Courage under fire

Right-wingnuts crack me up, especially in the US where they're fighting ''oppression'' against President Barack Obama's tax policy with teabags.

This has become a tremendous joke in liberal circles because -- unfortunately I can't link to a complete explanation here but you can always consult Professor Google -- right-wingnuts have no idea what they're talking about.  Teabagging has a whole different meaning than they seem to think.

Their arguments don't resonate also because  it's hardly ''oppressive'' to repatriate some $43 billion that the rich have sheltered offshore. I could go on but it's off-topic really.

Bottom line?

They have no clue about oppression. And if they think that holding a tea party is a mark of bravery, why they're as crackers as the stuff they servewith their whine and cheese.

Want real oppression? Want real bravery? Want real protest?

Here, the 300 Afghan women who protested against the insane laws their government plans to subject them to:

KABUL, Afghanistan — 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!”

The women scattered as the men moved in.

“We want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want equality!”

The women ran to the bus and dove inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.

“Whores!”

But the march continued 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.

It was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning.

The Star has more, plus video, here.

In a country where women are beaten, stoned, beheaded for defying the patriarchal restrictions against them, there may still be repercussions. They may yet be hunted down and punished. 

As Afghan womens rights activist Sitara Achakzai was on Sunday.

 A Taliban spokesperson, Qari Yousef Ahmedi, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Gunmen killed Sitara Achakzai outside her home in Kandahar city and then drove off, said Matiullah Khan Qateh, police chief of Kandahar province. He said the four men drove up on two motorcycles and shot Achakzai as she was getting out of her car.

Achakzai, a dual German-Afghan citizen, spent the years of Taliban rule in Germany and returned to her native country to fight for women's rights, said Shahida Bibi, a member of the Kandahar women's association who worked with Achakzai.

A member of Kandahar's provincial council, Achakzai was vocal in encouraging women to take jobs and fight for equal rights, Bibi said.

So today's protesters show real guts.

Or, real ''teabags,'' as it were.

(A little shout-out to my friend Mattt with three Ts.)

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Here's my friend and colleague Rosie Dimanno on the the death of Trooper Karine Blais, the 117th Canadian casualty in Afghanistan and what it all means.

An IED, such as the one that Monday killed Trooper Karine Blais – 21 and just arrived in Afghanistan two weeks ago – takes no note of gender. But within the insurgency that plagues the nation, women have been most certainly targeted: Female police officers, aid workers, politicians, human rights advocates, teachers and schoolgirls.

Women suffer more in Afghanistan, both when they break gender boundaries – for which they are often punished – and when they live an utterly conventional existence as wife, daughter and sister. Even when segregated, it is upon their shoulders that the household usually relies.

With husbands and sons unemployed, women must make ends meet. In the countryside, a head wrap covering their faces, they work just as hard alongside men in tilling the fields. They and their young children carry jugs of water from distant wells while menfolk gather to drink tea or worship at mosques that women can't enter.

It is entirely correct, as Canadian-Afghan journalist Nelofer Pazira wrote in the Star last week, that there is a huge gap between women's rights as guaranteed in the new constitution and reality. It is indisputable, as she reminded, that females are held hostage to draconian practices, regardless of laws passed by parliamentarians. They are property, sometimes valued less than livestock.

But there are laws in Canada that criminalize domestic abuse and still women are pounded, killed, by their male partners. That doesn't mean we shrug off cruelty or stop trying to hold tormentors accountable.

It will be generations, if ever, before Afghanistan accepts in practice the very idea of equal rights for women.

It is an entirely different matter, however, to enshrine inequality in sharia-cleaving laws promulgated by religious scholars and endorsed – for political expedience – by a Western-backed president. Women's lives must not be bargained away so cheaply with backdoor re-Talibanization.

No less unacceptable is legislation such as the Shia Personal Status Law – now purportedly on hold, given global backlash – that applies only to one small segment of the population: Shiite females.

How can any country tolerate a different set of laws for a different branch of Islam faithful?

In the West, the outrage has arisen primarily over a section of this negotiated legislation that would make rape within marriage legal. Frankly, I do not understand the fixation among religious scholars – from all faiths – with sexual matters, intimacy and procreation.

But the hysteria in the West over the marital rape provision has been disingenuous. It was only 16 years ago that Oregon became the first U.S. state to make marital rape a crime – and just this year Oklahoma became the 50th state to follow suit. In Canada, the Criminal Code was amended in 1983.

Afghanistan is one of the most medieval societies on Earth. Disabusing Afghan men of the idea they can demand sex at least once every four days – as the law stipulated – will require a cultural shift of tectonic proportions.

They are not, in fact, so far behind the worldwide learning curve on this issue. It isn't, forgive me, a deal-breaker.

Far more worrisome is that part of the legislation that would return women once again to sequestered isolation, forbidding Shia females from venturing outside the home unless accompanied by a male relative.

This was a core commandment of the fanatical Taliban and must in no way gain a toehold again. Women all over Afghanistan today go out, alone and in groups. They walk their children to school. They shop. They work. They seek medical treatment. They do it in Kabul and they do it in Kandahar city.

NATO countries and donor nations have the right to draw a line, here.

Comments

[Chrystal Ocean]

I've a terrible foreboding for those young Afghan women who so courageously protested.

Re Dimanno's article, I agree with her concerning the western preoccupation with the marital rape portion of the Afghan law. That preoccupation is no surprise to me though. Our market capitalists use sex to sell everything, so why not outrage against this law?

[The Stygian and his Shemitish Dogs]

"How can any country tolerate a different set of laws for a different branch of Islam faithful?"

replace "different branch of Islamic faithful" with "status aboriginals", or whatever the term is nowadays, and let the two concepts lie there ......

[...pat.]

Thanks, Antonia. Good blog.

[Chris McGrath]

I've recently hooked into your blog through RSS and have to say that reading your posts leave me thinking, questioning, and excited about the ideas you're putting out there. I really appreciate your humour, your candor, and most importantly, your ability to really narrow in on the points that matter most. Thanks for keeping all of us on our toes when it comes to current events, and for making us think more and more critically about what we hear, see and read.

PS. Having been introduced to your blogspace by Sebastien (our trainer in common) inspired me to use this medium as a way to put my own thoughts out there. So thanks for leading the way!

[Antonia]

Thank you Chris! And I hear you are doing great!

I love Sebastien. He is more than a trainer. He is an inspiration and a friend. http://www.sebastienpt.blogspot.com/ But he is not blogging often enough.

[The Stygian and his Shemitish Dogs]

The "Tea-Parties" appear to be aimed at both Republicans and Democrats, see Michelle Malkin's excellent coverage, especially this item:

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/04/15/california-tea-party-to-california-gop-smackdown/

After all, the Republicans basically threw the election by declining to use all sorts of material.

And the remarks on the videos you linked to: does Anderson Cooper have clue about anything?
and the remarks in video from Chicago are payback for Bush = Hitler, etc.

Finally, thinking a bit ahead, some of the women in the "you want courage?" item may end up as refugees in Canada some time down the road. One of them will probably write a book, and have to go into hiding, and be dismissed, like Nonie Darwish and Brigitte Gabriel, as "biased" and "Islamophobic" by the liberal establishment.

[sooey]

It really makes you wonder about the persistance of anti-Feminism in the west when we have the advantage of seeing how medieval life is for everyone in country's where Feminism doesn't exist.

[Chris McGrath]

Yes, he's a pretty special guy... although, we should be careful not to say it too much... might go to his head!!! LOL!!!

And he must get back to blogging... I wholeheartedly agree. You do your part and I'll do mine and he'll get back to it! Someone once said 'it takes a village'... I think we can handle it between the two of us. ;)

Hope you get a chance to check out my blog -- would be great to hear what you think (www.secondcomingofchris.blogspot.com)

Take good care,
Chris

[Antonia]

COMMENT OF THE MONTH TO SOOEY!

[Paul]

Sooey, I’ll try to answer your question – at least from my POV as an “anti-feminist”, or as other feminists have called me – an “equity-feminist”, or as those drum-beating Promise-keeper types tend to call me, one of those “Feminazis.” (Despite the attempts to pin my argument on each side of the feminist spectrum – my argument is always the same – which means all camps are simply using the word as shorthand for an ad-homenin dismissal of criticism without actually engaging the content).

Going with your terminology, the "anti-feminists" (at least ones who share my views) do not view today’s Western feminism (or gender-feminism, or the dominant gender discourse within Western feminism – however you like to term it) today as being the same movement that is presently occurring in "countries where Feminism doesn't exist", despite the fact that you apply the same word to it.

We would view those women as being much more akin to the1920's Women’s Suffrage movement and its renaissance in the 1960's --movements which predated the use of the word "feminism", and which had not yet adopted the totalizing Marxist gender script of patriarchy theory that provides the foundation for the current iteration of feminism in the West. We think that model perpetuates sexism by reinforcing the traditional chivalric gender constructions (strong vs weak, aggressive vs passive, protector vs protected) , rather than equalizing them – foundationally the inverse of the original movements. I recognize that you and Antonia disagree with this take on it, but that is the essence of how someone is “anti-feminist” as you say, and yet still a vocal human rights activist in the case of women – applauding the bravery of these women.

To take it further, we “anti-feminists” find ourselves caught in the odd position of being vocal and uncompromising advocates for human rights (which includes women's rights, in cases where they are disadvantaged), but often at loggerheads with gender-feminist advocacy - which we believe ends up drawing unlikely moral equivalences (which appear to us as terribly insensitive to the depth of suffering), and creating “continuum models” which root within the core of all fundamentalist moral panics (ie. porn leading to rape, dancing to fornication). As such, “anti-feminists” tend to see such gender-feminism's pinning of the issue to the gender, as opposed to the gender to the issue, as having become part of the problem, foundationally similar to any tribalist movements like the Promise Keepers (who make the same claim for “equality”, and which also oppose claim to oppose feminism) and other more overt and militant biopolitical organizations. Therein lies the source of much confusion among feminists, and gnashing of teeth among “anti-feminists”, because the so-called “anti-feminists” in the non-Promise Keepers camp oppose gender-feminism for entirely different reasons.

As such, when being branded as “anti-feminist” by feminists, or as a “feminist” by the burgeoning Men’s Movements and also the old school religious right, it feels like I’m an atheist dismissed as having Protestant bias, because I challenge Catholic dogma. To the atheist, there is no significant difference between the beliefs of Catholicism and Protestantism - they are both facets of the same belief.

[sooey]

Well, as Gilda Radner so famously said, "It's always something".

[Paul]

Yes, but hopefully that earnest and thorough answer answers the question you asked: why "anti-feminism" is so prevalent in the West when we see how women live in "those countries".

If you track back to Stygian's statement here: http://thestar.blogs.com/broadsides/2009/04/no-honour-here.html#comments , you can see a well-supported explanation of why human or women's rights advocates have reason to be concerned with Western feminism's involvement in that issue.

[sooey]

All I read was the same old same old anti-Feminist backlash dressed up as "concern" that women's rights take away from the finite rights pool that's supposed to belong exclusively to... I dunno... you and yours, I guess.

[The Stygian and his Shemitish Dogs]

Sooey Sweetie,

I will take you up on that.

All my siblings are sisters, our children are evenly split between boys and girls, and the grandchildren (three) are all girls so far. So the majority of my "you and yours" are women. All of them have equal rights to me, apart from the youngest, and the latter will acquire those rights with age.

Except if sharia becomes law, maybe they won't.

I am complaining while I still have that right. I'm taking advantage of what may ultimately prove to be only a breathing space provided by mostly Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, who have managed to crown accusations of "Islamophobia" with the ridicule they so richly deserve.

The tone of this discussion reminds me of the nuclear disarmament nonsense in the eighties, with most feminists playing a role equivalent to that of Soviet apologists, and "anti-feminist backlash" as "red-baiting", for people who have really run out of ideas.

[Paul]

Really sooey?

Please quote the section that said that. Because what I'm reading, in Stygian's post and mine, is how the new feminism seems to be attacking people the people who it claims to help. Not anything noteworthy about men in his post. It doesn't even need to go there.

It is helpful though to understand your caricature though, because I wasn't sure until you wrote that what kind of person I was speaking with here. I think I can now set my expectations accordingly. You approve of this Antonia? You aren't one of those militant "radical" feminists I described?

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go twirl my oily moustachios and figure out what other villainy I can come up with.

[sooey]

Okay, we'll be "MRFs" (Militant Radical Feminists) and you guys can be "SAFs" (Strident Anti-Feminists).

[Sebastian Stoker]

Please consider me one of the former, not the latter. Thanks!

[The Stygian and his Shemitish Dogs]

Stoker you Smoker

SAF can be "Second Amendment Foundation" or close to the Welsh for "I will stand ("I'll take my stand"?)". Works for me.