August 31st, 2009 8:10 am - Phyllis Chesler
The Burqa: Ultimate Feminist Choice?
Naomi Wolf Discovers That Shrouds Are Sexy Women in chadors are really feminist ninja warriors. Rather than allow themselves to be gawked at by male strangers, they choose to defeat the “male gaze” by hiding from it in plain view.
But don’t you worry: Beneath that chador, abaya, burqa, or veil, there is a sexy courtesan wearing “Victoria Secret, elegant fashion, and skin care lotion,” just waiting for her husband to come home for a night of wild and sensuous marital lovemaking.
Obviously, these are not my ideas. I am quoting from a piece by Naomi Wolf that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago. Yes, Wolf is the bubbly, feminist author who once advised Vice President Al “The Climate” Gore on what colors he should wear while campaigning and who is or was friendly with Gore’s daughter. Full disclosure: I have casually known Wolf and her parents for more than a quarter-century.
Wolf recently traveled to Morocco, Jordan, and Eygpt, where she found the women “as interested in allure, seduction, and pleasure as women anywhere in the world.” Whew! What a relief. She writes:
“Many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualizing Western gaze. … Many women said something like this: …’how tiring it can be to be on display all the time. When I wear my headscarf or chador, people relate to me as an individual, not an object; I feel respected.’ This may not be expressed in a traditional Western feminist set of images, but it is a recognizably Western feminist set of feelings.”
Really? If so, I’m the Queen of England.
Now that Wolf is no longer the doe-eyed ingenue of yesteryear, she sees the advantage of not being on view at all times. A Westerner, “playing” Muslim-dress up, Wolf claims that hiding in plain view gave her “a novel sense of calm and serenity. I felt, yes, in certain ways, free.” In addition, Wolf believes that the marital sex is hotter when women “cover” and reveal their faces and bodies only to their husbands.
Marabel Morgan lives! In the mid-1970s, Morgan advised wives to greet their husbands at the door wearing sexy clothing and/or transparent saran wrap with only themselves underneath. Her book, Total Woman, sold more than ten million copies. According to Morgan, a Christian, “It’s only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him.”
Well, what can I say? Here’s a few things.
Most Muslim girls and women are not given a choice about wearing the chador, burqa, abaya, niqab, jilbab, or hijab (headscarf), and those who resist are beaten, threatened with death, arrested, caned or lashed, jailed, or honor murdered by their own families. Is Wolfe thoroughly unfamiliar with the news coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan on these very subjects? Has she forgotten the tragic, fiery deaths of those schoolgirls in Saudi Arabia who, in trying to flee their burning schoolhouse, were improperly veiled and who were beaten back by the all-powerful Saudi Morality Police? Most Muslim girls and women are impoverished and wear rags, not expensive Western clothing beneath their coverings. Only the pampered, super-controlled, often isolated, and uber-materialistic daughters of wealth, mainly in the Gulf states, but also among the ruling classes in the Islamic world, match Wolf’s portrait of well kept courtesan-wives.
Being veiled and obedient does not save a Muslim girl or woman from being incested, battered, stalked, gang-raped, or maritally raped nor does it stop her husband from taking multiple wives and girlfriends or from frequenting brothels. A fully “covered” girl-child, anywhere between the ages of 10-15, may still be forced into an arranged marriage, perhaps with her first cousin, perhaps with a man old enough to be her grandfather, and she is not allowed to leave him, not even if he beats her black and blue every single day.
Wolf claims that she donned a “shalwar kameez and a headscarf” for a trip to the bazaar. I suggest that Wolf understand that the shalwar kameez and headscarf that she playfully wore in Morocco are not the problem.
I wonder how Wolf would feel if she’d donned a burqa, chador (full body bags) or niqab (face mask) for that same trip; how well she would do in an isolation chamber that effectively blocked her five senses and made it difficult, if not impossible, for her to communicate with others?
And, by the way, the eerie effect, ultimately, of shrouded women is that they become invisible. They cease to exist. They are literally ghosts.
Wolf presents the West as anti-woman because it treats women as sex objects. Am I happy about pornography and prostitution in the West? Hell no and, unlike Wolf, I’ve fought against them–but to portray these vices as a “Western” evil, and one that the Islamic world opposes, is sheer madness.
It is well known that the Arabs and Muslims kept and still keep sex slaves–they are very involved in the global trafficking in girls and women and frequent prostitutes on every continent. You will find pornography magazines in every princely tent–those for boys as well as for girls. I am told that the Saudis fly in fresh planeloads of Parisian prostitutes every week. Perhaps they veil them before they conduct their all-night and all-day orgies. Or, perhaps they view them as natural, “infidel” prey.
Let me suggest that Wolf read a book that is coming out in September, written by a Christian-American woman, Mary Laurel Ross, whose American Air Force husband trained the Saudi Air Force. It is called Veiled Honor and is a timely, comprehensive, “nuanced” (Wolf calls for “nuance” in our understanding of “female freedom”) account of her approximately fifteen year sojourn in Saudi Arabia. I would also suggest that Wolf read the works of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel) and Nonie Darwish (Cruel and Usual Punishment) for starters.
Then again, I suspect that Wolf is not necessarily looking for any “nuanced” truths about “female freedom” but is, rather, fishing for Saudi gold and positioning herself within the Democratic Party. After all, what she has written in this brief article supports President Obama’s position vis a vis the Muslim world. Source: http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2009/08/31/the-burqa-the-ultimate-feminist-choice/
From the National Post. Historical fantasies
Jonathan Kay, National Post Published: Monday, August 24, 2009 This just in from former Canadian Islamic Congress chief Mohamed Elmasry: Islamic slavery wasn’t all that bad. Writing in The Canadian Charger — a newly formed internet-based grab bag of anti-Western articles published by hard-left Canadian activists — Elmasry works hard to distinguish the evils of Christian slavery from the purportedly enlightened race-mixing that resulted from its Islamic equivalent.
Some snippets: “Islam, with no church, teaches that all humans, irrespective of their gender, skin col-our and ethnic origin are capable of doing good; there is no original sin. The One God is the Lord of all, not of special people or tribe[s] … Islam and Africa have made something of each other that is quite extraordinary … Islam teaches that slaves, who were then the result of wars, Africans or not, should be treated well and set free as soon as possible … Islam also teaches that slaves can buy their freedom in-kind. Thus many of them excelled to be teachers and even scholars … Islam teaches a slave is a victim of circumstances who should be helped to be free and treated fairly in the mean time. Trading in slaves is a sin. This is in contrast to the teachings of the Bible, ‘Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling.’” … The Arab Muslims called Africans Zanji (hence the island of Zanjibar or Zanzibar), Habashi (from Habasha, Arabic for Ethiopian) or Sudani (Arabic for black). Such
Elmasry’s theme is that Islamic slavery was an enlightened exercise in regional
multiculturalism
names “were not derogatory but simply ethnographic … Some [slaves] achieved high rank and status …” And so on.
The basic theme is that Islamic slavery — to the extent it was bad at all (and it’s not really clear that Elmasry thinks it was) — was an enlightened, almost consensual, win-win exercise in regional multiculturalism. In his characteristically absurd elevation of Islam over Christianity, he makes no mention of the fact that religious Christians led the abolition movement in the West — while slavery persisted wholesale in the Arab world until late in the 20th century, and still survives in parts of Islamic Africa, including Sudan. Indeed, one wonders what the Christian tribes-people from southern Sudan who have been abducted, forcibly converted to Islam and enslaved by Arab Muslims in recent years would make of Elmasry’s historical fantasies.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? Our Christian leaders seem to do nothing but apologize these days — for every historical sin under the sun. But here you have a man who recently led the most prominent Muslim activist group in Canada, and he thinks it’s just dandy that his Arab forebears colonized and enslaved great swathes of Africa over the course of many centuries — a colonial situation that essentially persists in Sudan and regions of the Maghreb.
Remember this the next time Elmasry or one of his fellow travelers denounces Western “imperialism.” jkay@nationalpost.com Source: http://vladtepesblog.com/
LE MONDE ARABO-ISLAMIQUE ENVERS LE SOUDAN (DARFOUR): ENTRE ESCLAVAGE, TRAITE NÉGRIÈRE ET NETTOYAGE ETHNIQUE Le génocide voilé (voir impérativement la vidéo)
24 Juin 2008 En France lorsqu'on veut empêcher la lecture d'un livre on ne le censure pas. Du moins officiellement. Il s'agit là d'une pratique archaïque laissée aux dictatures. Non, en France on a mieux : l'indifférence des grands médias. C'est ainsi qu'un superbe ouvrage, "Le Génocide voilé", a fait l'objet d'un véritable boycott médiatique. Et pour cause, il décortique un sujet brûlant : la traite négrière arabo-musulmane. S'il semble, aujourd'hui, aisé de parler de l'esclavage transatlantique, ce n'est pas le cas pour celui concernant la partie subsaharienne. Il existerait comme un mutisme. Et lorsqu'on sait que l'auteur est l'anthropologue et économiste Tidiane N'Diaye connu pour être est l'un des grands spécialistes des civilisations négro-africaines et de leurs diasporas on comprend mieux la gêne de ceux qui ne cessent de culpabiliser les Occidentaux. Vidéo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcIcd3T2BMw Le génocide voilé
Présentation de l'éditeur" Les Arabes ont razzié l'Afrique subsaharienne pendant treize siècles sans interruption. La plupart des millions d'hommes qu'ils ont déportés ont disparu du fait des traitements inhumains. Cette douloureuse page de l'histoire des peuples noirs n'est apparemment pas définitivement tournée. La traite négrière a commencé lorsque l'émir et général arabe Abdallah ben Saïd a imposé aux Soudanais un bakht (accord), conclu en 652, les obligeant à livrer annuellement des centaines d'esclaves. La majorité de ces hommes était prélevée sur les populations du Darfour. Et ce fut le point de départ d'une énorme ponction humaine qui devait s'arrêter officiellement au début du XXe siècle. "Biographie de l'auteurL'anthropologue et économiste Tidiane N'Diaye est l'un des grands spécialistes des civilisations négro-africaines et de leurs diasporas. Il est l'auteur de nombreux ouvrages sur ce sujet. Commentaire au Livre Le Coran légitime l’inégalité constitutive entre le maître et son serviteur. Il parle des esclaves « qu’Allah a fait tomber entre vos mains » (Ainsi Sourate 33,49). Il voit aussi dans la réussite matérielle le signe d’une grâce divine. « Allah a favorisé certains d’entre vous, plus que d’autres, dans la répartition de ses dons. Que ceux qui ont été favorisés ne reversent pas ce qui leur a été accordé à leurs esclaves, au point que ceux-ci deviennent leurs égaux- Nieront-ils les bienfaits d’Allah ? » (Sourate 16 dite des Abeilles ,71) « Allah propose en parabole un serviteur qui, en esclavage, ne peut rien, et un homme (libre) à qui Nous avons attribué de belles ressources, sur lesquelles il fait dépense en secret et en public. Sont-ils égaux ? [Non point] ! à Allah ne plaise ! Pourtant la plupart [des Impies] ne savent pas. » (16,77/75) « Allah propose (aussi) , en parabole, deux hommes dont l’un est muet, ne peut rien et est à la charge de son maître car, quelque part que celui-ci l’envoie, cet homme ne lui rapporte rien de bon.(Cet homme) est-il l’égal de son maître qui ordonne avec équité et suit une Voie Droite ? » (16,78/76) Un autre exemple tout aussi significatif Ce fut après le mariage du Prophète avec Maymûnah, (ce qui lui faisait neuf femmes) … (`Aishah, Sawdah, Umm Habîbah, Hafsah, Umm Salamah, Zaynab Bint Jahsh, Juwayriyyah, Safiyyah et Maymûnah),… que le verset suivant fut « révélé » à Mahomet: "Il ne t’est plus permis de changer d’épouses ni de prendre d’autres femmes, en dehors de tes esclaves même si tu es charmé par la beauté de certaines d’entre elles. Dieu voit parfaitement toutes choses." ( Sourate Les factions, verset 52) Après cela, le Prophète ne se maria plus jamais. Cependant, lorsqu’un souverain chrétien, ou le Muqawqis d’Egypte lui envoya deux femmes esclaves ( an 7 après l’Hégire) qui étaient sœurs en guise de cadeau (en réponse à une lettre du Prophète les invitant à embrasser l’Islam), accompagnées d’un beau vêtement et de quelques médicaments, le Prophète accepta une des deux filles, Maria, dans son foyer : il donna sa sœur Serene à un homme qu’il souhaitait honorer, à savoir Hassân Ibn Thâbit. Il accepta le vêtement, et renvoya les médicaments avec le message : " Ma sunnah est mon médicament ! " D’autres versets « révélés » juste à temps (!!!) servent à régler des tensions internes de ménage entre Mahomet et ses femmes; Ainsi les versets 1 à 3 Sourate 66 qui clôturent la débat houleux sur les activités nocturnes de Mahomet avec une esclave égyptienne et admonestent ses femmes jalouses pour leurs « objections. » D’autres versets du Coran "Heureux les croyants qui sont humbles dans leurs prières, qui évitent les propos vains, qui font l'aumône, qui se contentent de leurs rapports avec leurs épousées et leurs captives..." Sourate XXIII Les croyants. Captives: littéralement ce que possèdent vos mains droites c'est à dire vos "Captives de guerre" Sourate IV,3, ou vos esclaves IV,24 et 25. Ailleurs ce terme s'applique aux esclaves en général: "Vous devez usez de bonté envers ...vos esclaves" Sourate IV, 36 - ou à des esclaves de sexe masculin Sourate XXIV, 33 et 58. Et enfin la Sourate IV, 25... un grand moment d’humanisme "Celui qui parmi vous n'a pas les moyens d"épouser des femmes croyantes et de bonne condition, prendra des captives de guerres croyantes." Les relations sexuelles entre le maître et ses femmes esclaves sont les seules relations sexuelles hors mariage acceptées par le Coran «À l’exception des hommes chastes qui n’ont de rapports qu’avec leurs épouses et avec leurs captives de guerre; -ils ne sont donc pas blâmables, tandis que ceux qui en convoitent d’autres sont transgresseurs», sourate LXX, verset 29-31. Source: http://www.islamisation.fr/archive/2008/06/01/le-genocide-voile.html
Two articles on Islamic slavery: La storia di una bambina egiziana, domestica negli Stati Uniti I datori di lavoro dovrebbero riflettere sulle loro responsabilità in merito al rispetto dei Diritti dei loro lavoratori domestici Source: Download IslamicSlavery.docTranslated into Italian by FFFFF
The Yemen Observatory for Human Rights organization recently exposed a case of the sale of a slave, carried out with the permission of a court in the country.
The organization said that the institution of slavery still exists in Yemen, even though the country's constitution is bound by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Source: yohr.org H/T: MEMRI
The tale of a former Egyptian child maid in the US By Rukmini Callimachi First Published: January 2, 2009
IRVINE, California/CAIRO, Egypt: Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door.
They watched through their window as the child rinsed plates under the open faucet. She wasn't much taller than the counter and the soapy water swallowed her slender arms. To put the dishes away, she climbed on a chair.
But she was not the daughter of the couple next door doing chores. She was their maid.
Shaymaa was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family's crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off.
The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the US is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Families in remote villages send their daughters to work in cities for extra money and the opportunity to escape a dead-end life. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer.
The custom has led to the spread of trafficking, as well-to-do Africans accustomed to employing children immigrate to the US. Around one-third of the estimated 10,000 forced laborers in the United States are servants trapped behind the curtains of suburban homes, according to a study by the National Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley and Free the Slaves, a nonprofit group. No one can say how many are children, especially since their work can so easily be masked as chores.
Once behind the walls of gated communities like this one, these children never go to school. Unbeknownst to their neighbors, they live as modern-day slaves, just like Shaymaa, whose story is pieced together through court records, police transcripts and interviews.
"I'd look down and see her at 10, 11 — even 12 — at night," said the Shaymaa’s neighbor at the time, Tina Font. "She'd be doing the dishes. We didn't put two and two together."
A maid’s story
Shaymaa cried when she found out she was going to America in 2000. Her father, a bricklayer, had fallen ill a few years earlier, so her mother found a maid recruiter, signed a contract effectively leasing her daughter to the couple for 10 years and told Shaymaa to be strong.
For a year, Shyima, 9, worked in the Cairo apartment owned by Amal Motelib and Nasser Ibrahim. Every month, Shaymaa's mother came to pick up her salary.
Tens of thousands of children in Africa, some as young as 3, are recruited every year to work as domestic servants. They are on call 24 hours a day and are often beaten if they make a mistake. Children are in demand because they earn less than adults and are less likely to complain. In just one city — Casablanca — a 2001 survey by the Moroccan government found more than 15,000 girls under 15 working as maids.
The US State Department found that over the past year, children have been trafficked to work as servants in at least 33 of Africa's 53 countries. Children from at least 10 African countries were sent as maids to the US and Europe. But the problem is so well hidden that authorities — including the UN, Interpol and the State Department — have no idea how many child maids now work in the West.
"In most homes, these girls are not allowed to use so much as the same spoon as the rest of the family," said Hany Helal, the Cairo-based director of the Egyptian Organization for Child Rights.
By the time the Ibrahims decided to leave, Shaymaa’s family had taken several loans from them for medical bills. The Ibrahims said they could only be repaid by sending Shaymaa to work for them in the US. A friend posed as her father, and the US embassy in Cairo issued her a six-month tourist visa.
She arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Aug. 3, 2000, according to court documents. The family brought her back to their spacious five-bedroom, two-story home, decorated in the style of a Tuscan villa with a fountain of two angels spouting water through a conch. She was told to sleep in the garage.
It had no windows and was neither heated nor air-conditioned. Soon after she arrived, the garage's only light bulb went out. The Ibrahims didn't replace it. From then on, Shaymaa lived in the dark.
She was told to call them Madame Amal and Hajj Nasser, terms of respect. They called her "shaghala," or servant. Their five children called her "stupid."
While the family slept, she ironed the school outfits of the Ibrahims' 5-year-old twin sons. She woke them, combed their hair, dressed them and made them breakfast. Then she ironed clothes and fixed breakfast for the three girls, including Heba, who at 10 was the same age as the family's servant.
While they ate breakfast watching TV, she cleaned the palatial house. She vacuumed each bedroom, made the beds, dusted the shelves, wiped the windows, washed the dishes and did the laundry.
Her employers were not satisfied, she said. "Nothing was ever clean enough for her. She would come in and say, 'This is dirty,' or 'You didn't do this right,' or 'You ruined the food,'" said Shaymaa.
She started wetting her bed. Her sheets stank. So did her oversized T-shirt and the other hand-me-downs she wore.
While doing the family's laundry, she slipped her own clothes into the load. Madame slapped her. "She told me my clothes were dirtier than theirs. That I wasn't allowed to clean mine there," she said.
When the couple went out, she waited until she heard the car pull away and then she sat down. She sat with her back straight because she was afraid her clothes would dirty the upholstery.
It never occurred to her to run away.
"I thought this was normal," she said.
A tale of two cities
If you could fly the garage where Shaymaa slept to the sandy alleyway where her Egyptian family now lives, it would pass for the best home in the neighborhood.
The garage's walls are made of concrete instead of hand-patted bricks. Its roof doesn't leak. Its door shuts all the way. Shaymaa's mother and her 10 brothers and sisters live in a two-bedroom house with uneven walls and a flaking ceiling. None of them have ever had a bed to themselves, much less a whole room. At night, bodies cover the sagging couches.
Shown a snapshot of the windowless garage, Shaymaa's mother made a clucking sound of approval.
"It's much cleaner than where many people here sleep," said Helal, the child rights advocate. He explains that Shaymaa's treatment in the Ibrahim home is considered normal — even good — by Egyptian standards.
Even though many child maids are physically abused, child labor is rarely prosecuted because the work isn't considered strenuous. Many employers even see themselves as benefactors.
"There is a sense that children should work to help their family, but also that they are being given an opportunity," said Mark Lagon, the director of the US State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
That's especially the case for well-off families who transport their child servants to Western countries.
In 2006, a US district court in Michigan sentenced a Cameroonian man to 17 years in prison for bringing a 14-year-old girl from his country to work as his unpaid maid. That same year, a Moroccan couple was sentenced to home confinement for forcing their 12-year-old Moroccan niece to work grueling hours caring for their baby.
In Germantown, Maryland, a Nigerian couple used their daughter's passport to bring in a 14-year-old Nigerian girl as their maid. She worked for them for five years before escaping in 2001. In Germany, France, the Netherlands and England, African immigrants have been arrested for forcing children from their home countries to work as their servants.
In several of these cases, the employers argued that they took the children with the parents' permission. The Cameroonian girl's mother flew to Detroit to testify in court against her daughter, saying the girl was ungrateful for the good life her employers had provided her.
Shaymaa's mother, Salwa Mahmoud, said her father believed she would have better opportunities in America.
"I didn't want her to travel but our family's condition dictated that she had to go," explained Mahmoud, a squat, round-faced woman with calloused hands and feet. She is missing two front teeth because she couldn't afford a dentist.
"If she had stayed here in Egypt, she would have been ordinary," said Awatef, Shaymaa's older sister, "just like us."
Legal intervention
On April 3, 2002, an anonymous caller phoned the California Department of Social Services to report that a young girl was living inside the garage of 28 Pacific Grove.
A few days later, Nasser Ibrahim opened the door to a detective from the Irvine Police Department. Asked if any children lived there beside his own, he first said no, then yes — "a distant relative." He said he had "not yet" enrolled her in school. She did "chores — just like the other kids," according to the police transcript.
Shaymaa was upstairs cleaning when Ibrahim came to get her. "He told me that I was not allowed to say anything," said Shaymaa. "That if I said anything I would never see my parents again."
When police searched the house, they turned up several home videos showing Shaymaa at work. They seized the contract signed by Shaymaa's illiterate parents.
After initial denial, 12-year-old Heba eventually admitted that Shaymaa had lived with the family for three years in Egypt and in California.
The police put Shaymaa in a squad car. They noted her hands were red and caked with dead, hard-looking skin.
For months Shyima lied to investigators, saying what the Ibrahims had told her to say.
She went without sleep for days at a stretch. She was put on four different types of medication. She moved from foster home to foster home. Her mood swings alarmed her guardians. In school for the first time, she struggled to learn to read.
Investigators arranged for her to speak to her parents. She told them she felt like a "nobody" working for the Ibrahims and wanted to come home. Her father yelled at her.
"They kept telling me that they're good people," Shaymaa recounted in a recent interview. "That it's my fault.”
Three years ago, she broke off contact with her family. Since then she has refused to speak Arabic. She can no longer communicate in her mother tongue.
During the 2006 trial, the Ibrahims described Shaymaa as part of their family. They included proof of a trip she took with the family to Disneyland.
Shaymaa's lawyer pointed out that the 10-year-old wasn't allowed on the rides — she was there to carry the bags.
The couple's lawyers collected photographs of the home where Shaymaa grew up, including close-ups of the feces-stained squat toilet and of Shaymaa's sisters washing clothes in a bucket.
In her final plea, Amal told the judge it would be unfair to separate her from her children. Enraged, Shaymaa, then 17, told the court she hadn't seen her family in years.
"Where was their loving when it came to me? Wasn't I a human being too? I felt like I was nothing when I was with them," she sobbed.
The couple pleaded guilty to all charges, including forced labor and slavery. They were ordered to pay $76,000, the amount Shaymaa would have earned at the minimum wage. The sentence: Three years in federal prison for Ibrahim, 22 months for his wife, and then deportation for both. Their lawyers declined to comment for this story.
"I don't think that there is any other term you could use than modern-day slavery," said Bob Schoch, the special agent in charge for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles, in describing Shaymaa's situation.
Shaymaa was adopted last year by Chuck and Jenny Hall of Beaumont, Calif. The family lives near Disneyland, where they have taken her a half-dozen times. She graduated from high school this summer after retaking her exit exam and hopes to become a police officer.
Shaymaa, now 19, has a list of assigned chores. She wears purple eyeshadow, has a boyfriend and frequently updates her profile on MySpace. Her hands are neatly manicured.
But in her closet, she keeps a box of pictures of her parents and her brothers and sisters. "I don't look at them because it makes me cry," she said. "How could they? They're my parents."
When her father died last year, her family had no way of reaching her.
Back in Cairo
On a recent afternoon in Cairo, Madame Amal walked into the lobby of her apartment complex wearing designer sunglasses and a chic scarf.
After nearly two years in a US prison cell, she's living once more in the spacious apartment where Shaymaa first worked as her maid. The apartment is adorned in the style of a Louis XIV palace, with ornately carved settees, gold-leaf vases and life-sized portraits of her and her husband.
She did not agree to be interviewed for this story.
Before the door closed behind her, a little girl slipped in carrying grocery bags. She wore a shabby T-shirt. Her small feet slapped the floor in loose flip-flops. Her eyes were trained on the ground.
She looked to be around 9 years old.
 By Rukmini Callimachi Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door. They watched through their window as the child rinsed plates under the open faucet. She wasn't much taller than the counter and the soapy water swallowed her slender arms. To put the dishes away, she climbed on a chair. But she was not the daughter of the couple next door doing chores. She was their maid. Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family's crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off. The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the U.S. is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Families in remote villages send their daughters to work in cities for extra money and the opportunity to escape a dead-end life. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer. Read more ...Source: AP H/T: Dhimmi Watch
 December 23, 2008 | Simon Deng
Late last month, I went to hear Bishop Desmond Tutu speak at Boston's Old South Church at a conference on 'Israel Apartheid.'
Tutu is a well respected man of G-d. He brought reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa. That he would lead a conference that damns the Jewish State is very disturbing to me.
The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families -- even though I also drove on Israeli roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools, and get the best medical care in the world. I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. I see street signs in Arabic, an official language here.
None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutu's South Africa. I also know countries that do deserve the apartheid label: My country, Sudan, is on the top of the list, but so are Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What has happened to my people in Sudan is a thousand times worse than Apartheid in South Africa. And no matter how the Palestinians suffer, they suffer nothing compared to my people. Nothing. And most of the suffering is the fault of their leaders.
Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud.
Tutu said Israeli checkpoints are a nightmare. But checkpoints are there because Palestinians are sent into Israel to blow up and kill innocent women and children.
Tutu wants checkpoints removed. Do you not have doors in your home, Bishop? Does that make your house an apartheid house? If someone, Heaven forbid, tried to enter with a bomb, we would want you to have security people 'humiliating' your guests with searches, and we would not call you racist for doing so. We all go through checkpoints at every airport. Are the airlines being racist? No.
Yes, the Palestinians are inconvenienced at checkpoints. But why, Bishop Tutu, do you care more about that inconvenience than about Jewish lives?
Bishop, when you used to dance for Mandela's freedom, we Africans -- all over Africa -- joined in. Our support was key in your freedom. But when children in Burundi and Kinshasa, all the way to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in particular in Sudan, cried and called for rescue, you heard but chose to be silent.
Today, black children are enslaved in Sudan, the last place in the continent of Africa where humans are owned by other humans -- I was part of the movement to stop slavery in Mauritania, which just now abolished the practice. But you were not with us, Bishop Tutu.
So where is Desmond Tutu when my people call out for freedom? Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish State.
Why?
Simon Deng is a refugee from Southern Sudan, now an American citizen. Source: Hudson New York H/T: Gateway Pundit Desmond Tutu
Latest recipient of the Demented Priest Award
 By Peter Beaumont and Alexander Carnwath In one of the most extraordinary episodes in African legal history, a panel of judges from Senegal, Mali and Togo will tomorrow issue a verdict expected to give fresh hope to more than 40,000 people being held as slaves in rural Niger and across the region. The landmark case of Hadijatou Mani, a courageous young woman of 24, will be heard in a packed court in Niger's capital, Niamey, which will decide whether Niger's government has failed to protect Ms Mani and tens of thousands like her who have been enslaved, despite the practice being outlawed five years ago. If she wins her case, which is being heard by the justice arm of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), she is likely to be awarded compensation of up to £40,000, in a humiliating reversal for the authorities she blames for her lost youth. Ms Mani was sold into slavery at the age of 12 and repeatedly raped by her master. Her appalling story is familiar in a country where the ownership of slaves, many from a hereditary slave caste, has been commonplace, particularly in remote rural areas. Read more ...Source: The Observer
 SEATTLE, Washington (AP) -- Five Afghan immigrants enslaved a teenage girl they brought to the United States, with some forcing her to do chores and one beating and sexually assaulting her, according to a federal indictment unsealed this week. The girl is from an impoverished single-parent home in Afghanistan, and she was informally adopted by another family there that forced her to marry at age 13 in 2005, Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office, said Thursday. The girl's 37-year-old husband is Mohammad Atahee, a friend of the adoptive family; U.S. officials don't recognize the marriage. Atahee and three of the family's members were already living in the south Seattle suburbs when the girl's adoptive mother, Nasima Yousuf, 70, brought her from Afghanistan in 2006, as part of what prosecutors say was a plot to enslave her. Yousuf's husband, Mohammad, 84, had filed an immigration petition to bring the girl to the U.S., claiming his wife was her biological mother. Read more ...Source: AP
 By Emeka Mamah Mohammad Nureen Ashafa is the Imam of Ashafa Central Mosque, Tudun Wada, Kaduna; Vice President, Ashafa Mosque Foundation, as well as the Co-Executive Director of Interfaith Mediation Centre of Muslim-Christian Dialogue Forum, also in Kaduna. He spoke to some media organisations on the implications of the death sentence [fatwa] passed on octogenarian Islamic preacher, Mohammed Bello Abubakar, by the Jama’tu Nasril Islam [JNI], for marrying 86 wives contrary to Islamic injunctions. Excerpts: Do you support the fatwa passed on Mohammed Abubakar for admitting that he has 86 wives?I strongly support the JNI fatwa. In Islam, if somebody claims to be a Muslim, he professes Islam and he wants to act in the name of Islam, then he has no legitimacy to marry more than four wives. In Koran Chapter four, God made it very clear. You are free to marry women of your choice; you can marry two, three, or four. However, if you feel you cannot do justice among them, marry only one wife. This scriptural text is not ambiguous. This is a direct instruction from God, so, anything that negates that injunction is not allowed. You cannot marry more than four wives. There is room for concubine in Islam. And that is why you see some royal fathers have four wives and they have concubines. The history of concubine has to do with slavery, if you had women who are in your possession as slaves. This is because in those days, people bought slaves. It may no longer be fashionable in modern times but the law is still there. Read more ...Source: VanguardH/T: Dhimmi Watch
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