Thursday, November 02, 2006
EIDING FRENZY
Australian Democrats national secretary Suzanne Bassette agrees with Sheik Taj el-Din ole-Catmeat al-Hilali:
I’m going for political suicide here but I’m willing to stand up with anybody else in this country who happens to agree with Sheik Hilali’s sentiments.
Not because of any emotional or religious point of view but from sheer logic. While men who want to assault women exist, there will be women who get assaulted. Unfortunately, how a woman dresses does affect her level of likeliness to be chosen. The subsequent reaction to this latest opportunity to get angry about something is the real lesson here.
Interesting theory. Helpfully, a recent impromptu social experiment in Hilali’s home nation of Egypt allows us to test Bassette’s claim. Cairo’s Forsoothsayer reports:
On the first two days of Eid in Cairo, a mob of hundreds of men swept through downtown attacking and sexually assaulting random girls in an animalistic display that must boggle every mind. Apparently, the utter lack of basic decency, respect for women, or the rule of law was not confined to Ramadan alone - in fact, Ramadan was the only thing suppressing the baser instincts of these men. I feel sick at heart, and may never spend time downtown again, as it seems we women are actively in danger there ...
Below is an eyewitness account I translated, in a somewhat rudimentary fashion, by Malek, a blogger who was there at the time:
“While yesterday the attacks were just random, young men now formed human trains that approached a girl quickly and surrounded her completely and began groping parts of her body ...
“After less than five minutes we found vast numbers of youth whistling and running towards Adly Street. We accompanied them to see what was going on.
We were surprised to find a girl in her early twenties who had fainted on the ground, surrounded by a large number of youth who were groping parts of her body and taking off her clothes ...“The crowd did not disperse until the appearance of two girls wearing the Khaliji ebaya (loose outer garment worn by women from the Gulf) walking alone down the street. The young men surrounded them completely and a large number of them pressed against the girls and removed the veils they were wearing, and attempted to remove their ebayas ...
“After a short while another girl appeared who was also wearing the veil and the ebaya. She was also surrounded and they succeeded this time is removing the ebaya, but a security guard was able to draw her into a building and shut the gate and prevent the young men from reaching the girl.
“There was another girl who wore trousers that were a little tight and an ordinary shirt. This time her shirt was removed and her bra ripped and no one helped her except one of the security personnel who had a club and who pulled her into a shop.
“These were the incidents I was able to personally witness in less than an hour I spent in that area ...
“The young men did not distinguish when they undertook their assaults between veiled and unveiled girls.”
So much for Bassette’s quaint notion. Driven by blogger coverage, the BBC subsequently ran this piece on the attacks (also mentioning heroic shopkeepers who intervened). Tom Gara has much more.