[DAWN] LATELY, more and more voices are being raised for the abolition of the Council of Islamic Ideology. The strongest demand has come from the Sindh Assembly which, through a unanimous resolution passed on March 31, asked the federal government to get rid of this body citing recent anti-women views expressed by it. Earlier several civil society organizations and women's rights groups had made similar demands.
The CII has lately hogged the headlines with a flurry of opinions and recommendations that, if considered, would roll back whatever some positive legislation, enacted over several decades, has managed to achieve for women's rights.
Its first salvo was against DNA testing in cases of rape. DNA tests, in most countries that prefer to live by the rules of law and justice, are considered the most conclusive evidence not only in instances of rape but in other crimes as well. As long as DNA test reports are not accepted as primary evidence in rape cases by Pakistain's judicial system, the conviction rate for rape will remain negligible and survivors will continue to be denied justice.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
04/08/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Iff the War for OWG-NWO was supposed to include the pro-secular modernization of Islam, clearly it isn't working.
[DAWN] TO imagine the state of mind of Nizam Mai is to stare madness in the face. In a country where rape is often not reported to even families, let alone the law, her teenaged daughter was determined to seek justice. Even when the main suspect was granted bail last month, the rape victim refused to give up and went to the Bet Mir Hazar cop shoppe to lodge a protest. One does not know how the conversation went, but the fact is that she exited the cop shoppe, doused herself with petrol, and set herself ablaze. The burns she suffered led to her death, and her desperate act can only be taken as evidence of the level of confidence with which she viewed her chances of getting justice. That her mother complained on Wednesday that pressure was being put on her to drop the case -- even though the Supreme Court has taken suo motu ...a legal term, from the Latin. Roughly translated it means I saw what you did, you bastard... notice of it -- is a shameful, damning indictment of the state and the priority it affords to women's rights and safety.
There can be no denying that victims of rape in Pakistain must resort to desperate measures just to draw attention to their plight, let alone hold out any hope for justice. It was just a few days ago, after all, that in Layyah, a rape victim and her mother put themselves in a cage in the forlorn hope that the police might be induced to pursue the investigation with more seriousness. In this case, the suspects had been released at the request of a member of the National Assembly. Will this situation ever improve? Not until this crime is brought out of the shadows and prioritised by the law enforcement and justice systems. Every country that has relentlessly pursued rape cases has seen a drop in the incidence rate; every country where the police has been sensitised to women's rights has seen improvements. Pakistain's problem is the fact that the state does not seem interested.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/08/2014 00:00 ||
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[DAWN] A BASIC, though major, error the government has made in the process of dialogue with the outlawed TTP so far is to entirely ignore the narrative war. As far as the government is concerned anything that reduces the level of violence in the short and medium term is an idea worth pursuing, regardless of other -- less tangible, though no less important -- consequences for state and society. Consider the ideological war that is being fought through propaganda and intimidation by the TTP. The latest audacious move on that front was creating and putting online a website run by the TTP's media wing, Umar Media. The website was accessible for part of yesterday before apparently being taken down, but thus far there is little clarity whether the blackout was ordered by authorities here or whether the website has been taken offline for violating the terms of use of a foreign website-hosting company. Either way, the very fact that the TTP decided to publicly announce the creation of an official website indicates that the propaganda war is being taken to the next level by the group.
Why do narratives matter to begin with? Consider how the country has once again arrived at the stage where a government finds it easier to negotiate with than to take on the TTP. Even though it had long become clear that the TTP's ideology is an intolerant and murderous one, the religious and political right continued to hawk the line that the Taliban were simply conservative patriots who resented Pakistain's assistance in the war on terror -- and that once the state's allegedly misguided policy was reversed, the gunnies would lay down their arms. Because that narrative was not effectively or forcefully challenged, it eventually became the starting point for dialogue at all costs -- regardless of what the TTP itself said about its goals and intentions.
Now, with violence and intimidation of the media having silenced the most vocal critics of the TTP and the government's policy of appeasement, there is little left by way of a counter-narrative in the public domain. Whether it is via ideological allies in mainstream politics and the media or directly executed by the TTP itself, the Taliban worldview is the one being aggressively hawked -- and the only one that is aggressively competing for the hearts and minds of the public. That one-sided battle can have tremendously dangerous effects because it brings more and more concessions to the TTP into the realm of the acceptable as far as public opinion is concerned. What Paks really need to hear, what the government truly ought to be reinforcing is that Pakistain is a democratic, constitutional polity in which individual rights and freedoms are sacrosanct. The alternative is the Taliban worldview -- and, again, it's practically the only one being projected at the moment.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/08/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Short version : In a shocking development, Arabs don't like Jews, and are capable of stunningly bad judgement. Wash, rinse, repeat for , oh, about seventy years or so. And that's just in late 20th century.
(sarc off)
Posted by: ed in texas ||
04/08/2014 7:26 Comments ||
Top||
#3
In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood leadership for years moved in lockstep with the Grand Mufti. The influence of Hitler and Mussolini was already pervasive by the mid-nineteen thirties, both within the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian army. Several Ikhwan (including the young officer Anwar Sadat) cooperated with the Nazis, and many Brotherhood and military officers continued their support through World War II. Following its close, the Egyptian crown, influenced by the Brotherhood and its anti-colonialist message, worked with French intelligence to assist the Grand Mufti to escape Europe. Offered a home in Cairo, the anti-semitic poison he had spewed on the Nazi radio during World War II would continue in the Middle East. As noted in the article, the result was evidenced in the 2 November 1945 Cairo riots that marked the anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Cairo's Jewish quarter was attacked by the Young Egypt (Misr al-Fatah) Society "Green Shirts", a fascist paramilitary group founded in 1933 and whose leaders worked in
partnership with the Brotherhood. A similar assault occurred in Libya where the Brotherhood led an attack on the Jewish community in that country. Ironically, the riots predated by only a few days the Nuremberg War Crime Trials that opened on 20 November 1945.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
