Assalaam O Alaikum
This beautiful and courageous speech came to me via email. I like to share with all of you. The main issue we are facing in this world is that the West is hell bound to demonize Islam and Muslims due to thier ulterior motives. The media and leaders are brain washing thier citizenry. If we Muslims utter a truth then these brainwashed people obvioulsy will take it with grain of salt and may find it difficult to believe us. Now, hearing the truth from own kind will get a warmer ear. I urge you to send this speech of this kind and gracious Jewish woman to any non-Muslim you know (may be around 10 of your friends) asking them to read it and make their own judgements. This is the least we can do to help the Muslims who are suffering all over the world from "Muslim Womb Scared" Western leaders.
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The talk from 2005 is still a good reminder for our current troubling
times. May God bless her for her courage and strength.
2005 International Women's Day Address to the European Parliament by
Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old
when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below
is Nurit's speech made on International Women's Day in Strasbourg
earlier in 2005.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan is recipient of the European Parliament's 2001
Sakharov prize for her peace advocacy in the Middle East. She is also
a lecturer in language and education at Hebrew University in Israel.
---
WOMEN
by Nurit Peled-Elhanan
_________________________________________________
Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honour and a
pleasure to be here, among you (at the European Parliament).
However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian
woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in
my county are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my
speech to Miriam R`aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the
Gaza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers
while picking strawberries at the family`s strawberry field. No one
will ever stand trial for this murder.
When I asked the people who invited me here why didn't they invite a
Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion too
localized.
I don't know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination
may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is
always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse,
torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.
It is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on
Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army, has
expanded around the globe, In fact, state violence and army violence,
individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim women today,
not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is
setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever
addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe
and in the USA.
This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.
Great France of "la liberte, egalite et la fraternite" is scared of
little girls with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the
Muslim womb which its ministers call a demographic threat.
Almighty America and Great Britain are infecting their respective
citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile,
primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being non-democratic,
chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in spite of
the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not
Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a
non-devout Jew.
I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every
day, every hour, I don't know the kind of violence that turns a woman's
life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of
women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy
and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and
night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of
strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished , who are
deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not
part of my personal ordeal.
But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against
children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi,
Afghan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of the same
unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the free
enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and enlightenment rob
us of our children.
Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been
for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree
that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the
world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose
children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces
with our sons and daughters.
They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by
politicians.
And the viruses , though they may have various illustrious names--such
as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland--are all the same. They are all
part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and
to empower the powerful.
We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence
that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved
mothers.
Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national
asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an
international threat. They are educated not to cry out: `I gave him
birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one
whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece
of land.`
All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we
can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of
their dead bodies.
And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our
fear and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail Mama
Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers.
I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a
mother have been violated and are violated because I have to fear the
day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to
be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their
clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals.
Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I
live in, I don't dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to change
their lives.
I don't want them to take off their scarves, or educate their children
differently, and I will not urge them to constitute Democracies in the
image of Western democracies that despise them and their kind. I just
want to ask them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for
their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to have children
and to maintain a dignified family life in spite of the impossible
conditions my world in putting them in. I want to tell them we are all
bonded by the same pain, we all the victims of the same sort of
violence even though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who
are mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my taxes.
Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is
not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European
indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism and its cruel
regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda and
inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order
Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip in front of their children for
security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allow
American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license to Israeli
jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary
hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water
or clean mattresses and to separate them from their breast-fed babies
and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to
education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees and prevent
them from cultivating their fields.
I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I
don't know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect
from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been
suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers` cry is
not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such
as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me
to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I
should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their
children in strawberry fields or on filthy roads by the checkpoints,
when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children
who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race and
religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their
betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova--another mother who lived
in a regime of violence against women and children--asked:
Why does that streak o blood, rip the petal of your cheek?
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To do any collective work without prior mutual consultation is not only a
way of the ignorant but is also a clear defiance of the regulation laid down
by Allah.
"Shariah: The Islamic Law" - Abdur Rahman I. Doi, pp. 15-19
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The preceding document was posted on AMILAnet - a service of
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