TIME Magazine Doesn't Give a Rat's Ass about Women's Rights in Afghanistan

In the Spring of 1978, Afghan minister of social Affairs, Anahita Ratebzad, wrote, "Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country … Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention." Soon afterward, the United States spent about a billion dollars to help keep her vision from coming to light.

Anahita Ratebzad was one of the founders of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan. It was socialist, anti-clerical, anti-multi-national, and very pro-education. During its brief ascendance, the upward trajectory of women's rights in Afghanistan reached its peak, only to rapidly decline as the battle between Soviet forces and their puppet Afghan government on one side, and covert U.S. forces and resurgent Muslim fundamentalism on the other side, ended in chaos. From that chaos emerged the Taliban.

The United States, in backing the fundamentalist Mujahidin, spent about a billion dollars to defeat the only regime in Afghan history that mandated equal educational rights for Afghan women.

One might hope that TIME Magazine, in an article on the plight of Afghan women, might make a passing reference to Anahita Ratebzad. It might have added depth to their incredibly shallow article, had they considered interviewing Ratebzad, who is 80, and from what I can tell, still alive.

The only reference by TIME Magazine to Ms. Ratebzad dates back to the time of Charlie Wilson's War, which Time applauded, in a hit piece on the puppet government of Babrak Karmal:

Karmal, a 50-year-old bachelor, went into hiding with other members of the Parcham group. Among them was his longtime mistress, Anahita Ratebzad, who had been packed off as Ambassador to Yugoslavia.

Most references to the relationship between Karmal and Ratebzad are more kind, calling them "lovers" or "longtime companion[s]." TIME, whose love of Charlie Wilson's War extended to their review of the Tom Hanks-Julia Roberts movie, giving the slick propaganda production a 1,100-word review. Some of TIME's praise for this bio-pic about the guy who thwarted the movement for women's rights in Afghanistan:

The result, Charlie Wilson's War, is that seemingly impossible object these days: a picture about war and politics that has manages to be both rational and inspirational. It is also the year's funniest smart movie.

The December 2007 review by Richard Corliss, as lame as it is in some ways, is actually less shallow than this coming week's cover story there, by Aryn Baker.

Most criticism of TIME on the story so far has been in their choice of a cover, showing a young Afghani woman who has been awfully mutilated by the Taliban for her leaving an abusive home environment.

More importantly, though, are articles critical of the viewpoint of the article itself. Here at The Seminal, Derrick Crowe's brutal analysis of TIME's misrepresentation of the real situation in Afghanistan merits wide note. For instance:

This is something that folks who put together TIME’s cover better understand right now: the fox is already in the hen-house. There is a very powerful set of anti-women’s-equality caucuses already nested within the Afghan government that the U.S. supports. These individuals and groups are working to reassert the official misogyny of the Taliban days already, independent of the reconciliation and reintegration process. Given the opportunity, these individuals and groups in the U.S.-backed government will manipulate the reconciliation and reintegration process and leverage armed-opposition-group participation in the process to push through policies they’d prefer already as compromises with their "opponents." This is why the propaganda of TIME’s cover is so pernicious: the women of Afghanistan are caught in a vice already, stuck between their opponents in the insurgency and in the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. If one is concerned about the rights of women in Afghanistan, the question is, how do we give women the most leverage possible in this situation?

The post-invasion erosion of women's rights in Iraq was, along with the dispossession of almost 100% of Iraqi Christians, one of our salient failures there. Before our invasion, women in Iraq were more highly educated than in any other Middle Eastern nation but Israel. Christians there had an important role in government, politics and civil administration (as did women). Though the U.S. Government purports to care about this, they are lying.

Afghanistan is even worse. TIME magazine's disgustingly meretricious story on this is so shallowly dishonest, it may even evoke a favorable tweet from Sarah Palin.

More Late July Pictures from the House by the Lake

A water lily on Neklason Lake


Corn in the garden. It needs some warmer weather.


Cherokee Purple tomatoes


Peas, Green beans and potato box #2. The green beans need a LOT more sun and heat.


Campanula


Sedum Spurium

Arson - Updated X 2

From Bent Alaska:

The Anchorage Fire Department has concluded [note - see update] that someone deliberately burned down a Gay Pride Float two days before it would appear in the city's 4th of July parade. The fire also destroyed the garage and damaged the house of Ken and Paula Butner, allies who kept the Imperial Court's float in a car tent in front of the garage. Their daughter was awakened around 5:30 a.m. on July 2 by the sound of paint cans exploding outside her window, and she woke the rest of the family. Luckily, no one was injured.

Jesse Griffin, at The Immoral Minority, writes:

Gee I wonder which church this arsonist attends? Well okay to be fair, there is no evidence that this asshole attended the Anchorage Baptist Temple. But you just know that a cheer went up when they learned that this float went up in flames, and that their hate filled rhetoric certainly laid the groundwork for this kind of assault.

Neither the Anchorage Daily News nor the Alaska Dispatch seem to have covered the issue of the damage to this float yet, at least with their own reporters. But if and when they get around to it, there was a probable witness to the arson. Hopefully, the witness can take a look through these pictures for a possible clue:
I'm not saying that any of these people had anything to do with the arson. But one never knows.

Here are links to more photos from the June 2009 pro- and anti-Proposition 64 demonstrations in Anchorage. The probability that one of the images shows the perp is more than marginal:

The Mudflats

Progressive Alaska

Progressive Alaska

Henkimaa

Winston's Mom

Anchorage Daily News

There will be a fundraiser to help pay for the damages:

A fund was set up to help the Butners repair their home and rebuild their garage, with security cameras and a big enough garage to store the float inside. A fundraising dinner has been announced for August 14 to replace the destroyed float equipment.

"Insurance will not cover the sound equipment belonging to Daphne Do All LaChores, emcee of Drag Queen Bingo and PrideFest Parade announcer," wrote Phyllis of Identity, Inc.

Hence, a fundrai$er to replace the equipment—a spaghetti feed with salad on:


Saturday afternoon, August 14, 2010, from 1:00 to 5:00 pm at Guido's, 549 W. International Road. Tickets $10.00 per person, $5.00 under 10 years old. $5.50 of every adult ticket sold will go to Daph. There will also be a 50/50 split the pot and silent auction to raise funds for the equipment.

Update - 12:10 p.m: According to Linda Kellen Biegel, the Anchorage Fire Department has not made the arson determination. It was insurance company investigators. The AFD is still working on their evidence. Linda will have a report on this today at The Mudflats.

Update - 3:00 p.m. Friday: Here's a link to Linda's article on this at The Mudflats. And there's a new article at Bent Alaska. Both ask for, as does this article, help for the Anchorage Fire Department, from anyone who might be able to shed light on this.

top image - Celtic Diva; other images - PA

Ethnic Cleansing of a Bedouin Village in Israel.

First of all, to quote a commenter at a blog covering this action:

Arab citizens of Israel have full equality and human rights and they can build houses in Jerusalem and eat cherry tomatoes and are not discriminated against at all and anyone who says otherwise is an anti-Semite.

Now that that is taken care of, the ethnic cleansing operation. The people whose village is being razed, are Israeli citizens:




More coverage:

Promised Land

The Guardian

Mondoweiss

For AKM and Shannyn

Jeanne and Shannyn don't allow people or cartoon characters to talk like this on their blogs, but it is about a Teabagger that accidentally shows up for Netroots Nation, where AKM and Shannyn spent last week:


hat tip - Howie Klein

Blue America 2010 Ad

Blue America, which helped raise about $70,000 for Mark Begich in 2008, but has pretty much disowned him now, created this ad - the first of several coming out:

How Much Dispersant Is Being Put into the Gulf of Mexico - and Where?

Apparently, the coordinates given in this video are from a "rig [that] was toppled by Hurricane Ivan some 6 years ago. It still leaks today enough to create a plume 10 miles long." Along with several reports of leaks on the ocean floor from the same basin into which BP was tapping in the blown out rig in April, we need to ask "How many drill holes leak?"

We need to question whether or not the application of these dispersants was more commonplace than is generally acknowledged before the late April BP rig blowout. With thousands of capped off wells out there, some reported to be leaking unknown quantities of oil, should we have a right to know whether or not the amount applied, mixed with the oil it is meant to hide, is more than we might have assumed?

NOAA and the USCG need to be more active in protecting our interests, less involved in protecting those of a foreign-owned oil company with a criminal record as long as the slimy trail of this slick.

British Prime Minister Calls Gaza a "Prison Camp"

This is unprecedented. For one thing, Tony Blair, who is now Middle East envoy for the "Quartet" (the United Nations, European Union, United States, and Russia) has never been so critical of the results of Israeli foreign policy. Cameron knows Blair is under a lot of heat right now, with the possibility of a renewed, more thorough, opposition-led inquiry into what was probably the murder of Dr. David Kelly by British intelligence on July 18, 2003. Chances are that Blair knew about it, and may be brought in to testify in any inquiry.

Cameron's statements, made in Turkey, will be denounced by somebody in Avigdor Lieberman's Foreign Office, but Prime Minister David Cameron, in his statements, has tread new territory. Israel's ambassador to the UK said today, "The people of Gaza are the prisoners of the terrorist organisation Hamas. The situation in Gaza is the direct result of Hamas's rule and priorities."

So far, though, there has been no statement released by the Israeli Foreign Office.

The Washington Post's Jackson Diehl has condemned Cameron, calling Cameron's statements "pandering at Israel's expense."

Apparently, Cameron made the same or a very similar statement in The House of Commons recently:

Cameron defended himself later at a press conference with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister. "My description of Gaza is something I said in the House of Commons several weeks ago. Perhaps this is final proof that if you want to keep something completely secret you should announce it in the House of Commons." A No 10 source added: "This is not an elevation of the rhetoric. This is equivalent language."

Closer Comparisons Between the Pentagon Papers and the Wikileaks Documents

Hundreds of commentators, thousands of bloggers, are already making comparisons between the Wikileaks Afghanistan documents and the Pentagon Papers Vietnam documents from 39 years, 11 months ago.

I was working in radio news, public affairs and arts broadcasting in Seattle (KRAB-FM) when the Pentagon Papers came out. My story, picked up by the fledgeling NPR, was crafted around interviewing stodgy guys dressed in suits, as they came out of what was then the largest building in Seattle, the Seafirst Building (now known as Safeco Plaza), carrying folded up newspapers under their arms. I asked them if they had read anything about the leaked documents, and if they had, I asked for impressions.

Shortly afterward, Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel first came to my attention, as he began reading from the Pentagon Papers on the Senate floor, during a filibuster.

A lot of people active in liberal and progressive politics now weren't even alive in June, 1971, so this diary will make a few comparisons between the Pentagon Papers and their reception, and the emerging Wikileaks story. I'll use Youtubes to do a lot of the illustrating.

Here's a nifty mini-documentary on the Pentagon Papers, prepared by the New York Theatre Workshop early this year, for their production of the play, Top Secret:

The Supreme Court heard the case on June 26th, 1971. On June 29th, Sen. Mike Gravel (Dem - Alaska), read extensively from the Papers on the Senate floor. Here is his recollection, from a Democracy Now episode on July 2nd, 2007:

Gravel wasn't alone in defending the actions of Ellsberg and others. But criticism of the leaks beyond the White House's almost insane reaction crossed party lines, as many of the decisions revealed by the Papers involved key Democrats.

Here are two clips on Nixon's reaction:

June 13th:



Haig's prediction of a "gut fight among Democrats" didn't come to pass.

June 29th:

The same day, Sen. Gravel began reading the Papers:

So many people are covering Wikileaks, one might get inundated. I guess that is a good thing, as just 48 hours ago many of us interested in this were complaining about the lack of followup on last Week's Washington Post coverage of the explosion of useless spy agencies since 2001.

The best article I've read yet that compares the Pentagon Papers structurally to the so-far revealed Wikileaks material, is by New Yorker writer, Amy Davidson, just a few hours ago:

This stash will be compared to the Pentagon Papers, and in some ways that’s right—WikiLeaks, like Daniel Ellsberg, has been accused of ignoring the national interest. (An unfair charge, unless by “national interest” one means the political interests of a particular Administration.) But the Pentagon Papers were a synthetic analysis, a history of the war in Vietnam. WikiLeaks has given us research materials for a history of the war in Afghanistan. To make full use of them, we will, again, have to think hard about what we are trying to learn: Is it what we are doing, day to day, on the ground in Afghanistan, and how we could do it better? Or what we are doing in Afghanistan at all?

As with the Pentagon Papers, the White House is furious with the publication of the leaks:

To some extent, bloggers have already observed many times over that Wikileaks, in its ability to transcend national borders through the internet, is a deeper, more meaningful development in an already recognized and growing phenomenon, and that it represents something even more important:

In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.

I'm not sure how comprehensively accurate that statement is. The late Spring Gaza flotillas were reported by a rather large, somewhat interlocking group of bloggers from dozens, perhaps scores of nations. Bloggers from Malaysia to Ireland to Alaska covered three flotilla groups or individual vessels, tracking and writing about them in real time, using public GPS shipping tracking tools, live-feed video, twitter, texting and cell phone cameras. All this was done right into the face of obvious and publicly declared attempts by one of the supposedly most vaunted electronic warfare military organizations on the planet. After the Israeli military destroyed or confiscated millions of dollars worth of personal computers, cell phones, cameras and video recorders, flash cards smuggled out of Israeli jails inside of human bodies emerged within days to counter the false IDF narrative.

Iranian resistors seem to be capable of working around internet restrictions erected by the Iranian government. Coverage of the BP oil spill, especially where it is now beginning to cross borders in the Gulf of Mexico, is somewhat trans-national.

Just as when the U.S. Government lashed back at those who showed them to be liars in the Pentagon Papers case, so now, the U.S. Government is just beginning to lash out at those who are showing contemporary policies and actions to be both clearly illegal and downright stupid. When the White House push-back gets mobilized this coming week, will a new Sen. Mike Gravel emerge, to challenge the imperiousness of the current president and his advisors?

Andrew Breitbart's Next Target? - Oliver Stone

Since Oliver Stone confronted Bill Maher in late June, on Palestinian rights, on Maher's show, I've been waiting to see where the push-back would come from. We need wait no longer. Andrew Breitbart, desperate to regain his creds, appears to be ready to lead the attack.

At about 1:00 a.m. Monday, EDT, Breitbart's site, Big Hollywood, picked up on Alana Goodman's 9:00 p.m. EDT story at the far-right site, Newsbusters, which opens with:

Director Oliver Stone belittled the Holocaust during a shocking interview with the Sunday Times today, claiming that America's focus on the Jewish massacre was a product of the "Jewish domination of the media."

The director also defended Hitler and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and railed against the "powerful lobby" of Jews in America.

The Times only allows subscribers to view their full articles. The article was written by Camilla Long.

What's Breitbart's Big Hollywood site trying to turn this into? And who else is picking up on the story, and where it may lead? The Charlotte Conservative News is running the Alana Goodman piece almost in entirety. It may be time to start a timeline. Breitbart involvement timelines in the O'Keefe and Shirley Sherrod fiction events are fascinating.

I'm ready for Breitbart, smacked down pretty thoroughly last week, to make a move into new territory, away from his anti-Black racism. Stone is verdant territory for Breitbart's methods of taking advantage of cutouts to distance himself - at least in his own mind - from the originators of the stuff he likes to take credit for.

Stone's work has always been all over the map. I've never discovered a unifying element in his takes on history, politics, social mores or film making. There are no lack of documentaries that compare Stalin to Hitler. Stone's 10-part series isn't about that, though, even as his critics suggest otherwise. From all I can tell, Stone's series will be more Howard Zinnish than Kumbaya with Fidel, Hugo and Mahmoud.

Stone's upcoming Showtime documentary is about under-reported events in mid-20th century American history. It has been targeted since January by the far right. Articles from the far right press on Stone's newest TV effort center on terms that point out Stone's interest in Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and so on. The term "belittling the Holocaust" is Goodman's, not Stone's.

Essentially, regarding the "belittling," Stone said in the Camilla Long piece, "Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 [million killed]."

I'm not sure why this is belittling the Holocaust, as it is true in terms of numbers of people killed, if not addressing those numbers as population percentages. Since shortly after the end of World War II, some portrayals of Eastern European deaths caused by conflict between 1939 and 1945 have been criticized for not being Holocaust-centric enough. American journalist and writer, Alexander Werth, may have been the first to observe this, in updated editions of his masterpiece, Russia at War 1941 to 1945. The official position of the USSR on how to deal with why the Nazis killed whom and when has always been suspect because of Katyn and the Soviet system's own holocaust against so many of their own citizens. The Soviet position that had Hitler been given more time, he would have turned to Slavs and others after he had liquidated all Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses has resonance, based on captured Nazi documents from the war.

Stone's statements about Jewish influence in American media are the closest to real trouble I can find in these articles. The influence is pervasive. And it is often wonderful. Jewish voices like Amy Goodman, Phil Weiss and Glenn Greenwald would probably like to affirm Stone's message in his upcoming documentary.

Stone fails to describe what he sees accurately. The Jews he may be referring to probably don't represent where Judaism is going in the 21st century. He should have taken more time to define this influence for what it is, a sub-set of anything that can be identified as "Jewish influence." I'm not about to claim the generals in Myanmar represent Buddhism, anymore than I'm ready to claim militant Zionist expansionism's enablers who are Jewish represent Judaism.

Is there a move afoot to try to get Stone's series cancelled? Some are trying to get Sarah Palin's Alaska reality series cancelled, so?

Is Breitbart man enough to attack Oliver Stone more openly than his hit piece Sunday night might suggest?

We'll see.