Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Will Obama be able to match Bush's record on women?

From Elinor Burkett's So many enemies, so little time, pp. 104-105
    “But everything in Afghanistan was about gender. While men were punished for what they did, for defying the authorities, the Taliban’s relentless war against Kabul’s middle-class women wasn’t a simple equation of crime and punishment. There was a desperation to the floggings and the stonings meted out to these women, a hysteria behind the ruthless and uncompromising humiliation that spoke to just how powerless the fundamentalist leadership felt in the new world that had taken root in Kabul, the world inching toward modern values like diversity, tolerance and equality. The sight of an unveiled rosy cheek or a lock of hair tousled by the wind was the most intimate, thus the most potent, symbol of a world they could no longer control, despite Allah’s command that they control it. Only by concealing that swath of flesh, by reining in those unruly tresses, could the men in power regain the sense that they were masters of their perversion of a Koranic domain.”
George W. Bush has freed those women. He has done more for women than any American president in history. He freed more people than Lincoln. Millions of women in Afghanistan can again have jobs, education and civil rights because of him. And the Left (who would all claim to be feminists) in this country and Europe won’t even mention it except to castigate him. From my blog, December 07, 2004, "The Taliban--It was about Gender"

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