America, Saving Muslim Women’s Lives
Images of oppression.
By Fred Thompson

Sometimes, you read or hear something, and an image forms in your mind that just won’t go away. For me, one of those images comes from the 2002 news stories about religious police in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, who beat young girls trying to escape a burning school. Because they weren’t wearing headscarves and black robes, 15 innocent girls were locked in a blazing building to burn while firemen watched helplessly.

Not all Saudis support this sort of extremism, but many Muslim radicals reject the premise that women should have even the most basic rights. These include the right to vote, to work, to drive, to choose one’s own husband, to charge a man with abuse or simply to move about without male escort.One of the worst examples of this gender oppression was Afghanistan during the Taliban days. Women were not allowed to go to school, to work outside the home or even go out in public without a male family member. A woman with a medical emergency, but no male relatives to take her to a doctor, was expected simply to suffer or die. An aged woman with no one to bring her food was expected to starve. Too many did.

Life for women under the Taliban and similar governments ought to inspire anger and indignation in everybody, especially human rights advocates. I’m constantly surprised, however, by the apparent apathy among many who say they care about the rights of women and other minorities.

I doubt, for example, that our television networks have spent as much time exposing the horrors of life for millions of women in pre-liberation Iraq and Afghanistan as they’ve spent covering Abu Ghraib. For some reason, everyday atrocities such as the endemic beatings, honor killings and forced marriages of women just don’t seem to be newsworthy.

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