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Monday, January 23, 2006

Islamist women redraw Palestinian debate on rights

NABLUS, West Bank -- With her textured handbag, heavy mascara, and a veil revealing only her eyes, Alaa Awdeh sounds like the ultimate feminist. Women, she believes, should have equal rights in Palestinian society, especially the right to die in the armed struggle against Israel.

''That's what I am looking for, to sacrifice my life," said Awdeh, 18, an Islamic studies major at Al Najah University in Nablus and enthusiastic member of the youth wing of Hamas, the radical Islamic group.

Islamic women like Awdeh have redrawn the debate over women's rights in Palestinian society...

Islamic studies, eh? Must not be the peaceful co-existence brand I keep hearing about. I sure hope no one is interfering with the educational opportunities on offer in the West Bank. Say, you think any of those fine folks in the British University system with so much venom for Israelis voice much in the way of objection to the fact of Palestinian Arab universities being used as hate incubators?

Khalil Shikaki makes an appearance (see, this is why the background of these academics matter -- they're opinions are presented uncritically as expert):

...Khalil Shikaki, a political scientist considered the most reliable pollster of Palestinian public opinion, said that the Palestinian struggle against Israel had yielded contradictory effects on Palestinian society.

On the one hand, he said, Palestinian society evolved to allow women a degree of political equality rare in the Arab world, because everyone -- women and children as well as men -- was drafted into the political and military struggle against Israel.

At the same time, the realities of occupation and violence also encouraged society to revert to its most traditional social networks: the family, the tribe, and mosque.

''You need more conservative social values to survive under occupation," Shikaki said. ''You don't have a government to protect your rights."...

On the contrary. "Under occupation" you have a civil authority tasked and responsible for protecting your rights. It's when the occupation ends and the anarchy takes over after people discover that snappy political slogans designed for Arab children and European dilettantes do not a government make -- that's when your rights are unprotected.

If we'd been a little less sensitive about this "horrors of occupation" nonsense, and cared a little less about charges of imperialism, perhaps we would have used a few more troops to put a clamp down on Iraq when we went in and saved us and the Iraqis a lot of lives and aggravation.

1 Comment

A bit of symmetry just struck me. Wasn't Israel one of the few, if not only, places in the world that drafted women into its military? So "Palestine" has "empowered" its female population too.

As for the "feminist" with the veil and heavy mascara who is a student of "Islamic Studies"... ...evokes images of the infamous montage at one of the Palestinian universities of the carnage at the Sbarro pizzaria a number of years ago, wherein the student body looked, gawked and giggled at the representations of blood and gore, including the lower torso of a patron, left standing after the blast, at the take-out counter.

Some chance for partnership in a "just peace" as proposed by David Hirsh and Jon Pike in Haaretz, eh?

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