Scum
This upsets me so much I can hardly see straight – the head of Kandahar’s department of crimes against women murdered on her way to work. Bastards, bastards, bastards.
Taleban rebels, who banned women from joining the police when they were in power, said they had carried out the shooting. “We killed Malalai Kakar,” a Taleban spokesman told AFP news agency. “She was our target, and we successfully eliminated our target.”
Well aren’t you clever. That’s a real accomplishment, isn’t it – you had guns, and so you were able to shoot someone to death. Guess what – anybody can do that. It’s easy, it’s cheap, it’s cowardly; anybody can do it. But it’s only low-life thuggish bullying chickenshit scum who want to do it. People like you. People who want to make crimes against women into sacred rites. People who want to turn all of life into blank meaningless obedient hell on earth. People who want to destroy everything any good and replace it with their horrible murderous oppressive mindless death-loving gun-toting masculinist selves. Scum. I hope Allah appears to you in your dreams and tells you what loathsome shits you are and you wake up just long enough to cut your own heads off.
Exactly. Which is why they do it. Bastards bastards bastards.
Maybe you could do something in the main page of B & W to remember Malalai
Kakar and other murdered women. A memorial section or something like that. It doesn’t bring people back to life, but mourning is a way of paying tribute (if that is the right expression) to the dead. I know that it’s a sensitive subject.
That’s an idea. Rather like that photo montage that Joanne has at Campaign Against Honour Killing – which makes reading the main page a painful process, but then that’s as it should be. I can’t do anything (or rather ask Jeremy to do anything) right now, but maybe later.
We can’t bring her back to life but we can damn well keep the memory of what happened to her on the front burner.
Miserable bastards.
Fucking hell.
I like the idea of a memorial section to the heroines martyred (what other word is there for it?) for the cause of their own humanity. If only to remind us of the sheer numbers while still putting faces and names to the statistics.
It really annoys me that stuff like this makes me wish for an indiscriminate carpet bombing of these cultures. I hate the primal feelings of rage and retribution that well up inside me when I read stories like this.
Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I met a Taliban member face to face and had his fate in my hands. I really hope my inner savage would be overruled by my modern system of ethics.
…and, you know, today I just had to read a paper by a defender of FGM complaining about how Western feminists are being hegemonic in how they oppose it, how asylum sets up a false dichotomy of victims-saviors-savages (how is a tripartite category a dichotomy? don’t ask), how they portray all Africans as misogynist, how Waris Dirie is a tool of the white man, etc.
In the like of Kakar’s killing this was all the more infuriating. Especially since the writer was talking about how women are “constructed,” i.e. how they are portrayed and framed in Western media—and she was discussing this like it was on par with questions of how they are treated. In other words, in response to feminist arguments against FGM, she’d say “but that argument makes African women LOOK like victims!” She had one or two valid points about the portrayal of Africa in western media, but that’s orthogonal to the question of offering asylum to someone fleeing mutilation, no?
My rambly comment has a point, which is simply this: with stuff like Kakar’s murder going on, what does it say that academic feminists are focusing so heavily on the representational aspects of the debates on global women’s rights?
“She was our target, and we successfully eliminated our target.”
This sentence, alone, surely sums up the sheer arrogance of the taliban.
How gleeful it is indeed – of a job well done!
“Kandahar is a key battleground of the Taleban insurgency,”
Yeah, I recently saw a programme on the box regarding life in Kandahar – and the only women in sight were those who were sitting like dogs on mats, waiting for their taliban masters.
with stuff like Kakar’s murder going on, what does it say that academic feminists are focusing so heavily on the representational aspects of the debates on global women’s rights?
That angers me, too. Post-imperial middle-class guilt-tripping, rather than engaging with real problems. It reminds me of when I was on the committee of the student branch of Amnesty at my old university. At committee meetings, sometimes very little was done because two other committee members spent more time worrying about using ‘gender inclusive’ and ‘politically correct’ (the first time I had heard the phrase, c. 1988-90) language in newsletters to members than about the prisoners…
Yes, there’s a bit about that in chapter 4 of this forthcoming book.
Yeah, I mean, I have a high tolerance for political correctness in general and I do see its value, but when it conflicts with actual results then we’ve got a problem.