Repealing a ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia would result in ‘no more virgins’, the country’s religious council has warned.
A ‘scientific’ report claims relaxing the ban would also see more Saudis - both men and women - turn to homosexuality and pornography.
The startling conclusions were drawn by Muslim scholars at the Majlis al-Ifta’ al-A’ala, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, working in conjunction with Kamal Subhi, a former professor at the King Fahd University.
Authorities detained a Saudi woman on Saturday after she launched a campaign against the driving ban for women in the ultraconservative kingdom and posted a videotape of herself behind the wheel on Facebook and YouTube to encourage others to copy her.
Manal al-Sherif and a group of other women started a Facebook page called 'Teach me how to drive so I can protect myself,' which urges authorities to lift the driving ban. She went on a test drive in the eastern city of Khobar and later posted a video of the experience.
Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world to ban women - both Saudi and foreign - from driving. The prohibition forces families to hire live-in drivers, and those who cannot afford the $300 to $400 a month for a driver must rely on male relatives to drive them to work, school, shopping or the doctor.
[snip]
Women are also barred from voting, except for chamber of commerce elections in two cities in recent years, and no woman can sit on the kingdom's Cabinet. Women also cannot travel without permission from a male guardian and shouldn't mingle with males who are not their husbands or brothers.
While this week marked the 100th anniversary of International Woman’s Day, which celebrates women’s rights around the world, a new pro-jihad publication is pushing for a different form of empowerment in the “path of victory for Allah’s religion and raising its banner.”
“A Muslim woman lives a tough journey today, with enemies raging at her from the east and the west. It gets to the point where Muslims are targeted as strangers,” the magazine Al-Shamikha – The Majestic Woman – tells female readers. “The enemies wish with the greatest desire to remove her from the truth of her religion and the truth of her role, because they know well how the situation will be if the women entered the battleground.”
The Majestic Woman is the latest in a series of texts speaking to the role of women in jihad, with articles ranging from “Pages from the notebook of a female warrior” to beauty tips and the five pillars of the “Majestic Woman.” The magazine also touches on material and financial support for jihad, but steers clear of military instruction and jihad training.
In a radio interview Monday on Univision, President Obama chided Latinos who "sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.'"
Quite a uniter, urging Hispanics to exact political revenge on their enemies — presumably, for example, the near-60% of Americans who support the new Arizona immigration law.
This from a president who won't even use "enemies" to describe an Iranian regime that is helping kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. This from a man who rose to prominence thunderously declaring that we were not blue states or red states, not black America or white America or Latino America — but the United States of America. Read more . . .
[Ed. Attempting to find a balance between ideologies is historically difficult. The image you see above is an emblem from the French Revolution, and we know how that unfolded.]
The blogosphere abhors a vacuum. So when the mainstream media (MSM) leave holes in a given narrative -- in this case, the biography of the president -- bloggers individually, incrementally, and indefatigably strive to fill in the blanks -- sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.
In his comprehensive, 600-plus-page biography of Barack Obama titled The Bridge, New Yorker editor David Remnick lays down the baseline of what the mainstream media know about the president -- or at least what they want us to know.
Where Remnick falls oddly silent -- not even to scold the blogosphere, which he does often -- is on the question of Obama's love life. This would not be particularly noteworthy save that Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams From My Fatheris in large part a racial coming-of-age story.
In Obama's all-consuming search for identity, and in Remnick's effort to document that search, Obama's romantic life should surely have featured. Whether he dated white women or black women -- and what he might have learned from either -- matters.
Video appears on the website of NotForSaleCampaign.org. This organization is attempting to find solutions to modern-day slavery. If you want to know more and take a pro-active role in reducing human trafficking, then this is a good place to start.
Americans are rightfully ashamed of our own history in the slave trade, and of course there are many who will never let us forget and move forward. Indeed, some have made an industry, others a religion, out of racially dividing America.
However, for those who only want to focus on slavery in America, I would like to direct your attention to an article by Howard Dodson titled Slavery in the Twenty-First Century. Dodson is an African-American "lecturer, educator and consultant, is Chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of The New York Public Library and a specialist in African-American history. He is a former member of the President’s Commission on the National Museum of African American History and Culture and serves on the Scientific and Technical Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route project." Dodson attempts to raise awareness, and he calls his kinsmen to action [emphasis mine]:
The slave trade is back in full force. This modern slave trade, however, is not limited to just young Africans; women and children are also being enslaved in almost every continent. It is estimated that there are over 27 million enslaved persons worldwide, more than double the number of those who were deported in the 400-year history of the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas. What is remarkable is that this unprecedented trafficking largely goes unnoticed. The 27 million victims of the modern slave trade are more invisible to the world’s eye than were the 10 million to 12 million Africans who were forcibly sent to the Americas during the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. How do we account for this fact in this age of media and communications overload and transparency?
Since varying forms of modern slavery exist in every society and major community worldwide, persons who would become twenty-first-century abolitionists are obliged to call upon Governments, religious bodies and citizens to launch investigations and convene hearings on the status of slavery and slave trafficking. The existence of millions of enslaved persons around the world challenges us to create a global abolitionist movement. Among the first to join should be those who benefited from the successful movements that ended the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. I, for one, have signed up.
The U.S. Department of State annually produces a report on slavery. The latest Trafficking in Persons Report 2009 details human trafficking activity around the world. A few quoted excerpts from the report are below. In addition to these excerpts, readers are reminded that Jefferson's Rebels published an article, Sexual Depravity Breeds Savage Jihadists, which dovetails with the evidence presented in this report. Also see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's introductory remarks to the report. If you are curious about slavery in countries not listed here, please turn to the full report above.
Innocent photos of this woman driving led to her arrest after she posted them online
