Friday, April 17, 2009
A vision of life in a shariah state, where marching for rights actually carries risk and means something: Women protesters against 'marital rape' law spat on and stoned in Kabul
A group of Afghan women who braved an enraged mob yesterday to protest against an "abhorrent" new Afghan law had to be rescued by police from a hail of stones and abuse.
The protest by about 200 women, unprecedented in recent Afghanistan history, was directed at the Shia Family Law passed last month by the Afghan parliament which appears to legalise marital rape and child marriage.
The rally, staged by mostly young women with their faces exposed, was a highly inflammatory act of defiance in a country as conservative as Afghanistan. It provoked a furious reaction from local men and a rapidly expanding mob threatened to swamp the demonstrators as they tried to approach the Afghan parliament.
"Go home if your mothers and fathers are Muslims," one Shia cleric shouted at the protesters, who were pressed into an ever-tighter huddle as the crowd surrounded them." These people will beat you if you stay."
Some of the women appeared cowed by the aggression, staring blankly at the ground, but one shouted back: "If you were Muslims, you wouldn't pass this law." As the protesters continued to chant slogans they were often drowned out by counter chants of Allahu akbar (God is greatest). "I am not afraid. Women have always been oppressed throughout history," Zara, an 18-year-old student, told The Times as men in the crowd lunged forward and screamed abuse.
"This law is against the dignity of women and all the international community opposes it. The US President calls it abhorrent. Don't you see that actually we are the majority?"...
The baying mob tore down banners, spat on demonstrators and hurled stones. As police struggled to maintain order, at one point the women appeared to be in danger of disappearing under a sea of shaking fists...
[h/t: Sophia]
Update: Phyllis Chesler (who lived in Afghanistan and was married to an Afghan man) comments on this issue here.
Yes, and are we presently in a period where the larger part of the Left supports, or does not support - the initiative, the invasion, the continuing effort, the western imperialist drive, fill in the blank - in Afghanistan?
The answer to that question has changed so often, I'm not sure where we're at presently.
The desertion of women by so-called feminists is appalling to me.
I was discussing this with an acquaintance the other night. We older feminists do not understand it. Obviously people like Phyllis Chesler are baffled as well.
This in itself has driven some old lefties toward the Right because current leftist philosophy apparently favors theocratic and cultural oppression of women and gays and that is diametrically opposed to our philosophy.
Rather than supporting progress, at least abroad, the "new left" or whatever it's supposed to be has apparently become a force for reaction - one example is the phenomenon of sociological excuse-making for female circumcision based on the notion that it's an "indigeneous cultural practice" and therefore we shouldn't comment or try to get rid of it.
Perhaps this is an extreme form of "political correctness"?
Anyway it's part and parcel of the adoption of repressive militias and political parties like Hamas.
It makes absolutely no sense for theoretical progressives to support genocidal regimes which also repress their own people, yet that's what they're doing.
I don't get this - it's been especially apparent since 9/11 for some reason, and it often goes with "troothiness" and antisemitic conspiracy theories and of course the damnation of Israel.
So on the one hand you have condemnation of the US and the West for "colonialism/imperialism" yet on the other complete abandonment of liberal values where human rights are concerned - unless of course Israel or the US are the perps - and this is compounded by disregard for fact-based history - on the university level even there is now the "narrative" as if history were a totally subjective stream of consciousness and not composed of actual facts, actual events.
Obviously each of us experiences events differently but that doesn't mean the events didn't happen! So go tell that to people who, on the university level, are playing word games -
Thus we're beginning to see the complete warping of reality - even so-called newspapers seem unsure of what is real. Maybe reality itself is political, situational, relative?
Take the NYT for example - on the one hand publishing op-eds by Roger Cohen extolling the virtues of the Iranian theocracy because a few Jews are permitted to exist there, whilst simultaneously he accuses Israel - whose people were victims of an extermination only a few decades ago - of "crying wolf" re Iranian nukes - on the other the Times publishes a heart-felt plea for the release of a journalist condemned by Iran to 8 years in prison for "espionage".
Hello?
We also see some examples of nuttiness on the Right, really disgusting stuff like Buchanan referring to a Ukrainian SS member as "Dreyfuss".
Oy.