I am still unsure of how to absorb/ make sense of what happened to over 60 women at the Hammad International airport in Doha last month. I can’t seem to compartmentalise it anywhere in my head. In summary, a baby (a few days old) was found abandoned in one of the bins at the airport. The authorities found her and did the only thing that any despotic nation in an apocalyptic horror potboiler would do: They decided without judge or jury that all the women in all the planes bound out of the airport were guilty, culpable and punishable. So they summarily off-boarded these women, took them to a waiting ambulance somewhere in the airport, had them lie down and then proceeded to strip them down to nothing so they could be invasively examined to determine IF any of them was the mother. The ambulance was surrounded by male security guards and the only privacy was afforded by mostly sheer blinds on the ambulance windows. (I won’t go into the moral debate of why the infant was abandoned in the first place – ironically, that very act in itself is one of the many wretched backwash constructs of our “virtuous” male driven social and religious systems and is richly deserving of a whole new rant).

Even more telling of how morally corrupt, power-driven and patriarchal our global collectiveness and the international media machine are, is the almost total silence on the issue from everywhere. The self righteous, voluble right wing media that has an opinion on everything has been as silent as the clock in our universal Halls of Justice. The only reasons that i got to know of the incidence were that one intrepid woman came forward to talk of this physical (she describes it as sexual) abuse on foreign soil while she was en route to Australia, and that I’ve subscribed to Austrialia’s current affairs program “60 Minutes”; and so this video just kind of half heartedly showed up on my YouTube feed.

Since i saw that brave woman’s interview, this one recurring thought has been gnawing at me psychologically and emotionally: what if I had been on one of those fateful flights bound out of Qatar that evening? What if I or one of my sisters or my niece or another one of my female near and dear ones had been subjected to that kind of coercion, humiliation and gross invasion of our bodies?

I’ve written about this incidence hoping for a bit of catharsis in not only thanking my lucky stars that as a woman, i was not in fact there at the time; but also to do my part in making it known that what happened was NOT ok. It was ugly, misogynistic and especially shameful for the stalwarts of a religion and an ideological culture that almost a BILLION women are a part of worldwide.

(See the full 60 Minutes interview via the below link)

https://youtu.be/JgIvt9nm_1M