Sunday Stuff

Today is Sunday. In preparation for the coming week, I have been doing some reflecting.

Around This Tired Old World

I have joined with the people in Australia as they have remembered, mourned, and honored the estimated 209 lives lost to brush fires.

Last week I discovered RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) and became a committed supporter: 

My prayers are lifted for the families of the miners killed in the coal mine explosion in the Chinese province of Shanxi.

It’s all in the connotation: 

Wheels!

This arrived on Friday: 

I am still learning how to operate it, especially how to keep its wheels off my nosehose. 

Prophetic Cartoon Strip

This cartoon arrived in my email for Alex:

Yesterday the cartoon became prophetic. In the afternoon the snow began falling while my furball was outside cattin’ around. Out of my window, I saw Alex streaking across neighbors’ lawns toward our house as the snow fell around—and on—him. I was able to open the door just as Alex leaped on the porch. He continued running in his wildebeest stampeding mode into the house and leaped on my our desk. When I shuffled up to the desk, the wet furball jumped into my arms and cuddled until his fur was fairly dry. Then he leaped down and spent the next 20 or so minutes sitting on the furnace outlet and licking his coat. Silly cat! 

Personal

I do not look forward to the examination scheduled for me next Tuesday at the Veterans Administration Hospital:

Afghanistan: No Peace without Justice

Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)

If you are freedom-loving and anti-fundamentalist, you are with RAWA.

RAWA is the oldest political/social organization of Afghan women struggling for peace, freedom, democracy and women's rights in fundamentalism-blighted Afghanistan since 1977.

Afghanistan needs troops—but it needs troops of doctors, troops of teachers, troops of Peace Corps volunteers, and troops of farmers to go and replant the fruit orchards.
~ Kavita Ramdas, President and CEO of Global Fund for Women

I concur with the observation of Kavita Ramdas. Afghanistan is in need of doctors, teachers, and much more, primarily due to the United States abandoning the people of Afghanistan following their liberation from the oppression of the Taliban so that the Bush administration could enact its private vendetta against Saddam Hussein—does anyone remember him?—in Iraq.

The Taliban still exist and remain connected with the terrorists of Al-Qaida. From what I read, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda remain potent both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, always ready to impose their masculine subjection of women as if women were property with even fewer rights than animals: 

1- Complete ban on women's work outside the home, which also applies to female teachers, engineers and most professionals. Only a few female doctors and nurses were allowed to work in some hospitals in Kabul.

2- Complete ban on women's activity outside the home unless accompanied by a mahram (close male relative such as a father, brother or husband).

3- Ban on women dealing with male shopkeepers.

4- Ban on women being treated by male doctors.

5- Ban on women studying at schools, universities or any other educational institution

6- Requirement that women wear a long veil (Burqa), which covers them from head to toe.

7- Whipping, beating and verbal abuse of women not clothed in accordance with Taliban rules, or of women unaccompanied by a mahram.

8- Whipping of women in public for having non-covered ankles.

9- Public stoning of women accused of having sex outside marriage. (A number of lovers are stoned to death under this rule).

You can find many additions to the above list HERE.

Afghan Woman Being Prepared for Execution by Stoning

You may not agree, but here is my baseline: I consider myself a peacemaker; I do not like war. However, when appeasement results in oppression and injustice by such fanatics as the Taliban and Al-Qaida, then I believe the world has the obligation to protect and liberate the victims.

Therefore, I support the decision of President Barak Obama to increase our military presence in Afghanistan. We must no longer live in a world that turns its back on oppression and injustice.

I appreciate your comments on this post. 

Sentenced to Death

A 23-year-old Afghan reporter and college student has been sentenced to death for distributing a controversial article about Islamic treatment of women that he downloaded from the Internet:

Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh… a reporter for the daily Jahan-e Naw and a journalism student at Balkh University, was arrested Oct. 27 in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, an area where mullahs hold particular influence over law and cultural life.

His alleged offense was distributing to classmates a report, printed from a Web site, commenting on a Muslim woman's right to multiple marriages. The article, written in Farsi, which is close to the Dari language spoken in Afghanistan, questioned why men are allowed to have four spouses in Islam while women are denied the same right.

Without a lawyer to represent him, Kambakhsh was hustled Tuesday into a small hearing room where three judges and a prosecutor conducted a five-minute proceeding, according to his older brother.

He was then handed a piece of paper saying he had acted against Islam and should be executed, said the brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, who visited him in prison Wednesday night.

~The Washington Post, 25 January 2008: Read complete article HERE

For a more detailed report, click HERE

If I suffered from high blood pressure, steam would have been pouring from my ears when I heard this report of Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh’s “trial” and death sentence mourning on the BBC’s Reporting Religion. You may listen to what I heard by clicking HERE.


I am sick of the hatred, violence, prejudice, and injustice advanced by religious fundamentalism, no matter what the flavor—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, etc. I have written about fundamentalism and the menace of its zealots to the peace and justice of the world. I won’t repeat myself here, but if you want to read what I wrote back in 2005, click HERE.

More and more words and thoughts are coming under attack. It’s crazy! What if you were to print this post and share it with some friends, then a few months later the police knocked on your door, placed you under arrest, held you in prison for months, and then, after a five minute trial, sentenced you to death for sharing something that I had written?

Absurd, you say, it couldn’t happen. But it has happened and will happen again. And I can bitch, and moan, and complain about it because, at least at the moment, I have the freedom to do so in this blog. But even that freedom is not guaranteed.

So I must do something regarding in injustice perpetrated by these Islamic fundamentalists on this young man, Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh. I understand that at this only Afghan President Hamid Karzai can save his life. So I am writing and emailing the President of Afghanistan pleading for justice. Will you join me?

Official Website of Afghan President Hamid Karzai

Email address of President Hamid Karzai president@afghanistangov.org

Snail mail address of President Hamid Karzai:

President Hamid Karzai
Gul Khana Palace
Presidential Palace
Kabul, Afghanistan

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)