'You should begin by reforming your own home'

Pakistani actress Veena Malik, in trouble with religious fundamentalists after her appearance on the Indian version of 'Big Brother', hits back at a cleric who accuses her of betraying Islam and her country:

If you want to do something for the glory of Islam, you have plenty of opportunities. Bribery, robbery, theft and killing in the name of Islam. There are many things to talk about. Why Veena Malik? Because Veena Malik is a woman? Because Veena Mali is a soft target for you.

There are many other things for you to deal with. There are Islamic clerics who rape the children they teach in their mosques and so much more. Pakistan is infamous for many reasons other than Veena Malik [...] You should begin by reforming your own home and only then ask me to do the same.

Most telling admission by the mullah? ‘Let me tell you that I did not watch the show…’

Be sure to watch the video through to the end.

The week in links

Here's a few things you might have missed over the past seven days.

Khaled Mattawa makes a powerful case for intervention in Libya, while Michael Rubin urges President Obama to step up to the plate. Mark Bahnisch critiques the Left's take on Libya. Alan Johnson and Michael Walzer exchange views on intervention, and Michael J. Totten asks the Arab world for something in return. And Josh Rogin provides a fascinating insight into why the White House changed its mind on the no-fly zone. When the UN finally does the right thing, the people of Benghazi celebrate.

Meanwhile, the Arab spring spreads. Next stop Damascus? Malik Al-Abdeh reports on the first signs of revolt in Syria. Looks like there might not be too many more fawning photoshoots for Vogue, Mrs. Al-Assad.

Further east, Shehrbano Taseer, the brave and outspoken daughter of murdered liberal politician Salman Taseer, discusses the state of things in Pakistan, in a three part interview. And speaking of brave young women: Harry's Place reports on the worrying arrest and interrogation of Iranian poetess Hila Sadighi.

In the aftermath of the savage murder of a  young Israeli family in Itamar, Claire Berlinski reflects on writing about terrorism. Meanwhile, a report on IDF soldiers and paramedics at the same settlement saving the life of an Arab mother and baby gives the lie to the nonsense of 'Israel Apartheid Week'.

Finally, back home, Nick Cohen and Rob Marchant reflect on Labour's prospects in the light of Ed Miliband's performance as leader and his brother David's recent speech.

No book burning - but no excuse for violence

I don't believe that any books are 'sacred'. The Qu'ran, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Tibetan Book of the Dead - all are human products and should be treated as such. In a free society no book, whether secular or religious, should be protected from criticism, ridicule or even condemnation if necessary. But talk of burning books of any kind makes me nervous and summons up some pretty unpleasant historical memories (see above).

So I hope Pastor Terry Jones cancels his plan to burn copies of the Qu'ran on the anniversary of 9/11. He is perfectly within his constitutional rights to do so (something the Pakistani government doesn't seem to understand), but it would be wise of him to desist. It would provide one more excuse (as if they needed it) for Islamist militants to run riot and terrorise the innocent. You can imagine the scene in cities across the 'Muslim world', as the usual 'rage boys', to use Hitch's coining, 'spontaneously' congregate in front of the cameras, miraculously supplied with American flags to tear and burn (where's their respect for other people's sacred totems?).

But let's be clear. If Jones goes ahead with his mindless stunt, and innocent people get killed in Asia or the Middle East, those deaths won't be his 'fault.' The blame will lie entirely with the perpetrators and their warped ideology, which sees every slighting of their beliefs as justification for murder and mayhem. In their fundamentalism and intolerance, Pastor Jones and the Islamists are mirror images of each other.

Update: 11th September

Predictably, authoritarian and corrupt leaders in the Middle East and Asia have leapt on the protest bandwagon, to bolster their own support. It was astonishing, and a little absurd, that President Karzai of Afghanistan used his annual Eid message to condemn the actions of an insignificant and unrepresentative clergyman halfway across the world. And his claim that 'insulting the Koran is an insult to nations' was patently ridiculous and designed to stoke the dangerous fires of protest.

Meanwhile, the protesting crowds in Afghanistan and elsewhere are said to be outraged just by the 'idea' of burning their holy book, even if it doesn't actually transpire. Watching and reading the reports last night, I thought I detected a note of disappointment in the protestors' reaction to the news that Pastor Jones may not, after all, go ahead with his book burning.

Finally, on this of all mornings, it struck me that the saddest consequence of this whole affair (so far) is that, on the anniversary of the terror attacks on New York and Washington, it has focused attention on the twisted fundamentalist ideology that inspired those outrages, rather than on the thousands of innocent victims and those who still grieve for them.

Once upon a time in Afghanistan

Where do you think this photograph was taken: somewhere in Europe or America, perhaps, circa 1960? In fact it's a picture of a record store in Kabul, Afghanistan, at around that time. It's one of a remarkable series of images from a photobook of the country published by Afghanistan's planning ministry in the late '50s or early '60s, and bought in a market by an Afghani schoolboy, Mohammad Qayoumi, who emigrated to the States and is now president of California State University, East Bay.

Other photos (which you can see here) show mixed-sex groups of students and workers, in modern dress, at universities, factories, parks and cinemas. In case we're tempted to think this was some kind of sub-Soviet propaganda exercise, it's worth remembering that the pictures date from before the Russian invasion, which initiated the process of dismembering modern Afghanistan that continued during the civil war and Taliban takeover. Qayoumi uses the photographs to counter the myth, recently reinforced by Liam Fox with his 'broken 13th century country' jibe, that Afghanistan has always been 'an ungovernable land where chaos is carved into the hills'. Qayoumi begis to differ:

But that is not the Afghanistan I remember. [...] A half-century ago Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods. There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit with outside help. Ordinary people had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunities for all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that has been destroyed by three decades of war, but it was real.

Qayoumi admits that the images were 'perhaps a little airbrushed by government officials', but they serve as a reminder that, even in a country ravaged by decades of conflict like Afghanistan, 'disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable.' Some of the photos, and Qayoumi's comments on them which point up the contrast with the current situation, are incredibly poignant: 'Remembering Afghanistan's hopeful past only makes its present misery seem more tragic'.

There is an overpowering sense of generations of lost opportunity, of lives constrained. The images are a reminder, too, of the sheer barbarism of the fundamentalist ideology that laid waste to much of this burgeoning modernity, and the stupidity of a cultural relativism, present as much in pseudo-leftist posturing as in Fox's post-imperial condescension, which assumes that secular modernity is a 'western' phenonomen whose benefits are not relevant to the lives of people in other 'cultures'.

(Via Kenan Malik)

A saint of social action

Every now and then I read about someone who has managed to combine in their life elements that remain fragmented and conflicted in my own - and to accomplish things that make the achievements of ordinary mortals seem trifling. Yesterday's Guardian carried an obituary for Vicente Ferrer, who fought for the POUM during the Spanish Civil War and was imprisoned by Franco, then trained to be a Jesuit priest, with the idea of 'helping others':

In 1952 he volunteered to go to India. At first he devoted himself to his spiritual development in Pune, but, surrounded by desolation, he soon moved from reflection to action. He started with a school and 12 acres of land at Manmad, north-east of Mumbai. In an arid area, he persuaded farmers to dig wells, offering them oil and wheat while they dug. Then, the digger of one well would help another, in a system Ferrer termed "linked brotherhood".

He was to spend the rest of his life in India, entering into conflict with landowners and political bosses because of his co-operative methods, emphasis on education and challenges to the caste system and to the subjugation of women. He lived and worked among the poorest, especially the dalits (untouchables), who lacked all rights and were mostly illiterate.

Ferrer's approach was rather different from that other European missionary in India, Mother Theresa:

"Misery and suffering are not meant to be understood, but to be solved," and "I've declared war on pain and suffering" were two phrases that helped him raise money, not just from leftwing Catholics (he was never friends with the church hierarchy, who were unrepresented at his funeral) but from a wide base of donors.

His achievements seem to have been nothing short of heroic:

By the time of Ferrer's death, his foundation had opened and supported 1,700 village schools, serving 125,000 children and employing 2,000 teachers, and three general hospitals with 1,300 staff. It had planted 3m trees and opened libraries, an Aids clinic and family-planning clinics. It organised wells and irrigation schemes. Several projects focus on women, especially dalits, whose lives are blighted by constant childbearing, rape and murder.

If you have to have saints, then Ferrer sounds like a pretty good candidate.

A war on women

The situation of Afghan women and girls is not bad, or oppressive, or exploitative: it is extraordinary. In fact, in thinking about this situation, I am led to the conclusion that—in addition to all the other wars being waged today—there is, to be blunt, a war on women.

That's Susie Linfield, giving a pessimistic assessment of the prospects for gender equality in Afghanistan. She continues:

In Afghanistan under the Taliban—and still, to a large extent, today—the situation of women and girls might best be compared to that of German Jews under the Nuremberg laws or to American blacks under Jim Crow (and slavery). It’s not just that Afghan females lack education and skills, though this should not be underplayed. (The female literacy rate in the parts of Pakistan that have traditionally been Taliban-controlled is a stunning 3 percent, and I suspect that the same is true in many parts of Afghanistan.) It’s not just that the political, judicial, and civil rights of women and girls are denied; it’s that their status as human is unrecognized.

After giving some distressing examples of the continuing oppression of Afghan women, including the fact that 'none of this violence, this humiliation, is seen as a crime,' Linfield concludes:

Given all this, I can actually understand the fury and panic of some Afghan males faced with the advent (if indeed it is) of ideas of democracy, equal citizenship, etc. An almost unimaginably radical transformation of social relations and social psychology would be required to bring Afghan women—and men—into the modern world; this would be a revolution in the true sense of the word.

Having compared the situation in Afghanistan with the even more brutal treatment of women and girls in the Congo, Linfield ends with some questions:

Who can explain this barbarism? Who can explain this utter hatred of the female, of female sexuality, of the future, of life? More important, who or what can stop it?

The Taliban's war on schoolchildren

You often read about the number of civilian deaths caused by NATO forces in Afghanistan. It seems the US special forces 'have a reputation for raiding Afghan houses in the middle of the night, on the basis of intelligence that can be accurate or inaccurate, causing a disproportionate number of civilian casualties,' though many more innocent deaths are the result of air strikes. 

But I don't think anyone has ever accused the international task force of deliberately targeting non-combatants. Their Taliban opponents are very different, however, according to this account of an attack on a primary school in Asadabad. Seven children were killed and thirty-four wounded. Kristen Rouse, who served with the US Army National Guard in Afghanistan, says that it never occurred to her that the Taliban would target schoolchildren:

But we soon learned that the Taliban routinely burned school buildings, assassinated teachers, and even singled out the children themselves for maiming, dismemberment and attack. As the Taliban see it, boys should not be educated beyond rote learning of narrow theology, and girls must not be educated at all. The Asadabad atack - although one of the most severe to date - was hardly unique.

Now the news that the Pakistani government have conceded control of the Swat Valley to the Taliban, who proceeded to shut down nearly 200 schools, is giving Rouse sleepless nights. She's unhappy that American officials appear not have objected to the deal, and she reports that many of her fellow-veterans are also 'outraged' at the thought of the US negotiating with the Taliban:

as if they were just another Afghan political party and not a criminal gang that inflicts and enforces the most extreme ignorance, poverty and violence upon innocent people - upon schoolchildren.

(Via Norm).

Theatre of war

The Tricycle Theatre in north London has commissioned a series of plays about Afghanistan 'in the belief that the history of the country is not well known in the UK, even though thousands of British troops are there in operations against the Taliban.' Artist director Nicholas Kent stated: 'It's a history project, without being in the least dry'.

Sounds like a worthy initiative, in the best traditions of theatre as public education. But what kind of history lesson are theatre-goers likely to get? Here's Nicholas Kent again: 'We have a lot to learn about the historical backdrop: about how British and Russian self-interest caused so many of the problems in the country.' 

A lot to learn? Seems like Kent has made up his mind already. You'll notice he doesn't mention the damage caused to Afghanistan by feuding warlords or the oppressive Taliban regime. But perhaps he shares the dominant pseudo-left belief that these 'problems' were 'caused' by western 'self-interest' and that Afghans are simply passive pawns of outside forces, rather than having any agency of their own.

I hope the dramas commissioned by Tricycle end up challenging, rather than merely confirming, the political prejudices of the north London theatre-going classes.

Read Hitchens and Mehta on Mumbai, avoid Dalrymple

Must-reads on Mumbai:

This column which, with its revelation that hostages were tortured before being shot, confirms the sheer inhumanity of the terrorists, and with its indication that Jews were singled out for particularly horrific treatment, is further evidence that the attackers weren't responding to some local 'grievance' but were motivated by an all-too-familiar transnational ideology of which antisemitism is a consistent feature.

Christopher Hitchens on what the terrorists thought they were attacking:

What's at stake is the whole concept of a cosmopolitan city open to its own citizens and to the world - a city on the model of Sarajevo or London or Beirut or Manhattan. There is, of course, a reason they attract the ire and loathing of the religious fanatics. To the pure and godly, the very existence of such places is a profanity.

Along similar lines, Suketu Mehta (author of Maximum City, a paeon to Mumbai) celebrating his home city, which he loves for all the reasons that the fundamentalists hate it:

Why do they go after Mumbai? There's something  about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.

Best avoided:

This inevitable and predictable attempt to pin the blame on anybody (America, Britain, India, even Israel) but the perpetrators, by the always reliable William Dalrymple, devastatingly deconstructed by Eamonn McDonagh.

Update

More must-reads:

This from David Aaronovitch, wondering why, if the terrorists were motivated by local, communal grievances, they went out of their way to target 'the small headquarters of a small outreach sect of a small religion, which far from being a big symbol of anything, you would almost certainly need a detailed map and inside knowledge even to find'.

As he says, the treatment of the hostages at Nariman House gives the lie to root cause 'explanetics'. And Aaronovitch wonders if it's coincidental that the area that gave birth to some of the Mumbai murderers (the south Punjab) has one of the highest levels of acid attacks on women anywhere in the world. The terrorists, he concludes, represent 'a political-religious movement of men espousing violent self-righteousness, impossible purity and hatred of human complexity. No wonder the target was cosmopolitan Mumbai, with its foreigners, minorities, its maddening mix of people and moralities, all of them diluting the one, true, narrow way.'

And although I don't agree with its author's conservative and anti-secularist politics, this piece by Dennis Prager, on the centrality of antisemitism to the Islamist mindset, is also required reading:

Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India and therefore aimed to destabilize India's major city devote so much of its efforts - 20 per cent of its force of 10 gunmen whose stated goal was to kill 5,000 - to killing a rabbi and any Jews with him?

The question echoes one from World War II: Why did Hitler devote so much time, money, and manpower in order to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child in every country the Nazis occupied? [...]

From the perspective of political scientists, historians, and contemporary journalists, the answer to these questions is not rational. But the non-rationality of an answer is not synonymous with its non-validity

For the Islamists, as for the Nazis, the destruction of the Jews - and since 1948, the Jewish state - is central to their worldview.

If anyone has a better explanation for why Pakistani terrorists, preoccupied with destabilizing India, would expend so much effort at finding the one Jewish center in a country that is essentially devoid of Jews, I would like to hear it.

Mumbai and the theology of death

What on earth can one say about the horrific events in Mumbai? Reading accounts of this latest massacre of the innocents, I was struck above all by the nihilism and sheer inhumanity of the terrorists. Never has the Al-Qaeda boast, 'You love life and we love death', seemed so fitting. While British and American passport-holders appear to have been targeted in at least one location, and the assault on a Jewish centre can hardly be accidental, it's the indiscriminate nature of the attack that stays in the mind. Indians and foreigners, Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Jews - all were regarded as legitimate targets by these coldhearted  fanatics.

At the Leopold Cafe, 'five men wielding AK-47 rifles charged in and opened fire without asking anyone to identify themselves. They lobbed hand grenades at the horrified onlookers'. At a busy railway terminus, 'gunmen shot up the reservation counter of the station, randomly sprayed passengers, believed to be entirely composed of Indian travellers and commuters, and fled.' In the lobby of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, according to Conservative MEP Sajjad Karim who was there, 'a gunman appeared in front of us, carrying machine-gun type weapons. And he just started firing at us'.

At lunchtime today, I listened to an insensitive, boneheaded Radio 4 presenter asking the Indian ambassador whether, given that the Mumbai attackers were probably Islamists, his government should now start attending seriously to the grievances of its Muslim population, as Britain had to do after 7/7.  It's enough to make you weep.  In something he wrote after 9/11, but which I can't find right now, Christopher Hitchens recalled asking some Chilean exile friends whether they were tempted to launch a similar attack on America, after the CIA-backed overthrow of Allende. They were horrified at the thought. Genuine radicals, those whose radicalism arises from a love of humanity and rage at inequality and injustice, don't tend to see the mass murder of innocent people as a legitimate tactic. The murderers of Mumbai, like the Baader-Meinhof killers that I wrote about the other day, were not reacting to 'grievances', unless they were grievances imagined in their twisted theology of victimhood, but acting out the logical dictates of a nihilistic and death-loving ideology. 

Blogroll update

Restored to the blogroll: Terry Glavin (removed some time back due to prolonged silence), if only for his impressive reporting from Afghanistan, and for photos like this which speak volumes:

Guardian balances nonsense on Georgia with good sense on Gaza

This morning I completed an online survey from The Guardian, in which I used the suggestion box to rail against the one-sided nature of its comment pages. Now I'm feeling a little shamefaced, having read today's paper and seen how they neatly balance some predictable tosh on Georgia from Seamus Milne with a well-argued piece by the Israeli ambassador on the recent hearing-aids-and-balloons showboat to Gaza.

We were in Italy when the Georgian crisis began and, despite intermittent access to newspapers and CNN, it was difficult to get the measure of what was going on. This analysis by Michael Walzer throws some helpful light on the situation, as does this piece by Christopher Hitchens. Both are useful antidotes to Milne's simplistic article, in which he concludes that - guess what? - it's all America's fault and that we should welcome the revival of Russian military power as a 'counterbalance' to US domination of the international scene. Milne seems to revel in the prospect of a renascent, autocratic Russia and is certainly sparing in his criticism of its recent actions, in contrast to his habitual virulent antipathy to the United States.

In his piece on the Gaza boat-trip, Ron Prosor takes the protestors to task for their silence on Hamas' contribution to the sufferings of the Palestinian population. I hadn't realised that, as well as the ridiculous, publicity-seeking Lauren Booth, the passengers also included Yvonne Ridley, filming the whole thing for (who else?) Iranian TV. The situation in Gaza is dire, for complicated reasons rarely addressed by grandstanding celebrity protestors, but how can you take seriously a demonstration that includes characters like these?

Only connect

In a recent post I described my conflicted feelings about the issue of Tibet, as well as my brief flirtation and ultimate disillusionment with Buddhism. A propos of this, and via Butterflies and Wheels, I recently came across an article by Donald Lopez at The Immanent Frame, about the apparent connections between Buddhism and neurobiology. If you follow the links back, you reach this New York Times piece about neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor's experience of having a stroke, and her comparison of her sensations with Buddhist descriptions of the effects of meditation. And from there you can link back further to the Youtube video of Taylor talking about her experience.

 

The way Taylor describes her experience is extremely moving and she has a great gift for conveying sensations and emotions, but some aspects of her testimony made me feel quite uncomfortable. It also helped me to pinpoint one of the reasons why, despite my own experience of the benefits of meditation, I eventually drifted away from Buddhism. 

The integrity of Taylor's experience is unquestionable, but the interpretation she constructs around it is, I think, open to challenge. She makes a great deal of the differences, and supposed separation, between the right and left sides of the brain, controlling our immediate sensory experience of the world, and language and communication respectively. Now I'm no neuroscientist, but I do find this kind of brain science, popularised in a thousand self-help books, overly simplistic. Taylor describes her experience of the first few minutes of a stroke as like having the left, rational side of the brain switched off, and basking temporarily in the immediate, sensory world of the right brain. Moreover, she describes this in the kind of mystical language that has got some Buddhists and New Age types all excited.

I found myself wanting to challenge some of the implications that Taylor drew from her experience. She suggests that our immediate, sensory, right-brain experience is what enables us to feel at one with the world and is the source of our connexion to each other and to the world - while it's our left brain's constant, rationalising chatter that is the basis of our individuality and thus our separateness from others. From this, it's a short step to arguing (as she does) that if we all spent more time in the former mode of being (and, by implication, less time being rational and critical), we'd be better people and the world would be a more peaceful and harmonious place.

I believe this to be profoundly mistaken and dangerous. As a humanist, I would argue that it's precisely our capacity to reason, articulate and communicate that makes it possible for us to escape from the prison-house of self and make connexions with other human beings. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that the quest for mystical oneness leads not to mutual understanding but to selfishiness and solipsism. Moreover, it can end up in an apolitical outlook that is open to all kinds of dangerous irrationalism. 

In the days when I used to browse Buddhist websites, I came across an account by a group of western Buddhists who, in the aftermath of 9/11, wanted to do something to heal the perceived rift between the west and the Arab world. They described visiting a Middle Eastern country and making contact with a group of intellectuals who seemed open to dialogue. The latter were eager to meet westerners, and wanted to know their opinions about the Arab world - its politics, history and literature. But the Buddhist group had to admit they knew nothing of these things, and had done no reading about them as preparation for their trip. Instead, following the logic of their Buddhist beliefs, they had hoped to connect with their Arab interlocutors on the basis of their 'oneness' as human beings - that is, at the level of feeling and emotion, rather than knowledge, reason and debate. Needless to say, the encounter was something of a failure, and a massive missed opportunity. 

One of the commenters on the Immanent Frame piece links to an article by Slavoj Zizek, who views western Buddhism as a contemporary opium of the people, the ideal spiritual gloss for global capitalism. Now, you can argue that Zizek is being overly reductive and make the obvious points about the complex relations of base and superstructure, but after listening to Jill Bolte Taylor and reading some of the commentary on her experience, I began to wonder if he had a point. He also has some insightful things to say about the place of Tibet in the western imagination, managing to be critical of western romanticisation of the country without falling into the trap of excusing the Chinese occupation.

Act of God? Blame the West

You'd think the Burmese cyclone would be one event that really couldn't be blamed on 'the West'. After all, this was an act of God/nature, made worse by the (in)action of a home-grown military junta, and in whose aftermath western nations have been queuing up to offer humanitarian aid.

But you'd be wrong. Over the past few days, the usual suspects have been going through ever more mind-boggling intellectual contortions, eager to find a way of attributing some responsibility for the disaster to western democracies. So labyrinthine are their arguments that it's difficult to work out if the likes of Simon Tisdall and Simon Jenkins are criticising western governments for not intervening more directly, or for wanting to intervene in the first place. 

There was a particularly gruesome example of this kind of hand-wringing, overlaid with sanctimonious religious guilt-tripping, on yesterday's 'Thought for the Day', in which Rev John Bell played the familiar anti-colonialist card in order to help us to 'understand' the Burmese government's reluctance to accept aid from the West. In Bell's twisted version of events, it wasn't so much the brutality of the regime that was to blame for the plight of the Burmese people, as the sanctions imposed on it by the West. And it was our 'cultural ignorance' that was the barrier to the country accepting western aid, not the cruelty or self-interest of the generals.

As always, commentators who adopt this invertedly-racist (because it denies agency to anyone but white westerners) line of thinking let themselves off the hook of actually proposing any solution to the problem. So - Simon, Simon, John - if you were the British or the US government, what would you do?

Thank goodness that some can see through these rhetorical posturings. Read Norm on Simon Tisdall's twisted logic here, and David Aaronovitch's characteristically forthright call for intervention here.

Update

Seems I wasn't the only one to find that 'Thought for the Day' repellent. Here's Norm on a 'rank piece of apologetics.'

 

An unlikely feminist hero

Gary Thompson, at 51 the oldest British serviceman to die in Afghanistan or Iraq, went back to the RAF as a reservist after a career in business. Why? In February he told a local newspaper:

I have five daughters, three of whom are at university. I want women in Afghanistan to be given the same opportunities that my daughters have had. It means I can come back and say I have played my part in trying to make that happen.

Thompson was killed, with fellow airman Graham Livingstone, 23, when their vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb in Daman district, Afghanistan.

Gary Thompson was the same age as I am when he died. For all my passionate support for women's rights, I doubt if I could do what he did. Sometimes feminist heroes are to be found in the unlikeliest places.

Free Tibet: from feudalism as well as Chinese tyranny

Apropos of this post, in which I shared my conflicted feelings about the Tibetan issue: I see Butterflies and Wheels links to this article, which dispels some of the myths about Tibet as a peace-loving Shangri La prior to the Chinese takeover. Much of what the article has to say about the feudalism, superstition and cruelty that flourished in this supposed Buddhist paradise is undoubtedly accurate. The only drawback is that the piece is written by Michael Parenti, a notorious Milosevic apologist with an apparent nostalgia for Stalinism, who characteristically lets the Chinese regime off extremely lightly. Surely it's possible to be critical of Tibet's feudalist past without lending moral support to the totalitarian cultural vandalism wrought by Beijing? Conversely, calling for self-determination for Tibet is not the same as endorsing a return to religious authoritarianism.

Normal service resuming soon

Just back from a brief holiday. Normal blogging will resume in a few days, so watch this space. In the meantime, thanks to those who sent good wishes on the occasion of this blog's first birthday. And, while you're waiting for new stuff, check out my debate with Roland and the New Centrist - on which candidate Euston Manifesto supporters should back in the US election - at the end of this post.  And on the same subject, check out this post from Bob, as well as the debate in the comments that follow. Meanwhile, the New Centrist and Chinese in Vancouver have picked up on my post about Tibet.

Free Tibet?

Bob has a confession to make about his former dismissiveness towards the Free Tibet campaign, attributing it to youthful secularist zeal and a 'Stalinophilia' that saw the Chinese communist regime as a bulwark against the 'real' enemy of western capitalism.

The history of my own attitude towards Tibet has been somewhat different. As a teenager I had a deep interest in eastern spirituality and a romantic attraction to the countries on the old hippy trail - Tibet, Nepal, Ladakh. More recently, I went through a phase in which I was seriously interested in Buddhist philosophy, and it was the Tibetan variety that appealed to me most strongly.

However, despite the benefits that I gained from Buddhist practice, I eventually decided that the philosophy was not for me. Without going into detail, I suppose I concluded that the individualism and otherworldliness of Buddhism were incompatible with my interest in culture, politics and history. I also began to feel that westerners (including me) tended to see Buddhism refracted through their own religious history and were really looking for a version of Christianity with the difficult bits left out. At the same time, the credulity of western Tibetophiles began to worry me: people who had rejected the 'myths' of their own religious traditions swallowed whole stories of reincarnation, levitation and so on.

During my Buddhist phase I warmly supported the Tibetan protest movement and was angry with western leftists like Clare Short who dismissed it as a fashionable Hollywood cause. Now that I've recovered my sceptical secularist bearings, my feelings are more conflicted.

I realise now that Tibet before the Chinese invasion was hardly the idyllic, spiritual and peace-loving paradise portrayed in films such as Martin Scorsese's emotionally powerful but hagiographic Kundun. Revelations about the sexual antics of supposedly saintly lamas have also taken some of the gloss off the Tibetan myth. And practices that to the devotee suggest a sacred spiritual tradition - such as lamas engaging in tantric rituals with young girls, or boys being taken from their families and raised in monasteries - in another light can be seen as clear examples of abuse.

I'm also aware of a double standard in myself, hostile as I am to the residual political power of religion in the Middle East and supportive of forces that seek to advance secular modernity in the Arab and Muslim world - but at the same time critical of Chinese attempts to modernise Tibet. I'm aware of the contradiction, but I'd defend myself by arguing that modernity can't be imposed by force, and that introducing the obvious benefits of modern communications, medicine and so on shouldn't be at the cost of annhilating a centuries-old culture. 

And the form of modernity that China seeks to impose on Tibet is itself regressive: based on mass industrialisation, cultural homogeneity and political conformity. Western critics of China's policy in Tibet somehow need to find a way of opposing its harsh authoritarianism without idealising Tibetan culture or preventing it from evolving - and without seeing the East through the lens of their own post-industrial disillusionment with modernity and longing for an 'authentic' spiritual culture.

So yes, - 'Free Tibet' - but free it so that it can develop and modernise in its own way, not according to the centralised prescriptions of a discredited Maoist totalitarianism.

Kambaksh blasphemy sentence update

This looks it might be good news.

He's forty. She's eleven. And they are a couple.

This is the UNICEF Photo of the Year:




And this is the caption:

He’s forty, she’s eleven. And they are a couple – the Afghan man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. “We needed the money”, Ghulam’s parents said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school. But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan’s Ghor province know better: “Our men don’t want educated women.” They predict that Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children for Faiz.

The picture, by American photographer Stephanie Sinclair, makes an eloquent statement - perhaps more powerful than any number of wordy articles - about women's rights, children's rights, and the ways in which they continue to be traduced in many conservative religious cultures. According to UNICEF:

During her stay in Afghanistan, it consistently struck American photographer Stephanie Sinclair how many young girls are married to much older men. She decided to raise awareness about this topic with her pictures. Particularly as the official minimum age for brides in Afghanistan is sixteen and it is therefore illegal to marry children.

Early marriages are not only a problem in Afghanistan: worldwide there are about 51 million girls aged between 15 and 19 years who are forced into marriage. The youngest brides live in the Indian state of Rajasthan, where 15% of all wives are not even 10 years old when they are married. Child marriages are a reaction to extreme poverty and mainly take place in Asian and African regions where poor families see their daughters as a burden and as second-class citizens. Already in their younger years, girls are given into the “care” of a husband, a tradition that often leads to exploitation. Many girls become victims of domestic violence. In an Egyptian survey, about one-third of the interviewed child brides stated that they were beaten by their husbands. The young brides are under pressure to prove their fertility as soon as possible. But the risk for girls between the ages of 10 and 14 not to survive pregnancy is five times higher than for adult women. Every year, about 150,000 pregnant teenagers die due to complications – in particular due to a lack of medical care, let alone sex education.

Yes, of course, poverty helps to create the contexts in which child marriages persist, but the influence of powerful religious discourses, in which women are regarded as inferior beings, should not be overlooked. Still, it's good to see UNICEF making this bold choice for its photo of the year and not being held back by fear of offending particular religious or cultural groups (though I'm curious as to why I couldn't find any reference to the award on their main English-language website: when I googled this I was directed to their German site). Women's rights, children's rights, human rights - are universal and indivisible.

It's a deserving choice - and a heartbreaking image. You can see more examples of Sinclair's work on this topic here.

(Via)

Update
The Afghan Women's Network have kindly linked to this post. According to their website:

AWN is a non-partisan Network of women and women’s NGOs working to empower Afghan women and ensure their equal participation in Afghan society. The members of the Network also recognize the value and role of children as the future of Afghanistan and, as such, regard the empowerment and protection of children as fundamental to their work.