this, that, this other thing, and Sack Donald Rumsfeld Now

[solarbird]

In 1998, I tried to get anyone who would listen to pay attention to this little political experiment Pakistan was running in Afghanistan called the Taliban movement. I wrote political leaders, I talked about it on mailing lists and with friends, trying to get other people interested, and quite frankly, nobody (from any party or of any political persuasion) gave a rat's ass. Apparently, we haven't learned a goddamn thing.

Everyone else has linked to it already, but the section on V-J day alone makes it worthwhile: liz_marcs writes about Pearl Harbour and 1941.

Does anybody know if this is as obscenely bad as it looks? Session 9G: “...And Beat them Lightly”: An Analysis and In-Depth Discussion of Verse 4:34 - reportedly a seminar at the Islamic Society of North America's national convention. The description says that seminar on beating women is "to understand how this verse is to be applied as a protection for women, not as an abuse." Because beatings are good for you! Fuck that noise.

Can we Sack Donald Rumsfeld Now? Please? Please? Money quote: "In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said 'he would fire the next person' who talked about the need for a post-war plan." (Spotted by Andrew Sullivan.)

Comments

[pobig.livejournal.com]

I've been reading Ted Rall's Silk Road to Ruin, which had a lot of surprising history of the Taliban and Pakistan's current government. I certainly had no inkling of it in 1998 beyond a few Bob the Angry Flower cartoons.

[solarbird]

I'm not trying to claim to be some sort of foreign policy mastermind. I just happened across an article on the de facto enslavement of women as chattel breeding animals under the Taliban government, and started digging. It didn't take long to figure out how bad this was and how we could get it stopped if our nominal-allies in the Pakistani government decided to yank their security support. At the time, that's probably all it would have taken.

And now they're at it again. To which I can only go what. the. fuck?!

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

Many liberals (including myself) were worried about the Taliban going back to their founding. The right wing only cares when it's got a war to misrun, and it can manipulate anti-Islamic feeling to gain support for its its insane policies.

Thanks for the liz_marcs post. It's a good one.

About the "and beat them lightly" verse: don't believe a damn thing you see on Little Green Footballs. It's a hate site run and populated by deranged people. I don't know much about Islam, but I know enough to know the context of that verse. Prior to Islam, heavy beatings of wives were the cultural norm in Arabia, and the first recourse rather than the last. Women were treated as inanimate property or misbehaving animals. Islam raised the status of women by treasuring them and calling on men to treat women as they would their most cherished possessions.

By modern standards, that message is horribly misogynist, but it was a vast improvement on the prior condition of women. Quoting that verse out of context is intellectually dishonest (for example, the very next verse mentions a process of arbitration between the families of husbands and wives that gives each spouse equal weight in resolving differences.) It is possible to criticize the message in modern terms (such as most people criticize "spare the rod and spoil the child") while recognizing what it meant at the time, and in fact that's the only proper way to conduct scholarship about something like this. If you want to see the verse in context, see http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/004.qmt.html.

This is the danger in extending our concern about our own fundamentalists to other kinds of fundamentalism. We usually don't understand the cultural context, and it's far too easy for that misunderstanding to be exploited to further an agenda that helps our fundamentalists and authoritarians to the our detriment and the detriment of the people in other places that we want to help. The same people going on about how horrible this verse is on LGF are among the prime cheerleaders for the war in Iraq that has put back the rights of women, gay people, and other liberal minorities in Iraq by decades. That war is leading to a fundamentalist theocracy there and reinforcing the power of our own budding authoritarian theocracy here.