Afghan women & NPR

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

From: jdevine@xxxxxxx
To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [PEN-L:20230] Afghan women & NPR
Date: Sat, 01 Dec 2001 18:56:18 +0000

Michael Rubin writes:> Furthermore, Kabul was always more
progressive and cosmopolitan than the rest of Afghanistan.  For
example, the Feminist Majority's "Stop Gender Apartheid" campaign
still reports that women cannot leave their house unless accompanied
by a close male relative.  However, women in every city I visited
walked around in pairs. <

Recently, I heard Sylvia Pujoli (sp?) on US National Public Radio
reporting on the Afghan meetings in Bonn, where women were
participating. I found it interesting that she referred to "Gender
Apartheid" in a news story, not an editorial. Now I have no doubt
that the Talibums treated women as bad as the Saudis or the Northern
Alliance (US allies) do, if not worse (though I found little to
disagree with in Rubin's article, based on a discussion I had with a
reporter who's been to Afghanistan). But the question is why NPR
would be editorializing in this way. Two reasons spring to mind:

(1) it's a feminist way of endorsing the Bush Killer Kowboy state's
attack on Afghanistan; and

(2) it's an effort to leverage the Bush administration's official
opposition to patriarchy in order to generalize the critique to other
countries, e.g. Saudia Arabia.

The latter is progressive, but it's a real problem in that it's mixed
up with the former.

Jim Devine