Conservatives Can't Keep Up WIth Technological Developments

I wish I could remember his exact quote, but a high school history teacher impressed me by explaining how technological achievements galloped way ahead of society's ability to evolve spiritually, intellectually and morally to deal with those achievements. He said it so elegantly though. In her book, Murder in the Name of Honor, journalist/activist Rana Husseini makes a similar point about backward, morally-primitive conservatives and how they relate to women. Last weekend we looked at how horribly conservatives deal with women... and suddenly the Republican War Against Women was in a more international-- and timeless-- context.

Husseini's book deals with a litany of horrific crimes by conservative barbarians against women, including conservative barbarians who emigrate to more advanced countries, including our own. I noticed an ironic strand in her work about how technology and social media has lent itself to the murders and brutalizations of women, mostly by husbands, fathers and brothers. "A new addition to the list of murder weapons," she wrote, "is the mobile phone. In Kurdistan, where there has been a sudden influx of cheap mobile phones, men are using them to take photos and record audio and video clips of women and girls who are breaking social codes. These are then widely distributed, damaging women's reputations and putting their lives at risk. The first case is believed to have been in 2004, when footage of a seventeen year old girl having sex with a boy circulated in Erbil. Two days after the video was made public, the girl's family killed her... In 2006, 170 cases of mobile phone-related violence were recorded. By 2007, this figure had more than doubled to 350...

"Kurdistan [said an official of a women's rights NGO] is developing, but people still adhere to the old customs and traditions. And women are still the primary victims."

...The nineteen-year old Iraqi was, according to her father, murdered by her own in-laws, who took her to a picnic area and shot her seven times, Her crime: having an unknown number of her mobile phone.

...In another case that was reported in Al Hayat newspaper in 2003, a twenty-year old woman was stabbed to death by her brothers after she started listening to Um Kalthoum (a famous Arab singer known for her love songs). The brothers believed that her musical taste was evidence of an illicit affair, and, acting on their suspicion, killed her and then turned themselves into the police. Investigations later proved that the victim's husband had bought the tapes for his wife to listen to while he was away.



...[I]n August 2007, the Daily Telegraph reported a story about a young Saudi girl in Riyadh who was killed by her father after he walked into her room and found her chatting to a man on Facebook. The father reportedly beat up his daughter and then shot her to death.

The case remained unreported in Saudi Arabia until April 2008 when Saudi preacher Ali al-Maliki strongly criticized Facebook and called on the Saudi government to ban the internet site because it was corrupting Saudi youth.

"Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the internet than they are spending on food," he said. The story was written up in the local press as an example of the "strife" that Facebook was causing in Saudi Arabia. Ali al-Maliki said women were posting "revealing pictures" and "Behaving badly" on the site, which has become very popular with young Saudis.

...In May 2007, nineteen-year old Shawbo Ali Rauf was taken from her home in Birmingham [England] to Iraqi Kurdistan where she was stoned to death, Her crime was having unknown numbers on her mobile phone-- which proved to her family that she was having an affair.

Conservatives don't "trust" new technology. It should have come as no surprise that Turkish conservative Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan started blaming Twitter and Facebook when people in Istanbul demonstrated against her corruption for selling off the city's most beloved park to wealthy developers for a shopping mall. I don't think he has a Twitter handle but he called social media "a menace." Dictators and authoritarians have always hated media they can't control. "Now we have a menace that is called Twitter," Erdogan said. "The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society."

Unsurprisingly, news and rumours about the marches quickly spread on Twitter, which appeared to have galvanised support in other parts of Turkey. Police used teargas on demonstrators in Turkey's biggest city Istanbul, and also in Izmir and the capital Ankara, which sparked further outcry.

Protests were then held across the country, and nearly 2,000 people are said to have been arrested in 67 towns and cities.

Erdogan attacked Twitter for spreading misinformation and helping to fuel the unrest in Turkey. Perhaps he was referring to tweets such as these...