What is The Difference Between Major & Minor Sins?

 

Blackmailer jailed for using photos to get sex and money from woman

 Rot in jail!!

A blackmailer who repeatedly raped a woman and pocketed her life savings after threatening to publish lingerie photos of her has been jailed for 17 years.

In passing sentence on Daood Hussain at Birmingham Crown Court Judge Peter Carr, said “You treated her, on the evidence that I have heard, in a demeaning and degrading fashion and with complete contempt.

"The prosecution were right in their submission to the jury in that you were a man who wanted control and you were not going to take no for an answer from her.

"You also made a demand for £10,000 which she paid.

"Again you threatened that you would distribute the documents I have already referred to.”

And the judge said the effect of releasing the pictures would have had a “potentially devastating” effect on the victim and her family within their community.

Hussain, 28, of St Andrews Road, Bordesley Village, an unemployed electrical engineer, had denied but was found guilty of blackmail and 12 charges of rape by a jury following a trial.

The defendant was ordered to register as a sex offender for an indefinite period and was also banned from contacting the victim or her family on his release from jail.

In a police interview the woman said Hussain had demanded she meet him during the summer of 2012.

He showed her a leaflet he had made which included pictures of her in lingerie, along with her address and telephone number with a caption advertising her as a prostitute.

She then agreed to meet him ten times for sex sessions in the run up to Ramadan, in June and July 2012, sometimes in his car and other times at various hotels around Birmingham.

The woman eventually complained to the police.

Farah Ramzan, defending, said “He is the youngest of six siblings and comes from a very close knit family. Clearly this is going to have a devastating effect on the whole family.”

Source

Why stoning is not a part of Islamic Law

Asian grooming: why we need to talk about sex

When it comes to sex, Alyas Karmani is a plain-speaking man. For a Muslim imam he is breathtakingly so. "Oral sex and anal sex are taboo in the British Pakistani community," he announces matter-of-fact way over gosht palak in his favourite curry-house just up the hill from Bradford University. "Sex is seen as only for procreation and only in the missionary position. More so if your spouse is from abroad."

He is addressing the question of whether a disproportionate number of British Asian men are involved in grooming underage girls for sex. He thinks the answer is "Yes" – which is also very plain-speaking on a subject around which the British policing, political, academic and social work establishment dances with over-sensitive diplomacy.

Yet Imam Karmani is no maverick. As well as being an imam, he is a psychologist with more than 20 years of practical experience in youth and community work. He is a former adviser to the Department for Education on youth empowerment and a one-time head of race equality for the Welsh Assembly and is now co-director of Street, a project whose name stands for Strategy to Reach, Empower and Educate Teenagers.

One of its key projects is running courses to change the attitude of young British Pakistanis which, Alyas Karmani believes, underlie the cultural assumptions which have led a number of Asians to become involved in the on-street grooming of schoolgirls for sex. Eight men of Pakistani heritage, and an Afghan, were were convicted at Liverpool Crown Court this week of offences including four rapes, 11 charges of conspiracy to engage children in sexual activity and six of trafficking children for sexual exploitation.

"Many British Pakistani men live in two worlds," he begins. "The first is encompassed by family, business, mosque. It is a socially conservative culture where there is no toleration of sex outside of marriage, and little emphasis on sexual gratification."

Many are emotionally browbeaten into preserving their family honour by marrying a cousin from their family's village in north-west Kashmir, the part of Pakistan from which the forefathers of Bradford's Asian community originally migrated.

These new wives can bring with them "an unhealthy attitude towards sex and sexuality". It is not Islam which induces that, he says, but a traditional rural Kashmiri culture.

"The second world in which British Pakistani men live," he continues, "is the over-sexualised, material and lust-driven English lifestyle, where women are scantily clad, binge-drinking is a mainstream form of entertainment and porn is a massive factor." You might have thought that, as time passed, British Asians would have found middle ground between these two worlds.

But that has not been happening. "Patriarchs and matriarchs within families have huge influence," says the imam. "Conservatism is maintaining its grip. Around 60 to 70 per cent of British Asians, men and women, are still virgins when they marry."

For those Asians who work at night –such as taxi-drivers and takeaway workers – these two worlds collide dramatically in their workplaces which are filled with young women from a culture in which drinking to insensibility is commonplace. "Many of these men do not understand what is appropriate behaviour in wider society and what is not," he adds. "They are so lacking in social skills – because relationships between men and women in Pakistani culture are characterised by a real formality – that they can misconstrue an ordinary conversation with a white girl in their taxi and think she is indicating that she is open to a sexual advance when that is not what she means at all."

Others cannot resist the temptation aroused by women – and young girls – whose cultural assumptions are so alien from their own.

There are a number of ways, says Alyas Karmani, in which second and third generation British Pakistani men cope with the cognitive dissonance induced by living with two conflicting cultures.

Some give in to the temptations of Western life – which in an Asian urban context might mean celebrating values embodied in gangsta music and films. "It links sexual violence with gang lifestyle and glorifies it through rap and videos which degrade a man to 'pimp' and a woman to 'bitch'," Karmani says. Others turn their back on that and embrace religion, sometimes in a puritan or even jihadist way. But many are conflicted into living a double life.

They do that in a variety of ways. "Some have a wife from Pakistan and an English girlfriend by whom they may also have children," he says. "In some cases the English girlfriend predates the wife; some relationships go back to schooldays. Sometimes the arrangement is open – the wife knows about the other family but says nothing. Sometimes even the man will marry the girlfriend under Islamic law, though not under British law, obviously. Some of these relationships are exploitative, others are consensual.

"Some of these men with double lives, who lack the social skills to go out and chat up a white girl of their own age, use prostitutes for sexual gratification," he continues. "But a few abuse the sexuality of vulnerable young girls they come across as taxi-drivers and in takeaways. It's important to stress that this grooming behaviour is not an endemic pattern among Pakistani men; overall there is only a very a small minority of Pakistani men involved in grooming and sex gangs."

Some in the Asian communities resent even this very qualified criticism. Iftikhar Ahmad, of the London School of Islamics Trust, has complained that "native Brits have double standards and are hypocrites [who] don't mention the fact that the majority of men who go to countries in east Asia looking for under-aged sex are white European men".

But generally condemnation from religious and community leaders in the Asian community has been slowly growing over the past two years as a succession of cases has reached the courts in which men from the Asian community have been convicted of crimes involving the sexual exploitation of underage girls.

Expressions of shame, however, have outnumbered attempts at analysing whether there are specific qualities in ethnic minority culture which nurture the attitudes from which abuse springs.

Six years ago, Mohammed Shafiq, who runs the Ramadhan Foundation, a small Muslim youth organisation in Manchester, spoke out about the involvement of British Pakistanis in underage sex abuse crimes. He was roundly vilified by his own community. "I was accused of doing the work of the BNP," he recalls. "I had excrement through my door. I received death threats." His offence was to insist that "to say that ethnicity is not a factor in these crimes is a lie".

Members of Asian grooming gangs, he said, thought "that white girls are less valuable than girls from their own community, which is sick and abhorrent". This grew, he declared, from an assumption among some members of the Muslim community that "white girls have fewer morals".

More recently, up the road from Bradford in Keighley, a youth worker named Shakeel Aziz has spoken out, declaring sexual grooming to be "an extension of other criminal activity, specifically gang association and drug selling. It's really a jigsaw of different problems and issues in society that enforce one another," he said. And last year the broadcaster Adil Ray, a DJ and comedian with the BBC Asian network, set out another hypothesis in a BBC Three investigation into on-street grooming. He asked whether there was something particular about the Kashmiri culture that nurtured abusive attitudes.

Ray, who is from a Pakistani community in Birmingham, interviewed Yasmin Qureshi, the former specialist sexual offences lawyer who is now MP for Bolton South East. He noted that most of the cases of grooming by Asians occurred in the North and Midlands, which is where in the main immigrants from Kashmir settled to work in the factories and mills. The MP concurred. "In the south... there's more integration between communities," she said. "You very rarely find a school that has 80 per cent of one nationality. The people who came and settled in the south came from a much more educated, literate background... You can't take away from the fact that a lot of people come from Kashmir where some of the communities are culturally quite traditional."

This is not so far from the claim made in 2003 by Ann Cryer, then Labour MP for Keighley, that Pakistani men were exploiting local children because they had married, or been promised in marriage, "to someone they've never met, some cousin from their village in Mirpur who is almost certainly illiterate and hasn't got anything in common with them".

Alyas Karmani agrees with Mohammed Shafiq about the dissonance caused for British Pakistanis caught between two cultures. And he agrees with Shakeel Aziz that there can be an interplay between grooming and drug and gang cultures. But he does not accept the idea that Kashmiri culture is somehow more backward and thereby to blame.

"That's a flawed analysis. It's not about education. It's about access and opportunity," he says. "These men – and it's worth stressing that only a very tiny minority have deviated in this way – are not targeting white girls specifically but going for those who are most easily accessible and vulnerable, and that is by definition mainly white girls as young Asian teenagers are within the protection of the home at that time of night.

"The issues around ethnicity and sexuality are complex," he continues. "Some powerful gangsta types have white girlfriends as status symbols. They would not dream of sharing them with anyone.

"But other 'big men' think it adds to their status and kudos if they pass their conquests around to their 'brothers' under biradiri – the system of clan loyalty which has been brought here from Kashmir. That is often the case with those who abuse young girls. They involve brothers or cousins or friends from their clan."

That observation is confirmed by academic researchers working on child sex exploitation. Analysis by Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley at University College, London's Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science shows that abusers' networks were "tightly knit and characterised by strong social bonds predating the abuse, such as kinship".

Gangs did not develop around a shared furtive interest in child sex abuse. Rather, abuse was introduced into pre-existing social networks.

"Sometimes money changes hands," says Imam Karmani. "But not large amounts. Most of the girls are enticed into relationships with the smallest of gifts – a £5 top-up for their mobile phone, a free kebab or bag of chips. Any girl who is unprotected can be targeted. It's not racist; it's opportunistic. They are usually girls from damaged or dysfunctional backgrounds, who are out on the streets at all hours."

So it is not about race, he insists, though it grows out of cultural presuppositions. "These men disrespect all women, but these white girls are more vulnerable. They objectify women, just as white footballer rapists do," he says. "Porn," he adds, "plays a big part in it."

What can be done about all this? Wendy Shepherd, of the children's charity Barnardo's, is one of the UK's most experienced on-the-ground experts on child sexual exploitation. She has a checklist of necessary improvements. It coincides almost entirely with that of Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley from the Institute of Security and Crime Science.

The improvements include better police training and strategies, so that prosecutions do not simply fail because there is no evidence beyond the word of the victim against the abuser; greater co-operation and information sharing between police, social workers, doctors, nurses, teachers and charities; more direct help for victims, including those who don't know they are being abused; and more work with children in schools to raise awareness of the risk.

But vital to the list, says Wendy Shepherd, is that the younger generation of men needs to be educated in better attitudes towards women.

That is precisely what Alyas Karmani has begun to do. All across the country – but mainly in Bradford, Blackburn, Manchester and London – he runs courses aimed at three key groups. "We run From Boys to Men courses for 11- to 13-year-olds to talk openly about puberty, bodily changes, sexual attraction and Islamic teaching on there being no sex before marriage," he explains. "Many have had no conversation with their fathers, because sex is an embarrassing and even shameful activity in traditional Pakistani culture.

"Sex education in schools does not address real life issues and challenges," Karmani adds – and a lot of the boys had been removed from sex education classes at school on religious grounds. "So all their information is from their peers, the streets or the internet. They have no understanding of sex in a loving relationship, or any understanding of what is permitted and forbidden in Islam. They confuse Islam with conservative Pakistani culture."

He runs run similar courses for 14-to 19-year-olds, which also deal with drugs, alcohol, gangs and violence. "Many of these kids just want an adult male to talk frankly with them. They have to learn the importance of self-respect and not being susceptible to peer pressure or older men who offer them alcohol or want to take them to the brothel. Teaching respect for themselves and respect for women is part of that. The sessions also deal with social networking and internet, violence and sex, honour killings and domestic violence, sex offending, grooming, statutory rape, "date rape" and indecent assault.

"We talk about what is abusive and what not – and about the need to respect white women and the damage that on-street grooming does to the victim, the man and the wider community," he says.

"We look at famous case histories, like Britain's youngest rapist, who was 13. We don't flinch from hard cases and will answer any questions whatsoever. And we do some hard-hitting aversion therapy using the filmed testimony of women who have been raped – who are someone's daughter and sister."

For adults, he runs a "Joy of Muslim Sex" course. "I talk to the men and my wife talks to the women," he explains. "What you have to understand is that these people are coming from a Pakistani culture in which no demonstration of affection is allowed between a married couple in public or in front of their children – not even a peck on the cheek or holding hands.

"That would be completely shameful behaviour. We try to teach them to overcome that and to be affectionate with one another, to create time and space. That's hard in a community where it's common for two brothers and their wives to live with the men's parents still.

"We talk about pre-play and foreplay, about the importance of hiring a hotel room once in a while for private space for prolonged pleasure, getting to know one another better. Sometimes the women, especially those who have come from Pakistan for an arranged marriage, need lessons on how to seduce their husbands. I told one woman that she needed to pay more attention to her husband and she paused and said: "I'll iron more of his shirts then". I had to explain that wasn't quite what I meant."

The course uses material from the 15th-century erotic Arabic sex manual The Perfumed Garden. "The men need to be told that sex for women is about emotional intensity more than the mere physical. The demand for all of these courses is huge," he concludes. "I could spend all my time doing nothing else. The need is massive."

Men like Alyas Karmani are trying to get the British Asian community to address a problem from which, he admits, it has been in denial. But it is not enough simply to point the finger at Asians, as Wendy Shepherd points out. Her long experience with Barnardo's shows that if you scratch the surface you'll find some pretty appalling attitudes towards women in the white community too.

"It's not that long ago that a man could get drunk on a Sunday lunchtime and go home and give his wife a beating and people would accept that as normal," Wendy Shepherd says. "The danger with saying that the problem is with one ethnicity is that then people will only be on the look-out for that group – and risk missing other threats."

Child sex abusers come from all backgrounds. Greater Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood said after the Rochdale convictions that his force was investigating other cases of on-street grooming which did not involve British Pakistanis. "Our experience shows us that all communities need to be vigilant to this issue." Without that many more children will suffer at the hands of such men.

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Israeli plan would uproot 30,000 Bedouin

Bulldozed by Israel more than two dozen times, a village known by Bedouin Arabs as Al-Arakib is one of many ramshackle desert communities whose names have never appeared on any official map.

If Israel's Parliament adopts proposed new legislation, it never will.

The plan to demolish more Bedouin homes in the southern Negev region and move 30,000 people to government-authorized villages connected to power and water lines has been hailed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a "historic opportunity" to improve Bedouin lives.

But Israeli Arab leaders, who have long complained about discrimination against their community in the Jewish state, call it "ethnic cleansing," and aim to thwart the project with protests, a general strike and appeals to the United Nations to intervene.

"I will never leave here, I intend to stay until I die," said Abu-Madyam, 46, a farmer from Al-Arakib.

He and his family of nine live in a makeshift plastic-sided shack in a cemetery near the ruins of their wooden home, razed by Israeli authorities last year.

The project is the most ambitious attempt in decades by the government to resettle Negev Bedouin and free up land in the largely open spaces of southern Israel for development and construction of military bases to replace facilities in the crowded center of the country.

Some Israelis argue the Bedouin have grown too dominant in the Negev, a geographic area wedged between Hamas-ruled Gaza and the occupied West Bank where Palestinians want a state, and that they pose a possible security risk.

The area being restructured also abuts Israel's largest Negev city of Beersheba and is near several military bases.

For decades, Israeli governments have tried to attract Jewish Israelis to move to the Negev, offering mortgage and tax breaks, but the region has fewer opportunities for employment than in the heavily populated center of the country.

Only 20 percent of Israel's Jewish population lives in the Negev, which covers more than 60 percent of the nation's land area. Bedouin villages take up two percent of Negev land.

Arabs make up about 20 percent of Israel's population of seven million, 200,000 of them Bedouin citizens. Most of Israel's Bedouin, who predominate in the desert area that accounts for two-thirds of its territory, are descendants of nomadic tribes that had wandered across the Middle East from time immemorial.

Half of the Bedouin live in towns and villages recognized as formal communities by the government. Others live rough, in tents and shacks on patches of desert.

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FBI Reports Dramatic Spike in Anti-Muslim Hate Violence

Anti-Muslim hate crimes soared by an astounding 50% last year, skyrocketing over 2009 levels in a year marked by the vicious rhetoric of Islam-bashing politicians and activists, especially over the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" in New York City.

Although the national statistics compiled by the FBI each year are known to dramatically understate the real level of reported and unreported hate crimes, they do offer telling indications of some trends. The latest statistics, showing a jump from 107 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2009 to 160 in 2010, seem to reflect a clear rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric from groups like Stop Islamization of America. Much of that rhetoric was aimed at stopping an Islamic center in lower Manhattan.
At the same time, the new FBI statistics showed a rise of almost 11% in anti-Latino hate crimes. The increase may be related to anti-immigrant rhetoric deployed as Arizona passed a harsh law targeting immigrants in 2010. Since then, even more anti-immigrant rhetoric has been heard around the country, suggesting that when the FBI's 2011 statistics come out, they will show a further rise in anti-Latino hate crime.

Earlier, anti-Latino hate crimes rose some 40% between 2003 and 2007, then diminished in 2008 and 2009. The newly reported apparent rise in these crimes last year also reflected, albeit in a diminished way, a 2010 rise in anti-Latino hate crimes of almost 50% reported earlier in California.

But it was the anti-Muslim numbers that were dramatic, and they occurred in a year when many watchdog organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, reported an increase in Islam-bashing rhetoric. The year 2010 saw multiple verbal attacks on planned mosques, along with several violent attacks and arsons.

It's not provable precisely how hateful rhetoric from public figures drives criminal violence. But anecdotal evidence suggests the link is a tight one. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, anti-Muslim hate violence skyrocketed some 1,600%. But then-President Bush gave several speeches that fall emphasizing that Muslims and Arabs were not our enemies -- only Al Qaeda was. Almost certainly thanks to that, anti-Muslim violence declined the following year by almost two thirds.

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In Afghanistan, Rage at Young Lovers

Comment: I don't say this to offend, it is my honest opnion, I think Afghanistan is hell on earth.

The two teenagers met inside an ice cream factory through darting glances before roll call, murmured hellos as supervisors looked away and, finally, a phone number folded up and tossed discreetly onto the workroom floor.

It was the beginning of an Afghan love story that flouted dominant traditions of arranged marriages and close family scrutiny, a romance between two teenagers of different ethnicities that tested a village’s tolerance for more modern whims of the heart. The results were delivered with brutal speed.

This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.

When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security.

The riot, which lasted for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred and the two teenagers, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, confined to juvenile prison. Officially, their fates lie in the hands of an unsteady legal system. But they face harsher judgments of family and community.

Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.

“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed.

The teenagers, embarrassed to talk about love, said plainly that they were ready for death. But they were baffled by why they should have to be killed.

Mr. Mohammed, who is 17, said: “I feel so bad. I just pray that God gives this girl back to me. I’m ready to lose my life. I just want her safe release.”

Ms. Mohammedi, who believes she is 17, said: “We are all human. God created us from one dirt. Why can we not marry each other, or love each other?”

The case has resonated in Herat, in part because it stirred memories of a brutal stoning ordered by the Taliban last summer in northern Afghanistan.

A young couple in Kunduz was stoned to death by scores of people — including family members — after they eloped. The stoning marked a brutal application of Shariah law, captured on a video recording released online months later. Afghan officials promised to investigate after an international outcry, but no one has faced criminal charges.

The immediate response to the violence in Herat was heartening by comparison. Top clerics declined to condemn the couple. Police officers risked their lives to pull the two teenagers to safety and deposit them into the legal system, rather than the hands of angry relatives. And the police reported that five or six girls had fled the city with their boyfriends and fiancés in the weeks after the riot.

After discussing the case, the provincial council decided that Mr. Mohammed and Ms. Mohammedi deserved the government’s protection because neither was engaged, and because each said they wanted to get married.

“They are not criminals, even if they have committed sexual activities,” said Abdul Zahir, the council’s leader.

But so far, their words have not freed either of the teenagers or lent them any long-term security.

Ms. Mohammedi was initially taken to the only women’s shelter in this province of more than 1.5 million people, but the police transferred her quickly to the city’s juvenile detention center, a sun-washed building where about 40 girls and 40 boys sleep in separate dormitories. The police said they had referred the teenagers’ cases to prosecutors.

“From their point of view, she committed a crime,” said Suraya Pakzad, director of Voices of Women Organization, a rights group that provided Ms. Mohammedi with a bed for one night.

Ms. Pakzad said most of the women and girls in the shelters of western Afghanistan had fled forced or abusive marriages, or had been ostracized from their communities for dating young men without their families’ approval. Male relatives often punish such transgressions with beatings or death.

But in separate interviews at the juvenile jail, Ms. Mohammedi and Mr. Mohammed said they had not worried about such things.

He did not think about the rage that would erupt if a young Tajik man picked up a Hazara girl in a neighborhood dominated by conservative Hazaras, members of one of Afghanistan’s many ethnic minorities. “It’s the heart,” Mr. Mohammed said. “When you love somebody, you don’t ask who she is or what she is. You just go for it.”

They had much in common. His father was dead, as was her mother. They described each other as quiet and polite, both a little shy. They liked the same sappy songs that float over from Iran.

After six years of primary school, Ms. Mohammedi had wanted to study English and take computer classes, but she said her family told her it was a waste of time, and sent her to work at the ice cream factory, for $95 a month.

There, at least, they found each other. Mr. Mohammed spent a month stealing hellos before Ms. Mohammedi tossed her phone number at his feet.

The couple talked on the phone most nights, even though her stepmother disapproved. After a year, they decided they were fed up with hiding their relationship. They would meet, go to the courthouse and get married. Mr. Mohammed persuaded an older cousin to take him to the village of Jabrail, where she was waiting in the town square.

They had not driven 30 feet when a yellow Toyota Corolla blocked their path and angry men jumped out. Ms. Mohammedi was not hurt in the melee that followed, but the crowd beat up the cousin and pummeled Mr. Mohammed until he collapsed.

“We knew they would kill us,” she said.

They now spend the days at opposite ends of the same juvenile jail, out of each other’s sight. Mr. Mohammed nurses the wounds still visible in his swollen face and blood-laced eyes, and Ms. Mohammedi has been going to classes and learning to tailor clothes.

Both say they want to be together, but there are complications. Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid.

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Saudi Women Sue Male Guardians Who Stop Marriage

‘Enough Adhl’

Year after year, the 42-year-old Saudi surgeon remains single, against her will. Her father keeps turning down marriage proposals, and her hefty salary keeps going directly to his bank account.
The surgeon in the holy city of Medina knows her father, also her male guardian, is violating Islamic law by forcibly keeping her single, a practice known as “adhl.” So she has sued him in court, with questionable success.

Adhl cases reflect the many challenges facing single women in Saudi Arabia. But what has changed is that more women are now coming forward with their cases to the media and the law. Dozens of women have challenged their guardians in court over adhl, and one has even set up a Facebook group for victims of the practice.
The backlash comes as Saudi Arabia has just secured a seat on the governing board of the new United Nation Women’s Rights Council — a move many activists have decried because of the desert kingdom’s poor record on treatment of women. Saudi feminist Wajeha al-Hawaidar describes male guardianship as “a form of slavery.”
“A Saudi woman can’t even buy a phone without the guardian’s permission,” said al-Hawaidar, who has been banned from writing or appearing on Saudi television networks because of her vocal support of women’s rights. “This law deals with women as juveniles who can’t be in charge of themselves at the same time it gives all powers to men.”

In a recent report by the pan-Arab Al-Hayat newspaper, the National Society for Human Rights received 30 cases of adhl this year — almost certainly an undercount. A Facebook group called “enough adhl,” set up by a university professor and adhl victim, estimates the number at closer to 800,000 cases. The group, with 421 members, aims at rallying support for harsher penalties against men who misuse their guardianship.

An estimated 4 million women over the age of 20 are unmarried in the country of 24.6 million. After 20, women are rapidly seen in Saudi society as getting too old to marry, said Sohila Zein el-Abdydeen, a prominent female member of the governmental National Society for Human Rights.
Fathers cite adhl for a variety of reasons — sometimes because a suitor doesn’t belong to the same tribe, or a prominent enough tribe. In other cases, the father wants to keep the allowance that the government gives to single women in poorer families, or cannot afford a dowry.

Islam’s holy book, the Quran, warns Muslim men not to prevent their daughters, sisters or female relatives from getting married, or else they will encourage sexual relations outside marriage. But under Saudi judges’ interpretation of Islamic Shariah law, the crime can be punished by lifting the male guardianship, nothing more.
Hardline judges refuse to go even that far. The founder of the Facebook group, who introduced herself only as Amal Saleh in an interview with Saudi daily Al-Watan, said she set up the group after courts let down adhl victims. She said her family threatened her with “death and torture” when she pressed for her right to get married while she was under 30. She is now 37 and still single.

Some judges even punish the women themselves for rebelling against their fathers. In one high-profile adhl case, a young single mother, Samar Badawi, sued her father and demanded he be stripped of his guardianship. She fled her house in March 2008 and spent around two years in a women’s protection house in Jeddah, waiting for the court ruling.

In April, she got it — she was sentenced to six months in prison for disobedience.
She was released late October, under heavy pressure from local rights group. The judge transferred guardianship to her uncle, and it is not yet clear if her uncle will let her get married.
Badawi refuses to speak to the media after her release, but her lawyer, Waleed Abu Khair, said hardline judges hate the protection shelters because they say the shelters corrupt women.

In Saudi Arabia, no woman can travel, gain admittance to a public hospital or live independently without a “mahram,” or guardian. Men can beat women who don’t obey, with special instructions not to pop the eye, break an arm or leave a mark on their bodies.

In the Saudi public school curriculum, boys are taught how to use their guardianship rights.
The concept of guardianship is interpreted in conservative Islam as meaning that men are superior to women. Moderate Islamic schools of thought, however, see the practice as an order for men to protect women, financially, emotionally and physically.

Radwa Youssef, an activist, said the answer is not to abolish guardianship but to redefine it. Since 2009, she has collected 5,400 signatures for a campaign called “Our Guardians Know Best.” She said many women who go against their male guardians’ will marry the wrong men and bring shame on their families.
“I see guardians as bodyguards who are serving women and protecting them; it is a responsibility, not a source of power,” Youssef said. “If there is a male misusing his powers, he should be introduced to rehabilitation sessions to advise and guide him.”

The Medina Surgeon, as the Saudi media tagged her, has been waiting for justice since 2006.

The surgeon, who has Canadian, British and Saudi certification, filed a lawsuit to drop her father’s mandate. But despite a paper trail carrying testimonies from suitors turned away by her father, bank documents that show her father taking over her salary, medical reports showing physical abuse, and the fact that her four other single sisters over 30 face the same destiny, no ruling has yet been issued.
The only answer she gets from the judge is to go back to her father and seek reconciliation.

“He wants me to go to death,” she told The Associated Press over the phone from Medina, speaking on condition of anonymity because she feared family retaliation. “Until when I am going to wait? ...The prophet Mohamed (PBUH) himself wouldn’t have allowed adhl to take place.”

The surgeon lives in a “protection house,” one of dozens scattered around the kingdom for victims of adhl and domestic violence. Under a fake name, she gets escorted to courts accompanied by guards, fearing retaliation from her father.
She recalled her last encounter with her father inside the court: “I kissed his feet. I begged him to let me free, for the sake of God.”
She turns 43 next month.

Afghan women speak out on abuse from behind mask

I had so many dreams for my life, but when I saw him, they just disappeared." Saraya spoke softly, her hunched-over body and nervously twisting hands testimony to all she says she has had to endure.

"I told my father I didn't want to marry him: 'why are you doing this to me?'" She continued: "My father said 'you are of an age to be married and this is my decision, not yours.'"

Saraya says it only took three days for her to realize she had been married off to a madman.

Emotions and turmoil she never dared publicly speak of tumble out freely -- concealed, along with her face, behind a mask.

Half the mask is pale blue, the color of the "chaudari" or burka, symbolizing the oppression of women; the other half white, representing innocence.

This is Afghanistan's new revolutionary TV show called "Niqab," meaning "The Mask."

Behind the concept is 28-year-old Sami Mahdi.

"I was always desiring to have something like the mask, like this show in our media," Mahdi said. "I was not very sure about the concept and the format, but I was very sure about the mask, you know. Because in Afghanistan, it's very difficult for women to talk about their difficulties and their problems, and the violence they are facing in their home."

Her identity safely concealed behind the mask, Saraya said she was forcibly married off to a known rapist, a man with an existing criminal record when she was 15 years old. He was 58.

"When my youngest was just four years old, my husband brought women to the house and raped them.

"My child asked me: 'who are these women?' I could not say anything to my child -- my husband would just beat me."

She said she eventually ran away, fearing that he would harm their daughter. She said she firmly believes that if her husband ever found her and their three children he would murder them all.

But she says, she had to speak out for the sake and future of her children and other women.

"I am not sure we can make a difference for the victims," Mahdi said. "You know for the women who are coming here and talking about life, sometimes I think they are victims forever.

"But we can use the life of these individuals as an example to show the people, I am sure we can make some changes in the life of the women. And I am sure we can change in the minds of men in Afghanistan."

The studio audience is made up of a panel of religious and legal experts, as well as human rights campaigners, who offer their insight, opinions and advice.

"Your marriage at such a young age to such an older man is against Islam," a religious expert told Saraya. "His behavior is against Islam and against the law."
Mahdi said the inspiration for the show came from watching his mother.
"In the mind and eye of the people, her work is not worthy although she is doing much more than I. I am not talking just about my mother, I am talking about all the mothers in Afghanistan," he said. "Maybe there are a lot of mothers, thousands of mothers who are living in the same situation, they don't have a tongue, they don't have a voice to talk about what they are suffering."

Although the situation for women in Afghanistan has improved since the days of the Taliban's oppressive regime, women have been treated as commodities for centuries.
At least 59% of marriages in the most recent survey done by an Afghan non-governmental organization, Women and Children Legal Research Foundation, were considered forced marriages. Of these, 30% were "badal" or "exchange" marriages in which men trade their daughters or other female relatives for women or girls from other families for the purpose of marriage.

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Israeli soldier attacks Palestinian farmer on his own land

A Muslim Store Owner Changes Another Man Life By The Grace Of Allah

Muslim religious leader jailed for sex attack on girl

A MUSLIM religious leader has been jailed after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting a young girl.
Members of Portsmouth's Muslim community have spoken of their shock after Hafiz Rahman, a former Imam of the Southsea mosque, was convicted at Portsmouth Crown Court.

Rahman, 67, molested the teenager in Portsmouth while he was supposed to be teaching her about the Qur'an.

A jury of eight men and six women took less than two hours to find him guilty sexual activity with a child.

Jailing him for a year, Judge Roger Hetherington said: 'Given your position in the Muslim community and the respect with which you were accorded as a result by the family that you were visiting, this was as bad a case of breach of trust as it is possible to imagine.'

Muhammed Badruz Zaman, who helped found the Jami Mosque in Victoria Road North, Southsea, said: 'For someone like him to do that it is unbelievable. He was well known and respected.

'It's sad. It will shock every Muslim to hear what has happened.'

Rahman, of Northern Road, North End, is a Hafiz – a term for someone who has memorised the entire Qur'an.

After stepping down as Imam he was being paid by families across Portsmouth to teach their children.

On December 27 last year he went to the 15-year-old's home and molested her after they were left alone.

Judge Hetherington said the attack would have carried on if the girl's father had not unexpectedly come home.

The judge said: 'The parents of the child came to retain your services because they understood that you were a respected and indeed revered member of the community who had until recently been an Imam to the mosque.

'On the jury's verdict and on abundant evidence, for whatever reason, you took advantage of that situation for your own sexual gratification.
'It must have been a very frightening experience for that girl.'
Stephen Smyth, defending, said Rahman had lost his standing as a respected member of the community.

'This means it will be over for him and he will be deported,' he said. 'Everything goes and he has to go back to a Muslim country convicted of what he is convicted of, which will be very seriously regarded. He has nothing to look forward to in his life.'

Judge Hetherington told Rahman: 'I accept that for all your life apart from this incident you have behaved properly and you may well have done many good things to other people during your life. Nevertheless this was a terrible lapse on your part.'

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'Sexual predators': Gang of Asian men weep as they are jailed for total of 32 years for abusing white girls as young as 12

A gang of Asian ‘sexual predators’ were jailed yesterday for abusing white girls as young as 12.

The five men preyed on their victims over several months and threatened them with violence if they refused their advances.

One of the men branded his victim a ‘white bitch’ when she resisted, while a second smirked: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.'

The men, all British-born Pakistanis, attacked the four girls in play areas, parks and in the back of their cars, Sheffield Crown Court heard.

They gave them gifts and introduced them to their friends. The girls were abused so frequently that after many months it ‘became a way of life’.

The girls, who were being monitored by social services, were eventually rescued by police and removed from their homes amid growing concerns for their safety.

Two of the men wept in the dock yesterday as they were jailed.

Judge Peter Kelson QC told them: ‘I’ve listened to the backdrop of some of you sobbing – I have to say your weeping cuts no ice with me at all.

‘You had what you regarded as your fun, now you will take your punishment.’

The five, Umar Razaq, 24, Razwan Razaq, 30, Zafran Ramzan, 21, Adil Hussain, 20, and Mohsin Khan, 21, were found guilty of a string of sexually related offences against the girls, one aged 12, two aged 13 and one aged 16.

Ramzan was found guilty of raping the 16-year-old girl in her own home, and the other four were found guilty of sexual activity with a child.

Umar Razaq was jailed for four and a half years, while the judge gave Razwan Razaq 11 years.

Ramzan was jailed for nine years, and Hussain and Khan both received four years. All five were placed on the sex offenders register. Three further men were cleared.

The attacks took place in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, during 2008, the court was told. Khan, a mortgage adviser who owned a BMW, described his victim as a ‘little stick’ who looked as if she had not reached puberty.

Despite this he told her he loved her and would spoil her like a ‘princess’.

During the seven-week trial the jury were told how the men drove around the streets looking for girls. The teenagers believed they were in relationships with the much older men.

On one occasion Umar Razaq tried to pull the clothes off one of the 13-year-olds.

When she resisted he pulled her hair and called her a ‘white bitch’.

On another occasion Umar introduced the girl to his brother Razwan who had sex with her in his car.

Afterwards he told her: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.’ When Ramzan was asked by police what age he was attracted to he later replied: ‘As long as they are not too young and they’re legal, that’s it.’

The authorities were alerted after some changes were noted in the behaviour of the victims and they were removed from their homes.

Joyce Thacker, director of Rotherham’s children and young people’s services, said the girls were under child protection plans following family breakdowns or other issues with their behaviour.

‘When we pieced together a map of what was happening we stepped in very quickly to move these girls to a place of safety outside Rotherham,’ she said.

‘It started off as a grooming exercise by the men who became friendly with the girls, gave them gifts and introduced them to their friends.

‘When they got used to being abused it just became a normal way of life for the girls. It is akin to self-harm.

‘It was very dangerous. The girls could have faced death if the men weren’t getting what they wanted.’

She said the girls’ parents bore some of the responsibility but they were in a difficult position and at a loss to do something about their children’s ‘alternative’ lifestyle.

Detective Sergeant Dave Walker, who led the inquiry, said: ‘One was only 12 when she met one of the men and started smoking cannabis and drinking and coming in late at night.

‘As it escalated the defendants were becoming more aggressive to the girls.

‘We basically have a group of young men who think it is all right to abuse young girls and they just groomed them and isolated them from their families.’

All four girls are now back in mainstream education. The three youngest are taking GCSEs and the eldest is at college.

Mr Walker added: ‘We don’t know what the future holds for them but it will be a lot better than it was.

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Israel dumps waste on Palestinian

Israeli settlements have been dumping untreated waste directly into a sewage canal that runs through the occupied West Bank, affecting Palestinian villages along its banks.

The hazard posed is compounded by the dumping of toxic chemical waste on agricultural land, with villagers reporting a rash of skin diseases and respiratory problems.

The Israeli government has banned plans by the Palestinian Authority to build pipes and pumps to treat and divert wastewater away from the affected villages.

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