[Buddha-l] anti-Israel and anti-semitism

[jkirk]

 But when the subject is Islam, suddenly all good intentions appear to have 
vanished.
> Funny people, those Buddhists!
> Erik
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What? When I think of Muslims, as opposed to the essential category "Islam", 
I think with compassion of the women who got whipped and/or imprisoned, or 
stoned to death, while the men who raped them got off; of the women, 
particularly the Afghani women, forced to stumble around in gigantic cloth 
tents with a tiny, heavily screened opening for vision, while the men can 
move freely in their clothing; of the women forced to repeatedly bear 
children up to 15-20 pregnancies because they must accept what god has 
ordered as their destiny. One famous such woman, Nur Mahal, the beloved wife 
of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, endured 14 pregnancies and died giving 
birth to her last. I feel
compassion for the girls who are married off as soon as they reach puberty 
instead of being educated in school; compassion for the Muslim women who not 
only must submit to god but even more so to their husbands, to being beaten 
regularly if it's his choice, and denied divorce. (Even though the Quran 
allows a woman to divorce, custom prevents it. Husbands can divorce wives by 
merely saying the magic word, talaq, thrice.)
I feel compassion for the brothers of blood sisters they are forced to 
murder in order to defend a family's "honor", recently in some cases when a 
woman simply refused to marry the person selected as her future husband.
There is so much more that on some days it's hard to fathom it all.
Joanna