Rosa May Billinghurst Quotes

Collection of Spoken Words of the Prophet

This quotation illustrates the horror which many society women felt when one of them became a suffragette. Note that the reaction was almost as if Emily had died. This social reaction by other women was emotionally one of the most difficult things with which the suffragette had to cope.

In the 18th Century, the Islamic Barbary States combined their religious beliefs for Jihad against non believers with a classic criminal enterprise. They would authorize cosairs to outfit ships and attack Christian merchant ships on the high seas. They would capture the ship and the cargo, which would be split with the ruler of the country. The crew and passengers would by “rented out” as slaves until they would be ransomed, the proceeds of which would also be shared. To motivate a larger ransom, the captives were regularly tortured as well as worked almost to death. The Barbary Pirates encouraged the “slaves” to write to their relatives, friends and governments to try and raise the ransom. O’Brien’s ship was captured in 1785. He had been a slave for 4 years when he wrote this. See for a quote from a letter he sent Congress. Finally, after 10 years, O’Brien and those of his crew that were still alive were finally freed. O’Brien’s unusual experience and knowledge of the Barbary States qualified him as an expert and he was then appointed Consul-General to Algiers. Individual Christian countries were offered a “treaty” whereby for an annual payment of tribute to the Barbary country, the corsairs of that country would not attack ships flying their flag. The Christian country had to make 4 different tribute payments to each of the Barbary nations. Most of the European powers were paying the tribute even though some could easily defeat the Corsair navies in a war. The cost of outfitting a fleet for war was much more costly than paying the tribute. The new nation of the United States was good pickings for the Barbary pilots and there was a period of several decades where the Americans had to create a policy to pay tribute or go to war. At different times America did both.

The horrible practice of female genital mutilation (often referred to as FMG) is often believed to be an Islamic ritual. However, it is not. It is a custom whose origins were pre and outside of Islam. (See {635209}.) It has been practiced—mostly in Africa—by Christians and Animists also, but that is now rare among those religions. For Muslims, there is not a single mention of it in the Koran or in any other writing or saying attributed to The Prophet. A few modern Islamic clerics have issued Fatwas (Islamic legal opinions) against the barbaric practice. the procedure is extremely painful and a bleeding complication can be and often is fatal. Other immediate complications include acute urinary retention, urinary infection, wound infection, septicemia, tetanus, and in case of unsterile and reused instruments, hepatitis and HIV. 140 million women and girls are living with the effects of FGM.

At that time in American History, the George W. Bush Justice Department had a small team of lawyers who wrote a legal brief that defined torture in such a way that many of the most common forms of torture were no longer legal torture, even though they had been torture in American law and were again torture after this embarrassing episode of American history. The renamed techniques were called “enhanced interrogation” and a few terrorist suspects were subjected to it before the rules and laws were changed and the “legal opinions” nullified. The FBI and military intelligence did not use the so called enhanced interrogation techniques as they felt that torture produced unreliable intelligence as the victim will say anything the questioner wants to hear to end the torture. They also thought the Justice department memo was sloppy and defective legal work. Senator McCain was a particular expert on torture in that he had, during the Vietnam War, been captured and imprisoned for 7 years during which he had been tortured on several occasions.