THE SILLY SELFIE JOE BIDEN AND FADED CELEBRITY BARRY O TOOK LEFT THEM LOOKING LIKE 2 YOUNGSTERS WHO JUST DISCOVERED THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB AND TRAINING BRAS.
FINALLY, THERE'S SOME PUSH BACK THAT ALL THIS OVERSHARING IS KIND OF TACKY.
BUT NO REAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT THAT THE MEDIA ITSELF FUELED THIS TACKY TREND.
REACHED FOR COMMENT THIS MORNING BY THESE REPORTERS, THE DAHLI BAMA RESPONDED, "DEBASE THE PRESIDENCY? BOYS, I INTEND TO SKULLF**K IT UNTIL I'VE DRAINED EVERY LAST DROP OF CREDIBILITY FROM IT!"
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Shahram Aghamir: Last month the Iraqi Cabinet approved a new personal status legislation called the Ja'fari law which is named after the sixth Shi'ite Imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq who established a school of jurisprudence in Medina in the 8th century. This legislation has created an uproar among Iraqi women's rights and the civil rights community. If approved, the Ja'fari law will abolish the current Personal Status Law 188 which is considered one of the most progressive in the Arab world. The new law will roll back the rights of women in marriage, divorce and child custody as well as inheritance. It will lower the age of marriage for girls from 18 to 9 and boys to 15. Who has initially proposed the law and what are the implications of this law for Iraqi women? Malihe spoke with Iraqi women's rights activist Basma al-Khateeb who volunteers with Iraq's 1st Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women Shadow Report Coalition as an expert and a trainer.
Basma al-Khateeb: Actually, the Minister of Justice by the end of October declared that they have a committee -- expert committee -- and they have finished drafting the Ja'fari law. It consists of 256 articles and he's going to present it to the Cabinet by the next session. He says that they've been working on for the past two years.
Malihe Razazan: Back in 2004, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim who died in 2009, he was in exile in Iran for 20 years before the invasion, and after the occupation of Iraq, he worked very closely with the Americans. His party worked to pass Decision 137 issue by interim governing council to abolish the Personal Status Law Number 188 which was passed in 1959 --
Basma al-Kahteeb: That was actually the first thing that he -- that he issued, this Resolution 137 -- as if Iraq had no problems. This was the only rule that he came up with. And we had demonstrations and we managed to defeat that. They withdrew it.
Malihe Razazan: Yeah, because there was a huge backlash against it.
Basma al-Khateeb: But this is historical. His father, Muhsin al-Hakim, back in 1959, when the civil Personal Status Law was issued, the religious institutes led by Muhsin al-Hakim back then, his father, refused this Personal Status Law because it will take all the authority from the cleric.
Malihe Razazan: In matters regarding women's divorce, child custody, inheritance it will be left to civil courts.
Basma al-Khateeb: Yes. And this is how our judicial system and lawyers and colleges and scholars all -- I mean, we're talking about sixty years that all our institutions -- judicial, court, everything -- is built on it. This -- going back just to abolish all of this -- this law --the formal law, the Personal Status Law that's still active now. It doesn't go to clerics, only the judge rules. This current law puts another council that is in control of judges of courts. It just turns everything into chaos. Every lawyer has to study all these religious and cleric institution and legal issues. It doesn't mean that we have one court. It means that we have more than 20 courts because each Ayatollah is different in examination with the other. Havilah? Even though they're Sh'itie, they're different from the Sadr group, they're different from Sistani interpretation which means multi courts.
Raheem Salman, Ahmed Rasheed, Isabel Coles and Andrew Roche (Reuters) explore the topic and note:
Proponents of the Ja'afari Law say many families marry off daughters underage anyway, particularly in the rural south, so the bill would protect young brides by codifying their status.
"The law does not make the marriage of underage girls obligatory," said Shi'ite women's rights activist Thabat al-Unaibi, adding she would not let her own two daughters marry until they were old enough to have finished their studies.
"Why all the fuss over this issue?"
And supporters have been the winners. Hajer Naili (Women's eNews) notes:
Haider Ala Hamoudi, a law professor at the University of Pittsburg who advised the 2009 Constitutional Review Committee of the Iraqi legislature on behalf of the United States Embassy in Baghdad, has analyzed the text.
In a phone interview he called it sloppily drafted and poorly organized. "I just dismiss it as publicity to garner votes."
In a March 31 article in the Jurist, Hamoudi lays out the obstacles to transforming religious texts into actual laws and calls the text something of a "political stunt." In the article he quotes Ayatollah al- Bashir Najif, a leading Shiite, as criticizing the bill as "rife with flights of fancy in legal and juristic formulations that render it impossible that a jurist would find it acceptable."
Really? We're going to predict what's going to happen in an election when anything can happen?
And if it's being used "to garner votes," might some push hard for it to pass the Parliament after the election?
I have no idea what's going to happen with the bill.
But it does have supporters and it is being sold. It's being normalized.
And this is happening not just with the bill and the attempt to kill off the Personal Status Law Number 188. This is part of a larger war. Dropping back to January 27, 2012 snapshot:
We bring that up because Nouri did finally find a woman and named her to be Minister of the State for Women's Affairs. The woman is Dr. Ibtihal al-Zaidi. And Al Mada reports the lovely doesn't believe in equality stating equality "harms women" but she's happy to offer government dictates on what women should be wearing. No, she's not a minister. She's many things including words we won't use here but she's not friend to women and that's why Nouri picked her. A real woman fighting for other women? Nouri can't handle that. A simpering idiot who states that women should only act after their husband's consent? That gender traitor gets a ministry. She's currently at work devising a uniform for Iraqi women.
Let's to back to Wednesday's broadcast of Voices of the Middle East and North Africa.
Basma al-Khateeb: It lowers the marriage age for girls to 9 --
Malihe Razazan: From 18.
Basma al-Khateeb: -- 15 for boys, it's 18 for both [currently] marriage. Only in very, very special cases it's 15 with the consent of the judge under the current law. But for this Ja'fari law it lowers the age to 9. And wives must seek permission from their husbands before leaving the house. If I am a doctor or a minister or a lawyer, I cannot go out without permission from my husband, go out of the house. Muslim men would be prohibited from marrying non-Muslim women. Granting husbands legal rights to have sex with their wives without their consent. Granting custody to the father of any child over two-years-old in the case of divorce which is not the case that we have now with the current law.
Note the similarities between the law and the position, two years ago, of the Minister of Women's Affairs.
Nouri picked that idiot for a reason.
This is not happening by accident.
Bit by bit, this gets pushed over and over. And every time it does the appropriate response is world wide condemnation. Short of that? It's not just being normalized within Iraq, it's being normalized outside of Iraq via silence.
"But it's still a danger because it's there, the draft is there," Basma al-Khateeb noted.
As Mark Taliano (Troy Media) observes, "'Freedom' and 'democracy' are still cloaking, tacitly or overtly, mass murder and genocide in Iraq at this moment." And that's certainly clear as Nouri terrorizes the citizens of Anbar. His War Crimes are many but include the non-stop bombing of residential neighborhoods in Falluja. Yesterday's snapshot noted how common these bombings were. The military's bombing of the residential neighborhoods continues. NINA reports, "A source at the Fallujah General Hospital told the reporter of the National Iraqi News Agency / NINA / five people, including a woman, were killed and 11 others wounded, including two children, in the renewed shelling and mortar to most of Fallujah today." Qatar News Agency covers the killing of civilians here.
This is a War Crime. Nouri's committing War Crimes with weapons the US government provides him with.
Ann submitted a question to Gwen Ifill's live 'chat' (it's not) at PBS' The NewsHour today:
12:34
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12:34
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So Ann raises specific issues and gets an 'answer' where Gwen basically says, 'Watch The NewsHour!'
It's a funny kind of chat with Gwen playing Amway salesperson.
But credit to Ann for raising the issue during the 'chat.'
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