I Now Pronounce You Horrifically Beaten, Abused and Disfigured

YouTube: Uploaded by YouCruising on Dec 31, 2011

A video given to the BBC shows the extent of the injuries suffered by a 15 year-old Afghan child bride who was locked up and tortured by her husband.

The girl was left starving after being detained by him and his family for several months.

The case came to light this week when police rescued the teenager, Sahar Gul, who had been locked up in the basement of her in-laws' house.

Police say that she had had her nails and clumps of hair pulled out.

In addition they say she had chunks of flesh cut out with pliers.

Sahar Gul was married off to a 30-year-old man around seven months ago, when she was just 14 years old. Her parents contacted police after not being able to see her for several months.

She was rescued from a dark, windowless room in her in-laws' house, according to Baghlan police official Jawid Basharat.

In the video, as Sahar is taken to hospital in a wheelchair, she is asked who beat her. She names her father-in-law, her husband, her sister-in-law, her brother-in-law and her mother-in-law. The 15-year-old says her hair and her nails were pulled out by her mother-in-law.

The authorities in the northern Baghlan province said they were aware of reports that the girl was tortured after she refused to be forced into prostitution, but could not confirm that was the case.

Rahima Zarifi, director of the Women's Affairs Department in Baghlan, said Sahar had been severely tortured, both physically and mentally, and that the psychological scars were likely to endure.

The police have managed to arrest Sahar's in-laws, but her husband had already fled.

Women in many parts of Afghanistan continue to suffer domestic abuse, often at the hands of their own family or in-laws.

Human rights activists worry that the plight of many women here, especially in rural areas, is being sidelined as the international community focuses on its military drawdown, and puts less emphasis and less pressure on the Afghan authorities over human rights.

In the second quarter of this year alone, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission registered 1,026 cases of violence against women, compared with a total last year of 2,700.

Those are only the cases that come to light.

Under Afghan law, the earliest age for marriage for girls is 16. However, almost half of Afghan women are married when they are younger.

For The Sake Of The Children, We Should Stay Together

Woman Set To Marry Her Rapist

EMIRATES24/7

AFGHANISTAN: A woman in Afghanistan, jailed for adultery after being raped and then pardoned and set free, sees herself forced to marry her attacker after her brothers are threatening to kill her and she has nowhere else to go.

Gulnaz, who does not know her exact age but is 20 or 21, has told her story in a quiet voice with her blue burqa pushed up over her face, as her baby daughter, the child of her rapist, played on the floor at her feet.

She has told the French newsagency AFP she will have to marry the man as she needs a father for her child and to give both of them a home.

The woman says she no other place to live as her brothers have vowed to kill her, her attacker and her daughter.

Gulnaz was freed from prison on Tuesday, two years after she was jailed for a so-called moral crime, being raped by her cousin's husband.

Pakistan Attacked NATO and Afghanistan then Received Ass Kicking

Afghans Say Pakistan Fired First in NATO Attack

Wall Street Journal
NATO and Afghan forces on a nighttime operation Saturday came under fire from across the Pakistan border before they called in a deadly airstrike on two Pakistani military posts, leaving U.S. relations with Pakistan in tatters, according to Afghan and Western officials' version of events.

Pakistan's army reacted angrily, calling the "unprovoked" raid on the border posts an "irresponsible act." The military denied firing on NATO forces and questioned why the coalition undertook a sustained two-hour attack on well-known border positions, involving helicopters and fighter jets, which left 25 soldiers dead and another 25 injured. More Here

Grope Me ... Feel Me ... Touch Me: Islam Forbids Sexual Harassment

NY Times
November 22, 2011, 1:00 PM

Women Take a Stand in Kabul

By NOORJAHAN AKBAR

BBC PersianParticipants marched against the widespread public sexual harassment of women on the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, last July. The protest was spearheaded by Noorjahan Akbar, a young woman currently studying in Pennsylvania, and the co-founder of Young Women for Change, an organization advocating against sexual discrimination and inequality in Afghanistan.

I was nervous when I woke up on July 14, 2011. The signs were ready, the pamphlets and flyers printed, and my attire for the day picked. I had received calls from the police, confirming that they would send us 10 officers for security. Media was informed and women’s organizations contacted. Everything was ready, but I was nervous.

Women’s protests and walks are very rare in Afghanistan and this was the first time I had organized one. I wanted to raise awareness about sexual street harassment and identify it as a problem, in a country where most Afghans either deny the existence of it or blame it on the women.

Every woman I know, whether she wears a burqa or simply dresses conservatively, has told me stories of being harassed in Afghanistan. The harassment ranges from comments on appearance to groping and pushing. Even my mother, who is a 40-plus teacher always dressed in her school uniform, arrives home upset almost every day because of the disgusting comments she receives, sometimes from youth half her age and sometimes from white-bearded men who sit by the roads. Only three days before the walk, I was groped in front of the orphanage where I taught creative writing.

Enraged, I called my mother and told her that I no longer wanted to teach. Once I started planning the walk, however, I took that rash statement back.

On the day of the march, we met in front of a restaurant. For some reason that is still unclear to me, the manager of the restaurant had refused to allow us in, so we took refuge in the Afghan Culture House, a center owned by a woman. There were about 25 of us. The meeting was brief and emotional followed by hugs and good wishes.

Moments later we were in front of Kabul University, where we started the walk, and were joined by an additional 25 people. Soon the 50-plus marchers and supporters were surrounded by Afghan and international news. After a few interviews, we began walking towards the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. While we passed out flyers, talked to the police and supporters, and directed members of the media, an incredible feeling of empowerment and hope took over me. In the faces of my companions, I read hope, pride and solidarity. I was amazed at how everything happened so quickly. It had been less than two months since Young Women for Change had held its first meeting.

I had not even dreamed of this day when in May 2011 my friend, Anita Haidary, and I announced on Facebook that we were organizing a meeting on May 25 in Kabul to discuss sexual discrimination and gender inequality. We expected no more than 15 guests, but more than 75 women of different ages, ethnicities and backgrounds showed up. Over 10 Afghan and Afghan-American women in Washington D.C. attended via Skype. This organizational meeting was followed by many more.

During this process, we had to fight hopelessness when the police forbid us from meeting at Kabul University because they “did not want women making problems for them.” We had to persevere when we faced humiliation, harassment and insults as we tried to establish YWC as a non-profit. We had to remain strong and just smile, every time we were asked with disbelief and a smirk: “but you are too young and you are all women; how will you run an organization?” In addition to all that, we had to continue dreaming and planning even when only one or two women came to a meeting.

Eventually, we formed Young Women for Change, an organization commited to working for gender equality. We first decided to focus on a problem we all faced: street harassment. We designed a campaign that included posters, flyers, radio spots, social media, televised interviews and debates, and the first-ever walk against street harassment of women.

Soon we were writing slogans like “Islam and the law forbid the harassment of women,” “I have the right to walk in my city safely,” “these streets belong to me too,” “I will not keep silent the next time you insult me,” and many more. Next thing we knew we were marching down the street, accompanied by a supportive group of men as well as by members of the police and media. I was no longer nervous. I was proud.

Thursday, July 14, 2011 was the first day I felt like I belonged to the city I have lived in for most of my life. I realized that the women who were walking in their high heels and headscarves–as well as their male supporters–had so much strength and power waiting to be unleashed, and it made me so proud to be among them.

Despite Afghanistan’s history of war, and its news filled with suicide attacks, violence, Talibanism and corruption, I had found something to be proud of in my country. This was the moment I fell in love with Afghanistan.

Since then, YWC has been able to gain non-profit status, form a male advocacy group, organize monthly lectures on issues regarding gender and women’s studies, collect books to build libraries in Kabul and Helmand, and begin conducting research on street harassment in Kabul, thanks to a new grant. During this journey, my love for Afghanistan and its people has increased tremendously. It is not that I did not love my homeland before; but when I saw the ability and the motivation to form a grass-roots feminist movement in Afghanistan, it inspired me so much that I knew I would never be able to abandon it.

Yonus EntezarNoorjahan Akbar, the co-founder of Young Women for Change, an organization advocating against sexual discrimination and inequality in Afghanistan.

Noorjahan Akbar, 20, is the co-founder ofYoung Women for Change, an organization advocating against sexual discrimination and inequality in Afghanistan. She has been working for women and children since she was 12 and started a radio show that focused on teenagers in Afghanistan.

Noorjahan has also researched Afghan women’s folkloric music, translated a collection of short stories for Afghan children and held creative writing classes in orphanages. She is currently a student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

www.facebook.com/ywc.af

Nail Islamists From Afar

The Herald Sun

WE have lost lives pointlessly combating Islamists on the ground in their own miserable lands. The West is smarter than that. Let's kill them from a safer distance.

Samuel Huntington died three years ago, and we still debate his idea that after the collapse of Communism, the world began splitting along cultural rather than ideological lines.

The eminent political scientist first collected his thoughts together as a provocative essay in 1993 published by Foreign Affairs magazine titled The Clash of Civilisations?

He was more certain of his ideas when expanding on them for a book three years later: The question mark had gone.

Eight years before the World Trade Centre was levelled by 19 Islamic terrorists dedicating their handiwork to the greatness of their god, Huntington saw future conflict arising from such cultural tensions and by lunchtime on September 11 many of those who remembered reading his theory thought he had seen the future clearer than Nostradamus.

But like the infamously vague and fraudulent French seer, Huntington's ideas have less purchase the further we move from 1993.

Early on the public enthusiastically took to Huntington's ideas, notwithstanding the flight of intellectuals. But components of his arguments seem profoundly correct, even if it is possible that their embrace might make them self-fulfilling, particularly the existential fight that significant parts of Islam imagine they are having with the West.

The West is not at war with Islam. We have launched a War on Terror, and the targeted terrorists are mostly Muslims, and we should kill them.

You can't negotiate with an extremist quoting the Koran as the reason he must murder your family.

We must kill him. Or her.

Nor can we negotiate with the mums and dads taking pride in their children strapping explosives to themselves to kill strangers in public places because they are envious of the fruits of advanced Western notions of democracy, education and equality.

Neither will we negotiate with those among us - right here in suburban Australia - who wish for sharia law and other sixth century accoutrements of the more primitive brand of Islam that have taken deadly hold elsewhere.

Australia is part of the arm wrestle against Islam's extremists and has troops on the ground trying to kill the Taliban in Afghanistan. More Here

Wedding party killed in Afghan roadside bombing

ABC News

Afghan president Hamid Karzai has condemned the killing of eight civilians in a roadside bombing in eastern Afghanistan.

A car carrying a bride, a groom and his relatives struck the roadside bomb in the eastern province of Laghman.

The groom, a woman and a child were among the dead.

The explosion happened in the Alingar district as the family members were returning from a wedding party.

Commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, has also condemned the bombing, saying the Taliban do not care about the Afghan people.

He says it was a sad example of the insurgency's absolute lack of respect for civilian life.

The latest attack took place as more than 2,000 tribal, religious and political leaders from across the country prepare to travel to Kabul to attend a traditional meeting, known as a Loya Jirga.

Delegates will discuss plans for a military and strategic pact with the United States.

Last week, Taliban leader Mullah Omar released a statement urging his fighters to reduce civilian casualties and warned of punishments for those who fail to obey his order.

Afghanistan: Mother and daughter stoned to death for adultery

Afghanistan: Mother and daughter stoned to death for adultery

Big News

AsiaNews has reported the stoning of two women, a mother and daughter, both accused of adultery.

According to the organisation, the two were killed Thursday in Ghazni, 138 kikometres southeast of Kabul, only a few hundreds metres from government offices.

Sources told AsiaNews that a group of armed men entered the house where the young widow lived with her daughter.

After accusing them of adultery, they were taken out of the house and stoned before being shot dead.

Despite the sound of screams and gunshots, it appears authorities were not immediately contacted by friends or neighbours.

Officials have said a number of religious leaders in the city have been issuing fatwas, a part of sharia law, asking people to report any one who has allegedly been "involved in adultery". 

Digital Journal

Ghazni - Taliban gunmen stoned and then shot to death an Afghan mother and daughter they accused of "moral deviation and adultery." The killing happened in the Khawaja Hakim area of Ghazni city on Thursday.

Afghan authorities have arrested two men in connection with the incident.

BBC reports that Afghan officials say Taliban gunmen broke into the house in which the woman and her daughter lived and took them out to the yard where they stoned and shot them to death. Afghan authorities, however, blamed neighbors for not informing the authorities as soon as the incident happened. People in the neighborhood who heard shots said they were too afraid to go out.

A neighbor of the women identified as Rahimullah, said:

"When the women in the neighborhood washed the bodies of the killed women, they saw signs of stoning, and the doctors at the local hospital also confirmed to us."

BBC reports that the attack was carried out only 300 meters from the governor's office in Ghazni city. BBC correspondent in Kabul Bilal Sarwary, confirmed that the incident happened in a part of the city close to the governor's office, the police chief's office and the office of the Provincial Reconstruction Team. According to BBC, there are 18 districts in Ghazni, out of which only seven are in government control.

Ghazni provincial police chief Zilawar Zahid, however, denied the story that the women were stoned to death. He told reporters that the gunmen entered the house and killed the women inside.

Daily Mail says local religious clerics are issuing fatwas and asking people to report cases of "adultery." BBC reports that the Taliban impose their strict version of Sharia law over the areas under their control. They ban girls from attending school, they have banned joint weddings, banned mobile phones, video cameras and music. Only the Taliban radio is allowed to operate. Drivers are regularly beaten in the streets. Afghan government officials are arrested and imprisoned, with some having been executed by beheading.

Daily Mail reports a gruesome incident of stoning to death caught on video which happened in the Dashte Archi district of Kunduz early in the year. The video showed Taliban fighters stoning a couple to death in northern Afghanistan on the allegation that the couple committed adultery.

The Taliban have no apologies for perpetuating, in the Twenty First century, medieval notions of law and justice. A Taliban spokesman, according to Daily Mail, defended the custom of stoning "adulterers" to death:

"Anyone who knows about Islam knows that stoning is in the Koran, and that it is Islamic law.There are people who call it inhuman - but in doing so they insult the Prophet. They want to bring foreign thinking to this country."

Double Crossers ... Pakistan

Secret Pakistan: Double Cross

In May this year, US Special Forces shot and killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Publicly Pakistan is one of America's closest allies - yet every step of the operation was kept secret from it.

Filmed largely in Pakistan and Afghanistan, this two-part documentary series explores how a supposed ally stands accused by top CIA officers and Western diplomats of causing the deaths of thousands of coalition soldiers in Afghanistan. It is a charge denied by Pakistan's military establishment, but the documentary makers meet serving Taliban commanders who describe the support they get from Pakistan in terms of weapons, training and a place to hide.

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The Vanishing Little Star of Bethlehem

Human Events

News coming out of the Middle-East in the last few months has focused on two principal areas: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the so-called “Arab Spring”. The headlines have been restricted to these two topics. Buried deep within the bodies of such prestigious papers as the New YorkTimes, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, if covered at all, are stories of the on-going destruction and persecution of millennia-old Christian communities within the cradle of Christianity: the Middle-East. The phenomenon is not exactly new; it’s been going on for decades if not centuries, but the growth and spread of Islamic fundamentalism within the last decade and the overthrow of Western-oriented Arab dictatorships has set in motion a rising tide of anti-Christian behavior that threatens to wipe out Christianity in the Middle-East in what amounts to a repetition of what has occurred to Jewish communities throughout Islamic nations within the past six decades since the creation of the Jewish State of Israel.

Five nations that demonstrate the ongoing obliteration of Christianity in the region will serve to illustrate the point: Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iran. 

We start with Egypt, a nation of eighty million with a 10 % minority population of eight million Coptic Christians. The Coptic Church is one of the world’s oldest, and its appearance in Egypt precedes Islam by at least half a millennium. Earlier this past month, Copts throughout Egypt organized demonstrations to protest the fire-bombing of a church in upper Egypt the prior week, as well as one  back in mid-March, and the on-going campaign of harassment by Islamists in the region. At the October 9, 2011 demonstration in front of the Maspero district headquarters of the national television network, attended by a reported figure of 10,000 Copts,  the Egyptian army opened fire with live ammunition, killing Copts indiscriminately. Then armored military vehicles appeared driving into the crowds randomly, causing widespread mayhem. Final tally: 24 dead and over 300 wounded. The on-going Islamist attacks against the Copts are causing many to consider seeking refuge in the West.

Let’s move on to Iraq. Twenty years ago, Iraq’s Christian community numbered over a million members. A decade ago, out of a total population of almost 24 million, 850,000 identified as Christians. Today, with a population of 30.7 million, the Christian population appears to be less than 335,000. What has happened? Although the new Iraqi constitution guarantees freedom of religion, there is no provision in the Iraqi system for those that wish to convert, especially if it is from Islam to Christianity. And radical Islam has been launching attacks on Christian Iraqis ever since 

Saddam Hussein’s ouster. This past year has seen the level of violence increase, starting with last year’s al-Qaeda attack on Our Lady of Deliverance Syrian Catholic Church in Baghdad which left 52 dead. Anti-Christian persecution continues, unabated.

In Afghanistan, along with the country being virtually “Judenfrei” or “Judenrein”, it is now free of any overt symbol of Christianity with the destruction of the last remaining church in March 2010. The U.S. State Department’s recently released report on religious freedom indicates that the small native Christian population feels tremendous pressure to remain out of sight, and the case of the Moslem who converted to Christianity and was nearly executed under Afghanistan’s Sharia law for Islamic apostasy demonstrates that freedom of conscience does not exist in present day Afghanistan despite the presence of American and NATO forces in that country for a decade. 

When we turn to the Palestinian Territories, we are looking at the birthplace of Christianity. To see this two millennia community threatened with disappearance must be gut-wrenching for devout Christians. But like it or not, the Christian Arab population of the Holy Land faces the threat of extinction. The causes are many, but explosive Muslim birth rates compared with bare replacement rates among Arab Christians have caused the Christian percentage of the Palestinian Territories to diminish sharply. In actuality, the Palestinian Christian population has increased in the past forty-four years from 42,494 in 1967 to slightly more than 50,000 today. However, because of the changing percentage ratios of Christians to Muslims in the greater Bethlehem area—a region traditionally associated with very high percentages of Christian populations (70-95%)—the decreases to 28-60% appear as precipitous declines. More Here