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Originally Posted by mcatdog
Salsa,
That's all true but almost all of those things are
a) nowhere near as bad as what happens to women in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran.
b) just the beliefs of a religious group, not actually the law.
I mean in Iran a lot of women have been buried in the ground up to their necks and stoned to death just for committing adultery or for being forced into prostitution by their parents. You can't even begin to compare that to very debatable issues like judicial activism or federal funding for art and science.
I think the problem is that we in the West are afraid to sound "high and mighty" when we speak out against the oppression of women by dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and Iran. We shouldn't be though. We aren't any better than regular people from other countries, but regular people aren't the ones who are responsible for this, the dictators are.
In fact the people who respond to these events by saying "Look at what happens in the West too" are IMO the ones who sound high and mighty because they are sort of implying that people in the third world still aren't good enough to deserve democracy.
To support the point that making women stay in their house and never talk to anyone outside their families, isn't what everyday Muslims want: The three countries with the largest Muslim populations (Indonesia, India, and Pakistan) either have or did have a woman president, which the US has never had.
Yeah I agree. I only brought it up 'cos someone mentioned Ireland. Thank god (no pun intended) we in the western countries have it nowhere near as bad as saudi, iran, even malaysia & indonesia.
Sometimes I wonder how many people have actually been to some of the muslim countries. The only middle eastern country I've been is Israel (beautiful place), but I was in rural Malaysia and Indonesia (rural enough that I got Malaria). I've seen first hand some of the trafficking and exploitation of women and (all children but particularly) girls in Thailand, Cambodia, and the Phillipines. I befriended a lot of people who had some of the most fucked up paths through life.
I've really wanted to go to Saudi Arabia, and I still do. I guess my world citizenship transcends religion and morality, and that's just the way it should be.
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