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Articles & columns
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| No to Omerta: the code of silence | |
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| Nadia yassine, 23/07/2006 |
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| Hayat, my little sister, my dear sister; I am writing to you from France, a country of human rights that is now at last stirring up the shameful affairs of the DSTs from all sides. Today, I have read with great sorrow, but also with inward anger, that you had been kidnapped by the “Intelligence” (not at all intelligent, actually) of our poor country. |
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| Our dear country, our poor country (both literally and figuratively) is given over to the contingencies of a world where people wonder more and more what the meaning of a man, of a woman, is and more particularly what their rights mean. From Palestine to Morocco, the famous Broader Middle East, the world is laid waste, and prey to tragedies and humiliation. |
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| My dear Hayat, my sister, my friend; you have been thrashed, you have been insulted, you have been humiliated, but you are greater and stronger than your brutish aggressors who should be pitied more than anything else. |
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| You are also greater, stronger than your brutish aggressors because against bestial violence you have set the strength of your heart and soul’s resistance, the strength of a human, a full-fledged human. |
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| Our main strength in the movement, my dear sister, my friend, my comrade, is precisely that we have broken the taboo of silence; the very same one wherein the torturers of our peoples have confined consciences for centuries. The taboo of silence, it is the prison without walls wherein our autocracies have imprisoned us to the extent of making of us lifeless and apathetic characters. |
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| If we go back to our History, the toll is heavy and painful. But my dear Hayat, my sister of eternity, history is a science that is dangerous...for tyrants, and we absolutely need to go back to it so as to face the future. |
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| We said nothing when Hassan (God bless him) succumbed to the poison of those who wanted power for the sake of power. We said nothing when Hussein (God bless him) was cut into pieces by Yazid, prince of believers (believers in what, exactly?) We said nothing when each time a free and honest conscience rose up against the imposture of the Princes who have enthroned themselves on our coward abdication of responsibility. |
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| We said nothing when Hajjaj executed Said Ibn Joubair. We have learnt to keep quiet, absolutely, terribly, fatally. We suffer in silence, but that must stop.We drain the cup of humiliation to the dregs each day without even giving a grimace of disgust, and that must no longer be.We will pay for that, men and women? Very well then!!! Our Jihad lies in resisting evils by the word and nothing else…Then well done Hayat, heroine of our Jihad by the word! |
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| Hayat, you still have not assessed the braveness of your action; history will tell it to you. By persecuting the women of our movement, the regime wants to strike an extremely dynamic women’s section that gives the lie to all the stereotypes that depict the Islamists as absolutely, inevitably misogynous, and therefore as fatally extremist. You’re disturbing them Hayat, you’re upsetting the stereotypes that enable them to conduct some international entryism that is vital for them… |
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| We’re disturbing the current autocracies, heirs of those that imprisoned us in political harems. You’re disturbing them Hayat, you’re bothering them, my sisters, because an Islamist woman is supposed not to speak; she just has to be a silent scarecrow that serves their modernist and secularising views. You must not move, you must not give hopes to your children, you must not be positive and mistress of your actions and your history. You are supposed to be downcast, silent, mother of your children and all the inhibitions of earth. You must shut your « trap », not open it!!! You must play the idiot, not the militant. You must yield to injustice, not rise against injustice. You must be in stores, not in politics. |
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| The regime’s intention, Hayat, by persecuting the women of our movement, was to kill two birds with one stone. The Makhzen is by the way absolutely right to save its stones since all its policies consist in firing all that moves, but the world is moving and will keep moving more and more, including Morocco. |
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| The first stone, Hayat, was to strike the spirit of our movement’s female members by instilling terror into their hearts. The second is to play on the logic of honor in our traditional societies. One only needs to look at the impact and the psychological uneasiness that accompanies the female testimonies gathered by the IER (Makhzen-founded Institution for Equity and Reconciliation). The Makhzen wants to impose on us the burden of shame, but that wouldn’t do thanks to the education that we receive inside our movement and that teaches us to call a spade a spade. |
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| We won’t wait for the IER of the year 2036, and let the Makhzen realize that there is no more question of us keeping quiet because, Hayat, if anyone is ever to have their honor sullied by the scandal, it is certainly the torturers, not the victims. We won’t obey the law of Omerta. That era is in the past.Hayat and you my sisters of eternity, let us stick together and set against the law of the Omerta the law of the just word, the strong word, the committed word. What honor would we seek to save by hiding such barbaric actions if our country is systematically wrecked in its dignity by brutes who rightly define themselves as professionals of the Moroccan police? Of what honor can we talk, Hayat, if your children, mine, and those of this nation have no option but to throw themselves in the Mediterranean, become suicide bombers, or work with the unofficial bad, the unofficial ugly? |
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| And you, husband of Hayat, disciple of the “Justice and Spirituality” school, I greet you with all the best regards. What effort you must have exerted on yourself to break, at the expense of a chauvinistic and autocratic culture that imprisons us, the law of Omerta, the law that betrayed Hassan, Hussein, Said Ibn Joubair and all the just of History. God bless you, and may He bless my brothers and sisters in the movement who conduct a Jihad that is far harder than the one our ancestors conducted formerly by the sword to free the world from all sorts of oppression, with all due respect to stereotypes, to reproaches and to the historical falsehood. God bless you, the iconoclasts who cause the deep-seated taboos to fall! |
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| Hayat, never keep quiet! We have nothing except the word to struggle against evil. |
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