Poor Afghan Women Brainwashed by Western anti-Islamic propaganda
I'm on my lunchbreak now and checked the New York Times online a moment ago to catch up on current events, and wanted to immediately share this article with you. (Registration required). It is thrilling to read about these brave Afghan ladies demonstrating against the "marital rape" law, though it is equally disheartening to see the vitriolic fury their protest march generated among the fanatically conservative minions of Kabul.
The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.
“Get out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”
“We want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want equality!”
But the march carried on anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.
With the Afghan police keeping the mob at bay, the women walked two miles to Parliament, where they delivered a petition calling for the law’s repeal.
The women who protested Wednesday began their demonstration with what appeared to be a deliberately provocative act. They gathered in front of the School of the Last Prophet, a madrassa run by Ayatollah Asif Mohsini, the country’s most powerful Shiite cleric. He and the scholars around him played an important role in the drafting of the new law.
“We are here to campaign for our rights,” one woman said into a loudspeaker. Then the women held their banners aloft and began to chant.
The reaction was immediate. Hundreds of students from the madrassa, most but not all of them men, poured into the streets to confront the demonstrators.
“Death to the enemies of Islam!” the counterdemonstrators cried, encircling the women. “We want Islamic law!”
The women stared ahead and kept walking.
The end of the article features one of the clerics of the madrassa, a Mohammed Hussein Jafaari.
The article quotes him as saying, “We Afghans don’t want a bunch of NATO commanders and foreign ministers telling us what to do.”
Oh yeah? Well, you know what Mr. Jafaari? A lot of Afghan women don't want a bunch of perverted Islamic male scholars telling them what to do!
I really wish there was something substantial we could do to help these ladies achieve the gender equality that they deserve. For all of their bravery, sadly they appear to be vastly outnumbered. Off the top of my head, one thing we could do, even if it does not solve the problem, is to offer asylum to any Afghan woman who wants to flee the country to escape the law. One counterargument to that idea though is that if we make it easier for the more independent minded women to leave Afghanistan, that will just make it harder for the remainder who stay behind. But I fear that the number of women who will push back is not enough as it is, and therefore it would not make much of a difference if they stayed, except to get themselves killed. Besides, if we can get enough women to leave, maybe it will create a shortage of wives and these tribalistic misogynystic assholes won't be able to have children to pass on the madness to another generation.
6 comments:
You really should take a cultural anthropology class. The more we take this "safe them from their own culture" approach, the more it won't work. Not saying we should do nothing, but there is a time to reserve judgment in order to try and understand a cultural practice, then figure out how to go about effecting the change, not just calling people religious perverts right out the gate. Not saying we should do nothing or that no one has the right to make a judgment, just saying it will be ineffectual.
Thank you for your comments, Sparrowhawk. FYI, I e-mailed a Muslim Women's Rights group in Malaysia a short while ago and solicited them for advice on how best to help the cause of women's rights in predominantly Muslim countries.
I have no illusions that this particular blog post, or the previous one, is anything more than an ineffectual rant. But so what? I have the right to do it and I felt like it.
If you have any constructive suggestions, I'm all ears.
no... no asylum! no more refugees! keep em where they are for now... whew, immigration nightmare averted.
I'm left thinking this: yes, I'm all about people having freedom to do anything they want; screw a cloned Iranian goat for all I care (and send me the vid). but the mean side says I really dont give a shit about a single living person in Afghanistan.
I think its a retarded waste that they are reverting to Sharia law and ask myself this - is Afghanistan productive in any useful and independent way? I mean, other than opium, breeding, and sucking down foreign aid.
Seriously, remove the 'right to exist' clause and poof, every Afghani is dead in a single night. Is that going to affect anyones economy? Anyones trade deficit? Any markets? Any currency?
Yea, its scary when there are places in the world actually moving backwards away from freedom... but I'd prefer to withdraw and let them die off.
no... no asylum! no more refugees! keep em where they are for nowHomeless Diver, realistically, the number of Afghan women to take advantage of it would probably be in the hundreds at most. Not much of an immigration crisis.
is Afghanistan productive in any useful and independent way? I mean, other than opium, breeding, and sucking down foreign aid.The tragedy of Afghanistan's history is its geography. For the last two centuries it has been meddled with by outside powers, such as the British and the Russians in the 19th century, the US and the USSR in the 20th century, Pakistan in the post-Soviet era, to name some examples.
The Taliban likely would still be in power if Osama bin Laden had not used Afghanistan as a base for his organization.
Ironically, this all started when a pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan in the late 1970's tried to impose social reforms on the population, including equality of the sexes, and the religiously conservative tribespeople revolted. The US government started covertly supporting Afghan rebels in order to provoke a Soviet invasion in 1979. Talk about blowback.
Seriously, remove the 'right to exist' clause and poof, every Afghani is dead in a single night. Is that going to affect anyones economy? Anyones trade deficit? Any markets? Any currency?Seriously, I hope you are not suggesting that it is okay to kill entire nations as long as it doesn't harm anyone's economy.
The world needs more additional leagues of strong women apart from these Afghan org. Many women are abused every day in different parts of the world so can't blame us for always aspiring to be at par with men.
Thanks again commenter from Asian Escort New York! We absolutely need more strong, independent women in this world. And also need to change attitudes so that women who work in the sex trade are not abused or persecuted.
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