Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Leading imam during Cartoon Crisis regrets involvement


Ahmed Akkari, who acted as spokesperson for Islamic faith group Det Islamiske Trossamfund, says that anti-Denmark trip to the Middle East was a mistake
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The now 35-year-old Ahmed Akkari says that both age and familiarising himself with enlightenment thinkers has made him see the value of democracy (Photo: Scanpix)
Ahmed Akkari has been on a long journey, both physically and mentally.
 
In December 2005, Akkari was among a group of imams who travelled through the Middle East in order to create international pressure on Denmark to officially apologise for Jyllands-Posten newspaper’s printing of the Mohammed cartoons. 
 
The trip instigated a series of violent protests against the drawings, which led to a boycott of Danish products and culminated in fire being set to several of Denmark’s embassies in the region. Denmark’s reputation and international goodwill was on the line. 
 
In the centre of this whirlwind of events stood the then-26-year-old Akkari, who was the then spokesperson for the Islamic faith group Det Islamiske Trossamfund (DIT). For several weeks he stood in front of TV crews, where he again and again explained how disrespectful the drawings were to Muslims. 
 
But today his answer to whether Jyllands-Posten was within its rights to print the Mohammed drawings is quite clear.
 
“Yes, it was okay.”
 
“The trip was the wrong thing to do” 
 
Akkari was born in Lebanon in 1978, but moved with his family as a refugee to Denmark in 1985 and grew up in the Jutland town of Thy. During his teenage years, Akkari became deeply influenced by his family’s more religious associates. In a kind of teenage rebellion, he became highly critical of Danish society and customs.
 
Back then, his world was made up of two things: good and evil, with Islam as the agent of good. Today his world view is more nuanced and complicated, being older and not having gone through life unscathed. 
 
When the group of imams took off on their trip in 2005, there were many less than honourable goals and motivations for the mission that Akkari says he failed to notice.
 
“Today I want to be perfectly clear about the purpose of the journey. It was wrong. The whole process, all the ideas behind it, and why we wanted to react. It wasn’t right and I would encourage everyone to reconsider should something like this happen again,” said Akkari.
 
The drawings were abused 
 
Akkari’s days as an imam are now behind him and he says that he is “no longer a part of the Islamic mission". He further claims that many of his former colleagues are hypocrites with a mindset that is “horribly wrong”.
 
“The world doesn’t need a lid on human expression. That also goes for people you might disagree with. There was something deep-seated in the mentality of the group I belonged to, which I just didn’t notice. There was this fundamental idea that people were not allowed to express themselves freely, and that is just wrong,” said Akkari.
 
Were the cartoons misused?
 
“The way I see it today, yes. Behind all the talk of protecting religious imagery, there is always power and abuse," he said. "It is simply revolting.” 
 
Akkari’s journey to reach the opinions he has today has taken years and has been a gradual process. His doubts started to form, however, already a few years after the climax of the Cartoon Crisis.
 
A change of heart in Greenland
 
Following the massive attention he received during the crisis, Akkari decided to move to the small Greenlandic town of Narsaq in the autumn of 2008. There he worked as a teacher in the town’s only primary school. Surrounded by high mountains on the flat plains of Greenland, Akkari used the long winter months to study the writings of enlightenment freethinkers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau.
 
He studied the American Declaration of Independence and he tried to view his past experiences and Denmark from different points of view. The trip to Greenland became a sort of formation journey, where Akkari developed as a human being.  
 
The search for the ideal society
 
Akkari has spent his time looking for a country with “peace, serenity and understanding”, a kind of ideal society. He points to the Scandinavian countries, Canada and Australia as examples of ideal societies.
 
“You can’t find many examples of societies like that around the world. So I have deducted that there must be something wrong with those societies where, in the name of religion, individuals are stripped of their right to free expression.”
 
Although he didn't want to name names, the now 35-year-old Akkari said there are certain people within the Danish Muslim community who should realise that they have actually been treated quite well in Denmark. 
 
“They should understand that the country they now live in has rules and those rules should be followed. If they do not agree, or simply can’t make life here work, then they should find another place where they can better identify themselves with.” 
 
Are you saying that disillusioned and unhappy Muslims should just pack up and leave?
 
“I don’t know about that, but what I am saying is that if you can’t figure out to adapt in an appropriate manner, then … Denmark is after all a free country where you can choose to be almost whoever you want to be, what more could you ask for?” said Akkari. 
 
You had a very active role during the Cartoon Crisis, an event you are now very critical of. Do you feel you owe anyone an apology? 
 
“I feel that I have sent the necessary signals and the necessary words I need to send. If there is anything more people want from me, then everyone is welcome to give me a call or knock on my door.” 
 
Are there others from your former community who should apologise for their roles?
 
“Perhaps it would be better if they got educated on topics related to having a country and on being a citizen of a country. A form of modern etiquette training you could call it.” 

Time to Hard-Delete Carlos Danger

WASHINGTON — WHEN you puzzle over why the elegant Huma Abedin is propping up the eel-like Anthony Weiner, you must remember one thing: Huma was raised in Saudi Arabia, where women are treated worse by men than anywhere else on the planet. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/opinion/sunday/dowd-time-to-hard-delete-carlos-danger.html?ref=maureendowd&_r=0

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

MY FAVORITE COMMUNIST SPY CHIEF

I thought I knew a lot about lying. After all, I’ve written two popular books about high-level lying and deception and been interviewed on the subject hundreds of times on radio and TV.
I thought I knew pretty much all of the tricks – the ways Americans have been influenced, misled, duped, seduced, indoctrinated and intimidated into abandoning all that is good and wholesome in favor of angry, irrational and destructive ideologies and behaviors.
But that was before I met Ion Mihai Pacepa.
The author of a mind-boggling new book called “Disinformation,” Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect to the West from the Soviet bloc.
In other words, he was a top commie spy chief – the director of foreign intelligence for Romania and top adviser to the infamous dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. As such, he not only was an eyewitness to some of the most audacious and high-flying secret lying campaigns of our lifetime, he was in some cases a major participant!
Fortunately, God saw fit to disrupt Pacepa’s brilliant career by instilling within him a strong conscience, so that eventually – despite the power and prestige, the seductive delusions of communism and the luxurious lifestyle he enjoyed as a spymaster, replete with mountain villas, hunting lodges and chauffeurs – his conscience won out. So he mustered up the courage to turn his back on the evil empire and take a very precarious leap of faith from the pinnacle of power.
He landed in the U.S., where he spent years revealing to America’s intelligence services precisely how their enemy counterparts conducted their most secret and nefarious activities. Now 84, Pacepa lives here as a “proud American,” but due to long-term security threats and assassination plots against him, he lives under cover of an assumed identity.
That’s because, when Pacepa broke with communism, defected to the West and single-handedly demolished an entire enemy espionage service (the one he himself managed), Ceausescu went nuts. He experienced a nervous breakdown, put a $2 million bounty on Pacepa’s head and dispatched multiple assassination squads – including the notorious terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. “Carlos the Jackal” – to the U.S. to find his former top adviser and kill him.
It didn’t work. All such attempts against Pacepa’s life – and there were several – proved unsuccessful, though at one point the general’s CIA-created cover was blown and he had to adopt a whole new identity and relocate again.
Ultimately, the curse Ceausescu placed upon Pacepa came back home to roost big-time, as the dictator and his equally vile wife, Elena, were executed by a Romanian firing squad immediately following a trial in which the accusations against them came almost word-for-word out of Pacepa’s first book, “Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae & Elena Ceausescu’s Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption.”
“Red Horizons” became an international bestseller published in 27 countries, and President Ronald Reagan reportedly came to refer to it as “my bible for dealing with dictators.” (See photo below.)
U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf handing President Reagan a copy of "Red Horizons" in the Oval Office
OK, that’s enough Cold War history. Understanding the past can be important, but with Americans witnessing the ongoing meltdown of their beloved country, many are more concerned with understanding the present – and how to alter what is shaping up to be an ominous future.
So let’s talk about the present.
First, forgive the unpleasant reminder, but in an era when the gravest threats to America emanate from two malevolent, expansionist ideologies – Marxism and Shariah Islam – we have twice elected a president in thrall to both. And the cowardly and craven news media made it happen. Moreover, government is broken, our culture is in the toilet, family breakdown is rampant, drug dependency (illegal and legal) are the new normal and God is increasingly being shut out of our society. You get the picture.
As we try to comprehend how America could possibly have sunk so low so quickly (remember, just 25 years ago Reagan was president and it was “morning in America”), along comes Ion Mihai Pacepa to once again expose the secret super-lies of sociopathic leaders and to shine his unique light into the oncoming darkness.
For this reason he has written “Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism,” coauthored with historian and law professor Ronald Rychlak and published by WND Books. I was honored to be involved as the book’s editor, and also as a scriptwriter and on-screen contributor to the companion feature-length film documentary, “Disinformation: The Secret Strategy to Destroy the West.”
That’s all fine, you say. But really, what does a former communist spymaster have to say that is relevant to me today?
Let’s see: Little things like why so much of the Western world has disastrously turned against its own founding faith, Christianity. Or why “radical Islam” and jihadist terrorism, after a long period of apparent quiescence, suddenly burst onto the scene in modern times to attack not only Israel but America. (Hint: PLO leader Yasser Arafat and his successor Mahmoud Abbas, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and even al-Qaida top dog Ayman al-Zawahiri were all trained by the KGB.) Little things like why the U.S. lost the Vietnam War when our heroic soldiers won every single battle – and how current Secretary of State John Kerry greatly facilitated this loss by championing KGB disinformation. Little things like why Marxism is increasingly manifesting in the U.S., even at the highest levels of government, creating a virtual coup d’etat intended to “fundamentally transform” free America into a centrally planned socialist state.
Is that relevant enough for you?
To me, as someone who is already a student of the strategies and tactics of deception, “Disinformation” is like the final piece of a giant jigsaw puzzle that’s been missing one element. That piece, finally put in place, completes the picture that makes the chaos of the modern world truly understandable.
Although Pacepa and his co-author Rychlak brilliantly cover many of the really consequential disinformation campaigns that have misled and brainwashed so much of today’s world, there is one disinformation campaign – which affects Pacepa personally – that still needs to be exposed, and that is happening right now, today.
That’s right. Today, July 28, 2013, is the 35th anniversary of the day Pacepa arrived in the U.S., forever leaving behind the high-level world of communist espionage. He gathered up his courage and walked into the U.S. Embassy in West Germany and informed the officer on duty that he, a two-star general and top official in the vast Soviet intelligence machine, wanted to defect to America.
So far, so good. He was whisked out on a night flight.
But there was a problem. Even though President Carter had approved Pacepa’s defection and granted him asylum, the general soon discovered he had done his job way too well. You see, he had so convinced Carter that Ceausescu was a great guy – a moderate, “Westernized” communist leader, one interested in freedom and trade, a man the U.S. “could do business with,” unlike all those nasty “hardliners” back in Moscow – that now, when he informed Carter it was all a ruse, an act, a disinformation campaign, the president of the United States didn’t believe him! Carter’s big ego was way too invested in believing he was going to be the one to dismantle communism by embracing the “maverick” Ceausescu and thereby driving a stake into the heart of the Soviet bloc, causing it to crumble. As usual, Carter was terminally naïve.
In reality, Ceausescu was one of the most detestable leaders of the last century, and life in Romania was darker and more repressive than even Moscow, very similar to today’s ultra-repressive personality cult in North Korea.
It wasn’t until Reagan came into the Oval Office that Pacepa was believed. In fact, after reading Pacepa’s “Red Horizons,” Reagan immediately – the next day – altered U.S. policy toward Ceausescu’s Romania, recognizing it as the adversary it truly was and cutting off “most favored nation” trading status. This is why some in Romania still hate Pacepa to this day.
It’s unusual – no, it’s extremely rare – to encounter a person like Pacepa who lived, worked and conspired, not just as an eyewitness, but as a major participant in high-level deception and mass manipulation, yet who somehow managed to leave it all due to a crisis of conscience. Most often, people so swept up in power and deception just stay that way until they die. Pacepa had a strong, inborn sense of decency that couldn’t be completely destroyed by the overwhelming Soviet communist lie-machine that consumed almost everyone and everything in its path.

Thus, to have a witness such as Pacepa – the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect during the entire Cold War era – is a treasure. And for this reason, his book, as well as the movie, are likewise treasures.

Now, about that disinformation campaign we wish to neutralize today: The main reason Mihai Pacepa – or “Mike,” as his friends call him in the U.S. – still has to live under a CIA-created identity is that, to this day, there are powerful people in Romania who regard him as a traitor. In fact, since the release of this new book and film, there are active measures to attack and defame him and perhaps worse.

But now, the tables may providentially be turning, as a major talk show in that nation’s capital of Bucharest is broadcasting a special six-hour show today, which is airing the entire two-hour film “Disinformation: The Secret Strategy to Destroy the West” (with Romanian subtitles). It will also feature an interview with former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, who wrote the “Introduction” to “Disinformation.”

Here’s a Romanian TV commercial teasing today’s broadcast of the “Disinformation” documentary:

Decades ago, to free Romania from one of the communist world’s nastiest dictators, Radio Free Europe actually read Pacepa’s “Red Horizons” over the air so all Romanians could hear it. Today, with the “lie machine” still working overtime to defame Pacepa – who in reality is a national hero for having so devastatingly exposed his former boss, Ceausescu – maybe this nationwide broadcast of “Disinformation” will shake things up over there again.

Meanwhile, back in the good old USA, if you’re a reader, get the book – it’s sensational (read the Amazon reviews). If you’re more of a film watcher, do yourself a tremendous favor and get the movie. (It shot up to the No. 1-selling film documentary in the country on Amazon within two days of its release last month.) Watch it, show it to your friends and share it with others. It’s both an education and a revelation. I believe you’ll appreciate it every bit as much as I do.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/my-favorite-communist-spy-chief/#IgEBmj7Y37231Mg6.99 

The Affordable Care Act's Rate-Setting Won't Work



Continuing efforts by congressional Republicans to "defund" further implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, even if it takes shutting down the federal government, are willfully destructive. As Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.) told the press last week, "I think it's the dumbest idea I've ever heard . . . as long as Barack Obama is president the Affordable Care Act is gonna be law."
Clearly, the foremost achievement of President Obama's first term is the Affordable Care Act, and when fully implemented the law will move America closer to universal health coverage—something many progressives have sought for years. Like it or not, the law—at least its foundation—is here to stay, and lawmakers ought to focus over the next year on ensuring a relatively smooth implementation.
Associated Press
Although I've been critical of many components of the law, there is still much to applaud. Accountable Care Organizations could eliminate duplicative services and prevent medical errors while seeking to reduce costs for individuals, particularly if their creation ultimately leads to the end of fee-for-service medicine, as I believe it will. In addition, the Health Insurance Marketplace exchange systems, once implemented, will provide individuals with competitive plan options based on price, services, quality and other factors. Even more important, the exchanges will make the process of securing health insurance much easier and more transparent for millions who don't currently have it.
The administration's decision to delay implementation of the employer mandate until 2015 will help funnel individuals and families who do not get insurance through their employer into the exchanges. While this may benefit the participating insurers in the short term, this also accelerates the trend toward divorcing health care from employment. This is not a radical idea, and was even proposed by Sen. John McCainin his 2008 presidential campaign. That development will lead to the end of job lock for workers and contribute to a more competitive American business community in the longer run.
That said, the law still has its flaws, and American lawmakers and citizens have both an opportunity and responsibility to fix them.
One major problem is the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body. By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.
There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting—the essential mechanism of the IPAB—has a 40-year track record of failure. What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has indicated that the IPAB, in its current form, won't save a single dime before 2021. As everyone in Washington knows, but less frequently admits, CBO projections of any kind—past five years or so—are really just speculation. I believe the IPAB will never control costs based on the long record of previous attempts in many of the states, including my own state of Vermont.
If Medicare is to have a secure future, we have to move away from fee-for-service medicine, which is all about incentives to spend more, and has no incentives in the system to keep patients healthy. The IPAB has no possibility of helping to solve this major problem and will almost certainly make the system more bureaucratic and therefore drive up administrative costs.
To date, 22 Democrats have joined Republicans in the House and Senate in support of legislation to do away with the IPAB. Yet because of the extraordinary partisanship on Capitol Hill and Republican threats to defund the law through the appropriations process, it is unlikely that any change in the Affordable Care Act will take place soon.
The IPAB will cause frustration to providers and patients alike, and it will fail to control costs. When, and if, the atmosphere on Capitol Hill improves and leadership becomes interested again in addressing real problems instead of posturing, getting rid of the IPAB is something Democrats and Republicans ought to agree on.

Mr. Dean, governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2002 and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is a strategic adviser to McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP.

Monday, July 29, 2013

The Women of Islam

For his day, the Prophet Muhammad was a feminist. The doctrine he laid out as the revealed word of God considerably improved the status of women in 7th century Arabia. In local pagan society, it was the custom to bury alive unwanted female newborns; Islam prohibited the practice. Women had been treated as possessions of their husbands; Islamic law made the education of girls a sacred duty and gave women the right to own and inherit property. Muhammad even decreed that sexual satisfaction was a woman's entitlement. He was a liberal at home as well as in the pulpit. The Prophet darned his own garments and among his wives and concubines had a trader, a warrior, a leatherworker and an imam.
Of course, ancient advances do not mean that much to women 14 centuries later if reform is, rather than a process, a historical blip subject to reversal. While it is impossible, given their diversity, to paint one picture of women living under Islam today, it is clear that the religion has been used in most Muslim countries not to liberate but to entrench inequality. The Taliban, with its fanatical subjugation of the female sex, occupies an extreme, but it nevertheless belongs on a continuum that includes, not so far down the line, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan and the relatively moderate states of Egypt and Jordan. Where Muslims have afforded women the greatest degree of equality--in Turkey--they have done so by overthrowing Islamic precepts in favor of secular rule. As Riffat Hassan, professor of religious studies at the University of Louisville, puts it, "The way Islam has been practiced in most Muslim societies for centuries has left millions of Muslim women with battered bodies, minds and souls."


Part of the problem dates to Muhammad. Even as he proclaimed new rights for women, he enshrined their inequality in immutable law, passed down as God's commandments and eventually recorded in scripture. The Koran allots daughters half the inheritance of sons. It decrees that a woman's testimony in court, at least in financial matters, is worth half that of a man's. Under Shari'a, or Muslim law, compensation for the murder of a woman is half the going rate for men. In many Muslim countries, these directives are incorporated into contemporary law. For a woman to prove rape in Pakistan, for example, four adult males of "impeccable" character must witness the penetration, in accordance with Shari'a.
Family law in Islamic countries generally follows the prescriptions of scripture. This is so even in a country like Egypt, where much of the legal code has been secularized. In Islam, women can have only one spouse, while men are permitted four. The legal age for girls to marry tends to be very young. Muhammad's favorite wife, A'isha, according to her biographer, was six when they wed, nine when the marriage was consummated. In Iran the legal age for marriage is nine for girls, 14 for boys. The law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls to 14, but this year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed the move. An attempt by conservatives to abolish Yemen's legal minimum age of 15 for girls failed, but local experts say it is rarely enforced anyway. (The onset of puberty is considered an appropriate time for a marriage to be consummated.)
Wives in Islamic societies face great difficulty in suing for divorce, but husbands can be released from their vows virtually on demand, in some places merely by saying "I divorce you" three times. Though in most Muslim states, divorces are entitled to alimony, in Pakistan it lasts only three months, long enough to ensure the woman isn't pregnant. The same three-month rule applies even to the Muslim minority in India. There, a national law provides for long-term alimony, but to appease Islamic conservatives, authorities exempted Muslims.


Fear of poverty keeps many Muslim women locked in bad marriages, as does the prospect of losing their children. Typically, fathers win custody of boys over the age of six and girls after the onset of puberty. Maryam, an Iranian woman, says she has stayed married for 20 years to a philandering opium addict she does not love because she fears losing guardianship of her teenage daughter. "Islam supposedly gives me the right to divorce," she says. "But what about my rights afterward?"
Women's rights are compromised further by a section in the Koran, sura 4:34, that has been interpreted to say that men have "pre-eminence" over women or that they are "overseers" of women. The verse goes on to say that the husband of an insubordinate wife should first admonish her, then leave her to sleep alone and finally beat her. Wife beating is so prevalent in the Muslim world that social workers who assist battered women in Egypt, for example, spend much of their time trying to convince victims that their husbands' violent acts are unacceptable.




Beatings are not the worst of female suffering. Each year hundreds of Muslim women die in "honor killings"-- murders by husbands or male relatives of women suspected of disobedience, usually a sexual indiscretion or marriage against the family's wishes. Typically, the killers are punished lightly, if at all. In Jordan a man who slays his wife or a close relative after catching her in the act of adultery is exempt from punishment. If the situation only suggests illicit sex, he gets a reduced sentence. The Jordanian royal family has made the rare move of condemning honor killings, but the government, fearful of offending conservatives, has not put its weight behind a proposal to repeal laws that grant leniency for killers. Jordan's Islamic Action Front, a powerful political party, has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, saying the proposal would "destroy our Islamic, social and family values by stripping men of their humanity when they surprise their wives or female relatives committing adultery."
Honor killings are an example of a practice that is commonly associated with Islam but actually has broader roots. It is based in medieval tribal culture, in which a family's authority, and ultimately its survival, was tightly linked to its honor. Arab Christians have been known to carry out honor killings. However, Muslim perpetrators often claim their crimes are justified by harsh Islamic penalties, including death for adultery. And so religious and cultural customs become confused.


Female circumcision, also called female genital mutilation, is another case in point. It involves removing part or all of a girl's clitoris and labia in an effort to reduce female sexual desire and thereby preserve chastity. FGM is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa and in Egypt, with scattered cases in Asia and other parts of the Middle East. The World Health Organization estimates that up to 140 million girls and women have undergone the procedure. Some Muslims believe it is mandated by Islam, but the practice predates Muhammad and is also common among some Christian communities.
Sexual anxiety lies at the heart of many Islamic strictures on women. They are required to cover their bodies--in varying degrees in different places--for fear they might arouse the lust of men other than their husbands. The Koran instructs women to "guard their modesty," not to "display their beauty and ornaments" and to "draw their veils." Saudi women typically don a billowy black cloak called an abaya, along with a black scarf and veil over the face; morality police enforce the dress code by striking errant women with sticks. The women of Iran and Sudan can expose the face but must cover the hair and the neck.
In most Islamic countries, coverings are technically optional. Some women, including some feminists, wear them because they like them. They find that the veil liberates them from unwanted gazes and hassles from men. But many Muslim women feel cultural and family pressure to cover themselves. Recently a Muslim fundamentalist group in the Indian province of Kashmir demanded that women start wearing veils. When the call was ignored, hooligans threw acid in the faces of uncovered women.
Limits placed on the movement of Muslim women, the jobs they can hold and their interactions with men are also rooted in fears of unchaste behavior. The Taliban took these controls to an extreme, but the Saudis are also harsh, imposing on women some of the tightest restrictions on personal and civil freedoms anywhere in the world. Saudi women are not allowed to drive. They are effectively forbidden education in fields such as engineering and law. They can teach and provide medical care to other women but are denied almost all other government jobs. Thousands have entered private business, but they must work segregated from men and in practice are barred from advancement.


Though Iran is remembered in the West mostly for its repressive ayatullahs, women there enjoy a relatively high degree of liberty. Iranian women drive cars, buy and sell property, run their own businesses, vote and hold public office. In most Muslim countries tradition keeps ordinary women at home and off the street, but Iran's avenues are crowded with women day and night. They make up 25% of the work force, a third of all government employees and 54% of college students. Still, Iranian women are--like women in much of the Arab world--forbidden to travel overseas without the permission of their husband or father, though the rule is rarely enforced in Iran.
Gender reforms are slow and hard-fought. In 1999 the Emir of Kuwait, Sheik Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, issued a decree for the first time giving women the right to vote in and stand for election to the Kuwaiti parliament, the only lively Arab legislature in the Persian Gulf. Conservatives in parliament, however, blocked its implementation. In addition, the legislature has voted to segregate the sexes at Kuwait University. Morocco's government has proposed giving women more marriage and property rights and a primary role in developmental efforts, but fundamentalists are resisting the measures.




Muslim women are starting to score political victories, including election to office. In Syria 26 of the 250 members of parliament are female. In Iraq the numbers are 19 out of 250. Four Muslim countries have been or are currently led by women. In Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, they rose to prominence on the coattails of deceased fathers or husbands. But Turkey's Tansu Ciller, Prime Minister from 1993 to 1995, won entirely on her own.
Turkey is an exception to many rules. Women in Turkey are the most liberated in the Muslim world, though Malaysia and Indonesia come close, having hosted relatively progressive cultures before Islam came to Southeast Asia in the 9th century. In Turkish professional life women enjoy a level of importance that is impressive not only by the standards of other Islamic countries but also by European lights. Turkey's liberalism is a legacy of the republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, an aggressive secularist who gave women rights unprecedented in the Muslim world (even if he found it hard to accept women as equals in his own life). Last week the Turkish parliament went a step further by reforming family law. Previously, a man was the head of the household, able to make unilateral decisions concerning children. No more. The law also establishes community property in marriages and raises the marriageable age of girls from 15 to 18.


Around the Islamic world, women are scoring other victories, small and large. Iran's parliament recently compromised with conservative clerics to allow a single young woman to study abroad, albeit with her father's permission. Bangladesh passed legislation increasing the punishments for crimes against women, including rape, kidnapping and acid attacks. Egypt has banned female circumcision and made it easier for women to sue for divorce. In Qatar women have the right to participate in municipal elections and are promised the same rights in first-ever parliamentary balloting scheduled to take place by 2003. Bahrain has assured women voters and candidates that they will be included in new elections for its suspended parliament.


Saudi Arabia, the chief holdout, has at least pledged to start issuing ID cards to women. Today the only legal evidence of a Saudi woman's existence is the appearance of her name on her husband's card. If she gets divorced, her name goes on her father's card; if he's dead, her brother's; and if she has no brother, the card of her closest male relative, even if she scarcely knows him. Manar, 35, a Riyadh translator, thinks ID cards for women will make a real difference. "As long as you are a follower, you cannot have a separate opinion, you cannot be outspoken," she says. "Once you have a separate identity, then other things will come." For most Muslim women, there are many things left to come.
—Reported by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Amanda Bower/ New York, Andrew Finkel/Istanbul, Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi, Scott MacLeod/Riyadh, Azadeh Moaveni/Tehran, Amany Radwan/ Cairo, Matt Rees/Amman and Simon Robinson/ Sana'a



Could Electric Cars Be Bad For The Environment?

An electric charging station is seen on Tuesday, June 18, 2013 in Montpelier, Vt. (Toby Talbot/AP)
An electric charging station is seen on Tuesday, June 18,
2013 in Montpelier, Vt. (Toby Talbot/AP)
Plug-in electric cars have lower greenhouse gas emissions than the average gas-guzzling vehicle.
But if you look at the environmental impacts over the car’s life cycle — from manufacturing, powering and, eventually, retiring them to the junkyard — the electric car’s environmental merits are greatly diminished.
Conservationist Ozzie Zehner argues in a piece called “Unclean at Any Speed“ that electric cars may be worse for the environment than traditional gas-powered cars.
Zehner, who is also author of the 2012 book “Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism,” writes in IEEE Spectrum magazine:
When the National Academies researchers projected technology advancements and improvement to the U.S. electrical grid out to 2030, they still found no benefit to driving an electric vehicle. If those estimates are correct, the sorcery surrounding electric cars stands to worsen public health and the environment rather than the intended opposite. But even if the researchers are wrong, there is a more fundamental illusion at work on the electric-car stage.
Don Anair, co-author of the Union of Concerned Scientists 2012 report “State of Charge” offered this response to Zehner’s article:
Powered by today’s electricity grid, operating an electric vehicle produces less global warming emissions than the average new compact gasoline vehicle (averaging 27 mpg) everywhere in the country. In regions with the cleanest electricity grids, electric vehicles out perform even the best hybrids. And factoring in estimates of global warming emissions from manufacturing reduces, but doesn’t negate the benefits of EVs, as I illustrate in the following blog post.