Belly dancers vs Burqas

I didn't know what to expect going to this meeting.  I honestly was dreading going but it really opened my eyes to a lot.  When the women first started speaking he had us complete the sentence "Muslim women are....." and we wrote it on a paper and give it to her.  She then read every answer in the room.  Most of the answers were words such as "oppressed", "misunderstood" and "beautiful".  I wrote down the word "conservative".  After she read all of the answers in the room I was shocked at some peoples answers.  Some people seemed to judge these women for the way they dress.  They were judging people they dot even know.
After finding out what others in the room thought of Muslim women we started looking at different images.  She spoke about Aladdin and how it shows racism in the movie wether you catch it or not.  Jasmine was portrayed as a beautiful woman with small features and revealing clothes.  However Jafar had more realistic features and he was portrayed as evill. Also in the movie there was originally a song with the lyrics " where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face but hey its home."  They changed these lyrics before the movie came out.

She then showed us this image of a muslim women. 

A man took this picture of this women without even asking her.  The picture then turned famous and bad things were then said about muslim women just by this one photo.  Things were said such that she is angry and sad and in reality she was probably just shocked that someone snapped photo of her. The photographer of this picture was then paid a ton of money to find this women and interview her.  And when he did and her picture was on a magazine they did not even show her face on the cover.  She was all covered up instead of showing who she really is.

I related this experience to our reading to the silence dialog because i feel like these muslim women are being silenced when they should be heard and we should be learning about them and their culture instead of calling them oppressed because they do not say much.  you never know anything about anyone if you are silencing people

I learned to never judge a book by its cover.  I also learned a little about the Muslim culture and that was cool to be able to learn.  Muslin women are viewed as "oppressed" and i learned that this is not true.  They are beautiful smart women who are just like me.  Just because they dress differently then i do does not mean that their personality is any different then someone from the USA or China or Europe.  We are all equal.