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"This is wrong. This is the United States of America."
Law and order is gone, gunmen are roaming at will, raping and looting, as people die of heat and thirst, bodies lie rotting in the street, with no medicine and now there are thousands of people defecating in the streets. This is wrong. This is the United States of America.
Front-page photos of the dead and desperate in New Orleans, devastated by the Hurricane Katrina , almost all of them poor and black have shaken assumptions about American might.
The issue is being studied closely by American ethicists and social psychologists who opines that rules of human behavior including respect for others' property and for social order itself dissolve quickly in desperate circumstances like the storm's aftermath. Ethicists call it state of nature -- an atmosphere without rules or infrastructure, where the needs are so great that anything goes.
It is under extreme distress that the true character of a person emerges. This reflects the culture of the person and as a whole of the society he belongs.
The looting and chaos in New Orleans reflect a culture of violence. In South Asia, where the tsunami killed more than 30,000 not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged or raped.
Parallel religious courts under scrutiny
The Supreme Court of India has issued notices to the Islamic Seminary, Darul-ul-Uloom & the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) on a petition accusing the two most important Muslim bodies of trying to interfere with the country's legal system and introduce parallel Islamic laws in violation of the Constitution.
Cleric's power too large a challenge for the Indian Government
The 'culture' of rape that exists in India and Pakistan arises from profound social anomalies in their moral code, which is based on concepts of honour and shame. In honour-and-shame cultures like those of India and Pakistan, male honour resides in the sexual probity of women, and the 'shaming' of women dishonours all men. Any country claiming to be a democracy must secularise and unify its legal system, and take away power exercised by medievalist religious institutions that teaches the most fundamentalist, narrow, puritan, rigid, oppressive version of religion.
Ever since the Indian Government caved in and passed an act that nullified the Supreme Court's judgment in the Shah Bano case, denying alimony to divorced Muslim women, Indian politicians have not dared to challenge Islamist clerics' power.
Another honor rape in Pakistan
Another woman has been "honour
raped" (read gang-raped) by five men in Pakistan's Central Punjab
province where another high-profile gang-rape of a woman, Mukhtaran Mai,
on the orders of a village council had triggered
an international outcry.
Violence against women is common in rural Pakistan where tribal and feudal
customs hold sway. Hundreds of women are raped or killed every year by men
intent on restoring honour after behaviour by the woman or a male relative
deemed inappropriate in the male-dominated society.
An
Islamic Critique of the Rape Laws of Pakistan from a Woman-Sensitive Perspective.
Muslim council "finds" that the rape never occured....and hence the matter is closed?
The All India Muslim Personal Law Board which sent a team on a fact-finding mission says it is unlikely that Imrana was raped. They "support their finding" on the argument that her house did not offer sufficient privacy for a rape to have occured.
Protest against India rape fatwa
A ruling by a Muslim seminary in India that a woman allegedly raped by her father-in law must separate from her husband has been met with wide protests.
Mediapersons are the prostitutes of the governments?
Several top journalists who have covered the UAE say the country has a long way to go in respect of providing functional freedom to the media, while at least one top journalist in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region feels, “My colleagues and I are prostitutes of the government.”
Rape victim ordered to marry rapist
Police in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have arrested a man accused of raping his daughter-in-law. But a Muslim council of community elders has ordered that she marry her father-in-law and change her relationship with her husband to that between a mother and son.
It also ordered her to leave her home and stay away for seven month and 10 days to become "pure".
A village council in Kerala in India has lost its legal battle against the corporate giant Coca Cola Company.
The struggle by the villagers against
the exploitation and pollution of water of Coca Cola Company at Plachimada
completed three years on 22 April 2005.
In
addition to depleting the water resource in the otherwise drought prone
village, the company also dumped its waste sludge in the fields and banks
of the irrigation canals, heralding it as free fertilizer. Aside from stinking
so badly it made old folk and children sick, people coming in contact with
it got rashes and kindred infections and the crops which it was supposed
to nourish died.
Clamp down on Ladies Bars
Maharashtra government has ordered closure of ladies bars to protect the morals of the youth. The government should not be in the job of policing the morals of citizens. The states task is to regulate and ensure that people who do not want to be disturbed by such adult entertainment are isolated in time and space from such joints.
35 rapists acquitted
The High Court of Kerala has acquitted all but one of the 36 accused in the Suryanelly sex scandal. The prosecution failed to adduce adequate evidence before the court to ensure proper punishment showing how infirm the legal system was when it came to protecting women. The verdict points to the gender bias inherent in the Indian legal system, and the need to overhaul it to ensure that women received as much legal protection as men.