Israeli women strip in support of nude Egyptian blogger
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When an Egyptian activist posted a nude picture of herself online in protest at the lack of freedom of expression, it sparked outrage in her country.
Now, a group of women in Israel have also stripped off in a show of solidarity.
Inspired by 20-year-old Aliaa Elmahdy's bold move, the 40 Israelis posed naked for a 'copycat' shot - holding a banner to cover their modesty.
The sign read 'Homage to Aliaa El Mahdi. Sisters in Israel' with the slogan 'Love without Limits', written in Arabic and Hebrew.
Love without Limits: A group of 40 Israeli women gather to pose nude in Tel Aviv on Saturday
Led by 28-year-old Or Templar, who set up a group on a social networking website inviting women to join her, the girls put their political differences aside to express their support.
On the Facebook group, Templar wrote: 'Girls, let's give the world a good reason to see the unique beauty of Israeli women.
The women were supporting Aliaa Elmahdy, who sparked outrage when she posted a nude picture on her blog to protest the lack of freedom in Egypt
'Regardless of whether they are Jewish, Arab, straight or lesbian – because here, as of now, it doesn't matter.
'Let us show the doubters that our international discourse doesn't depend on governments.'
Templar's plan came as a response to Elmahdy, who posted the image of herself wearing only stockings and red flat shoes on her blog last week.
The country is currently preparing for elections following the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak.
Elmahdy's blog received millions of hits but thousands took to her site to make negative comments.
Tepler told Israeli new website Ynet: 'I got the idea the day that the blogger's photo was posted.
'I didn't expect that she would get the response that she got.
'It got on my nerves that she received a quarter of a million abusive comments and death threats.
'I felt that when a liberal, enlightened woman in Cairo cannot express herself and gets threats from her state, I should show solidarity.
'Of course there's the nationalistic aspect, and I won't deny being a leftist and a seeker of peace.
'I feel like the governments don't represent the enlightened, simple people who want peace.'
Elmahdy, a self-proclaimed atheist who recently dropped out of university, insists she will continue to fight for her freedom.
She told CNN: 'Women under Islam will always be objects to use at home.
'The (sexism) against women in Egypt is unreal, but I am not going anywhere and will battle it til the end.
'Many women wear the veil just to escape the harassment and be able to walk the streets.
'I am a believer of every word I say and I am willing to live in danger under the many threats I receive in order to obtain the real freedom all Egyptian are fighting and dying for daily.'
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wow.
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Originally posted by NeverSayGoodBye:
The women were supporting Aliaa Elmahdy, who sparked outrage when she posted a nude picture on her blog to protest the lack of freedom in Egypt
I wonder whether singaporean women would strip to protest lack of freedom in Singapore.
She told CNN: 'Women under Islam will always be objects to use at home.
She is confusing Islam with arabic and bedouin culture.
In such traditional Arabic society, the extended family, not the individual, was the basic social unit; all property was controlled by the patriarchal head of such a family and, accordingly, most decisions were in his hands.
His control of the marriage of his male descendants was ensured by the fact that a price had to be paid for a bride to her family, and this would require the patriarch's consent.
Such a patriarchal family arose from the fact that marriage was patrilocal, the young couple residing with the groom's father so long as he lived, while he continued to live with the groom's paternal grandfather until the latter's death.
Such a death of the head of an extended family freed his sons to become heads of similar extended families that would remain intact, frequently for three or more generations, until the head of the family dies in his turn.
Within such a family each male remains subject to the indulgent, if erratic, control of his father and the indulgent, and subservient care of his mother and unmarried sisters, while his wife is under the despotic control of her mother-in-law until her production of sons and the elimination of her elders by death will make her a despot, in turn, over her daughters-in-law.
This Arabic emphasis on the extended family as the basic social reality meant that larger social units came into existence simply by linking a number of related extended families together under the nominal leadership of the patriarch who, hy general consensus, had the best qualities of leadership, dignity, and social prestige.
But such unions, being personal and essentially temporary, could be severed at any time.
The personal character of such unions and the patriarchal nature of the basic family units tended to make all political relationships personal and temporary, reflections of the desires or whims of the leader and not the consequence or reflection of any basic social relationships.
This tended to prevent the development of any advanced conception of the state, law, and the community (as achieved, for example, by the once tribal Greeks and Romans). Within the family, rules were personal, patriarchal, and often arbitrary and changeable, arising from the will and often from the whims of the patriarch.
This prevented the development of any advanced ideas of reciprocal common interests whose interrelationships, hy establishing a higher social structure, created, at the same time, rules superior to the individual, rules of an impersonal and permanent character in which law created authority and not, as in the Arabic system, authority created law (or at least temporary rules).
To this day the shattered cultures along the whole Pakistani-Peruvian axis have a very weak grasp of the nature of a community or of any obligation to such a community, and regard law and politics as simply personal relationships whose chief justification is the power and position of the individual who issues the orders.
The state, as a structure of force more remote and therefore less personal than the immediate family, is regarded as an alien and exploitative personal system to be avoided and evaded simply because it is more remote (even if of similar character) than the individual's immediate family
This biological and patriarchal character of all significant social relationships in Arab life is reflected in the familiar feature of male dominance.
Only the male is important.
The female is inferior, even sub-human, and becomes significant only by producing males (the one thing, apparently, that the dominant male cannot do for himself).
Because of the strong patrilocal character of Arab marriage, a new wife is not only subjected sexually to her husband; she is also subjected socially and personally to his family, including his brothers, and, above all, his mother (who has gained this position of domination over other females in the house by having produced male children).
Sex is regarded almost solely as simply a physiological relationship with little emphasis on the religious, emotional, or even social aspects.
Love, meaning concern for the personality or developing potentialities of the sexual partner, plays little role in Arabic sexual relationships.
The purpose of such relationships in the eyes of the average Arab is to relieve his own sexual desire or to generate sons.
Such sons are brought up in an atmosphere of whimsical, arbitrary, personal rules where they are regarded as superior beings by their mother and sisters and, inevitably, by their father and themselves, simply on the basis of their maleness.
Usually they are spoiled, undisciplined, self-indulgent, and unprincipled. Their whims are commands, their urges are laws. They are exposed to a dual standard of sexual morality in which any female is a legitimate target of their sexual desires, but the girl they marry is expected to be a paragon of chaste virginity.
The original basis for this emphasis on a bride's virginity rested on the emphasis on blood descent and was intended to be a guarantee of the paternity of children. The wife, as a child-producing mechanism, had to produce the children of one known genetic line and no other.
This emphasis on the virginity of any girl who could be regarded as acceptable as a wife was carried to extremes. The loss of a girl's virginity was regarded as an unbearable dishonor by the girl's family, and any girl who brought such dishonor on a family was regarded as worthy of death at the hands of her father and brothers. Once she is married, the right to punish such a transgression is transferred to her husband.
To any well-bred girl, her premarital virginity and the reservation of sexual access to her husband's control after marriage ("her honor") have pecuniary value.
Since she has no value in herself as a person, apart from "her honor," and has little value as a worker of any sort, her virginity before marriage has a value in money equal to the expense of keeping her for much of her life since, indeed, this is exactly what it was worth in money.
As a virgin she could expect the man who obtained her in marriage to regard that asset as equivalent to his reciprocal obligation to support her as a wife.
As a matter of fact, her virginity was worth much less than that, for in traditional Arabic society, if she displeased her husband, even if she merely crossed one of his whims, he could set her aside by divorce, a process very easy for him, with little delay or obligation, but impossible to achieve on her part, no matter how eagerly she might desire it.
Moreover, once her virginity was gone, she had little value as a wife or a person, unless she had mothered a son, and could be passed along from man to man, either in marriage or otherwise, with little social obligation on anyone's part.
As a result of such easy divorce, and the narrow physiological basis on which sexual relationships are based, plus the lack of value of a woman once her virginity is gone, Arab marriage is very fragile, with divorce and broken marriage about twice as frequent as in the United States.
Even the production of sons does not ensure the permanence of the marriage, since the sons belong to the father whatever the cause of the marriage disruption.
As a result of these conditions, marriage of several wives in sequence, a phenomenon we associate with Hollywood, is much more typical of the Arabic world and is very much more frequent than the polygamous marriage, which, while permitted under Islam, is quite rare.
Not more than 5 percent of married men in the Near East today have more than one wife at the same time, because of the expense, but the number who remain in monogamous union till death is almost equally small...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/19.html#73