Tuesday, July 03, 2007

An Open Letter To The Fanatics

Fellow Muslims,

Leave. Salman. Rushdie. Alone.

Why do you people care that his book is blasphemous?
He doesn't like AlRasool.
..So?
He is entitled to his own opinion!

What really bothers me, is those of you who are annoyed with how Arabs and Muslims are always the bad guys in movies, but support those who want Salman Rushdi executed!

Why?

May I remind everyone, (or inform them), that according to Islam, if you are born Muslim, and decide to, well, not be a Muslim anymore, you should not be executed. Only if you are Muslim by choice, can you be punished for changing your religion.
So calling for his execution is sheer fanaticism and blind rage.

May I also remind those who still think it is right for Muslims to be marching for his death and issuing fatwas demanding it, that Somalia is still the most poverty-stricken country in the world.

Instead of us pulling together to stop our Somali brothers and sisters from dying of hunger, we all choose to focus on a man whom we wish to murder, therfore shifting more people's attention to him and helping him sell more and more books.

What, do you people like death in general?

All this really does show your devotion to AlRasool and his people. Shouting in the streets and declaring your hatred for Salman Rushdie at the dinner table.
Really.

You disgust me.

ubergirl


By the way, meet seven year old Mohamed:



He lives in Somalia.
In 2006, he spent two months at a clinic run by the French relief agency Doctors Without Borders. He was treated by a British doctor.
It's good that the French have time to waste on the poor, seeing as we have more important matters to deal with like hiring hitmen for Salman Rushdie and others who we believe are hell-bound.

32 comments:

Anonymous said...

My dear ubergirl,if you ever run for office in Canada, I'll vote for you.

Anonymous said...

Now why would you want to do that, Eva? Why would you offer your Canadian "vote" to someone from another country running for office in Canada. Get a grip on yourself.

Ubergirl, you have a fan in Eva, but you are far too intense to be a Canadian politician. I wouldn't vote for you. I do enjoy reading some of your posts, though. You'd make a great activist.

Anonymous said...

I so agree. Muslim reactions to the whole Satanic Verses fiasco in general have been so extreme. Way to represent, people. Is it so impossible for us to keep our opinions to ourselves for the sake of maintaining face? I know changing people's infantile reflexes to anything remotely 'blasphemous' is nearly impossible, but really, we all need a good seminar in Diplomacy.



And hey, I've never heard that there's a difference in treatment of apostates born Muslim and apostates who converted. Can you cite any sources?

Anonymous said...

This post is funny, I'm loving how you puke religous information as if you studied the shit for years. I myself am no fan of organized religon, but it goes on my last never when people choose to follow a certain religon then start to pick and choose what they want to keep, or what they want to flush down the piss(occasionally shit) bowl. It's great that you're thinking outside the box, but talking about religon without studying is as bad as the extremists rearranging what they like to kill people like me. I really do feel for you on the whole Somalia issue, but I have to admit the whole "meet seven year old Mohammed" was funny, it reminds of those late night christian adverts "For 70 cents a day you can provide little Ashley with food and an education, lend a hand to Ashley, and Jesus will lend a hand to you."

ubergirl87 said...

النظام السياسي في الإسلام
تأليف الدكتور سعود بن سلمان آل سعود
الدكتور سليمان بن قاسم العيد
الدكتور خالد بن منصور الدريس
الدكتور عبدالعزيز بن سعود الضويحي
الدكتور تيسير بن سعد أبو حيمد
الدكتور عادل بن علي الشدي


Is where I got my information.

And anonymous, I HAVE in fact been studying Islam for years.
And I'm glad you find starving children amusing.

Anonymous said...

"Only if you are Muslim by choice, can you be punished for changing your religion."____If that is really the rule, then that is equally wrong. Anyone should be free to seek for themselves, and not locked into one religion or another. Scientology also tries to lock people in.

Anonymous said...

Why??

Because of Child abuse and Neglect.

These Muslim Fanatics calling for the murder of Rushdie were badly abused growing up.

That's why they like death so much.It gives them the chance to act out the murderous rage that has been brewing inside of them for so long. All the while thinking of it as a heroic deed for the Muslim faith. Even though in reality it's murder.

Children who cannot depend upon their caretaker to work through their daily fears have to "swallow down whole" their deadly abusers and store their abusive personalities in their brains, in a dissociated part of the right hemisphere's amygdalan network, a persecutory personality termed an alter. Its purpose is to hold the early terrors of abuse and abandonment in a split-off form that allows the child to not have to express his pain and humiliation to the parent (usually the mother) for fear of completely losing her and being killed. The alter allows the child to blame himself for the abuse, then splitting himself as victim into two additional internal alters: the Hero Self, who clings to his Killer Mother Alter and protects her, and the Bad Self, whom he must punish to avoid having the mother completely abandon and kill him.

Alters are the time bombs embedded in the right brain during childhood that are the sources of all later violence. Because they are dissociated modules, the adult can seem to be any personality mode, even passive or withdrawn, but when they act out the earlier hurts and fears and rages against a Bad Self victim they can become a murderer or terrorist or soldier massacring thousands without guilt. It is the dissociated aspect of social violence and war that allows so many psychologists to conclude that men like Goering or Auschwitz guards or bin Laden are "perfectly normal," since their left-brain personalities are well organized, not "psychotic," while their right-brain dissociated alter modules periodically take over and commit their violence.

Salman Rushdie is a "Bad Self Victim". In their irrational right brains he has to be punished for his "sins". Just like they were as children. And whoever does the deed will be called a "Hero".

It's sick I know but that's what happens when people are mistreated as children.

Anonymous said...

Leah, you'd be surprised how many immigrants run for office in Canada. Some actually get elected. But that's not the point.

I do not expect ubergirl to hop on the first plane to Canada in order to get elected. I merely expressed my appreciation for her independent thinking. There is this thing called humor. Some day you'll learn to recognize it.

Anonymous said...

Eva, no I'm not surprised by immigrants running for office. You are talking about someone who is a citizen of another country and has no allegiance to Canada. I think Canadians can run their own country just fine.
But that is not my point, either.

I appreciate humour as much as anyone. For instance, I find it very funny that you fawn all over an inexperienced 19 year old teenager. I agree she is very bright and is an independent thinker, as you said. But she is a teenager not a messiah. Like I said before. Get a grip on yourself.

MOe999 said...

jason, a person is merely scuplt by his own experiences.. yet you still see so much voilence around. i'm not an idealist nor realist, maybe a mixture of both. my point is people don't seem to diffrenciate between what's real & not, all they care about is things that really don't matter instead trying to change themselves to help others when it comes to having good sense in life. i know if i change just one person in a certain thing and s/he sleeps on it, it would be enough to change the world. voilnce is never the answer, while we come together when it's about music.. the song union by BEP expresses that.


Ubergirl, :-)


MOhammed

ahmad banjar said...

i didn't know anything about Salman Rushdie before reading this post and after reading the post i got a little curios , so i googled him and i found some links about him .

and of course there was some links talking about how bad is this guy and he should be killed and our writers shouldn't defend him .

and there was this amazing article and this is the link :
http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/news/alarabiya-Jun-23-07.html
this article answered alot of my questions . and the writer really talked about real things . things i knew its wrong but i couldn't say why its wrong and i couldn't convince ppl around me its wrong .

some of our ppl find its hard to except the fact that ppl are deferent and ppl dont think the same way they do .
some ppl cant get the fact that some ppl have deferent values than their values . they are just not ready to change , they think its saver to live the way they've been living for years .

i didn't read the book yet and i dont think i will read it any time soon because its banned over here so i cant judge him and say he's either right or wrong . but i dont know why some ppl have problems with writers , we all know what happened to rajaa al sanee and to her book here . and not just her Rajaa is just an example .

any way i think i have to stop now because i can talk about these kind of stuff like forever because its some kind of relief to me talking about these things , i dont like to talk about certain subjects in public and i have my reasons .

thank you upergirl for this amazing post . and before i go i just wana say Eva ... stop alluring uper to move to Canada , we need girls with such her mind here in saudi arabia :p

zahrat ilma6ba5 said...

a7mad esmaha uBer mo uPer :D

أبو سنان said...

It is interesting to note that if not for the idiotic reactions to the book, which I have read, by extremists, no one in the world would know who Rushdie is.

His books are crap, he has little or no talent as a writer. These idiots who protested against him made a second rate writer one of the best known writers in the world.

It is just like the Mohammed cartoons issue, if not for the stupid actions of the extremists no one would have known about them. Because of their retarded responses the images of Mohammed were spread all over the world.

I dont know who is worse, the idiots who make stuff that speaks ill of Islam, or the fanatics who do their best to make sure it gets spread all over the world.

Anonymous said...

moe999:

You're right. But the question is WHY? Why can"t they differentiate between reality and fantasy? And why do they care about things that really don't matter. What early experiences "sculpted" them to think and behave in this way?

Anonymous said...

Jason did u have to put in that bit about abusers being 'usually the mother'. Do you have any proof of this at all? No I didn't think so.
Besides I don't think it's important to find out why they behave this way. Why appease them?

Anonymous said...

Uber I thought your post was funny. When you said
'only if you are a Muslim by choice can you be punished for changing your religion'.
Oh, OK then, that sounds reasonable. What is the punishment? Execution, oh.

It's a good point well made about Somalia though. What is it with these death fanatics?

It could be about social control. Get people wound up about things they can do nothing about (like Salmon Rushdie being given a knighthood in Britain) so they feel angry but powerless. Then manipulate their emotions into love for their religion/country. Governments love that stuff and do it all over the world.

Sewmouse said...

أبو سنان said it right! Every word that I would have said - but even more eloquently.

That book "Satanic Verses" is crap. It is virtually unreadable, and would have died an ignominious death all on its own had not the extremists decided to advertise it for Mr. Rushdie. I know for a fact I'd never have even attempted to read it if not for the uproar.

As for little Mohamed - I hope that as he grows up he has teachers that are as wise as you, Uber - teachers that emphasize that which is good, and right, and wholesome, rather than that which is of hate and violence and death.

Anonymous said...

Kay: The evidence is massive. I think it's very important to find out why, so as to remove the sources of their violence.

Here are just a few examples.

Dorothy Bloch, "So the Witch Won't Eat Me": Fantasy and the Child's Fear of Infanticide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978,

James Gilligan, Violence:Reflections on a National Epidemic. New York: Vintage Books, 1996,

James F. Masterson, Psychotherapy of the Borderline Adult: A Developmental Approach. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1976,

James Masterson found children of borderline mothers felt that "the only way they could please their own mothers was to kill themselves" and that their mothers actually often told them "I'd be better off without you" and "I could kill you."

Dorothy Bloch is one of the first psychiatrists actually treating young children,And when the displacement onto monsters is investigated further, she found they picked up the mother doll and "stated with deep feeling, 'She wants her child to die!'" And, of course, she regularly found the mother was violent toward the child or constantly said things like "I wish I never had you"

James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist who has spent his life talking to violent criminals in prisons, reveals that they all were horribly abused as children:
As children, these men were shot, axed, scalded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of windows, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their 'pimps.'

Islamic terrorists today regularly report their mothers brought them up to be a suicide bomber, a martyr, even picking which son should die and which must remain alive to support her in her old age. One mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber who had blown himself to bits told the reporter "with resolutely cheerful countenance, "I was very happy when I heard. To be a martyr, that's something. Very few people can do it. I prayed to thank God. I know my son is close to me."

Explosive devices to kill themselves and innocent civilians are called "Mothers of Satan." In Gaza, a mother of three Hamas suicide bombers videotaped his path to suicide, saying she wished she had 100 sons to sacrifice rather than three, and was made famous as "The Mother of Martyrs." Mothers often dress their little children in pretend explosives to encourage their suicide. Terrorists often drag themselves after being shot to their mothers, saying, "O my mother, I have been martyred," or "You bore me to die." Witnesses report that "When at last her son is martyred, she is said to be overjoyed to hear the news and emits a zaghrada (a high-pitched wailing sound made by women on happy occasions such as the entrance of a bride and groom at their wedding), sometimes even expressing the wish that all her sons will thus be taken.

I can't make this stuff up.

Anonymous said...

"I dont know who is worse, the idiots who make stuff that speaks ill of Islam, or the fanatics who do their best to make sure it gets spread all over the world."_____The fanatics, of course. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making jokes about or criticizing any religion. All ideas and beliefs are open to criticism. Then those who think they are true can produce evidence to support their beliefs. Those who simply get angry and insist that they are right because they are right are both absurd and (in some cases) dangerous.

Anonymous said...

Jason, In the UK we have a saying 'a mothers place is in the wrong'.

The suicide thing is weird. I remember years ago when I was a child and the Iran/Iraq war was going on I saw a programme on TV about Iranian parents sending their young children to help clear the land mines. The parents (the programme interviewed both the mothers and fathers) said they were very happy for their children to be martyred.
I was shocked and later spoke to some Muslim friends about the same age as me (nine or ten) and they looked at me in surprise and said 'what's wrong with that. The children will go to heaven?'.
Their mum and dad said the same thing.

Obviously though, women are not the major bringers of war and most pimps are men not women. To argue otherwise is just absurd.

Thanks for letting me talk through your comments Uber.

Anonymous said...

Kay: True. Men are the major bringers of wars. But the fantasies in the heads of soldiers and war leaders center around
"Killer Women" or "Killer Mothers." These are fantasies of course, but are nevertheless very powerful and drive them to kill. The reason: Because women are the major caretakers of little children. If fathers raised children then we'd have "killer Daddy" fantasies breaking out before and during wars. It's not to blame anyone but simply to try to understand the roots of violence.
Read Below:

the Enemy also assumes the Killer Woman imagery, as, for instance, in the Persian Gulf War when Saddam Hussein was depicted as a dangerous pregnant mother with a nuclear bomb in her womb or as the mother of a death-baby.

The further back in history one goes, the more wars are openly considered as being fought for Killer Goddesses, from Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis and Kali to the Aztec mother-goddess Huitzilopochtli, who had "mouths all over her body" that cried out to be fed the blood of her soldiers.

If, as feminists of all stripes contend, violence and militarism are simply patriarchy write large, why are Motherlands the central focus of emotional group-fantasies about war? The answer is clear: all these "Dangerous Women" and Killer Motherland fantasies are mainly those of men. It is mainly men who kill under the delusion that "We have laid ourselves over the body of the motherland in order to revive her" or "We are to die so that the motherland may live; for while we live the motherland is dying." It was men on WWI battlefields who called their cannons "Mother" and say themselves as children waiting upon and feeding Her. It is men who as officers refer to themselves as the "company mother" and or as "the mother hen watching the other guys like they was my children."

Tribal groups, like nations, get into their killing moods by fusing with a maternal spirit. Most, like the !Kung bushmen, describe this fusion openly as obtaining Maternal Power: One warrior tells how he got his fighting power, his "hot !num": "when I was a tiny thing, sucking at my mother's breasts, I took n/um, I drank n/um…I was about three or four years old. I would cry, and cry, and cry…I was afraid of the n/um. N/um was hot and hurt." The fusion experience is similar to an temporal lobe epileptic seizure, and like these seizures, it provides the person experiencing it with convulsive tremors and feelings of powerful violence: "

The infanticidal childrearing of tribal societies is generally downplayed by anthropologists, who have idealized tribal mothering as badly as historians have idealized mothers before the 20th century. Most academics by now are familiar with how Margaret Mead left out how Samoan girls were routinely raped — which she represented as being "sexually free."

Infanticide was so widespread that few children grew up without seeing several of their siblings killed by their mother at birth. Mead kept infanticide out of her published reports, but wrote in her letters home "we've had one corpse float by, a newborn infant; they are always throwing away infants here." What is more, in many tribes the mothers ate every other newborn out of "baby hunger," and forced their other children to eat parts of their siblings too.

The Editor of the Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, Arthur Hippler, points out the idealization of the Alaskan Eskimos he worked with as pure "ethnographic bias. Infanticide was till recently routine, as was giving away children, killing them, neglecting their physical needs and refusing substantial emotional interaction. All this is done so smilingly and with such denial of reality that apparently only the most psychiatrically sophisticated observers noted it. Instead of the smiling, friendly, non-aggressive mask presented, Eskimo life in reality is a seeting cauldron of angers and violences, emotional abandonments and impulsive acting out" within their families. They usually are a variety of schizoid
personalities, moving easily back and forth from affection to attack, saying to their child, "Do you love your new baby brother? Why don't you kill him?" As adults, they can be overly hospitable to you at one moment and then try to kill you the next with little cause, since to them you have suddenly turned into a witch. Tribal myths often openly make the link between Killer Mothers and tribal wars. The Sambia say, "Numboolyu's wife, Chenchi, killed her first male child….Because she killed the first male child, we now fight—war."

Hitler said he was literally married to Germania: "Marriage is not for me and never will be. My only bride is my Motherland."

Hitler's conviction that he got his power from his mother was so literal that he kept pictures near his desks of both his actual mother, Clara, and of Medusa, the Greek goddess who murdered her own children. Hitler said of the painting of Medusa, "They are the eyes of my mother!" Medusa was so deadly that one look from her could kill you. Hitler endlessly practiced before a mirror so his eyes would be killing "mother-eyes" like those of his own deeply depressed mother. Staring at his Nazi soldiers, Hitler could empower them also to be fused with the powerful Killer Mother, saying, "I want to see again in the eyes of youth the gleam of the beast!"

There are many more examples I could give but I think you get the idea.

By the way: I could email u the full article with all the references. My Email address is redsexfestival@yahoo.com

Anonymous said...

Jason, is this some kind of New Age Freudism? Of course, primitive people act callously - could they do otherwise in an unforgiving environment? In animal kingdom, too, we see mothers kill and even eat their offsprings. In all events, mothers butchering their children are an aberration of nature.

To many men, especially those in patriarchal societies, women are either mothers or whores. Anything else would mean equality which is a concept they fear. It is out of this background that the myth of all-powerful goddesses arose and along came the notion of motherland and the sacrifice she commands. In short, men are just acting their fantasies about women.

As for the proud mothers of suicide bombers: blame that on islamist indoctrination. Save for the rare kamikaze and the equally rare Tamil Tigres (they, too, victims of indoctrination) no other culture has produced so many willing martyrs. By the way, where are the killer mothers of Buddhists, Jews and Christians? Any suicide bombers there?

Anonymous said...

Some of it is Freud. The good Freud. The rest is Object relations theory and neurobiology.

There is simply a TON of evidence pointing to mistreatment in childhood as the ultimate source of cruelty and violence. Nobody is made violent simply because they live in a harsh climate.

Human mothers butchering their children is unfortunately not an aberration of nature. MOST mothers and fathers throughout history have killed off their offspring. That includes Jews, Buddhists and Christians. Even today in many parts of the world infanticide remains a common practice.


Children throughout history have arguably been more vital, more gentle, more joyous, more trustful, more curious, more courageous and more innovative than adults. Yet adults throughout history have routinely called little children "beasts," "sinful," "greedy," "arrogant," "lumps of flesh," "vile," "polluted," "enemies," "vipers" and "infant fiends."1 Although it is extraordinarily difficult to believe, parents until relatively recently have been so frightened of and have so hated their newborn infants that they have killed them by the billions, routinely sent them out to extremely neglectful wetnurses, tied them up tightly in swaddling bandages lest they be overpowered by them, starved, mutilated, raped, neglected and beat them so badly that prior to modern times I have not been able to find evidence of a single parent who would not today be put in jail for child abuse. I have searched so hard during the past three decades for any exceptions to this extremely abusive pattern that I have offered a prize to anyone who could find even one "good mother" prior to the eighteenth century-the definition being one who would not today be incarcerated for child abuse. No one so far has claimed the prize. Instead, historians have assumed that my evidence for routinely abusive parenting must be terribly exaggerated, since if it were true it "would mean parents acted in direct opposition to their biological inheritance," and surely evolution "wouldn't be so careless...as to leave us too immature to care properly for our offspring."2

It is not surprising that the existence of widespread child abuse throughout history has been viewed with disbelief. 3 In this chapter, the historical evidence for each childrearing practice will be presented, focusing on the actual statements made by caretakers and children so that one can understand the intrapsychic reasons behind the abuse and neglect and show how parents have struggled against restaging their own childhoods and have slowly evolved the more loving, empathic childrearing which has been achieved by some families in the modern world.

INFANTICIDE AS CHILD SACRIFICE
Mothers who feel like killing their newborn children today are clinically found to be deeply depressed and lonely, because, according to Rheingold's study of 350 filicidal mothers, "It is only the fear of being a woman that can create the infanticidal impulse...having a child is the most forbidden act of self-realization...punishment is inescapable and punishment means annihilation...To appease the mother she must destroy the child, but the child is a love object too. To preserve the child she must renounce mother... She is trapped in a desperate conflict: kill mother and preserve the baby or kill the baby and preserve the mother."95 Mothers in the past routinely chose killing the baby, by the billions, driven to it by her devil alter (her own destructive mother image in her head).

In my previous articles on infanticide, I have shown that boy/girl sex ratios of preliterate tribes average 128/100, while boy/girl ratios from census and other sources in European history ranged from as high as 400/100 to 140/100 in the middle ages.96 With Indian and Chinese boy/girl ratios in the nineteenth century running at 300/100 and higher,97 and with current Asian statistics still showing over 200 million girls "missing" in the census figures,98 I have determined that it is likely that overall infanticide rates of both sexes exceeded 30 percent in antiquity and only slowly declined to the very small rate in advanced societies today.99 Multiplying these infanticide rates by the 80 billion human births in the past 100,000 years100-80 percent of them occurring before 1750, and even more of them occurring in areas with high Asian-style infanticide rates-a weighted average infanticide rate for the entire 80 billion births was likely at the very least 15 percent, or 12 billion children killed by their parents.

Even this astonishing figure is not the whole story of infanticide, however. Every study of infant death rates among children sent out to wetnurses and abandoned in foundling homes shows much higher death rates, running to over 70 per cent and higher, even in modern times.101 Doctors of every age agreed that "the most profound cause of the terrific waste of infant life [is] neglect...neglected by their own mothers and neglected by the nurses to whom they were abandoned..."102 Since parents who sent their children to wetnurse and foundling homes knew quite well they would likely not see them again-indeed, often they were sent to so-called "killing wetnurses" with a small sum of money under the tacit assumption that they would not be returned103-these "delayed infanticide" acts must be added to the estimated rate of child killing, increasing it by at the very least a third, or a total of 16 billion children killed by parental acts over the entire historical span. No wonder people in the past so often said that everywhere in their areas "you could hear coming out of the bottom of latrines and ponds and rivers the groanings of the children that one had thrown there."104

Although poverty played some part in this holocaust of children, it is doubtful if it was the main cause of child deaths. In the first place, the cost of bringing up a girl is no more than the cost of bringing up a boy, so the differential infanticide rates are certainly parental choices. When, for instance, Arabs dug a grave next to the birthing place of every new mother so "if the newborn child was a female she could be immediately thrown by her mother into the grave,"105 it was likely hatred of girls, not poverty, that was the motive. Secondly, if scarce resources were the main cause, then wealthy parents should kill less than poor. But the historical record shows exactly the opposite: historical boy/girl ratios are higher among wealthy parents,106 where economic necessity is no problem at all. Even in early modern England, the infant mortality rates for wealthy children were higher than the same rates for ordinary farmers, day laborers and craftsman.107 Thirdly, many wealthy high civilizations such as Greece, Rome, China, India, Hawaii and Tahiti are very infanticidal, especially among their elite classes. As one visitor to Hawaii reported, there probably wasn't a single mother who didn't throw one or more of her children to the sharks.108 There were even societies where virtually all newborn were killed to satisfy their overwhemling infanticidal needs, and infants had to be imported from adjoining groups to continue the society.109 Finally, many nations-like in Japan until recently-kill their children selectively in order to balance out an equal number of boys and girls, a practice called mabiki, or "thinning out" the less promising ones,110 again revealing a quite different motive than the purely economic. It is most certainly not economics that causes so many depressed women on the delivery tables even today to implore their mothers not to kill them after they have given birth.111 Women since the beginning of time have felt that their children "really" belonged to God-a symbol of the grandmother, and that "the child was a gift that God had every right to reclaim."112 When killing her child, therefore, the mother was simply acting as her own mother's avenger.

The book that this chapter came from can be read in it's entirety here: http://www.psychohistory.com
For FREE.

Do read it so you can know where I'm coming from.

Anonymous said...

I forgot. It's also based on the findings of psychohistory.

Anonymous said...

Jason, you are obviously very intelligent and well read you should get your own blog.
The sound of children coming from latrines and ponds, was never normal in the UK and as far as I know America (the two countries where I have lived). Actually, your comments made me really depressed and put me in a bad mood for hours.
I want to be able to ignore these problems that happen so far away to people who aren't me but I can't and so I have come back to comment.

One of the saddest things in the world is the huge numbers of infanticides. Nowadays though it really only occurs in vast numbers in countries that kill girl babies. Many families avoid having a dead baby by taking advantage of science and aborting a girl in the womb. The fact this happens to so many girls suggest it is a violence perpetrated on women rather than by them. However, if you want to believe otherwise go ahead. I don't care.

Mythical goddess' of war do nothing to change my opinion because they don't really exist except in the minds of the men who worship them. Men make tornados and hurricanes into women as well. Ever thought of that?

By the way Eskimo is considered a racially derogatory term. Nowadays people say Inuit which suggest the book you cited was written from a colonial perspective, years and years ago.

Thank you Uber, sorry for hogging the comments (especially with such a bleak subject)

Kay.

Anonymous said...

Kay: Thanks.

About the US and Britain having high infanticide and child death rates, It's not refering to the present day. That was back in the early modern period. The 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Where mortality rates were unbelievably high. Anywhere from 20 to 50 percent. These figures are about the same as current African and Asian rates. As high as these official rates are, they don't include all kinds of newborns that are killed outright and thrown away, since most people will never admit to such a thing. The figures for infanticide in America today I think are a few thousand a year? I believe. Still alot but nowhere near what it was a century or two ago. Read below:

No Place For Girls TIME Magazine
Monday, Dec. 10, 2001 By MEENAKSHI GANGULY DEOLI

Where did all the little girls go? Akhila, a 70-year-old midwife, can tell you. She has assisted at virtually all the births of the past five decades in Deoli, a village in the Indian state of Rajasthan with more than 5,000 residents?and very few girls. Plenty of the babies she delivered were female. What happened to them? "Dead, killed," she says bluntly. "As soon as a girl is born they say, 'Old lady, get out.' And after I leave, the mother twists its neck."

Throughout the developing world, boys, who can support parents when they get old, are favored over girls. In India, the enduring dowry system makes the situation worse: poor families can go bankrupt trying to raise the cash or goods needed to get a daughter married. A boy is a better bet on the future: maternity clinics throughout India specialize in aborting female fetuses following amniocentesis and ultrasound exams (although the practice is illegal). Girls are more likely to be malnourished than boys and less likely to be taken to a doctor when sick. That brutal discrimination comes through in the latest Indian census, completed this year, which shows that in the 0-6 age group, there are only 927 females for every 1,000 boys. (Because more human males are born than females, the universal average is 952.) In Punjab state, the figure drops to a woeful 793 girls?and, ironically, Punjab is among India's richest regions. In the capital of New Delhi last month parents stuffed a newborn girl into a plastic bag and left her in a ditch, where she was found barely alive being gnawed by stray dogs.

In Deoli, a poor, desert farming village, just seven girls have been born into the warrior Bhati community?most prone to killing off their baby daughters?in the past decade. "It's in the water," jokes Ram Singh Bhati, an elder in a bright yellow turban. "We Bhati men don't produce daughters." That, of course, is biologically impossible. Most women in the village shrug and refuse to talk about the missing girls, but some matriarchs are more truthful. Nayan Kanwar, a 50-something grandmother of five, says she can't understand the fuss. "I had four girls, but I got rid of all of them." Why? "They are a burden," she says, "and best killed off early." How did she do it? "Oh, I just did not feed them. I left them lying in a corner. They cried for a bit, but then they quieted down and eventually died. Only one lasted two whole days." Her pregnant sister-in-law is standing by. "I will only love it if it is a boy," she says. "I will have nothing to do with girls."

The economics of the dowry system are brutal: the average Deoli family with a bride will transfer its modest wealth to the groom's family. "Stop coming here and criticizing us," carps one recently wed male villager. "If you are so concerned, give us a fixed deposit for our daughters' dowries. Then see how many we produce." New laws are unlikely to make a difference: the old ones are simply ignored. It can take the tides of history to wash away the traditions that are killing Deoli's newborns. Until then, average citizens will continue to take the situation?and their baby girls' fates?into their own hands.

Anonymous said...

Jason, even though many of the facts you quote may be true, especially the conditions in India, it remains that you are clogging someone's comment section with huge portions of text. Besides, your "killer mother" theory does not apply to religious fanaticism. If you really want to know how fanatics are recruited, read this:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2042156.ece

You will see that many of these children have caring parents.

Anonymous said...

Eva: Thanks. It's a telling article.

But u see that is exactly what I'm talking about. The little ten year girl was HAPPY to die for Allah, nobody was FORCING her to do it. She was willing to die rather than go back home to her family! Why? Because she's terribly lonely. She desperately wants to go to heaven, to get the love she never got. This is what all terrorist want: LOVE. And the only way they think they can get it is to become a martyr. Many of the children repeatedly rejected relative's pleas to leave before the violence started because many of them are THAT lonely. The religious school where they were "brainwashed" filled a hole, a need in them that had been there for a very long time. Children who are loved alot and not abused do not get swayed so easily into killing themselves for the sake of Allah. They like u would immediately say, "This is crazy" and leave. These children are obviously not in their "right minds" but in their "wrong minds" their dissociated Killer Parent alters. They see it as normal and are completely cut off from what it means emotionally. The little girl was ANGRY at her father for saving her.

Anonymous said...

Jason, of course the little girl isn't in her 'right mind' she is only 10 years old. It does not mean she is in a 'killer parent alter' (which sounds like the name of a death metal band) just that she has the reasoning capacities of a child.
Anyway, you really should get your own blog 'cause it's rude to clog up someone's comments blog like this.
Also the story you left was pretty disgusting. Tone it down with the disturbing imagery, especially in someone else's blog.

Anonymous said...

Kay: Okay I'll stop. But this just goes to show you what one has to contend with when bringing up this stuff. Nobody wants to hear about it. And so it continues.

Thanks Uber for allowing me to hog your comment section.

أبو سنان said...

Jason,

You might not be aware that most Indians are Hindus, so it would be hard to use their practice of killing baby girls to explain terrorism commited by Muslims.

Although female dowry is practiced by some Muslims in India, the practice itself is forbidden in Islam.

Men are required to pay dowry to women, not the other way around. The money give in such a dowry is to be used the way in which the woman pleases.

I firmly believe that anyone who kills a child for any reason will have a VERY hard time escaping the fires of Hell, and that to me is justice.

أبو سنان said...

"As a result of selective abortion, between 35 and 40 million girls and women are missing from the Indian population"

http://www.iheu.org/node/1049

A slaugher some 8 times that of the holocaust and the world sleeps.