[lbo-talk] On Islamic radicalism and the left by Don Hamerquist

Michael Pugliese michael.098762001 at gmail.com
Thu Aug 17 17:42:20 PDT 2006


Not just Gulbuddin Hekmatyr of Afghanistan who got the lion's share of the CIA aid via the Pakistani ISI in the anti-Soviet jihad, throws acid in unveiled women's faces, it appears.

http://www.google.com/search?q=hezbollah+acid+women%27s+faces http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5152
>...Tehran, Iran, Jan. 04 – In the latest "acid attack" by radical
Islamists on young women accused of ignoring the country's strict dress regulations, two female university students had acid splashed on their faces in the town of Shahroud, north-eastern Iran.

The two women, aged 21 and 22, study geography in Shahroud's Open University. Unidentified assailants travelling on a motorbike moved next to them in Ferdowsi Street and threw acid on their faces as they were walking. The attackers immediately left the scene and have not been arrested.

Radical Islamists operating under the umbrella of the paramilitary Bassij force and Ansar-e Hezbollah have stepped up their campaign against the "mal-veiling" of women and girls since the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian President regularly addresses meetings of these Islamic vigilantes and praises their efforts "to purify the Islamic Republic of the vestiges of corrupt Western culture".

http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-middle_east_politics/europe_left_3815.jsp How the European left supports Lebanon Hazem Saghieh 14 - 8 - 2006 The left's embrace of an Islamist movement supported by Iranian mullahs would have appalled Karl Marx, says Hazem Saghieh.
>...In Lebanon, the combination of Khomeini's ideas and the Israeli
invasion spawned Hizbollah which called, in its early years, for the creation of a (Shi'a) "Islamic republic" – this, in a country which had started out as a melting-pot of religious minorities. There are other key facts about Hizbollah often neglected by the left. At its outset, members of the movement in the Beka'a valley, accompanied by Iranian "Revolutionary Guards", used to spray girls' legs with acid, because their skirts did not cover their knees and their faces were not veiled.

Between them Hizbollah and Amal, the other main Shi'a movement, killed several communist leaders and intellectuals, so as to monopolise the resistance to Israel and annex it to Syria and Iran.

(On that, Hizbollah's Victory ACHCAR Gilbert June 2000 http://www.europe-solidaire.org/article.php3?id_article=2967
>...Q: Why has the Lebanese victory been claimed by Hizbollah alone?
Were not other forces — Palestinians, Lebanese Left — involved in the resistance movement? If not, why not?

Achcar: The reason Hizbollah appeared as the only father of victory (as the saying goes, victory usually has several fathers, whereas defeat is an orphan) is that they did everything they could to monopolize the prestige of the resistance movement. After the 1982 Israeli invasion, you had an uneasy coexistence and competition between two tendencies in the fight against the occupier: the Lebanese National Resistance, dominated by the Lebanese Communist Party, and the Islamic Resistance, dominated by Hizbollah. The Palestinian forces had been wiped out from southern Lebanon by the invaders; those remaining in the refugee camps were not really a match for Hizbollah, especially since some Lebanese forces like the Shiite communalist militias of Amal were keen on preventing them from spreading again out of the camps. Amal are still there — they are among those who recuperated the stretch of land abandoned by Israel and its local proxy. But they were never a key force in the Resistance movement: they lost their impetus long ago to the benefit of Hizbollah, and turned into a purely conservative and patronage-based party.

Hizbollah conducted all sorts of operations to establish their monopoly over the resistance movement, up to repeated onslaughts against the Communists, murdering some of their key Shiite cadres in particular. The CP behaved in a most servile manner, not daring to retaliate and instead calling on the "brothers" in the Islamic Resistance to behave in a brotherly manner — a call which has no real chance of being heard if it is not backed by decisive action to show the damage that could result, precisely, from the alternative behavior! Such an attitude contributed greatly to the progressive shift in the balance of forces to the advantage of Hizbollah. Many of the most militant members of the Lebanese left among the Shiites were attracted to Hizbollah.

We should recall that at the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 there was no Hizbollah and the CP was the major militant force among the Shiite population in southern Lebanon. The party started losing ground to the advantage of Amal first, and Hizbollah later after 1982. In both cases the lesson was the same: all these movements were appealing to the same constituency, i.e. the traditionally very militant Shiite population of southern Lebanon. In such a competition, the shyest is doomed to lose inevitably, all the more so when you don't even dare to put forward your own radical program and you end up tail-ending the dominant communalist forces. Here again you need to dare to struggle and dare to win!)

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:zvOGJPrRnCUJ:ww4report.com/node/727+hezbollah+acid+women%27s+faces Iraq: acid attacks on "immodest" women Submitted by Bill Weinberg on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 06:28.

A particularly chilling story from Iraq. From the UN news agency IRIN, and available on the website of the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF).

IRAQ: Acid attacks on "immodest" women on the rise

July 4, 2005 - (IRIN) For Sumeya Abdullah, a 34-year-old primary school teacher in the capital Baghdad, life will never be the same again. In late June she had her legs burned by corrosive acid in a street attack because, she believes, she was not wearing her veil and the traditional 'abaya' covering common in many Middle Eastern countries.

"I was shopping in one of the most crowded districts in Baghdad when I felt my skin burning by something corrosive. It was horrible, a terrible pain, then I found myself in hospital," Abdullah said.

Witnesses in the district where the attack happened, said that for more than two weeks, women have been targeted by acid attackers for dressing immodestly. Sometimes the assailants spray or throw the acid on foot, or on occasion, from a moving car. Other attacks have been even more shocking.

"A month ago I was walking from my college to my house when I was abducted in the street by three men. They dropped acid in my face and on my legs. They cut all my hair off while hitting me in the face many times telling me it's the price for not obeying God's wish in using the veil," Hania Abdul-Jabbar, a 23-year-old university student, recounted.

"Today I cannot see out of one eye because the acid made me lose my vision. I am afraid to leave my house. Now I am permanently disfigured with a monster face," she added with tears rolling down her swollen and scarred cheeks.



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