Michael Rubin writes:> Furthermore, Kabul was always more progressive and cosmopolitan than the rest of Afghanistan. For example, the Feminist Majority's "Stop Gender Apartheid" campaign still reports that women cannot leave their house unless accompanied by a close male relative. However, women in every city I visited walked around in pairs. <
Recently, I heard Sylvia Pujoli (sp?) on US National Public Radio reporting on the Afghan meetings in Bonn, where women were participating. I found it interesting that she referred to "Gender Apartheid" in a news story, not an editorial. Now I have no doubt that the Talibums treated women as bad as the Saudis or the Northern Alliance (US allies) do, if not worse (though I found little to disagree with in Rubin's article, based on a discussion I had with a reporter who's been to Afghanistan). But the question is why NPR would be editorializing in this way. Two reasons spring to mind:
(1) it's a feminist way of endorsing the Bush Killer Kowboy state's attack on Afghanistan; and
(2) it's an effort to leverage the Bush administration's official opposition to patriarchy in order to generalize the critique to other countries, e.g. Saudia Arabia.
The latter is progressive, but it's a real problem in that it's mixed up with the former.
Jim Devine