Radical Feminist Yanar Mohammed's letter to U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton

[image of Yanar Mohammed is from here]

[Source for what follows is here: here]

Yanar Mohammed: Thank you Hillary for submitting to our patriarchs

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2009-06-06

In a visit to Egypt which was meant to be a landmark in US-Arab relations, Hillary Clinton chose to have her head covered with a veil, thus forwarding a clear message to more than a hundred million Arab women: "if an American Secretary of State can wear it, it should be okay for you too."

Women of the Arab world and the Middle East suffered and struggled from patriarchal Islamist oppression which escalated in the last two decades. One simple example of the oppression is the excluding of females from all decision making positions as they are thought of as "emotional" and "irrational". Therefore, a woman cannot be a judge in court; neither can she be a full witness, as two women's testimony will be equal to one man. Other examples of the oppression travel around the world dressed in full black, with no openings, even for breathing.

In a total control of governmental and non-governmental mass media, Islamist ideologists brainwashed generations into the idea that females are deficient human beings with an evil urge to disgrace and dishonour. Therefore, they should be restricted into a narrow zone lest they bring shame and filth upon the innocent unsuspecting patriarchs at home. The same ideologists who hold the binding veil in one hand, hold another unreserved banner in the other hand which assures the males' biological need for more than one sexual partner and tries to polish legalized polygamy with baloney testimonies of "'...being fair among wives when it is too difficult".

None of these misogynist ideologists mention the human catastrophe which befalls the female and children population in an Islamist city. In the religious city of Najaf , south of Baghdad 20% of the adult female population are abandoned wives with no income. They are second, third and fourth wives of men who had taken off for other women. Their husbands do not care to divorce them or to spend on their wives and their children. In the "holy" city of Najaf , masses of destitute women and children roam in the streets and may manage to live off the charity of religious institutions which had justified their abandonment and poverty in the first place.

The Islamist ideologists do not feel compelled to justify the tragedy of tens of thousands of women and children of a polygamist culture. They continue to pump a woman serves man ideology to the young generations to perpetuate the males' misogynist practices and the females' submission to misogyny as part of faithfulness and godliness.

There was a time of progressive leftist change in the Arab and Middle Eastern societies. It coincided with a world-wide movement for liberation from colonialism. Our mothers' generation benefited from that age as they reached to the university seats and became doctors and engineers.

Still, it took many years of political and feminist struggle to get rid of the veil and the control of patriarchs who imposed the veil on them. As you may know Hillary, these women were not born with the veil. It always takes a misogynist patriarch to tie it around your head and neck. But these women gracefully succeeded and got rid of the veil, the symbol of their oppression. From thereon came the female Ministers, judges, scientists, doctors, and engineers.

Hillary ...
We are proud of our bodies and do not need to cover them to please your allies, the Islamist patriarchs. We also know that our fight for women's rights needs to parallel with a fight to end the US occupation in Iraq , as we have only witnessed deterioration in our lives and social status since day one of the occupation. Thanks to you and others like you, the Islamist patriarchs are ruling as government and militias in Iraq now. We know that women of Iraq cannot dream of a day of freedom as long as the US troops are in here.

If you need to flirt with your Islamist patriarch allies, go ahead. But never dare speak in the name of women and women's rights. Stick with the patriarchs in the boy's club as it serves you better.


Yanar Mohammed
Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq , president
June 6, 2009
www.equalityiniraq.com

White Man's Trinity: The Rule and Maintenance of Patriarchy, Prostitution, and Poverty

[image is from here]

I am trying to absorb and comprehend the information in the last twenty posts here, including my viewing of the film, "The Selling of Innocents"; the stories of Native North Americans forced into white Christian Boarding Schools, which were primarily places for psychic as opposed to fully lethal genocide; and the atrocities perpetrated by men, endured and resisted by women globally. I am struck once again with how complex the web of white male supremacist atrocities are. Not impossible to understand, but not simple. Not simply about "patriarchy" or "capitalism" or "whiteness", but all of the above and more. Which is not to say men don't rule worldwide. They do. Men created capitalism. Men maintain patriarchy with a brutal hand. Men control the location and production of poverty.

In the film, The Selling of Innocents, we have a story of post-colonial patriarchal cultures, in the relatively small impoverished country of Nepal and in portions of the city of Mumbai in India, in which women and girls have little value as human beings separate from their connection to men; and their "value" to men is to be used and abused as something that is worthless. We have a story of a society that has been ravaged and permanently altered by colonial invasion and rule, in India's history by the British. We have a story of how a kind of poverty that is a product of industrialisation, capitalism, and Western global imperialism, has left many desperate for "income" or the means to purchase food and other necessities for living, like drinkable water. When you are made to pay for water, you are incredibly dependent on the seller in order to survive for even a few days. Nepal didn't use to be impoverished. India has been impaired by British colonial invasion and occupation. Western cultures, their customs, religions, and laws, pollute and poison the world just as U.S. nuclear waste pollutes and poisons many American Indian people and the land that white people have allowed them to live and die on, called reservations.

Many of these cultures used to be self-sufficient, sustainable, and free from outside invasion and abuse. This doesn't mean they were paradises. This doesn't mean there were no problems. It means that for me, as a white U.S. man, I must call out the ways that white Western society has created the problems that we now see the world over, including the atrocity of female sexual slavery, sometimes called prostitution. I live in a country where "prostitution" can be seen and experienced as separate from sexual slavery. This is one of the luxuries of living in the U.S. For this distinction is non-existent in many parts of the world that are far more poor than is the U.S.

The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Corporate Capitalist Globalisation including an obscenity called "Free Trade", has created a particularly gross form of impoverishment in many regions of what is called "The Third World". The Third World, let's not forget is actually The First World, but has been relegated "third place" by white societies who are self-named "The First World". Indigenous societies existed before every single white one. Indigenous societies have existed for tens of thousands of years before "white manhood" appeared on the Earth.

White manhood and its ideology of white male supremacy, and its culture, politics, religions, and laws, is what has destroyed Indigenous societies all over the world, making them materially poor instead of sustainable. It has made the Third World populated primarily by people of color, mostly female, has been made dependent on the First World, dominated by white men.

White manhood thrives on two things primarily: possession and consumption of that which is not itself.

And here we have the source of incest, rape, battery, prostitution, sexual slavery, and ecocide. Here we have an idea, made real, that female human beings belong to one man or many, and that the Earth is to be dominated, not lived with as a friend, sibling, or parent.

I support all radical efforts to end white man's rule, possession, consumption, and destruction of female human beings of all colors, and of the Earth and all its other inhabitants, many of which white man has already made extinct. Extinction is the inevitable end point of white man's rule. There is no other possibility given white man's values and ways of organising society.

White man's massacres and manipulations of Indigenous societies globally, and his specific abuses of women and girls seen as existing for him, to do his labor and to satisfy his consumptive and destructive sexual appetite, is what I consider to be a horror that is made most horrific by being made to seem natural and inevitable, which is also to say "normal".

To any white man who believes that patriarchy ought to be normal, that prostitution in inevitable, and that poverty is natural, I say this: Your life will end one day, and the Earth will live on. Hopefully you have not left politic heirs to your atrocious ways of being human. Between now and the end of your life, do what you can to end the horror rather than support and celebrate it.

The Story of Apne Aap and The Selling of Innocents, Ruchera Gupta's film on Female Sexual Slavery/Prostitution

an initiative to end sex-trafficking

every woman free, every child in school

[image of logo and statement is from here] 

TRIGGER WARNING: HORRENDOUS STORIES OF SEXUAL ABUSE OF GIRLS AND WOMEN IN SYSTEMS OF PROSTITUTION AND SEXUAL SLAVERY

Why does someone have to be some man's mother" or some boy's sister to be SOMEBODY!? And why does being a prostitute and sexual slave make a girl or woman NOBODY? -- Julian

"The Selling of Innocents" (Part 1 of 6; 6 is closing credits) on Sex Trafficking by Ruchira Gupta, Executive Director
Apneaap Women Worldwide
The story behind the film:
It began like a routine assignment, triggered by a journalist's nose for news. Ruchira Gupta stumbled upon the subject while walking through the hills of Nepal in 1994.

"Many villages in the hills had no women between the ages of 15 and 45," remembers Ruchira. "It was strange and I started making inquiries. The answer was always the same: 'They have gone to work in Mumbai.'

I found that there was a system to procure girls and carry them in trucks to the Indo-Nepal border and then in trains to brothels in Mumbai’s Kamatipura. I saw procurers on the prowl, parents selling their daughters, money changing hands and tin-roofs and radios in Nepali homes with daughters in Mumbai." Ruchira knew she had a story and rang up her friends to help find someone who would be interested in it.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) sent down its team and the work began. "I had already researched for nine months," said Ruchira. "My networks in Nepal with the pro-democracy activists helped. But those who had spoken so frankly clamped up the moment they saw a camera and crew."

That was just the beginning of the many problems that awaited the crew. "Certain politicians were involved and the mafia did not want us to continue," she said. "We were stopped on the road, our helicopter was denied permission to land, and our car was stoned."

Ruchira spent months hanging around the brothels getting to know the women, building trust and slowly gaining access. "I didn't go through anyone in the power hierarchy in the area," she said. "I kept the police, politicians and NGOs out. I had to make friends with the women in prostitution, talk to them on terms of equality. I told them intimate details of my life before I got to know theirs. I promised them that they could walk off camera whenever they wanted, reveal only what they wanted to and ask me to stop filming at any time."

"I told the girls I had a job to do," said Ruchira. "Some wanted to help because they thought that their story needed to be told, for others it became a game in which they helped conceal the camera to film how the clients behaved with them."

Once the 40-day shooting schedule was over, Ruchira realized that she 'couldn't walk away'. To begin with she admitted the girl she bought in Katmandu, into a school. She then took her documentary to different forum to raise awareness on this global crime against women and girls. It was screened at the Stockholm World Congress on Sexual Exploitation of Children, UNICEF regional workshops, UNAIDS conference in Manila and UN in New York.  It was dubbed into 6 languages with the support of UNAIDS and shown in South and South-East Asian villages to put forth the horrors of brothel life.  The 47-minute film called ‘The Selling of Innocents’ was made for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and she won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in 1997 for it.
 

Ruchira continued to keep in touch with the women in the red-light areas of Mumbai who had helped make the documentary. They asked Ruchira to help them change their situation and protect their daughters from falling prey to prostitution. However, Ruchira asserted that they have to help themselves and she would facilitate. And so Apne Aap was born. Apne Aap means self-help in Hindi.

Apne Aap started out as an informal group of women and girls who gave Ruchira information, advice, protection and physical and emotional support.

"Discussions over a period of time began to range from what I could give them, to what they should demand from the government and society. Most of the women had daughters and wanted to prevent their daughters from getting into prostitution."  The group started by meeting in parks and on beaches. The main concentration was on breaking the sense of isolation that the women and girls in the community suffered from. This informal group began to learn the strength of collectivizing. They realized that when they bargained together they were treated with more respect. A group dynamics emerged.

The group then needed space to institutionalize its work. It needed money for medicines and food. It needed legal support to protect itself from extortion and money. It needed sponsors for its daughters.  Apne Aap was finally registered in August, 2002 as an NGO in Mumbai, India.

Through the efforts of a board member Apne Aap was given a room in an abandoned municipal school on Falkland street- the heart of Mumbai's red-light area. These quickly become a drop in centre. This room was a safe place to meet, chat, sleep, stitch torn clothes, bathe and to get mail. It was also a place to hold meetings and classes.

Apne Aap's needs and ambitions grew. The members wanted to reach out to other sisters trapped in prostitution. It wanted to dismantle the system of prostitution itself by going after the buyers. They decided to replicate the programme in Bhiwandi and also in three other states of India-Bihar, Delhi and West Bengal. They decided to lobby in Parliament for a change in the India anti-trafficking law, ITPA to punish buyers more severely.

Apne Aap mobilizes and mentors community based groups of trafficked and vulnerable girls and women to empower each other. The Centres provide the safe space and opportunities for legal, education and livelihood training to the groups of girls and women to develop the skills and abilities to resist traffickers. This strategy has a) empowered mothers to rescue their daughters and put them into schools breaking the cycle of caste-based intergenerational prostitution and b) empowered women to rescue each other by demanding access to the right to livelihoods other than prostitution, education and safe housing in their small group structures.

Apne Aap now runs women-led self-help groups, residential and non-residential schools/classrooms and legal support cells.

It has reached 10,072 women and girls. Of these 812 girls are in regular schools, 1,200 women have formed small business cooperatives known as self-help groups, and 3,042 women have submitted a petition to Indian Parliament asking for a change in the anti-trafficking law, ITPA (Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act), to punish buyers and protect women and girls.

It brings out its own newspaper, Red Light Despatch, which is written by women and girls in prostitution for their sisters who are survivors and victims’. The women of Apne Aap want a world in which it is unacceptable to buy or sell another human being and to imagine an economy in which one does not force one to sell oneself.
[source: http://www.apneaap.org/about.html]

Radical Feminist Ruchira Gupta on Ending Prostitution and Sexual Slavery

[image of feminist journalist/filmmaker Ruchira Gupta is from here]

“Our groups seek not to mitigate the circumstances of sex-trafficking but to end sex-trafficking. We seek complete transformation, not simply reform. Our members who are victims and survivors of sex-trafficking want a world in which it is unacceptable to buy or sell another human being and to imagine an economy in which one is not forced to sell oneself. We are trying to keep sex-trafficking profiteers from legalizing sex slavery in India even though more Foundation funds, especially US-based Foundations, are spent on the supposed protection of sex buyers from AIDS than the protection of women and children from sex buyers. This has created a vested interest in the preservation of brothels in some parts of India for the distribution of condoms rather than protecting the women and children even though there is no evidence that increased condom distribution in brothel districts is leading to condom usage or a decrease in AIDS.”

-- Ruchira Gupta, President and Founder of  APNE AAP WOMEN WORLDWIDE [source: here]

Here is a video in which Ruchira Gupta explains her journey towards doing this political work. TRIGGER WARNING: It includes her story of being sexually assaulted. PLEASE NOTE: THE FIRST HALF MINUTE or so of this video IS A VERY LOUD PIERCING SOUND with only a colorbar image. After that the volume may be turned back up, and the interview begins.
 

Andrew Windy Boy (Chippewa/Cree) on surviving the abuses at a North American white Roman Catholic Boarding School for First Nation children

Carlisle Indian Industrial School, run by

emotionally and physically abusive

cultural and spiritual genocidalists, 1885 ECD

[image is from here]

This is a very painful story told by Andrew Windy Boy (Chippewa/Cree) about being humiliated and culturally assaulted. The image above and the video interview below are both speak about the genocide that happened at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in North America. More information about the film this interview is from, follows the video.

The mass murder of human beings is just one method of committing genocide. Oppressors taking away a people's religion and their language are two other ways to achieve the same goal.

June 16, 2008
Rich-Heape Films Releases New Documentary
“Our Spirits Don’t Speak English: Indian Boarding School”

June 1 2008, Rich-Heape Films released its long awaited documentary titled "Our Spirits Don't Speak English: Indian Boarding School". On June 10, 2008, the government of Canada formally apologized to the World, in a solemn parliament session for its treatment of Indians in the last century. Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper apologized for previous governments' policies of taking Indian children from their parents and homes and forcing them into residential Roman Catholic schools.

Now, in this [2008] documentary, learn why this formal apology had to be made.

UPC# 652648680436

Dallas — Street Date June 10, 2008 —Native American owned Rich-Heape Films announces the release of “Our Spirits Don’t Speak English: Indian Boarding School,” a documentary that examines an educational system that was designed to destroy Indian culture and tribal unity. When it began in 1879, the philosophy of the Indian boarding school system was “to kill the Indian and save the man,” the mission statement of Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder and superintendent of Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania until 1904.

Jim Thorpe (Sauk and Fox), the iconic hero survived the boarding school system. Grace Thorpe (Sauk and Fox), his daughter, in her last interview before she passed away on April 4, 2008, discusses boarding school experiences in the new documentary.

The battle against and the victory over the boarding school monster is told by educators, former and current students who were interviewed at Carlisle; Sherman Indian School, Riverside, Calif.; Sequoyah High School, Tahlequah, Okla.; Anchorage, Alaska; and other locations.

One of the most compelling is an interview with Andrew Windy Boy (Chippewa/Cree), from which the title is taken. Windy Boy, who attended boarding schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s, talks about the assault on his culture.

“[They] took me to the boarding school where I wasn’t allowed to talk my native tongue or practice my native ways.

“I didn’t know any other language so whenever I’d talk, it would come out. Cree would come out. And whenever I’d talk, I’d get hit.

“We met Andrew Windy Boy in 2002 while on the Summit Lake Paiute Reservation in northern Nevada. Andrew’s oral history of his boarding school experience was the inspiration for this film,” says Steven R. Heape, Cherokee Nation Citizen and executive producer of Rich-Heape Films. “Andrew’s story is not one you will find or hear in the public school system. He and other survivors of the boarding school system truly have my respect for what was endured just for being an Indian child. This is a story that must be told and not forgotten,” Heape said.

In addition to Grace Thorpe, participants include Henrietta Mann (Southern Cheyenne), Ph.D., endowed chair in Native American Studies at Montana State University – Bozeman, and Daniel R. Wildcat (Yuchi of the Muscogee Nation), Ph.D., co-director of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Center and member of the faculty of American Indians Studies.

Gayle Ross, renowned Cherokee storyteller and Great Granddaughter of Chief John Ross, is host and narrator of the film.

August Schellenberg narrated the opening introduction statement.

Screenwriter of the film is Dan Agent (Cherokee/Choctaw), former editor of the Cherokee Phoenix from November 1999 through 2006, original story by Karl Tipre.

“Our Spirits Don’t Speak English; Indian Boarding Schools” is the latest addition to the Native-owned film company’s portfolio of award winning films, that includes “Trail of Tears: Cherokee Legacy,” released in 2006 and chosen “Best Documentary Feature” at the 31st Annual American Indian Film Festival.

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END RAPE NOW! a message to men from one man

This was made by a white man in a Feminist Studies class. The focus of the video is sexual violence against women on college campuses, but not exclusively on campus. Please share this video with every man you know.

Jennifer Drew on the Maintenance of Rape and Radical Feminist Analysis Focused on Ending Violence Against Women

[image of poster is from here]

What follows was posted as a comment to the blog abyss2hope, linked to from this blog, but also here. Marcella's post links to a non-Indigenist Australian report on education's role in preventing sexual violence against women written by white feminism who misrepresents "second wave" feminism, but who offers many insights into what needs to change on an educational level to really stop the violence, not just attend to it as an on-going crisis.


Here is a link to that [non-Indigenist] ACSSA (Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault) report titled Conceptualising the Prevention of Sexual Assault and the Role of Education.

My questions are these:
When will governments consistently and adequately fund Social Services and Community Resource groups that are designed not just to help those women harmed by men, but to stop men from doing the harming in the first place!? In some societies, if a man rapes a woman, he is removed from the community and killed. How long would rape continue if that was standard practice?


Just below is Jennifer's response to Marcella's post on this important topic. (I corrected one typo.)


At December 21, 2009 5:01 PM,  JENNIFER DREW said...
Very true this report when discussing what is commonly termed second wave feminism does make sweeping statements and once again castigates radical feminists for supposedly reducing female survivors of male violence as 'perpetual victims.' Similarily this report claims radical feminists claimed all men were potential perpetrators.

If the writer had cared to read Catharine McKinnon's work and other radical feminists work, she would have realised her claims were totally untrue. Elizabeth Stanko and Liz Kelly have also written extensively about male violence against women and girls.

What second wave feminists sought to discover is how and why male violence committed against women and girls (and to a lesser extent boys) is widespread, common and mundane. Answering these questions meant radical feminists went to the root of the problem and that is and still is how dominant masculinity is constructed, promoted and maintained as natural.

Likewise radical feminists have looked at how power operates and which dominant group continues to retain this power and define to subordinate groups, primarily women and girls, what does and does not come within the term 'sexual, physical and or pyschological violence.'

But of course we are in the midst of a huge backlash and individualism and 'diversity' means if taken to its logical conclusion that men as a group are not the ones with greater social and economic power and women as a group are supposedly able to negotiate and limit any male's decision to commit sexual/physical/pyschological violence against them. Oh so simple, but as radical feminists discovered or rather re-discovered, patriarchy is not that simple.

Second wave feminists listened to women's and girls' experiences of male violence committed against them and then publicly named such violence for what it is - male control and subordination of all women and girls.

If we cannot name the perpetrators then we cannot even begin to engage in primary prevention work. Naming the perpetrators means challenging the social construction of masculinity and femininity both of which serve to enforce and maintain male power and control over women and girls.

Interlinking this is racism, misogyny, homophobia and classism, none of which can be separated out from how gender is and continues to be constructed as 'natural and unchanging.'

As the backlash commenced so new terms were developed in order to hide the fact violence is predominantly committed by males against females, but since this truth had to be kept hidden, phrases such as family violence, interpersonal violence and even gender-based violence were coined. All of which serve to hide which biological sex is disproportionately committing such acts. 'Family violence' implies several members within a family are committing violence against other members - again too simplistic because it ignores power dynamics and how one or two family members have greater economic and social power than other family members.