Inferior Beings



The Sunday Times carried this disturbing report of a mother, Zeian Asfura, who lost a  daughter and two grandchildren in Gaza the other day, yet seems willing to hand over more of her children as likely brides of a Hamas military commander, as if the young women are inferior beings and have no say in the matter.

Which may reflect the reality of the situation in a part of the world where women have few, if any rights, but it's still depressing nonetheless.

Mother praises Hamas son-in-law even as daughter dies


Hamada Hamada, GAZA, Inna Lazareva, TEL AVIV - The Sunday Times
Palestinians run for shelter in Gaza City yesterday during an Israeli airstrike (AFP 
PHOTO/ROBERTO SCHMIDT/Getty Images)

TO ISRAELIS, Mohammed Deif is public enemy No 1. But to his mother-in-law, whose daughter and two grandchildren were killed during an attempt to assassinate him last week, Hamas’s top military commander is a hero.

“Should Deif request the hand of any of my other daughters, I will happily consent and even if she, too, is martyred I will consent to the third,” said Zeian Asfura, 61.

“It is an honour to have Deif a husband to any of my daughters and be a father to their children.”

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Asfura said when she agreed in 2011 that her daughter could marry a man at the top of Israel’s most wanted list, she was ready for the worst. “When I agreed the marriage, I in effect consented to a fate of martyrdom for my daughter,” she said.

As the top commander of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, Deif has tormented the Jewish state for three decades, deploying suicide bombers and directing the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. Tuesday’s assassination attempt against him, believed to be the fifth, involved an airstrike using four one-ton bombs and four penetrating bombs capable of destroying underground cavities.

Although he appears to have escaped, living up to his nickname “the cat with nine lives”, Israel was more successful the next day, when it killed three other top Hamas commanders.

The attacks have been a serious blow to Hamas, which responded by executing 18 alleged collaborators — seven of them in public — whom it accused of “sharing information with the enemy about the location of tunnels, fighters and rockets”.

Both sides, meanwhile, have continued to exchange fire. Israel pounded Gaza with 30 airstrikes yesterday after vowing that “Hamas will pay a heavy price” for the death of a four-year-old boy who was hit by a mortar.

But hopes of a breakthrough were raised after the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, announced a new round of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians in Cairo.

More than 2,100 Palestinians and 68 Israelis have died during the seven-week conflict. “What interests us now is putting a stop to the bloodshed,” said Abbas after meeting the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

“As soon as a truce goes into effect, the two sides can sit down and discuss their demands.”

The Israelis, meanwhile, are continuing to talk tough. On Friday, the Israeli Defence Forces threatened a resumption of “ground actions” in Gaza for the first time since they pulled out on August 5.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has approved the call-up of up to 10,000 reservists.



Women as Chattel (5 July 2014)





Here's an extract of an article from The Independent which says a lot about the state of women in a fundamentalist Islamist state - not only do the jihadists see it as their right to kidnap women to be their brides, but the official government ID cards are required to display a woman's marital status.   

The Iraqi army and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) are battling for control of Iraq’s largest refinery outside Baiji north of Baghdad, with each side holding part of the complex. But in the town of Baiji itself, a few miles away, which is completely under the control of Isis, residents say they are most frightened by Isis militants going door to door asking about the numbers of married and unmarried women in the house.

“I told them that there were only two women in the house and both were married,” said Abu Lahid. “They said that many of their mujahedin [fighters] were unmarried and wanted a wife. They insisted on coming into my house to look at the women’s ID cards [which in Iraq show marital status].”

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