Ruthless, Savage Punishments of Political Islam — Invoke Nemesis, Don’t Invite Your Enemy to Dinner

Not Twitter but AP seems to have brought us his contorted face:

“AP – Iranian senior hard-line cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, delivers a Friday prayer sermon, at the Tehran University …”

Parisa Hafezi Parisa Hafezi – TEHRAN (Reuters) – bottom-lined the purpose of the so-called prayer sermon:

” … “I want the judiciary to … punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson,” Ahmad Khatami told worshippers at Tehran University. …Khatami … said the judiciary should charge the leading “rioters” as being “mohareb” or one who wages war against God.

“They should be punished ruthlessly and savagely,” he said.  Under Iran’s Islamic law, punishment for people convicted as mohareb is execution. ”

In other words, the Ayatollah wants to kill them.  Ruthlessly and savagely. Stripped down and available for all to see, political Islam’s message today in Iran is the following:

Kill them — for wanting their votes to count;  Kill them  (the “they” who “should be punished ruthlessly and savagely” according to the Ayatollah because of “war;”   Kill them for a war where dominant males define what they want as “God” and project their own demonic behavior upon others who wish to be free of them.   (Click on this blog’s category of “Demonic Males” not as woo-woo religious concept but as hard, Harvard science about male destructiveness and violence relevant to human society.)

Don’t call it spiritual, don’t call it justice, don’t invite it to dinner.  Political Islam needs an invocation of Nemesis spiritually to end its reign. (Click on category, Nemesis.)

Political Islam will never be a friend to any freedom-lover (and that goes double for its whammy against the lives of women as women, religiously designated an underclass by male trauma for male control — not that fundamentalist Christianity and all other male-designed fundamentalist religions do not also oppress women as women, inherent to maintaining sexual politics around the globe).

It’s not that political Islam is the only politics against which Nemesis ought be spiritually invoked.

It’s just that political Islam does not dress up its hatreds in hypocrisy, making the hating easier to see for what it is, in the longest war.

Frenchwoman takes on Monsanto (An End to Corporate Food Fascism?)

It won’t be twittered today, because it’s not tiny-url immediately breaking news told in few bits of type.  But it deserves repeating that we all might want to educate ourselves about food politics in the longest war. And a Frenchwoman, Marie-Monique Robin, has shown the way.

From http://www.responsibletechnology.org/, excerpts from a report on Marie-Monique Robin, Director of The World According to Monsanto:  “… filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin has received 20 awards for her investigative documentaries filmed around the world. She is the recipient of the prestigious “Prix Albert Londres,” equivalent to the French Pulitzer, and … the Laurier du Sénat (The Senate Laureate, The Award for the Best Political Documentary), FIGRA’s Best Investigative Documentary Award, The Award of Merit from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA / United States), and The Critics’ Award at Cairo’s Cinema Festival, among others. Her book The Photos of the Century: 100 Historic Moments has more than 700,000 copies in print in seven languages.  Ms. Robin spent three years working on The World according to Monsanto, beginning with four months of intensive internet research examining declassified documents, leaked internal files, scientific studies, trial transcripts, articles, and first hand accounts of whistleblowers. The film actually shows Ms. Robin doing internet searches, identifying incriminating documents that are also available to everyone. She then takes us with her to four continents where she verifies the information and sheds more light on Monsanto’s outrageous behavior and impact. The film debuted in Europe in February 2008, and has since been shown in 15 countries and purchased by 20 international channels. Her accompanying book, which came out at the same time, became an immediate bestseller in French, and is being translated into 10 languages. The revelations in her film and book have generated a wave of anti-GMO and anti-Monsanto sentiment worldwide.”

This revolution for food freedom, Twitter isn’t covering.  Twitter can’t.  To talk about it requires more than sound bites.

Here’s the DVD cover you probably have never heard about [and its bottom-line cynicism that in the food phase of the longest war, the biotech giants — soulless companies required by shareholder investment law to make corporate profits (and not health of the people and the planet) their primary mission — cannot possibly have freedom-loving people’s best interests at heart]:

Ms. Robin and I have not met, I’m no publicist and there’s no money coming my way for anything commented upon in this blog.  It should no longer astonish me — for Nemesis’ sake, I blog about hypocrisy in prevailing media-manipulated culture  —  when I check current news to learn (as I did today) about something amazing (like the work of Ms. Robin) that mainstream mass-and-social media in the US had not brought to my attention.

The greatest joy of blogging is the chance to share with others what ought to be communicated but usually isn’t.   Here’s also a picture on their terms of a couple of dogs (Luce and Lucky) who without need of the ASPCA have been good friends:

Sarkozy, France’s Perfectly Imperfect President, Correctly Opposes Submissive Gender-Class Clothing Shrouds in Public for Women

Whether you like France’s President or not (and he does seem to think with his small head in his personal life), he has sounded the correct call for freedom in opposing political Islam’s efforts to impede the freedom of how folks think about equality with powerfully submissive images of shrouded women on public streets.

• AP 
• Jude Dude comment:  If my religion in America required me to  parade “my woman” around with pierced nipples showing (or send her out that way to shop for me), on the streets of the city  it would be (as it should be) against the law for public clothing.

See AP photo for comparison; then  ask yourself what kind of torturing male minds would invent such garb for women and dare to call Islam as politically practiced a religion of “love.”   One indication of political Islam’s sexual discrimination against modern women is that they must shop but swelter on a hot day inside their shrouds when less subjugated women are dressing down for the heat wave. See also the Twittered and cell-phone pictures of women’s dress on this blog from Iran’s version of man’s war against womankind.

If anybody wanted to dress up dogs like shrouded Islamic women on a hot summer day and have them parade around outside on an American street, the ASPCA would be all over it in all-American opposition to animal cruelty.

Hypocrites: They deserve no less than the spiritual invocation of Nemesis against this cruelty.  Even if women have been traumatized behind closed doors or mentally manipulated to their seeming compliance, when objectively viewed the practice of gender shrouding remains cruel.  See posts that follow.

Nemesis as Prayer for the People in our Troubled Time

The well-credentialed author of the book, Nemesis — named for the Greek Goddess who used Her righteous anger to destroy arrogance, hubris and oppression — suggests that the American republic has gone down so far an imperialist path since World War II, the necessary corrective workings  of Nemesis will be financial ruin (if we can avoid nuclear war).  Since the book’s publication a couple of years ago, the increasingly negative globalization of dominant political economies — and today’s headlines — reflect a time of challenge so great we might all unite in prayer or consciousness beyond religious and secular viewpoints, beyond blue and red, beyond our own opinions.

But how to unite for ending oppression in our time?  Being American by birth, let me start with the people I know best.

Americans  have long been praying (some would say preying)  — something all male-dominant systems seem to share in political common.  Our versions of God as male deity don’t seem to be helping or bringing an end to evil; neither does false hope for believers only to be beamed up during armageddon. For that reason, why not try praying that Nemesis end the reign of global oppression — and clear the way for an end to the domination and submission modeled at its roots in the gender war that’s the longest war of all.

Wrap up your invocation to Nemesis in the name of Jesus and the power of Christ if you want; the red-letter reported words of biblical gospels show Jesus cursing political hypocrites with “woe.”

Judaism and other mainstream religions similarly have plenty in their history to allow the cursing of oppressors  — all in the self-defensive  name of freedom.

Spin it for the people and not for the politicians, and we might use our religious heritage to help free ourselves.   Harriett Tubman did that with her Underground Railroad.  Can we affort to do less?

As one image of  female body type that’s not a pornification of culture, Nemesis as Goddess has been pictured  like this:

(Nemesis, by Alfred Rethel, 1837.  Her name is from the Greek word meaning, “to give what is due.”)

Why Today’s Political Islam in Iran Would Rather Shroud & Silence Women about Male Violence

Wearing his turban of power among his cheering male supporters, today in Iran the Ayatollah as highest Islamic leader spoke out against the people demonstrating for greater freedom. Why would Iran as icon of political Islam try to keep shrouding and silencing women?  [photo credit of Turban Guy, AP online; all social commentary, Jude Dude]

Shrouded and silenced women are less likely to have a chance for action or a voice in gaining their freedom. Shrouded and silenced women cannot show or tell their physical and emotional bruises (and worse) at men’s hands.

Iran’s religious base does not keep women safe from male violence any more than women are subjected to violence all over the world in the longest war. Not that all females are pacifist.  However, reputable statistics on serious degrees of violence confirm what we know from personal experience and headlines —  men in general (not all men, but mainly men) are the seriously violent gender.

Despite what we all know from living on this planet, the issue of male violence continues to be silenced, repressed and “spun” to such a degree that the obviously higher rate of male (compared to female) acts of serious violence still get debated online as if language about the topic can override the real-world actions of men.  In reality, FBI Supplementary homicide reports (1976-2005) showed this about murder in the U.S.:  Male offenders for all homicides are 88.8%. Women: 11.2%.

Where one intimate partner murders another, males commit 65.5% of these homicides, females: 29.2% (percentages apparently off 100% where no clear perpetrator  found). When children are victims, men murdered them 61.8% of the time, women: 38.2%. When elderly victims are killed, men commit 93.5% of these crimes, women: 6.5%. In cases of serial killing men are the offenders 93.5% of the time, women: 6.5%. In instances where two or more offenders work together to commit a homicide men are the offenders 91.6% of the time, women: 8.4%.

Beyond the daily acts of male violence, if we attribute to men (overwhelmingly the world’s leadership class) responsibility for  international and intra-national (civil) wars, the sum of violence skyrockets (about 50 million deaths in World War II alone). The male leadership of North Korea bandies nukes about in 2009, other global male leaders have access to pushing the nuclear button, the male leadership of Iran uses brute force to buttress an election it stole, the male leadership everywhere implicates the citizenry in declared and undeclared wars of violence.    As subtext for all the warring behavior —  men as a global gender class keep women in a subordinate gender class.

As a guy, and parent of a daughter, I see it.  How can anybody without an anti-woman discriminatory agenda claim it’s not so?

If say, dogs, began hurting men at the rate that men hurt women, be assured there would be a global outcry by men for the elimination of dogs. I’m just saying, not recommending.  Because I’m a guy, I know there would be  a global outcry by men to get rid of the dogs.  Forgiveness was invented as something men want from women, not something men in practice extend to those who hurt men.  (The hypocrisy of lip service by men about forgiveness, particularly when women are in the audience?  Merely another tool of man-made manipulation against the inherent good natures of women.)

When women are shrouded and silenced by men, then women cannot research and cannot report the truth about male violence as Rachel Jewkes, Clare Nullis and Maria Jose Alcala have done today.   (See excerpts from AP’s report below;   note the names of the unshrouded and unsilenced women who have done the good work to speak out about male violence.)

By CLARE NULLIS, Associated Press Writer Clare Nullis, Associated Press Writer – Fri Jun 19, 3:27 pm ET

CAPE TOWN, South Africa – A leading South African research group said one in four male South Africans it surveyed admitted to committing rape — a finding that cast a harsh light on a culture of sexual violence that victims groups say is deeply embedded in society. …  Chief researcher Rachel Jewkes said Friday that the findings were “shocking” but “not unexpected.” Opposition political parties said they were horrified, but victim support groups said they were not surprised. … The research council survey said that nearly 20 percent of those [men] who admitted sexual abuse had the AIDS virus — only slightly higher than the 18 percent infection rate among men not involved in rape.  It said that 17 percent of the men surveyed admitted to attempted rape, and 9 percent said they had taken part in gang rapes. In all, 42 percent of men surveyed said they had been physically violent to an intimate partner (current or ex-girlfriend or wife), including 14 percent in the past year.  … Many victim support groups complain that rape cases are repeatedly postponed and little is done to protect the woman from the trauma of facing her tormentor. Most cases don’t even reach court. … “Rape is one of the most brutal human rights violations in the world,” said Maria Jose Alcala, who heads the U.N. development fund’s effort to curtail violence against women. “It is a stark manifestation of just how little value our societies place on the lives and dignity of women and girls.”

But back to political Islam, which is where  this post started.  Before you buy the misguided multi-culti notion that who wears what on her or his head is merely about “culture” and not rooted in political Islam’s misogyny,  remember a fallen hero, a woman who was in fact silenced by a man murdering her for her “sin” of not wearing the correct shroud.

“[February 20, 2007] Female Pakistani minister shot dead for ‘breaking Islamic dress code’ [Reported by Devika Bhat and Zahid Hussain in Islamabad, timesonline.co.uk; photo credit (Rahat Dar/EPA)]”

Zilla Huma Usman was an ally of President Pervez Musharraf and promoted rights for women in Pakistan — an  Islamic man murdered her because of her clothing and his interpretation of her “sin.”   She had been the minister for social welfare in Punjab province, Pakistan — where another dangerous, male-led government has nukes and might try to kill us all.

Today’s Slave Trade aka Human Trafficking

Trivia bonus question:  Who’s the real-life actor dad of 24‘s Keifer Sutherland?  Jude Dude Answer:  Who cares, playing heroes runs in the family. (Dad Donald Sutherland played a hero in the “Human Trafficking” TV mini-series.)

For the many millions of enslaved (aka trafficked) people every year, the danger and depredation  don’t stop after the TV shoot’s a wrap.

“Human Trafficking”:  Sounds so much better than “Today’s Slave Trade.” Even the two-part TV “complete miniseries,” by its subtitle under  the “Human Trafficking” header, acknowledged that the main target merchandise of today’s sex slave trade is not boys but girls.  An online photo advertising the miniseries:

Maybe too laden with heavy grief for those who care, and too glossed with prurient interest for those who do not, the global sex slave trade in girls cannot be named for what it is and receive the anti-trafficking funding needed by social activists.

And indeed, caring, courageous social activists have caught the political attention on the need to stop human trafficking.  Certainly it is not only the overwhelming numbers of girls and women, but also some boys and men, who are trafficked and not always for sex or only sex.  Concentration-camp-style, farm-and-construction, and domestic-servant-to-master-behind-closed-doors-type labor are also options.

This week, Secretary of State Clinton spoke up about it: Clinton: US Has “Responsibility” To Fight Trafficking

Slavery:  Now a bigger global criminal enterprise than black-market weapons, second only to the illegal drug trade.  But all the pieces fit together.   The big-three of global crime are (1) drugs, (2) slavery, and (3) arms because, to take a common slavery example, profiteers cannot enslave girls, boys and young women to degradation serving male tourists in brothels without drugs to numb the human merchandise and without guns to enforce the profiteers’ dominance over the merchandise.

Remember the media brouhaha (understandable) over Catholic priests (all males) who were caught for buggering little boys?  These crimes,  heinous, yet also a social barometer in sounding a bigger public outcry than you have ever heard raised against the systematic rapes of girls who have not just one but two natural orifices below the belt in which to be abused by men.  Of course there are a relatively few women who for whatever reasons (socialization, trauma, derangement) act out in predatory violence against others. But in a global profit-based economy,  to understand the big-picture “why” of trafficking requires looking to the source of the demand that leads to criminals trafficking, drugging and coercing girls who grow into pimp-controlled women  as a cheap source of supply.

To focus on meaningful global political solutions it helps to notice who is doing the most of what to whom.

More images of revolt in Iran: Fashion from women who are heroes

Does fashion precede freedom for some women?

We’re seeing freedom (and fashion) statements — from the nailpolish worn by individual women in some of the photos of the revolt in Tehran to designer handbags on display — also partial face masking plus  improperly worn head scarves, a punishable offense against women by the men who run political Islam. Images from Tehran suggest that forward progress of women’s global liberation may include steps through stages of self-actualization within the framework of what global culture currently supplies.

For women living under a religio-politico system of subordination by dress code (and chronic behind-closed-doors violence nobody witnesses),  any woman in public improperly wearing her male-required head scarf provides a  brave act of defiance in our world of cell-phone cameras and Twitter.    Some of the women pictured can afford Twitpic, they may Twitter.  They could probably afford (or somebody in their family afforded it for them) an education.  They can afford nail polish and designer bags.  When they revolt against the male-imposed veil, they revolt for women around the world who are required to comply by economic deprivation, threat and actual violence with their second-class gender caste status.

[Images from Wikipedia under “Hijab,”  “Abaya” and “Niqab” topics … there’s much more in the realm of imagery about political Islam’s dress code for women around the world, but why bum you out?]

[Woman with her son in Afghanistan, above, followed by two women under dress-code requirements on the Arabian peninsula  and a woman in Monterey, CA, USA]

In the facade for misogyny political Islam provides, it cannot advance anybody’s liberation to see a woman wearing political Islam’s required headdress — admittedly by the religion itself a symbol of male subordination of what men have dubbed as an “impure” womanhood redeemed through being masked in public.  That said, perhaps we outside Iran should consider whether we want to support women’s right to be free from religion, when every woman in question not only has no independent voice in the public sphere but we also cannot so much as see her face.

Maybe in some way of progression I do not fully understand as a guy with global male privilege —  maybe when teens outside political Islam “sext” their boyfriends with technology, when a woman in Tehran streaks her hair and improperly wears the head scarf in public, when women try to own the agency as actors of being “hot” — it advances women’s global liberation.

Maybe any fashion chosen by a woman — even if the available manufactured options tend still to objectify women as women, as a gender class — is still a  little closer really to being free.

Maybe it’s all steps of progress.  All necessary as part of the process of woman and women getting out of the male-dominance of being male-objectified targets in the longest war.

Twitpic Update: Twittering Today’s Iconic Images of the Spirit of Freedom in Iran

At Twitpic you can find a photo being billed on the proprietary site as iconic depiction of today’s protest in Tehran, green banner unfurled in the streets filled with a largely male crowd.

In the vast people’s outpouring of the Iranian revolt, wonder why you can see an injured girl attended by a male, a woman mixed in with male crowds, or a woman standing alone in defiance, among the  throngs  of  mainly men — but few groups of women among thousands (maybe more) of men who have taken to the streets in protest? See photos in Twitter, Tweetdeck post below, and these additional images:

Iranian women’s peaceful activist actions have, in recent months before the election, been fragmented by mullah-militarist men roughing them up and jailing them with a release condition that they be isolated from each other and no longer able to assemble.  It’s not being widely reported, but google Delaram Ali, Iranian Women’s Movement, One Million Signatures Campaign, Delara Darabi and Shirin Ebadi … and you may get the story.

Under the oppression directed against Iranian women by Ahmadenijad sympathizers, the women who are activists may believe this current uprising is their last chance — but because they cannot organize to tell us, and because Ahmadenijad is curtailing news from Iran, we receive no direct appeal from them.  Meanwhile, men are largely carrying most of the green banners without aid of women who have inspired the call to freedom in Iran over the past three decades.

The unreported story of today’s revolt is that Iranian freedom-loving women have been attempting — marching in the streets, singing and chanting slogans, organizing for freedom — for over thirty years to join with Iranian men to bring about social respect for individualism in community of the type most Americans take for granted. In those earlier years American feminist Kate Millett went to Iran and, before the Iranian government expelled her, gathered compelling material and with old-media (paper) photographic help from Sophie Keir wrote a book about Iran.

If the best of Kate Millett’s books weren’t currently out of print (no big surprise in a big-oil global mass-media world also run on the backs of women), we’d better understand political Islam (as compared to reformist efforts) and the dominator politics of what’s happening today in Iran.  Twitter and related apps provide excellent technology for showing what’s now (at least when a government doesn’t block tech egress) — but if we depart from the collective wisdom of where we’ve been, even a Twitpic won’t show the way to where we’re going.

Twitter, Tweetdeck and Getting Out Iran’s Pictures of Election Revolt

“Get the full picture …”  because when we see truth with our own eyes, it’s easier to see through the longest war’s lies.  [As Tweetdeck and many others have said]:  “A picture tells a thousand words …”

As much as we like to use our words, the green leaves around a purple flower from a Tweetdeck page …

… say more about the robust life-force to grow, freely, than any indistinct text even if brought into focus.   Twitter and third party apps like Tweetdeck have gotten the cell-phone photos out of Iran about the mullah-led post-electoral suppressions of the people’s will to freedom.  Used this way, call technology my hero.  The dominator old men of the longest war’s portion in Iran may now have stopped even Twitter’s tiny url’s from getting outside the man-made lines drawn as Iran’s national boundaries.  But not before these images  emerged of the green of freedom adopted by women and men joining together as freedom-lovers in Iran.

• The moderate Mousavi was identified before the elections (and resulting people’s revolt over the election being called a win by the previously ruling mullah-militarists of Ahmadinejad) as likely to beat Ahmadinejad.
• Mousavi in outreach to Iranian women branded himself successfully as the green candidate – though the color did not reflect a commitment to environmental issues so much as progressive Islamic resonance symbolic of constructive change and liberation.
• After what Mousavi’s supporters identify as rigged elections for the status quo, these images that got out indicate what we know about bravery and revolt in Iran (before the dominator government’s efforts at information blackout):

Sexting: Why Girls Do It

Society normalizes today’s teen-aged girls to “sexting.”   It’s not their fault, but females of all ages take the blame for a lot about man-made society that’s not their fault.   That’s a short answer to the “why” of girls sexting and getting punished for it.

The whole story of why requires a look at the big picture other than what’s on the cell-phone or laptop screen of any high school girls at the moment of sexting.

Everything about this blog is social commentary and  the sexting issue — cell phone photos, laptops and teen web cams, coarsening of culture, on and on it goes with a focus on the girls apart from the gender-class sexual politics girls did not establish  — typifies the hypocrisy of blaming females, business as usual, for social forces they did not make.

Social beings live in social context.  Isolation to a social being can feel like death itself.  We know (from being there now or having been there) how important fitting in to a peer group is to teens.   (Photo illustration:  Chris Bovey, online with name reference, apparently a male photographer from what can be googled; the female model not credited so we do not know if she is an ex-girlfriend or ex-wife, a current girlfriend or wife, a “hot” for fun and for free one night stand, a sex worker, a photoshopped image added to a cell-phone photo or a woman who voluntarily let hersef be photographed to bring attention to a social phenomenom.  Whoever she is, she’s  nothing if not “hot.”)

This week’s multi-plex offering, The Taking of Pelham 123, also normalizes sexting by a young woman (teen) showing her bra via laptop to the handsome boyfriend who says he loves her while riding a subway train publicly to watch her sexting.  His love talk is that he’s “got her” and she (like the mythic Echo to Narcissus) echoes the words back to him as her shirt comes off to reveal the bra.  The laptop on the highjacked subway train ultimately saves the handsome man’s young life.  No two or more girls or women are shown onscreen at any time in any sort of relationship, friendship or otherwise. No mother onscreen has a relationship with a daughter (athough a key plot point involves a mother and a son).  “Bitch” is normalized by the film’s opening soundtrack and John Travolta’s character discussing “bitch” as a subordinated being who takes it from a dominant male.

Even Denzel Washington’s character was screenwritten not to honor the telephone request of his valiant wife (while she suffered, home and alone, watching the media portrayal of danger to her husband) for something as ordinary as that he bring home a gallon of milk.  (Asking him to bring home a gallon of milk at workday’s end was her brave, no-nonsense way to show faith in his longevity, by the daily-living nature of her request made by phone call during his risky ordeal.  Thus, although she stood by her man and showed her faith in all things male, he argued with her about size of milk container. He brought home a half gallon.)

Do you see the valiant wife or any female face pictured anywhere on the movie poster?

2009 Sony Pictures.

Sexting:  Girls do it because they want to fit in to the male-dominant “hot” culture the longest war has made.  Girls do it because they do not see any other viable options.  Girls do it because their mothers, damaged through no fault of their own by the longest war, have not bonded and banded together to stop the damage they pass on to their daughters in the “token torturer” role (various combinations of fitting-in fashion or stages of undress, over-emphasis on appearance, plastic surgery, believing in malehood to save us  -or-  the flip side of religious fundamentalism,  following man-God religions and subordinating the female by demure but sex-mandated dress code and conduct as the mind-numbing pathway to a false peace built on the backs of women —  on and on it goes with media and man-God religion to entrain the brain).

And then some prosecutors want to tag the girls as sex offenders for sexting. Do not get me started about the red-herring of prosecuting or not.   (Oh, no, here comes a mini-rant any way.)

Some women (and some men) bravely name this nonsense of prosecuting teen sexting instead of looking at the true sexually political causes, just as some women (and some men) bravely network and mobilize for women’s freedom around the globe from escalating oppression (mental and physical) against women.  But in a sexually political male-dominant world of social conditioning, the male-dominant goal (by the media product and religious dogma being disseminated) is that men keep on dominating because  women do not help women —  and daughters and mothers (or dads who would not sell out their daughters to male-dominant values) do not bond —  leaving women with only men and/or the man-God to adore and worship.

Eroticizing this power differential in man’s war against womankind is what sexting (get ’em early and often) is all about.