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Sunday, August 21, 2005

Here's the "freedom" American kids are dying for
Posted by Jill | 9:17 AM

Every time the Bushistas take Laura Bush off her downs long enough to wax rhapsodic about freedom for women in Iraq, I want to puke.

Here's what women in Iraq get to deal with in Bush's dream democracy in the Middle East (emphases mine):

Across the country, a steady clampdown on women's rights has been going unreported and unchecked by the government. Islamic terrorism is killing and injuring Iraqi women daily, employing among other weapons, acid attacks.

My women's rights group, the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq, has been documenting part of the upsurge in violence against women. In March this year, for example, followers of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr targeted an outing of students from Basra University. Playing football and listening to music, the mixed group was attacked in Basra Public Park. One male student was killed trying to defend his female friends against Islamists who literally tore the women's clothes off their bodies. Sadr's men photographed the dishevelled, half-dressed women, and told them that their parents would receive the photos if they didn't refrain in future from "immoral" behaviour.

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed - notably in the city of Mosul - and, recently, anti-women Islamists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women's faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called "honour killings" are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. When I was in Baghdad a few months ago, I couldn't go anywhere without a bodyguard. The sense of danger and threat was tangible.

Islamist repression against women is a campaign of "moral" terror. Leaflets, graffiti and verbal warnings in their thousands warn women against going out unveiled, against putting on make-up, and against shaking hands or mixing with men. Female doctors have been prevented from treating male patients, and male doctors warned not to attend to women.


But I suppose that in the eyes of the Bush Administration, this is the natural order of things. After all, this is the Administration that is 100% behind the Christofascist Zombie Brigade's agenda (which doesn't look all that much different than what we're seeing in Iraq, albeit it's SLIGHTLY less violent). After all, this is the Administration that's putting up John Roberts for the Supreme Court, a man who treats pay disparities between men and women as a joke; a man who has said that "Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good," and who called the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court a "crass consideration"; who described state efforts to combat sex discrimination in the workplace as "highly objectionable".

No, the Zombies aren't throwing acid in women's faces...yet. But there's little qualitative difference between the people screaming "Baby Killer!" outside of abortion clinics and the clerics beating women for showing their ankles in the Middle East.

{Hat tip: Digby)
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