This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.Too many places in this world are not populated by people whose values qualify them for membership in humanity; why are we even wasting our time and resources trying?
When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security.
The riot, which lasted for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred and the two teenagers, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, confined to juvenile prison. Officially, their fates lie in the hands of an unsteady legal system. But they face harsher judgments of family and community.
Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.
“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
You Can't Have Democracy And Freedom...
... if you don't yet have a mastery of how to be human:
Jil, unfortunately it is NOT for humanitarian reason that the occupying forces in Afghanistan or Iraq are there. In Iraq it is the rich oil resources that the whole country sits on. In Afghanistan it is the known mineral resouces and the potential oil deposits not advertised that makes it the prize. The humanitarian thing is all smoke and mirrors to divert from the real reason of the occupation! The value of these resources put into pale the initial trillions being spent.
ReplyDeleteActually, Afghanistan has a very valuable natural resource: They supply the world's best American testosterone. We went into Afghanistan because Americans were kicked hard in the nuts and (rightfully, in my opinion) needed to blow some evil muthafuckas to hell principally because it gave America a much-needed anti-terrorist, pro-America erection.
ReplyDeleteBut Democracy? Freedom? Gender equality? That was just an excuse for us being there (as if we couldn't admit what we were really exporting) and a lame one at that.
Clearly the most efficient , expedient and testosteronical thing to do is to carpet bomb the region with neutron bomb style munitions. That way we eliminate the pesky, troublesome,fundamentalists without harming the region's valuable oil and minerals.
ReplyDeleteSadly, here in North America, the fundamentalists are well mixed in with the non-fundamentalist portions of the population so we can't do the same thing there.
Democracy? Freedom? Who cares! We're Americans! Waterboard everyone who hates us. Just because our founding fathers put strict injunctions against cruel and unusual punishments in the constitution doesn't mean we should actually follow those rules. Bachman Rules!
And remember- never fall asleep with your finger on the page down key. You might run into old blog entries and comment on them from and out of time or context POV.