Aurat March: Pakistani women face violent threats ahead of rally
By Saira AsherBBC News
Image copyrightAAMIR QURESHI
Image captionLast year's march drew thousands onto the streets
Conservative groups in Pakistan are often heard to invoke a famous saying: the proper place of a woman is in her "chadar aur char diwari" - meaning veiled and within the four walls of her home.
But this weekend, in the face of violent threats and legal petitions, women across Pakistan are preparing to demand their rights in direct defiance of that belief.
Since 2018, Aurat March - Urdu for Women's March - has been held in many cities across Pakistan to coincide with International Women's Day on 8 March. It is no small feat in a conservative Muslim country where many women often don't feel safe in public places because of the harassment they often endure.
Those who took part last year faced intense backlash, especially online. Some said they had received death and rape threats afterwards.
And this year, voices on both sides of the debate have grown louder in the lead-up.
While religious and right-wing groups have said the march goes against Islam, even moderate factions have taken issue with what the marchers themselves acknowledge is a provocative approach.
"There's a deep conflict in the society that we live in, about the right of women to ask for their rights; to be mobile, to be out in the streets," says a 38-year-old organiser in Karachi, who did not want to be identified.
The idea for Aurat March began when a few women decided to mobilise their networks and gather in a park in the port city of Karachi on International Women's Day to ask for an end to violence and harassment.
It has since evolved into a wider movement, including transgender people, demanding better laws to protect women and enforcement of existing laws, as well as raising awareness and changing attitudes.
Image copyrightARIF ALI
Image captionThe posters and slogans on display in 2019 caused controversy
The march took inspiration from similar events in the US, but has been further fuelled by incidents at home. The "honour killing" of social media star Qandeel Baloch by her own brother and other incidents have shone a light on violence against women in recent years.
"The need for younger feminists to have a voice was already there," says the organiser, who was part of that original group of women.
"We are challenging the status quo. We're challenging the regressive elements in our society."
'Snatch your rights'
This year the key demand is economic justice for women, as highlighted in the manifesto.
But it was the slogans and signs held up in 2019 which drew wider attention to the movement. Participants faced criticism and abuse in the mainstream media, alongside intense trolling online.
It was the rallying cry "mera jism, meri marzi", which translates to my body, my choice, in particular which touched a nerve last year and continues to cause controversy ahead of this year's march.
Aurat March proponents have argued it is about a woman's control over her own body, but the phrase was seen by critics as obscene, having a sexual connotation and going against the highly prized expectation of modesty in a woman.
It's also contributed to the voices saying the movement is too Western in its ideals.
The story behind "mera jism meri marzi" (my body, my choice)
Image copyrightAURAT MARCH
Noor (not her real name) created a poster with these words for last year's march. She came up with the slogan because she wanted to highlight the right of women to have agency, to choose what she wants to wear and do with her own body, without fear of harassment or rape.
She says the negative reaction has scared her so much that she now finds it difficult to speak with her real name.
Noor was speaking to BBC Urdu.
Those involved acknowledge the slogans and signs are provocative, but they argue that's what is needed when you are trying to change social norms.
"One way [to address issues] is to continue slowly working, and hope to achieve a result maybe a few decades later. The other approach is to just snatch your rights because it has been too long, it has been too hard and it has been too traumatic," says a 28-year-old volunteer, who identifies as gender fluid.
There have been attempts by the group to explain the ideas behind the movement through their social media channels and community outreach .
But that doesn't seem to have prevented the deep divisions and tense exchanges ahead of this year's event. If anything they've grown more vitriolic.
Posters and murals put up by organisers have been vandalised. Social media posts asking for volunteers have unleashed a barrage of misogynistic abuse.
"We are probably going faster than the society can digest... but we are helping them unlearn the toxicity that was taught to them by the society, culture and religion and we are trying to make them learn a new de-gendered system," the volunteer acknowledges.
The controversy has even reached the court in Lahore, where a petition was filed last month to stop the march from going ahead, arguing that its aim was to "spread anarchy, vulgarity, blasphemy and hatred" of Islam.
The court ruled it should proceed - but said organisers needed to ensure people participating adhere to "decency and moral values".
And as the march gets closer, the battle appears to be intensifying. The debate reached a fever pitch this week when a playwright known for his misogynistic views, verbally abused a female rights activist during a panel on Aurat March on live television.
While there was condemnation of his outburst, the same people cautioned organisers on their messaging.
Mahira Khan, one of Pakistan's most famous actresses, said on Twitter that she supported the march but warned against using provocative placards.
Skip Twitter post by @TheMahiraKhan
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Mahira Khan
✔@TheMahiraKhan
I’m sure those who have been organizing the Aurat March are experienced, have been working for years for the cause of women..they have a better idea of what should and should not be done. I write out of pure observation.
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But international human rights groups have come out to support the march, with Amnesty International condemning "the horrific threats of violence, intimidation and harassment of the marchers".
"The fact that women are unable to demand their human rights without being put in very real danger underscores just how important the Aurat March is."
The volunteer says they are fearful of acid attacks, bomb threats, stalkers and even doxxing - the publication of someone's personal details online.
"We are scared. But if we are not scared, if we don't have fear, how do we expect the change to come?"
Come Sunday, even the fear won't keep them confined to the veil and four walls anymore.
Gloria Steinem - How The CIA
Used Feminism To Destabilize Society
3-19-2
"
In the 1960´s, the elite media invented second-wave feminism as part of the elite agenda to dismantle civilization and create a New World Order."
Since writing these words last week, I have discovered that before she became a feminist leader, Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA spying on Marxist students in Europe and disrupting their meetings. She became a media darling due to her CIA connections. MS Magazine, which she edited for many years was indirectly funded by the CIA.
Steinem has tried to suppress this information, unearthed in the 1970´s by a radical feminist group called "Red Stockings." In 1979, Steinem and her powerful CIA-connected friends, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas prevented Random House from publishing it in "Feminist Revolution." Nevertheless the story appeared in the "Village Voice" on May 21, 1979.
Steinem has always pretended that she had been a student radical. "When I was in college, it was the McCarthy era," she told Susan Mitchell in 1997, "and that made me a Marxist." (Icons, Saints and Divas: Intimate Conversations with Women who Changed the World 1997. p 130) Her bio-blurb in June 1973 MS. Magazine states: "Gloria Steinem has been a freelance writer all her professional life. Ms magazine is her first full-time salaried job."
Not true. Raised in an impoverished, dysfunctional family in Toledo Ohio, Steinem somehow managed to attend elite Smith College, Betty Friedan´s alma mater. After graduating in 1955, Steinem received a "Chester Bowles Student Fellowship" to study in India. Curiously, an Internet search reveals that this fellowship has no existence apart from Gloria Steinem. No one else has received it.
In 1958, Steinem was recruited by CIA´s Cord Meyers to direct an "informal group of activists" called the "Independent Research Service." This was part of Meyer´s "Congress for Cultural Freedom," which created magazines like "Encounter" and "Partisan Review" to promote a left-liberal chic to oppose Marxism. Steinem, attended Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe, published a newspaper, reported on other participants, and helped to provoke riots.
One of Steinem´s CIA colleagues was Clay Felker. In the early 1960´s, he became an editor at Esquire and published articles by Steinem which established her as a leading voice for women´s lib. In 1968, as publisher of New York Magazine, he hired her as a contributing editor, and then editor of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Warner Communications put up almost all the money although it only took 25% of the stock. Ms. Magazine´s first publisher was Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy´s Dallas motorcade route. Despite its anti establishment image, MS magazine attracted advertising from the crème of corporate America. It published ads for ITT at the same time as women political prisoners in Chile were being tortured by Pinochet, after a coup inspired by the US conglomerate and the CIA.
Steinem´s personal relationships also belie her anti establishment pretensions. She had a nine-year relationship with Stanley Pottinger, a Nixon-Ford assistant attorney general, credited with stalling FBI investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King, and the ex-Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Latelier. In the 1980´s, she dated Henry Kissinger. For more details, see San Francisco researcher Dave Emory.
Our main misconception about the CIA is that it serves US interests. In fact, it has always been the instrument of a dynastic international banking and oil elite (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan) coordinated by the Royal Institute for Internal Affairs in London and their US branch, the Council for Foreign Relations. It was established and peopled by blue bloods from the New York banking establishment and graduates of Yale University´s secret pagan "Skull and Bones" society. Our current President, his father and grandfather fit this profile.
The agenda of this international cabal is to degrade the institutions and values of the United States in order to integrate it into a global state that it will direct through the United Nations. In its 1947 Founding Charter, the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic activities. However this has never stopped it from waging a psychological war on the American people. The domestic counterpart of the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" was the "American Committee for Cultural Freedom." Using foundations as conduits, the CIA controlled intellectual discourse in the 1950´s and 1960´s, and I believe continues to do so today. In The The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Francis Stonor Saunders estimates that a thousand books were produced under the imprint of a variety of commercial and university presses, with covert subsidies.
The CIA´s "Project Mockingbird" involved the direct infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets. "By the early 1950´s," writes Deborah Davis, in her book Katharine the Great : Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire, the CIA owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communication vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all." In 1982 the CIA admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field. Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who ran the operation until his "suicide" in 1963, boasted that "you could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple of hundred dollars a month."
I was born in 1949. Idealists in my parent´s generation were disillusioned when the Communist dream of universal brotherhood turned out to be a shill for a brutal despotism. My own generation may discover that our best instincts have also been manipulated and exploited. There is evidence that the 60´s drug counter culture, the civil rights movement, and anti-war movement, like feminism, were CIA directed. For example, the CIA has admitted setting up the National Student Association as a front in 1947. In the early 1950´s the NSA opposed the attempts of the House Un American Activities Committee to root out Communist spies. According to Phil Agee Jr., NSA officers participated in the activities of SNCC, the militant civil rights group, and Students for a Democratic Society, a radical peace group.
According to Mark Riebling, the CIA also may have used Timothy Leary. Certainly the agency distributed LSD to Leary and other opinion makers in the 1960s. Leary made a generation of Americans turn away from active participation in society and seek fulfillment "within." In another example of the CIA´s use of drugs to interfere in domestic politics, Gary Webb describes how in the 1980´s, the CIA flooded Black ghettos with cocaine.
I won´t attempt to analyze the CIA´s motivation except to suggest what these acts have in common: They demoralized, alienated and divided Americans. The elite operates by fostering division and conflict in the world. Thus, we don´t realize who the real enemy is. For the same reason, the CIA and elite foundations also fund the diversity and multi cultural movements.
Feminism has done the most damage. There is no more fundamental yet delicate relationship in society than male and female. On it depends the family, the red blood cell of society. Nobody with the interests of society at heart would try to divide men and women. Yet the lie that men have exploited women has become the official orthodoxy.
Man loves woman. His first instinct is to nurture ("husband") and see her thrive. When a woman is happy, she is beautiful. Sure, some men are abusive. But the vast majority have supported and guided their families for millennium.
Feminists relentlessly advance the idea that our inherent male and female characteristics, crucial to our development as human beings, are mere "stereotypes."
This is a vicious calumny on all heterosexuals, 95% of the population. Talk about hate! Yet it is taught to children in elementary schools! It is echoed in the media. Lesbians like Rosie O´Donnell are advanced as role models.
All of this is calculated to create personal confusion and sow chaos among heterosexuals. As a result, millions of American males are emasculated and divorced from their relationship to family (the world and the future.) The American woman has been hoodwinked into investing herself in a mundane career instead of the timeless love of her husband and children. Many women have become temperamentally unfit to be wives and mothers. People, who are isolated and alone, stunted and love-starved, are easy to fool and manipulate. Without the healthy influence of two loving parents, so are their children.
Feminism is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on society by its governing elite. It is designed to weaken the American social and cultural fabric in order to introduce a friendly fascist New World Order. Its advocates are sanctimonious charlatans who have grown rich and powerful from it. They include a whole class of liars and moral cripples who work for the elite in various capacities: government, education and the media. These imposters ought to be exposed and ridiculed.
Women´s oppression is a lie. Sex roles were never as rigid as feminists would have us believe. My mother had a successful business in the 1950´s importing watch straps from Switzerland. When my father´s income increased, she was content to quit and concentrate on the children. Women were free to pursue careers if they wanted to.
The difference was that their role as wife and mother was understood, and socially validated, as it should be. Until Gloria Steinem and the CIA came along.
Comment
From ChandRa
katalinmigray@cox.net
3-19-2
As a woman, I found Makow's article to be absurd. Even if what he says about Gloria Steinem is true (after perusing his website, though, I would doubt anything he says),stating that her supposed connection with the CIA proves that feminism was created by the elite to bring about the New World Order is akin to saying that the anti-war protests were created to bring about the New World Order, because there were infiltrators. While I was on Henry Makow's site I wrote down a few more of his beliefs, which I would love to share and comment on.
One of his articles is titled "For Freedom's Sake - Remove Feminist Professors". In it he claims that feminism is a lesbian marxist ideology, and criticizes feminists for being "frankly dedicated, not to the preservation of Judeo-Christian civilization but to it's overthrow." Henry Makow also states in this article that a book written by Dick Cheney's wife is a fine book (he's obviously a fan). Which brings me to another article he wrote on his concepts of a feminine woman. According to Henry Makow, a feminine woman "is not driven by personal ambition" because a "career is a feminist lie". "She wants to be enlisted by a man" because "she depends on a man".
Makow has advice for men when it comes to marrying a woman. In Makow's words, "women's liberation has taught women to pursue sex for it's own sake, as though they were men. This is not feminine. If a man prefers a new car, why would he marry a "used" woman?" And as for marital bliss? "They make decisions together, but he has the last word". Of course his comments on the amazing play "The Vagina Monologues" were just as enlightening. I watch it on HBO when it's on. I know the play by heart. Makow misquotes Ensler's monologues constantly to make a point. His point.
He also wrote, regarding "The Vagina Monologues", "This play partly exemplifies why radical Islam has declared war on America." "Muslim fundamentalists believe their culture is threatened. They are fighting to preserve their wives and children who are the future. If their wives are infected by our homosexuality, they will insist on becoming "independent" like men." I am curious as to why Makow constantly equates the seeking of equality by women with homosexuality. Unless he's afraid that once a woman is independent, she wouldn't need a man, and perhaps doesn't actually prefer them (which isn't true, depending on the man and the woman).
Additionally, he aptly reveals his wit and intelligence when he attempts to enter the mind of Ensler, who actually is witty and intelligent. Ensler, by the way, wrote "The Vagina Monologues". He also faults Ensler for telling Times that "the patriarchal (i.e.) nuclear family is a deadly institution". Makow counters that "the nuclear family is the primary institution of herosexuality", which he says "satisfies the profoundest psychological needs of both sexes". He also seems to believe he knows the minds and make-up of all feminists. He states that feminists are Marxists, lesbians, and you're either a Jew/Christian or a Feminist.
My friend, who pointed his Steinem article out to me on your site, is a Jewish male and a feminist. I have many female friends who are Jewish and feminist. As a matter of fact a lot of Jewish women are feminists. I was raised Catholic, am more into the Essenic version, and a feminist. He also seems to believe they are dried up, hostile women, and if they like other women, it's for lack of a penis. I, myself, am bisexual. I'd have to agree more with Angelina Jolie's viewpoint on women with women, when she said, in an interview, that it's a beautiful thing.
ChandRa
