The medical profession is doing all it can though we have to address this as a social evil. People should be proud to have a girl child.

—Dr. Vinay Agarwal, president of the Indian Medical Association, speaking about the first conviction leading to a jail sentence in India for a doctor and his X-ray technician for determining the sex of a female fetus, which they then agreed to abort based on its gender.  Dr. Anil Sabhani and his assistant Kartar Singh were sentenced to two years in jail and a fine for agreeing to abort a female fetus in 2001.

India banned gender testing for fetuses and abortions based on the results in 1994. Traditional biases and crippling dowry prices have made female lives significantly more expendable than those of their male counterparts; medical journal The Lancet estimates that ten million female fetuses were aborted during the past two decades as a result of gender determination, a practice which has ratcheted up the gender imbalance as high as 793 girls to every 1,000 boys in the state of Punjab.

Mimi Hanaoka

Abdul Rahman, the Afghan Christian convert who was supposed to stand trial for apostasy — the penalty for which is death, according to Islamic Sharia law — has been freed on the basis that he is mentally unfit to stand trial. Rahman, a Christian for 16 years, converted in Pakistan while he was working as an aide worker and lived in Germany prior to returning to Afghanistan in 2002.

While he was deemed mentally unsound for trial, the Afghan authorities who arrested him two weeks ago would have struggled to put his case to trial under the glaring light of international scrutiny. Rahman may be mentally unsound, but the decision to declare him unfit for trial was probably the only way that the Afghan authorities could placate the international community while still maintaining its legitimacy.

A slew of nations expressed their revulsion and horror at the prospect of Rahman’s pending execution, with a glittering list of dignitaries pleading for his release, including Australian Prime Minister John Howard, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Pope Benedict XVI, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik.

While Rahman has escaped standing trial, it is likely that vigilante justice will now resolve the issue unless he successfully and immediately seeks asylum abroad. He was, after all, turned in to the authorities by his family, following a dispute. If the law refuses to execute Rahman, then the clerics will ensure that he gets his just dessert. Cleric Abdul Raoulf told his followers at  the Herati Mosque: “God’s way is the right way, and this man whose name is Abdul Rahman is an apostate.” According to Raoulf’s sermon, Rahman had “committed the greatest sin” in his conversion and ought to be executed.

The courts have effectively set a precedent, since this was possibly the first case of its kind in Afghanistan. While the legal decision that he is unfit to stand trial is interesting, what will be more interesting will be the reaction of the millions of ordinary Afghans. While Rahman has survived his first hurdle, the second — of religious conviction and vigilante justice — will certainly be harder to overcome.

Mimi Hanaoka

“[It is] the death of the sisterhood… An end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than men…. In the past, women of all classes shared lives centred on explicitly female concerns. Now it makes little sense to discuss women in general. The statistics are clear: among young, educated, full-time professionals, being female is no longer a drag on earnings or progress.”

— Alison Wolf, a professor at Kings College London and author of “Does Education Matter?,” a contentious article in Prospect magazine in which she contends that the emergence and success of elite women in well-paid jobs has essentially tolled the death knell for feminism and “female altruism” and is proof that women have finally broken through the glass ceiling. Educated women, she argues, will earn as much as men and slightly less then men if they have children. Women, according to Wolf, have been lured by career success away from careers in fields that have a caretaker component, such as teaching. The temptation of a successful career acts as a disincentive to having a family, which has led to “grave consequences,” including a decline in birth rates.

Critics of Wolf’s argument point to structural and financial mechanisms that suggest that the glass ceiling has yet to be broken through, at least properly. Significantly, women are typically the beneficiaries of long-term maternity leave.  Meaning, effectively, that even the “elite women” that Wolf highlights must choose between a career and a family at some point since women are still typically saddled with child-rearing duties. Even financially successful women are asked to bear the brunt of parenting duties, should they choose to have children, and thus bear a double burden. If such women choose not to have children, they are accused of forsaking parenthood and held responsible for a declining birthrate. Either way, successful women seem to lose.  

Jenny Watson, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission in the UK, cites reduced promotion, less pay, a dearth of women in higher-ranking posts, and a lack of flexible work opportunities as proof that women with children suffer, on balance, compared to their male counterparts.

The glass ceiling, then, still looks pretty much in tact.

Mimi Hanaoka

“The film is meant for people not yet in Holland to take note that this is normal here and not be shocked and awed by it once they arrive.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born member of the Dutch Parliament, speaking about  To the Netherlands, an educational film released by the Dutch government and targeted at potential immigrants who must take the new entrance exam in order to enter the country.  The film contains images of gay men kissing and of a sunbathing topless woman; there is an edited version for people in countries, such as Iran, where possession of such images is illegal.  The 15-minute exam that went into effect March 15 is administrated at 138 embassies worldwide and tests applicants for rudimentary Dutch language skills and information about Dutch law and culture.  Potential questions include whether hitting women and female circumcision are legal and where Crown Princess Maxima is originally from (Argentina).

Opponents decry the measure as a naked attempt to discourage immigrants from Muslim countries. Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk — known as “Iron Rita” — has recently spearheaded the campaign for more stringent immigration requirements. Immigrant advocate Abdou Menebhi, who is Moroccan-born, stated: “They are trying to find every pretext to show that people should not come to the Netherlands because they are fundamentalist or not emancipated. They confront people with these things and then judge them afterwards.”

The more restrictive immigration policies were implemented partially due to the controversy sparked by the murder of Theo van Gogh (great-great-grandson of the painter) as a result of his controversial 10-minute short film Submission about the abuse inflicted on Muslim women. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the film, also received death threats. Van Gogh planned on making a three-part series about the subject. The second film was to be a treatment of the same issue from the perspective of Muslim men.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Sensing the conservative zeitgeist that is creeping through America, South Dakota is taking the initiative to lead women’s health back into the deprivation of decades past.  South Dakota began its crusade early: in 1998, the state declared that a pharmacist may refuse to dispense emergency contraception to a woman, even if she carries a prescription for it: “No pharmacist may be required to dispense medication if there is reason to believe that the medication would be used to (1) cause an abortion; or (2) destroy an unborn child.”  Unsurprisingly, South Dakota has already banned all medical treatments related to or drawn from human cloning, in addition to banning human embryonic stem cell research.  

On March 6, 2006, South Dakota governor Mike Rounds signed a document banning almost all abortions in the state, making no exception for pregnancies that are results of incest or rape. The new law will be mired in the court systems and will be unlikely to take effect unless it is upheld by the Supreme Court. Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, both conservative Justices and Bush appointees, have the potential to swing the Supreme Court into conservatism and to overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in 1973. The law is slated to be put into action on July 1st and carries a five-year prison sentence for any doctor who performs an illegal abortion.

Other states are following suit. Alan Nunnelee, a Mississippi state senator, declared, “Roe is the worst kind of law…I believe we can do better.”  He is moving to ban abortion in the state.  

Mimi Hanaoka

South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds yesterday signed a document banning almost all abortions in the state, making no exception for pregnancies that are results of incest or rape. Although the measure will be an extremely restrictive one — permitting abortion only if the mother’s life is in danger — the new law will be mired in the court systems and will be unlikely to take effect unless it is upheld by the Supreme Court. Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, both conservative Justices and Bush appointees, have the potential to swing the Supreme Court into conservatism and to overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in 1973. The law is, however, slated to be put into action on July 1st and carries a five-year prison sentence for any doctor who performs an illegal abortion.

For now, the 800 or so women who annually have abortions in South Dakota will be subject to the current law, itself stringent, which puts increasingly severe restrictions on abortions throughout the course of pregnancy. Abortions after the 24th week may currently only be performed to protect the mother’s health and safety.

Mimi Hanaoka

“This decision strikes at the heart of democracy… Elected politicians should only be able to be removed by the voters or for breaking the law.”

— London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone, condemning his upcoming four-week suspension from office for suggesting that a Jewish journalist was like a concentration camp guard. Mayor Livingstone will appeal his suspension, which is scheduled to begin on Wednesday.  

Nobody, it seems, is particularly pleased with the ruling.  Major Livingstone is livid about the suspension ruling made by the Adjudication Panel for England, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews — the body that lodged the complaint and never asked for the suspension — stated that it found the incident, the guilty result, and the major’s subsequent suspension regrettable. Additionally, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, decried the suspension as a “clear over-reaction and an affront to our democratic traditions.”

The whole fuss stemmed from the fact that Major Livingstone, who made the comments to Oliver Finegold of the Evening Standard newspaper outside a party organized with public funds, refused to apologize for his comments. The mayor, for his part, refused to apologize, stating that the Evening Standard had supported the Nazis in the decade leading up to Word War II.

The conversation, which was recorded, captures Mayor Livingston asking Oliver Finegold if he is a “German war criminal,” to which Finegold replies: “No, I’m Jewish, I wasn’t a German war criminal. I’m quite offended by that.”

The Mayor responds to Finegold by stating: “Ah right, well you might be, but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?”

Mimi Hanaoka

The escalating — and, by this point, utterly ludicrous — row sparked by the provocative cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad first published by best-selling Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30th of last year have recently created a furore in the Muslim world, despite the fact that they were published in October of last year by the Egyptian newspaper al-Fagr, which went largely unnoticed. The cartoons were published by Jyllands-Posten alongside an editorial critical of self-censorship in the Danish media.  

Here are a few statistics:

One million dollars: the bounty offered by Maulana Yousaf Qureshi, a Muslim cleric in Peshawar, Pakistan, to anybody who murders one of the cartoonists.

44 people (at least): the number of people of who have died in cartoon-related protests.

12 gold coins: the prize offered by Hamshahri, Iran’s best-selling newspaper, in a contest being launched for the 12 “best” cartoons about the Holocaust. Farid Mortazavi, an editor at the paper, asserted that the intentionally provocative competition would serve to test Europeans’ dedication to the notion of freedom of expression.

Mimi Hanaoka

In the weird mélange of reality and fiction, Osama bin Laden will follow in the footsteps of Hitler when he takes on Batman in the upcoming Holy Terror, Batman! graphic novel. The core of the plot is simple: Osama bin Laden, the curiously elusive al-Qaeda leader, charges America with being the “Great Satan” that peddles a culture seeped in aggression and pornography (and the recently released images of torture at Abu Graib jail that occurred in 2003 will hardly damped the fervor of such accusations) and then attacks Batman’s Gotham city, which is modeled on New York City.

Frank Miller, the author of Batman, sees no shame in propaganda, and he recently stated at a comic book convention that “It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a piece of propaganda — Batman kicks al-Qaeda’s ass…It just seems silly to chase around the Riddler when you’ve got al-Qaeda out there.”

The earliest possible publication for the Batman comic featuring Osama bin Laden will likely be next year, but this isn’t the first time that comic books have been employed in the service of political objective — in 2005 the U.S. Army was attempting to create a comic book that would, in theory, have the youth of the Middle East and Islamic world embracing Americanism with open arms. The rationale was that “in order to achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East, the youth need to be reached.” Thus, the American government’s Federal Business Opportunities website posted an ad looking for a collaborator for “a series of comic books,” since the medium would provide “the opportunity for youth to learn lessons, develop role models and improve their education.” The comic book would be produced by a new player in the business: the U.S. Special Operations Command based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home to the 4th Psychological Operations Group.

Any pawns in the escalating war of media propaganda between the U.S. and the Muslim and Middle Eastern world will face stiff competition. The tentacular reach and popularity of the graphic novel now extends to the Middle East with AK Comics’ Middle East Heroes line of comic books, which is the first comic book specifically targeted for the audience in the region. The graphic novel, which is published in both Arabic and English, pits forces of good and evil for control of the City of All Faiths. Al-Ahram Weekly ran an article last year about Middle East Heroes with the cheerful title “My Favorite Superhero,” which quoted a 27-year-old business analyst explaining the appeal of the comic: “The setting is familiar and most characters’ names are Arabic…it’s just easier to connect.”

While jingoistic propagandism on both ends of the conflict will likely find an easy, or at least curious, audience, it will also likely deepen the unthinking rift that cuts through the ideological spectrum.

Mimi Hanaoka

The behemoth that is Wal-Mart is now being hauled to court by three women in Massachusetts; if Wal-Mart loses, it will be a victory for women and women’s health advocates.

At issue is Plan B, an emergency contraceptive pill that can prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of sex. Pharmacies in Massachusetts are permitted to sell the pill, which is generally issued by prescription, over the counter, although none are required to do so. State law requires its pharmacies is to stock and provide “commonly prescribed medications in accordance with the usual needs of the community.” The three plaintiffs in Massachusetts are contending that Plan B falls within the usual needs of the community.  

Wal-Mart cites low demand for its refusal to stock the drug; however, the AP refers to a letter attributed to John Delaney, a Wal-Mart lawyer, stating that it was the company’s policy — and not a lack of demand or poor sales — to not stock emergency contraceptive pills. The only state in which Wal-Mart stocks Plan B is Illinois, where federal law mandates that it do so.

Should Wal-Mart lose this case, it will be a victory for women and women’s health advocates and a clear message to the corporate monstrosity that it cannot overrule the genuine needs of the community on the basis of its own political motives.

Mimi Hanaoka

Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s film about two gay cowboys who fall in love, leads this year’s Oscar nominations by contending in eight categories, including the prestigious triumvirate of best picture, best director, and best actor awards. And unlike TV’s recent superficial and flitting obsession with all things gay and metrosexual, the film’s multiple nominations lends gay issues a visibility and conversations about them a weight that it hitherto lacked in the mainstream media.  

Being gay became almost faddish in the media recently, with the slew of TV programs — Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Boy Meets Boy — that, while they didn’t normalize homosexuality, certainly increased its visibility. Ever the vanguard of truly trashy television, the Fox network almost waded into hitherto unimaginably tasteless ground in 2004 with a show that was to be called Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay. Bowing to pressure and a startling sense of decency, Fox cancelled the two-hour show, ostensibly for “creative reasons.” But these shows, while giving airtime to gay TV personalities, reduced homosexuality to a facile stereotype of the consumerist, vain, and fashion-conscious gay man.

Brokeback Mountain refuses to stoop to the grotesque stereotypes that the Fox and Bravo networks so greedily capitalized on, and its multiple nominations legitimize its foray into addressing gay issues. The Academy Awards will be aired on March 5th.

Mimi Hanaoka

With recent race-related riots in Birmingham, Sydney, and Paris, it should be heartening to see a coalition of Muslims, evangelical Christians, and secular humanists all demonstrating for a common cause.  Except that the common cause that has drawn these disparate groups together threatens the very fabric of public debate.  

The British government is currently teasing out the details of the proposed Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which would confer upon religious groups the same legal protection against hate crimes as racial groups. Since British courts already regard Sikhs and Jews as races, this new bill would apply, for example, to Muslims and Christians. Individuals guilty of inciting racial hatred would be subject to a maximum of seven years in prison.
  
Protection against hate crimes is all well and good, except that the House of Commons has signaled its intentions to reserve crucial changes made to the bill in the House of Lords.

In short, the House of Lords amended the bill so that in order to protect free speech, the hate crimes bill would include threatening words and behavior. Insults and abuse would not be considered hate crimes. Furthermore, the hate crime would need to be intentional. Excluded from the definition of hate crimes are proselytizing, discussion, criticism, and insult.  Abusing or ridiculing religious beliefs or practices would not be considered hate crimes. And this is how the bill should stand.  The House of Commons, which will be voting shortly on the bill, wants to reverse these amendments made by the House of Lords.  

Rowan Atkinson, the British comedian (known precisely for his acerbic wit), concisely stated his reservations about the bill, which opponents say would smother free speech and unduly threaten artists: “No one deserves a right to freedom from criticism.”

Mimi Hanaoka