My connection with this is (obviously) through the writings of Dr. Phyllis Chesler, but the relationship of suppression of women to suppression of the “wrong” religion (according to who’s in power) is universally important.

Here’s the “about” page on “meforum However my main hope in posting these two articles is that visitors to THIS blog about familycourtmatters will consider these topics. 

I consider the family law system symbolically an “archipelago,” and I also see it as Sharia in the making.  Most men are not really ready for women to be free from their domination throughout society.  The risks that we might just :

1.  Say No and stop providing services, including supporting oppressive systems, breeding more young, nubile females to satisfy infantile fantasies, and stop rebuilding what wars have destroyed, AND (as to middle aged males), after by doing this, have restored some possible equilibrium,

2.  Seek mates closer to our own age, and stop standing by while our neighbor females lose their lives, and children, through a court system, because we have been socially groomed that, by paying taxes (i.e., being employees, not employERs), someone else is responsible for it.

3.  In general set higher standards of behavior for interaction with us and our kids.

To be fair, though this is “MEFORUM” opening description:

The Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank, works to define and promote American interests in the Middle East and protect the Constitutional order from Middle Eastern threats. It does this in three main ways:

• Intellectually: Through the Middle East Quarterly, staff writings, lectures and conference calls, the Forum provides context, insights, and policy recommendations.
• Operationally: The Forum exerts an active influence through its projects, including Campus Watch, Islamist Watch, the Legal Project, and the Washington Project.
• Philanthropically: The Forum distributes nearly $2 million annually through its Education Fund, helping researchers, writers, investigators, and activists around the world.

Now about 2006, and how Phyllis almost got stuck overseas, and came back more feminist than before.  Many parallels exist with USA (from where I, obviously, blog)…

/// My life was akin to that of an upper class Afghan woman. My experience was similar to—but hardly as constrained as—that which an increasing number of Arab and Muslim women face today.

In this first decade of the twenty-first century, women living in Islamic societies are being forced back into time, re-veiled, more closely monitored, and more savagely punished than they were in the 1960s.

That said, I had never expected my freedom and privacy to be so curtailed. In Afghanistan, a few hundred wealthy families lived by European standards. Everyone else lived in a premodern style. And that’s the way the king, his government, and the mullahs wanted it to remain. Western diplomats did not peg their foreign policies to how Afghanistan treated its women.

Even before multicultural relativism kicked in, Western diplomats did not believe in “interfering.”

My comment:  This attitude prevails in the family-worshipping environment of white (and black, and other colors, from what I can tell) Protestant non-mainstream AND mainstream churches.  At least that has been my consistent experience over more than a decade, both married with violence, and single supposedly without it….

I am now (of recently) re-evaluating this concept of the ramifications Monotheism (as well as Atheism) according to its practice.  If you think THAT ain’t challenging …  it is ….. But an honest person will do this.  More in other posts.

 

The Afghanistan I knew was a prison, a feudal monarchy, and rank with fear, paranoia, and slavery. Individual Afghans were charming, funny, humane, tender, enchantingly courteous, and sometimes breathtakingly honest. Yet, their country was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, and preventable disease. Women were subjected to domestic and psychological misery in the form of arranged marriages, polygamy, forced pregnancies, the chadari, domestic slavery and, of course, purdah (seclusion of women).

Women led indoor lives and socialized only with other women. If they needed to see a doctor, their husband consulted one for them in their place. Most women were barely educated. In Kabul, I met other foreign wives who loved having servants but whose own freedom had been constrained. Some European wives, who had come in the late 1940s and early 1950s had converted to Islam and wore The Thing, as we called the cloaking chadari.

Each had been warned, as had I, that whatever they did would become known, that there were eyes everywhere, and that their actions could endanger their families and themselves. Afghans mistrusted foreign wives.

I have a post, a while back, including the “Seven-lesson Schoolteacher” (from “Dumbing Us Down” by John Taylor Gatto (1990), a homeschool favorite.  ONE of the lessons is, “there is no privacy.”  This concept is echoed in the Decalaration of Independence of the United States, as follows:

The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

[[As contrasted to “no-fault divorce.”  hmmm..]]

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

[[Again, read this with the concept of men governing women within their marriages, and society — and think about it!]]

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–

 And some of them are listed in this document:

 The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States…

• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.  {{or custody dependent on the will of a capricious judge..}}
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

These are the court paraprofessionals I keep blogging about….

• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

The family courts exist in ORDER to do this; it is therapeutic jurisprudence, and mediation, evaluation, supervised visitation IN ORDER to produce a desired outcome, which I have been posting about (see also NAFCJ.net).  When you have the words “required outcome” in a court case, as opposed to “required PROCESS,” you no longer have justice.  Period. 

Back to Phyllis’ Feminism formed, or re-inforced, in Afghanistan

Once, I saw an Afghan husband fly into a rage when his foreign wife not only wore a Western swimsuit to a swimming party—but actually plunged into the pool. The men expected to be the only ones who would swim; their wives were meant to chat and sip drinks. The concept of privacy is a Western one. When I would leave the common sitting room in order to read quietly in my own bedroom, all the women and children would follow me. They’d ask: “Are you unhappy?” No one spent any time alone. To do so was an insult to the family. The idea that a woman might be an avid reader of books and a thinker was too foreign to comprehend. Like everyone else, Ali was under permanent surveillance. His career and livelihood depended upon being an obedient Afghan son and subject. How he treated me was crucial. He had to prove that his relationship to women was every bit as Afghan as any other man’s; perhaps more so, since he had arranged his own marriage to a foreigner. ///

In Western terms, he had to prove his “masculinity.”

NOTE:  I haven’t fully processed this next  article but (as typically) put it out here for public consumption and digestion.  I do note that in our area (which has a prospering MidEastern population from a number of countries) I recently met a (professor/doctor) man, a Christian, who said that the U.S. has strongly underestimated the danger of Islam, and spoke of how Egypt (from where he was) persecutes Christians.  I remembered “Now They Call Me Infidel” for sure. 

(2) of (3)

======

Regarding “Not Without My Daughters” (Beth Mamoody), Yes, there was protest about this version of events; even Wikipedia acknowledges.  Here’s a link from the “Iran Times,” last August stating so:

 
‘Not Without My Daughter’ dad dies

0 Comments | Iran Times International (Washington, DC), August 28, 2009
Bozorg Mahmoody, the medical doctor who became internationally famous, even infamous, as the man described as a wife-beater in the book and film “Not Without My Daughter,” died Saturday. He was 70 years old.
The state news agency quoted his nephew, Majid Ghodsi, as reporting Mahmoody died in a Tehran hospital of kidney problems and other complications.

Ghodsi said, “He thought of his daughter until the end and passed away without seeing Mahtob.”

Mahtob, who will turn 30 next month, has said publicly that she refused to have anything to do with her father and has lived for years in an undisclosed city in North America under an assumed name so that he could not find her.
 
The book, written by Mahtob’s mother, Betty Mahmoody, and especially the 1991 movie adaptation, starring Sally Field as Betty and Alfred Molina as Bozorg, enflamed the Iranian-American community for depicting Iranians and Iranian culture negatively.

Betty Mahmoody responded that the heroes of the story were the Iranians who went to great lengths to help Betty and Mahtob flee Iran in 1986. Bozorg had refused to allow his wife to leave the country with their daughter, hence the title of the book and film.

Bozorg Mahmoody fought back in 2003 by cooperating in a French-German film financed by Finnish television that gave his side of the story.

Bozorg Mahmoody was defiant that his ex-wife invented much of the story and in the process defamed him and prevented him and his daughter from having a normal father-child relationship. And because of her book and the Hollywood film it spawned, he said he was “a victim of international politics.”

Wife-beaters are always “victims” …  Even the CONCEPT that a man might beat his wife for religious, or other reasons, is a vicious feminist lie striking at the heart of the family, which of course is with Apple Pie, what America is really about, as well as most religions . . . .

The MSM news are NOT majority feminist owned.  Nor are the churches, nor is Washington.  There is plenty of fatherhood & marriage funding making the rounds, still.  The richest church around (Roman Catholic, Vatican) has a real love/hate relationship with females, while promoting the breeding of more church members to dedicate their lives and services (and tithes, including help settling abuse complaints) to this organization.  It’s not owned by feminazis.  Nor are the Mormons, nor are other major churches that consider the family more important than individual rights.

And the news I’m reading, as hard as it tries to “equalize” the situation, still reports rapes, beatings, murders, etc. by women attempting to leave men as primarily BY men.  Maybe they did it for “real” good reasons, but the facts are, if the papers are not outright lying when they say what’s on the police blotter, there’s a lot of violence going around. … 

I think it’s time we searched for a BALANCED set of social paradigms, and seek to limit the power of government in our lives.  I do understand, from one perspective, how the feds have to step in at times and have in the past.  However, the creators of the poverty and the creators of the DOMINATE mentality should not be entirely trusted to set the social standards of an entire nation.  And for this — face it — until CONGRESS is more diverse, which takes independent money most of us don’t have — we are going to have to think more cooperative locally. 

Someday the middle-class will figure out what’s going on at the top and at the bottom of society, and I hope that there will be a track record of some truths (I don’t say ALL truth, which is an egotisticals tatement, but SOME relevant truths) to the cause and effect of all this — well, for an analogy to BP fiasco — spillage and spouting out of what’s in the innards of the earth into the more visible and more sensitive ecology of the ocean (of humanity….).  We are up to our necks in it. 

Don’t blame the oil! ……

And one response to PRESSURE is PRESSING BACK.  And the natural Re-action to PRESSING BACK AGAINST PRESSURE.

Adding the weight of “God” (and being His (or Her, or Their) “sole interpreter” in this is simply not really playing fair.