1. The young will make mistakes ( we all did too.) What women culturally are being sold is garbage that endangers them but let's not celebrate their deaths
2. I was in Morocco in 2001 pre-9/11.
Yeah its a great country with loads of amazing stuff to see and do.
I happen to be both white and blond and have been a practising Buddhist for the last 20 years. I had just come from a Buddhist retreat with my worship-group when I visited the country.
Everybody I met in places like Casablanca and Essaouira and Marrakech wanted to know..
"Where was I from..?" "What religion was I..?"
In my naivety I would answer Buddhist and then be subjected to endless 'debate' ie: haranguing..
Basically the line of Argument was:
There are Three main religions,
Jews worship Judaism (Islam contains elements of their holy books)
White Westerners are all Christians (Islam recognises Jesus as a prophet and the Koran contains elements of their Holy Books)
Both group are misguided.
Islam is the only other 'main religion'. It is the first and last word in religious truth and superior to the other two.
Indians like Buddhism because they are demented cow worshippers and a bit of a joke, same for all other religions.
In true Muslim fashion I was treated to aggressive friendliness wherever I went meaning that I was never left alone or in peace, had men come and sit opposite me wherever I sat down (sit on my lap (?) on one occasion) poke me in the ass when I was looking at something in a Soukh or just come in a group and stand there up close and personal and blow smoke in my face to get my attention.
No smart phones/ no translate apps so just grunting, prodding me and eyeballing me.
The ones that could speak English I had to get used to being told how great Morocco and Islam were and of course I soon learnt to lie about my religion as I was lectured on the superiority of their religion/ culture.
I can tell you story after story heard in hostels from girls about sexual harassment, being grabbed/ harassed everywhere they went. One guy had a chunk bitten out of his neck by a guy in a Casablanca subway tunnel who blocked his path in the middle of the day.
None of these people reported those happenings to either the police or the media - who wouldn't be interested anyway.
Its a great country in many respects, some very smart and cultured people in some towns ===== but Jesus Christ please dont anyone tell me that "its no more dangerous than New Zealand" that's a crock of shit.
Can't find the link but there was a very posh English writer who wrote a well received book about the Marcos era in the Philippines. he lived there in the Phils pretty much incommunicado. Why? He retreated there
>>>after being gang raped by 5 or so goatherds in the middle of the day in the suburban countryside in Libya in the late sixties<<<.
He blamed himself.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/j...ianreview8
"In 1964, on the eve of his graduation, he won the Oxford Newdigate prize for his poem "Disease" ... At the awards ceremony he was seated between the poet Robert Graves ("who had shaving foam dried in his right ear") and Agatha Christie.
Afterwards he went to Libya to teach English at a school in an Arab neighbourhood of Tripoli. It was the spring of 1966 and the Middle East was poised for conflict with Israel in what would become the Six Day War.
Three decades later, he wrote of an appalling assault he suffered in the semi-desert outside Tripoli. Sunbathing one afternoon, he looked up to find himself surrounded by "five Bedouin pastoralists", who took turns to rape him. The article, published in 1999 in Granta magazine, was entitled "Asking For It" and
questioned whether a young white male, wearing only a pair of jeans in an Arab country at a politically unsettled time, had not indeed had it coming.
Neil Belton recalls that Hamilton-Paterson had spoken to him about the rape long before the article, and was struck by his "tough-minded response" to it. And Hamilton-Paterson can still remember "the smell of sheep's grease on their robes and the sand in my mouth"."
Had it coming.. Asking for it..
Pretty much what any tourist rape victim would say on a ruined holiday in New Zealand?
Culture plays it part.