Military Personnel Getting The Help They Need

Whether you supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or not, one thing I think we can all agree upon is that we need to support the troops, both our active duty and our vets.  Unfortunately, the support system for returning military personnel is not great.  Not immune to the housing bust, a slew of  armed forces members found themselves losing their houses to illegal foreclosure.  A whopping 5,000 members may have been subject to illegal foreclosures by some major banks. Barack Obama said of the situation:  "It is unconscionable that members of our armed forces and their families have been some of those most susceptible to losing their homes through the actions of unscrupulous banks and housing lenders."

That's one thing we  agree upon. Another positive thing Obama and the current administration has done is enact the "Servicemembers Civil Relief Act" whereby:

...lenders cannot foreclose on active-duty military members and their families or charge them interest rates of more than 6 percent on preexisting debt. Some of the biggest lenders have already tried to rectify some of their violations of this law, but the administration’s announcement attempts to guarantee review and relief.

The review process would “provide any who were wrongly foreclosed upon with compensation equal to a minimum of lost equity, plus interest and $116,785,” paid for by the settlement, and provide additional protections and compensation for other abuses related to handling mortgages of military members, the White House document said.

As part of the administration's efforts to help vets and active duty members with their housing woes, it's encouraging them to refinance to lower interest rates through VA governmental loans.

The House Committee is also finally making an effort to help  vets (many of whom are now jobless) return to the work force with the "VOW To Hire Heroes Act".

There is still much more we can do to help to help the men and women in our Armed Forces. We need to make sure that the men and women who are currently fighting for and defending our freedoms, and those who served and are now stateside and back in the civilian world get the help they need.

(Brought to you by United States Military VA Loan)

Egyptian Vice Police Arrest Belly Dancing TV Station Owner For Facilitating

When I think of Egypt I think of the Pyramids, the Nile and belly dancing. Belly dancing is a traditional, popular dance form that dates back to ancient Egypt, but it's becoming less so as the country spirals downward towards a far more conservative and less tolerant Islam.  Once an enjoyment for all, it has only been accessible (and legal) in high-end hotels and clubs. Then about a year ago Baligh Hamdy started ElTet, a satellite TV station that exclusively broadcast belly dancing for the masses, at least those with access to satellite TV. Apparently Hamdy produced the videos himself, filming the dancers in their colorful skimpy outfits undulating to live music, and would then send the files to partners in Jordan and Bahrain, They would then air those videos on the satellite TV station.  People could tune in 24/7 to watch, until some viewers filed a complaint, and now Hamdy finds himself sitting in jail facing charges on suspicion of "facilitating prostitution", "harming public decency", "inciting licentiousness" and "operating without a license". 

Facilitating prostitution?  Belly dancers are now considered prostitutes? 
Hamdy was arrested by vice police in his flat in Cairo, which subbed as his studio, and now awaits his fate.

What might have gotten Hamdy in trouble, more so than the dancing itself, were the sexual enhancement and "matchmaking" ads he was airing during the broadcasts. Whether they were your typical match.com-type ads or the "voulez-vous couchez avec moi" escort-type ads, no-one is saying. I can't even imagine how they would deal with the plethora of 'little blue pill' ads that air during dinner time on U.S. networks.  Not that I approve of those ads while young ones are eating their spaghettiOs.

But there are those in Egypt who are dreading what the Islamists in leadership will bring to the table, in terms of censorship. If it's this bad now, I can't begin to imagine what will happen in a few years.
Sources: al Arabiya,WCSC,

UPDATE: Woman Fired - Drunk Couple In Dubai Accused Of Having Sex In Taxi

A foreign couple in Dubai were allegedly caught having sex in the back seat of a taxi, but were they really going at it? One can never tell when dealing with Emiratis. They find any public displays of affection offensive, and an innocuous peck on the cheek can actually land a couple in prison. In 2010, expats 24-year-old Ayman Najafi and 25-year-old Charlotte Adams found themselves spending a month in jail, fined £200 for drinking alcohol, and then deported to England after a woman snitched on them to the police. Apparently, her very young son  had seen the couple "kissing" in a restaurant where they were all eating, and that was enough to send them to jail.

This latest couple was also drunk, but deny they were having sex. The Irish man and British woman identified only as C.M. and R.B. (27) were in a taxi driven by an Asian man, but whether the driver snitched on them or they were pulled over by a policeman that "saw" what they were doing has not been determined yet.  The couple are being investigated and face charges of consuming alcohol, consensual sex, and public indecency- all no-nos in Dubai.

"C.M. and R.B. were boozed up when they were reported to a nearby police patrol that they indulged in sexual activity in the taxi's rear seat in an area close to Dubai Marina," a source told Gulf News.

According to primary police interrogations, the arresting police officer alleged that the woman was not wearing a shirt when he arrested the couple.

"Meanwhile C.M. countered those claims, according to his statement, contending that R.B. is his fiancée and that she was sad when he hugged her only."

"They couple deny involving in any form of sexual intimacy or public indecency."

The source added: "The suspects were said to have been sitting behind the driver's seat.

"It took nearly two minutes from the point where the taxi picked them up till the point where the police patrol stopped them.

"It would have been impossible for the woman to have taken off her shirt and initiated a sexual activity within a time span of two minutes.

"They admitted that they consumed alcohol… but they remained dressed and were not caught naked or involved in any form of sexual interaction."

It's quite obvious where the United Arab Emirates (UAE) stand on public displays of affection, but the whole alcohol issue is very confusing considering it is allowed for non-Muslims.  So why couples are being fined for consuming liquour like Najafi and Adams, or facing charges like the Irish and Brit couple is baffling.

As for the couple's alleged sexual activity, a  prosecution source told Gulf News,

"We are still waiting for forensic reports to prove whether the couple had sex or indulged in any form of sexual activity."

"On May 30, the investigating prosecutor will hear the statements of the Asian driver, Q.K., who is believed to have reported the incident, and the arresting officer.

"The suspects were released on bail after spending five days in detention in Jebel Ali police station."

The incident happened some time after midnight. It could not be confirmed whether the driver reported the matter or whether police officers on patrol spotted the couple engaged in an indecent act.

"Apparently DNA and forensic tests seem to be negative so far," the source said.

I'm not sure I even want to know what forensic exams they performed on the couple.

It's still my contention that you have to be pretty stupid, or pretty drunk, to break UAE laws, and even more stupid for going to Dubai in the first place. Far too many restrictions that can land you in jail, fined or both. Including bad language. No thank you!

UPDATE 5/28/12:

They've now identified the couple: 29-year-old Rebecca Blake and Conor McRedmond. Since the initial report, Rebecca has been fired from her cushy £100,000 per annum job, and now admits she had been on an all day drinking binge. Though she still contends she did not have sex in the taxi, she claims everything that day was a "blur."   Apparently she started off her day at the Rotana Hotel at midday for its "all you can drink" brunch. Yes, instead of an "all you can eat" buffet, there is a hotel in a Muslim country (that will jail you for being drunk) that serves alcohol instead. Rebecca continued drinking throughout the day and into the evening.  The alleged "deed" occurred when Conor and Rebecca decided to head home.   She also complained about cockroaches biting her during her 5 day prison stay.

This latest news about the incident is a game changer. She does not have my sympathies.  First of all, if most of the day is a blur, then in her drunken stupor she very well could have been going at it with Conor in the back seat of that taxi. And living in that country, she should have known what the consequences of being caught would be.  Same goes for spending the whole day drinking. Though jailing someone for being drunk or having sex outside of marriage is outrageous, it is their country and their rules. 

I still wouldn't recommend going there.

Arabs Got Talent- Tomboy finalist gets slammed for appearance

I have a confession to make: one of my guilty pleasures is America's Got Talent. I don't watch American Idol, or The Voice, but yes, I enjoy the sometimes fabulous, sometimes bizarre and sometimes altogether bad acts that strut the stage. And I love the interaction between the judges and the performers. Originating in England with Simon Cowell's Britain's Got Talent, it migrated across the ocean to the U.S. where it features judges Howie Mandel, Sharon Osborne, and Howard Stern who took over for Piers Morgan.  But who the heck knew there were franchises all over the world including an Arabs Got Talent.

Shot in Beirut, Lebanon for the MBC Network, it's a replica (almost) of the Brit and U.S. programmes but with Arab talent. They too have three judges, albeit kinder, gentler more patient ones: The judges are female singer Najwa Karam, Nasser Al Qasabi, and Ali Jaber. Since it's filmed in Lebanon, Najwa is not veiled and neither are most of the female talent. However, one of this season's finalists - tomboyish unveiled, 18-year-old Shamma Hamdan from the United Arab Emirates - isn't getting much support from back home because of her appearance. Her twitter account swelled to over 87,000 followers after her appearance on the TV show, but many comments have been downright mean-spirited, but not surprising given the conservative Emiratis.

Some tweets slammed her for her "un-Islamic" and "un-Emirati" appearance. Others were more cruel, making comments like "Shame on you. You don't represent anything Emirati. You should be pulled from the show." Still more made fun of her appearance. 

"It was like fire, rumours spread about my origin, that I am not 'originally' Emirati, that I am from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India, even Afghanistan, cause, hey, I don't look like the typical Emirati," she said. In fact the family is from Al Raisi tribe. 

"I am not a tomboy, not a boyat, not anything. I am just a musician who is a bit sporty," she says. "I like to surf when I am not playing music." 

"Imagine I performed in an abaya and shayla while playing on a guitar? What would they say? I would be called the biggest sinner in the world."

Hamdan is one of the better ones, but there are some as lacking in talent as everywhere else, including this poor woman. The judges are definitely far more patient than the U.S. ones.

Greek Neo-Nazi Party Leader - "There were no ovens, no gas chambers"

Granted, Greece is a humongous mess, faltering dangerously on a precipice, but how on earth does a Neo-Nazi party win 21 seats in  parliament? The extreme far right skin-head Golden Dawn party won a whopping 7% of the vote during the May 6 elections, and now the head of the Chryssi Avghi party, Nikos Michaloliakos, has joined Mahmoud Ahmadeinjad and others in denying the Holocaust ever took place. Not that it's a novel stance for a neo-Nazi, but this man (and his party) is now part of the Greek government.

“There were no ovens, no gas chambers, it’s a lie,” , the head of the Chryssi Avghi (Golden Dawn) party, said during an interview aired on the private Mega television channel on Sunday night.

“Auschwitz, what Auschwitz? I didn’t go there. What happened there? Have you been there,” he asked a reporter in the interview, adding that he had “read lots of books casting doubt on the number of six million Jews” who died in the Holocaust.

Prior to the elections, Michaloliakos apparently kept mostly mum about the extent of his Holocaust-denying beliefs, but the Greek people would have to be pretty darn stupid to not realize that neo-Nazis aren't terribly different from the original murdering Nazis.
Yes, voters were fed up with all the austerity measures their socialist nanny state was forcing them to put up with to save the country from drowning, but that's not a good reason to vote in extremists.

And it still boggles my mind that there are people who actually deny that there were gas chambers, and ovens, and that millions were killed, not only Jews, in spite of all the photographs, the witnesses and the evidence.

Good luck to the Greeks, they're going to need it.

Mobile FGM Convoys Being Organized By Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

China has its mobile abortion clinics, and now Egypt's enlightened Muslim Brotherhood is sending out mobile medical convoys to convince families to have their young daughters undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) for free, at least according to Bikyamasr (which isn't always trustworthy). In spite of the fact that this horrific practice is actually illegal in Egypt, it is still a common tradition among the poor and uneducated.

Naturally, human rights organizations in Egypt are in an uproar over the fact that the Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party has officially sanctioned these mobile FGM units. An article on Bikyamasr isn't clear as to whether the FGM is actually being performed in those mobile units or whether they're just aggressively encouraging the practice, but either way it's reprehensible.  At least there are people trying to do something about it.

A number of Egyptian human rights groups have submitted a communication to the Attorney General against the Muslim Brotherhood`s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) to investigate the complaints of people in the village of Abu Aziz in the Minya governorate, south of Cairo, over the existence of a large medical convoy organized by the party that wanders streets and does medical examination on people, including female circumcision, or female genital mutilation, in violation of Egyptian law, conventions and treaties signed by Egypt.

In Egypt’s legal code, Female Genital Mutilation is criminalized, as well as the inciting by doctors to convince families of the young girls of the need to agree to circumcise their daughters, “as a matter of preserving chastity.”

The communication demanded Mervat Tallawy, the head of the National Council for Women (NCW) and Major General Seraj EL Din El Rouby, the Governor of Minya, and Nasr El Sayed , Assistant Minister for primary health care, and preventive medicine, and family planning, to intervene to stop what it called “a farce propaganda for free circumcision, which was organized by one of the political parties, in Minya governorate to promote circumcision.”

Thankfully, there's an effort to educate women on how not to succumb to pressure- whether they'll have any success is questionable. And women's groups and others are attempting to get the Muslim Brotherhood and others to follow the rule of law with respect to FGM, but that too is doubtful.

The National Council for Women has criticized the FJP's stance on FGM claiming that it puts

"the person who promotes it under penalty of law because FGM is criminalized, and against human rights in general and women in particular.”

FGM was a problem under Mubarak, as well, but it wasn't sanctioned by the government.

And this is what the long, hard-earned battle against tyranny got the Egyptians after the Arab Spring, a worst kind of tyranny.

The Cow and The Ice Cream- How Obama won the presidency

A friend of mine posted the following on Facebook. Allegedly written by a Nashville schoolteacher shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency, it explains his/her theory of how Obama won. Albeit simplistic, it's interesting. I had my own theories at the time.

Whoever wrote this,  let's hope the voters don't go for the ice-cream this time around, we can't afford the mess.

"We are worried about "the cow"
when it is all about the "Ice Cream"

The most eye-opening civics
lesson I ever had was while teaching
third grade this year. The presidential
election was heating up and
some of the children showed an interest.
I decided we would have an
election for a class president.

We would choose our nominees.
They would make a campaign speech
and the class would vote.

To simplify the process, candidates
were nominated by other class
members. We discussed what kinds
of characteristics these students
should have. We got many nominations
and from those, Jamie and Olivia
were picked to run for the top spot.

The class had done a great
job in their selections. Both
candidates were good kids. I thought
Jamie might have an advantage because
he got lots of parental support.
I had never seen Olivia's mother.

The day arrived when they
were to make their speeches.
Jamie went first.
He had specific ideas about
how to make our class a better
place. He ended by promising to
do his very best.
Everyone applauded and
he sat down.


Now it was Olivia's turn to speak.

Her speech was concise.
She said, "If you will vote for me, I will
give you ice cream." She sat down.
The class went wild. "Yes! Yes! We
want ice cream."

She surely would say more.
She did not have to. A discussion
followed. How did she plan to
pay for the ice cream? She wasn't sure.
Would her parents buy it or would
the class pay for it. She didn't
know. The class really didn't care.
All they were thinking about was
ice cream.

Jamie was forgotten.
Olivia won by a landslide.

Every time Barack Obama opened
his mouth he offered ice cream and
52 percent of the people reacted
like nine year olds. They want
ice cream.
The other 48 percent know
they're going to have to
feed the cow and clean
up the mess."

Afghan Women Sold Like Cattle

It's obvious that women are considered second class citizens in many Muslim-majority countries, where they have fewer rights and freedoms than males. But in God-forsaken Afghanistan they are looked upon as commodities to be traded or sold like animals to the highest bidder. And it's not cheap to buy a wife/slave/maid, the women often fetch a good price, at least by Afghan standards. And although illegal to buy and sell women, it still happens all the time.

Hajji Rais Khan, a white bearded resident of Nangarhar’s Dur Baba district, needed only to remove his false teeth and hand over 3,000 dollars to conclude the swift purchase of a young woman for his bride.

Two other local families had quarrelled over the terms of an already implemented swap of daughters for brides. One of the fathers then learned that instead of the girls being returned home by mutual arrangement, his counterpart had simply sold on his 20-year-old daughter to an old man for 4,000 dollars. He vowed in retaliation to sell the girl in his care to “a man with no teeth”.


“I went there and removed my plastic teeth and told the man that my wife passed away two months ago and that this girl was my destiny,” said Khan. “He gave her to me for 150,000 afghanis (3,000 dollars).”

A disturbing aberration perhaps, were it not for numerous and corroborated accounts of such sales of women like livestock. These are distinct from the entrenched Afghan custom of arranged marriages for fixed dowries, and often result in the victim being sold into a life of drudgery or passed on to further buyers.


A widespread practice in bygone times, the purchase and sale of women is today not uncommon in six of Nangarhar's districts inhabited by members of the large Shinwari tribe, say officials and rights advocates.

“Women are sold in different districts of Shinwari (areas) of Nangarhar and we have taken up cases on various occasions,” said Sabrina Hamidi, the director of the women’s rights advocacy department at the Independent Human Rights Commission in the eastern region.

“I removed my plastic teeth and told the man that my wife passed away two months ago and this girl was my destiny. He gave her to me for 150,000 afghanis."

The practice continued as a result of “illiteracy, poverty and abhorrent traditions,” said Hamidi.

And after women are sold, contact is usually severed with their own family, often for the rest of their lives, which makes the women extremely vulnerable . Once sold, the woman effectively belongs to her buyer, his to work, abuse or resell as he sees fit.

Read the rest here.

I don't see any hope for women in Afghanistan, especially once NATO pulls out.