America’s first lady said women already have achieved extraordinary gains in the Middle East and that change must come to any nation that wants to be considered truly free.
“Women who have not yet won these rights are watching,” she said at the
World Economic Forum conference on the Middle East. “They are calling on the conscience of their countrymen, making it clear that if the right to vote is to have any meaning, it cannot be limited only to men.”…
“Freedom, especially freedom for women, is more than the absence of oppression,” Mrs. Bush said. “It’s the right to speak and vote and worship freely. Human rights require the rights of women.”
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“That is a terrible injustice, and it’s unacceptable in any society,” she said, noting that most of the people in the Middle East and northern Africa who are illiterate are women.
Gutsy stuff, sending the First Lady to an economic conference in Jordan and then having her basically call out, tongue-in-cheek, Middle Eastern regimes that continue to suppress women’s rights. There needs to be more of this.
The significance of the comments being made at an economic forum can’t be passed up, either, because pointing out the economic benefit to the liberalization of Middle Eastern women (which, obviously, when a state allows half its population to fully participate in the economy there undeniably is a very real economic boon) may be the only way to move some Muslim leaders in that direction, because certainly they’re not being persuaded on Western moralistic grounds.
There is no instant fix to the issue of women’s rights in the Middle East, which Iraq is most definitely proving. Depending on the extent of shar’ia (or Islamic) law present in the new Iraqi constitution, women, after a glance of what freedom may be like, could be barred from experiencing any true rights or even the semblance of equality. Civil society groups are fighting to make sure that will not be the case, but they are vastly outnumbered by a mostly conservative Iraqi government that seems more interested in instilling Islamic law than settling a more than tense domestic situation. However, the existence of these groups themselves is a great sign and suggests that, eventually, radical change in Iraq and perhaps throughout the region may eventually come, although it may take something spectacular to break down the barriers of a barbaric mindset that has rooted itself throughout the Middle East over a millenia.
Cross-posted to Digital Dissent