Palestinian women are hoping to improve their lives by using the air waves. A group of women in the West Bank this month launched one of the first all-women’s radio stations in the Arab world.

Halla Bazzar, a young professional woman in her 20s, begins her afternoon show. For Halla, the job is more than just running a show. It is about giving women living in conflict a key to success. “We talk about issues that would inspire women in the future,” she said.

Giving women hope for the future is one of the goals of the station, Nisaa FM, which broadcasts from the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Founder and manager Maysoun Odeh (pictured, right) says the station wants to entertain, but also empower women. “We broadcast success stories of women regionally, internationally, or locally in which they can take example from, and they know that they can do something and they can achieve something regardless of the situation,” she said.

The day-to-day situation for many Palestinian women living under occupation involves supporting their children while their husbands are in prison, finding housing after their homes are demolished, and navigating their way through Israeli checkpoints.

Wafa Abdel Rahman, a woman’s activist with the West Bank group Filastiniyat, says Palestinian women also face cultural issues.

“We suffer, as the rest of the women in the Arab world suffer, political Islam – the interpretation of Islam, which actually, is putting more burden on the women,” she said. “It portrays women as if they are the key to the honor of the family.  If you are a good Muslim or not depends on how is your woman. Is she covered?  Is she following all the instructions, etcetera. This is really hard on women.”

Abdel Rahman welcomes the new station.  “We need a radio that brings out all those issues,” she said. “But also to take it a step further and think how we can – not only women but also men – how we can together change the status of women and make it better.”

The station, whose name “Nisaa” means “woman” in Arabic, began operations this month with the help of Smiling Children, a Switzerland-based humanitarian foundation.

(LISTEN to the report at VOA News)

During World War II, General Paul Mueller, commander of the U.S. Army’s 81st Infantry, recruited a handful of soldiers from native Sioux tribes for a special mission that would keep the Japanese from intercepting vital communications. The General intended to confuse the enemy by sending all strategic messages in a coded Native American language.

On Wednesday, the last of the Lakota code talkers, Clarence Wolf Guts, died at 86 and was buried with honors in the Black Hills National Cemetery.

Wolf Guts was Gen. Mueller’s personal code talker, and traveled with him and the 81st division as it moved from island to island in the Pacific, headed for Japan.

A total of 11 Lakotas from South Dakota joined the mission and learned how to operate military radios to transmit communications between their units on the battlefield. Their special language helped the army to move troops and supplies undetected, and eventually win the war. German and Japanese cryptographers never were able to decipher any of the Native American-based code.

Another unit of Navajo code talkers were commended for their skill, speed and accuracy working with the U.S. Marine Corps. At Iwo Jima, six Navajo code talkers worked around the clock during the first two days of the battle, sending and receiving over 800 messages, all without error. Their commander stated, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

The once-classified units were finally publicized in a book and a subsequent 2002 film called “Windtalkers.” Nicolas Cage played a body guard sent by Marines to protect the valuable and vulnerable code talker, to ensure that he would never be captured alive.

WATCH a video below, and READ the story of Wolf Guts in a news report via the Rapid City Journal.

(For more of the story, read a longer feature article in South Dakota Magazine)