Actually, they are constantly condemned, because they have no relation to Islam. The accusation of Islamophobia is regularly used to censor people who speak out against violence against women - even though the problem is only part religious and part cultural.

By all means speak out yourself against this - write letters to the media, go on protests, join groups. People will encourage you, support you and recognise that your cause is a good one.

Then try the same thing in Iran or Saudi Arabia or Syria, say goodbye to your loved ones, and wait for the knock on the door in the dead of night from the heavily armed religious police.

Perhaps women who die in the UK in car accidents would be 'liberated' by the Saudi Arabian approach of simply preventing them from driving at all?

m/f thanks for the contribution. Westerners, be they feminists or blairites have exactly zero moral highground when it comes to preaching about the situation of women in Islamic countries. Question their agenda.

Sandra, Syria is a secular state. There are no "heavily armed religious police" here. Women can walk the streets at night, alone, without the fear of being raped. They can also drive here, as they can in Iran, where the recent feminist, islamic nobel peace prize winner lives. You'll have to come up with a better liberal-idiot justification for regime change...

Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing something hundreds of thousands of women in the west do every day - but she works in a repressive country in which men use Islam to subjugate and destroy women, so what's ordinary in the west is extraordinary there.

As for your suggestion that women don't have to worry about being raped - how sad, how very sad. Women are raped in Islamic countries, just as often as they are in Europe or America. Except, in Islamic countries, they victims are punished for being victims, if it comes to the attention of the authorities at all:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,868508,00.html

And Islamic attitudes to women are a problem even women who don't live in Islamic countries must confront:

"The boys were patient, standing in line and waiting their turn to rape. Their two victims, girls of 13, were patient as well, never crying out, at least that is what the neighbors said, and enduring the violence and abuse not once, but repeatedly over five months."
 http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=114798

" Alarmed at last week's police statistics, which revealed that in 68% of all rapes committed this year the perpetrator was from an ethnic minority, leading Muslim organisations have now formed an alliance to fight the ever-growing problem of young second and third-generation immigrants involved in rape cases against young Danish girls."
 http://www.cphpost.dk/get/62605.html

Women are oppressed globally in various and sundry ways. But the point the author makes is important especially to British and American feminists of most stripes but particularly liberal fems who play asset to empire and CIA spins on how awful Muslim men treat Muslim women. These fems have whole gobal projects going which support imperialism and capitalism from World Bank Development projects for women to Western academin treaties by feminists which pave the way for "modernism" and "Secularism" which really means global capitalism and fascism with results for women which the author lists in the above commentary. But the commodification and dehumanization of women goes much deeper than that under imperial capitalism...check out these DOJ states...

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

IN THE UNITED STATES
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MURDER . Every day four women die in this country as a result of domestic violence, the euphemism for murders and assaults by husbands and boyfriends. That's approximately 1,400 women a year, according to the FBI. The number of women who have been murdered by their intimate partners is greater than the number of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.
BATTERING . Although only 572,000 reports of assault by intimates are officially reported to federal officials each year, the most conservative estimates indicate two to four million women of all races and classes are battered each year. At least 170,000 of those violent incidents are serious enough to require hospitalization, emergency room care or a doctor's attention.


SEXUAL ASSAULT . Every year approximately 132,000 women report that they have been victims of rape or attempted rape, and more than half of them knew their attackers. It's estimated that two to six times that many women are raped, but do not report it. Every year 1.2 million women are forcibly raped by their current or former male partners, some more than once.

THE TARGETS . Women are 10 times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate. Young women, women who are separated, divorced or single, low- income women and African-American women are disproportionately victims of assault and rape. Domestic violence rates are five times higher among families below poverty levels, and severe spouse abuse is twice as likely to be committed by unemployed men as by those working full time. Violent attacks on lesbians and gay men have become two to three times more common than they were prior to 1988.

IMPACT ON CHILDREN . Violent juvenile offenders are four times more likely to have grown up in homes where they saw violence. Children who have witnessed violence at home are also five times more likely to commit or suffer violence when they become adults.

IMPACT ON HEALTH AND SOCIAL SERVICES . Women who are battered have more than twice the health care needs and costs than those who are never battered. Approximately 17 percent of pregnant women report having been battered, and the results include miscarriages, stillbirths and a two to four times greater likelihood of bearing a low birth weight baby. Abused women are disproportionately represented among the homeless and suicide victims. Victims of domestic violence are being denied insurance in some states because they are considered to have a "pre-existing condition."

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SOURCES:
"Violence Against Women: A National Crime Victimization Survey Report", U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., January 1994.

"The National Women's Study," Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, 1992.

"Five Issues In American Health," American Medical Association, Chicago, 1991.

Bullock, Linda F. and Judith McFarlane, "The Birth Weight/Battering Connection," Journal of American Nursing, September 1989.

McFarlane, Judith, et. al., "Assessing for Abuse During Pregnancy," Journal of the American Medical Association, June 17, 1992.

Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics, 1992.

Sheehan, Myra A. "An Interstate Compact on Domestic Violence: What are the Advantages?" Juvenile and Family Justice Today, 1993.

Sherman, Lawrence W. et al. Domestic Violence: Experiments and Dilemmas, 1990.

A study of five cities -- New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Minneapolis -- by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, published in 1992.




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Now check out Human Rights Watch report on violence against Iraqi women and girls by imperialist "soldiers".


 http://hrw.org/reports/2003/iraq0703/
Climate of Fear:
Sexual Violence and abduction of Women and girls in Baghdad

A much more anti-imperialist critical moral pluralism is called for on the part of Western liberals and progressives in general and most feminists of all stripes with the exception of a few well read and world wise anarchist feminists.

ciao for now,
June