Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1301 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Wed 21 Mar 2007 22:30 Post subject: Religion of Peace Watch: Swedes Deal with Imported Barbarism
I guess Sweden has not seen this type of barbarism since the Viking age ended.
ABC News: Sweden Takes Aim at Honor Crimes
Sweden Takes Aim at Honor Crimes
Swedish Integration Minister Takes Aim at Honor Crimes
By KARL RITTER
The Associated Press
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - The oppression of women and girls in the name of family honor has become an urgent problem in Sweden with the arrival of growing numbers of immigrants over the past few years, the country's integration minister said Tuesday.
Nyamko Sabuni, herself a Congolese immigrant and Sweden's first black minister, said in an interview with The Associated Press that Swedes should not accept traditions that clash with the Scandinavian nation's fundamental values, including equality between the sexes.
Sabuni has angered many Muslims in the past by calling for a ban on headscarves for teenage girls in Sweden.
"Honor-related violence is an urgent gender equality issue," said Sabuni, 37. "Everyone who works with it the police, social services and women's shelters say that we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. It's a big problem."
Many European countries have reported so-called honor crimes, in which women are punished or even killed by relatives for committing adultery or violating other sexual mores. But Sabuni, who took office with the center-right government in October, said the problem was much bigger than the handful of murders that have gained major media attention in Sweden in recent years.
"I know there are girls who cannot choose with whom to marry. I know there are girls whose genitals are mutilated. I know there are girls whose virginity is checked before they marry," Sabuni said. "For me it's unacceptable that these phenomena exist in a democratic country."
About 12 percent of Sweden's 9 million residents are foreign-born, and the proportion is growing. Last year, Sweden received about 80,000 immigrants the highest number ever led by an influx of Iraqi refugees.
Many Muslims in Sweden have lashed out at Sabuni, saying they feel unfairly targeted by her campaign against honor crimes. They say such traditions date back hundreds of years in some Middle Eastern and African countries and have nothing to do with Islam.
Sabuni, who was raised in a Muslim family but considers herself an agnostic, said: "I'm not that interested in what Islam stipulates. I am very interested in saying that some traditions, some practices are completely unacceptable and illegal."
Sabuni has also angered Muslims by calling for withdrawing state support to religious schools and a ban on headscarves for girls under 15, although those proposals have not won support in the four-party government.
"Everything suggests this tradition is emerging here in Sweden, it's not something you bring from your former home country," Sabuni said about the Islamic headscarf. "And that brings the question: What is happening in our society that makes parents put headscarves on their children?"
Unlike in France, there are no laws against wearing religious symbols in schools in Sweden.
Sabuni said Sweden would be able to absorb the growing tide of refugees, but added that discrimination and self-imposed seclusion by some immigrants were hampering integration.
"We have a generation today that does not really feel Swedish. Many with an African background, like myself, are not addressed as Afro-Swedes, but as Congolese or Somalis or something else," she said. "In that respect I feel that we have failed."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1301 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Wed 21 Mar 2007 22:57 Post subject:
In the "Religion of Peace" you have peace when women submit to men's egos...when they don't, the women violate the peace. The only way to restore peace is to beat them to death, throw acid on them, stone them, burn them alive...then peace returns. "No woman, no cry."
Joined: 19 Jan 2006 {Posts: 185 } Location: Southern California
Posted: Wed 21 Mar 2007 23:35 Post subject:
"Keep your friends close...and your enemies closer" Sadly for some of these women mentioned in the above articles, the enemy is their own bloody family.
Honor killings are culturally sanctioned, and outside of Arab-influenced Africa, I'm not aware African nations that embrace the practice.
From what I've read, Christians, Muslims, Druze and possibly Mizrahi Jews from North Africa and the Middle East carry out honor killings.
For me the question is: Do Muslim immigrants from these areas (unlike Christians) use their religion to justify that behavior? Some of what I've come across seems to suggest they do.
Beating diresepectful women is apparently sanctioned in the Koran. An imam residing in France was deported for sanctioning the beating of women based on "his reading of Islam's holy book."
France: Kicking out cleric who thinks beating up women is OK
An Algerian imam living in France, whose comments condoning wife-beating sparked an uproar in the country was deported.
Chirane Abdelkader Bouziane’s expulsion to Algeria came a day after his remarks, which were made in a magazine interview, were widely reported by French media and drew swift reaction from authorities and Muslim leaders. Dalil Boubakeur, president of the mainstream French council of the Muslim religion, said the remarks were “scandalous and revolting.”
“You don’t say things of such gravity without suffering very serious consequences,” Boubakeur, whose council serves as a link to the government, told Europe-1 radio.
Bouziane, 52, imam of a mosque in the Lyon suburb of Venissieux, told the April edition of Lyon Mag that a man could beat his wife “under certain conditions, notably if the woman cheats on her husband.” He claimed that the Koran authorises such punishment. Asked if he was in favour of stoning, he replied, “yes.”
Justice Minister Dominique Perben said that he was personally scandalised by the remarks. The Interior Ministry said in a statement: “The government cannot tolerate remarks in public that are contrary to human rights, detrimental to human dignity and in particular to the dignity of women.” Bouziane reiterated the comments to reporters but specifying that blows to a woman’s face and upper body should be avoided. “Don’t aim at the face, don’t aim at the eyes, the ears, the nose,” he said on LCI television. “Hit low, that is, on the bottom.”
His expulsion came less than a week after another imam was forced to leave the country. Last Thursday, France expelled an imam who called for jihad, or holy war, from his mosque in Brest, in western France.
Female genital mutilation is sanctioned in a variety of cultures and practiced by adherents of many religions. In Egypt the practice allegedly goes back to Pharaonic times and Coptic Christians and Muslims practice it.
Sadly, though not surprisingly, some left/liberals (you know those who should be in the forefront of criticizing this behavior), influenced by relativism and multiculturalism, prefer to remain non-judgmental or morally confused about the issue.
Female Genital Mutilation
PART 2 OF 2
===========================================================================
Date: Wed, 02 Apr 1997 18:38:42 -0500
From: "Deborah A. Elliston" <elliston>
Subject: whose mutilation, and of what
I find it problematic that female genital mutiliation in Africa
regularly reappears on this list as a locus of feminist research interest,
and that it more generally is treated as a legitimiate topic of U.S.-based
feminist writing. U.S.-feminist authored writings on the topic thus far
demonstrate to me only that FGM cannot be analyzed or theorized from a
U.S.-based perspective. When U.S. feminists write about FGM, their
writings almost invariably become vehicles for placing non-Western women
once more 'under Western eyes', to borrow a phrase from Chandra Mohanty:
African women end up constructed, in these works, as thoroughly oppressed
victims (of their men, their 'culture') while Western women are the free
and enlightened thinkers who would rescue them, or at least draw back the
'veil' over these practices and 'expose' them to the enlightened light of
U.S. feminist criticism.
Rather than promoting the further exoticization of African women
from those few societies within which some women undergo FGM, rather than
adopting the colonial assumption that it is in 'other places' that one
finds the more radical practices which 'mutilate' female bodies and
desires, U.S.-based feminist scholars interested in FGM would stand on
much firmer grounder -- methodologically, epistemologically, and ethically
-- if they looked to 'female mutiliation' in their own backyards: Breast
implants, anyone? 'Cosmetic' surgeries? Belly tucks? Liposuction? And
what of the variety of services provided to infants: intersex sex
assignment surgeries, for example, the surgical 'correction' of
'ambiguous' genitals?
Deborah A. Elliston
Department of Anthropology
New York University
New E-mail (effective immediately): deborah.elliston @ nyu.edu
*NOTE NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS: OLD ADDRESS EXPIRES SOON*
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