Will women be turned away from the UN Commission on the Status of Women, to be held in March, in New York? The world’s global institutions must fight the ‘Muslim Ban’, starting with the United Nations.
On November 9th as the dust settled and we took in the Republican victory in the US elections, I hugged my daughter and told her, “WE will be ok. WE will be safe.” I reminded her that as a child I had lived through the Iranian revolution, where we had seen our lives upended. I insisted that those events – travel bans, arrests, families separated, assets frozen – would not take place in America, regardless of the rhetoric against Muslims or citizens of Muslim majority countries. In conversations with friends and family, who were anxious, we deployed dark humor but we did not overdo it. Rightly so, our sympathy lay with the undocumented women, men and children, who’d be at the mercy of the new sheriff in town. Compared to them, we were and are the lucky ones. Or so I thought.
Recent Op-Eds
- To Address Extremisms In The New Decade, Do What The Women Say
- Despite the Challenges, Donors Must Continue to Support Struggling Nonprofits in Afghanistan (The Chronicle of Philanthropy)
- What Happened in Afghanistan Isn’t Staying in Afghanistan (Common Dreams)
- Where are the Women Peacemakers? (Le Monde Diplomatique)