SNIPPITS AND SNAPPITS

Moral decay, political corruption and fascism are everywhere. But activists have been busy. For decades we have tried every tactic to avert catastrophe. We voted, wrote letters, gave money, held signs, protested in marches, clicked links, signed petitions, tweeted websites, wrote books, taught classes, turned off the television, programmed apps, engaged in direct action, committed petty vandalism. All for naught. Popular revolution remains the only viable tactic left.

Wednesday, 31 August, 2011

FEMALE TRAFFICKING SOARS IN IRAQ

A tribal Libyan girl, does she face the same fate as her iraqi sisters?

By Rebecca Murray

September 1, 2011

IPS News

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=104911

Al-Battaween, the red light street in Baghdad.

Credit:Rebecca Murray/IPS

BAGHDAD,

Aug 27, 2011 (IPS) ~

Rania was 16 years old when officials raped her during Saddam Hussein’s 1991 crackdown in Iraq’s Shia south. She says.

"My brothers were sentenced to death,

and the price to stop this was to offer my body,"

Cast out for bringing ‘shame’ to her family, Rania ran away to Baghdad and soon fell into living and working in Baghdad’s red light district.

Prostitution and sex trafficking are epidemic in Iraq, where the violence of military occupation and sectarian strife have smashed national institutions, impoverished the population and torn apart families and neighbourhoods.

Over 100,000 civilians have been killed and an estimated 4.4 million Iraqis displaced since 2003.

Amnesty International states:

"Wars and conflicts, wherever they are fought, invariably usher in sickeningly high level of violence against women and girls."

Rania worked her way up as a sex trafficker’s deputy, collecting money from clients. She explains:

"If I had four girls, and about 200 clients a day

~ it could be about 50 clients for each one of them."

Sex costs about 100 dollars a session now, Rania says.

Many virgin teenage girls are sold for around 5,000 dollars, and trafficked to popular destinations like northern Iraq, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. Non-virgins are about half that price.

Girls who run away to escape domestic violence or forced marriage are the most vulnerable prey for men working for pimps in bus stations and taxi stands.

Some girls are also sold into marriages by family relatives, only to be handed over to trafficking rings.

Most of Iraq’s sex traffickers are predominantly female, running squalid brothels in neighbourhoods like the decrepit Al-Battaween district in central Baghdad.

Six years ago, a raid by U.S. troops on Rania’s brothel brought her nefarious career to an abrupt end. The prostitutes were charged along with everyone else for abetting terrorism.

Imprisonment changed Rania’s life. While she served time in Baghdad’s Al-Kadimiyah lock-up ~ where more than half the female inmates serve time for prostitution ~ a local women’s support group befriended her. Today she works for them as an undercover researcher, drawing on her years of experience and connections to infiltrate brothels throughout Iraq.

Covered in black, with black, lacquered fingernails and gold bracelets, Rania says,
"I deal with all these pimps and sex traffickers. "I don’t tell them I’m an activist; I tell them I am a sex trafficker. This is the only way for me to get information. If they discover that I’m an activist I get killed."

In one harrowing experience, Rania and two other girls visited a house in Baghdad’s Al-Jihad district, where girls as young as 16 were held to cater exclusively to the U.S. military. The brothel’s owner told Rania that an Iraqi interpreter employed by the Americans served as the go-between, transporting girls to and from the U.S. airport base.

Rania’s co-workers covertly took photos of the captive teenagers with their mobile phones, but were caught. "One girl went crazy," Rania recalls. "She accused us of spying. I don’t know how we escaped," she exclaims. "We had to run away ~ barefoot!"

Before the Gulf War in 1991,

Iraq enjoyed the highest female literacy rate

across the Middle East,

and more Iraqi women

were employed in skilled professions,

like medicine and education,

than in any other country in the region.

Twenty years later Iraqi women experience a very different reality. Sharia law increasingly dominates everyday life, with issues like marriage, divorce and honour crimes implemented outside of the court system, and adherence to state law.

"Many factors combined to promote the rise of sex trafficking and prostitution in the area," a Norwegian Church Aid report said last year.

"The US-led war and the chaos it has generated;

the growing insecurity and lawlessness;

corruption of authorities;

the upsurge in religious extremism;

economic hardship; marriage pressures;

gender based violence

and recurrent discrimination suffered by women;

kidnappings of girls and women;

the impunity of perpetrators of crimes,

especially those against women;

and the development of new technologies

associated with the globalization of the sex industry."

The International Organization of Migration (IOM) estimates 800,000 humans are trafficked across borders annually, but statistics within Iraq are very difficult to pin down.

Although the Iraqi constitution deems trafficking illegal, there are no criminal laws that effectively prosecute offenders. Perversely, it is often the victims of trafficking and prostitution that are punished.

IOM is currently working with an inter-ministerial panel to lobby for a new reading of the revised counter-trafficking law, which has been stalled by the government since 2009.

"We have reports about trafficking both inside and out of Iraq," says senior deputy minister, Judge Asghar Al-Musawi, at the Ministry of Migration and Displacement.

"However, I admit that Iraqi government institutions are not mature enough to deal with this topic yet, as the departments are still in their growing phase."

Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the government has done little to combat the issue. "This is a phenomenon that wasn’t prevalent in 2003," says HRW researcher, Samer Muscati.

"We don’t have specific statistics. This is the first part to tackle the problem; we need to know how significant and widespread the problem is. This is something the government hasn’t been doing. It hasn’t monitored or cracked down on traffickers, and because of that there is this black hole in terms of information."

Zeina, 18, is an example of an invisible statistic.

According to the local Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), she was 13 when her grandfather sold her to a sex trafficker in Dubai for 6,000 dollars. She performed only oral sex with customers until a wealthy man paid 4,000 dollars to take her virginity for one night.

After four years of prostitution, Zeina finally escaped the United Arab Emirates and returned back to her parents in Baghdad.

She approached the authorities and took her grandfather to court.

However, Zeina has since disappeared. OWFI has learned she was sold again, this time by her mother to a sex trafficker in Erbil.

OWFI director Yanar Mohammed says her office has been threatened for their advocacy against the lucrative trafficking industry, especially reporting on an infamous brothel owner in Al-Battaween district known as Emam.

Describes Mohammed. "In each house there are almost 45 women and it is such a chaotic scene where women get treated like a cheap meat market. You step into the house and see women being exploited sexually, even not behind closed doors. So the woman who runs these houses makes an incredible income, and has a crew around her to protect what she does."

Emam is said to enjoy close ties with the Interior Ministry, and has never had one of her four houses shut down. Despite OWFI’s expose, her operations are unaffected.

Mohammed sighs.

"Iraq has a whole generation of women who are in their teens now, whose bodies have been turned into battlefields from criminal ideologies."

(END)

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WORDS OF NOTE

Pharisaism is Talmudism;

Talmudism is Judaism;

Judaism is Zionism;

Zionism is Communism;

Communism is Nazism;

Nazism is the New World Order;

The New World Order is the reign of the Antichrist;

They are all the Six forms

of the ultimate Satanic Evil.

*****

“Gentiles exist only to serve Jews as slaves. Goyim were only born to serve us. Without that they have no place in the world. Only to serve the people of Israel. Why are gentiles needed? They are only here to work. They will work, they will plow. They will reap. We will sit like effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created,” Rabbi Yosef, Sha Party, Jerusalem Post

*****

"The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews ~ all of them in all different levels ~ is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle." ~ Rabbi Kook, the Elder, father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism, said

*****

The cruel canard ‘anti-Semitic’ does not apply for many reasons, not the least of which is the simple fact that the slanderous word itself is derived from language games for purposes of propaganda and in real world context has no validity. ~ Tom Valentine

*****

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker.

Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy.

Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot'

than the stigma of conformity.

And on issues that seem important to you,

Stand up and be counted at any cost.

~ Thomas J Watson (1874-1956)

*****

'There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. The business of the Journalist is to destroy truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.' ~ John Swinton, former Chief of Staff, The New York Times, 1953

WORDS FROM THE ZIONIST/TALMUDIC ENTITY TO BE AWARE OF

"My opinion of Christian Zionists? They're scum, but don't tell them that. We need all the useful idiots we can get right now." ~ Bibi Netanyahu

*****

It was hard for Satan alone to mislead the whole world, so he appointed prominent rabbis in different localities. ~ A Chasidic saying attributed to Nahman of Bratzlav, early 19th century

*****

This is what Trotsky, a Jew,was preparing for the Russians for the implementation of Communism, which Marx based on the Babylonian Talmud for Gentiles:

"We should turn Her (Russia) into a desert populated with white Niggers. We will impose upon them such a tyranny that was never dreamt by the most hideous despots of the East. The peculiar trait of that tyranny is that it will be enacted from the left rather than the right and it will be red rather than white in color.

Its color will be red literally because we would spill such torrents of blood that they will pale all human losses of the capitalist wars and make the survivors shudder.

*****

The largest overseas banks will cooperate with us most closely. If we win the Revolution and squash Russia, on the funeral pyres of its remains we will strengthen the power of Zionism and become a power the whole world would drop in the face of on its knees. We will show the world what real power means.

By way of terror and blood baths we will bring the Russian intelligentsia into a state of total stupor, to idiocy, to the animal state of being. So far our young men dressed in leather ~ the sons of watch repair men from Odessa and Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitza ~ oh, how beautifully, how brilliantly do they master hatred of everything Russian! With what a great delight do they physically destroy the Russian intelligentsia ~ officers, engineers, teachers, priests, generals, agronomists, academicians, writers!" ~ Secret Forces in History of Russia. U.K. Begunov 1995, p 148

*****

Marxism, to which all branches of Socialism necessarily adhere, was originated by Jew Karl Marx, himself of Rabbinical descent and has been dominated by them from the beginning. Marx did not actually originate anything; he merely “streamlined” Talmudism for Gentile consumption.

*****

“One of the finest things ever done by the mob was the Crucifixion of Christ. Intellectually it was a splendid gesture. But trust the mob to bungle the job. If I’d had charge of executing Christ, I’d have handled it differently. You see, what I’d have done was had him shipped to Rome and fed him to the lions. They could never have made a savior out of mincemeat!”~ Rabbi Ben Hecht

*****

“The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks.”~ Al Goldstein (publisher of Screw Magazine).

*****

"You have not begun to appreciate the depth of our guilt. We are intruders. We are subverters. We have taken your natural world, your ideals, your destiny, and played havoc with them. We have been at the bottom of not merely the latest Great War, but of every other major revolution in your history.

We have brought discord and confusion and frustration into your personal and public life. We are still doing it. No one can tell how long we shall go on doing it. Who knows what great and glorious destiny might have been yours if we had left you alone." ~ Marclis Eli Ravage, Century Magazine February, 1926.