Zainab Salbi Quotes
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Being a leader for me is about having the courage to speak the truth, and live the truth, despite attempts to silence our thoughts, feelings, and past experiences.
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Growing up under Saddam's rule, I witnessed many injustices occurring everyday in my country and yet I could not do anything to prevent them.
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I grew up in war-torn Iraq, and I believe that there are two sides of wars and we've only seen one side of it. We only talk about one side of it. But there's another side that I have witnessed as someone who lived in it and someone who ended up working in it.
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In every single culture I encountered, there were always women who defied cultural norms to do what they believed was right for them. This phenomenon has never been related to how rich, poor, successful or not successful the woman may be.
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They are women who are standing on their feet in spite of their circumstances, not because of it. Think of how the world can be a much better place if, for a change, we have a better equality, we have equality, we have a representation and we understand war, both from the front-line and the back-line discussion.
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From an economic perspective, women are treated unfairly: they perform 66 percent of the world's work and produce 50 percent of the food but they only earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property.
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I believe that a lot of progress has been achieved to address gender inequality: We have moved from a time where women in the US could not apply for credit card without their husband's signature to a time where women are the owners of their businesses.
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Since a very young age, my mother made sure to tell me about the plight of women... As she raised my awareness about women's issues, she also made sure to ingrain in me the importance of being strong and independent and not to let anybody define me by their images of what women should be.
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We have been so consumed with seemingly objective discussions of politics, tactics, weapons, dollars and casualties. This is the language of sterility.
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Everything can be taken from you in a second, but the human spirit is so strong. War can teach you so much about evil, and so much about good.
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My message to the world is that until we recognize that peace is not just the absence of war but the revival of life on the "backlines," where women are keeping kids in school, caring for the sick and injured, and daily negotiating space for the continuation of critical life processes of this nature, we're going to continue to miss the point.
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One year of the world’s military spending equals 700 years of the U.N. budget and equals 2,928 years of the U.N. budget allocated for women.
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Working with women survivors of war has taught me that we need to listen to women's perspectives on war in order to understand how to effectively rebuild a country, a community and a family.
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Without women's full inclusion at the decision making table, we cannot have any healthy decision making that is good for men and women alike.
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It seems to me that violence against women has been tolerated for so long that the world has become numb to it.
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It appears easier to talk about protecting women than it is to fully include women at all decision-making levels in peace talks and post-conflict planning.
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When war ends, women are the first to pick up the pieces. Where there is no market place, they go door to door. When homes are destroyed, mothers and daughters haul stones to rebuild or plow fields together.
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I believe that leadership acts should be manifested by engaging in external work that can be observed and shared with everyone else.
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Leadership is not about having the charisma or speaking inspirational words, but about leading with example.
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The injustice is that women continue to be the main target of violence both during wartime and peacetime and yet there is still a lack of a public outrage.
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War is nothing but a microcosm of peace... it shows you life in a more intense way and that's how I continue to live it... for good or bad reasons.
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Since war often enters homes through the "kitchen door," we need to understand women's attempts to keep life going in the face of shortage of food, closing of schools and reduced freedoms.
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I believe that there is an urgent need to restructure the discussion of war to include the impact it has on women.
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I learned that victims come in all image - some raped, some witnessing an act of violence, some losing loved ones. I learned that the solutions come by both listening to the people impacted by the crisis and by learning from historical experiences in other places.