Random Note #203,671
John Lyons was The Australian’s Middle East correspondent for many years and in his comment piece today he calls out and nails Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s “alternative facts” over women’s rights in Islam on Q&A on Monday night.
Magied has been skating by as the exotic “other” in her colourful attire and getting away with her schtick as the ABC’s pet muslim marketing guru with her muslim perspective on the Drum and Q&A for far too long.
The Q&A producers, instead of going for the predictable shouty tabloid overkill with Jackie Lambie would have better served their audience to have Magied going head to head with a far less strident and more thoughtful survivor of women’s rights in Islam like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who actually does have the on the ground, authority and the experience to put Magied back in her box.
Magied and others who want to push the envelope, bend the truth and stretch reality must realise that in a basically well read, educated, wired and connected first world country with finger tip access to information her argy bargy over women’s rights in Islam with Jacquie Lambi was never going to pass the sniff test. Although Lambie was not the right person to debate the subject, she was right when she forcefully made the point that in Australia, we only have one law, Australian law.
By her own admission Yassmin Abdel-Magied has been in Australia since she was two, so her coal face interaction with the actual practice and theory of women’s right in Islam as John Lyons points out below would, I suspect be pretty much close to zero.
BELOW IS AN EXTRACT FROM JOHN LYONS PIECE
“….Abdel Magied argued that women are treated well in Islam. This may be the case in Brisbane, where she lives, but the idea of trying to argue this about Islam in general is nonsense.
In Iran, discrimination against women is entrenched in the law — the treatment of women as second-class citizens is open and formalised.
The notion that they are equal is absurd.
For example, if a negligent driver in Iran hits and injures a female pedestrian the courts will make the driver pay half the compensation that they would if they injured a male pedestrian.
I covered the 2009 “Green Revolution” in Iran for The Australian, an uprising violently crushed by the Ayatollahs.
While I was there I got onto a bus with an Iranian-English woman who was showing me around Tehran.
I got on the front of the bus, for the men, and she got on the back, for the women.
A wooden pole separated the two.
When we began talking, an Iranian woman sitting on the bus confronted us — were we married and if not then we should not be talking to each other in public.
In Iran, a man and a woman should not talk in public unless they are related.
That same Iranian-English woman told me how “Islamic police” would walk alongside her in the street and tell her to wipe lipstick from her face, or that her scarf was not covering all her hair.
I was invited into some homes, where I spoke to many young Iranian women about their status.
Clearly frustrated, the married ones told me that an Iranian woman could only leave home, even to go to the shops, if their husband or father gave them “permission.”
The women, who are connected to the world through the internet, movies and the strong university educations available in Iran, were both upset and embarrassed by this reality.
Things in Saudi Arabia are just as bad — women are not allowed to drive cars. Supporting that ban, Saudi cleric Sheikh Salah al-Luhaydan claimed it had been scientifically proven that driving “affects the ovaries” and leads to clinical disorders in children.
Bear in mind that Sheikh al-Luhaydan is a spiritual leader, guiding future generations of Saudis in their attitudes.
This sort of medieval mentality is found in many parts of the Arab world.
In 2010, the United Nations put on a summer camp for children in Gaza. But a Salafist group, Free of the Homeland, said the UN was “teaching schoolgirls fitness, dancing and immorality.” Two days later the camp was attacked and destroyed.
Then in 2013, the UN decided to fund a Gaza marathon. About 1500 people registered, including many woman and children.
But Hamas, which controls Gaza, banned girls and women from participating.
The UN cancelled the event.
For Yassmin Abdel-Magied to sit in a studio in Sydney and try to sugar-coat reality of how well women are treated in Islam will not help anyone..” Sugar Coating The Reality Of Islam