Women's News September 7, 2011

Several articles out of Jordan:

A Jordanian woman was killed by her father after she gave birth in the hospital.  He killed her because she was a widow, and therefore shouldn't have been pregnant.  Yes, honor killings still happen.

A Bangladeshi woman is accusing her boss of rape, at a garment plant in Jordan.  He is claiming that she's lying, and a company director said it's a plot to send jobs to America.

Some female Nobel Laureates are asking the president of South Africa to appoint a different chief justice of the Constitutional Court.  They say his current pick would be bad for women, citing his rulings in rape cases.

It's very disturbing to see how many parts of the world still don't see women as equals.  And I specifically mean that in regards to rape.  Even in the United States, there is a stigma attached to rape, and women who have been raped may feel like they did something wrong. 

If I am robbed and beaten up while walking home, everyone is on my side, and I can talk about it.  But if a women is raped while walking home, she may be too ashamed to mention it.  And if she does, some people will blame her for not taking better precautions or for wearing the wrong clothes.  In some countries she could even face death from an honor killing, because she had sex before marriage - even though it's rape!  At some point, men must realize that their honor is not tied to a woman's sexuality.  Maybe then women will be equal to men.

Israeli arms to South Africa

This was in my Top Stories section for May 24, 2010:

Haaretz (Israel): Report: Israel offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa - well, I certainly was not expecting this headline on the front page. This article quotes an article from The Guardian (UK) about a new book from an American researcher who found documents on nuclear talks between Israel and South Africa in the 1970s. Apparently a nuclear deal didn't quite go through, but Israel did sell tritium to SA and there may have been a joint nuclear test in late 1979.

There have been a few updates. According to the Daily Beast, Shimon Peres has denied a lot of the scandal, and called it slander. And Haaretz has a refutation of that by the author of the book, Sasha Polakow-Suransky.