Muslim Bloggers and Journalists Speak Out

www.spiegel.de ^ | April 11, 2007 | Henryk M. Broder

[Nachum]

Muslim journalists and bloggers across the Arab world are speaking out to promote civil society and women's rights in Islamic societies. But it is a hard struggle at times, with societal pressure and even fines to contend with.

The first so-called "honor killing" that Rana Husseini wrote about was the case of a 16-year-old girl who was killed by one of her brothers after she had been raped by another brother.

"The family blamed her, saying that she had 'seduced' the brother," Husseini recalls. That was in 1994 and Rana was only into her first few weeks of working as a reporter for the daily English-language newspaper The Jordan Times, where she had originally planned to write about "beautiful things" like art, literature and music.

Born in 1967 as the daughter of Palestinians who had moved from Jerusalem to the Jordanian capital Amman a year earlier, Husseini attended Oklahoma City University, where she studied journalism and art. Back in Jordan, the first lesson she had to learn was that "a woman's life is not worth very much," and that the victims of sex crimes were "always punished twice

[Free ThinkerNY]

Reforming Islam will be about as easy as reforming Nazism. Good luck.

[lndrvr1972]

I agree when will the rest of the world wake up and see that Muslims want to take over the world. I am sick and tired of this pussy footing around we need to kill these people, If you ever watch the the starting of religion it went to shit when Islam came to town. I think that we need to do another crusade the Muslim religion is full of shit and should be iradicated they are intolerant of democracy womens rights.
I am sick and tired of Bush’s policy about how this war should be handled. The reason we are still here is because we are being way too nice.

[Shadowstrike]

I just love how it’s always the women’s fault. She ‘seduced’ her own brother and they just had to kill her for it.
What a crock!
Islam is a sicko cult.

[sageb1]

Islam in and of itself is bad news. Promote moderates and what do we get? We still get Islam.

[Killborn]

If Islam is really this monolithic all oppressing ideology then there’d still be full-scale fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan not peacekeeping operations WITH the help of indigineous forces. As such, it’s doing a pretty lousy job when a large number of its followers are a lot less fanatical than the average Nazi or Imperial Japanese. We’d accomplish more in 4 years in the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan than in both Germany and Japan after WWII. In fact, if as many people are this cooperative in WWII, it would have ended a hell of a lot sooner.

To lump/alienate all potential allies as enemies is a stupid move. Even the American colonists worked with the “savages”.

[Realism]

Pretty simplistic point of view. The colonists used the Indians to gain power, France helped also. So if France decided that they would assume control and setup a government for colonists and the American Indians, the colonists would have turned on France without hesitation.

The shia and Kurds "used" the coalition to take power in Iraq, when it didn't happen the shia quickly turned on our troops with the help of Iran. Bottom line is, when you empower a group to fight a far away enemy you must be prepared to either hand over power to them once they succeed or prepare to fight on two fronts indefinitely.

[Killborn]

The majority of the violence in Iraq is perpetrated by outside agitators. There is a sectarian lift but not as widespread as they adn the media claim to be. What’s going on there is what would happen if gangbangers in America have access to high-powered weapons and explosives. The majority of Iraqs want to simply live in peace. The violence is gradually turning fence sitters into active opposition ot the thugs as witnessed in Al Anbar. Fallujah was once a terrorist sronghold but now it’s one of the fastest developing cities in Iraq.

The extremist Shias are receiving direct help from Iran. There’s a reason why the coward Al Sadr hid over there when the surge got rolling. Kurds are the most helpful and fastest developing group except for one: the Communist PKK scumbags that are constantly launching terrorist attacks into Turkey, much to the Coalition’s displeasure.

[Killborn]

Re: Indians, my point is that we take our allies where we can. Heckfire, part of the reason we were able to tame the west is because of other tribes that were willing to help us. IT would have gone on a lot longer were it not for these friendly tribes and Indians.