Topless Protest (Photo : Femen)
Two women from Femen disrupted on Saturday evening a Muslim conference on women's role. The pair, aged 25 and 31, removed their Arab-style cloaks and jumped on stage to show bare breasts and their torso with the words "I am my own prophet" and "No one subjugates me" tattooed.
The Telegraph reports that the topless protesters made a scene while two fundamentalist Islamic preachers were tackling the questions if wives should be beaten by their husbands or not. Before the two women were seized by 15 men and turned over to French police, the duo managed to grabbed microphones and shout feminist slogans in Arabic and French languages.
Ironically, the men who grabbed them answered the question under discussion. A video clip of the incident showed a man kicking one of the two topless protesters while she was on the ground, reports Daily Mail. The video has become viral with almost 124,000 hits in just a few hours since it was posted on YouTube.
Besides the violence, the Muslim men also called the two dirty whores and shouted they should be killed, according to Inna Shevchenko, spokeswoman of Femen. French police, however, protected them from further violence from the Muslim men.
Prosecutors questioned the two but later released them. The organizers of the conference said they would file charges against the protesters.
The conservative outlook of the Islamic religion was evident in the conference where cooking and shopping were pushed as feminine activities. One speaker posted on social media a call for Muslim women to wear veils over their faces or risk going to hell or being raped in the next life.
Because of the incident as well as tweets apparently from Muslims that encouraged stoning or mass rape of the two protesters, almost 6,000 people signed an ongoing online petition against the conference.
