MALALAI JOYA OUSTED BY AFGHAN PARLIAMENT

Above is a video of an interview with 29-year-old Malalai Joya, whom I have blogged about here, who has just been ousted by the Afghanistan parliament for enraging former mujahadeen fighters – now in President Hamid Karzai’s U.S.-backed government and many of whom are warlords — by comparing them, in a recently-televised interview (not the interview in the clip above) with a stable full of animals, saying “This is a word that fits — a cattle house is full of animals, like a cow giving milk, a donkey carrying something, a dog that’s loyal,” Joya said.

I included the video clip above for several reasons, among them that Joya describes in the interview the way an 11-year-old girl was recently kidnapped by warlords, raped, and then exchanged for a dog.  Where women’s and girls lives mean nothing at all, it is no crime, in their minds, for men with money or power to kidnap, rape, and exchange a little girl for a dog, but it IS a crime to compare the men who do such things with dogs or other animals.  In fact, to compare such men with dogs and animals is, in my view,  to insult the dogs and animals. 

A parliament rule known as Article 70 forbids lawmakers from criticizing one another, a rule Joya says was created because of her outspoken challenges to the warlords, who she says in the interview clip above are, with U.S. backing, holding all of Afghanistan hostage.  Joya has had to travel with a cadre of bodyguards and has had her life repeatedly threatened.  Please watch this video.  Women are committing suicide in huge numbers in Afghanistan, their lives are worth nothing, and the U.S. says nothing, does nothing, and is, in fact, responsible.

Goddamn these suckers.  Goddamn them, every last one of them. 

 Link the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and the Global Sisterhood Network. 

Heart