Meriam Ibrahim and Faith McDonnell

Townhall.com ^ | September 20, 2014 | Ken Blackwell

[Kaslin]

The “War on Women” theme has become a campaign perennial in the U.S.

We hear it charged that anyone who does not support sex selection abortions is somehow engaged in a war against women. No matter that the vast majority of those “selected” for death in these horrific procedures are female, that is, little women.

In a similar vein, many of us who speak out for women shockingly abused in Muslim lands are accused of being Islamophobes and culturally insensitive. The simple fact is that the fate of women in these lands is grim. In not one of the Muslim majority lands are basic human rights respected.

But the inventors of new “rights” seem to be increasingly indifferent to the denial of those foundationaluniversal that were recognized in UN documents more than half a century ago. For the adoption of the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR) and their “universal” application no less a figure than Eleanor Roosevelt worked for years. For her efforts, she was called “First Lady of the World.”

A key part of the UNDHR is Article 18, which enshrines the right to change your religion, to practice and manifest your beliefs. Here’s the full text:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

In much of the Bloody Crescent, Article 18 is a virtual dead letter. But today, we are indebted to the tireless efforts of Faith McDonnel lof the Washington-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD). Faith has reported on many of these shocking violations of human rights—especially in Sudan. For years, Faith’s voice has been the Voice of Faith for endangered Christians in this war-torn African nation.

Much of what we came to know of the case of Meriam Ibrahim we learned from the detailed and accurate reporting done by Faith McDonnell. Meriam, a young mother in Sudan, was jailed and threatened with death for apostasy, the act of changing her religion from Islam. Her captors also clapped in irons her 20-month old son. He was briefly the youngest prisoner of conscience in the world—until Meriam went into labor with her second child, a little girl.

This Christian family was literally in chains for their faith. And Meriam’s husband, Daniel Wani, is a U.S. citizen.That fact made their children U.S. citizens.

Despite this, it was took a Herculean effort to move the State Department to get engaged in this case. We begin to think the late Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, was right when he said he hoped to see the State Department open up “an American desk.”

Happily, Meriam and her family have been freed. For her faith and her courage, Family Research Council will honor Meriam Ibrahim at a Washington Gala at the annual Values Voter Summit on September 27^th.

We should also salute the record of that champion of human rights, lawyer and activist, Bill Saunders. Bill spent many years at Family Research Council and now is a senior attorney with Americans United for Life.

More than a decade ago, Bill joined fellow believers in Sudan at Christmas.

The Khartoum regime then called the National Islamic Front, sent warplanes over the church on Christmas Day to bomb the Christian worshipers—their fellow countrymen! Bill’s reporting on this event—long before 9/11—first alerted many of us to the dangers of Islamist violence.

So, as we honor Meriam Ibrahim, we thank God for the witness of human rights activists here and around the world. We thank Faith McDonnell and Bill Saunders, our fellow Christians who cry out for the persecuted church. They are the voice of conscience in our distracted times.

[yldstrk]

Merriam told Megyn Kelly that she was always a Christian and that she gave birth in shackles.

[alloysteel]

The imaginary “War on Women” that is supposed to be waged upon the female gender by the Republican party is another of those lies, that repeated frequently enough, results in a total distortion of reality and any degree of polite conversation that may have existed.

A very real “War on Women” has been going on for centuries, if not since the dawn of time, and it traces back to a very wrong view of how religion should be practiced. Women, after all, are the mothers of every one of us, and for better or worse, each of us has been born of and nurtured in some manner or another by some member of the female gender.

There is a line in the “Cowboy Code”, which admonishes us, “Don’t shoot the girl”, a gentlemanly gesture that respects females for BEING females. Of course, when the girl shoots at you first, that changes the equation a little, but normally girls have to be vastly provoked to be driven to shooting first. Usually they slip the guy a little poison.

The female gender is quite different from the male gender, literally in every cell of their bodies. By artificial manipulation, some of the basic characteristics of one gender may be imposed upon the other, but only to the greater harm to both.

The Islamic ideology (not really a religion in any sense of the word) has turned biology and history upon its head, and imposed a status upon females that effectively render them to be slaves, subject to the will of the “Strongman” in their lives, be it the father, the betrothed husband, the brothers, or any of the male offspring. When a female escapes from this bondage, she is hunted down and in every way that may be brought to bear, she is humiliated, disgraced, oppressed, and eventually murdered by some means. No reprieve, no mercy, and in many instances, no recourse for the many injustices visited upon her. Various tyrannies in the history of mankind have imposed just this kind of subjugation upon the “weaker” sex, to their own eventual peril.

Even in that great paragon of idealism, the nation once known as “the United States of America”, women’s rights as fully functioning human beings was not realized at the beginning. But gradually, the bonds were loosened, and today the female gender is offered greater freedom of thought and conscience in most of what are considered to be the Western representative republican democracies than anywhere in the so-called “Third World”.

But the freedom to revert to the old ways is always available to the women of the world. And unbelievably, some of them really DO choose that personal oppression.

Low self-esteem, I guess. Otherwise why would ANY female willingly marry a mean, nasty brute? And end up murdering him while he slept?