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From ABC News:

The killers showed no mercy: They didn’t spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Monday, Nigerian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.

Rubber-gloved workers pulled ever-smaller bodies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave. A crowd began singing a hymn with the refrain, “Jesus said I am the way to heaven.” As the grave filled, the grieving crowd sang: “Jesus, show me the way.”

At least 200 people, most of them Christians, were slaughtered on Sunday, according to residents, aid groups and journalists. The local government gave a figure more than twice that amount, but offered no casualty list or other information to substantiate it.

An Associated Press reporter counted 61 corpses, 32 of them children, being buried in the mass grave in the village of Dogo Nahawa on Monday. Other victims would be buried elsewhere. At a local morgue the bodies of children, including a diaper-clad toddler, were tangled together. One appeared to have been scalped. Others had severed hands and feet.

Religious violence is not a new thing. Some of the most enduring images I have from my Jewish education are descriptions of the violence that has been perpetrated for centuries against Jews by Romans, Greeks, Christians and, though perhaps less often, Muslims. One subtext of those lessons was that the Jews, because we were so steadfast in our religious beliefs, because we refused to assimilate, have been made to suffer religious persecution more than any other group; and, indeed, when I was younger, I often experienced real cognitive dissonance when I heard about religious violence that did not involve Jews. Over time, as my vision of the world and my place in it widened, that dissonance disappeared. I came to understand as well that religion was sometimes merely the justifying veneer that one group would place over the violence they wanted to do to another, a way of hiding their more political and material motivation.

The more I heard and read about religious violence, the more familiar the scripting of it became–and it is remarkable how similar the scripts are; how carefully scripted the incitements to violence are, if not the violence itself, regardless of the religious denominations involved–and, eventually, the stories I would hear left me feeling more numb than anything else. Yes, it was horrible that people were killed, but, I would think, as long as religion contained within it the possibility for someone to decide that he or she is following the one true path and that all those not on that path are morally and spiritually inferior and therefore suspect, then the potential for religious violence inhered in religion, and there was no escaping it.

I continue to believe that, I suppose, which is why I tend not to write about religious violence as such: I just don’t think there is all that much to say, or, rather, that I have much to say that would be useful. Still, this story, which has also been reported on Yahoo! News and other news outlets–the New York Times puts the death toll at 500–brought me up short. In part, this is because I have a very close friend from Nigeria, and she has talked often about the tension between Muslims and Christians in her country. Indeed, this massacre is said to have been retaliation for a similar slaughter of Muslims perpetrated by Christians some time ago, and I can even imagine, from the way in which she talks about it, that my friend might have been among those Muslim-killing Christians had she been in the country and the circumstances been “right.” I feel, in other words, a personal connection to this story that I have rarely felt, not least because my friend might have been among those killed whether or not she had participated in the prior massacre.

I did not know about how deeply my friend’s fear, mistrust, and hatred of the Muslims in Nigeria ran until after our friendship was well-established. She says she feels this way only about Nigerian Muslims, not about people who follow Islam in general, and I believe her, and she tells stories about her own experiences in Nigeria and the experiences of the people she knows to justify herself. The fact that she makes this distinction, of course, suggests that the issues at stake are not really religious, but the fact that they are expressed religiously–in terms of spirituality and morality and the one true path to God–makes it hard, even just between the two of us, to get at what those stakes really are; and then I think about the way our invasion of Iraq and ousting of Saddam Hussein made space for the Sunni and Shia to go at each other’s throats–check out this NPR interview with Deborah Amos about her new book, Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East–and even the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over the status of Jerusalem, which is so often played out in religious terms. And when I think about how may more examples I could list, I cannot help but feel that maybe it’s all, always, political; maybe the god or gods all these people fight over is just a way of not having to take responsibility for their own politics, their own desire for power, their own inability to share, their own fear of everything that makes them vulnerable; maybe the need to make your religion the only true one is nothing more than fear and cowardice, and we all know how thin the line is between the coward who cowers and the coward who becomes a bully.

It has been a very long time, since I was an undergraduate in fact, that I have known personally someone who could place her or himself so easily, so firmly, so absolutely, on one side of this kind of divide and so thoroughly forget that the other side is also inhabited by people; and yet even as I write that, it would be dishonest of me not to own up to the fact that I too once stood with Israel, as a Jew, in strictly religious terms, in a way that denied the humanity of the other side.

That we all have this capacity within us is by now a cliche, but how do you learn to accept that impulse in someone who has become your friend? Because if you cannot accept it–which is not the same thing as approving of it, or allowing it to go unchallenged–then there can no longer be a real friendship. This is the question that I am confronting.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Today is International Women’s Day. Around the world women will be celebrated through rallies, political action, and gifts.

 To celebrate both International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month here is a timeline showing a bit of the history of International Women’s Day:

1857- New York Lower East Side Female textile/garment workers staged a protest against 12 hour work days and poor working conditions. For female trade union members this began International Women’s Day (IWD).

1909-The first National Woman’s Day occurred on February 28^th in the United States.

1910- The Copenhagen Initiative established a Women’s Day to honor the fight for women’s rights and universal suffrage. The day was approved unanimously by over 100 women from 17 countries. No fixed date had been chosen yet though.

1911-Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland held rallies for International Women’s Day for the first on March 19^th.

1914-International Women’s Day became part of anti-war movement during World War I. Russian women observed their country’s first IWD on the last Sunday of February. Other places in Europe celebrated around March 8^th by holding rallies and/or protesting the war.

1917-Again Russian women protested on IWD and four days later the Czar stepped down and the provisional government gave women the right to vote.

1975-was designated as ‘International Women’s Year‘ by the United Nations.

1978-The Education Task Force of Sonoma County in California began “Women’s History Week.” It was purposely chosen to occur along with IWD.

1987-A Congressional resolution made March Women’s History Month nationally.

Today- IWD continues to have its political roots, but is also a day to just take a moment to recognize and pay respect to the women in our lives.

IWD is now an official holiday in China, Angola, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and many other countries.

 To find an event or more information about International Women’s Day visit http://www.internationalwomensday.com/

Glenn Greenwald is right. This pro-Iraq War column by Marty Peretz is not only wrong, but it contains an unbelievably racist statement:

There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

There are racist bigots who have argued that Jews cannot be trusted, because they’re inherently deceitful people. These racist bigots are rightly called anti-Semites, and they are despised by anyone with a functioning brain.

Marty Peretz just argued that Arabs can’t be trusted, because they’re inherently deceitful people. He’s a racist bigot, and he should be despised by anyone with a functioning brain.

This is not new. And it should not be ignored. Marty Peretz is a flaming racist douchebag. He views Arabs as less human than the rest of humanity. He is not merely prejudiced. He is proudly so.

His opinions are of no more merit than those of David Duke. And no decent human should think otherwise.

I usually love watching the Olympics. There is so much to love, the passion of the athletes, the elaborate ceremonies and the competition that paradoxically unites most of the world. The Olympics can so often bring out the best in people; after Nodar Kumaritashvili’s tragedy today it was beautiful to see the way everyone united in remembering the fallen athlete, dead just before he was to compete for the first time.
Yet, the Olympics can bring out the worst in people too. You see, the IOC loves to brag about how they treat everyone equally. But they don’t.
Women STILL can’t ski jump. The IOC is barking about athlete space and yadda yadda- but they allowed a new event to be created after they said that. At another time they were quoted as saying it didn’t look healthy for them. Since when did IOC members go to med school?! Unless they have, I hope they will forgive me for not trusting their medical opinions. (Ironically, the record for Whistler’s best ski jump is held by a woman!) A woman sued a Canadian court and whil the court did find that the IOC was violating Canada law, the Olympic group didn’t have to follow those laws. AND a member of the group, Dick Pound, said that “If in the meantime you’re making all kinds of allegations about the IOC and how it’s discriminating on the basis of gender,” he warned, “the IOC may say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember them. They’re the ones that embarrassed us and caused us a lot of trouble of trouble in Vancouver, maybe they should wait another four years or eight years.’” I really wish I could say April Fools or something here, but no, he said it. If the womenfolk create a rumpus over anything, they aren’t going to compete for a long time.
Gee, what a kind man. Where do they MAKE people like this?
So, in conclusion, the IOC has made me lose interest in supporting the Olympics in any way, shape or form, which is a real bummer because Vancouver is not more than a few hours from where I live. But I just can’t support such blatant discrimination. I wouldn’t have though the Olympics was capable of that sort of thing. But they are.
If you want to read more, go to http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1963484_1963490_1963447,00.html

No seriously…. a Turkish girl was buried alive by her father for quote, “hanging out with boys.” The Huffington Post reports,

The body of a 16-year-old girl police say was buried alive by relatives in an “honor” killing carried out as punishment for talking to boys has been discovered in Kahta, Turkey.

Turkish police discovered the body after acting on an anonymous tip. The tipster told police that the girl was killed after a family council meeting, and had been buried under a chicken pen. Police say that the girl had complained two months earlier that her grandfather beat her for talking to boys.

The girl, identified by police only by her initials M.M., was said to have a large amount of soil in her stomach and lungs, indicating she had been buried alive.

“The autopsy result is blood-curdling. According to our findings, the girl – who had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood – was alive and fully conscious when she was buried,” one anonymous expert said.

The girl had been reported as missing by her family. Police have arrested her father, mother and grandfather. Her mother has been released but her father and grandfather are awaiting trial.

Not only was MM arbitrarily killed because of her oh-so-rebellious decision to interact with people of the opposite sex, she was buried alive AFTER her family had a round-table discussion about her “unacceptable” disobedience. In addition, her grandfather had already beaten her months prior for talking to boys. I can’t even muster an adequate reaction to something so horrifying. I suppose I probably shouldn’t be so surprised considering the fact that over 200 “honor” killings happen each year in Turkey alone. If that doesn’t frighten you… it should.

Honor killings are rooted in the idea of male-supremacy; the belief that men have some divine honor that must be protected from the frivolous, immoral behavior of women. Thousands of men around the globe literally justify killing the women in their family under the guise that they are protecting their families honor. In fact, according to the United Nations, over 5,000 honor killings occur worldwide each year. That number is also speculative because it doesn’t account for the underreported instances of violence against women in the form of honor killings.

Let us also be careful not to get it twisted. Honor killings are not isolated to concentrated places on the globe and they are most certainly not happening “out there” in far away, exotic places. Appropriating this type of colonialist narrative would be extremely problematic. Honor Killings are simply a representation of global violence against women that has no borders, religious affiliations, or national boundaries.

I recently read an article about the correspondence and meeting between two of the most independent thinkers of the 20^th Century, Margaret Sanger and Mahatma Gandhi. The two activists met in 1936 when Sanger traveled to India to speak with Gandhi about birth control. By that time Sanger was advocating internationally for artificial contraceptives and sought to make Gandhi an ally.

Despite the fact that the movement was gaining popularity in a society with a serious poverty crisis, Gandhi was an outspoken critic of artificial birth control. His general attitude was that

“Persons who use contraceptives will never learn the value of self-restraint. They will not need it. Self-indulgence with contraceptives may prevent the coming of children but will sap the vitality of both men and women, perhaps more of men than of women. It is unmanly to refuse battle with the devil.”

Sanger, on the other hand, once told her granddaughter that “for intercourse, I’d say three times a day was about right.” (Go girl!)

Gandhi believed that men needed to overcome desire for women and warned women that if they engaged in intercourse for pleasure that men would lose respect for them and begin to view them as mere sex objects.

Instead, women in Gandhi’s world had a special role. A lesser-discussed aspect of Gandhi’s radical lifestyle was that up until his death he regularly slept, fully nude, with young women. The purpose was to demonstrate brahmacharya, or complete control over body and organs, by this display of sexual restraint.

While Gandhi warned women against giving away their chastity to avoid being treated as sex objects, isn’t that precisely the way that Gandhi treated them by using them as submissive roles of his presentation of self-restraint?

This ritual demeaned women by portraying them as something impure, something for men to “overcome.” He reduced women by manipulating them to deny their own natural sexual urges, and insisting that the only expression of their sexuality be in lying naked with him in bed, a situation where he was in full control and which was void of healthy sexual activity.

While many today praise Gandhi’s progressive views on women’s rights, was he really as concerned about the dignity of Indian women as he claimed?

Sanger did not succeed in convincing Gandhi to support the birth control movement. Instead he maintained his position that his followers “transcend carnal lust.”  While Sanger did not make what could have been a powerful ally, I think the important fact is that the conversation took place.

Given all that has happened in India since Gandhi’s death in 1948, I wonder where he would stand on the issue of birth control today. Certainly few people would agree with his approach in a country where nearly half live below the poverty line.

In 1959 Sanger stood by the side of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru when he declared that $10 million would go to family planning efforts. I wonder what Gandhi would have thought about the use of state resources to fund population control.

The meeting between Margaret Sanger and Gandhi demonstrates Sanger’s audacity and serves as a good lesson for activists to seek allies even in unlikely places. It is also great feminist food for thought.

As Ireland waits for a landmark ruling by the European court of human rights, controversy over abortion and women’s health in Ireland has become a hotspot for international scrutiny. According to the Human Rights Watch, Irish legislation, in which women who obtain an abortion are sentenced to life in prison, is putting women’s lives at risk. In addition, recent legislation banning abortion has been inspired by deliberate misinformation from rogue anti-choice agencies.

Women have been told they may become infertile, require a hysterectomy or possibly need a colostomy bag after an abortion by agencies that target women seeking advice about unwanted pregnancies, says the report.

“Women in need of abortion services should, as a matter of international law and human decency, be able to count on support from their government as they face a difficult situation,” said Marianne Mollmann, the women’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “But in Ireland they are actively stonewalled, stigmatised, and written out.”

According to the report, the government limits information about legal abortion services and has failed to crack down on false claims from “rogue” agencies masquerading as unwanted pregnancy support groups.

One 29-year-old woman was shown a video of ultrasound images and pictures of mothers by an agency called “British Alternatives”.

“[The woman] put a model of a small foetus in my hand … told me to name my baby, asked me how I would feel if I killed the baby,” she said.

Another woman described being harassed over the phone by a pro-life agency for weeks: “They would ask ‘Is your baby still alive? Have you killed it yet?’.”

It’s unfortunate that anti-choice deception has been so effective in influencing Irish legislation. Even worse, the Irish governments only response to this claim is that women should report incidents of misinformation to the authorities. Unfortunately, this assumes that women have access to the correct information to begin with.

Here’s to holding out for the European court of human rights to make the right decision. Over 4,600 Irish women have obtained abortions abroad in the UK alone. This seems to indicate that abortion is going to happen regardless of its legal status; the difference being cost and efficiency. In the status quo, legal barriers for Irish women seeking an abortion has only increased the propensity for complications and magnified the economic cost for women.

It is fashionable in many quarters to bash the United Nations, and lets face it, there are many good reasons to; as an organization made up of the various governments of the world, the UN operates at the level of dysfunction that one would predict. The organization has not brought universal peace, and it has not fixed all the world’s problem, and it is beset by problems both within its control and outside it.

And yet.

And yet the United Nations, for all its faults, does great work. It sends talented women and men into countries in need, and helps them to grow. It provides fresh water, agricultural know-how, education, and family planning throughout the developing world. No, the UN cannot by itself lift a nation out of poverty. But it can help ameliorate the worst levels of degradation, and it can help countries slowly grow from dysfunction to functional.

The United Nations was engaged in Haiti before an horrific earthquake struck, providing both security and development aid to a nation that has long been dogged by semi-functional government and a broken civil society. They have paid a heavy price for their engagement. At least 36 UN workers have died in the earthquake so far, and it is possible those numbers will grow.

Their deaths are not more tragic than the other tens of thousands of deaths suffered in this earthquake. But they are worthy of note. Because it is easy to mock the UN for its failures. And yet the men and women who died in Haiti serving the UN died in service to humanity’s best impulses, our desire to help those who are worse off than we ourselves.

Humanity’s best impulses will be what helps the nation of Haiti to rebuild from the catastrophe in Port-au-Prince, and not just in the immediate future. The United Nations will remain in Haiti long after the minicams have gone home. They will not solve all the problems that plague Haiti; no organization can. But they will continue to help, as they have been helping for years.

And while it’s fashionable in some corners to criticize the United Nations, I hope we don’t forget that.

Media outlets continue to flash scenes from the devastated nation of Haiti. A ticker of organizations that need money in the relief effort run under newscasts as we sit, watch and hope for better news. Even before the 7.0 earthquake shook this nation about 2000 miles from the U.S., people were suffering.

Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. Some estimates of people living in poverty are as high as 80% of the population. A UNICEF representative told Rachel Maddow only 46% of the country had access to clean water prior to the quake. These numbers are devastating in their own right, let alone how they affect people’s ability to access needed assistance.

My heart goes out to everyone impacted by the devastating earthquake. However, I’m particular emphatic towards the women of Haiti. Females are unequally affected by crisis situations. 

Women are often more impacted by crisis situation than other groups. Education and access to aid is crucial after a disaster like the Haitian earthquake. Since women make up 70% of the world’s poor and two-thirds of the non-literate population, it is understandable that they would have extra obstacles to obtaining aid services.

Many small farms and home businesses are run by women to sustain their family. These are also the vulnerable to tragedies like the earthquake. Workloads for women are already larger for women across the world and these only increases with rebuilding efforts. Then to top it off, intimate partner and sexual violence increases in times of crisis.

Despite the bleak forecast for women in a crisis, they are not simply damsels in distress. Women take a central role is preventing disaster and reconstructing their communities after one occurs. As care-takers women are more likely to prepare family emergency plans, kits and be aware of who will need the most help in their community. They are also the ones that take on the responsibility of organizing reconstruction of homes and community structures.

Many of us want to help. It seems right now money is one of the few ways to help Haiti. One women’s organization that has a good reputation and is helping in the relief effort is MADRE.

Those local to New York may want to help Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, Lakou New York, and Movement of Dominican Haitian Women which are planning an immediate delivery of first aid relief. They will be going to the Dominican/Haitian border and donations are encouraged. IFCO/Haiti Relief, 418 West 145th Street, New York NY 10031.

For a broader look at places to give, ABC News has a list of organizations that are bringing supplies and support to the field. Read through them and give to the one you feel most comfortable.

Also, I am sure as time goes by and pictures stop showing up on the news Haiti will need support more than ever. I suggest checking back then and maybe as a world community we can help Haiti reconstruct and revitalize.

 Photo Credit: New York Times

There’s never much that can be said in the first few hours of a natural disaster, other than that the disaster has happened, and that help will be needed. Well, disaster has happened. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti, right by the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince. And help will be needed.

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hempisphere, and one of the densest as well. Port-au-Prince is the nation’s most populous city, and it is full of structures that were built of cheap concrete with little serious engineering behind them. It is a nation with about half of its population subsisting on about $2 a day. Needless to say, that’s not a population building their houses with earthquake-proof redundancies. That’s a population happy to get a roof up that doesn’t leak.

When even the nation’s presidential palace — a structure that was built with care and engineering — has collapsed, it is unquestionable that thousands and thousands of homes of more modest construction have collapsed as well. And tens if not hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of injury, homelessness, and death.

Our neighbors to the south will need our help. The San Francisco Chronicle has a list of some options, and I’ll post more as they come along.

Until then, keep your thoughts and, if you’re so inclined, your prayers with the people of Haiti.