Women's studies professor says Islamic fundamentalists violate women's rights

By Tyler Will

College Publisher Network

October 24, 2007

Donna Hughes, professor and Carlson endowed chairperson of the University of Rhode Island women's studies program, contended that Islamic fundamentalists violate women's rights yesterday. Her lecture in the Memorial Union was part of URI's College Republicans Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Hughes told roughly 35 people in the audience that the two largest obstructions to women's rights are Islamic fundamentalism and sex trafficking.Hughes said she uses the term Islamic fundamentalism to describe a "political movement," and said.
"Islamic fundamentalism is a political movement that has particular goals and methods and ideology," Hughes said.
Hughes dubbed the movement as "a major threat to world peace and freedom," and a distortion of religious belief.
"The political goal of Islamic fascists is to create a religious dictatorship," she said.
Hughes said the goals are demonstrated through rituals like honor killings, beatings, stoning, threats and family pressure.
Hughes defined an honor killing as a murder carried out by family members who oppose the family's will. Other breeches of women's rights include mandatory dress codes, such as the requirement of head coverings.
"They basically treat women, honestly, as dirt," Hughes said.
Hughes was careful to isolate the political movement from Islam itself.
"I am not talking about all of Islam or all Muslims," she said. "I'm talking about a political movement."
Hughes' specified objective did not deter student discomfort. Sarah Shihadeh, the president of the URI Muslim Student Association, said that honor killings happen all over the Middle East.
"This is not Islam," she said. "Christians do that. Muslims do that. Don't blame the religion for what people do."
Shihadeh said she came to the United States two years ago and has a very informed representation of the Middle East. Hughes had to remind Shihadeh, and other students, that she was speaking about a political movement, not Islam in general.
Some of the controversy could have sprung from Hughes' mention of the judicial system in the Middle East. She referred to Muslim activists who came to the United States and tried to install a separate judicial system for Muslims, "which, of course, did not guarantee equal protection under law," Hughes said.
Hughes said that a system of law called Sharia law segregates public facilities and subdues women's position in society. Hughes said eight women in Iran, a country which claims to operate under Sharia law, are waiting in jail to be stoned.
"This form of killing is not found in the Quran. It is a barbaric form of killing used centuries ago and brought into modern timers by Islamic fundamentalists," she said.
She also said that Islamic fundamentalists oppose democracy.
"They oppose democracy and the Western concept of freedom, claiming that Western democracies and laws are man made, and only the laws of God or Sharia laws are valid," Hughes said. Hughes added that most effective form of justice lay with the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights.
Hughes said people are afraid to condemn women's rights violations, because it is a part of another culture.
"What it translates into is being silent, and accepting some of the worst human rights violations against women," Hughes said.
She emphasized that the world has a "responsibility" to protect the rights of women. Privileged societies should seek to assist oppressed women, Hughes said.
Hughes said the solution to the problem is to develop Islamic interpretation of the Quran that support women's rights.
"There are, indeed, liberal and moderate Muslims who I believe we should be supporting," she said.

A noted dissident says Iran is closer to a nuclear bomb than we think.
By John Hughes
November 7, 2007

The Christian Science Monitor
Provo, Utah - The head of the Iranian opposition group in exile that supplied early intelligence on Iran's clandestine nuclear program says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has engineered a clever disinformation campaign to convince foreign experts that Iran is eight to 10 years
away from developing a nuclear bomb. But in fact, she says, the regime is less than two years away from producing such a weapon, as part of
its plan to "create an Iranian empire" in the Middle East.
In a wide-ranging weekend telephone conversation from her base of exile in Paris, Maryam Rajavi told me that Mr. Ahmadinejad has purged
between 40 and 50 senior military officers who are in disagreement with his plans. She also explained that the resignation of Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, followed dispute between Mr. Larijani and Ahmadinejad over "incentives" Larijani had been prepared to offer his interlocutors in the West.
Ms. Rajavi heads the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), whose military arm is the People's Mujahideen of Iran.
The Mujahideen are listed as a terrorist organization by the US for its violent tactics. (The group allegedly supported the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979.) But in a bizarre twist, some 3,800 Mujahideen fighters who later conducted operations against the Iranian
regime from Iraqi territory during the reign of Saddam Hussein are currently being held in benign custody in Iraq by US forces as "protected" persons. The current Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is attempting to prosecute or deport them. Rajavi says this is at the behest of Iran.
Both the NCRI and the People's Mujahideen claim to have substantial underground support in Iran. Though the information of exiled groups
about events in their tyrannized homelands has come under acute scrutiny since Iraqi exiles produced questionable data about events in
Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the NCRI is credited by US sources with accurately identifying clandestine Iranian nuclear facilities early on.
By interesting coincidence, The Times (London) recently cited Bahrain's Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa as the
first Arab leader to directly accuse Tehran of seeking nuclear weapons. "While they don't have the bomb yet, they are developing it,
or the capability for it," The Times quotes the crown prince as saying, adding that this is the first time one of Iran's Gulf neighbors has "effectively accused [Iran] of lying about its nuclear programme."
In her weekend conversation, Rajavi was adamant that "military intervention" in Iran by the US or others is not desirable. However, she praised the Bush administration for its recent branding of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity. The IRGC, she said, holds key positions in government, dominates much of the economy, controls the nuclear program, and has a major role in drug trafficking. The US government's action against it, she says, is a "clear testament and an indispensable prelude to democratic change in Iran."
Her own program for change in Iran is a combination of accelerated sanctions and political pressure from without and upheaval arising
from discontent within. Getting rid of her own organization's "terrorist" label, she argues, would help energize internal critics of the regime. She says support for this is growing among both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. She is heartened by recent efforts
of British parliamentarians to persuade the European Union to lift restrictions on Iranian opposition groups and blacklist Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
The Guards, she says, are responsible for the torture and execution of many Iranians and are the "center of all the disasters" of the Iranian
people. They are also key to Iran's military role in Iraq. According to Rajavi, they use the "Ramezan" garrison and four tactical bases
near the Iran-Iraq border to send arms and explosives to Iraq. NCRI has exposed three factories in a very secure area in Tehran that are
making roadside bombs to send to Iraq, she adds.
In a previous conversation with Rajavi a little more than two years ago, she spoke in Persian, translated into English through an interpreter. On this occasion she spoke in heavily accented English. "I studied English in high school," she said, "but I have been practicing it more." She also speaks French.
As we began our conversation, she reminded me that "everything I warned you about two years ago about Ahmadinejad has come true. He has
declared war [on his perceived enemies]."

Iranian regime’s ‘Achilles’ heel’

By Ali Safavi

Yemen Observer

November 13, 2007
Shortly after ousting Tehran’s Chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, and appointing one of his own cronies, a former Revolutionary Guards Commander, Saeed Jalili, to the post, the Iranian regime’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told the state-run news agency ISNA that the regime’s nuclear case was “closed” and that U.N. sanction resolutions were “just a pile of papers.” He raised the stakes even further by announcing on Wednesday that Tehran had succeeded in manufacturing 3,000 centrifuges, which would enable it, according to some experts, to make a bomb within a year.
Despite Ahmadinejad’s asinine attempts to project a commanding and authoritative political tone to the mullahs’ foreign interlocutors, however, within Iran his position is as fragile as ever. When he visited Tehran University last month, he was met with the chants of “death to the dictator.”
The scene at Tehran University epitomized a dual reality about the Iranian regime. On the one hand, the regime desperately endeavors to portray a powerful image of itself, and thus thwart additional international pressure. On the other hand, that fictitious image is frequently shattered into pieces by students, women, workers, and other disenchanted sectors of Iranian society.
In summer, the ruling mullahs subjected the Iranian population to a dreadful wave of suppression with the sole aim of quelling further social unrest through terror and fear, and thereby thwarting any real prospects of change at one of the most critical junctures of their 28-year rule.
Amnesty international reported that 250 people have been hanged in Iran since January, many in public before the stunned eyes of onlookers, children and adults alike. In yet another barbaric act, some hangings have also been broadcast on state television.
The human rights watch dog, which recently referred to the Iranian regime as “The Last Executioner of Children,” added that 71 minors are currently waiting to be hanged in Iranian prisons. Moreover, at least 600 prisoners in a single jail west of Tehran remain on death row.
Close to 150,000 women were arrested in summer for “mal-veiling,” while at least 977,000 individuals were interrogated on the streets under other phony pretexts. On July 5th, a man in Takestan, a city in Qazvin, was stoned to death, and at least eight women will suffer the same fate.
All this comes at a time when the mullahs are gripped by terminal crises at home, and are increasingly isolated. The October 25 designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, its terrorist arm, the Qods (Jerusalem Force, the Ministry of Defense and a number of institutions and officials by the U.S. Government as Nuclear proliferators and terrorism financiers was sent shock waves through senior Iranian leadership.
However, even as the weakening regime becomes alarmingly more barbarous towards the country’s population, Western governments continue to exhibit a troubling proclivity for silence and tolerance. Turning a blind eye to the Iranian regime’s severe human rights violations is one of the more revolting symptoms of the appeasement policy towards the mullahs.
Hitler, it is often said, enthusiastically welcomed negotiations during the 1930s in order to buy time for the preparation of war. Once he reached his short-term objectives, however, he declared negotiations as futile, and at one sweep obliterated Neville Chamberlain’s vision of “peace in our time.”
Today, the Iranian religious tyrants have adopted similar tactics. Not that long ago, in April, Ahmadinejad had said, “negotiation is the best way out of Iran’s nuclear stand-off.” Today, he openly ridicules the idea by exclaiming that the mullahs “are not ready to sit around a table and discuss their absolute nuclear rights.”
So, what has changed since April? Simply this: As the regime continues to adopt a more aggressive stance towards the Iranian people, the response from Western governments turns out to be ever more timid and lenient.
If the West continues to ignore the dire human rights situation in Iran, therefore, it would ultimately be faced with a more brazen Iranian regime, which struggles to prolong its survival by more suppression at home.
But, that’s not all. The regime would also step up its meddling in Iraq to erect a sister Islamic republic there, foment wider chaos in Lebanon, partition Palestine to prevent a long lasting Middle East peace, and inch ever closer towards a nuclear bomb. Therefore, “the Men of Tehran” (to borrow an analogous phrase used in reference to the appeasers during the 1930s - “the Men of Munich”) will have chosen dishonor and will definitely have another Mid-East war.
Ironically, the same appeasers of Tehran have caged its most effective opposition, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), by placing it on the terrorist list. They have hitherto effectively covered the mullahs’ Achilles’ Heel. Referring to this policy as “crazy,” Dick Armey, former Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, added in a recent interview with CNN, “[The PMOI] are the people that can keep us best informed of what’s going on in Iran, and they are the people that can best inform people within Iran of the opportunities for liberty. And we keep them tied down.”
The PMOI is the main component of the democratic coalition of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose leader Maryam Rajavi told the Council of Europe earlier this month that the world does not have to choose between war and appeasement. There is a third option, democratic change by relying on the Iranian people and the organized resistance. Western governments could ill afford to ignore her option.
As a first practical step in this regard, the PMOI must be removed from the terror list. As well, and in addition to a strong censure resolution at the current UN General Assembly session, Tehran’s appalling human rights record must immediately be referred to the Security Council to consider binding decisions against the mullahs.
Sooner or later, the West will realize that the only parties offering it a helping hand out of its predicament with the mullahs are the Iranian people. Let us hope that will happen sooner rather than later.