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A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 16, 2001
Mokhiber/Weissman
Kill,
Kill, Kill
November 15, 2001
George
Monbiot
Blasting
Our Way
Toward Peace
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens
Mind-Meld
and Hot Bodies
Steve
Perry
Afghan
Puzzle Palace
RAWA
We Do Not Accept
the Northern Alliance
November 14, 2001
Jensen/Mahajan
The
Press Must Press Harder on Afghanistan
David Vest
The Great Unificator
Harry
Browne
Preventing
Future Terrorism
November 13, 2001
Peter Mahoney
Veteran's
Day, 2001
Rep. Ron
Paul
Expanding
NATO
Is a Bad Idea
November 12, 2001
Robert Jensen
Goodbye to
All That...
Patriotism
Nancy
Oden
My
Day at the Airport
CounterPunch Wire
East Timor
10 Years
After the Massacre
C.G. Estabrook
Instead
of Terror
Alexander Cockburn
Wide World
of Torture
November 11, 2001
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
November 10, 2001
Grover Furr
Seeking an Opposition
to the Afghan War
Bruce
Kyle
Anatomy
of a Green Smear:
Backstabbing Nancy Oden
November 9, 2001
Karen Snell
Torture By
Proxy
John Troyer
A
New Kind of Activism
Tariq Ali
Q &
A About the War
Michael
Colby
Schoolgirl
Gets Booted
for Anti-war Views
November 8, 2001
Mokhiber/Weissman
The
Cipro Rip-Off
Mitchel Cohen
The Smear Campaign
Against Nancy Oden
Steve
Perry
American
Roulette
November 7, 2001
Bahour/Dahan
Placebo Peace
Plan
Tom Turnipseed
Bush
Gives Billions
to His Oil Buddies
Cockburn/St. Clair
Greens, Airports
and
National ID Cards
Dr. Susan
Block
Ayatollah
Asscroft
Brian J. Foley
Bombing Campaign
Not "Self-Defense" Under International Law
November 6, 2001
Mark Scaramella
Where's
That Red Cross Money Going
C.G. Estabrook
Our Torturers
Sheperd
Bliss
Scott
Nearing on War
Rep. Ron Paul
Underwriting
the Taliban
Tariq
Ali
The
General Who
Came to Dinner
Evan Ravitz
Stop the War
Through
Direct Democracy
Steve
Perry
Hunger
in Afghanistan
November 5, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
Living
in the Minefields
David Price
Terror
and Indigenous People
November 3, 2001
Declan McCullagh
Nancy Oden Interview
Daniel
Wolff
The
Memphis Blues Again
Mark Weisbrot
War on Civilians
Dave Marsh
How
the RIAA (and the FBI) Cheat Musicians
Robert Jensen
Speaking
Out Against
War on Campus
November 2, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Green
Party Leader Detained at Maine Airport; Prevented from Boarding
Any Plane
Alexander Cockburn
FBI Eyes
Torture
November 1, 2001
Dean Baker
Dying
for Patents
Sami Amarah
US Attempts
to Recruit
Russian Vets of Afghan War
Molly Secours
Where
Are the Voices of Reason? Let the Women
Be Heard
William Blum
Unleashing the
CIA
October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
the Poor,
Subsidize the Rich
Chris Clarke
Thank God
for Berkeley
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Days That
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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November 16,
2001
Here Are the Muslim Feminist Voices,
Mr. Rushdie!
By Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Salman Rushdie tells us in his Op-Ed essay in
the New York Times (Friday, Nov 2, 2001), that
"highly motivated organizations of Muslim men"-whom
he labels "Islamists"-have been "engaged over
the last 30 years or so in growing radical political movements"
all over the Islamic world, movements that have produced the
terrorists who not only destroyed the symbols of the freedom-loving
West and killed 6000 innocent people in the process on 9/11,
but who have been systematically destroying the very societies
of which they are a part, with much of their savage venom focused
on the female citizenry. In a parenthetical aside, Mr. Rushdie
sighs, "(oh, for the voices of Muslim women to be heard!)"
Well, I have news for Mr. Rushdie. Muslim
women have been speaking out against the obscurantist
Islam he decries in his essay, for years and years and years,
although clearly Mr. Rushdie, and many others, have not paid
them much heed. There are Muslim women who are feminists, theologians,
writers, lawyers, activists, scholars both in the "Islamist"
societies he paints with a broad brush, as well as in the "west,"
who have been engaged in a two-pronged struggle against both
Islamic extremism as well as-and this is where their difference
from Mr. Rushdie arises-the unjust foreign policies of the United
States that have contributed, and continue to contribute, to
the "hijacking" of Islam for terrorist ends.
Shall I name a few? Dr. Nawal El Saadawi
is one, a dear friend and my colleague these days at Montclair
State University, who has written over 20 novels exposing the
hypocrisy of Egypt's rulers in their cynical use and abuse of
Islam to whip up public support for their repressive policies
against free-thinking writers and intellectuals like herself.
For her criticism of Egyptian state repression (aided and abetted
by the foreign intervention of the United States), she got thrown
into jail by Anwar Sadat, a so-called anti-Islamist! She is currently
in self-imposed exile here after having suffered an attempt by
the Egyptian authorities last summer to have her declared a heretic,
a blasphemer against Islam and the holy Prophet.
But she--like her many counterparts all
over the Muslim world, such as Asma Jahangir of Pakistan, Fatema
Mernissi of Morocco, or the women of RAWA, the Revolutionary
Association of Women in Afghanistan, to name but a few--is not
willing, unlike Mr. Rushdie, to comprehend what happened on 9/11
merely in terms of Islam and its regressive politics of blame
directed at the West, and particularly at the United States.
In a conversation I had with her shortly after the attacks on
the WTC and Pentagon, she expressed the hope that the attacks,
devastating as they undoubtedly were, might, in the long run,
prompt the U.S. to rethink its foreign policy, particularly in
the Middle East.
While I think Rushdie is correct in asking
Muslim societies to look inward, to take "responsibility
for many of our own problems" so that we can then begin
to "solve them for ourselves," he is disingenuous in
implying that such "problems" can be "fixed"
in isolation from global politics and economics.
In an essay entitled, "At Critical
Crossroads," published in Dawn, the largest
circulating English-language daily of Pakistan , Asma Jahangir,
leading advocate of Human and Women's Rights and President of
the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, (who has herself had
to face innumerable death threats from "Islamists"
for her courageous defense of women victims of the most hideous
"crimes of honor"), writes from a"both/and"
perspective regarding the 9/11 catastrophe, in contradistinction
to Rushdie's univocal analysis. She observes that while the people
of Pakistan, familiar with acts of terrorism and their consequences,
have almost unanimously condemned the killing of innocent people
in New York and Washington, and that while "there can be
no justification for, nor rationale behind such acts," nevertheless,
such a terrible deed does call for reflection by the entire world
leadership.
Like Rushdie, she exhorts the "Muslim
world to correct its rhetoric against 'infidels' and promote
a culture of democracy and tolerance within their own countries,"
yet, she simultaneously-and in contradistinction to Rushdie-insists
that "The North needs to change its policies toward the
South." She goes on to tell us that while the majority of
Pakistanis do NOT support the Taliban regime, their lack of support
for them "is not because they respect the U.S.-whom they
closely associate with the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians-but
because there is growing resentment against domestic jihadi groups
and disrespect for the Taliban style of government." Should
her reporting of Pakistani sentiment against unjust Israeli policies
toward the Palestinians be read as evidence of Pakistani "anti-Semitism"
and "Islamic slander against Jews" as Rushdie seems
to suggest? That would hardly seem justified here.
What about the statements we have seen
in recent weeks from RAWA,
posted on the internet? In these, we are hearing the voices of
revolutionary Afghani women who have been speaking out against
the atrocities of the Taliban regime for the past twenty years
at grave risk to their own lives, yet, who has been listening?
In a statement that began circulating on September 14th, these
women express their "deep sorrow and condemnation for this
barbaric act of violence and terror" that was committed
against the innocent people of the United States, yet they also
wish to remind the world that, unfortunately, it was "the
government of the United States who supported Pakistani dictator
General Zia-ul-Haq in creating thousands of religious schools
from which the germs of the Taliban emerged." They also
point out that Osama Bin Laden had, at one time, been the "blue-eyed
boy of the CIA." What is scariest of all, perhaps is the
following observation, that "American politicians have not
drawn [sic] a lesson from their pro-fundamentalist policies in
our country and are still supporting this or that fundamentalist
band or leader."
They are, ofcourse, referring to the
U.S support of the so-called Northern Alliance, which, according
to a spokeswoman of RAW I heard just a few days ago at Judson
Memorial church in Greenwich Village, has committed worse atrocities
than even the Taliban, including the rape of 70 year old women.
Do all of these observations of the Revolutionary Women of Afghanistan
amount to an unfair and crippling "politics of blame"
against the U.S. as Rushdie would have it? And if so, what does
it mean that such a misguided view of world politics is held
and being propagated here NOT by fundamentalist "Islamists,"
but by their victims and staunchest critics, the ordinary Muslim
(not Islamist) women of Afghanistan?
Perhaps we should consider carefully
the bone-chilling consequences foreshadowed by RAWA in the following
statement: "The U.S. government should consider the root
cause of this terrible event, which has not been the first, and
will not be the last one too." Perhaps we should read this
statement juxtaposed next to a statement issued by the Joint
Action Committee for Citizens Rights and Peace, a committee comprised
of the Institute of Women's Studies , Lahore (IWSL), as well
as several other women's groups and NGOs in Pakistan, and issued
on October 3rd, 2001.
"Civilization," note the JAC
members, "is not synonymous with capitalism or global political
and economic power." Hence, the members of this coalition
committee strongly believe that forms other than the use of violence
can, and must, be worked out for conflict resolution, and they
are therefore, unequivocally (like RAWA), against the U.S waging
war on the innocent people of Afghanistan.
They are quick to point out that in the
current crisis in which the world finds itself, America has played
no small role, to say the least; such an analysis leads them
to the inevitable conclusion that echoes RAWA's warning:
In this context the international community
must note the resentment generated by insensitive and unjust
policies of the United States, particularly in their unconditional
support to the aggressive policies of Israel towards the people
of Palestine and in their sustained campaign against the people
of Iraq. It should be remembered that much of the terrorism in
Afghanistan and Pakistan stems from international interventions
in the region including by the United States for its own political
ends in which Osama Bin Laden himself was originally an ally
of the U.S.
Lest we be led into agreeing with Rushdie's
thesis that such an analysis smacks of a "paranoic"
Islamism that wishes to "blame all its troubles on the West
and, in particular, the United States," we would do well
to remind ourselves that the statement was issued by largely
secular, certainly anti-Islamist women's groups and NGOs of Pakistan,
who make explicitly clear that they have, in keeping with the
"both/and" imperative I referred to earlier, "persistently
called upon the authorities in Pakistan to take a firm stand
against those groups that have promoted violence, sectarianism,
and extremism in our country."
Thus, it is indeed possible, I would
say crucially important, to comprehend the current world crisis
not in a simplistic way as "this is about Islam" or
"no it is not about Islam," but in the complex ways
that the women of the Muslim world have been seeing and describing
it even before T-Day 9/11. The world should listen to these voices,
the female voices allied with the "secularist-humanist principles"
Rushdie seems to think don't exist in the Islamic world.
Fawzia Afzal-Khan is a professor in the Department of English
at Montclair State University.
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