Unit 2—Human Rights, Women’s Rights
Guiding questions: How visible are the human rights violations against women world-wide, and why? To what extent do developed countries like the US have a responsibility to act, and why?
It is not a secret that women are not seen as equal to men. It has not been like this for centuries. Only in the past fifty years in Western culture, have women started to speak up.
This behavior is in a way part of man’s instinct. Old civilizations like the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Chinese and many more had male rulers. Men are a symbol of power and, in a world where the rules were selected according to who was physically stronger, women had little to no chance of being heard.
With the French revolution and the concretization of science, the West created a society that chooses its rulers not based on strength (or their ability to kill) but on their intellect. With democracy we began electing those who we believed should rule. Changing our political system to one that is based on equality inevitably led those who were not considered equal to inconformity. Before the ideas behind democracy and equality, slaves had never thought of the possibility of being free – Freedom was a concept as strange to them as ice is to a camel.
Feminism rose from the center of the social revolution; after the Second World War. But the Second World War was not truly a World War. Many countries, apart from Europe, East Asia and the United States, had little or no part to play in the war. This is why the social revolution – the true and final transition from physical to an intellectual leadership – has not taken place in the majority of those counties. Countries and societies were the one that rules is the one with an AK-47 hanging from their neck have many steps to take before Feminism can be in the top of their priorities. Before they start thinking about women being paid as much as man, they have to fight for right that is even more fundamental: Freedom.
The rest of the world, that is, those countries where the social revolution has taken place and are ruled by the mind and not by the arm, do know the reality of their neighbors, yet there is little they can do about it. In fact, one should ask the question of whether, by their own rules, they have the right to do so? What happen to respect to private property? Those territories, those homes and those souls are not under any of the Western countries jurisdiction. If we put aside the question of whether we have the right to intervene or not (I will assume we do) we must consider how we want to intervene.
It is my personal belief, which is based on talks I have had with people since I started this class, that most people have absolutely no idea about what is going on in Poipet (A city in Cambodia were thousands of girls are taken from the streets, denigrated and prostituted against their wills) or in practically any major city outside the West. They ignore most of the global issues and most of what they do know about them is merely superficial (I do not completely exclude myself from this category). Very few people will admit that they do not know what is going on in Israel, Darfur, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. Yet those are only the countries that get more publicity – usually because of economical reasons – but they are not the countries that are suffering the most. I do not intend to say that the people in Palestine are sitting in the beach enjoying the sun – no, I say that we are highly unaware of the true problems the world is facing: “the AIDS epidemic began over 25 years ago, and the disease continues to prey upon millions of children around the world. Over 2.1 million children are HIV–positive, with more than 400,000 children becoming newly infected with HIV / AIDS each year.”[1] We all know that AIDS in Africa is a problem, we all know that it is in the UN’s priority list, but what do we really know about it? Knowing the statistics is merely glancing at the problem. AIDS is not a political problem that can be solved with international congregations. AIDS is a problem that must be attacked with education, but in order to educate we need to first understand what we are educating about. In order to do that we need stories. We need to hear people that is like us – people that laugh and love – to tell us what they have lived to even begin to comprehend it.
Last year I had the opportunity of going to Poland for a week and visit the ghettos and the concentration camps. This trip is one that is impacted in my memory as an experience I treasure the most. The pictures I have from Poland are pictures that don’t seem like pictures from any of my other trips. Its not that we were sad and depressed the entire time, it is that inside of us we were beginning to understand what the Holocaust was. We were starting an inner transformation what would shift the way we view Judaism, Israel and who we are. This experience did not occur over night; Majon Le Madrijim Jul, the institute I traveled with, organized from months before weekly classes on Germany, Hitler and the Holocaust. They took us to museums and showed us movies. But most importantly, they brought survivors who would stand in front of a hundred and fifty young adults from all over the world and tell their stories one more time. It is knowing the people that which made it real, what gave it live and made it relevant.
Kristof and WuDunn write in their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression in to Opportunity for Woman World Wide about facts and statistics, but they also write about stories. The authors traveled across the world, interviewed hundreds of people, and came up with their book, which more than a book it has become a cause.
What Kristof and WuDunn did is the first step the West must do if we want to help those people. They opened our eyes. They also attempt to propose way we can help change the world. On their Web Site the link to buy the book is not at all what comes first to your eyes. There is a list in this website that talks about companies that are fighting for causes and it gives you information on how you can support them.[2]
We have taken a step forward and it is our duty to help those who have stopped walking up on their feet and moving again, yet we cannot tell them where they should be moving to. We have no right to go in to other cultures and impose our ways (although every great civilization in history has done it). We can help guide but we cannot lead those societies that are dead. By dead I mean a society where there is no progression and has no active movement. America, England, France, Japan, Canada, and many more have to stick out their hand and help. But they most do this wisely because sadly we have seen in the past ten years that dog you intend to pet can also bite.
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