feminine-genius

An interesting alert

I am rather illiterate in such things, but this just came across my desk, which relates to "high concentrations in Roundup Ready soybean meal and corn, distillers meal, fermentation feed products, pig stomach contents, and pig and cattle placentas:"

A team of senior plant and animal scientists have recently brought to my attention the discovery of an electron microscopic pathogen that appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings. Based on a review of the data, it is widespread, very serious, and is in much higher concentrations in Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans and corn—suggesting a link with the RR gene or more likely the presence of Roundup.  This organism appears NEW to science!

This is highly sensitive information that could result in a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies. On the other hand, this new organism may already be responsible for significant harm (see below). My colleagues and I are therefore moving our investigation forward with speed and discretion, and seek assistance from the USDA and other entities to identify the pathogen’s source, prevalence, implications, and remedies.

We are informing the USDA of our findings at this early stage, specifically due to your pending decision regarding approval of RR alfalfa. Naturally, if either the RR gene or Roundup itself is a promoter or co-factor of this pathogen, then such approval could be a calamity. Based on the current evidence, the only reasonable action at this time would be to delay deregulation at least until sufficient data has exonerated the RR system, if it does.

For the past 40 years, I have been a scientist in the professional and military agencies that evaluate and prepare for natural and manmade biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks. Based on this experience, I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high risk status. In layman’s terms, it should be treated as an emergency.

There's more, including the details of how such pathogens are linked to spontaneous abortions and infertility in animals. No direct relationship to the same in humans, but the alarm concerns the tinkering in the food supply that will bear the seeds of its own destruction. I know we don't necessarily want to know how the food gets to the grocery stores (and our plates!) but perhaps we should be aware of this.

Economics and women in India

This interesting piece concerning India should remind us that our economic ties aren't changing anything about the culture that doesn't welcome little girls:

Despite a booming economy and big cities full of luxury cars and glittering malls, the country is failing its girls. Early results show India has 914 girls under age 6 for every 1,000 boys. A decade ago, many were horrified when the ratio was 927 to 1,000.

The discrimination happens through abortions of female fetuses and sheer neglect of young girls, despite years of high-profile campaigns to address the issue. So serious is the problem that it's illegal for medical personnel to reveal the gender of an unborn fetus, although evidence suggests the ban is widely circumvented.

"My mother-in-law says a boy is necessary," says Sanju, holding her severely malnourished 9-month-old daughter in her lap in the hospital. The woman, who goes by one name, doesn't admit to deliberately starving the girl but only shrugs her own thin shoulders when asked why her daughter is so sick.

She will try again for a son in a year or two, she says.

And why are the girls so maligned, unwanted? It's centuries of living a culture that favours boys for all sorts of reasons.

In the district hospital's maternity ward, a wrinkled old woman walks out holding a just-born girl wrapped in a dirty rag like an unwelcome present. Munni, who uses only one name, is clearly unhappy. Her daughter-in-law has just given birth to her sixth girl in 12 years of marriage.

Will the daughter-in-law go through another pregnancy?

"Everyone wants boys. A boy takes care of you in your old age," Munni says.

As a mother-in-law, Munni will likely have enormous control over her son's wife, influencing how many children she has and nudging or bullying her to bear a son.

Sex-selection abortion when possible; neglect and malnourishment for those who survive, and then a life of imbalance and marginalisation.

"Women cry when they have girls," nurse Lalitha Gujar says as she spoons powdered coconut, peanuts and sesame seeds into bowls of fortified milk to nourish the tiny children.

All nine mothers of the sickly infant girls say they want sons — to look after them when they get old, because their sisters-in-law have more sons, because their mothers-in-law demand male children.

"If a woman has a boy, for a month she will be looked after. If she has a girl, she'll be back in the fields in three days," says Sudha Misra, a local social worker.

An exhausted mother who faces neglect, poor nutrition and blame for producing a daughter is likely to pass on that neglect, social workers say. For an infant, that can mean the difference between life and death.

"A malnourished child will get sick and the chances of death are very high," Bandil says.

Males get first priority. "First the husband is seated and fed, then the brothers and then whatever is left is fed to the girls," says Bandil. "If there are two mangoes in the house, first the boy will get to eat."

It's not just the poor, but a mindset that impacts those who have the wherewithall to offer enough to their daughters, but deprive them anyway. Consider the lavish Bollywood films depicting beautiful women and luxurious lifestyles -- it doesn't make much impact if the population is so ingrained in its preference for baby boys. There are laws on the books to support girls and discourage this marginalisation, but the people find ways around them. Tragic.

Consider the family structure

From the obituary of Osama bin Laden (which begins with his father):

Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, had started out as an illiterate dockside labourer in Yemen before buying a place on a camel caravan to the newly created kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There he worked as a porter, saved money, and founded a construction company. During the 1950s he underbid other contractors to work on the palaces of King Abdel-Aziz al Saud.

He became close to the king, who granted him an exclusive contract to transform Mecca and Medina and (at least in theory) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. He also became close to Crown Prince Faisal, who would replace Abdel-Aziz as king in 1964. As a result, Mohammed and his family grew extremely rich even by Saudi standards, and the family construction company opened businesses and subsidiaries across the Middle East, often forged by ties of marriage. Mohammed notched up a total of 22 wives, though by process of divorce he contrived to have only four at any one time — in line with Muslim law.

Osama (which means “young lion” in Arabic) was the 17th of Mohammed’s 52 (or 53) children. His Syrian-born mother, Alia Ghanem, was Mohammed’s 10th wife and the least favoured of his four wives at that time (a claim bolstered by the fact that Osama was their only child). Osama was said to have resented living in the shadow of his older half-brothers and to being referred to by some of his relatives as “son of a slave.”

When he was four or five his father divorced his mother and awarded her to one of his company executives, Mohammad al-Attas, by whom she had several more children. Soon afterwards Mohammed bin Laden died in a plane crash on his way to marry his 23rd wife. His estate passed to his children in the form of shares in the family company. Estimates of Osama’s share range from $35 million (the figure given by sources close to the family) to $250 million, as cited by American officials in 1991.

While most of Osama’s siblings were sent to Lebanon to be educated, Osama remained in Jeddah and enrolled at al-Thager, Jeddah’s best school. He was shy, immature and not particularly bright, but at the age of 14 seems to have experienced some sort of religious awakening, possibly influenced by a charismatic Syrian gym teacher who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. As a result he stopped watching the Western films he had loved and refused to wear western dress outside school.

My contention has always been that because Islam allows polygamy and divorce, it undermines the possibility of a healthy environment for children. We knew ten years ago -- when we first were introduced to Osama -- that his family situation was ghastly. This is not an excuse, but simply an explanation of how the husband's rejection of this child's mother affected him greatly, and in this case facilitated his resentment that was later channeled into religious fanaticism.

The fact that he grew up to do the same thing is a given. The religion he loved allowed it, and whatever oppression he felt in this family as the only son of a discarded wife was overcome by living it on his own terms as an adult male. One can only wonder at what relationship existed between father and son, and perhaps it's only natural that another man gained his affection and attention, bringing him closer to his faith -- a faith that didn't require any filial piety, but only an outlet for his ambition.

I understand that pop psychology is to simplistic -- not reliable, of course, as the entire answer, but one cannot dismiss the dysfunction built into the religion. If Catholics mean what they say about the marriage and the family, then these things must matter. The ultimate heroic act would be for Osama to reject the god that so disenfranchised his own mother, but that was not an option. The boys live what they learn, and take out their problems on the women when their time comes. Tragic from start to finish.

One detail glossed over

As the world reacts in various ways to the demise of Osama bin Laden, most will miss a small detail -- how some depraved men act when under seige:

The U.S. team was on site for just 40 minutes, and bin Laden was killed resisting the assault, an official said. Three other men, one of whom may have been one of bin Laden’s sons, were killed in the raid along with a woman used as a human shield. Two women were injured. No other civilians or U.S. personnel were injured, said the officials, who spoke on condition they wouldn’t be identified.

This is a theme that is occasionally touched upon when discussing the burqa, which can be a handy device for hiding explosives, but that is a different issue than what happened here. Bad men had no compunction about hiding behind a woman, which shows another deplorable side to their character. In this case, a terrorist evaded a bullet by hiding behind a woman, who died in his stead. Ugh. [And remember, in her "paradise," she gets to serve the men -- even there.]

Ultimately, there is no chivalry in Islam. Whereas good Christian men would gladly lay down their lives for women and children, it is often the opposite in Muslim circles, where women and children are sacrificed for men -- whether through their application of divorce and inheritance laws, their exercise of the polygamy option, or other sanctioned behaviours that degrade women. My prayers this day are for the soul of this woman, and so many others who love God but suffer for the ways of Muhammed.

UPDATE: This account gives her name and a few details.

Amal al Ahmed Sadah was Osama’s fourth wife. They were married in the late 1990s in Afghanistan when she was 17 years old. Sadah was from Yemen, and she is thought to have returned to her home country sometime after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, according to The New Yorker. It is unclear when Sadah returned to South Asia to be at Osama’s side.

That would have made him approximately age 40 when they married, and the New Yorker describes her as a "kind of mail-order teen-age bride from Yemen." As for my concern that this detail would be glossed over, I was wrong. It's garnered a great deal of attention, including an enormous banner headline at the Telegraph (early hours of 3May11), "Bin Laden killed cowering behind 'human shield' wife"

Osama bin Laden used his wife as a human shield in a last desperate attempt to save his own life before he was gunned down by US special forces in his hideout in Pakistan. Armed with an automatic weapon, the al-Qaeda leader's last act was to force his young bride to sacrifice her life as he tried to fire back at the US Navy Seals storming the compound.

Well, there you go. I'll go look on Muslim women's sites to see if they're chatting about this.

UPDATE II: The White House is walking back this story, so in charity, I must as well; and I must explain myself. What we do know is that bin Laden had four wives -- first a cousin, then two Saudi women, and it's possible that all had left him. That's when a Yemini teen-ager was sent to him, perhaps as a gift from a grateful collaborator. Among the four women, he derived eleven sons.

My contention is that the Muslim form of marriage, which entails unilateral no-fault divorce on the part of the men and unions that do not require the consent of the women (either at the outset or upon the breaking of the unions) cannot create a foundation for a stable or healthy society. Even the Islamic understanding of the "contract" is anti-woman, for the arrangement is that the husband must provide room and board in exchange for exclusive intimacy rights (on demand). Even the woman's eternal life hinges on whether her husband is satisfied with her -- which ignores the woman's disposition, her heart, her efforts, or her piety. To achieve heaven, she must simply satisfy the man to whom she has been given.

I could go further into the nature of motherhood in Islam, which is merely physical and is not based on what she does after delivery -- in fact, she has no rights over her children and will not be a part of their lives should she leave (of her own volition or against her will). It is a denatured view of women and an unhealthy view of family life, which may account for many elements of Islamic society that we witness around the world.

Ultimately, for the sake of this story, we'll offer the latest:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House rowed back on a claim made earlier that a wife of Osama bin Laden acted as a human shield in an unsuccessful bid to save the Al-Qaeda leader's life.

Counter-terrorism official John Brennan had briefed reporters from information that was later updated as more people involved in the operation were interviewed, a senior White House official said.

Bin Laden, who was killed in a raid by US special forces, was with a woman who was wounded, while another woman was also killed in a different part of the house in crossfire, said the official.

The White House is balancing the demand to brief the media quickly while knowing that the fact pattern will get clearer over time, said the official.

Brennan said earlier Monday that a female at the compound in Pakistan who "was, in fact, in the line of fire that reportedly was used as a shield to shield bin Laden from the incoming fire."

Pressed on reports the woman shot dead by Navy SEALs during a firefight at a compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan was one of bin Laden's four wives, Brennan told the White House briefing: "That's my understanding."

Brennan had said it was not entirely clear "whether or not bin Laden or the son or whatever put her there or she put herself there" or whether the Al-Qaeda chief himself fired rounds during the exchange.

I have the utmost regard for our armed forces, who prioritise the safety of innocents, and if a woman was killed, it had to have been unavoidable for one reason or another. If bin Laden's wife survived, that is a net good, and we lament the death of any who died as a result of the chaos of the moment.