In
a high-level meeting on religious persecution in Brussels, the
President of the European Parliament (EP) said that Europe cannot afford
to continue ignoring the fate of Christians, who are “clearly the most persecuted group” in the world.
In
Wednesday’s meeting, EP President Martin Schulz said that the
persecution of Christians is “undervalued” and does not receive enough
attention, which has also meant that it “hasn’t been properly
addressed.”
Schulz’s concerns were echoed by EP Vice President
Antonio Tajani, who warned that Europe sometimes “falls into the
temptation of thinking we can ignore this task,” referring to the
protection Christians throughout the world who suffer persecution.
Speakers
cited the work of Open Doors, a human rights organization that monitors
the persecution of Christians, noting that 150 million Christians
worldwide suffer torture, rape and arbitrary imprisonment. Christians in
Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea and Nigeria are among those
hardest hit.
The Open Doors report
for 2015 found that “Islamic extremism is by far the most significant
persecution engine” of Christians in the world today and that “40 of the
50 countries on the World Watch List are affected by this kind of
persecution.”
Last
week I arrived back home to Iraqi Kurdistan, exhausted but proud of a
small but real triumph over the Islamic State. Three women and two
toddlers came back with me—five human beings just rescued from
enslavement by ISIL. For over a year, they were abused, raped and traded
fighter to fighter because of one reason: our Yazid religion. I am
determined to save every last one of the more than 2,000 Yazidi women
and girls still waiting to be freed.
They thought they were
abandoned. Their ISIL captors told them that no one wanted them, in
their shame and defilement, and that no one was looking for them. But I
insist on reaching out to them through pleas on Arabic radio and TV. I
give them my phone number, and tell them that we love them and we want
them back. Some brave women hear these messages and contact us, and a
rescue mission commences. I answer the phone every time, determined to
do all that I can, but it is little, and it is not enough. I know there
will always be another call, another Yazidi who is terrified and broken
and in need of hope, as the world looks the other way.
One of the
women, clutching her 2-year-old child, was so distraught. The child kept
asking for her 7-year-old sister, who had been taken away from her
mother and enrolled in a religious institution where she would be forced
to convert to Islam. Her mother had had no choice but to escape without
her, and she told me she feared the girl would be raped at the hands of
the militants. We have evidence of the militants raping our girls as
young as age 8.
For that brief time in August 2014, the United
States launched airstrikes to halt the advance of ISIL after its troops
took over a third of Iraq, saving the Yazidi people from total massacre
by ISIL troops. But since then, we’ve been abandoned and forgotten by
Washington and the rest of the international community. For every story
of a girl who has been rescued, there’s another one about a girl who is
still in captivity, where she is starved, raped, beaten and sold—often
to “fellow” Iraqis. And 500,000 Yazidis, a full 90 percent of the
indigenous Yazidi population, are in displaced persons’ camps, living in
abject misery and isolation with less than minimal sustenance. We
languish in these camps, live without income, and without food, medicine
or even shelter durable enough to keep the rain out. As long as ISIL
remains intent on wiping my people off the map; and as long as the Iraqi
and Kurdish Regional governments continue to see Yazidis as less than
second-class citizens, unworthy of significant aid and attention, these
horrors will continue.
The Vatican has been given another hostile interrogation by a United Nations committee over its record on clerical sex abuse.
One member after another of the committee against torture brushed aside the Holy See's argument that its obligation to enforce the UN convention against torture stopped
at the boundaries of the world's smallest country, the Vatican City
state. They demanded the pope's representative give answers to a long
list of questions about the treatment of sex abuse claims against clergy
throughout the world.
The Holy See, which long predates the city
state, is a sovereign entity without territory. It is as the Holy See
that the Catholic leadership maintains diplomatic relations and signs
treaties such as the convention against torture.
But
Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's UN ambassador in Geneva, told
the committee: "The Holy See intends to focus exclusively on Vatican
City state."
The American expert on the committee, Felice Gaer,
made plain her disagreement. She said the Holy See had to "show us that,
as a party to the convention, you have a system in place to prohibit
torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment when it is
acquiesced to by anyone under the effective control of the officials of
the Holy See and the institutions that operate in the Vatican City
state".
Vatican faces tough questions at UN torture committee
Vatican to answer questions on past, present and future handling of clerical sex abuse
Archbishop
Silvano Tomasi, (R), Apostolic Nuncio, Permanent Observer of the Holy
See to the Office of the United Nations in Geneva, and Vincenzo Buonomo,
(L), of the Secretariat of State of the Holy See prior to the UN
torture committee hearing on the Vatican, at the headquarters of the
office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the Palais Wilson,
in Geneva, Switzerland. Photograph: Salvatore Di Nolfi/EPA
As
expected, a Holy See delegation faced tough questioning at the UN’s
Committee Against Torture in Geneva yesterday. For the second time in
three months, the Vatican was appearing before a UN body to answer
questions about its ratification of a UN treaty, especially with regard
to is past, present and future handling of clerical sex abuse.
In his opening address to the committee, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi,
the Holy See’s permanent representative at the UN in Geneva, argued
that while the Holy See lent “its moral support and collaboration . . .
to the elimination of torture”, it had signed the torture convention in
2002 “on behalf of the Vatican city state”.
No jurisdictionArchbishop
Tomasi said he intended to “focus exclusively on the Vatican city
state”, the 100 -acre statelet that surrounds the Basilica of St
Peter’s.
In that sense, he claimed, the Holy See
had “no jurisdiction over every member of the Catholic Church”. Rather,
he said, persons who “live in a particular country are under the
jurisdiction of the legitimate authorities of that country and are thus
subject to the domestic law [of that country]”.
Inevitably,
that assertion prompted a critical reaction from the UN committee, with
US human rights activist Felice Gaer accusing Archbishop Tomasi of
making an “alleged distinction” between the Holy See and the Vatican
city state.
She questioned the Holy See’s apparent
assumption that the torture convention applied only to the “four
corners of Vatican City”, saying that as far as she could see, Vatican
City was simply a “sub-division” of the Holy See.
I’m not sure if Islamic law is the worst thing ever… but it’s probably the worst thing ever for women.
I keep hearing that Mohammed was the original feminist and that
Islamic law protects women. Also the State Department praised the
moderate Muslim president of moderate Muslim Maldives for being elected
through democratic values.
Nothing says democratic values like rape, Islamic law and being the brother of a tyrant.
The US has congratulated Abdulla Yameen on him being
elected as the new President of the Maldives, and called the association
between the two countries as “a long history of cordial relations”.
“The extraordinarily high turnout on November 16th was a tribute to
the Maldivian people’s commitment to the democratic process and
democratic values,” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told
reporters yesterday. Yameen is the half-brother of former autocratic ruler Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.
Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen, center, was sworn into the
presidency on Nov. 17, 2013. Photo by Maldivian government (press
release).
Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen refused to sign a bill Thursday
that criminalizes some forms of marital rape, Religion News Service
reported. Though the bill passed parliament with 67-2 vote, Yameen
rejected the legislation, which limits a husband's right to demand sex
from his wife, because it was "un-Islamic."
The bill did not criminalize all marital rape, but banned it under the following circumstances:
if a case for dissolution of a marriage is in court
while a divorce, filed by the husband or wife, is pending a court hearing
if the intent of intercourse is to transmit a sexually transmitted disease
According
to a recent study, an astounding 30 percent of India's lawmakers are
facing criminal charges raining from petty theft to rape and murder. Not
surprisingly, the lawmakers themselves are resisting efforts to clean
up parliament. LinkAsia's Ajoy Bose reports from New Delhi on the
political maneuvering going on inside the world's largest democracy.
Freedom in Egypt? It just gave men the freedom to rape me in Tahrir
Square: As violence erupts in Cairo, woman attacked by a gang in
demonstration recounts her ordeal
By
Angella Johnson PUBLISHED:
18:01 EST, 6 July 2013
|
UPDATED:
07:41 EST, 7 July 2013
She saw them running towards her as she approached Cairo’s Tahrir Square and within seconds she was surrounded. What
followed for Yasmine El-Baramawy was the most terrifying 70 minutes of
her life – a prolonged, brutal rape and sexual assault by dozens of men,
while a crowd looked on. And did nothing. ‘I
felt hands all over my body, as they tore at my clothes like savage
animals and tried to pull down my trousers,’ recalls the 30-year-old
musician and composer.
Trauma: Yasmine El Baramawy was subjected to a brutal rape in Cairo's Tahrir Square during the 'Arab Spring' in November 2012
More than 100 thugs also beat
her with sticks and slashed at her with knives – disgusting, degrading
‘punishment’ because she dared to join the protests against former
President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party. Yasmine was back in Tahrir Square yesterday – and once again felt that rising sense of panic as vast crowds clashed.
The two-and-a-half year battle
for democracy in Egypt has witnessed a large number of women being
sexually assaulted or raped – simply for daring to take a stand.
It is the shameful, untold story of an Arab Spring revolution that went
off-track. And perhaps the most disturbing element is that these
attacks are said to have been sanctioned by Morsi and the Brotherhood. Egyptian
civil rights activists say that at least 91 women were sexually
assaulted or raped in Tahrir Square during protests, which began last
Sunday.
Journalist Angella Johnson reports from Cairo's
Tahrir Square during a week of massive political upheaval in Egypt which
has seen violent action from both pro- and anti-Morsi protesters
The assailants operated in a
climate of impunity – encouraged by religious zealots within the
government who had called female protesters whores and who had blamed
rape victims for not staying home. It is even believed that the gangs
were paid by the Muslim Brotherhood. Yasmine’s
nightmare happened last November as she tried to join friends in the
square to protest against Morsi’s constitutional changes, which granted
him unlimited powers. ‘About 15 men rushed from the crowd and trapped me by linking hands in a circle,’ she explains. ‘It
happened quickly and in such a way that I later realised it was well
rehearsed. I was cornered, trapped and stripped from the waist up before
I had time to recover from the shock. ‘I managed to run, but tripped and fell on my face.’ They
were on her again in an instant. Despite her statuesque 5ft 9in frame,
Yasmine could do nothing to stop them. The daughter of a businessman and
a chemist, Yasmine is a strong, intelligent and confident young woman,
who has always felt able to take care of herself. But the numbers were
overwhelming. More sets of hands than it was possible to count clawed at her, grabbing her breasts and groping inside her underwear. ‘It was as if I was in a washing
machine, being pushed and pulled and grabbed,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know
what was happening to me or when it would end. I thought that I would
faint or die, but I still tried to fight back.’
Uproar: Egyptians in Cairo celebrate the
announcement made by Egyptian Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah Al-Sissi
that Mohammad Morsi has been ousted, earlier this week
She
was dragged several hundred yards as the mob feverishly tore at her
clothes. Some tried to cut them off while she desperately clung to her
trousers. ‘When they couldn’t get the jeans off, they slit them at the
back with a knife. I was bleeding from my face and nose, but that didn’t
stop them.’ Surprisingly,
her attackers were not feral kids or teenagers, but grown men ‘aged in
their 20s to 40s.’ Some were well-dressed and respectable. Yasmine adds: ‘One guy tried to
French kiss me and I bit his tongue so hard it bled. He screamed in
agony and started kicking me in the back as I lay on the ground. 'They
tried to put me in a car, but there were so many people crowding around
it that they couldn’t open the door. I ended up pinned to the bonnet as
they drove a block away.’ The
attack continued as the vehicle crawled along at slow speed. Some of
the men whispered menacingly, ‘We are going to f*** you.’ By
now Yasmine was covered with blood and excrement, having been pushed
into sewage on the ground. Dozens of people had stood by watching her
ordeal in the square – but none intervened.
A woman prays with supporters of former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi during Friday prayers
Thankfully, she was eventually rescued
by a woman dressed in traditional Islamic dress and several of her male
friends and neighbours. But it was two months before Yasmine reported
the crime – and then only because several friends also suffered
attacks. ‘I felt guilty,’ she says. ‘I thought that if I had said something before, they would have known the dangers.’ Yasmine
says she wanted to shame the authorities into taking action. ‘I do not
want to live in a country where men think it’s OK to do this to a woman.
I don’t know any girl who has not suffered from verbal or physically
sexual assaults.’ She blames
a cultural acceptance of sexual harassment and an orchestrated campaign
by the state for what happened – and is calling for a comprehensive
national strategy on the part of the government to change public
attitude. Mervat
El-Tallawy, a prominent Egyptian female politician, told The Mail on
Sunday it was women who had suffered most under Morsi’s regime.
‘His party regard them as little more than chattel and sex slaves,’
says Ms El-Tallawy, chairwoman of the National Women’s Council.
NEW
YORK – Around the world, people’s understanding of why rape happens
usually takes one of two forms. Either it is like lightning, striking
some unlucky woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time (an
isolated, mysterious event, caused by some individual man’s sudden
psychopathology), or it is “explained” by some seductive transgression
by the victim (the wrong dress, a misplaced smile).
Illustration by Barrie Maguire
But
the idea of a “rape culture” – a concept formulated by feminists in the
1970’s as they developed the study of sexual violence – has hardly made
a dent in mainstream consciousness. The notion that there are systems,
institutions, and attitudes that are more likely to encourage rape and
protect rapists is still marginal to most people, if they have
encountered it at all.
That
is a shame, because there have been numerous recent illustrations of
the tragic implications of rape culture. Reports of widespread sexual
violence in India, South Africa, and recently Brazil have finally
triggered a long-overdue, more systemic examination of how those
societies may be fostering rape, not as a distant possibility in women’s
lives, but as an ever-present, life-altering, daily source of terror.
The
latest “rape culture” to be exposed – in recent documentaries,
lawsuits, and legislative hearings – is embedded within the United
States military. As The Guardian reported in 2011,
women soldiers in Iraq faced a higher likelihood of being sexually
assaulted by a colleague than they did of dying by enemy fire.
So
pervasive is the sexual violence aimed at American women soldiers that a
group of veterans sued the Pentagon, hoping to spur change. Twenty-five
women and three men claimed that they had endured sexual assaults while
serving, and lay the blame at the feet of former US Defense Secretaries
Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. The reason, the lawsuit claims,
is that these men oversaw an institutional culture that punished those
who reported the assaults, while refusing to punish the attackers.
When
Maricella Guzman reported a sexual assault in her first month of
service in the Navy, instead of being “taken seriously,” she says, “I
was forced to do sit-ups.” Women soldiers who had served in Afghanistan
came forward to speak with the filmmakers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick,
whose Oscar-nominated film The Invisible War
exposed the scale of the problem. The fear of rape at US-held
battlefields led directly to endemic illnesses caused by dehydration:
women at the front, serving in 110-degree heat (43 degrees Celsius), did
everything possible to avoid drinking, because rape was so common in
the latrines.
The tales of
colleagues, and even superiors, assaulting soldiers whose lives they
are supposed to protect – stories that reveal the license that the
attackers must have felt they had – are harrowing enough. What becomes
clear from story after story in The Invisible War is a
consistent – indeed, nearly identical – narrative of concealment,
cover-up, and punishment of alleged victims, for whom justice was almost
impossible to obtain through institutional channels.
James
Taranto has decided to inject himself into the military rape issue;
problem is, his ideas are all of the antiquated ‘blame the victim’
variety. Image @PSAWomenPolitics
An
Air Force commander exercised her discretion in a sexual-assault case.
Now her career is being blocked by Sen. Claire McCaskill. Why?
JAMES TARANTO
Lt.
Gen. Susan Helms is a pioneering woman who finds her career stalled
because of a war on men—a political campaign against sexual assault in
the military that shows signs of becoming an effort to criminalize male
sexuality.
Gen. Helms is a 1980 graduate of the Air Force Academy
who became an astronaut in 1990. She was a crewman on four space-shuttle
missions and a passenger on two, traveling to the International Space
Station and back 5½ months later. Two days after arriving at the station
in 2001, she, along with fellow astronaut Jim Voss, conducted history's
longest spacewalk—8 hours, 56 minutes—to work on a docking device.
In
March, President Obama nominated Gen. Helms to serve as vice commander
of the Air Force Space Command. But Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri
Democrat who sits on the Armed Services Committee, has placed a
"permanent hold" on the nomination.
Associated Press Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.
At
issue is the general's decision in February 2012 to grant clemency to
an officer under her command. Capt. Matthew Herrera had been convicted
by a court-martial of aggravated sexual assault. Ms. McCaskill said
earlier this month that the clemency decision "sent a damaging message
to survivors of sexual assault who are seeking justice in the military
justice system."
Associated Press Lt. Gen. Susan Helms
To
describe the accuser in the Herrera case as a "survivor" is more than a
little histrionic. The trial was a he-said/she-said dispute between
Capt. Herrera and a female second lieutenant about a drunken October
2009 sexual advance in the back seat of a moving car. The accuser
testified that she fell asleep, then awoke to find her pants undone and
Capt. Herrera touching her genitals. He testified that she was awake,
undid her own pants, and responded to his touching by resting her head
on his shoulder.
Two other officers were present—the designated
driver and a front-seat passenger, both lieutenants—but neither noticed
the hanky-panky. Thus on the central questions of initiation and
consent, it was her word against his.
On several other disputed
points, however, the driver, Lt. Michelle Dickinson, corroborated Capt.
Herrera's testimony and contradicted his accuser's.
Capt. Herrera
testified that he and the accuser had flirted earlier in the evening;
she denied it. Lt. Dickinson agreed with him. The accuser testified that
she had told Lt. Dickinson before getting into the car that she found
Capt. Herrera "kind of creepy" and didn't want to share the back seat
with him; Lt. Dickinson testified that she had said no such thing. And
the accuser denied ever resting her head on Capt. Herrera's shoulder
(although she acknowledged putting it in his lap). Lt. Dickinson
testified that at one point during the trip, she looked back and saw the
accuser asleep with her head on Capt. Herrera's shoulder.
Archbishop
Silvano Tomasi, (R), Apostolic Nuncio, Permanent Observer of the Holy
See to the Office of the United Nations in Geneva, and Vincenzo Buonomo,
(L), of the Secretariat of State of the Holy See prior to the UN
torture committee hearing on the Vatican, at the headquarters of the
office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the Palais Wilson,
in Geneva, Switzerland. Photograph: Salvatore Di Nolfi/EPA
Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen, center, was sworn into the
presidency on Nov. 17, 2013. Photo by Maldivian government (press
release).
