I learned from today’s Deseret News that Salt Lake has a women’s radio station: KUTR AM-820. I never knew this! An article in today’s D-News about an Iraqui Women’s Radio Station revealed this.
The article is about the Iraqi women’s radio station seeking support. It’s spokeswoman, Bushra Jamil, a human rights officer in Baghdad, will speak the the Salt Lake City Main Library at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 19; at the University of Utah’s Women’s Resource Center on Thursday, April 20, at noon; and on Friday at the university’s Hinckley Institute of Politics at noon.
There’s a sense of urgency on Radio Al-Mahaba, Baghdad’s “Voice of Iraqi Women.” The station, which debuted a year ago, wants to educate women about their rights in a country where those rights are in a state of flux. It also gives Iraqi women a chance to express their opinions on everything from husbands to politics.
“We tell about their dreams, their suffering, their hopes,” explained Radio Al-Mahaba spokeswoman Bushra Jamil in a phone call from Baghdad. Jamil will be in Salt Lake City next week, where Utah friends she has never met are hoping to raise enough money to replace Al-Mahaba’s transmitter, destroyed by a bomb last fall.
Morning host Kurt Bestor (one of the few men at the station) feels a solidarity with the broadcasters in Baghdad. Bestor has convinced his bosses at Bonneville International to make Al-Mahaba and KUTR “sister stations.”
“Gradually, Iraqi women lost their freedoms and their rights,” Jamil says. Many of those rights were debated as the country worked out a constitution last year, with Shiite fundamentalists pushing for the implementation of Islamic law that could, for example, make it illegal for an Iraqi woman to travel by herself outside the country.
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 
Not Surprised
I’m not surprised you’d not heard of AM820. Unfortunately, no one did before they flipped it to the crap it is now.
Honestly, I struggled with the programming before (I worked there in a support department for it and KSL Radio), but I always figured “Well, I’m not a woman… not conservative… and not LDS.”
Hi, discovered your blog trying to find out more about Bushra Jamil.
~ Ben (now in Portland, Ore.)