Category: Human Suffering

Frank Crimi in FrontPage As Iranian lawmakers now seek to lower the legal age of marriage for girls to nine-years-old, the number of Iranian brides already under 10 years of age is sharply rising. The Iranian decision to allow nine-year-old girls the legal opportunity to be married to fully grown men was announced by Mohammad Ali Isfenani, chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee. Isfenani called Iran’s current civil legislation, which sets the minimum legal age of marriage for girls at 13-years-old, “un-Islamic and illegal,” saying, “We must regard nine as being the appropriate age for a girl to have reached puberty and qualified to get married. To do otherwise would be to contradict and challenge Islamic Sharia law.” Isenfani’s clarion call for prepubescent marriage comes at the same moment a new report from the Union for the Protection of Children’s Rights (UPCR) found 75 Iranian girls less than 10-years-old were forced to marry in the past two months, part of a sharp rise in the overall number of Iranian child brides under the age of 10. According to

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Frank Crimi in FrontPage An 11-year-old mentally disabled Christian girl has been sent to a Pakistani prison over allegations she committed blasphemy, just the latest act of bruising intolerance being perpetrated by Muslims against Pakistan’s besieged Christian minority group. Rimsha Masih, who is afflicted with Down’s Syndrome, was arrested in early August at her home in the capital of Islamabad after she had been accused by her Muslim neighbors of burning 10 pages of the Koran. Rimsha’s alleged heretical act offended local Muslim sensibilities enough to spark an angry mob of over 600 to gather outside her home, threatening to burn down Christian homes in the neighborhood if the police did not immediately arrest the young girl. However, according to Farrukh Saif, head of the Pakistan-based human rights group, World Vision in Progress (WVIP), Rimsha, who works as a maid, denied any blasphemous wrongdoing, claiming she was simply burning garbage and “did not know a Koranic book was among the papers because she cannot read.” Nevertheless, Pakistani police quickly brought Rimsha into custody, persuaded less by her illiteracy and mental

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Frank Crimi in FrontPage A growing collection of Palestinian leaders are acknowledging that the recent rise in “honor killings” and other horrific acts of violence being perpetrated against Palestinian women can only be stemmed by changing the Arab cultural and Islamic propensity of violence toward women. The latest victim of a Palestinian honor killing was Nancy Zaboun, a 27-year-old mother of three, who, moments after she left a divorce hearing in Bethlehem, was brutally murdered by her husband. Nancy had been in the process of seeking an early exit from her marriage after having suffered repeated beatings over the course of her ten-year marriage, beatings that often required hospitalization but which never resulted in criminal charges being brought against her husband. Unfortunately, Nancy Zaboun’s attempt to flee her abusive marriage caused such a stain on her husband’s familial honor that he stabbed her multiple times, a death sentence which tragically has been shared by a long and ever-expanding list of Palestinian women and girls. In the years between 2007 and 2010, the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights has reported 29 women were killed by family members in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, in the past two years, 25 women have been subjected to honor killings, with 13 women murdered in 2011 and 12 women slain in 2012. Those victims include: 17-year-old Rofayda Qaoud, whose mother placed a plastic

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Frank Crimi in FrontPage Saudi Arabia has taken its gender apartheid system to new heights with its plans to build an industrial city populated exclusively by female workers. The all-female municipality, which will begin construction in 2013, is expected to provide Saudi women work and career opportunities in a country that actively strives to separate them publicly from men. To that end, the gender-specific metropolis, which is expected to generate 5,000 jobs, will house textile, pharmaceutical and food processing industries run by “female entrepreneurs” and staffed with all-women production lines. As yet, it’s still unclear how the all-female metropolitan labor force will arrive to work, given that Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that prohibits women from driving, prohibitions that include public lashings and prison sentences for offenders. That being said, Saleh al-Rasheed, head of the Saudi Industrial Property Authority, which will oversee construction of the industrial city, expressed confidence that the future female employees would “demonstrate their efficiency in many light and clean industrial sectors that suit their interests, nature and capabilities.” Of course, determining a

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Frank Crimi in FrontPage When it’s spring, a young man’s fancy may turn to thoughts of love, but when it’s summer, the thoughts of wealthy Arab men turn to purchasing underage, impoverished Egyptian girls as temporary “summer brides” for use as sexual slaves and forced laborers. That disturbing revelation was found in the US State Department’s 2012 “Trafficking in Persons Report,” which found that rich Arab tourists visiting Egypt, most of whom hail from the Persian Gulf, are seeking temporary marriages with young girls in order to circumvent Egypt’s ban on pre-marital sex. Those restrictions make finding a hotel or landlord willing to rent a room to unwed couples in search of extra-curricular sex virtually impossible, thus requiring the need to find quick and proper marital documentation. It should be noted that temporary marriages have long been used in Islamic countries to give religiously legitimate cover to a sexual relationship, commonly used by young couples not ready for a permanent marriage, men seeking to have affairs, or men unable to afford the expense of a traditional Islamic wedding. Not surprisingly,

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Frank Crimi in FrontPage The Pakistani Taliban has banned UN health workers from administering polio vaccine to almost 250,000 children living in South and North Waziristan, the Taliban-controlled region along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Despite the near eradication of polio worldwide — having been reduced from over 350,000 cases in 1988 to less than 700 in 2011 — Pakistan remains one of three countries, where the disease still remains endemic. Yet, when the government of Pakistan recently launched a national three-day polio vaccination campaign targeting 34 million Pakistani children, its efforts to reach a quarter million children living in South and North Waziristan were rebuffed by the Taliban. According to Taliban leaders, the UN vaccinators from the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF were really not health workers on a mission to protect vulnerable children from the dreaded viral disease, but rather US spies trying to locate new Taliban targets for American drone strikes. Despite the absurdity of that charge, it should be noted that the Taliban view of vaccination campaigns of any kind had become somewhat jaundiced after it learned the United States

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Frank Crimi in FrontPage The “honor beheading” of an Afghan woman and her two children is but the latest act of barbarism in the escalating and seemingly never-ending violence being levied upon Afghanistan’s women and girls. The latest victims of the Afghan war on women were a 30-year-old woman named Serata and her eight-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter, all of whom had their heads cleaved from their bodies by Serata’s divorced husband, Mohammad Arif. While Serata appeared to be the sole target of Arif’s revenge, according to Afghan police, after her children saw their father burst into their home in Ghazni province and “take their mother’s head off, he killed them too.” Serata and her children’s horrific deaths were prompted because she had apparently “dishonored” Arif’s familial reputation by divorcing him last year after suffering through a decade of abuse, a stain so great that it necessitated Arif’s act of bloody vengeance. Sadly, this horrific crime appears to be only the latest in a rapidly growing wave of “honor killings” plaguing Afghan women and girls, a swell that saw 17

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