Letters to the Editor
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Asma lives
Malalai Joya, another ferocious, brave woman in the tradition of Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali; a tradition that began at the very dawn of Islam with Asma bint Marwan, a poetess and nursing mother who defied Mohammed, and was brutally murdered on his direct order.
May God protect her, because Allah's slaves are after her.
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And kill her they will....
The best we can hope for is that they won't torture her first.
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This may play well here but consider the country in question
Afghanistan really doesn't need more divisive rhetoric. Anyone who understands the country's history will see that she's making things worse rather than better with these insults.
I know, Americans who don't know much about Afghanistan think this is wonderful, to speak out like this.
Well it's really nothing new at all. Angry divisive insults have been keeping Afghans from uniting behind a central government for a long, long, long, long time.
This country needs a believable, stable central government a lot more than it needs an angry woman shouting insults and provoking violence.
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A little refresher in Afghan politics by the way
Since most Americans only remember the Taliban, they tend to think of Afghanistan as a religious country where a small beleaguered group of educated secularists have finally at long last carved out a small niche in the society and are fighting every day to keep their toehold.
But this is a country that was run by a series of atheist Marxist dictatorships between 1973 and 1989. The Marxists spoke out about human rights and women's rights especially -- but look what happened when they took power. Even other Marxists were not safe. You could just be the wrong shade of Marxist and end up tortured to death in prison.
Afghanistan has swung between enormous extremes. Right now the main thing they need is stability. You need a stable central government if you're going to have a socially accepted and enforceable standard of human rights.
As far as the drug smugglers go -- Afghanistan has always been a center of smuggling, some tribes are quite proud of their family histories of smuggling, and I don't think anyone will ever stop that aspect of Afghan culture.
Ms. Joya is certainly not going to stop it.
Especially not when our War on Drugs has created so many brilliant opportunities for instant wealth.
In fact -- even though Afghanistan has always had a native hashish culture, as far back as anyone can remember -- it only became a haven for opium cultivation AFTER the War on Drugs began.
It's American taxpayers who provide most of the artificial price supports for illegal drugs that enriched the warlords and make being a warlord worthwhile in the first place.
What would happen if you took that money away from them?
You'd have a lot of unemployed men with guns, with no other source of income.
I don't think any of this has occurred to Joya as she lashes out at warlords and smugglers.
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But of course
It's all someone else's fault . . . the immediate multicultural apologetic. It's the Russians -- no, the Americans -- that force Afghan men to beat and smother their many wives, that force the women to eat "smeared leavings" off the men's plates (that's Kate Adie's phrase, not mine, a respected BBC journalist); that compel them to "marry" and molest nine-year-old girls; that prevent them from developing a sustainable agriculture and instead sell drugs to finance more and more jihad.
Sorry, but the frothing, murderous Allahu Akhbars are not our fault, and neither is the pure disaster that is their "culture." This woman is a hero, and I hope, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she can find a safe place far away from the mighty Muslim warriors who threaten to rape and kill her for speaking the truth.
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Anonymous knows best
Yes, please listen to an anonymous american poster for what afghanistan *needs*. This 'angry woman,' couldn't possibly have any insight...
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Yes I do know, because I took the trouble to do a LOT of reading after 9/11
A shortage of outspoken angry people on the left has NEVER been a problem in Afghanistan.
If you look at Agfhan politics over the last 40 years you will find absolutely no shortage of outspoken people on the left willing to hurl provocative insults at their opponents.
In the past, the outspoken, radical Afghan left has mainly succeeded in provoking and prolonging civil war.
They never built any bridges to their opposition. They had no strategy other than to overpower them -- a strategy that failed because urban educated Marxists represented less than 10% of the population.
What Afghanistan has lacked in modern times is a middle ground in politics.
There's a shortage in Afghanistan of people willing to compromise. That's what they've been lacking in the past. In the past almost everyone favoring modernization was a radical Marxist.
This tendency towards angry radical extremism on both sides of the political spectrum is largely how they got to where they are now.
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Here's a great book on the history of the Afghan left
The Tragedy of Afghanistan, by Raja Anwar
He's a socialist himself and he gives a blow by blow account of how things fell apart when the angry outspoken left had their chance to run the country.
The problem was never a lack of radical bravado. The problem was an inability to shut up long enough to build a government by consensus that had actual support from the rural, uneducated, non-Marxist population.
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Oh Big Deal
I don't understand the horror people have because other people have had plastic surgery. I live in the Hamptons. Try finding an un-lipo'd thigh or a wrinkled brow. Today is the first day of the summer season. I went to my local garden center and was confronted with a woman who had had something done to the space between her nose and her upper lip. The spot that becomes wrinkled on older women. It had been lasered or chemically peeled or something, but it looked tight as a drumskin and was shiny white. Hey, she paid for it with her own money, she likes it better than wrinkles, what do I care? I blink, look away, acclimatize myself to the odd appearance of her... lip-space thing .. and life goes on.
I know people who tut-tut breast implants in public who actualy have breast implants themselves. Me, I like Botox. I fully admit I've had Botox and when people say to me "But you don't have any wrinkles!" I say "Then the Botox is working pretty well, isn't it?" I can move my eyebrows, my forehead isn't frozen - doctors have had several years of practice at injecting Botox nowadays; the "frozen forehead" is a corny sitcom joke that TV writers (who have all had Botox) make for cheap laughs.
I used to work in Manhattan hospitals. I worked with some of the world's top plastic surgeons. Believe me, when your favorite star looks strikingly young for his or her age, you can bank on it that s/he has had work done. They've all had it done.. I know, I was there and saw them!
So if a lady wants to wear a pair of pants without having to wear a below-the-crotch sweatshirt to cover her middle-aged camel toe and she feels the only way for that to happen is to have a labiaplasty, I won't hold it against her. It's her real estate, not mine. People obsess about all manner of body parts you and I may never even notice. As long as they are using their own money, their kids aren't going hungry and they fully understand the surgical risks involved, go for it. If they want to shave an inch or two off their labs, who am I to disapprove?