Things go well at first and there are numerous very funny incidents, but when they begin to go wrong, they go very badly wrong. In a not-so-subtle way, these broadcasts could lead to some degree of liberation for all Arab women and bring about positive changes in their culture and government due to their newly empowered voices. In this volatile part of the world, these things have really happened.įlorence is hopeful that her plan to raise the consciousness of the women in her audience could eventually lead to improvements in the ludicrous aspects of their way of life - overthrowing the burkha, doing away with the religious police and harsh punishments for tiny offenses etc. I thought, ‘What kind of barbaric society do we live in that such abominations go on every day?" *** … "It’s hard to put my finger on it, Azade, but probably when the religious police pushed those girls back into the burning school because their heads weren’t covered. She introduces the first guest who is promoting her book "Stop, You’re Killing Me: The Repression of Women in Arab Societies and What You Can Do about it." The women in the live audience are at first shocked and dismayed but are soon laughing uproariously, as they realize that because it was accidental, there will be not be the usual harsh consequences.
The first, "Cher Azade, The Thousand and One Mornings" begins with a burkha covered woman accidentally tripping over a coffee table and revealing part of her leg. They launch a seemingly innocent line-up of programs for women. "In the neighborhood of two billion dollars per year, my lord."įlorence is cleverly assisted by sheika Laila and an unlikely crew, studded with a cast of characters that are somehow as original as they are stereotypical: the "Black Beret" body guard, a gay desk-jockey and former colleague at the State Dept., and a mercenary, high-powered international lobbyist, "who was acknowledged by even his most grudging peers to be the capital’s premier champion of causes so devoid of hope, so lacking in integrity, there was a kind of gallantry to it that aspired to a level of grandeur." "How do you mean ‘vast’? The desert is vast. Florence tries to show him projected advertising revenue. In Matar, she seeks an audience with the Emir, Gazzir Bin Haz (Gazzy to his friends) to bribe his consent to have his only wife (a half-British former London television personality who negotiated a shrewd pre-nuptial agreement) to help her set up a new satellite television station targeted at women. She goes directly to the fictional country of Matar ("the Switzerland of the Persian Gulf" enriched by "Infidel Land" gambling and access rights to the pipeline running through it to the gulf from the adjacent fictional county, the much more extreme, Wasabia, the "Middle East's preeminent no-fun zone"). Scoffed at and forced to resign at State, Florence is then approached, recruited and secretly funded by the mysterious "Uncle Sam" who appears to know all about her proposal but will not even tell her which government agency he works for finds herself off to the Persian Gulf. "I’m just trying to think outside the box." that she has gone over his head to the Secretary of State with her plan: " Female Emancipation As A Means of Achieving Long Term Stability In the Near East: An Operational Proposal," … and explains : Outraged by the execution of an Arab friend who had tried to escape her husband and seek asylum while in Washington, DC but was then forced home to her fate, Florence Farfaletti has a brainstorm.
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