I guess I’m not supposed to ask what role the US has played in creating and promoting the Taliban or Osama bin Laden himself. Clearly the only parties that bear any responsibility are our puppet regimes and the tin pot dictators we install. Most of all, it would seem that Virgil feels the “primary responsibility” lies with the girls themselves. When, Oh when will the rule of 11 year old Islamic girls end??

Well, noen, all I know is that Oprah is on record as saying

And I think your FIRST question should be: “How do the economic and military policies of the COUNTRIES IN QUESTION contribute to those injustices? Whiling away your hours pondering THAT question would be a more profitable use of your precious time. America’s contribution to the misery of those you are concerned with
is often not without effect, but the primary responsibility is to be found with the leadership of the nations where these conditions exist and their indigenous populations themselves.

Yeah, there is a certain legitimacy to that position. All my life I have been confronted with images of poor black children in dire need. Biafra, Bangladesh, Africa and now Afghanistan and thereabouts. The message seems clear, “There are these horrible injustices in the world and for a small donation you can buy off your white guilt.” More importantly, it keeps them over there, far away from me so I need not be discomfited by their pain and need never question how I may be contributing to it in the first place.

I never see needy poor children, white or black, from the US or other first world countries though they do exist. I also don’t see in the general media any discussion about why those children (Islamic girls in this case) are in that condition in the first place. How do the economic and military policies of my country contribute to those injustices?

I think that issues like these tend to function as a distraction from those larger questions.

I can’t be bothered looking for evidence, but my memory of the response to feminist campaigns for muslim women’s rights in the 90s was that feminists are just a bunch of racist meddlers and anyway its futile because those poor muslims prefer it that way.

I assume this is a follow-up to you at 12.31.08 at 12:03 am: I agree that Afghan/NWFP Pakistani approaches to women’s rights are now related and I agree that western feminists have been active in bringing Taliban oppression to light.

The Spivak phrase is from ‘The Subaltern Cannot Speak” (on interpretations of sati); I quote further from it

“Obviously I am not advocating the killing of widows”

But given we’re 114 comments in with still no evidence of this feminist movement to ignore the issue, it seems kind of irrelevant.

Change is coming Bubba. Research in the past half life, err, half decade has stumbled upon a vast improvement to the Neutron bomb; gender specific radiation targeting with blast dampening. Amazing really, and tests should be coming to a country half a world away from you soon assuming the right appropriations are made to continue protecting the homeland. Early tests heve been positive, though the current yields makes the effects only noticeable over a few generations [projected].

I really have a hard time believing that the most recent spate of bomb droppers give a shit about what feminists have to say about an issue; at best feminist ideas get to be a cudgel to beat anti-war folks with. No small thing when the decision’s on a knife-edge I suppose, but going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq had precious little to do with women’s rights.

Maybe, though, it’s even more sensitive to write about this now, that is if you believe the new US administration will do things differently.

Censoring yourself out of humility, or worse, to “protect” them from islamaphobes, is true paternalism.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the Islamophobes in question are not rude guys who stare at women in headscarves on the street in Toronto, they are people who can influence a superpower’s decision to drop bombs on the very girls whose access to schools we are talking about. In fact, shutting out the voices of Middle Eastern feminists is one of the major strategic goals of said Islamophobes.

“They also generally do not advocate going out, missionary-like, to lecture either Muslim feminists or Muslim society in general, because as one prominent feminist pointed out, we westerners just don’t have the standing in that society to redirect peoples’ actions. We just don’t.”

Have you ever thought that the position you’re describing is just as much a form of paternalism as any search-and-rescue operation in the middle east? These women literally don’t know what they’re missing! Persuading them otherwise is the ethical thing to do if you truly believe in equal rights. Censoring yourself out of humility, or worse, to “protect” them from islamaphobes, is true paternalism.

Bah, you caught me in crossfire. I wasn’t fearmongering, and the use of the word “terrorist” was literal (threat designed to terrify people into changing their behavior; though perhaps it’s a word that needs to be retired for all the connotations it invokes). It wasn’t meant to be a full and complete analysis of the context and connections surrounding this incident; I was just explaining to s. jones that even if we were all completely aware of all the contexts (which this person was alleging was true, and which according to s. jones meant nobody should bother to talk about it), the post was useful insofar as it provided information on new and disturbing developments, so we should talk about the new and disturbing developments in Gaza instead. You’ll notice I went so far as to go find a large-scale community discussion about Gaza on another blog for s. jones.

You’ll also notice this same person’s still hacking on about “the lack of any post here on Gaza is particularly galling in this post” (which aside from the syntax is noteworthy, once again, because this person hasn’t been trolling the dozens of completely civil-liberties-unrelated posts on CT, just Ingrid’s. Why? Because it’s a civil liberties post that dares to not address Gaza! For some reason talking about comic books is alright in the midst of crisis, but talking about other civil liberties violations isn’t: I was addressing the absurdity of s. jones attempting to enforce a civil-liberties-reportage ethic exclusively on this post.)

Anyhow. That having been said, I’d agree there’s some parallel as you mentioned: we have all this spine-chilling report of a threat, but maybe not enough context to determine whether it was just some attention-seeking rogue whose statement’s being trumped up. Is the “Threatening Islamist/Taliban Commander” the new “Angry Black Man” in media? Should his threat be taken at all seriously? Did some reporter go find some isolated nut to trump up falsely as the representative face of the entire Taliban? We notice the original BBC report says a local Taleban commander, and Ingrid attributes the threat to “they” (the entire Taliban). Is this accurate? These are fair questions.

For the answer, I’d take my cue from this sentence: Those who can afford it have already moved out of the region, but the poor have no other option than keeping their daughters at home, our correspondent says. So, it sounds like there’s a legitimate ongoing threat to the safety of schoolgirls in the region. People don’t just up and move in significant numbers when an isolated nut is raving, unless that nut has sufficient power to carry out violence in the region. Sounds like the 1/15/09 threat is only one component of ongoing actualized violence. It looks like Ingrid checked this out as well, given the extra source in comment 46.

I guess we can see this violence as the result of oppression, but it’s still not possible for me to buy that being oppressed justifies planning and carrying out the killing of schoolgirls in one’s region. Feel free to comment on how this makes me a horrible person because I just don’t understand what they’ve gone through, or that I’m not sufficiently sympathetic to have a full comprehension of cause and effect, etc.

I can understand if some people don’t want to jump on a bandwagon that could be hijacked to justify a military intervention they oppose. But as the original post remarked: there are some things you can’t ignore.