Welcome to the Crazy World of the Internet
If you are unsuccessful in making friends in real life, if you try to escape the contradictions and problems of your own society, if you consider yourself different and no one understands you or accepts your ideas, if you are an opponent of your government’s policies or if you are one of the so many appalled by the state of freedoms in your country, then you don’t have to close on yourself or hide in the dark anymore. If you have some time to spare, just enter the internet. Yes you heard me right, the internet! There you’ll find people who share the same concerns and interests as you. They will welcome and respect you as you are because they are pretty much like you. Now, don’t be afraid, this will not cost you more than a computer and some Internet subscription fees. Choose your internet service provider carefully if you don’t want to suffer from the greed of some companies who only worry about profit!
Here, I will take a look at the experience of some people I know who never thought they will become addicted before they joined the internet:
Meriem
l’ll start with Meriem, a girl from an isolated village in northern Morocco. She was forced to leave school at an early age, but was lucky to learn some math and some French. She comes from those villages in Morocco still dominated by a male mentality whereby women are only allowed to leave their homes twice in their lives, first to enter their husband’s home and second to be laid to rest. As any other teenager of her age, Meriem hears about sex and explores her own body. She doesn’t have any companion to talk to, not even an educated mother that would understand and help her learn more about the unknown part of her sexuality. Her father offered Meriem’s brother, who’s studying in high school, a computer with an internet connection. Meriem has now access to the internet and her brother seems willing to educate her on the basics of how to use a computer. Her brother succeeds in school and moves to the nearby city to pursue undergraduate studies leaving Meriem alone with the computer. She now uses it more than once a day and starts to discover its secrets. One day she starts talking sex with strangers over the internet. She slowly becomes addicted to it, answering other young people’s sexual desires over the webcam. Meriem gets married and goes to live in her husband’s house, but she can’t rid of her secret Internet addiction. She goes through an interminable cycle of suffering and pain caused by the internet!
Kamal
Kamal is a young man living in Saudi Arabia, an atheist, but he obviously hides his atheism for fear of exposing himself to unimaginable consequences. If he would come out, he would be arrested by the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice police, and would probably be sentenced to death and hanged. This is what the Islamic law says non believers should face after all!
He logs into Facebook using a pseudonym and meets a community of like-minded atheists from Morocco, the USA, Israel and many other countries. people worry about persecutions faced by atheists all over the world regardless of their appearances or nationalities. Kamal feels safe among them. For a while he thought he was the only atheist in the world but now thanks to the internet, Kamal and others have formed a unique group. Now he feels he can’t live without connecting with his online friends. Although Facebook has deleted his account many times Kamal still considers the internet a necessity that can not be given up.
Moroccan young people
Here I want talk about how the people in my country behave over the internet and why. Morocco ranks high amongst countries where most visits to pornographic websites come from. This is due to religious, social and moral contraints that inhibit sexual emancipation. Sex is presented as a taboo and something that angers God. In such circumstances young people look desperately for other ways to live their sexual freedom, and often Internet is the only space available. That is why so many young people end up addicted to online pornography.
Jillian
Jillian is a young American activist. Each time I log into my email account I find her connected and remains so for hours. I first came to know Jillian when she sent me an email from Boston seeking information about the arrest of Moroccan blogger Bashir Hazzam. We both worked on the campaign of support for Bashir and since that time we became friends. Jillian is an internet addict par excellence. She’s an online activist, a blogger and Twitterer with an impressive number of followers. She’s dedicated to a number of issues but she’s mostly interested in questions related to Morocco and the Middle East. However Jillian is a special kind of internet addict: her addiction is positive and productive and she too, I guess, can’t imagine a life without the internet. The same goes for Hisham Almiraat and Naoufel Chaara and all other online activists.
Internet is a very complex world. To go to the bottom of it one needs to look at it from a sociological and psychological point of view in order to understand why so many people now consider the internet an inseparable part of their lives.
Switzerland: here are my views on Burqa
German Translation: click here
A few weeks ago, I was invited to a reunion of the association of freethinkers inSwitzerland, and was accompanied there by Daniel Stricker the blogger and youtuber, who happens to be also the president of freethought association in St. Gallen.
During our journey by train, we discussed a document prepared by his association concerning a bill presented by the Swiss People’s Party, which demanded a legal ban on burqa in Switzerland. My friend Daniel was hesitant, particularly because this topic is closely related to human rights issues, like individual freedoms, and women’s right to dress as they see fit, but he completely agreed with the local freethinkers’ point of view: ” I am against the burqa but also against the banning of the burqa.. because in Switzerland it is simply not a problem yet. And right-wing parties (members of these parties who are christians) want to make that an issue in order to gain votes. I cannot support that.
As a person with an Islamic background, who understands the implicit significance of burqa, I replied:
To me burqa enforces gender inequality and contempt for women. I may even say that it’s a denial of her existence, and her right to share the public space. It’s as if Islam, with its hijab and burqa, wants to tell us that the normal place for a woman is between the walls of her home, away from the prying eyes of society, in an attempt to isolate her and deprive her of her right to share experience in society, to communicate and make friendships.
So how can we accept such a grave infringement on women’s rights in Western societies without any attempt to fight such a backward and sick culture, where women are reduced to a hole for sex, and a machine to procreate and cook, when their counterparts in the West compete with men in all intellectual and artistic fields? We may accept with much pain and grievance to see women wearing burqa on TV or on the Internet, in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Iran… but allowing such slavery creep into Western countries like Switzerland under the guise of respecting alternative cultures, would be unacceptable. How can I respect a culture that degrades the value of women and infringes on their basic rights? It’s like being asked to respect Nazism or stoning in Iran! Frankly, it’s an attempt to spoil European sophisticated taste, by exporting the culture of hijab and burqa to the West, where forward steps had already been taken in such matters since the beginning of the Renaissance and the Enlightenments, thanks to the great sacrifices of feminist movements.
Burqa, as a form of disguise, is a big threat to security in the social milieu, because the face is the best way we can recognize a person, and the means through which we can communicate with the people with whom we share the public space, thus sharing emotions implicitly, like the feeling of security or fear. How can I feel secure in a bus for example, when the person next to me is hiding their face, and I can’t know whether they’re a man or a woman, a friend or a foe?
Hijab and burqa convey dangerous religious and racist messages as well: a girl dressed thus conveys the idea that she would only marry a Muslim or someone who converts to Islam (after they had undergone a circumcision), which would severely hinder their ability to integrate into Western society. Every Muslim expects that his sister (in the religious or literal sense alike) would only give birth to a Muslim, and that’s why such mode of dressing, like burqa and such, should be prohibited in educational institutions, and other social and economic sectors. Hijab, despite giving off a similar connotation, remains a moderate form of Islamic dressing, and though I’m not in favor of that practice (why wouldn’t Muslim men, for the sake of equality, cover their hair as well?), I don’t think a legal solution regarding it should be sought at this point. I have to say that a legal ban would not suffice by itself to solve this issue: Islam has to be reformed, so that Muslim women can have the right to marry non-Muslims… and so that the old teachings are renewed, because they belong to the past, whereas the future is for freedom, equality, and human rights. But, because there seems to be no will to renovation and intellectualization within the body of Islam, the legal solution is the only one available.
During my visit to Zurich, I was surprised to see women sitting near the river that runs through the city, with their children, wearing burqa. The scene seemed exotic to me despite the fact that I was used to seeing women with hijab and burqa in my own country Morocco, because I was not expecting that such a sick mentality has gone beyond its borders, infecting everything like a cancer.
It is not a necessary practice of the religion as many extremist scholars try to depict it, but a mere recent invention in its present form by the salafist current. Similar forms of dressing existed long before Islam as well in nearby civilizations, but when they started to spread among the Muslim population, they were not stopped; instead, the then new dress was encouraged by many as a means to enslave women and restrict their movements even more.
Some people may say that burqa cannot be considered as a “phenomenon” in Switzerland, to justify a legal ban; but why not? Why do we have to wait until the problem becomes a phenomenon, with a large base of supporters, and then the challenge would be greater, and it would be quite difficult to ban burqa legally? It would be wiser to ban burqa and any cultural practice that degrades the value of women and diminishes their freedom.
I beseech human rights activists to discuss phenomena socially and historically before making any positive or negative judgment, instead of using the method of a sports critique, which is weak and unacceptable. Burqa wearing may seem like a right that should be protected, but in fact it’s no more than the manifestation of negative and inhumane culture.
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Atheism: an attempt at self-criticism
Atheism is a common word that carries more negative connotations than its etymological significance implies. I personally prefer to use the term “non religious” because it approaches the intended meaning much better.
Atheism and non religiosity do not entail a complete rejection of the religious hypothesis regarding the origin of existence; it’s a state of free-thought wherein the idea of the existence of a willing force, that meant to bring the universe as it is today into being, is put into question.
Richard Dawkins, in his book “The God Delusion”, shed some light on the categories of atheism and gave the term its true meaning, amidst unfair depictions by the religious, and many atheists picked it in a form of defiance until the new meaning became so common that it overshadowed the other ones.
Atheism is, before all, a skeptic, logical, free, and independent vocation, which cancels the authority of the sacred, and finds its basis in deductive and comparative reasoning which has proven its efficiency to produce knowledge in modern scientific methodology. However, in its most famous conception, atheism became more focused on the rejection of the idea of God, in some sort of an “intellectual neurosis” which starts with the refusal of the concept of deity and confines itself to it forever.
Logically speaking, we can say that believing in the non existence of deities (as an atheist stance) is simply a basic deductive mistake, because a skeptic methodology must necessarily produce a skeptic stance. This is how the idea of the existence of god becomes legitimate within atheist thought, god being understood here as the first cause without regard to anthropomorphic traits and forms attributed to it by religions; and the feeling of spiritual belonging to that cause is logically acceptable, as an evolutionary link between the final state of existence and its origin, again without any regard to rituals of worship that religions appended to the deep desire to know the origin of all that exists.
Scientific objectivity requires that we transcend the idea of god, to inquire about the reasons behind the resilience and longevity of religious representation of the universe, and such an act requires that we accept that representation within atheistic thought not as contradictory but as logically comprehended.
The God delusion does not mean a complete rejection of religion, and that is what Dawkins meant by religion being a “symptom of a human need”; a symptom hints to an illness, but it’s not the illness itself.
Our colossal efforts to fathom the Islamic phenomenon should be directed to studying the double sanctity, i.e. the sacredness of the original text (the Koran) and that of the application texts (Sunnah, or Tradition). The fact that Muhammad prevented his followers from scribing Sunnah, is an explicit affirmation of its non-sacredness for political reasons, because he was aware of the dangers of having the sacred text contradict its applications: the text of the Koran, in its final establishment, became authoritative even on Muhammad himself, which implied that its applications should not have been written down in any way. Understanding the essence of human need to religion leads us to a primary observation, which is that religion is a personal and individualistic need, which then later becomes a collective phenomenon; Muhammad’s personal need for a religion became a collective entity with a leadership, followers, ambitions, and constraints, and this appears clearly in the contrast between the revelations in Mecca and Medina in shape and content, and the contradiction in the implementation of Islam, which did not differ much from the practices of any political leader; thus the transition from a personal to a collective belief was not necessarily intended.
There was an alteration in the finality of the sacred text with political pressure and the necessity to defend the ideology, which is why we need to make a double effort, first, to understand the constraints and the way through which the religious message mutated, at the time of the prophet, and later his followers; and second, to overcome ideological temptations as a researcher when dealing with the sacred text, by recognizing the genius of Muhammad and the genuineness of his existential quest, regardless of the conclusions he ultimately came to.
A call to break the fast publicly in Ramadan
Update: this video made more than 183,860 views.
A call to break the fast publicly in Ramadan
The month of Ramadan is considered as one of the most important and most sacred religious occasions for Muslims. During that month, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, and having sex everyday from sunrise to sunset. Unfortunately, as many people know, Muslim society absolutely refuses to respect alternative voices and opinions, especially if it comes from people who were forced to be Muslim by tradition, meaning that they were unlucky enough to be born in an Islamic country, where they would either die as Muslims or have a death sentence over their head for apostasy.
In these societies with a Muslim majority, there’s a large faction, though a peaceful minority, that chose to free itself from the ties of religion, and obviously they do not observe the fast because they have no moral obligation to do so from close or afar. But all too often they are obliged to for their own safety, pushed into some sort of a compulsory hunger strike, a fact that should be considered an infringement on individual liberties, guaranteed by international conventions on human rights, which state that no person is to be forced to do something they do not wish to partake in, especially when it’s related to their freedom of belief.
There are many who consider Ramadan a catastrophe, as they are coerced to pretend to be fasting in a society that forces its religion and traditions on everyone without any regard to freedom of individuals with their different religious beliefs and world views. Some call it a “nightmare” which they have to endure for 30 days every year: a month of disputes, nutrition problems, or a month of sleeping, eating in toilets and dark places, far from the prying eyes of society, like a thief or a criminal.
It’s a psychological battle led by every individual who is forced to fast in the presence of their family, their friends, and society at large, in order not to provoke Muslims, as they say, yet they do not seem to be provoked by the sight of a woman in her menstruation period eating, or when parents prepare the food for their kids, or when a woman fasts a number of days in compensation for the period during which she had to break the fast, when everyone around her eats normally, and she may even be the one who prepares the food.
Unfortunately the price of breaking the fast publicly during Ramadan in Islamic countries is high because, despite differences due to legal variations, its common trait remains ostracization, humiliation, hatred, and verbal and physical attacks. In Morocco for example there’s a law article which considers public eating during Ramadan a crime punishable by imprisonment. In Saudi Arabia and Iran death penalty awaits those who break the fast publicly.
We are a group of non Muslim Arabs who decided to call for an event centered on the theme of public eating during Ramadan, in several countries including Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon. Our objective is to break the wall of silence, to defend religious freedom, and make it a wide scale discussion in which everyone would participate.
By no means do we demand from believers in Islam not to observe their fast, or to abandon their religious practices, but it’s a humanistic call from the heart of dictatorship and suffering to respect the right of non Muslims to break the fast, and to protect that right with a legal support that would eliminate any punishment for public fast breaking and replace it with an article that would condemn any act of social segregation or attack on a citizen or a foreign resident who refuses to fast and eats publicly.
Achieving that goal would require a lot of courage and sacrifice, and the revolutions of the Arab spring may suffice to realize it provided they are protected from those who want to divert them from their path and exploit them to advocate a caliphate or a theocracy, instead of freedom and human rights.
You can support us by joining the page of the event on facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/Breakthefast
——– traduction française par Michel D. que je remercie ———-
“Un appel à la rupture publique du jeûne durant le Ramadan.
Le mois de Ramadan est considéré comme l’un des moments les plus importants et sacrés pour les musulmans. Pendant ce mois, les musulmans s’abstiennent de manger, de boire, et d’avoir des relations sexuelles, tous les jours, du lever au coucher du soleil. Malheureusement, comme beaucoup de gens le savent, la société musulmane refuse absolument de respecter les voix et les opinions alternatives, surtout si elles viennent de personnes qui sont contraintes d’être musulmanes par la tradition, c’est à dire qu’elles ont la malchance d’être nées dans un pays islamique où elles risquent, en tant que personnes musulmanes, la mort ou une sentence de mort pour apostasie.
Dans ces sociétés à majorité musulmane, il y a une fraction importante, même s’il s’agit d’une minorité pacifique, qui a choisi de se libérer des liens de la religion, et évidemment qui n’observe pas le jeûne, car ne se sentant aucune obligation morale de le faire, de près ou de loin . Mais trop souvent, ces personnes sont obligées, pour leur propre sécurité, à se contraindre une sorte de grève de la faim obligatoire, un fait qui devrait être considéré comme une atteinte aux libertés individuelles, garantis par les conventions internationales des Droits de l’Homme, qui stipulent que nul ne peut être forcé de faire ce à quoi il ne souhaite pas prendre part, surtout quand cela est relatif à leur liberté de croyance.
Nombreux sont ceux qui considèrent le Ramadan comme une catastrophe, car ils sont contraints de faire semblant d’être à jeun, dans une société dont la religion et les traditions s’imposent à tout le monde sans aucun égard pour la liberté des individus dans leurs différentes croyances religieuses et leurs visions du monde. Certains appellent cela un «cauchemar» qu’ils ont à supporter pendant 30 jours, chaque année: un mois de conflits personnel, de problèmes de nutrition, ou un mois à dormir, à manger dans les toilettes et des endroits sombres, loin des yeux indiscrets de la société, comme un voleur ou un. criminel.
C’est une bataille psychologique mené par chaque individu qui est obligé de jeûner en présence de leur famille, leurs amis, et de la société au sens large, afin de ne pas provoquer les musulmans, comme ces derniers disent, lesquels ne semblent pas être provoqués par la vue d’une femme mangeant pendante sa période de menstruation, ou lorsque les parents préparent la nourriture pour leurs enfants, ou quand une femme jeûne un nombre de jours de compensation pour la période pendant laquelle elle a dû rompre le jeûne, quand tout le monde autour d’elle mange normalement, et elle peut même être celle qui prépare la nourriture.
Malheureusement le prix de la rupture du jeûne, faite publiquement pendant le ramadan dans les pays islamiques, est élevé parce que, malgré des différences dans l’application des cadres juridiques nationaux, le trait commun reste l’ostracisme, l’humiliation, la haine et les attaques verbales et physiques. Au Maroc par exemple existe un article de loi qui considère que manger en public pendant le Ramadan un crime passible d’emprisonnement. En Arabie Saoudite et l’Iran la peine de mort attend ceux qui rompent le jeûne en public.
Nous sommes un groupe d’arabes non musulmans qui ont décidé d’appeler à une manifestation centrée sur le thème “manger en public pendant le Ramadan”, dans plusieurs pays dont le Maroc, l’Egypte, la Tunisie et le Liban. Notre objectif est de briser le mur du silence, pour défendre la liberté religieuse, et provoquer un débat à grande échelle auquel chacun participerait.
En aucun cas, nous n’exigeons que les croyants de l’islam cessent d’observer le jeûne, ou renoncent à leurs pratiques religieuses ; c’est un appel humaniste qui vient du cœur de la dictature et de la souffrance, visant à ce que le droit des non-musulmans à rompre le jeûne soit respecté, et à promouvoir la protection juridique et légale qui permettrait d’éliminer toute sanction en cas de rupture publique du jeûne et à remplacer l’arsenal juridique actuel par un article qui condamne tout acte de ségrégation sociale ou le fait d’attenter à un citoyen ou un résident étranger qui refuse publiquement de jeûner.
Atteindre cet objectif exigerait beaucoup de courage et de sacrifices, et les révolutions du printemps arabe pourraient y parvenir si elles se préservaient de ceux qui veulent les détourner de leur chemin et les exploiter afin d’imposer un califat ou une théocratie, en lieu et place de la Liberté et des Droits humains”.
Vous pouvez nous soutenir en vous joignant à la page de cet événement dans facebook:http://www.facebook.com/Breakthefast
I See No Freedom of Religion In Islam
Freedom of Religion In Islam:
Islam does not accommodate for freedom of thought, and although there have been some aspects of tolerance in Islamic history it has not evolved to a level of religious freedom. The kind of freedom that accompanied the Islamic early stages was selective and relative. It was strategic and tactical in nature. It was imposed by the political, military and economic situation prevailing at the time.
Religious freedom in Islamic thought has also been a periodic phase, developed to serve totalitarian goals. That is why, once the Islamic state reached its full might, infringement on freedom of religion has become a usual occurrence. The apparent tolerance did not therefore come from a strong belief in freedom values. It was rather a political maneuver imposed by the specific conditions of the Islamic society at different stages of its history.
At the beginning, Muslims were very vulnerable hence their initial peaceful rhetoric. In order to avoid the wrath of Quraish, win over supporters and give the new religion a peaceful appearance, conversion to Islam was not initially forced on anyone. Quranic verses, which refer to the idea that there should be no compulsion in religion, or that anyone shall be entitled to his or her own religion, all appeared during the first period of Islam: i.e. the very early founding stage. But once Muslims acquired a bit more power, after the migration to Yathrib, they adopted the idea that the faith should be spread by the sword. That led them to their first military victory. They entered Mecca and started forcing people to convert to Islam and destroy their idols. This is contrary of course to the principle of freedom of religion.
Throughout Islamic history, we find that Muslims have blatantly violated religious freedoms. Many churches have been converted into mosques, among which the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Most of the religious symbols like crosses and statues were destroyed. One of the most serious violations is the fact that Jews and Christians were systematically categorized as Dhimmis; in other words as second-class citizens, who had to pay extra taxes. This is the treatment reserved for Jews and Christians, the People of the Book. As for those with other beliefs, they lived in a very difficult position and had either to accept the religion of Islam or be killed.
“Moroccan” but not a Muslim:
Moroccan law assumes that all Moroccans are Muslims, with the only exception of Moroccan Jews. All are subjects of King Mohammed VI, Commander of the Faithful. It doesn’t recognize other religions though such as Christianity or Buddhism -not even different Islamic doctrines such as Shiism. And the authorities are relentlessly fighting conversions to Shiism or Christianity.
For many, Moroccan is a term synonymous with Muslim, as if Islam were the sole basis for the Moroccan identity. This is misleading because there are also Atheist, Christian and Baha’i Moroccans, who are proud of their nationality and heritage. Those, unfortunately, have no legal or social protection to be able to safely practice their freedom of thought in public. Even if there were legal guarantees for religious minorities, it will be difficult to adapt the Muslim mind with the culture of coexistence and tolerance, regardless of belief. Perhaps the most important justification Muslims use to reject that kind of tolerance is the claim that non-Muslims do not respect their holy places and religious symbols. They should know that no one should confiscate other’s right for creativity, thought and expression. No one should have the right to censure criticism unless persons are targeted beyond their beliefs, convictions or opinions.
All religious minorities in the Moroccan society do not criticize or discuss the Islamic faith, and all are not even engaged in the effort of enlightening their countrymen, yet they are often mistreated by their families, friends and employers…
So I wonder what kind of religious freedom Muslims talk about exactly?
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Allah und der Standhafte
Read the Article from here. English version will be available soon ( I hope )
Education and Freedom of Thought.
Freedom of expression is primarily based on freedom of thought. In the Arab and Muslim societies there is only one kind of thought: a religious and authoritarian thought that exploits human beings and tends to reduce them to their smallest common denominator, so that they appear as a multitude of identical copies, unable to criticize and avoiding any form of thinking whether free or oriented. This explains why there isn’t yet freedom of expression in those societies.
As for the forms of free expression that some citizens in the Arab world have attempted to manifest, they are receding and still pretty restricted to an intellectual elite which is the produce of Western influence. This elite, however, tends to shrink considerably with the takeover of the education systems across the region by the ruling oligarchy. This explains the dramatic quantitative and qualitative reduction in the intellectual elite.
As these societies started opening up to the Western world, some leading religious and political figures entered the modernization debate, and despite their calls against the Western civilization, the reality of everyday life made people question the credibility of their anti-Western rhetoric. In the eyes of people it was obvious that the Western civilization could at least achieve some form of happiness in this world. The ideological battle between Socialism and Capitalism during the twentieth century distorted the view and created alliances for one economic doctrine against the other. In their quest to win the ideological war, political movements resorted to every possible tactic including the exploitation of religious ideologies which eventually led to the resurgence of political groups with strong religious reference. Religion and theology then were introduced to the school in order to silence critical thinking among young people and facilitate their subjugation by traditional and religious approaches and also to avoid revolutionary uprisings like the one seen in 1969, which was based on critical thinking that spread during the post-WWII era.
From here, religious curricula at school started to breed and spread. Religious classes were created at secondary schools and universities. Scholarships were created to encourage students and researchers in this field. Murshidates(Religious female guides) and Imams were trained. This plan succeeded in eliminating the liberal movement, and has created armies of young extremists who do not tolerate difference and tend to ignite sedition and inspire hatred against non religious minorities.
In Morocco we should be questioning the education system in order to get rid of the preconceived religious ideas. Education must be a space for the pupil to free his or her mind from taboos. Students should be granted an intellectual immunity and universal humanitarian principles beyond the narrow concepts of belonging.
Education is our bet on future generations. Religious education can only produce the kind of conflicts and strife that we witness in present day, and therefore religion should be separated from education in exchange for promoting scientific, artistic and literary learning. Religion is for worship and should have no place in the classroom. It is misleading to consider religious thought as an academic subject, be it Islamic, Christian or Jewish. Though I do not deny that we ought and must examine all religions impartially and objectively based on comparative studies and whithin the historical contexts of the emergence of every religion. The real sources of terrorism, extremism and backwardness are to be found in those religious school books which encourage violence and an unwavering belief in absolute ideas taken for granted.
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Switzerland WAKE UP !
German translation available now : Click here.
A few kilometers from Lausanne there’s a reception camp for refugees, one of the most important of all in Switzerland. My journey there wasn’t easy, as I had to wait for more than 4 hours in Geneva International airport, and with the pressure and confusion I wouldn’t have been able to get to the center without the help of a police agent, who provided me with a train ticket for free, and a map showing the way from Vallorbe, the last stop on the rail line, to the asylum camp.
There, contrary to my earlier expectations, I was about to spend a week that would change all preconceptions I had about asylum seeking. To be honest, I was so excited for this new experience that I thought would allow me to meet activists and political dissidents who had to flee persecution, and intellectual and political confinement in their original countries; and when you read the UN article on asylum, you do not think for a second that thieves, drug dealers, illegal immigrants, and criminals who evaded justice in their countries, would be the ones to take benefit from it. But that is the case unfortunately, and during my stay in the reception center, I have personally cohabited with people who fabricated very sad stories in order to deceive the authorities, to have the right to residence in Switzerland, and medical and financial help, which are mostly paid for from the Swiss taxpayers’ money.
It is really painful and sad to see such people being granted a right they do not deserve, while many others who are in desperate need for protection refuse to enter Switzerland or any other European country illegally, which would be an infringement on the sovereignty of those countries. Just to clarify my point, my intention is not to enumerate the negative aspects of asylum seeking only, and I am not, and will never be against that category of Earth inhabitants; I have always considered myself a universal citizen, and when I chose to fight for my cause, I defended my ideas strongly, simply because they derive their legitimacy from universality, not from the narrow perspective of a particular ideology.
Is it not so beautiful to live like a bird, capable of flying wherever you want whenever you feel hindered or threatened? But by no means does that prevent one from respecting one’s new land, and trying to adapt oneself to each environment where one goes to seek protection. I’m trying to shed some light on this phenomenon, which needs to be discussed, and concerning which political measures should be taken to protect the values of Switzerland, values that constitute the basis of democracy and human rights, particularly women’s rights.
Several of my Swiss friends pride themselves over their laws, which went beyond mere equality between genders to give more rights to women, those goddesses that grant us love and life, in many aspects of human existence. Among the weirdest things that caught my attention, are the cases of some asylum seekers from North Africa that I met, who explained how they tricked the federal office of immigration, by pretending that they were from a country in deep political unrest like Libya or Tunisia, when they are for the most part from Morocco or Algeria, to increase their chances to obtain right to residence, and how they shed some crocodile tears during the interview, just to come out spouting sexual insults loudly against the interviewers or the translators.
During my stay in the asylum camp, most refugees went to Lausanne during the day by train, without ever paying the ticket. And when they saw me buying a ticket, I looked bizarre and ridiculous to them, because to them, travelling by train in Switzerland is for free, and even more, they give themselves the full right to scream at the ticket collector if they’re caught without one, because he or she has nothing to do against them but make them descend at the next station, upon which they take another train and so on until they get to their destination. One of the common ideas among the refugees in Switzerland is that “if you buy alcohol and food, you don’t deserve to be not a man”; of course the alternative to buying is stealing, and many of them are quite happy about the fact that shops in Switzerland are quite easy to rob. There are even districts where thieves sell their merchandise (clothes, cell phones, and other electronic devises) for very low prices. And here I must ask: why do the police not intervene? Not all asylum seekers in Switzerland get an official refugee status, but they get a 6 months residence permit; why are they so happy with it? Simply because 6 months is enough for a drug dealer or a professional thief to gain a relatively good fortune from their activities, not to mention that any asylum seeker, supposing his/her case was rejected, has the right to appeal and renew their request, which may extend their period of residence up to 4 years! Don’t be astonished, for many of them have years of influence from their original cultures, which contradict Swiss values completely most often. One of these values is cleanliness and hygiene, which is quite difficult or even impossible to respect for someone who is used to bathing once a month at most, urinating in public parks and near the walls of houses, or drinking a beer and tossing the bottle on the sidewalk. Hatred of the Swiss people may be considered a common trait among a certain category of asylum seekers: all Swiss to them are racist and islamophobic, which to them makes their looting and vandalizing activities legitimate from a religious standpoint, against those who are considered by Islam as infidels. And here again I must ask: how can Switzerland protect its frontiers from being breached by Muslim extremists who may be part of terrorist groups with destructive intentions? Especially that the majority of asylum seekers have no official papers proving their identity or their country of origin!
It would be wonderful to live in a world with no frontiers or treaties limiting freedom of travel for people, but we have to admit that all countries have the duty to make life better for their own citizens.
It is a moral obligation for Western countries to help other populations respect human rights and individual liberties, which would guarantee economic and cultural development. The immigration of underdeveloped populations does not solve their problems on the long run; it merely exports those very problems abroad.
Like this:
In women’s International Day
I do not know why God has chosen to choose from the prophets and apostles only virile masculine male. What if Moses, Jesus and Muhammad and others were females and teenagers? Did God create women in order to reproduce and to satisfy the desires of sex and food, while he created man in order be his messenger and to convey his message? Would divine and earthly texts belittle woman and consider her as having a mental and religious shortage and prisoners of her passion, without God’s supreme word? Doesn’t Racism and discrimination under which billions of women in the world live today are due to this view and due to the God’s sacred will? Who formed this masculine attitude and provided it with fanaticism and legislated for its laws and customs thousands of verses and hadiths? Don’t divine books express the complexity of prophets and their hysterical illness towards women and sex? I do not know why I am insisting on asking such questions which many people ignore or just pass by it.
We commemorate international days in order to celebrate women across the world (or rather to mourn them), and then we just sit to laugh and brag about a woman’s revolution in a mountain in Kandahar, or count the story of a woman freezing to death in a village in Morocco… and we end up exchanging flowers and red roses with lovers from across the Third World, intimidated, but at the same time inspired by the (forcibly) forbidden values of love and freedom.
I wished if this day could bring something new and positive for women. But it did not. All it brought instead were sexual allusions and pink, yellow and red flowers, with the smell of treason. This happens mainly because we (men) don’t find much to share apart from our suppressed fantasies and faded flowers, while the real issues remain forever postponed until the next “International Day”!
I think that The upcoming revolutions in the Arab world and the Berber North Africa will be against Islamists and the ideological expansion of fundamentalism, and will be led by women because they are the ones who would be most persecuted and exploited by theological regimes, for the Tunisian, Moroccan, or Egyptian woman, our sister and friend, would not accept anything in exchange for her freedom and dignity…
