Surviving terrorist attacks
ATHEIST FOUNDATION OF AUSTRALIA INCWhen Women are Unequal, we all Suffer. surviving terrorist attacks Combating domestic terrorism. by Pamela BoneIn order to make the Taliban what they are, they had to be taken away as small boys not only from their parents (if they had them; many were orphans) but from daily village life and from the influence of women, according to an archival history of the destruction of civil society in Afghanistan. Mohamed Atta, one of the men alleged to have taken part in the September 11 attacks against the US, in 1996 wrote a will in which he ordered that no pregnant women or "person who is not clean" be present at his funeral or visit his grave. In the will, published recently in the German magazine Der Spiegel, he also instructed that when he died, "he who washes around my genitals should wear gloves so that I am not touched there". surviving terrorist attacks Likely terrorist attack cities iraq. This might, you would think, indicate a fairly unhealthy attitude towards both sex and women. In the religious fundamentalist mindset, sex is sinful. Women provoke lustful thoughts, therefore women are to be hated and feared. surviving terrorist attacks Reasons in favor of terrorism war. Presumably, pregnant women are especially unclean because pregnancy is evidence of sexual activity. Men are not to blame for their sexual impulses, women are. Therefore women must hide themselves from men's eyes, must cover their bodies, heads and faces. In Kashmir recently, some women who defied the order to cover have had acid thrown in their faces, a Pakistani journalist I met in Washington last year e-mailed me. She wrote that she is disturbed by the increasing numbers of women, even in Karachi, who are covering. "I went to Saddar bazaar today . . . I was struck by the fact that I was about the only woman visible. I found myself wondering what would happen if the creeping Talibanisation of society that we are witnessing really takes hold, or gets official sanction as it has in the past. That is the biggest fear of women like me in Pakistan. "Despite Osama bin Laden's rallying cry on behalf of the Palestinians this week, America's support for Israel is a secondary reason for his organisation's war against the West. "The Palestinians have actually complained that he cares nothing for them," wrote British commentator Bryan Appleyard recently. "For bin Laden and for many Muslims, the primary crime is blasphemy against the holiest Islamic soil. " A turning point was the Gulf War of 1990-91. In Saudi Arabia, the land of Mecca and Medina, a widely circulated picture of American women soldiers riding in a jeep across the Arabian desert was enough to goad bin Laden and thousands of others into extremism, wrote Appleyard. Now the Western forces are bombing Afghanistan because the Taliban have refused to give up bin Laden. The West did nothing to help the women of Afghanistan when the Taliban began locking them in their homes, taking away their jobs and their education, forcing them to shroud themselves from head to foot. Now the Western forces are planning the government Afghanistan should have when the job is done, when (if) the "carefully targeted" strikes destroy the Taliban. It must include "every key ethnic group", they say. What about the importance of having women included? Is anyone listening to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, women who have been fighting against religious fundamentalism for years, who say the Northern Alliance, now the favorite of the West, is as bad, or worse, than the Taliban? Many women I know, here and overseas, are frustrated and fearful because while it is men who are deciding the action, this conflict, on one level, is about a deep and atavistic hatred of women. You can see remnants in Australia of the religious dislike of women.
Surviving terrorist attacks
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