Just Because They are WOMEN
This blog has been my platform for a number of things and one of them is my firm belief that PROSTITUTION IS ABUSE.
Have you ever been treated like a "thing?" Or been in what you thought was a relationship that you later found out, you were a "thing" or an "object"? In a situation where your feelings of being used, hurt or lied to didn't count?
Six years ago I was coerced and drawn into such a relationship; though calling it a relationship gives it too much credibility. I learned later that the person, whom I'd known for years who did this to me -- had been running ads on casual sex sites since 1999... and seeing escorts since about 2000. When I came along, I was just one more toy for this person; who'd been conditioned by endless evenings of online porn & lunch hours of hookers to see me as just one of them. He felt he'd "paid" for me with his lies -- and now I should just shut up because he paramoralized me as JUST AS BAD.
But this 'relationship' wasn't presented to me that way. It was presented to me as deep feelings, 'true' connectedness and emotional & spiritual intimacy and a DEEP NEED for my time & affection from a deeply lonely person. A person I thought I "knew" well enough. It was none of those things. It was similar to a 15-year old guy telling his date he "loves" her just to get into her pants. Except in this -- I was in my late 40s, with children, separated and severely depressed & disabled. Vulnerabilities this person was well aware of. And when I found out and subsequently stepped up to the plate... well, suffice it to say I was verbally attacked and had my character smeared. Eventually even my children were threatened because I stepped up.
When you realize you were NOTHING to someone; that you were used and that a portion of YOUR life was destroyed because of it -- you have every right to be angry, to speak out and to take your dignity back. You have a right not be to used or targeted because you are a vulnerable female. Because no one is nothing. No one.
(I will save the rant about why the police don't arrest more johns and go after more of the sex trade's customers for another day!)
In much of Islam -- women are nothing and are treated as such. We have read stories of how Sharia law has brutalized & murdered women who merely talk to a male, get a job or do anything that isn't under the thumb of a man. Being a woman in Islam brings torture, abuse, executions and a spiritual devastation we in the West can only pretend to understand. Imam's preach beating and abusing women as part the religious practice. Women are to be put down at all cost. No matter what. Daughters are to be 'honor killed' if they show any inkling of the independence Western women hold so dear.
Illegals are forced into prostitution in some new 'vacation spot' like Dubai. (Check your local travel agency -- Dubai is a new hot spot!) These women are so shamed they can't return home and are in endless debt to the criminals that run the clubs in Dubai or risk execution at the hands of their families, some of them Muslim. These women are SLAVES -- make no mistake about it. Slavery is alive and well. Where are the feminists? Where is N.O.W.? We need to speak out for these women -- because they certainly cannot speak for themselves.
They were born FEMALE.
(many thanks to Chaim from Freedom's Cost for this article!!:)
Slavery's new Mecca
In a new book documenting the modern slave trade, E. Benjamin Skinner travels to Dubai, known in the sex trade as 'Disneyland for men'
by E. Benjamin Skinner
To enter Dubai's most notorious brothel, the Cyclone, I paid $16 for a ticket that the bursar stamped with the official seal of the Department of Tourism & Commerce Marketing.
Prostitution is illegal in Dubai, whose laws are rooted in Islam, with penalties ranging up to death. But the stamp was only the first of several contradictions in a place of slavery for women that one well-travelled British monger referred to as "Disneyland for men."
One sign read No Soliciting; another read No Camouflage in the Disco Area. In the club, no less than 500 prostitutes solicited a couple dozen prospective clients, some Western servicemen among them.
An Indian living in London owned the place, and had not updated the decor in a decade, as if taste would reduce the charm and thus deter tourists. I walked over to the bar, and two Korean girls, who looked no older than 15 and claimed to be sisters, approached me.
"Do you want massage?" one asked.
While the strobe lights, the loud music and the general whirlpool of anxious femininity lent an air of abject chaos, the place was carefully ordered by race. Stage left was a crush of Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean women; centre stage were sub-Saharan Africans; stage right were Eastern European and Central Asian women, who initially identified themselves as Russians, but later revealed specifically that they were Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Uzbek and Moldovan.
A young Chinese woman wore a childlike perfume. The club bathed her in black light, so that she appeared like a radioactive negative of herself. In broken English, she explained that she had arrived in Dubai 28 days earlier, having been promised a job as a maid. Instead, human smugglers known as snakeheads sold her to a madam who forced her to pay off a debt by selling sex here. She trembled as she said that she just wanted to go home.
Her story was not unusual. A night earlier in another mega-bordello located in the three-star York International Hotel in the tony Bur Dubai neighbourhood, a 30-year-old Uzbek told me she had to pay off a $10,000 debt or "the mafia will kill my children."
In the Cyclone, every woman who spoke with me in depth explained that traffickers had taken their passports away as collateral until they paid off a debt. Alina, a bleach-blonde from northern Romania, sat forlornly smoking and playing electronic solitaire along the back wall. She had a raspy voice, and a sallow complexion that made her appear much older than her 23 years. She came here in 2004, after divorcing the alcoholic father of her three-year-old son. A Romanian woman in Dubai had promised her work as a waitress in a local restaurant.
When the woman met Alina at the airport, she told her what her real work would be. Without her passport, without any money, without any local contacts, she had no choice but to go with the woman to the Cyclone. From then on, her life was a blur of clients -- American, European, Indian, and mostly Arab. Some men purchased oral sex in the "VIP Room" above the bar, but they normally took Alina to a hotel or apartment. They were often violent.
"Many problem customers," she said, particularly among the Arabs.
Every morning at six she would return to the apartment of the madam, an abusive woman who took all the money. For Alina's efforts she was given one meal a day, coffee and cigarettes.
Alina contemplated escape, but running to the desert would be a death sentence for her, and running to the police would be a death sentence for her son. Her health faded, her skin fell apart and in the supply-saturated market of the Cyclone, she ceased getting customers, a fact that triggered the furor of her madam.
One night, the woman forced Alina to go with a Syrian man to the neighboring city of Al Ain. As soon as he picked her up, he started yelling at her in Arabic. She was terrified, and cried all the way to his apartment. There he tortured and raped her for two days. Shortly after the man released her, the madam announced that she was going back to Romania, and that she would manumit Alina.
For the first time in a year, Alina had a choice. Despite the horrendous abuse she had survived, and despite her illegal alien status, she went back to prostitution. She knew her reputation was shattered back home, and that she would never find legitimate work or a husband to provide for her son. So she stayed. But she insisted that "I am for myself."
In the Cyclone I found a range of nationalities, a wealth of sad stories; though most had been enslaved, some were now free. But for Alina, as for many others, there was no joy in freedom.
Before I left, I noted one sign that, unlike the rest, did not contradict the surroundings. On a coaster, embedded underneath the polyurethane finish of the bar top, was a quote by Martin Luther King Jr.: "We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."
Dubai grew at breakneck speed during the 1990s, developing faster than any country on Earth. In 1991, a handful of multistory buildings sat alongside a dusty, two-lane highway, with the occasional oasis, camel tracks and plenty of sand.
Fifteen years later, Dubai was a sparkling metropolis of 1.5 million people. Mirrored glass was everywhere, and while the streets were well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the skyscrapers were chilled to meat locker temperatures by massive air conditioners. Grandiose mosques and palaces gave variation to the skyline, and even the adhan was a sound effect-aided performance.
But with breakneck growth came whiplash. As the U. A. E. steadily loosened barriers to investment and immigration, unscrupulous operators moved in. Drugsmuggling arrests increased 300% in the two years preceding my visit. And Dubai also became the Mecca of the new slave trade. Although slavery was abolished here in 1963, many still worked under threat of violence for no pay. On occasion, unpaid or underpaid laborers resisted. In March, 2006, a small group of South Asian construction workers building the Burj Dubai tower -- set to be the world's tallest building -- rampaged through the emirate for several days to protest poor working conditions and low pay. Rami G. Khouri, the editor of Beirut's Daily Star, called it "our first modern slave revolt in the Arab region."
While the rioters were exploited, they were not enslaved. Tens of thousands of others were, but their plight was hidden. In addition to bonded construction workers, Filipino housemaids were regularly beaten, raped and denied pay by their Arab masters. As many as 6,000 child camel jockeys -- mainly from South Asia -- languished in hidden slavery on farms, where their masters beat them and starved them to keep their weight down.
I found Natasha enslaved anew by a Russian madam in the Cyclone. One evening, Dubai police rushed the doors, turned on all of the lights, ordered all of the men to leave and demanded the girls' passports. Natasha's was held by her madam, so the police threw her into an overcrowded desert prison for a month without trial. The conditions were appalling. She claimed that prison authorities laced her food with Bron, a codeine-based drug that supposedly killed her sexual appetite. The drug left her in a stupor and made her an easy mark for other prisoners. A month later, she was back in Chisinau, penniless and hopeless once again.
- Excerpted from A Crime So Monstrous by E. Benjamin Skinner
SOURCE
~~~~~~~~~
The silent screams of women and girls
by Lily Mazahery
Lately, I have developed a new hobby: I spend hours at my computer, poring over page after page of Farsi weblogs. I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that just about every intellectual, activist and women's rights advocate in Iran, including lawyers and journalists, keeps extensive weblogs, filled with useful information, opinions and social commentary - the kind of information that is woefully absent from official publications in Iran; the kind of information that the Islamic regime has masterfully, at times forcibly, eliminated from public view for almost three decades.
Within this newfound treasure trove, I have traveled to the depths of human suffering. I have witnessed the tears of mothers, the loneliness of daughters, and the hopelessness of fathers and brothers. I have felt the crushing weight of their silence. And in my mind, I have painted portraits of the authors who have so generously opened their hearts, minds and computers to the outside world and to those of us who share with them a common heritage, yet enjoy uncommon freedoms.
I have been surprised to read detailed accounts of torture, executions, beatings and prisoner abuse. I have become all too familiar with the pain of the families whose daughters are sentenced to death for acts they never committed, or acts that are the natural right of every human to commit.
I have learned that by replacing a once progressive legal system with Sharia doctrine, the Islamic regime has systematically oppressed, marginalized and dehumanized one half of its own citizens. Under this draconian system, Iranian women have lost their inheritance rights, as well as custodial rights to their own children. They are required to secure the express approval of their husbands or male guardians to obtain passports and to travel. Under Sharia law, a woman's testimony in court is, at best, worth half the testimony of her male counterpart.
TEMPORARY marriages are not the only method of institutionalized oppression of women and girls by the Islamic regime. Atefeh Rajabi was hanged in the city of Neka in the early hours of August 15, 2004. Her crime was officially declared to be "adultery," even though she had never married and was only 16 when the very judge who had condemned her to death served the added role of executioner by personally placing the noose around Atefeh's tiny neck and ordering her body to be raised. Unofficially, however, Atefeh's crime was defiance - defiance of the unnatural and unreasonable rules that were forced upon her by the Islamic government; defiance of her status as something less than human; defiance of the inequality, poverty and misogyny that have infested Iran in the past 27 years; and defiance of the binds designed to break the human spirit and destroy the essence of childhood.
To the very end, Atefeh maintained her defiance. Witnesses speak of an unusual sense of calmness in her beautiful blue eyes to the last minute. They recount the child's insolent last words, which were: "At the very least, you could have given me a glass of water. Animals are slaughtered more humanely than this."
Atefeh is not the only girl to be sentenced to death by the Islamic regime, nor the only child. Despite being a signatory to international treaties that expressly prohibit the heinous practice of child execution, Iran had the dubious honor of being the only country to execute children in 2005. In 2006, it shared this odious status with Pakistan - the only other country to have executed a child last year.
According to Amnesty International, Iran executed at least eight child offenders in 2005. It carried out its first child execution of 2006 on May 13 with the hanging of an unnamed 17-year-old boy along with an unnamed 20-year-old man. The two were hanged because they had allegedly engaged in homosexual acts.
Iran shows little sign of curbing its use of the death penalty on child offenders, just as it shows little respect for the rights of children and women as a whole. Delara Darabi, another Iranian teenage girl on death row, has spent the past two and a half years in prison for a crime she never committed. After murdering a woman related to Delara, Delara's 19-year-old boyfriend persuaded her to admit responsibility for the crime to protect him from execution. Apparently, both teenagers believed that because Delara was under the age of 18 she could not be sentenced to death. This belief proved to be devastatingly false.
With complete disregard for its obligations under the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and despite overwhelming evidence of Delara's innocence, a court in the city of Rasht found the teenager guilty of murder based on her initial claim of responsibility and sentenced her to death by hanging. The Islamic regime displayed even greater disregard for its promises to the international community, as well as to the rights of its own children, when its highest court upheld Delara's death sentence.
In prison, Delara has proven to be a remarkably poised and strong young girl with an amazing talent for painting and drawing. She has used her gift to compile a diary of her pain as a child prisoner on death row. She has produced an impressive collection of paintings that speak of the horrors of torture, of beatings, of hopelessness, loneliness, and the loss of a child's innocence. They are haunting images of injustice and brutality. They are the stories of the innocent women and children of Iran, shackled by the injustices of a brutal regime. They are a teenager's diary of crimes against humanity committed by her government.
Recently, we have witnessed a few rays of hope amongst the darkness that has befallen the citizens of Iran. By using the Internet to communicate with human rights lawyers, activists, and journalists inside Iran, we have been able to organize an international network of lawyers and journalists who have selflessly and bravely dedicated themselves to saving the lives of innocent Iranians. Through protests, demonstrations, publication of reports of atrocities committed by the Iranian regime and Internet-based petitions in various languages, we have generated substantial international attention towards the unjust treatment of women and girls, particularly those who have been condemned to death by stoning.
The result of this international collaboration has been nothing less than astonishing! In the past few months, we have been successful in securing stays of execution for Malak Ghorbany, Ashraf Kalhori, Kobra Rahmanpour and other innocent women. After spending seven years in prison for a crime that she had never committed, Hajieh Esmailvand was recently released from jail after all charges of adultery were dismissed in her case.
Parisa Akbari, a woman who was forced into prostitution by her husband, was also released from prison after the charges of adultery, for which she had been sentenced to death by stoning, were also dismissed. We are hopeful that our efforts will be successful in obtaining similar results for other prisoners, whose only crime is to have been born female in a society that not only devalues their existence, but takes extreme measures to take away their most basic rights as humans.
In this context, we have initiated the One Million Signatures campaign, designed to change laws that specifically discriminate against women and girls. We have also organized the Stop Stoning Forever campaign and signature drive, calling for the permanent removal of stoning laws from the Iranian legal system. By joining forces, we can make a difference.
We owe that to the daughters of Cyrus the Great.
The silent screams of women and girls existing under horrors of the Islamic regime must be acknowledged by each and every one of us. We must express our outrage, voice our anger, and show our support to those who can not speak for themselves. Anything less would be less than human, less than American, and most certainly, less than Persian.
Lily Mazahery is a Persian-American attorney, and the founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Legal Rights Institute. The above is based on a recent talk she gave.
SOURCE
PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION!! CLICK HERE
USING PROSTITUTES IS ABUSIVE AND SEX WITH A PROSTITUTE/ ESCORT/ HOOKER or whatever you want to call them - IS PAID RAPE.
Have you ever been treated like a "thing?" Or been in what you thought was a relationship that you later found out, you were a "thing" or an "object"? In a situation where your feelings of being used, hurt or lied to didn't count? Six years ago I was coerced and drawn into such a relationship; though calling it a relationship gives it too much credibility. I learned later that the person, whom I'd known for years who did this to me -- had been running ads on casual sex sites since 1999... and seeing escorts since about 2000. When I came along, I was just one more toy for this person; who'd been conditioned by endless evenings of online porn & lunch hours of hookers to see me as just one of them. He felt he'd "paid" for me with his lies -- and now I should just shut up because he paramoralized me as JUST AS BAD.
But this 'relationship' wasn't presented to me that way. It was presented to me as deep feelings, 'true' connectedness and emotional & spiritual intimacy and a DEEP NEED for my time & affection from a deeply lonely person. A person I thought I "knew" well enough. It was none of those things. It was similar to a 15-year old guy telling his date he "loves" her just to get into her pants. Except in this -- I was in my late 40s, with children, separated and severely depressed & disabled. Vulnerabilities this person was well aware of. And when I found out and subsequently stepped up to the plate... well, suffice it to say I was verbally attacked and had my character smeared. Eventually even my children were threatened because I stepped up.
When you realize you were NOTHING to someone; that you were used and that a portion of YOUR life was destroyed because of it -- you have every right to be angry, to speak out and to take your dignity back. You have a right not be to used or targeted because you are a vulnerable female. Because no one is nothing. No one.
(I will save the rant about why the police don't arrest more johns and go after more of the sex trade's customers for another day!)
In much of Islam -- women are nothing and are treated as such. We have read stories of how Sharia law has brutalized & murdered women who merely talk to a male, get a job or do anything that isn't under the thumb of a man. Being a woman in Islam brings torture, abuse, executions and a spiritual devastation we in the West can only pretend to understand. Imam's preach beating and abusing women as part the religious practice. Women are to be put down at all cost. No matter what. Daughters are to be 'honor killed' if they show any inkling of the independence Western women hold so dear.
Illegals are forced into prostitution in some new 'vacation spot' like Dubai. (Check your local travel agency -- Dubai is a new hot spot!) These women are so shamed they can't return home and are in endless debt to the criminals that run the clubs in Dubai or risk execution at the hands of their families, some of them Muslim. These women are SLAVES -- make no mistake about it. Slavery is alive and well. Where are the feminists? Where is N.O.W.? We need to speak out for these women -- because they certainly cannot speak for themselves.
We need to STEP UP for them -- like we would for ourselves!The only crime I ever committed was caring to much -- but the massive crime that the women in the articles below committed is worse, so much worse where they live:
They were born FEMALE.
(many thanks to Chaim from Freedom's Cost for this article!!:)
Slavery's new Mecca
In a new book documenting the modern slave trade, E. Benjamin Skinner travels to Dubai, known in the sex trade as 'Disneyland for men'
by E. Benjamin Skinner
To enter Dubai's most notorious brothel, the Cyclone, I paid $16 for a ticket that the bursar stamped with the official seal of the Department of Tourism & Commerce Marketing.
Prostitution is illegal in Dubai, whose laws are rooted in Islam, with penalties ranging up to death. But the stamp was only the first of several contradictions in a place of slavery for women that one well-travelled British monger referred to as "Disneyland for men."
One sign read No Soliciting; another read No Camouflage in the Disco Area. In the club, no less than 500 prostitutes solicited a couple dozen prospective clients, some Western servicemen among them.
An Indian living in London owned the place, and had not updated the decor in a decade, as if taste would reduce the charm and thus deter tourists. I walked over to the bar, and two Korean girls, who looked no older than 15 and claimed to be sisters, approached me.
"Do you want massage?" one asked.
While the strobe lights, the loud music and the general whirlpool of anxious femininity lent an air of abject chaos, the place was carefully ordered by race. Stage left was a crush of Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean women; centre stage were sub-Saharan Africans; stage right were Eastern European and Central Asian women, who initially identified themselves as Russians, but later revealed specifically that they were Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Uzbek and Moldovan.
A young Chinese woman wore a childlike perfume. The club bathed her in black light, so that she appeared like a radioactive negative of herself. In broken English, she explained that she had arrived in Dubai 28 days earlier, having been promised a job as a maid. Instead, human smugglers known as snakeheads sold her to a madam who forced her to pay off a debt by selling sex here. She trembled as she said that she just wanted to go home.
Her story was not unusual. A night earlier in another mega-bordello located in the three-star York International Hotel in the tony Bur Dubai neighbourhood, a 30-year-old Uzbek told me she had to pay off a $10,000 debt or "the mafia will kill my children."
In the Cyclone, every woman who spoke with me in depth explained that traffickers had taken their passports away as collateral until they paid off a debt. Alina, a bleach-blonde from northern Romania, sat forlornly smoking and playing electronic solitaire along the back wall. She had a raspy voice, and a sallow complexion that made her appear much older than her 23 years. She came here in 2004, after divorcing the alcoholic father of her three-year-old son. A Romanian woman in Dubai had promised her work as a waitress in a local restaurant.
When the woman met Alina at the airport, she told her what her real work would be. Without her passport, without any money, without any local contacts, she had no choice but to go with the woman to the Cyclone. From then on, her life was a blur of clients -- American, European, Indian, and mostly Arab. Some men purchased oral sex in the "VIP Room" above the bar, but they normally took Alina to a hotel or apartment. They were often violent.
"Many problem customers," she said, particularly among the Arabs.
Every morning at six she would return to the apartment of the madam, an abusive woman who took all the money. For Alina's efforts she was given one meal a day, coffee and cigarettes.
Alina contemplated escape, but running to the desert would be a death sentence for her, and running to the police would be a death sentence for her son. Her health faded, her skin fell apart and in the supply-saturated market of the Cyclone, she ceased getting customers, a fact that triggered the furor of her madam.
One night, the woman forced Alina to go with a Syrian man to the neighboring city of Al Ain. As soon as he picked her up, he started yelling at her in Arabic. She was terrified, and cried all the way to his apartment. There he tortured and raped her for two days. Shortly after the man released her, the madam announced that she was going back to Romania, and that she would manumit Alina.
For the first time in a year, Alina had a choice. Despite the horrendous abuse she had survived, and despite her illegal alien status, she went back to prostitution. She knew her reputation was shattered back home, and that she would never find legitimate work or a husband to provide for her son. So she stayed. But she insisted that "I am for myself."
In the Cyclone I found a range of nationalities, a wealth of sad stories; though most had been enslaved, some were now free. But for Alina, as for many others, there was no joy in freedom.
Before I left, I noted one sign that, unlike the rest, did not contradict the surroundings. On a coaster, embedded underneath the polyurethane finish of the bar top, was a quote by Martin Luther King Jr.: "We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."
Dubai grew at breakneck speed during the 1990s, developing faster than any country on Earth. In 1991, a handful of multistory buildings sat alongside a dusty, two-lane highway, with the occasional oasis, camel tracks and plenty of sand.
Fifteen years later, Dubai was a sparkling metropolis of 1.5 million people. Mirrored glass was everywhere, and while the streets were well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the skyscrapers were chilled to meat locker temperatures by massive air conditioners. Grandiose mosques and palaces gave variation to the skyline, and even the adhan was a sound effect-aided performance.
But with breakneck growth came whiplash. As the U. A. E. steadily loosened barriers to investment and immigration, unscrupulous operators moved in. Drugsmuggling arrests increased 300% in the two years preceding my visit. And Dubai also became the Mecca of the new slave trade. Although slavery was abolished here in 1963, many still worked under threat of violence for no pay. On occasion, unpaid or underpaid laborers resisted. In March, 2006, a small group of South Asian construction workers building the Burj Dubai tower -- set to be the world's tallest building -- rampaged through the emirate for several days to protest poor working conditions and low pay. Rami G. Khouri, the editor of Beirut's Daily Star, called it "our first modern slave revolt in the Arab region."
While the rioters were exploited, they were not enslaved. Tens of thousands of others were, but their plight was hidden. In addition to bonded construction workers, Filipino housemaids were regularly beaten, raped and denied pay by their Arab masters. As many as 6,000 child camel jockeys -- mainly from South Asia -- languished in hidden slavery on farms, where their masters beat them and starved them to keep their weight down.
I found Natasha enslaved anew by a Russian madam in the Cyclone. One evening, Dubai police rushed the doors, turned on all of the lights, ordered all of the men to leave and demanded the girls' passports. Natasha's was held by her madam, so the police threw her into an overcrowded desert prison for a month without trial. The conditions were appalling. She claimed that prison authorities laced her food with Bron, a codeine-based drug that supposedly killed her sexual appetite. The drug left her in a stupor and made her an easy mark for other prisoners. A month later, she was back in Chisinau, penniless and hopeless once again.
- Excerpted from A Crime So Monstrous by E. Benjamin Skinner
SOURCE
~~~~~~~~~The silent screams of women and girls
by Lily Mazahery
Lately, I have developed a new hobby: I spend hours at my computer, poring over page after page of Farsi weblogs. I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that just about every intellectual, activist and women's rights advocate in Iran, including lawyers and journalists, keeps extensive weblogs, filled with useful information, opinions and social commentary - the kind of information that is woefully absent from official publications in Iran; the kind of information that the Islamic regime has masterfully, at times forcibly, eliminated from public view for almost three decades.
Within this newfound treasure trove, I have traveled to the depths of human suffering. I have witnessed the tears of mothers, the loneliness of daughters, and the hopelessness of fathers and brothers. I have felt the crushing weight of their silence. And in my mind, I have painted portraits of the authors who have so generously opened their hearts, minds and computers to the outside world and to those of us who share with them a common heritage, yet enjoy uncommon freedoms.
I have been surprised to read detailed accounts of torture, executions, beatings and prisoner abuse. I have become all too familiar with the pain of the families whose daughters are sentenced to death for acts they never committed, or acts that are the natural right of every human to commit.
I have learned that by replacing a once progressive legal system with Sharia doctrine, the Islamic regime has systematically oppressed, marginalized and dehumanized one half of its own citizens. Under this draconian system, Iranian women have lost their inheritance rights, as well as custodial rights to their own children. They are required to secure the express approval of their husbands or male guardians to obtain passports and to travel. Under Sharia law, a woman's testimony in court is, at best, worth half the testimony of her male counterpart.
Even more astonishing, Iran's new Islamic-guided government has established a system of legalized prostitution, through the practice of "sigheh" or "temporary marriages," by which a mullah arranges a "legal union" between a man and a girl (some as young as nine years old) for a fee. The so-called marriage can last anywhere from one hour to 99 years. Under this system, men are free to enter into as many temporary marriages as they so desire, without having any legal obligation or responsibility toward the women and children that they "marry" only to use as sexual objects and slaves.Not surprisingly, this legalized system of slavery and oppression has led to a growing sex-trafficking industry that is partially operated by government officials and mullahs themselves. The girls who are forced into this system of sexual and economic slavery are typically transported to various countries in the Persian Gulf and are sold to individuals as well as to established brothels. The budding industry of sexual trafficking of Iranian girls has led to growing concerns about the spread of AIDS/HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases throughout the region.
TEMPORARY marriages are not the only method of institutionalized oppression of women and girls by the Islamic regime. Atefeh Rajabi was hanged in the city of Neka in the early hours of August 15, 2004. Her crime was officially declared to be "adultery," even though she had never married and was only 16 when the very judge who had condemned her to death served the added role of executioner by personally placing the noose around Atefeh's tiny neck and ordering her body to be raised. Unofficially, however, Atefeh's crime was defiance - defiance of the unnatural and unreasonable rules that were forced upon her by the Islamic government; defiance of her status as something less than human; defiance of the inequality, poverty and misogyny that have infested Iran in the past 27 years; and defiance of the binds designed to break the human spirit and destroy the essence of childhood.
To the very end, Atefeh maintained her defiance. Witnesses speak of an unusual sense of calmness in her beautiful blue eyes to the last minute. They recount the child's insolent last words, which were: "At the very least, you could have given me a glass of water. Animals are slaughtered more humanely than this."
Atefeh is not the only girl to be sentenced to death by the Islamic regime, nor the only child. Despite being a signatory to international treaties that expressly prohibit the heinous practice of child execution, Iran had the dubious honor of being the only country to execute children in 2005. In 2006, it shared this odious status with Pakistan - the only other country to have executed a child last year.
According to Amnesty International, Iran executed at least eight child offenders in 2005. It carried out its first child execution of 2006 on May 13 with the hanging of an unnamed 17-year-old boy along with an unnamed 20-year-old man. The two were hanged because they had allegedly engaged in homosexual acts.
Iran shows little sign of curbing its use of the death penalty on child offenders, just as it shows little respect for the rights of children and women as a whole. Delara Darabi, another Iranian teenage girl on death row, has spent the past two and a half years in prison for a crime she never committed. After murdering a woman related to Delara, Delara's 19-year-old boyfriend persuaded her to admit responsibility for the crime to protect him from execution. Apparently, both teenagers believed that because Delara was under the age of 18 she could not be sentenced to death. This belief proved to be devastatingly false.
With complete disregard for its obligations under the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and despite overwhelming evidence of Delara's innocence, a court in the city of Rasht found the teenager guilty of murder based on her initial claim of responsibility and sentenced her to death by hanging. The Islamic regime displayed even greater disregard for its promises to the international community, as well as to the rights of its own children, when its highest court upheld Delara's death sentence.
In prison, Delara has proven to be a remarkably poised and strong young girl with an amazing talent for painting and drawing. She has used her gift to compile a diary of her pain as a child prisoner on death row. She has produced an impressive collection of paintings that speak of the horrors of torture, of beatings, of hopelessness, loneliness, and the loss of a child's innocence. They are haunting images of injustice and brutality. They are the stories of the innocent women and children of Iran, shackled by the injustices of a brutal regime. They are a teenager's diary of crimes against humanity committed by her government.
Recently, we have witnessed a few rays of hope amongst the darkness that has befallen the citizens of Iran. By using the Internet to communicate with human rights lawyers, activists, and journalists inside Iran, we have been able to organize an international network of lawyers and journalists who have selflessly and bravely dedicated themselves to saving the lives of innocent Iranians. Through protests, demonstrations, publication of reports of atrocities committed by the Iranian regime and Internet-based petitions in various languages, we have generated substantial international attention towards the unjust treatment of women and girls, particularly those who have been condemned to death by stoning.
The result of this international collaboration has been nothing less than astonishing! In the past few months, we have been successful in securing stays of execution for Malak Ghorbany, Ashraf Kalhori, Kobra Rahmanpour and other innocent women. After spending seven years in prison for a crime that she had never committed, Hajieh Esmailvand was recently released from jail after all charges of adultery were dismissed in her case.
Parisa Akbari, a woman who was forced into prostitution by her husband, was also released from prison after the charges of adultery, for which she had been sentenced to death by stoning, were also dismissed. We are hopeful that our efforts will be successful in obtaining similar results for other prisoners, whose only crime is to have been born female in a society that not only devalues their existence, but takes extreme measures to take away their most basic rights as humans.
In this context, we have initiated the One Million Signatures campaign, designed to change laws that specifically discriminate against women and girls. We have also organized the Stop Stoning Forever campaign and signature drive, calling for the permanent removal of stoning laws from the Iranian legal system. By joining forces, we can make a difference.
We owe that to the daughters of Cyrus the Great.
The silent screams of women and girls existing under horrors of the Islamic regime must be acknowledged by each and every one of us. We must express our outrage, voice our anger, and show our support to those who can not speak for themselves. Anything less would be less than human, less than American, and most certainly, less than Persian.
Lily Mazahery is a Persian-American attorney, and the founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Legal Rights Institute. The above is based on a recent talk she gave.
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PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION!! CLICK HERE
Comments
Post a complaint about Barbie, or some other insult to rich white women, and you will have a hundred.
Does this define the problem?