VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN PALESTINE/SYRIAN NEWS + MORE FISK/MEDIA SCOUNDRELS/Farming Palestine for Freedom/INDIA: Religious Pogroms
Enrique Ferro
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN PALESTINE
Reforms needed to stem violence
Posted on August 16, 2012
RAMALLAH, Occupied West Bank, Aug 16 2012 (IPS) – After the brutal murder of a Palestinian woman in late July in a busy Bethlehem marketplace, local human rights groups are pushing for stronger reforms to stem violence against women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“We have problems with the existing laws,” Maysoun Ramadan, director of the Mehwar Centre, the West Bank’s only women’s shelter told IPS. “I think also we need to work more on raising awareness towards women’s rights. We have a problem with the mentality, the culture, we have a lot of previous constructions about women which need to be changed.”
Nancy Zaboun, a 27-year-old mother of three, was violently killed by her husband on Jul. 30 in Bethlehem. The murder took place after Zaboun left a divorce hearing. Her husband had reportedly beaten her regularly over the course of their ten-year marriage.
On Jul. 18, the body of another woman was taken to Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Palestinian police have reportedly arrested two of the woman’s relatives in connection with the killing, which is suspected to have been carried out to preserve “family honour”.
In 2010, the Independent Commission for Human Rights documented the cases of nine women who had been killed for this same reason – to preserve “family honour” – in the occupied Palestinian territories.
In addition to these “honour killings,” a 2009 study published by the Gaza-based Palestinian Women’s Information and Media Centre found that 67 percent of Palestinian women reported being subjected to verbal violence on a regular basis, 71 percent to psychological violence, 52.4 percent to physical violence and 14.5 percent to sexual violence.
“When women come to the shelter, they come in a very dramatic way. They have been abused and subjected to different types of violence for many years. They lost their confidence. They are sometimes aggressive, sometimes suicidal, sometimes in depression. They have nightmares,” Ramadan told IPS.
“They are all the time dependent on someone else and don’t believe in themselves. We try to help them to see their capacities and to raise their motivation to break this cycle.”
In January 2011, the Palestinian Authority (PA) passed a National Strategy to Combat Violence against Women for the period 2011-2019. The programme aims to create work training and empowerment programmes for women, provide social support, and promote a legal framework to stem violence.
“Our aim and target was to eliminate all forms of violence, no matter what kind of violence, against Palestinian women,” Rahiba Diab, the PA’s Minister of Women’s Affairs, told IPS from her Ramallah office.
“There is a serious commitment from the PA to support all the issues related to women, and not to forget about the violence that comes from the critical political situation that we’re living under as Palestinians,” Diab said.
In May 2011, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a presidential decree to suspend two laws: Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code of 1960, in effect in the West Bank, and Article 18 of the British Mandatory law of 1936, which is enforced in Gaza.
Article 340 granted a man exemption from prosecution and reduced penalties for killing his wife or other female relative if she is caught committing adultery. Article 18 provided leniency for the same crime if a man can prove that he acted in order to preserve his honour or the honour of others.
But various human rights groups have pointed to the fact that the PA left other tenets of the law in place, which allow for violence against women to continue unpunished.
Articles 97, 98, 99, and 100 of the Jordanian penal code deal with mitigating circumstances can be used to justify “honour killings,” – Article 98 allows perpetrators to avoid punishment if they can prove that they acted in a “state of rage”.
“The existing law still allows for women to be killed, still allows for impunity,” said Tahseen Elayyan, head of the ‘Protection of women in armed conflicts’ project at the Ramallah-based Al Haq human rights organisation.
“In order to take practical steps towards protecting women, especially from the so-called honour killing, the law must be changed, and perpetrators of this type of killing must be held accountable,” Elayyan told IPS.
According to a report released in December 2011 by the United Nations Economic and Social Council, “high levels of poverty, unemployment and related frustration have contributed to an increase in tension, and ultimately violence, within families” in the occupied Palestinian territories.
This is especially true in the Gaza Strip, where the increasingly harsh economic and social conditions created by the Israeli siege have translated into violence against women, according to Mona Shawa, head of the women’s unit at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza City.
“Gaza is under a closure. The economic situation is very bad. There is a high percentage of poverty and unemployment. There is frequent violence from Israeli attacks. All of these circumstances affect the level of violence against women,” Shawa told IPS.
She explained that while putting laws in place to protect women against violence is a much-needed first step, raising awareness on the rights of women and changing attitudes within Palestinian society is crucial.
“Most important is the community and the culture. We still have a culture which is based on discrimination against women. We still have a culture that sees women as not equal to men. This encourages violence against women,” Shawa said.
“Working on that as a government, as civil society…a joint effort must be made for all this to change.”
Published by Inter Press Service on August 16, 2012.
http://jkdamours.com/2012/08/16/reforms-needed-to-stem-violence/
SYRIA: OPPOSITION PARTY STANDS FOR DIALOGUE
Finally someone with his head on his shoulders!
Terrorist attacks intensify after Western war threats against Syria
By Johannes Stern
3 September 2012
Over the weekend the Western-backed opposition in Syria stepped up its attacks on government buildings, military facilities and civilians as it aims to bring down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and install a pro-Western client regime in Damascus.
Fighting between the Syrian army and Western proxy forces has been intensifying since US President Barack Obama threatened Syria with direct military intervention two weeks ago. Last week French President Hollande, British Foreign Secretary of State William Hague and Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi demanded Assad’s fall. Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu also called for a no-fly zone over Syria. However, for the moment decisions to enforce a no-fly zone and launch open warfare against Syria have not been finalized.
The Western powers are still relying on their armed proxy forces inside Syria—like the Turkey-based Free Syrian Army (FSA) and various Sunni Islamist terrorist groups—to fight Assad.
Media reports indicated intense fighting between the Syrian army and anti-Assad forces throughout the weekend. Opposition sources said that armed insurgents had seized an air defense base close to Deir-Ez Zor on Saturday, and that battles were raging near a military airport in the area. Opposition fighters also claimed that they had targeted the regime’s air installations near Aleppo and Idlib in the northern part of Syria close to the Turkish border, and that they had shot down a Syrian fighter jet.
On Saturday a car bomb near the Muaz Bin Jabal mosque in the Sbaineh suburb of Damascus killed 15 civilians. The explosion also reportedly wounded several people and caused damage to buildings in the area. The Sbaineh district is dominated by Palestinian refugees who are mostly reluctant to join the pro-Western opposition against Assad.
The Syrian state-run news agency, SANA, reported that earlier on Saturday another bomb killed Brigadier General Taher Subeir, when he got into his car in front of his home in the Damascus district of Rukn Addien. Since the outbreak of armed struggle in Syria, over 8,000 soldiers and security personnel have been killed by the Western-backed armed opposition.
In Deir ez-Zor, the largest city in eastern Syria, a suicide bomb attack on the pro-government al-Akhbariya TV station killed one person and injured two children.
On Sunday a bomb attack at the Syrian army’s General Staff headquarters in the Abu Rummaneh district in central Damascus wounded four officers. Islamist forces in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) took responsibility for the attack. A video statement released by the Grandsons of the Prophet brigade, a section of the FSA, said that “bombs were planted inside the army headquarters” and that “the operation targeted officers in the Assad army who have been planning and giving the go ahead for the massacres against the Syrian people.”
The blast was in the same district where an FSA suicide bomber killed four high-ranking Syrian officials—including Defense Minister Dawould Rajha and his deputy, Assef Shawkat—on August 15, and 55 people in a twin suicide car bombing outside a military intelligence building on May 10.
The FSA said it carried out the bombing as retaliation for an August 25 massacre in the Damascus suburb of Daraya, where more than 300 people were reportedly killed. While the FSA and other opposition groups blame the Syrian regime for the deaths, a report by Robert Fisk, the first Western journalist reporting from Daraya after the massacre, indicates that the FSA itself was involved in the killings.
Another element of the US-backed propaganda campaign is the release of ever-higher casualty figures, which are all blamed on the Syrian government. On Sunday the London-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said that 5,440 people, including 4,114 civilians were killed in August. The Local Coordination Committees (LCCs), a faction of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC), put the toll at 4,933 civilians.
Lakhdar Brahimi, the new United Nations (UN) envoy to Syria made clear that the offensive for regime change in Syria will be continued. In an interview with al-Arabiya TV he said that “the need for change is urgent and necessary. The Syrian people must be satisfied and their legitimate demands are met.”
He stated that the Syrian government is primarily responsible for the violence. Calling on both parties to stop the violence, he said that “this call is primarily directed to the government. More than others, it is the duty of governments, under any circumstances and anywhere, not just in Syria, to ensure security and stability for their people.”
Brahimi’s comments are deeply cynical. It is the intensification of the campaign by the US and its allies to oust Assad that is primarily responsible for the humanitarian disaster.
A former colonel of the Syrian army told the New York Times that he would not have defected if he had known that he would end up in a refugee camp in Jordan. He said: “We thought the regime would collapse in two months” explaining that now “the Syrians are getting killed in a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.”
This comment is particularly significant, in that it shows that Syrian refugees—presented in the Western media purely as victims of the Assad regime—view themselves as caught between the Iranian backers of the Assad regime and the reactionary Saudi monarchy, which is backing the anti-Assad forces together with Washington. They do not see the anti-Assad armed opposition as fighting for democracy, but for the strategic interests of the Persian Gulf monarchies.
Washington views regime change in Syria as the next step to deepen its hegemony over the energy-rich and geostrategically crucial Middle East and Central Asian regions. Iran feels increasingly threatened by the US war-drive against Syria and pointed to the danger of a wider regional war in the case of a US attack on its ally.
With cooperation from Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, America has the goal of striking a blow against Syria and making preparations for the fall of the Syrian government,” Mohammad Ali Assoudi, the deputy for culture and propaganda of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said.
He added, “if America were to attack Syria, Iran along with Syria’s allies will take action, which would amount to a fiasco for America. In the case of American stupidity and a military attack by this country on Syria, the joint military pact [Iran and Syria signed a mutual defense pact in 2006] of Syria’s allies would be implemented.”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/sep2012/syri-s03.shtml
Syria Real News - September 2 round-up
Syrian forces take rebel command centre
Syrian government forces have killed or wounded dozens of terrorists in a
successful operation to overrun and destroy a terrorist command centre
in Syria’s second city Aleppo. Outside the city, they have beaten off a
rebel assault on an airbase. Some of Aleppo’s residential neighbourhoods
have come under rebel mortars, which have already destroyed a post
office and a Roman Catholic church. Heavy fighting continues out ...
(click link to read full article)
A COMMENT:
More
evidence of the crimes of the FSA. Really if you are still believing
these people are revolutionaries, you need a brain transplant...
TODAY'S FISK:
There are 20,000 souls in Seyd Naya, Sunni Muslims, Greek Orthodox and Catholics, 13 churches and two mosques, "at least" two Christian women married to Muslims – make of this what you will.
On the edge of town, I come across a group of civilians at a sandbagged checkpoint. Government-approved, of course. They smiled. And they were armed.
Robert Fisk: In Maaloula, the past has relevance to Syria's tragic present
Monday 03 September 2012
Sunday is a good day to drive to Maaloula. There are fig and olive trees and grapes by the road and, for a time, you can forget that Syria is enduring an epic tragedy. True, you mustn't turn right to Tell, where the Syrian Arab Army are having a spot of bother with the Free Syrian Army and there are 35 military checkpoints on the 100-mile round trip from Damascus; but in the cool mountains east of the Lebanese border, Christians and Muslims live together as they have for 1,300 years. History, however, does not leave them alone.
Enter the wonderful Catholic church of Saint Sarkis and you find paintings of two Roman soldiers, based at the imperial fort of Rasafa north of Palmyra, who converted to Christianity and found themselves in a rather Syrian situation. Sergius and Pixos upset the Great Leader in Rome – the empire had not yet abandoned Jupiter, Venus, Bacchus and the rest – who ordered their execution. So the two legionnaires took sanctuary in Maaloula, preaching Christianity until the long arm of Rome's intelligence service caught up with them, and they were hauled back to Rasafa to be beheaded on the orders of the emperor. I look at the old man who is recounting this story to me and we both nod in unspoken agreement of its current relevance. Sergius and Pixos were defectors.
Over the Roman temple of Maaloula was built the church, and thence came in 1942 the twice wounded General Wladyslaw Anders, who was shepherding his 75,000 emaciated Polish soldiers from Soviet imprisonment through the Holy Land to join the Second World War allies and subsequently the battle for Monte Cassino. Anders gave a beautiful icon of Christ to the church at Maaloula; I found it inside the front porch, his name written at the base, but no hint of his mission. His brave II Polish Corps was condemned by Poland's post-war Communist government as a legion of defectors.
But Maaloula, of course, is known for finer things. Its people, as every tourist knows, still speak Aramaic, the language of Christ – Damascus was part of the Aramaen kingdom – and when I asked a young woman to say the Lord's prayer in her language, it sounded a bit like Hebrew. A suspicious Fisk wonders if this is the reason why, although there is a written language, the people of Maaloula do not learn it. Did Arabic and Hebrew descend from Aramaic? Scholars – I always find that an odd word – are still undecided.
So I chat to old Father Fayez who's serving time as the local priest and he refuses to talk politics, but insists that his people, in their old, blue-painted houses, live side-by-side with their Muslim neighbours; indeed, the 20,000 Christians and Muslims living in three villages all speak Aramaic. But the sunlight and sharply-defined shade in the church courtyard reflect the darkness that has fallen across the lives of these people. There had been three kidnappings of Christians, the priest says; all had been released after ransom was paid.
Then the owner of a Christian restaurant set off last month to collect some Muslim workers from a neighbouring village, and he'd been abducted on the way. The Free Syria Army brought the kidnapped man back to Maaloula. I drive to Seydnaya where the church is built, Peter-like, on a rock, the basilica of Seyd Naya – the Holy Virgin in Syriac – with a clutch of orphans and an off-duty Syrian army conscript cleaning the floors and bringing water for the children.
And then an angry nun approaches in her black habit, flapping like a blackbird, frameless spectacles pinned to the outside of her head covering. "You journalists want to harm this country," she chirps. "Before the war, we lived in peace. We had holidays, vacations, women and children could walk in the street at midnight." She stalked off, only to return – as I knew she would – for a second assault. She had a story to tell, for the Holy Spirit – while it may drift through the narrow cold stone corridors of Seyd Naya - cannot prevent violence from touching the church. "A boy wanted to come here to pray for his marriage because he was marrying a local girl," the nun said. "But then we heard today that his father has been killed in the massacre at Deraya…"
So I consulted Sister Stephanie Haddad who said that Seyd Naya was peaceful – she passed over the shells which hit the monastery seven months ago, supposedly fired by the Free Syria Army – and was now sheltering refugees from Homs and Hama and Tell and from Deraya itself. So I asked the obvious question. What would Jesus say if he turned up in Syria today? "If he came now, he would tell the people: don't kill, burn, shoot, kidnap or steal. All these things are mentioned in the Bible."
There are 20,000 souls in Seyd Naya, Sunni Muslims, Greek Orthodox and Catholics, 13 churches and two mosques, "at least" two Christian women married to Muslims – make of this what you will.
On the edge of town, I come across a group of civilians at a sandbagged checkpoint. Government-approved, of course. They smiled. And they were armed.
MEDIA SCOUNDRELS: A reminder to those who, used to these, media get so shocked when an honest reporter such as Robert Fisk says the truth.
Video Of US Backed Terrorists In Syria.
Correspondence and collusion between the New York Times and the CIA
Mark Mazzetti's emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power
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- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 August 2012 19.58 BST
- Jump to comments (422)
(updated below)
The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid. Obama officials did so to enable the production of a politically beneficial pre-election film about that "heroic" killing, even as administration lawyers insisted to federal courts and media outlets that no disclosure was permissible because the raid was classified.
Thanks to prior disclosures from Judicial Watch of documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, this is old news. That's what the Obama administration chronically does: it manipulates secrecy powers to prevent accountability in a court of law, while leaking at will about the same programs in order to glorify the president.
But what is news in this disclosure are the newly released emails between Mark Mazzetti, the New York Times's national security and intelligence reporter, and CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf. The CIA had evidently heard that Maureen Dowd was planning to write a column on the CIA's role in pumping the film-makers with information about the Bin Laden raid in order to boost Obama's re-election chances, and was apparently worried about how Dowd's column would reflect on them. On 5 August 2011 (a Friday night), Harf wrote an email to Mazzetti with the subject line: "Any word??", suggesting, obviously, that she and Mazzetti had already discussed Dowd's impending column and she was expecting an update from the NYT reporter.
A mere two minutes after the CIA spokeswoman sent this Friday night inquiry, Mazzetti responded. He promised her that he was "going to see a version before it gets filed", and assured her that there was likely nothing to worry about:
"My sense is there a very brief mention at bottom of column about CIA ceremony, but that [screenwriter Mark] Boal also got high level access at Pentagon."
She then replied with this instruction to Mazzetti: "keep me posted", adding that she "really appreciate[d] it".
Continued: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/158624#.UEVZmmd5eXs
AN INTERESTING REPORT:
Farming Palestine for Freedom
Overview
For Palestinians, agriculture is more than a source of income or an economic category in budgets and plans. It is tied to the people’s history, identity, and self-expression, and drives the struggle against Israel’s Separation Wall. In this brief, Lebanese activist, author, and agronomist Rami Zurayk joins Al-Shabaka Policy Advisors Samer Abdelnour and Alaa Tartir to tackle the almost spiritual significance of the land to the Palestinians and the deliberate Israeli efforts to break the link between farmers and their crops. They also discuss the Palestinian Authority’s terrible neglect of the agricultural sector and the destructiveness of some donor aid.1 The authors argue that farming is a productive, meaningful, and multi-dimensional form of popular resistance through which Palestinians can demonstrate – to themselves and the world – the urgent need to reclaim lands, livelihoods, and freedom.
The Culture of Land
Continued: http://al-shabaka.org/policy-brief/economic-issues/farming-palestine-freedom?page=showReligious extremists in India, Hinduists and Islamists:
Mumbai Massacre Perpetrator's Sentence Affirmed
Sep 3, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
Even as the death sentence of the Mumbai massacre's lone living perpetrator was affirmed last week, murderous politicians show how medieval justice in India remains. By Dilip D'Souza
In Mumbai on August 29, activists of the Shiv Sena party distributed sweets. Which is what you usually do when there's been a birth in the family, or a marriage, or some other good news. Elsewhere the same day, the head of their party, Uddhav Thackeray, demanded a public hanging. Not what you usually do when there's been a birth in the family or such like.
Dr. Maya Kodnani and Mohammed Ajmal Kasab. (AP Photo (2))
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“They have succeeded in dominating us more
through ignorance, than through force”.
Simon Bolivar
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed" - Steve Biko