Great post at Free Iran ...

AmirN eviscerates Charles A. Kupchan and Ray Takeyh in the International Herald Tribune.
Choice quotes:

First, the Iranian government is anything but nationalistic, and would destroy Iran to replace it with its own “Islamabad” if it could. Second, Iranians are currently either too busy trying to not starve to death, or getting high from drugs as an escape, or avoiding being thrown into prison and being tortured and killed to really care about having a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb is irrelevant to a people struggling to just stay afloat and dealing with constant torment and oppression from their own government. ...

The reason the mullahs have staying power is two-fold. First, they brutally and mercilessly oppress any opposition. Though effective in the short term, history has shown that its effect eventually diminishes and gets overwhelmed by a people who eventually reach a boiling point. Second, they have oil and money, which makes many of the world’s greedy nations – Russia, China, European nations, etc – want to continue to do business with and empower them. This too, will eventually be overcome, as the boiling point of the people will not be averted forever. It is a question of WHEN, not IF.

And the Mullahs “freed” nothing except their own “Willy,” which they have subsequently stuck up the backside of the Iranian nation and all of its citizens. ...

As far as the “Iranian moderates,” there is no such thing. The moderates are just the “good cops” in the “good cop, bad cop” routine. The moderates are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Save the “moderate” mumbo jumbo for the simpletons. ...

Now go read the whole thing at the link.
Iran

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Regime Change Iran

Just as a reminder, make sure you have Regime Change Iran bookmarked on your browser - and if you blog, be sure to link RCI on your sidebar. Regime Change Iran is the project of activist "Doctor Zin", and it's your one-stop shop for all the latest pro-Iranian news: everthing related to Iranian human rights, women's rights, democracy and freedom activism, and ... well, regime change. I read Regime Change Iran every day and you should, too.

Other Iran-related sites you won't want to miss:
Iran Focus
IranMania
Free Iran message board
SMCCDI
SOS Iran
Marze Por Gohar
PGLO - Persian Gay & Lesbian Organization

And finally, if you haven't done so yet, please take a moment to sign this petition:
True Security Begins with Regime Change in Iran

Iran
Regime Change Iran

Pakistan: Aisha Parveen Fights Sex Slavery

Via The Killing Zone, the Daily Times (Pakistan) reports:

LAHORE: The courts in Khanpur are to soon decide the case of Aisha Parveen, 20, and the decision could mean life or death for her, reports the New York Times.

“Ms Parveen ... is steeling herself for a state-administered horror. Just two months after she escaped from the brothel in which she was tortured and imprisoned for six years, the courts are poised to hand her back to the brothel owner,” writes Nicholas D Kristof.

Parveen says she was 14 when she was hit on the head while walking to school in NWFP. She awoke to find herself imprisoned in a brothel hundreds of miles away, in the town of Khanpur.

Parveen fought back and refused to sleep with customers, but she says the brothel owner - Mian Sher - beat and sexually tortured her ...

Rantburg weighs in.

Don't forget to bookmark The Killing Zone (homepage) for the latest info on women in the Middle East and the Muslim world.

Germany, ElBaradei Urge Iran to Stop Nuclear Work

Xinhua:

BERLIN, March 27 (Xinhua) -- German leaders and Mohammed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), urged Iran on Monday to suspend its nuclear program as top diplomats will meet over the issue here on Thursday.

The foreign ministers from Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States will meet in the German capital at the invitation of German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier over the Iran nuclear issue, according to a report from the German news agency DPA.

From the same story:

In another development in Germany on Monday, police searched business sites across the country in connection with the illegal export of double-use equipment to Iran.

The German prosecutor's office in Potsdam near Berlin said that some 250 agents raided 41 companies in 10 German states last week after learning of suspicious purchase requests by a Berlin firm.

The firm which was run by Russians is believed to have exported hydraulic pumps and transformer parts, which could be used at nuclear facilities.

The firm delivered the equipment from Berlin to a company near Moscow, and from there to Iran.

Iran

Debka: Hamas won't be invited to Khartoum summit.

Debka reports:

The Bush administration persuaded Arab rulers not to invite Hamas to their summit opening in Khartoum Tuesday, March 28 - but not to cut off funding. - March 27, 2006, 10:57 PM (GMT+02:00) - Most Arab leaders are worried by the rise to power of the radical terrorist group, whose PM-designate Ismail Haniya asks the Palestinian legislative council to vote confidence in his 24-member cabinet Monday, March 28. He is assured of majority endorsement after Hamas’s landslide win of the December election. Mahmoud Abbas will head the Palestinian delegation to Khartoum. But foreign ministers preparing the summit resolutions rejected Western demands to cut off aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian government.

Yemen and Security

Jane at Armies of Liberation links to a scathing column in the Yemen Times:

The political regime used to keep an iron grip over everything, even the opposition parties, sorting out differences with them through bargains and deals. But, when it has found out that these ways will no longer work out, it is going nuts and is behaving like a child who holds a gun and starts firing against everybody without knowing the consequences. ...

An anonymous guest poster at Armies of Liberation comments on Yemen's gun ownership, concluding:

The vast majority of Yemenis are engaged full-time in the business of
survival and savings. They know that goats plus rain equals money,
or that pick-up trucks plus subsidized fuel plus cheap labour equals
money. They also know that there is very little that you can do on a
daily basis with a gun that makes money. Forget notions of weapons
culture, or the odd gun freak that has five or six weapons, ordinary
people in the tribal areas can only afford to keep what weapons they
have in order to protect their other assets, so if you ask yourself
what is required to do this - you arrive at a very different answer,
but one which exactly tallies with first hand observation of rural
people’s houses and lives.

Via Internet Haganah, ICT on the Yemeni connection:

The Yemeni connection to worldwide Islamic terrorism stretches back nearly two decades; its roots can be traced to the war in Afghanistan during the 1980s between the Afghan rebels and the pro-Soviet Communist regime backed by Soviet military forces. During this war thousands of Muslim volunteers from all over the world, especially Arab countries (including Yemen), came to fight alongside their Afghan brothers. The war served these volunteers as a university for the study of radical Islam and prepared them, mentally and physically for the violent confrontation with the "infidel" West and with the Muslim regimes that cooperate with it. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan "proved" to them that the power of faith in Islam conquers all other forms of power.

The Afghan Veterans returned to Yemen during the early 1990s, convinced both of their ability to eliminate the remnants of the Communist Muslim regime in the southern region of the United Yemen and of their capacity to expel the foreign presence from Yemeni soil. They formed an alliance with the northern Sana government against the remnants of the southern Communist regime in the hope of being allowed to enlist in the Yemeni army and freely operate in southern Yemen, in order better to expel the American and British presence from Yemen. After these demands were rejected, the Afghan Veterans established radical Islamic organizations that began to undermine the Yemeni regime and perpetrate terrorist attacks against western targets inside Yemen and against senior Yemeni figures suspected of collaborating with the West. Soon these organizations began to cooperate with al-Qa'ida and even received financial support from it.

The involvement of Yemeni volunteers in the Iraqi war was just a matter of time. Just as in Afghanistan, Yemenis comprise a significant component of the Muslim volunteers in Iraq. However, in contrast to the Afghan case, this time the Yemeni regime made it more difficult for them to leave for Iraq; nor was the government pleased to accept them upon their return. As a result, Iraqi veterans and subsequent alumni of Afghan training camps, including the Yemenis, were forced to return to Yemen under false identities. Very quickly the concerns of the Yemeni government were confirmed: the return of Iraqi alumni to Yemen brought with it a wave of terrorist attacks that may threaten the stability in the country. Iraqi veterans, some of whom are members of al-Qa'ida, view Yemen as a convenient ground for the fostering of radical Islamic ideologies and as a target for terrorist attacks against the foreign presence in the region.

Yemen

The Iraqi Holocaust

US-led investigators have located nine trenches in Hatra containing hundreds of bodies believed to be Kurds killed during the repression of the 1980s.

The skeletons of unborn babies and toddlers clutching toys are being unearthed, the investigators said.

...The victims are believed to be Kurds killed in 1987-88, their bodies bulldozed into the graves after being summarily shot dead.

One trench contains only women and children while another contains only men.

The body of one woman was found still clutching a baby. The infant had been shot in the back of the head and the woman in the face. ... [source: BBC]

'You might have heard that an assassination attempt against Uday had taken place in 1996, which left him with injuries that caused impotency. This made him even more cruel and sadistic than his usual self. It has been revealed after the fall of the regime that he shot the doctor who broke the news to him (c.f. interview with one of the close bodyguards of Uday at Al Arabia last year). This added one more complex to his extensive repertoire of psychological problems. He started to hate anything to do with other people having any kind of sexual pleasure.

Well, that horrible day we learnt that the night before the Fedayeen [under Uday's command] had attacked scores of houses and dragged women and young girls to streets and beheaded many with swords leaving the heads at the doorsteps of the victims houses. Some of these heads were left in place for more than twenty-four hours. The atrocities lasted for several weeks.' [source: The Mesopotamian]

... This is the place where in the 1990s Hanna was hung from a rod and beaten with a special stick when she called out for Jesus or the Virgin Mary. This is where she and other female prisoners were dragged outside and tied to a dead tree trunk, nicknamed "Walid" by the guards, and raped in the shadow of palm trees. This is the place where electric shock was applied to Hanna's vagina. And this is where in February 2001 someone put a bullet in her husband's head and handed his corpse through the steel gate like a piece of butcher's meat. ... [source: The Washington Post, July 21, 2003; Page A01.]

From Hammorabi:
There are countless numbers of the documented crimes and torture of this family and those who worked with it. Some of these crimes and tortured methods are listed below:
1. Mass executions without trials
2. Genocides against Shia and Kurds by chemical and conventional weapons
3. Disappearances of thousands for ever after their arrest
4. Arresting and executing large numbers of young men, women and children during Iraq Iran war. The arrests could happen at any time and in any place.
5. Arresting any students just by simple doubt especially if not in the Baath party Shia and Kurds. In 1980s the Baath introduce what is called the (Closed Colleges and Universities) which means that all the students should be Baathist.
6. Cutting tongues until death
7. Mutilation of the body parts including ears cutting and tattoing on the forehead
8. Decapitations with swords
9. Falakah which is striking the feet with a painful sticks
10. Nails pulling
11. Insertions of glass in the gentilia
12. Death by mass rape (raping the victim by several rapist until death) ... [source: Hammorabi]

The Iraqi Holocaust

Radical Women

Cinnamon Stillwell at SFGate:

... the real radical women in the world go largely unremarked by the feminist movement. Today's true heroines are those who do battle with the gender apartheid, violence and oppression practiced against women in the Muslim world. There, women face not just phantom infringements to their civil rights and perceived slights to their sensitivities, but threats to their lives. With the call for reform in the Muslim world come the inevitable requirements of round-the-clock security.

Arab American psychologist Dr. Wafa Sultan is the latest to enter such dangerous waters.

Ever since Sultan took part in a debate on Al-Jazeera with Algerian Islamist cleric Ahmad bin Muhammad in February, the world has been riveted.

The two debated Islamic teachings and terrorism. But instead of the usual excuses, Sultan offered moral clarity. She blasted the Muslim world for being mired in a "medieval" mentality and she dubbed the war on terror not simply a clash of civilizations but "a clash between civilization and backwardness … between barbarity and rationality … between human rights on the one hand and the violation of these rights on the other, between those who treat women like beasts and those who treat them like human beings."

...Born in Syria to a middle-class family and raised a Muslim, Wafa Sultan began to reexamine her religious beliefs after a traumatic incident. A respected medical school professor was murdered before her eyes by two Muslim Brotherhood members shouting "Allahu akbar!" (God is great!). Eventually, she became a secularist and started writing for the Arab American Web site Anneqed.com. She became a strong critic of the intolerance and violence increasingly associated with the Muslim world. She also tackled the taboo subject of Muslim anti-Semitism, rejecting the hatred with which she had been indoctrinated as a child.

Lebanese Christian journalist Brigitte Gabriel has traveled the world sharing her experiences of persecution at the hands of Islamists in Lebanon. She and her family eventually found refuge in Israel, where she underwent an epiphany and, like Wafa Sultan, rejected the anti-Semitism she had grown up with. ...


Nonie Darwish is another Arab woman who has sought to bridge the gap with Israel as well as defend America's battle against Islamic terrorism. A former Muslim born and raised in Cairo and the Gaza Strip who later converted to Christianity, Darwish has lived in the United States for more than 25 years. ...

Irshad Manji is also a woman worth recognizing. A refugee of Pakistani descent from Uganda, Muslim journalist and activist Manji grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. She went on to pursue an impressive career, which now includes being a visiting fellow with the International Security Studies program at Yale University.

But it is her forays into critiquing Islam that have garnered Manji the most attention. As a lesbian, she faces a double dose of intolerance within Muslim culture, but she has never backed down. ...

And the list goes on: Hirsi Ali, Oriana Fallaci, Phyllis Chesler ...

Read the whole thing at the link.

women

Pakistan: Rape Victims in Jail

Khaleej Times (via Plus Ultra):

ISLAMABAD - Nearly 80 per cent of the more than 6,000 women and juvenile girls on trial in Pakistan are facing charges under the controversial strict ’Hudood’ Islamic laws that mainly deal with crimes of adultery and rape, said a human rights report published on Monday.


The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) report also noted an increase in the killings of women in the name of honour, English ’Daily Times’ reported. Most such killings targetted women and girls who contracted marriages against family’s will.

Human-rights and civil-society organizations are demanding the repeal of the Hudood laws that were introduced by late military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, in 1979, to gain support of Muslim clerics for his rule.

President General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in October 1999, has called on religious scholars to review the strict Islamic laws that are considered highly discriminatory against women. ...

women
Pakistan
Islam

The Manifesto of Twelve

Via Irshad Manji:

THE MANIFESTO OF 12:
Together facing the new totalitarianism

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism.

We -- writers, journalists and public intellectuals -- call for resistance to religious totalitarianism.

Instead, we call for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values worldwide.

The necessity of these universal values has been revealed by events since the publication of the Muhammad drawings in European newspapers. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the arena of ideas. What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilizations, nor an antagonism of West versus East, but a global struggle between democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The preachers of hate bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a world of inequality. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred.

Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of greater power imbalances: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all others.

To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed people. For that reason, we reject “cultural relativism,” which consists of accepting that Muslim men and women should be deprived of their right to equality and freedom in the name of their cultural traditions.

We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia,” an unfortunate concept that confuses criticism of Islamic practices with the stigmatization of Muslims themselves.

We plead for the universality of free expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on every continent, against every abuse and dogma.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

Signed,

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq , Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji , Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val, Ibn Warraq

Jeanne Cavelos on Gender in "Star Wars"

SF writer and astrophysicist Jeanne Cavelos writes:

"Against a background of stars and X-wing fighters, Luke holds his
lightsaber aloft while Leia crouches below him, brandishing a gun: two
tough heroes ready to fight the evil Empire. In my love of Star Wars, I
spent endless hours longing for 'a galaxy far, far away,' replaying the
movie in my head, studying every detail of the poster on my wall. It seemed
to embody the excitement of the movie and its strong heroes, Luke and Leia.
But as the Star Wars saga unfolded, I became troubled. While George Lucas
brilliantly combined diverse ideas and influences to create something
startling and inspiring, one aspect of the movies didn't live up to the
rest. I began to notice something new about the poster on my wall. Luke
above, superior; Leia below, inferior. It seemed to reflect the treatment
of the characters in the movies. The problem is not that the women are
supporting characters, though they are. Even a supporting character can be
striking and compelling. Han Solo is such a powerful, heroic figure, he
nearly eclipses Luke. But the women in Star Wars are not the memorable
figures they could be. Compared to their male counterparts, they are
inconsistent and underdeveloped. There is a clear lack of focus on these
characters on the part of George Lucas and the other writers, a tendency to
sacrifice the female characters to make the males look better, and a decided
inclination to reduce initially powerful women to inaction and irrelevance.
Leia and Amidala, as the two most prominent female figures in the films,
exemplify these weaknesses."

- "Stop Her, She's Got a Gun! How the Rebel Princess and the Virgin Queen
Became Marginalized and Powerless in George Lucas' Fairy Tale"
essay in STAR WARS ON TRIAL edited by David Brin and Matthew Woodring Stover
BenBella Books--FORTHCOMING June 2006
US $17.95/Canada $24.95
ISBN 1-932100-89-X


Jeanne Cavelos is the author of (inter alia) the Techno-Mage books, based on the Babylon 5 TV series. These are among my favorite works of recent science fiction: dramatically and morally complex, and very disturbing, but ultimately hopeful. I'll be looking forward to reading Cavelos' essay in the book when it comes out.

Jeanne Cavelos homepage

Cross-posted at

Translinear Light

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