activism/charity

making a difference

Ignoring Islamic feminism

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Firstly, a well-researched piece from The Guardian, Islamic Feminism On The Move: Muslim societies, from Afghanistan where female teachers are singled out for killing by a resurgent Taliban, to Saudi Arabia where women are not allowed to drive or travel… Read More ›

Nazanin saved from execution

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Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi has been released! Nazanin is a young Iranian woman who was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death after she stabbed a would-be rapist in self-defence. [old tigtogblog post]. The international awareness raised by the Save… Read More ›

What good does blogging do?

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Lauredhel, on Pondering power and resistance in response to attacks on the utility of feminist blogdom: Speech isn’t pointless. Speech isn’t inherently inferior to action. Speech doesn’t preclude action, and, what’s more, in the case of embedded often-impalpable power structures… Read More ›

Poverty and Peace

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poverty generates hostility and anger, and […] peace is impossible where poverty exists. Let’s just repeat Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammed Yunus’ words for emphasis, shall we? poverty generates hostility and anger, and […] peace is impossible where poverty exists… Read More ›

White Ribbon Day

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is tomorrow. ThirdCat has more details. UPDATE 29 November: In response to Jillaroo in comments, I’ll link to the discussion over at LP to the White Ribbon Day post I put up there – the thread became a trainwreck very… Read More ›

This bumper sticker I like

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I find a lot of bumper stickers and badges promoting partisan politics or ideological positions way too shrill for my taste. But I might actually buy this one: Found at Carry A Big Sticker. Might be nice if they also… Read More ›

Tutu on Darfur

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Last week Desmond Tutu wrote a piece for the The Sunday Times to mark the International Day of Action for Darfur on the 17th September. I didn’t know about that Day of Action, despite our fundraising for MSF in Darfur on Larvatus Prodeo not long ago: how many of us did?

Tutu’s article, A blind eye to genocide, makes for uncomfortable reading:

In Darfur 2m people have been ethnically cleansed since 2003, women and girls are systematically raped and tortured daily, there is cholera in the refugee camps and the violence is spilling into next door Chad, and all without the attention, or response, it deserves.

Beyond the 11th

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This is the name of a charity begun by two American widows, Susan Retik and Patricia Quigley: both women were mothers of small children and also heavily pregnant when their husbands died on 9/11, one in each of the planes that hit the Twin Towers.

Many other people lost their loved ones that day, but few have reacted as these women have done. Despite their grief and anger at the terrorists, Patti and Susan are actively engaged in charity work for the people of Afghanistan, the country where most of the hijackers trained before coming to the USA and committing their atrocity.

I heard Susan Retik interviewed on Radio National this morning to mark the 5th anniversary of the disaster. Before 9/11 she barely knew anything of Afghanistan, and her reaction to learning more about the Taliban and their oppression of women was to awaken her compassion in a very personal way based on her own recent tragedy: if life was so bad for women there generally, how much worse must it be for unsupported widows? And what could she do to help them, woman to woman?