Re: Keeping the faith for the sake of all our Aqsa Parvezes
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Posted by Gayl on 01:12:38 2007/12/16
In Reply to:
Keeping the faith for the sake of all our Aqsa Parvezes posted by By Rosie DiManno - Toronto Star
DiManno misses the point. This is not about subtext, but about the very nature of an ideology that declares quite plainly that the sentence for apostasy is death.
It is also about the importation of a shame-based social construct that nobody seems willing or able to confront.
Unfortunately, it is also about the mental paralysis gripping this and other Western countries, where the cry of racist! racist! drowns out the obvious and silences meaningful discussion.
The loudest of these silencers comes, not surprisingly, from the feminist movement. We've all forgotten that at its heart, the feminist movement is a political movement, not a human rights movement. If it were, someone from that government funded, narcissistic, self-serving cabal would have spoken out in, oh, maybe the early '80s when Sudan was bribed into adopting sharia, or maybe in '79 when the ayatollahs took over Iran and started imprisoning "women" at the age of 9 - maybe even 2 years ago when Islamic fundamentalists tried to enshrine sharia law in the statutes of Ontario!
It is a specious argument to equate the social control wrought by ultra-conservative Christians and Jews with the daily sentences of lashing, stoning, beating, and killing of women in the Muslim world. And those are just the "official" sanctions. Vigilantism is alive and well in Muslim communities around the world. The corpses of women executed to allow some man to save face stink to high heaven.
Keep the faith? The faith we need to keep is the promise Canada represents in the world, that this is a country where women are defined as full persons under the law and where freedom means the freedom to decide who you will be, what you will put on your body and who may or may not touch you - in any way.
We need to get this message through to immigrants as they come into this country, as their children attend school, as they open their light and heating bills, as they hold out their hand for that most precious of documents - Canadian citizenship: in Canada, your honour is wholly dependent upon your good treatment of others.
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