Assault on Misurata: How much longer can it go on?

The scale of destruction is brutal, in every corner a ghost of what could have been a family's escape, only it seems shelling by pro-Gaddafi forces left no refuge for civilians.

Al Jazeera's Andrew Simmons, from the besieged city.
Category:

News & Politics
If the citizens of Misurata lose, their children will be sodomized, their mothers raped and fathers beheaded.

Rape of Lady Justice - Johnathan Shapiro - So Africa

Congressional Hearing On Radicalization Of Islam pt.9 Abdirizak Bihi's O...

Abdirizak Bihi rails against Islamic supremacist organizations such as Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic organizations that have bullied, harassed and silenced moderate Muslims: "we have no voice." Muslims who are not supremacists or extreme are systemically victimized by these supremacist groups.

We Heard "Jew, Jew, Jew" as Mob Raped Lara Logan

"60 Minutes" Lara Logan was Repeatedly Raped by Egyptian Mob Yelling, "Jew, Jew! Jew!"

"60 Minutes" correspondent Lara Logan was repeatedly sexually assaulted by thugs yelling, "Jew! Jew!" as she covered the chaotic fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo's main square Friday, CBS and sources said yesterday.

This horrible story gets worse and worse. Worse still, CBS tried to keep the whole thing quiet and was forced to get in front of the story only when it became widely known that other media outlets were on to it. Who are they covering for?

And why? Because the false narrative the media is painting of what is going on in Egypt is patently false, and this brutal sex attack points to something else entirely.

Nypost logan

Where is Christian Outrage over Iraqi Atrocities?

Elnaz Babazadeh Raped and Murdered by Police

According to HRANA, Elnaz Babazadeh, a 26 year old woman was raped and murdered by Basij forces in the city of Tabriz (northwestern Iran) last week.

According to HRANA, Babazadeh’s car was stopped by Basij forces because she did not follow the Iranian regime’s dress code properly. Elnaz resisted the forces and did not listen to the orders of the Basij forces.

After Babazadeh resisted the orders by Basij forces, the Basij member who had stopped her jumped into her car and threatened her with a gun. Two other Basij members joined in and beat and raper her. They murdered Babazadeh and dumped her body close to Emamiyeh cemetery.

After local investigation was conducted by HRANA members in Tabriz, it was confirmed at Babazadeh’s funeral that the person who killed her was the son of a high-ranking Revolutionary Guards member.

The intentions of the savage Basij members was to put a stop to the “improper” way women in society dressed. Basij members believe this is their duty to God.

Elnaz Babazadeh`s family has filed a complaint against the murder of their daughter to regime officials, but the IRGC is trying to take control of the case.

Honor Killing

Another young woman tortured and murdered to add to the gruesome gallery..... The horror of these young girls, terror stricken victims, who live in homemade concentration camps, is given the imprimatur of the West in its complicit silence -- the urbane face of bloodthirsty savagery. The West looks away and more girls lead desperate, brutal lives. The "Feminists" look away, and pretend it is outside the realm of women's rights -- leftist tools of Islamic jihad. These useful idiots are on someone's payroll, or they fear Islam. Either way, get out of the way. Shame on all of you for failing our women, our children, our girls, our very way of life. How dare they throw away our superior culture with both

Prison Rape is an Intolerable Offense

Prison Rape is an Intolerable Offense
The News Tribune

Rape and sexual abuse remain too much a fact of life behind bars.
That’s intolerable. In the United States, our criminal justice system sends convicts to prison as punishment, not for punishment.
The recommendations of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Commission could be a step toward changing the prison culture that permits sexual abuse to continue.
The commission found that more than 60,000 prisoners are the victims of rape and sexual abuse each year. Many inmates are afraid to report such crimes and even those who do are often ignored or dismissed.
Not only hardcore criminals are being victimized. The commission heard from former inmates who made relatively minor mistakes – a political protest gone wrong, a drunken driving arrest or a probation violation – and ended up being brutally raped.
No matter what they did to land in jail, captives are a vulnerable population. They depend on prison authorities to protect them, and it’s in the best interests of those officials to do so.
Prisoners will seek protection where they can find it. When the only safe harbor is a gang, the repercussions affect not only prison safety but also public safety when prisoners carry their gangster ways to the streets after their release.
The commission is recommending that Attorney General Eric Holder issue standards that require prisons to have zero-tolerance policies on rape, better staff training and improved screening to identify prisoners vulnerable to abuse, among other measures. States could lose federal prison money if they fail to comply.
The cost to staff and equip jails and prisons accordingly will be high. But so too is the cost of the status quo.
Washington officials just agreed to pay $1 million to settle part of a class action lawsuit by current and former female inmates who claimed they were sexually assaulted by corrections officers at the state’s Purdy prison. Still pending is a dispute over what the state will do to prevent other inmates from being abused and to keep abuse allegations from languishing in files.
The rape commission’s report is significant not just for its recommendations but also for its attempts to quantify the problem. As much as sexual abuse has been assumed an inevitable consequence of confinement, its actual scope hasn’t been well documented.
In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a prison system’s failure to prevent sexual abuse of inmates can be a violation of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The caveat was that corrections officials must have known or should have known about the abuse.
Credible deniability, if there ever was such a thing, is in short supply today.


On September 10, 2004, Vili and Mary announced that they have been together constantly since her release. They plan to marry and Mary is willing to have more children for him. After her release from prison Vili petitioned the courts to lift the court imposed restraining order so they could see each other. The judge lifted the order barring contact between Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau..

A suburban Seattle school district elementary school teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau, was 34, and the married mother of four children in 1996, when she and Vili Fualaau, her sixth grade student entered into a sexual relationship. She was arrested in 1997 when she was pregnant with their child and sentenced to six months in jail and ordered to have no contact with Vili. A month later she was caught her car with him and she was pregnant with their second child. She served seven and a half years in prison for having sex with a minor. She was released from prison on August 4, 2004. Mary will be staying with a former coworker in a home close to where her girls live with their father's family. It is rumored that Mary and Vili plan to write another book together. Their first book was published and popular in France.

Mary wrote a book about her affair with Vili. Mary's former cellmate, Christina Dress, a close friend and co-author of her book said when Mary arrived at Purdy women's prison in 1998, she was harassed by inmates and guards.
"Inmates were preparing and sending her food with chemicals in it, spit in it, things like that. Tama Lisa and I put a stop to that...already been at prison, we knew how to handle it." Christina Dress - King 5 TV News

Rape in Iraq

Rape’s vast toll in Iraq war remains largely ignored
Author: Wameeth (Iraq), Mideast Youth
This is a report by Anna Badkhen, a correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, who highlights the sort of news that has too often gone unreported. I felt it was important to also share here for the sake of awareness:
Many rape victims have escaped to Jordan but still don’t have access to treatment and counseling.
AMMAN, JORDAN - As though recoiling from her own memories, Khalida shrank deeper into her faded armchair with each sentence she told: of how gunmen apparently working for Iraq’s Interior Ministry kidnapped her, beat and raped her; of how they discarded her on a Baghdad sidewalk.
But her suffering did not end when she fled Iraq and became a refugee in Jordan’s capital, Amman. When Khalida’s husband learned that she had been raped, he abandoned her and their two young sons.
Rumors spread fast in Amman; soon, everyone on her block knew that she was without a man in the house. Last month, her Jordanian neighbor barged into her apartment and attempted to rape her.
Khalida never reported the incident. Like tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, she does not have a permit to live or work here, and she is afraid that if she turns to authorities for help she will get deported. So instead of seeking punishment for her assailant, she latched the flimsy metal door of her apartment and stopped going outside.
Her story sheds light on a problem that is little researched, poorly understood, and largely ignored: Iraqi rape victims who now live in Jordan illegally and without protection. Sexual assault is heavily stigmatized in the Middle East, and victims are often afraid to talk about it to anyone, fearing that their families will abandon them. And their shaky status in Jordan leaves them afraid to seek help and vulnerable to new assaults and abuse. They fear persecution by Jordanian immigration authorities almost as much as they fear returning to Iraq.
“The lack of legal status does lead to these sorts of protection issues [and] puts them in very exploitative situations,” says Imran Riza, who heads the mission in Jordan of the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the main international agency that assists Iraqis in Jordan. Women like Khalida, he says, “are certainly vulnerable, and much more vulnerable than others.”
Rape is a common weapon of any war; no one knows how many Iraqi women have been raped since the war began in 2003. Most crimes against women “are not reported because of stigma, fear of retaliation, or lack of confidence in the police,” MADRE, an international women’s rights group, wrote in its 2007 report about violence against women in Iraq. Some women, like Khalida, are raped by Iraqi security forces. A 2005 report published by the Iraqi National Association for Human Rights found that women held in Interior Ministry detention centers endure “systematic rape by the investigators.”
A handful of organizations are working to help rape victims in Iraq. MADRE, together with the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, operates several shelters and safe houses in Baghdad for Iraqi rape victims, where the women have access to healthcare and counseling.
But militias often target women’s rights advocates in Iraq, so these facilities are “a clandestine network,” operated by “mostly somebody who at a great risk to themselves has opened a room for these victims,” says Yifat Susskind, MADRE’s communications director. The shelters have helped several thousand Iraqi women since 2003. Most rape victims learn about the shelters from other women.
Documenting sexual assault in Iraq by international researchers remains complicated because of widespread violence. “There’s been a security issue, so we haven’t been able to get people on the ground to look at the issue for a long time,” says Marianne Mollmann, who leads women’s rights advocacy at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which published its last report about rape in Iraq in 2003.
Similarly, no one has tried to estimate how many Iraqi refugees have been raped while in Iraq or in Jordan, says Mohamad Habashneh, a Jordanian psychiatrist who works with Iraqi rape victims.
Mr. Habashneh has treated approximately 40 Iraqi rape victims for clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. But he estimates that they are just a fraction of Iraqi refugees who had been raped.
Psychiatrists like Habashneh charge between $25 and $40 per visit, too expensive for most Iraqi refugees, who, like Khalida, live hand-to-mouth on monthly handouts of about $100 from international agencies.
Many victims are afraid to go outside or travel to a clinic out of fear of being detained by Jordanian authorities.
To help these women, women’s rights organizations in Jordan must coordinate with larger agencies, such as UNHCR, to provide care and programs that would help the victims earn money “because rape survivors are alienated from their family and therefore have no way to sustain themselves,” Ms. Susskind says.
But so far, these resources are not available for most Iraqi rape victims in Jordan. There are no support groups, no counselors, no hot lines, an no one to soothe Khalida when she has flashbacks that make her relive the day when assailants dressed in police uniforms arrived at the Oil Ministry where she worked and said they were taking her in for questioning.
She did not tell her husband that she had been raped but he figured it out. Now, Khalida does not blame him for going away, or for leaving her so vulnerable to men who wish to prey on her.
“I have his phone number,” she says, sobbing quietly. “I dial it sometimes for the kids to talk to their father. Sometimes, because I love him, I like to hear his voice. But when I say ‘hello’ he hangs up.”

Americans Fight In Iraq to Abuse Women

Why We Fight in Iraq: Muslims in the News

"Women Are Being Beheaded for Taking Their Veil Off": Honor Killings On Rise in Iraq

By Terri Judd, Independent UK

In Basra alone, police acknowledge that 15 women a month are murdered for breaching Islamic dress codes. Others say the number is higher.

At first glance Shawbo Ali Rauf appears to be slumbering on the grass, her pale brown curls framing her face, her summer skirt spread about her. But the awkward position of her limbs and the splattered blood reveal the true horror of the scene.

The 19-year-old Iraqi was, according to her father, murdered by her own in-laws, who took her to a picnic area in Dokan and shot her seven times. Her crime was to have an unknown number on her mobile phone. Her "honor killing" is just one in a grotesque series emerging from Iraq, where activists speak of a "genocide" against women in the name of religion.

In the latest such case, it was reported yesterday that a 17-year-old girl, Rand Abdel-Qader, was stabbed to death last month by her father for becoming infatuated with a British soldier serving in southern Iraq.

In Basra alone, police acknowledge that 15 women a month are murdered for breaching Islamic dress codes. Campaigners insist it is a conservative figure.

Violence against women is rampant, rising every day with the power of the militias. Beheadings, rapes, beatings, suicides through self-immolation, genital mutilation, trafficking and child abuse masquerading as marriage of girls as young as nine are all on the increase.

[more on Alternet]