Too little, too late. You've spawned at least 15 tit for tat threads. You can't get off the hook that easily. LSK - a temporary ban is in order for starting and fomenting this sort of clannish hysteria. A grown man should know better.

This tit for tat bullshit has to end somewhere folks. Let's grow up.

Originally posted by Cara.: ^There's every kind of basis actually, and it's far more reasonable to assume she was forced than that she made the choice of her own free will. 1)She is really young but even if she wasn't 2) He is really old but even if he wasn't 3) The age difference is 90+ years! He has great-grandchildren older than her. But what clinches it is social context. Knowing that girls back home are routinely forced into marriage, especially to married older men, and especially at that age, do you really find it more plausible that a 17 year old made this choice? So you impute force from the age difference and the social context? It's probably not really even the age difference that is the primary factor - when Anna Nicole Smith married that billionaire nonagenarian - nobody thought it was because she was forced. So essentially - it boils down to social context - read the patriarhcial Somali culture. Taken on the whole Somali culture is not very kind to women. But I don't believe that Somali women are routinely forced to marry against their will. Compared to Arabs and Pakistanis - Somali women say 'kir' quite a lot to their wouldbe male controllers. But then this viewpoint is coloured by personal perspective. It's not as if we have impartial statistics - all we have is personal anecodotes and the like. To me - it is not implausible that a nomadic girl in a dirt-poor conflict ridden country would choose to marry someone who could provide for her and her family regardless of his age, looks and number of previous wives.

I think you need to realize that others may make choices that may seem outlandish, ridiculous, disgusting and unfair. And you can say those things. But you really can't say in this case she was forced - there is no basis to make that argument. That is the sole point I'm arguing about.

It's wrong for Faroole to say what he said. No individual can deny another's obvious 'Somaliness'. It simply makes no sense. But I wonder about the actions that prompted the recent crusade on SOL. Is the detention of 5 men the worst thing that has happened to the OG folks? Have they been actually handed over to the Ethiopians or are they still in jail? Has the Kilinka Shanad administration never done anything like this or worse? Has the ONLF not experienced internal infighting, betrayal and killing? It seems to me this is typical of the Somali way. Turning an apparent injustice into some generalized monstrosity that you use to attack those you don't like today. And then tomorrow something else happens and another group does the same. Repeat ad nauseum.

^Girls back home are not inanimate robots controlled by men. Stop this nonsense. We CAN'T definitively know whether she chose this or not. So how can one say she was forced? There is just no basis.

Originally posted by Raamsade: quote:Originally posted by ThePoint: Saudi Arabia does not have as its national motto liberty, fraternity and egality. But it has the Quran, the Sunna, the Sharia and the Prophet Mohammed. Ostensibly superior sources of higher moral framework and system of governance that dispenses justice and bestows freedom according to Muslims. We expect Saudia Arabia to behave better (grant more freedoms and justice) than France because the former's laws and system of governance is from God unlike man-made motto of France. This is a self-defeating argument for a Muslim to make. Unless, of course, you're losing faith in Islam. Clearly you haven't read my posts with much comprehension. The argument consists of citizenship and its attendant rights. There is no citizenship for non-Saudis in Saudi Arabia and consequently fewer rights vis-a-vis citizens. France gives citizenship to many but fails to accord some rights to a certain section of its citizens due to the religion they practice. That is a failing of France to live upto the contract established with citizens. In general - I do expect Saudi Arabia to be a more just and peaceful place than France if it was actually living upto the Quran, Shariah and the Sunnah. But nobody has any illusions that that is the case. That is a general failing of most of the Muslim world.

Originally posted by Raamsade: The irony is none of the people who make the above argument are willing to extend it to Muslim women who decide NOT to wear the Hijab. Just about everywhere where Islamists exercise control, Muslim (and none Muslim) women are forced to wear the Hijab at the pain of imprisonment or fine or whipping or face some other draconian punishment. Where are their rights to dress as they like? Where are those great defenders of the liberty of Muslim women? Their silence is deafening. Unlike the hypocrites who speak out of both sides of their mouth. There are only 2 states that mandate hijab for all women - Saudi Arabia and Iran. No other other state in the Muslim world does so. Are the Islamists of Hamas forcing women to don the hijab? No. There goes the gist of your whole tirade. As to defenders of liberty and deafening silence - it's yet another baseless tirade. Read the posts on this forum regarding hijab and you can clearly see many people don't agree with forcing individuals to wear the hijab. But I doubt any of this matters. In your zeal to denigrate and demean Muslims and Islam you will say anything that comes from the deep recesses of your bias.

^I dislike it when folks try to tell other folks what they should or shouldn't do. This girl has a voice - she's not mentally infirm according to reports - thus she could have refused this marriage. Don't infanitilize this girl and her choice. Hasn't this ridiculous story been played out now?

There are a couple of things you're mixing up here Sherban. Saudi Arabia does not have as its national motto liberty, fraternity and egality. On the one hand France claims that motto and that it's a democracy and then it bans an important part of a people's belief system. In Saudi the deal is that anyone who is not Saudi is a guest worker - by definition a second class position while France actively solicits immigrants and promises them a new life and citizenship. Then the French government turns around and attacks the belief system of the very immigrants it willingly imported into its country. With Saudi - you know what the deal is - you're second class citizen unless you're Saudi but in France it's a total bait and switch. You're officially a citizen but in name only. And even worse French officials then boast about the diversity in their country etc. That said it is wrong for Saudi Arabia to ban churches and the practice of other religions in the whole country except for Mecca and Medina. But it's funny - non-muslims cite about the worst example of a Muslim country in terms of a closed and repressive culture in comparison to France which is a vital country in terms of much of western thinking. If a key country that is intergral of western culture and philosophy is being compared to the most intolerant and closed Muslim society - there is something deeply wrong with France.

I don't believe the claim of 112 years old. As for the SOL ladies wailing - most Somali ladies I know have been able to speak up for themselves and reject arrangements not to their liking. The rate of impotence and infertility increases vastly with age - if this guy is really 112 years old - he should not even be able to get it up without medication. This whole story makes no sense. Much like the story where Shabab are chekcing the bras of women.

Originally posted by Suldaanka: ^ Words like Trusted, Efficient and Fast come to mind when I think of Dahabshiil. quote: Originally posted by ThePoint: ^What do you mean Somalis? You mean FB - all good. They're gonna need big *** atm machines - wheel barrow full needed to make a $10 purchase. To my knowledge, by default Dahabshiil agents deal US Dollars but they also have exchange facilities if you want to covert them to local currency. Ahh good point. I've always wondered why Somalis don't reconsitute their currencies and make bills of bigger denominations or knock off a few zeros from the exchange rates by printing new bills. The Somali shilling is hampered here by its use in other parts of Somalia but the Somaliland shilling could manage a rework like that.

Of all the myriad tragedies that are occuring in Somalia - that there is this much hoopla about 5 men handed over to the Ethiopians tells you a lot about Somalis. And a lot about certain posters' degenerate mental state.

^What do you mean Somalis? You mean Somalilanders right - are you backsliding here Marc? FB - all good. They're gonna need big *** atm machines - wheel barrow full needed to make a $10 purchase.

Originally posted by Faarax-Brawn: This is freaggin awesome!!!! I think you failed to read the fine print of the debit card. Not available to punk sijuis

Good video. Makes you brush off any qualms about the pirates.

^The economic/power structure is different here than the West. Here - Dubai Inc = Makhtoum Family = Dubai Media. Which should equal a healthy sense of skepticism re the media from the reader.

^No you have more freedom - ie freedom not to move.

^Get used to it. It will be repeated endlessly. Especially by 'educated' people. I honestly feel sorry for this person. Here is another review of the book: The first four of Lazreg’s open letters are devoted to examining the main rationales for (re)veiling: modesty, the avoidance of sexual harassment, the assertion of cultural identity, and the assertion of one’s religious conviction or piety. The subject of modesty brings Lazreg to a discussion of the Quran, which, she believes, does not explicitly exhort the wearing of a veil, but only says that women should “preserve or protect your pudenda,” which has often been translated politely as “be modest.” The Quran, Lazreg also notes, “does not enjoin a woman to cover her face,” but what angers her most is that the veil “implies that a woman should humble, belittle, and feel sorry for her body.” She also adduces some telling etymology, noting that an “Arabic word for shame or modesty, haya’, is close to hayah, meaning ‘life.’ Is a woman to be ashamed of life, the life of the body?” But the Quran also exhorts men to be modest. The fact that they aren’t, Lazreg argues, is the real reason for the existence of the veil: “Men’s desire is the root cause of veils.” The custom, she adds, is not a personal act but a “social convention.” That the veil is a shield against sexual harassment is dismissed as an “illusion.” “Desire can pierce through the veil,” says Lazreg, “as it can lurk unacknowledged in the man who advocates the veil.” Veiling as an act of ethno-religious self-assertion, of course, became more pronounced after 9/11. But Lazreg resents that women must suffer because the male Islamic leadership depends so heavily on the custom as a marker of Muslim identity: “Feeling comfortable in one’s culture and asserting its worth is one thing. However, reducing the essence of that culture to the veil is another.” Lazreg is highly skeptical of those who don the veil out of so-called conviction, calling the term “elastic” and suggesting the veil may be used “for strategic reasons.” She is at a loss to see what is gained from wearing “a symbol of gender inequality.” As for piety, Lazreg is adamant: “Nowhere in the Quran is there an indication that the veil is a condition of a woman’s acceptance of her faith.” The fifth and final open letter, titled simply “Why Women Should Not Wear the Veil,” reiterates Lazreg’s multi-pronged attack in the preceding four. Discarding the veil is not a heresy like committing usury or drinking alcohol (veil laws are “made by men, not God,” she tartly notes). It is merely a historical phenomenon that has waxed and waned over the centuries and is subject to change in the future. Lazreg also notes that modern technology — cell phones and the Web — has made circumventing veil laws child’s play. More philosophically, “the hajib makes a woman feel removed from her environment.” In the workplace, it has “the symbolic effect of diminishing the importance of formal [gender] equality.” More mundanely, the veil is a terrible physical inconvenience in hot climates and an impairment to hearing – a sartorial “monastery.” It is “neither comfortable nor convenient.” The last pages of Questioning the Veil are devoted to debunking the neo-fundamentalist mantra that any decline in veiling is a sign of Islamic decadence or of base mimicry of that Mother of All Others, the “West.” She is frustrated that a highly personal decision (whether women’s “bodies are a source of shame or simple joy”) has been taken out of their hands — by Islamic men, of course. The veil, Lazreg finally ventures, “is the last refuge of men’s (sexual) identity.” Lazreg speaks like the ardent Islamic feminist she is when she alludes at the end to the Algerian fight for independence from France: “I do not think the women who veil themselves today in Algiers, Paris, or New York are engaged in the same struggle as Algerian women were in the 1950s, when they freed themselves of the veil in order to make history.” The veil, Lazreg believes, will prevent Islamic women from making liberating history in the future: “The veil is not action, it is reaction; it is repetition of the past.” http://www1.cuny.edu/forum/?p=4506

So what's new puss*ycat??????????

The UAE press is completely under the sway of the establishment. Those who put up the tall buildings are the same ones who own the newspapers and are telling you everything is going back to hunky-dory. I have serious doubts about such a report.

The Islamic veil Out from under Sep 3rd 2009 From The Economist print edition Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women. By Marnia Lazreg. Princeton University Press; 184 pages; $22.95 and £15.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk LONG or short, sternly pinned or silkily draped, the Islamic veil is the most contentious religious symbol today, in the West as much as in the Muslim world. President Barack Obama argues that Western countries should not dictate what Muslim women should wear. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, by contrast, recently declared that the burqa, the all-over Islamic covering, is “not welcome on French soil”. France’s parliament is now considering a ban on wearing the burqa in public. Marnia Lazreg, an Algerian-born professor of sociology at the City University of New York, feels passionately that Muslim women should not wear the veil, as both her mother and grandmother obediently did. She is particularly bothered by the trend of “reveiling” in the West and Islamic countries, whereby the daughters of women who went unveiled decide to cover up. But she also thinks that democratic governments should not impose dress codes by law. So she has written this collection of letters to Muslim women to try to coax them out from under the veil. Although uneven and with a rather weak grasp of French secularism, the book has great merit. It takes seriously the arguments advanced by defenders of the veil, female as well as male. Such views are various: that it is a form of modesty imposed by the Koran and an expression of piety; that it offers protection from sexual objectification and harassment in a loose, consumerist society; that it is a political statement and reassertion of Islam; that it is a badge of pride in an Islamophobic world. One by one, the author picks apart and punctures each argument, exposing hypocrisy and contradiction, and drawing on case studies of veiled women she has interviewed. On the question of modesty, for instance, Ms Lazreg points out that the Koran can be read in different ways. Women are variously told to “draw their veils over their bosoms and not to reveal their adornment save to their own husbands”, or to “cover their bosoms with their veils and not show their finery” or to “draw their shawls over the cleavages in their clothes”. Do adornment or finery really mean the hair and face? Why is a head-covering, especially when worn with elaborate make-up, more “modest” than decorous modern dress? The author is impatient with academic feminists on Western campuses who argue that the veil is a form of empowerment for Muslim women, and who dismiss charges of sexual oppression as elitist, Western concepts. Such an apology, writes Ms Lazreg, “makes good conversation”, but it is simplistic and dangerous. Muslim intellectuals, particularly men, exploit such arguments to justify “reveiling” educated young girls who are confused about their identity. Attempts to present the veil as a tool of empowerment, she writes, “rest on a dubious post-modernist conception of power according to which whatever a woman undertakes to do is liberating as long as she thinks that she is engaged in some form of ‘resistance’ or self-assertion, no matter how misguided.” With her letters Ms Lazreg offers a useful and timely counterpoint. http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14361774

I wonder about the Islam supposedly 'so ingrained in the Somali pysch in the past 20 years' that chooses to focus on chopping hands and pulling teeth. I wonder about the Islam that leads to war between 2 'Islamic' groups as we have had in Kismayo recently. I wonder how the current TFG may be 'back to the old gutter of clan politics with an Islamic branding' but its opponents are free from any such taint. I wonder about people who see the murky situation in Somalia as black and white, believer and non-believer, Muslim and gaal, xaq and baadil.

Originally posted by NASSIR: Angola needs skilled workers at this stage of its development, i.e exchange of technology, resource extraction and management. When will rich Congo become like Angola? It's true you need skilled people and as FB put it diversity is a good thing. But as a country it's not good to have the economy and power in the hands of a racial minority. You get unhealthy situations like the Asians in Uganda.