I keep seeing U.S. government propaganda posted by users here on Znet about the terrible treatment of women by Islam as an excuse for our wars of aggression. The treatment of women and girls in the United States and by the United States in Islamic countries we invade, is worse than what women and girls endure in Islamic countries.
Here’s a recent story by Dan Rather:
Modern Day Slavery in America — Over 300,000 U.S. Children Fall Prey to Sex Trafficking
Here’s what the heroic Muntadhar al-Zaidi has to say about how we treated women in Iraq:
Muntadhar Al-Zaidi from Beirut: I expected to be killed the day I threw my shoes at Bush
I lived in Afghanistan for almost five years in the late ’60s and early ’70s before the Soviet and U.S. invasions. There was no prostitution. Women were sold into marriage but not into prostitution. There were honor killings, but I have personal knowledge of honor killings in the United States also. In the U.S., however, more often a girl who is considered to have brought dishonor on her family is simply thrown out of the house and forced to live on the streets, which often results in prostitution for survival.
The symbol of Islamic mistreatment of women is usually the veil, however this also is misleading. While some Islamic countries prefer their females to be covered from head to toe, in the U.S. females are expected to show as much skin as possible and we have a multi-billion-dollar porn industry where females are not only naked but are used in the most degrading ways possible in pictures and on film. Encouraging females to make themselves attractive to all men at all times does not promote equality in the workplace or in the streets where scantily-clad females often cannot be visually distinguished from prostitutes. And costuming themselves to be physically attractive to passing strangers, rapists, and serial killers, does not promote the safety of women and girls.
At least one in six women in the U.S. is raped during her lifetime, but since our treatment of rape victims is often less than humane, the true figures are much higher. Only 6% of rapists in the U.S. will ever see a day in jail.
http://www.rainn.org/statistics
As for educating women and girls in Islamic countries, Iraq was a secular nation with highly educated females prior to our invasion and we did not improve the situation of women and girls in Iraq by killing them, destroying their country, and promoting sectarian violence. We do not yet have equal pay for equal work for females in the U.S., we have a huge high-school drop-out rate, and we have not eliminated illiteracy. While it is true that we have coeducational public schools, that is where most young American girls are introduced to the hard-core pornography that will shape their self-image and determine their social value.
Even in the most orthodox Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia, women can and do wear sexy clothes, but not in public and only for their husbands. To wear sexy clothes in order to look sexy to males you do not wish to have sex with, seems very stupid to Islamic women. It is accepted practice in the U.S. and many other non-Islamic countries, but some have found ways to ameliorate the results, as widespread rapes and assaults are inevitable when females are encourage to make themselves attractive and inviting to strangers. Among the methods of alleviating the harm to women are legalized prostitution or the stimatizing of prostitutes. In the U.S. the average serial killer is unlikely to get caught as long as he sticks to killing prostitutes unless he has killed more than twenty in a small geographic area within a very short period of time. But in most cases these "prostitutes" are just girls who were thrown out of them homes in lieu of honor killings and had few choices, if any, for survival other than prostitution.
The situation of females in Islamic and non-Islamic countries is different, but certainly not "better" enough to justify wars of aggression. Wars of aggression are the worst crimes against humanity known. Most of the wars of aggression in which the U.S. engages are resource wars or wars to justify the military-industrial budget and are not intended to improve the situation of anyone except the big oil and mineral corporations and the large defense contractors.
No matter how cleverly disguised, posting U.S. government pro-war propaganda on Znet should not be encouraged and should be responded to by leftists with humanitarian and socialist values like equality, dignity, and respect.
We are not in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan to help women, we’re there to kill them. We do not intend to invade Iran to help women, we want to kill them. Anyone who pretends otherwise is not being honest.
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