Saturday, July 4, 2009
Women's rights: Khaled Abu Toameh: 'They accused me of laughing in public'
A Palestinian female journalist complained over the weekend that Hamas policemen attempted to arrest her under the pretext that she came to a Gaza beach dressed immodestly and was seen laughing in public.
The journalist, Asma al-Ghul, said that the policemen instead confiscated her passport. Since the incident, she added, she has been afraid to leave her home, especially after receiving death threats from anonymous callers.
"They accused me of laughing loudly while swimming with my friend and failing to wear a hijab," Ghul told a human rights organization in the Gaza Strip. "They also wanted to know the identity of the people who were with me at the beach and whether they were relatives of mine."
In a phone interview with the Dubai-based Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya news Web site, the journalist said that the policemen who stopped her belonged to the Hamas government's Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice security force.
The special force reports directly to the Ministry of Waqf Affairs and is said to be a copy of units that have long been operating in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
The Hamas government, according to local reporters, has refrained from publicly admitting that the force exists out of fear of being branded fundamentalist...
Fear of the sound of women laughing. Pathological. [h/t: Sara]
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, p.44
Laughter. Honor killings occur in Gaza as well, among other items that could be listed, such as corporal punishments against non-Hamas factions, such as hundreds of arms and munitions smuggling tunnels below the Philadelphi corridor, many of them highly sophisticated operations. So they're capable of hard work and industry, and have plenty to keep themselves busy. By contrast, they destroyed the multi-million dollar greenhouse industry they inherited from Jewish communities in 2005, when the state forced all Jews to leave Gaza, rendering it Judenfrei.
Busy, busy, and industrious folks, in their own particular, cultural sense of the terms, which we're all "understand" and accord respect, as the proper, PC-dictated narrative and script demands, and as Obama's own terms are beginning to suggest as well.
Now, contrast this information with the assertion on the Stony Brook thread that liberalism and freedom = women getting raped, or not being taken seriously.
Truly I think that's an unfair assertion, especially under the circumstances.