effort by women to fight for their rights and liberty, against those inhumane "rights and liberties" of men, who rule the places where women protest. Unfortunately, white men tend to do one of two things regarding images such as this one: they either believe it's only "those" men (usually of color) who are abusing women, or they believe that such an image proves that conditions here in the white, white West are not at all misogynistic and oppressively brutal to women as a class.

What follows is radical feminist Jennifer Drew's response to this October 7, 2009 post, where it also appears as a comment.

Increasingly, and with a combination of rage and a hope that refuses to die--even while on life support, I believe that if men can't listen to and hear women speak out on this matter of emergency, fuck them for listening only to a man. Fuck them for being so SELF-CENTERED, MISOGYNISTIC, and INDIFFERENT as to think women don't speak truth on matters which most negatively impact their own and other women's lives.

So here's Jennifer Drew's comment, and to all men: READ THIS TOO, and read it as if the person you trusted most in the world to tell you the truth were saying it, to you, every hour of every day of your life, because this IS that much of an emergency. From Jennifer Drew to Anonymous of October 7:

So true [...] and every word you write is fact not fiction, not man-hating - just facts.

This also shows society is indeed male-centered, male-dominated and male-obsessed.

Where indeed are the men loudly shaming other men who rape and commit male violence against women. I and many, many women continue to wait in vain. In the meantime women are hounded, sexually insulted and denied their right of speaking their truth.

Granted there are a few men who dare to challenge other men but I refuse to put them on pedestals. Instead they are doing what all or most men should do and that is denounce men who hold women in contempt; refuse to hold misogynistic views and finally but perhaps most importantly, believe women like men are human and innately entitled to human status and all it entails. Those men who go against dominant masculinity are not more worthy or more praiseworthy rather they are doing what all men should be taught as boys and that is women just like men are human and women are not men's sexual commodities or put on this earth to cater to men's every whim, demand or pseudo male sex right.

If any male imagines men's crimes against women are exaggerated and lies then do yourselves a favour and read The War Against Women by Marilyn French. Oh but I forget anything written by a woman and particularly a feminist woman is apparently man-hating and can be dismissed as 'fantasy.' I wish!

Is it really asking too much for men to cease enacting 'bystander behaviour' and for once just once -condemn those men who rape and commit other forms of sexual violence against women. For once speak out against normalisation of prostitution because despite propaganda it is men who are driving the sexual exploitation of women and girls not the reverse.

Yes, because it is all about male power and male control over women. Now I await a deluge of hysterical complaints from men all claiming they are being victimised by such 'unjust treatment.' So it continues - men's never ending war on women.

END OF POST.

"The Good Man" and some notes about Man Hating

[image is from here]

I have done what I can (so far) to identify the phallusies found suffusing the myth of man-hating, comparing it to the reality of woman-hating elsewhere on this blog.

But, I do not wish to shame or silence anyone who does, in fact, hate men. Such a state of being is rare indeed, not encoded in law, not institutionalised, not found in any centuries old customs. But, it exists, because, generally speaking, it is better to hate those who harm you than to hate yourself for being so harmed. And it is better still not to hate at all. James Baldwin and Andrea Dworkin taught me that.

But, against great odds, some of us do hate men, most often particular perpetrators. I used to hate men. I don't any more, not due to any improvement in men's behavior, to be sure. Instead of hate, I feel disappointment, despair, and rage at how much power men have globally and how little of it is used to systematically stop other men from mistreating and abusing women.

Should there be a trial, perhaps a class action suit leveled against men by women in a feminist court, I hope that all men who are living their lives without regularly confronting other men on our violence against and domination of women are found guilty of being accomplices to the garrisoned crime of gynocide.

For that man who doesn't rape girls or women, who would never belittle or beat the shit out of a woman he proclaims to love, who won't use and abuse the women in pornography and prostitution, for that man who respects one woman he knows, I have a title. I call him "The Good Man". I use this term as a political parallel to the term I grew up understanding with increasing horror: "The Good German".

The notion of "a good German", references historically real European people who lived during the time of Hitler's rule. Such a person believed they were not to blame for allowing Hitler to persecute European Jews and other ethnic and political groups, who, ostensibly, did not see the Nazi Holocaust as it occurred before their eyes.

The Good German witnessed Jews in their region being arrested, shops shut down marked "Juden", families taken away in tears and terror. The Good German heard the rumbling of the cattle cars, smelled the smoke, saw the ashen sky, and still believed in Hitler and his political philosophy of economic and cultural strength through the eradication of certain people from European societies. These were the people who later claimed to not know what was going on. Exactly what part of the Nazi atrocity didn't reach them? Sure, most Germans and other non-Jewish Europeans didn't work in the Concentration Camps, weren't members of the SS, and didn't wear brown shirts. But they saw things that were bigoted and atrocious and did nothing to find out more and stop those cattle cars, liberating the people in them. They did not try and kill Nazis. They chose to believe in a myth: that Germany could be great, even if it required genocide to be great.

The U.S. is not Nazi Germany. George W. Bush was not "the new Adolph Hitler" and any who think he was, or who think Barack Obama is, are obviously grossly ignorant about European and U.S. American history and what constitutes a fascistic militarised police state operating out of the most dangerous forms of bigotry--those acted out. This is not to say that there are not similarities; clearly men's bigotry against women is acted out in innumerable ways. This is not to say that we should only feel fortunate and be grateful to be living in this time, in this place. While I am grateful that I did not endure or not survive a Germany that would have killed me for at least three reasons: being Jewish, gay, and a political radical militantly opposed to fascism, I know that the privileges I enjoy are not enjoyed by most U.S. Americans. "Fortunate" is not what I am. Advantaged is what I am.

But many of us here are impoverished, denied access to health care and education, are raped, are bought and sold as slaves, and are punished for being female, Chicana, Jewish, Arab, or Palestinian, American Indian, and Black--in this country, for example. Whites and men pretend not to notice these punishments, indignations, and insults. The smell of the polluted waters coming through the pipes of poor neighborhoods, the sight of those who lay dying from the latest beating or sexual assault or medical neglect, and who are dead from poverty or medical malpractice, the sound of those who scream at night when daddy or hubby comes home, or into one's bedroom, is not registered by those of us who are Good Men.

Instead, what is staring us in the face is somehow is registered in our minds as something other than human atrocity. Those of us with race and gender privilege are prone to making outraged note of any white woman, any woman or man of color who behaves "crazily" according to our judgments and determinations. Discrimination is real, as is bigotry. Oppression reigns this land, once running red with the blood of slaughtered American Indians who fought to keep whites off their land. American Indians still struggle against great odds, to find justice and dignity. And still the white man doesn't give up working to wipe all American Indians off this land of theirs. And all women are paying the price for his many victories utilising heinous methods of control and colonisation.

There is reason enough to hate the oppressor. And, yet, so few among the oppressed do.

END OF POST.

A commenter here gets her say: PLEASE READ!

[image of gorgeous artwork is from here. Please click on link for more artwork. This hand-made (not computer generated) painting is titled "Woman Power" and is 40cm by 30cm. For more about the Israeli artist, Keren Or Benafshi, see here]

One of the commenters at this blog had a response that wanted to make more accessible to readers here. I asked her if I could make it a separate blog post. She agreed. Here it is. (Very minor typos were corrected by me in what appears below so that if someone wants to translate this into another language the translation will be more accurate.) For its original location on A.R.P., at the October 2 JERK MEN post, see here. All of what follows below is her writing.

I don't think these guys are going to get outraged at their fellow men for being rapists. I don't see men marching in the streets to protest the rape of women and girls. They do sit home and watch football. I've never once heard a man get morally outraged to the point of anger over women getting raped ever. Never ever heard a man IRL ever say anything like this. Hey I'm in my 50s, I meet thousands of men and women every year, I travel widely. Never hear men ever bring up atrocities against women of their own free will. I have to bring up the subject always, and they never care when I do bring this up.

All objections to male behavior are called "man hating" -- that's right it's always labeled man hating.

I don't really see men ever getting outraged over the treatment of women and girls in the media period. Their silence is just deafening. The only time I ever see men get outraged is when "their" property rights are being violated or THEIR taxes are increased or THEIR porn is taken off the market. Then I see men getting good and mad.

I really don't think men as a species are capable of caring about women or girls at all, they just want to own women, have sex available or provide for their property upkeep.

And why is it that men who are supposedly so "logical" and "scientific" don't deal with the stats about who does what to whom and how frequently? If hundreds of thousands of women and girls are raped in a male led civil war, where is the international male outrage against this? I don't see it, I don't hear it. I can honestly say that I never ever hear any male outrage about any of their sex crimes, their sexual obsessions, their sex saturate lifestyles.

Perhaps men really aren't fully human after all. I really wonder because there is no action on their part that I can see IRL. Blogs like this are rare to non-existent. I don't think men want to care about anyone but their own selfish interests, and they'll keep on doing this till the end of time, that and letting rapists out of jail so that these men can continue to have access to children.

END OF POST.

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work!

[image is from here]

I do not know the author of this list but wish I did. I think it's brilliant. The list was sent to me by a feminist friend.


Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work!

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

And, ALWAYS REMEMBER: if you didn’t ask permission and then respect the answer the first time, you are commiting a crime--no matter how “into it” others appear to be.

END OF POST.

And JERK MEN say it's RADICAL FEMINISTS who blur the lines between SEX and RAPE!?! Read on...

[This is a photograph of a man, Matthew Knott, who raped a thirteen year old girl where he taught and will be allowed to teach again in just over five years. No, really. Read on...]

From the UK Timesonline

!!!!!SERIOUS TRIGGER WARNING!!!!!

I've added commentary into the piece, in brackets and in bold:

October 1, 2009
Teacher Matthew Knott groomed girl for sex over internet
by Russell Jenkins

Matthew Knott

A science teacher who invented an online teenage alter ego to groom a 13-year-old girl for sex has been jailed for four years at Manchester Crown Court.

[Four years... so she'll be JUST old enough then for him to rape as an adult??]

Matthew Knott, 24, who taught at Elton High School in Bury, Greater Manchester, targeted his victim through a social networking site and then sent her explicit sexual messages demanding photographs of her naked.

He created an online profile that he called Jessica, posing as a 15-year-old, and used it to facilitate a meeting with the child, who was not a pupil at his school.

A week after meeting online he picked her up in his car, drove her to his flat and gave her orders, “like a teacher”, to take off her clothes and had sex with her.

[As teachers do? WTF: As rapist teachers do!]

Knott, of Miles Platting, Manchester, was barred from working with children for five years after admitting grooming a child for sex on the internet and having sexual activity with a child.

[Excuse me?: for FIVE years?! He rapes a girl-child and gets to be a teacher again after FIVE YEARS???? And imprisoned for FOUR?? And why isn't his teaching license being revoked forever?? What does a white hetero male teacher in the UK have to do for THAT to happen? Misgrade a paper? Steel copy paper? Be physically abusive to a child in the classroom? What level of white heteromale supremacist contempt for all girls does this sort of sentence show? A LOT.]

Judge Michael Henshaw told him that they were carefully planned and calculated offences carried out in a devious way.

[Really? Ya think?! What a brilliant judge!]

He said: “The type of activity you engaged in is of enormous public concern. Parents throughout this country are no doubt worried sick what their offspring might be doing when they are using the computer.

[I'd say "the concern" isn't what the children are doing, it's what ADULT HETERO WHITE MEN are doing. Does this EVER get named as such in the press? WHAT/WHO THE PROBLEM REALLY IS?]

“There are people like you who adopt identities to encourage children to commit offences.”

[Who encourage CHILDREN TO COMMIT OFFENCES?!?! Someone disbar that judge. What a completely perp-invisibilising and victim-blaming thing to say.]

Adrian Farrow, for the prosecution, told the court that Knott spotted the girl’s profile on the website, Tagged.com. It gave details of her age and where she lived. He engaged her in an hour-long online conversation.

[Thanks for advertising and promoting THAT information, Timesonline!! You getting a pimp's cut of the earnings? Just imagine the rapists rushing to that site. To encourage children, not themselves, to commit offences. Anyone catching the problem here?]

When she made it clear how young she was, he replied that he felt bad. When she asked why, he replied: “Because I want to shag a 13-year-old”.

[THAT IS SO FUCKING GROTESQUE! So he's a goddamned misogynistic, misopedic sociopath and THAT won't get your teaching license taken away for life, let alone your freedom??? Oh, wait, no, someone who says THAT gets to teach children again in six years. THAT'S AN OUTRAGE!]

Knott told her that he worked in a laboratory, asked explicit questions about her sexuality and then demanded photographs of her naked.

Although reluctant, she sent a photograph of herself in her underwear and one in her knickers.

At this point she began receiving messages from “Jessica” who asked her whether she was looking for some fun, “knickers-off sort of fun”.

[So the hetero male prick lures girls by pretending to be a girl sexually interested in girls. And LESBIANS are stigmatised as being dangerous to children?!!?]

He persuaded her to meet him on May 31 this year but her plan to take a friend for protection fell through when her friend was “grounded” for staying out late. She was said to have panicked because Knott was already on his way.

He appeared kind and calm as he drove her to his flat but then ordered her to get undressed and began fondling her.

[One gets the sense that it's the ordering part that is the real crime here, along with what THE CHILDREN not THE MEN are doing online, that is.]

Mr Farrow said: “He took her into his bedroom, sat her on the bed and began to kiss her. He pushed her back on to the bed and continued to kiss her.

[And we need to know these grim details WHY exactly? The UK Times is just making this into pornographised bullshit.]

“At his request, in a manner she described as ‘like a teacher’ she undid her trousers and pulled them off. He had sexual intercourse with her. Immediately afterwards he took her home.”

[NO HE DIDN'T HAVE "SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH HER": HE RAPED HER. So where are the MRAs NOW complaining about how "feminists" mix up rape with sexual intercourse. See, for example, this complete asshole's male supremacist/antifeminist understanding of how FEMINISTS, not RAPIST MEN, mistake sex for rape and rape for sex:

Around this time it surfaced that a “feminist legal theorist, ” Catharine A. MacKinnon, had compared voluntary sexual intercourse to rape. That oversimplifies somewhat; what she says is that in “male-dominated, patriarchical, heterosexist society” the line between voluntary consent and coercion is blurred, so that in sexual relations between men and women a fine distinction between “voluntary” intercourse and rape can’t be drawn. [written by some jerk named By Steven Yates, August 1, 2006 NewsWithViews.com, posted at the blog of The Rooster. For more of Yates' ridiculousness, including my replies to Rooster regarding Yates' article in the comments section calling his ass out, see here.]

Later “Jessica” sent her a message asking: “Did you have fun?” She replied that she had not. She was told to delete the record of their online contacts and to deny anything if the police became involved.

[What a completely disgustingly fucked up thing to do. Not that we should be surprised by anything this rapist does. What does it say about a society that the law gives this man, this outrageously sadistic man, the right to teach in six years time?? What does it say about a society that the Internet is so stocked full of pornography and that the society as a whole is so misogynistic, racist, and misopedic, that such men as Matthew Knott are produced socially?]

“He used that fictional character to destroy evidence, just as he used ‘Jessica’ to encourage the girl to meet him in the first place,” Mr Farrow said.

The girl later told her mother what had happened and the police were called.

I publicly applaud the victim for not keeping his rape of her a secret, and I also know that is very rare for a child who has been sexually assaulted to do; the vast majority of survivors of child rape and sexual assault are too ashamed, humiliated, self-blaming, in need of blocking it out, and terrified to speak about it at all to anyone.]

Knott, who offered no reaction as he was jailed, was also banned for five years from having internet access except in a public library and barred from being alone with a female under 16.

[EXCEPT IN A PUBLIC LIBRARY?! WTF!?!? Well, how horrendous for him that he's limited to having the opportunity to lure and rape children still, especially if they are 16!!]

This is some of the worst fucked up reporting and ruling I've ever seen in a man/teacher-raping-a-girl/student case.

(I see that Cara at The Curvature blog has also posted on this; you can get there by clicking here.)

My latest reply to the idiot, Rooster, at his blog, is this:
Hey Rooster,

Please see:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6855294.ece

and:

http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2009/10/and-jerk-men-say-its-radical-feminists.html

I think the content of that article and what the rapist himself says, makes it abundantly clear when feminists question men's understandings of rape as sex and sex as rape, there's nothing wrong with the feminists for simply observing that men and the white male supremacist media can't make the distinction in practice or in the press.

Easy to attack the feminist theorists when men's rapist practices (that THEY call "sexual intercourse") are just right there in your face, huh?

Any comment?

END OF POST.

Roman Polanski is finally arrested for intoxicating, photographing, and raping a thirteen year old girl

[photograph of raper of a girl and film director, Roman Polanski, from here, which also has a timeline of U.S. efforts to arrest him over the decades]

From the very important blog, abyss2hope:

Polanski was arrested in Switzerland and is now facing extradition to the US which for some is viewed as the first step to seeing him get away with his crime and get away with fleeing justice before he was sentenced.

The teenager's troubling--and contemporaneous--account of her abuse at Polanski's hands begins with her posing twice for topless photos that the director said were for French Vogue.

This is child porn and if this was where the crime stopped this would, under current laws, be child abuse and a serious felony. But this isn't where Roman Polanski's crime stopped. Not included in this quote but included in the transcript is that he gave a minor alcohol soon after entering Jack Nicholson's house on the second photo shoot, an action which was and is a crime and which was witnessed by a third party.

He even used the glass of champagne as a prop in photos he took which gave that action an innocent overtone. He not only had her hold the glass but he had her drink while being photographed. This strikes me as highly deceptive. He could easily have her drink a soft drink of similar coloring if his only purpose was the one he claimed.

By using his authority as someone taking photos for a specific legitimate purpose it makes sense that a child would do as she was told by someone who seemed interested in doing nothing more than he'd gotten permission to do. She wouldn't know when the pictures being taken of her weren't for French Vogue. Her perception of danger would be reduced significantly under the influence of alcohol. She was quite literally, impaired.

This is called misusing authority. Writing that feels patronizing, but too many people refuse to understand this concept which plays out in the actions described during grand jury testimony.

[For the whole post, please see here.]

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