j’s blog

Ignorance is bliss…till it kills you. Dumb belief of the day.

Yahoo! News - Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Plagues Nigeria

By OLOCHE SAMUEL, Associated Press Writer

KANO, Nigeria - Accusations by Islamic preachers that vaccines are part of an American anti-Islamic plot are threatening efforts to combat a measles epidemic that has killed hundreds of Nigerian children, health workers say.

Government officials play down the anti-vaccine sentiment, but all the measles deaths have been in Nigeria’s north, where authorities had to suspend polio immunizations last year after hard-line clerics fanned similar fears of that vaccine.

Nigeria, whose 130 million people make it Africa’s most populous nation, has recorded 20,859 measles cases so far this year. At least 589 victims have died, most of them children younger than 5 and all in the north, the Nigerian Red Cross and the U.N. World Health Organization say.

Southern Nigeria, which is mainly Christian, had only 253 measles cases, and no deaths.

Health services are much better in the south. But the anti-vaccination sentiment in the north, evident from interviews with parents, seems to be a factor.

“Since the polio controversy, I have not presented any of my children for immunization because my husband said I should not,” said Ramatou Mohammed, who was at Abdullahi Wase Hospital seeking treatment for her baby, Miriam, for a measles rash.

“I heard on the radio that the vaccine was contaminated. I still don’t trust any vaccine,” the 28-year-old mother of four added.

Her views were echoed by others in the waiting room at the hospital in Kano, which is in the worst-hit state, with nearly 7,000 cases, including 155 deaths, since Jan. 1.

In 2003, Islamic clerics claimed the United States was using polio vaccine to sterilize Muslims or contaminate them with the AIDS virus. They ordered a boycott in messages disseminated from mosques, in radio broadcasts and by door-to-door campaigning.

The U.S. Embassy called the claims “absolutely ridiculous.”

But three powerful state governors in the north joined the polio boycott, and it dragged on 11 months before authorities persuaded the governors in July to accept vaccine bought from the predominantly Muslim nation of Indonesia.

By then the number of polio cases in Nigeria had risen fivefold, and the crippling disease had spread to nine other African countries where it previously had been eradicated.

Now there are fears the anti-vaccine sentiment could also affect the measles outbreak.

Last year, WHO recorded 24,363 Nigerian measles cases from January to September. That is not many more than this year, and officials say some states have not yet reported cases for March, which is generally the peak of measles season.

A big surge would be a blow to WHO, which had hoped to bring measles under control this year. Across Africa, measles deaths fell from 873,000 in 1999 to just more than 500,000 — or half the global total — in 2003, according to the U.N. health agency’s most recent statistics.

Some clerics have added the measles vaccine to their campaign against immunizations.

Nasir Mohammed Nasir, imam of Kano’s second-largest mosque, said Americans “can’t be killing my brothers and children in Iraq and at the same time claim to want to save my children from polio and other diseases.”

“We suspect a sinister motive,” he said.

In Washington, the State Department’s deputy spokesman, Adam Ereli, said such allegations are “crazy, outlandish, unfounded.”

Binta Alkassim, a 30-year-old mother of six whose 2 1/2-year-old daughter just got over measles after treatment at a Kano hospital, said the polio controversy had scared many families away from all vaccinations.

“You can’t trust these Americans,” she said.

Dr. Binta Ibrahim, a senior practitioner at Kano’s main Murtala Mohammed Hospital, believes people’s reservations are being overcome.

“People have begun to accept immunization, although slowly. It will take some time to get them to accept them completely,” she said.

Nasiru Mahmoud, a Ministry of Health official in Kano, said his office had received no reports of resistance to measles immunizations and said the outbreak in Kano could not be called an epidemic.

“We had some cases which our medical personnel have put under control,” he said.

Yahoo! News - Kuwait Professor Gives Up on Speech Fight

By DIANA ELIAS, Associated Press Writer

KUWAIT CITY - A liberal university professor — tired of legal and verbal assaults from fundamentalists who say he mocks Islam — has given up his fight for freedom of speech in a country he says has become infested with the "germs and viruses of hatred and tyranny."

Ahmed al-Baghdadi — sentenced last week to a suspended one-year prison term for mocking Islam — said he has written his last newspaper column. Earlier, he said he would seek asylum in a Western country to protect his life, his family and his freedom of expression.

On Saturday, the Kuwait University political science professor told The Associated Press he also was considering less drastic options, such as retirement or spending a year abroad, which would be easier on him and his family.

"Writing and living in the shadow of fear is impossible, and dignity is above all," al-Baghdadi wrote in his final column Saturday.

He said legal battles have broken his only weapon — his pen — and there was nothing left for him but to surrender.

Al-Baghdadi’s decision came a week after the Appeals Court convicted him of mocking Islam and handed down a suspended one-year prison sentence, overturning an acquittal by a lower court. It also ordered him to pay a $6,825 deposit, which would be forfeited if he commits the same offense within the next three years.

Al-Baghdadi, an archrival of religious extremists who also took him to court in 1999, has appealed the verdict to the higher Cassation Court, but he said Saturday in his final column for the Al-Siyassah daily newspaper that he would not return to writing even if he won the case.

"It is not a matter of a court ruling here or a court ruling there," he wrote. "It is the sick climate that is filled with germs and viruses of hatred and tyranny."

The legal battle stemmed from a June 5, 2004, column in which al-Baghdadi wrote that he sent his son to an expensive foreign school rather than a state school because he did not want "ignorant" teachers to teach him "how to disrespect women and non-Muslims." Wrong teachings could lead his son to terrorism, he said.

"In short, I want to have a son with an education and a mind I can be proud of, not (a son) with backward thinking," he wrote.

Two Muslim fundamentalists complained to judicial authorities about the column and al-Baghdadi was tried and acquitted by a misdemeanor court.

The Appeals Court, however, ruled the professor had made "derogatory" comments about Islam by linking terrorism and "backward thinking" to religious classes at state schools.

For more than a decade, this small, oil-rich ally of Washington has been pulled between politically strong fundamentalists, who want to fully implement Sharia, or Islamic law, and the less powerful Westernized liberals, who call for more democracy and freedom of expression.

The 1962 constitution guarantees freedom of expression but laws penalize those who insult the country’s religion.

In his farewell column, al-Baghdadi said he could not play "the Kuwaiti roulette" by continuing to write without knowing when the next court case would come.

The U.S.-educated al-Baghdadi, who specializes in political Islam, has been campaigning for years against fundamentalists who he said "terrorize" writers and journalists.

"If terrorism spreads, nobody will be spared. Everyone could be gripped by the neck for a word or a joke unsuspiciously uttered, and accused of being against religion," he wrote in a December 1999 column.

That year, al-Baghdadi was convicted of blaspheming Islam when he wrote that the Prophet Mohammed initially failed to convert nonbelievers in the holy city of Mecca. Kuwait’s emir, Sheik Jaber Al Ahmed Al Sabah, pardoned the professor and he was released from prison after serving about half of his one-month sentence.

Not her brother or one of the brothers, but a “brother”. You know the guy that kind of looks like Friar Tuck or a monk from the middle ages and is frequently at the side of Terri Schiavo’s mother? His name is Brother Paul and this is his “letter” and website:

Read Brother Paul’s letter:

Letter from Brother Paul

Br. Paul J. O’Donnell, fbp
Guardian Overall

Donations can be sent or delivered to:
Franciscan Brothers of Peace
Queen of Peace Friary
1289 Lafond Avenue
Saint Paul, MN 55104-2035
United States of America

The Franciscan Brothers of Peace are a 501(c)3 non-profit organization listed in the Kennedy Directory. All donations are tax-deductible.

The Franciscan Brothers of Peace have Ecclesial Approbation in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.

Yahoo! News - Women fear losing rights in new Iraq

Fri Mar 4

By Liz Sly Tribune foreign correspondent

The women at Nasar’s beauty salon were Christian and Muslim, Sunni and Shiite, but they spoke with one voice on an issue that worries them all.

"I’m sure they will form an Islamic government and our freedom will be gone," Suzan Sarkon, 30, said as she settled in to get her long black hair trimmed. "We’ve never lived freely in Iraq (news - web sites), and now I think we never will."

"I will commit suicide if that happens," vowed Karama Saeed, 27, who said she cried when she heard that the group led by the secularist interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi won only 14 percent of the vote in Iraq’s landmark election. "No," she said, reconsidering. "I will leave the country."

As Iraq embarks on its uncertain journey toward crafting a new constitution, Iraqi women have perhaps more to win or lose in the process than anyone.

Since the election results were confirmed, many women have expressed deep concerns about the direction in which they see their country headed. A coalition of Islamist Shiite parties won the largest share of the seats in Iraq’s new National Assembly. The parties have nominated an Islamic scholar to be prime minister, and though they insist they do not want to impose a religious government on Iraq, they have made it clear they expect Islam to feature in the new constitution.

Yanar Mohammed, a women’s rights campaigner, has no doubt that the parties represented in the Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, intend to use their majority to introduce Shariah, or Islamic law, into the constitution that the assembly will write.

Fearing marginalization

"This was their mandate. It’s their policy. If you are an Islamist party, it’s the priority on your agenda," she said. "Ibrahim al-Jaafari is well-decorated to look like a Western man, but he has this 100 percent Islamic agenda, and women will be inferior if he takes over."

Though al-Jaafari, the Shiite candidate for prime minister, and other Shiite leaders have said they do not want an Iranian-style Islamic government, they have said repeatedly that they will not allow laws that "contradict Islam" and that the "Islamic identity" of Iraq should be preserved–wording that, if included in the constitution, would open the door to the application of Islamic law in many areas of life that mostly affect women, experts say.

At a minimum, that likely will mean applying Shariah to civil and family laws, according fewer rights to women than men in areas such as marriage, divorce and inheritance, said Joyce Wiley, an authority on Iraqi Shiites at the University of South Carolina. "I’m afraid it’s not going to be very good for women," she said.

Salama Khafaji, a newly elected Shiite legislator, says women have no reason to fear Shariah. Many women who voted for the Shiite coalition support the idea of Islamic laws, which does not mean they want to impose their views on other women, she said.

"Many women choose to wear hijab," said Khafaji, who always wears a black head-to-toe abaya. "It will be voluntary."

But a climate in which religious values are being asserted by the country’s government may make it difficult for women who don’t want to cover themselves to resist social pressures to conform, said Mohammed, who plans to organize a march demanding a secular constitution on March 8.

The marked increase in the number of women wearing head scarves these days is only the most outwardly visible sign of the creeping Islamization of society that has already taken place since the U.S. invasion, leaving many women living under a de facto form of Islamic rule, she said.

"There are armed men everywhere. If you go without the protection of the scarf, they can stop you and you may get assaulted," Mohammed said. "And there’s pressure from husbands and fathers. Being good and chaste means you put a veil on. They tell you it’s voluntary, but how can it be voluntary when there’s that much pressure on you?"

The liberation promised by the U.S. invasion has so far eluded most Iraqi women. With gunmen roaming the streets and kidnappings a daily occurrence, protective fathers and anxious husbands keep their daughters and wives at home. Women have been targeted for failing to cover their heads and for expressing views such as those of Mohammed, who has received several death threats.

These days a trip to the beauty salon is one of the few escapes for women who no longer feel safe going out on the streets. At Nasar’s, in one of Baghdad’s safer neighborhoods, customers linger after their beauty treatments, smoking cigarettes, sipping sweet black coffee and talking about their increasingly restricted lives.

"Everyone I know stays home. It’s been two years since I went out with my friends," said Tara Husham, 22, whose Muslim father and Christian mother say she must be home by 5 p.m.

`Destroying us’

"Our lives have been devastated," said customer Saeed, a Christian and mother of two who barely dares to go out since she was chased last month by gunmen she believes were trying to kidnap her. "It’s destroying us psychologically."

"If there is Islamic law, it will be worse," Husham said. "Islamic law is very traditional–women must obey everything men say. It means democracy will be denied to us."

As she spoke, a figure cloaked in black entered the salon, striking a stark contrast with the other women dressed in jeans and tight sweaters.

Tearing off her head scarf and shaking loose her blond-streaked hair, Anwar Sobhi, 30, explained that she traveled from a neighborhood overrun by radical Sunni insurgents, where graffiti on the walls threatens death to women who don’t cover their hair and where the beauty salons were forced to close months ago because they are deemed un-Islamic.

"Of course, I don’t want to dress like this. … I want to wear what I like," said Sobhi, who is Shiite. "When I was a child, my parents used to try to make me wear hijab to school, and when I got around the corner I would take it off. It was just like suffocation."

She only began covering up last month, after she was threatened by armed men.

"Where I live, not even one lady can go out without completely covering her hair," she said. "It’s just too dangerous."

The other women listened with sympathy and alarm.

"If George Bush (news - web sites) thinks this is liberation, then he should make his own wife and daughters wear hijab," said Hanan Azzawi, 36, one of the salon’s stylists.

A strong streak of secularism runs through Iraqi society, the legacy of decades of rule by the quasi-socialist Baath Party. And it is by no means guaranteed that the Islamists, who hold a slim majority of the seats in the National Assembly, will be able to enforce their demands.

Allawi has mounted a challenge to al-Jaafari’s candidacy, and he is wooing women legislators, who have been given a third of the seats under Iraq’s election rules. Approval of the new constitution requires a two-thirds majority, and the secularist Kurds, who hold more than a quarter of the seats, also are opposed to Islamic law.

The women at Nasar’s say they hope Allawi prevails, and if he doesn’t, they are counting on help from another source.

"If America lets the Shiites rule Iraq, they will make a union with Iran (news - web sites) and it will create a very big power in the Middle East," said Husham, who finds it hard to believe U.S. forces invaded Iraq to install an Islamic government. "I’m sure America doesn’t want that. I’m sure they have a plan."

If not, Azzawi, the stylist, says she expects Bush to help out.

"He will have to issue visas for America with this new constitution, because we will all be leaving," she said. "Do they need hairdressers in America?"