Sanija Ameti, a Switzerland Muslim Politician Apologises For Shooting At Image Of Jesus
New Age Islam News Bureau
9 Sep 2024
· SanijaAmeti, a Switzerland Muslim Politician Apologises For Shooting At Image Of Jesus
· Iran Continues Arrests Ahead of Mahsa Amini’s Death Anniversary
· Harassment, disrespect, absent amenities: Women medical staff in Pakistan face same harrowing issues
· Unworthy Victims: Pakistani Women Confronting State Terror
· Three Women Prisoners, Saenaz Ahadi, Paiash and Hora Nishakht in Iran Strike Against Treatment in Jail
· Africa observes Pan African Women’s Day
Compiled by New Age Islam News Bureau
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Sanija Ameti, a Switzerland Muslim Politician Apologises For Shooting At Image Of Jesus
9 Sep, 2024
A Muslim member of the Green Liberal Party of Switzerland (GLP), Sanija Ameti, has apologized for using a Christian image for target practice.
The politician sparked outrage over the weekend when she posted a photo on Instagram of herself holding a sport pistol and another showing a picture of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, with their faces riddled with pellet holes.
According to local media, she had used a reproduced painting by the medieval Italian artist Tommaso del Mazza, taken from an illustrated catalogue.
After an online backlash, Ameti took down the post and apologized. She explained that she had decided to use a page from the catalogue because it was of the right size and “visible enough” to serve as a target.
“I didn’t pay attention to the content of the images,” she claimed. “That wasn’t right. I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart if I offended anyone.”
Speaking to the newspaper Blick, Ameti admitted that her actions were “absolutely stupid,” but added that she “didn’t think anything of it” at the time.
Several conservative politicians have condemned Ameti and urged her to resign from official posts. Nicolas Rimoldi, founder of the Mass-Voll party, accused Ameti of “inciting hatred” against Christians and threatened to take legal action.
Ameti’s family arrived in Switzerland in the 1990s as refugees from the war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina. A trained lawyer, Ameti is a councilwoman in the canton of Zurich. She is also the co-president of Operation Libero, a movement aimed at “fighting populism” and advancing “an open and progressive” society, according to its mission statement.
source: rt.com
https://www.rt.com/news/603697-swiss-politician-jesus-target/
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Iran Continues Arrests Ahead of Mahsa Amini’s Death Anniversary
(File Photo)
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SEPTEMBER 9, 2024
The Islamic Republic's security forces have arrested four more people in Kurdish towns ahead of the second anniversary of Mahsa Amini's death.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence forces arrested Kurdish citizens in the Divandarreh district of Kurdistan Province on Sunday morning.
They were forcibly arrested without search or arrest warrants, and their homes were subsequently searched by IRGC intelligence agents.
The four confirmed detainees include 39-year-old Mohammad Amini and Navid Sharifi from the village of KaniSefid, Farhad Qamari from Kotak, and Fouad Moradi from KilehKabud, according to Hengaw human rights organization.
According to IranWire sources, at least 14 civil activists, artists, and family members of those killed during the 2022 uprising have been detained in the Kurdish towns in recent days.
Previously reported arrests include SiavashSoltani, son of victim KobraSheikheh, and 16-year-old RamyarAbubakri, brother of another victim of the crackdown on 2022 protests, ZaniarAbubakri.
A source told IranWire that these arrests are part of a wider suppression campaign targeting dissidents, civil activists, and families of those who died during a crackdown on the 2022 protests.
Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, died in the custody of Iran’s morality police after being detained for wearing her hijab “improperly”. Her death sparked nationwide protests, which became known as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.
Source: iranwire.com
https://iranwire.com/en/news/133716-iran-continues-arrests-ahead-of-mahsa-aminis-death-anniversary/
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Harassment, disrespect, absent amenities: Women medical staff in Pakistan face same harrowing issues
Sep 08 2024
Islamabad, Sep 8 (IANS): The horrific rape and murder of a trainee doctor in the state-run R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata has ignited a furore over the working conditions and safety of women medical personnel in India, but the same harrowing issues - leering and groping colleagues, staff, and patients, stalking, inappropriate comments, lack of respect for their capabilities, and a marked lack of dedicated amenities - afflict their Pakistani counterparts also.
An online survey conducted on Dawn.com and its Dawn Images supplement, on their Instagram pages, found that 47 per cent of 988 female medical professionals reported feeling unsafe in both government and private hospitals. Of 932 respondents, 47.2 per cent said they had experienced harassment while on duty, and 67 per cent of 637 respondents said their hospital lacked a safe space to rest.
The sample size of the survey isn’t large enough to draw any major conclusions, but it does support what many women medical professionals reported about what it’s like to work at hospitals in Pakistan, Dawn Images said in a report.
That may go to explain why of 104,974 women medical graduates residing in Pakistan, 21,146, or around 20, are no longer part of the labour force, as per a report by Pakistan's leading research institution, it said.
Threats to woman doctors and nurses do not come from patients and visitors, but are sometimes internal, from within the hospital itself.
A recent study conducted at a Karachi-based hospital found that nearly 70 per cent of female surgeons in Pakistan had experienced harassment in the workplace. Women doctors and nurses from all four provinces, both in rural areas and in urban centres, shared their stories of harassment, ranging from catcalls, comments about their bodies, inappropriate jokes, and being touched.
One woman doctor revealed how in the middle of the night she received a message from an unknown number "complimenting my looks". More messages followed, detailing her exact location and describing what she was wearing. The messages became more frequent and she soon discovered they were sent by the head male nurse at the hospital. She did not file a complaint against him as she was told that he was favoured by the management.
Another doctor at a semi-private Lahore hospital reported that a resident doctor would make inappropriate comments to her. She initially ignored him, but soon it escalated into deliberate bumps and brushes, and creating situations in which they were alone.
In addition to these challenges, women in the medical field are subjected to invasions of privacy, with some even being filmed while on duty. A female nurse said: "I’ve been inappropriately touched by patients and disrespected by doctors. At first, I assumed the touches by patients were accidental, but a senior later told me otherwise."
"The most shocking moment was when I found inappropriate videos of myself on a 14-year-old boy’s phone."
Lack of separate, secure amenities is another problem. A female resident doctor at the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD) in Karachi revealed how the facility had a common restroom shared between male and female doctors. "There is no separate room for women doctors to rest - only a single space shared by both genders. Male doctors and nurses often enter the room unannounced. Anyone resting in the room could be caught off guard," she said,
One day, when a male colleague was about to enter the room unannounced, she asked him to knock before coming in. Offended by the request, he created a scene, accusing her of doubting his intentions. The situation escalated into an argument, drawing a crowd before consultants and the administration intervened.
Apart from restrooms, there is a more concerning issue of shared washrooms. A general surgeon from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa said that while they had a designated bathroom for women, male attendants often used it.
Beyond inadequate facilities, female doctors in Pakistan also face rampant gender discrimination. One Islamabad-based doctor revealed that even when she examined a patient and expressed a diagnosis, families wouldn’t accept her conclusions until a male doctor confirmed them. "My gender takes precedence over my capabilities as a doctor. It’s just a cultural thing," she said with a sigh.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor there to serve people, if you’re wearing a burqa, a lab coat, socks with shoes, and a mask on your face; if you have a woman’s body, you will be leered at, touched, and made to feel uncomfortable," a doctor who served in a Karachi hospital, told Dawn Images.
Source: daijiworld.com
https://daijiworld.com/news/newsDisplay?newsID=1224455
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Unworthy Victims: Pakistani Women Confronting State Terror
by Junaid S Ahmad
09/09/2024
Here, we have a devastating indictment of state terror in Pakistan by our indefatigable comrade, Khadijah Shah – the prominent Pakistani public figure and political activist.
After being violently harassed, abused, and jailed for eight months by Pakistan’s military and civilian parasitical kleptocratic elite, Shah was not deterred and after finally being released from prison, courageously began to politically organize even more fiercely. Indeed, she is relinquishing her American nationality (an act unthinkable by our ‘Lifestyle Left’) so that she can be directly participate in Pakistani political life. Since being released from jail, she has been working tirelessly to free thousands of female political prisoners languishing in the country’s dungeons, as well as being tenaciously involved in rehabilitation work for the women and their families who have been subject to unspeakable forms of repression over the past two years.
Khadijah Shah is precisely the type of Pakistani woman that our good friends at Democracy Now (DN) will never invite. Shah’s putative ‘false consciousness’ has prevented her from being a card-carrying member of the dozens of sectarian ‘Left’ groups in the country – the privileged folks that DN privileges even more by excluding anyone else.
Hence, the Pakistani liberal-left has deemed Shah unworthy of offering a ‘true’ woman’s perspective since she is ostensibly a ‘self-hating’ woman whose delusional self has led her to join at least 75 percent of the Pakistani population as critical – not blind – supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. As is displayed in the photo here, the ‘Movement for Justice’ has not allowed the past two years of brutal harassment, mass murder campaign, torture, and disappearances to intimidate them from, once again, mounting some of the most massive demonstrations and rallies in the country’s history – despite the violent police state crackdown and more of the same: mass arrests, beatings, and so on.
On the one hand, women like Khadijah Shah are sacrificing everything (including the ultimate price, their lives) to fearlessly fight the Pakistani establishment’s war on women. On the other hand, the liberal-left aristocrats sitting in their silos are planning their ‘revolution.’ The actual mass movement of ordinary women confronting the tyrannical Pakistani regime is, sadly, of no concern to the country’s mainstream women’s and human rights movement…at least until the former renounce their perspectives and politics and make a blood oath of absolute loyalty to the mosaic of Trotskyist, Maoist, and Stalinist bourgeois conclaves.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID). He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
Source: countercurrents.org
https://countercurrents.org/2024/09/unworthy-victims-pakistani-women-confronting-state-terror/
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Three Women Prisoners, Saenaz Ahadi, Paiash and Hora Nishakht in Iran Strike Against Treatment in Jail
SEPTEMBER 9, 2024
Three women political prisoners in Tehran's Evin prison have gone on hunger and medicine strikes to protest their conditions and treatment.
Sarvenaz Ahmadi, a children's rights activist, began a medicine strike on September 7.
Despite suffering from mental health issues and her doctor's insistence on proper medical care, authorities have denied her request for a medical leave.
Ahmadi was arrested on April 27 along with several union and labor activists and subsequently sentenced to three years and six months in prison.
ParivashMuslimi has been on hunger strike since September 3, protesting restrictions on phone calls and family visits, according to the HRANA human rights website.
Imprisoned since July in the women's ward of Evin, Muslimi has been reportedly denied in-person family meetings.
She was sentenced in August to a total of three years and eight months on charges including assembly and collusion, insulting leadership, and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.
Hora Nikbakht, a publisher, editor, and women's rights activist, joined the strikes on September 7.
She is also protesting limitations on family contact and visits. Nikbakht has been detained since June 12.
Source: iranwire.com
https://iranwire.com/en/women/133720-three-women-prisoners-in-iran-strike-against-treatment-in-jail/
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Africa observes Pan African Women’s Day
September 09, 2024
31 July is Pan African Women’s Day and 2019 marked the 57th anniversary of the Pan-African Women’s Organization (PAWO), the Specialised Agency of the AU dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment
In his statement to commemorate the day, the AU Commission Chairperson Moussa FakiMahamat noted amongst other things the import of the day pointing out that Pan African Women’s Day is a day to celebrate and acknowledge the Foremothers of Africa who gallantly fought for the liberation and development of this continent. He also reiterated the important role of African women who continue to be the backbone of our economies as farmers, entrepreneurs, traders, scientists and leaders in many other sectors.
The Chairperson noted that one of his priorities remains the full implementation of the policy organs’ call to have gender parity in the workforce of the AU by 2025 and committee that he will continue to demand dignity and protection for all women and girls who have been forcibly displaced in Africa; remarking that it is the collective responsibility of Africans to hold themselves and their leaders accountable to deliver on the gender equality and women’s empowerment commitments.
Read the Full statement AUC Chairperson Statement Pan African Women's Day 2019
Source: au.int
https://au.int/en/articles/africa-observes-pan-african-womens-day
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