He pledged, “There will be no imposition of the hijab on the Christian community or any other group because these matters are not a point of contention, and people are free.” It is not sure what he meant by “any other group.” If he meant “any other non-Sunni minority group,” then mandatory veiling could still be imposed on women of Sunni Muslim heritage.

When the fundamentalist, Salafi HTS was ruling the northern Syria province of Idlib earlier this year before they took over the whole country, it promulgated a law on public behavior that required all girls older than twelve to wear a veil in public, forbade public performance of music, demanded gender segregation, and established a morals police of the sort that used to patrol Saudi Arabia and still does police behavior in Afghanistan. It seems a little unlikely that its leaders have changed their minds about the desirability of any of these measures, though they also are not as strong in big cities like Aleppo and Damascus as they had been in small, rural Idlib.

Asked about whether women would be allowed to continue to serve as judges, as they did in secular, Baathist Syria, he replied that they would be allowed to go to law school, but maybe not to preside over courts: “”Women certainly have the right to learn and receive education in any field of life, whether in teaching, law, judiciary, or others. However, for women to assume judicial authority, this could be a subject for research and study by specialists, and it is too early to discuss this aspect.”

Women were 13% of judges in Baathist Syria, and had double that representation in the capital of Damascus.

Women comprised 46% of university students in the old regime, though they tended to major in fields such as education and literature and were underrepresented in medicine, economics, and engineering, according to Freedom House.

Arnaut hinted broadly that universities would be gender-segregated under the new government: “Syrian universities already exhibit many positive ways of proceeding, but these need to be reinforced to enhance the educational process and produce better outcomes than before. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen these ways of proceeding in a way that allows male and female students to focus their minds more fully on the educational process.”

Juan Cole, “Obeida Arnaout,” 2024.

Studies have shown that gender segregation in higher education harms women students and faculty. If they have to go to a separate all-women medicine or law school, and there are few women students in those fields, then they will suffer lack of resources. They will also be viewed as second-class citizens by the male portion of the university.

Then came the big issue, of women in politics. The one-party Baathist state was sectarian and dictatorial, not to mention genocidal, and so women’s participation does not tell us much (except that they were tainted by the atrocities committed by the government). But for what it is worth, 11 percent of the members of the phony “parliament” were women, and in recent years 3 of 31 cabinet members were women.

Arnaut was asked about whether women would be able to continue in these roles: “As for women’s representation in ministerial and parliamentary roles, we believe that this matter is premature and should be left to legal and constitutional experts who will work on rethinking the structure of the new Syrian state. Women are an important and honored component, so tasks must align with roles that women can perform. There will be no concerns regarding women’s issues.”

In other words, no, HTS does not envisage women being allowed to serve in parliament or on the cabinet or as prime minister.

That was bad enough. He went on to make a fool of himself by saying women are biologically unsuited to leadership roles: “There is no doubt that women have their biological and psychological nature, as well as their specific characteristics and composition, which must align with particular tasks. For example, it is not appropriate to suggest that women use weapons or be placed in roles that do not suit their abilities, composition, or nature.”

I read that the anchor interviewing him pointed out that hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled the Old Regime to safety in Germany, and that the leader who allowed them into the country and gave them safety was Angela Merkel, a female chancellor.

Al-Quds al-`Arabi quoted a reaction from Professor Milena Zain Al-Din from Damascus University: “We, the young women and women of Syria, are activists, politicians, human rights advocates, journalists, economists, academics, workers, and homemakers. We are revolutionaries, detainees, and fighters, and above all, we are Syrian citizens. Obeida Arnaout’s rhetoric is unacceptable. The Syrian woman, who has struggled and endured alongside millions of Syrian women, is not waiting for you to choose a place or role for her that aligns with your mindset for building our nation.”

The paper also quoted women who pointed to the countless modern Syrian women who have fulfilled roles as “politicians, judges, fighters, doctors, activists, and working mothers,” advising Arnaout to catch up on his reading about them.

Some women on social media demanded that Arnaout retract his remarks and resign.

( RFE/ RL ) – Iranian police released singer Parastoo Ahmadi in the early hours of December 15 following a brief detention after she performed without the mandatory head scarf, her lawyer has confirmed.

Ahmadi caused a stir on social media earlier this week after recording a performance with her hair uncovered and wearing a dress. The performance, recorded with a crew of male musicians, was uploaded to YouTube.

The police on December 14 claimed she was released after a “briefing session” but a source close to the family told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that she remained in custody. Her lawyer Milad Panahipur also denied the police claim, writing on X that the authorities were “lying” about her release.

The following day, Panahipur confirmed Ahmadi, who had been detained in her home province of Mazandaran, was released at 3 in the morning.

Two of her bandmates, Soheil Faqih-Nasri and Ehsan Beyraqdar, were also detained briefly.

Ahmadi’s Instagram account is no longer accessible, but her YouTube account remains active.

The video of her performance, dubbed “an imaginary concert” because female performers cannot sing solo in front of an audience, has received around 1.6 million views on YouTube since it was uploaded on December 11.

On December 12, the authorities said legal proceedings had been launched against Ahmadi and her bandmates for the “illegal concert.”

Ahmadi, who gained prominence during the 2022 nationwide protests after singing a song in support of demonstrators, has been widely praised for her performance.

On social media, many have hailed her for fighting “gender apartheid” and showing “bravery, resilience, and love.”

A rising number of women have been flouting the mandatory hijab in public since the 2022 protests, which gave rise to the Women, Life, Freedom movement.

The authorities have tried to crack down and recently passed a law enhancing the enforcement of the hijab by introducing hefty fines, restricting access to basic services, and lengthy prison sentences.

The new hijab and chastity law, which has been widely criticized by even conservative figures, is scheduled to go into effect this month, but at least two lawmakers have said its implementation has been postponed by the Supreme National Security Council.

Via RFE/ RL

Copyright (c)2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

—-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Parastoo Ahmadi: “Karvansara Concert, Parastoo Ahmadi”

That morning of November 6th, I sat down with her and four other women to face the election results. The six of us had spent almost every day together over the previous three months, recruiting, training, and deploying volunteers in northern Nevada in the campaign to elect Kamala Harris president and return Jacky Rosen to the Senate. We didn’t yet know that we had indeed managed the latter, but it was already clear that the next president would not be Kamala Harris but Donald Trump. This was my fourth electoral outing with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union. It was, however, my first time working directly with the union’s partner in Reno, Seed the Vote (STV), a campaign organization whose mission is to “win elections and build our movements.”

I’d initially been skeptical that STV, a progressive nonprofit outfit based in the San Francisco Bay Area, would be able to adapt to the union’s model: waging effective electoral campaigns while simultaneously training cooks, bartenders, hotel room attendants, and casino staff in the skills they need to build and sustain a fighting union. Would short-term volunteers show the same discipline and dedication I’d admired in union canvassers over the years? Would they go out again the day after they’d rung a doorbell and a voter carrying a shotgun had screamed at them, or sicced dogs on them, or called the police, or shouted racist curses at them, or even later followed them slowly in a pickup truck? As it turned out, most of them would.

Nor, by the way, was it lost on us that morning that all six of us were women. So are most of UNITE-HERE’s members and its two top officials, as was the director of the union’s campaign in Reno, along with the folks running the data department (something I had done in 2022). A wide variety of concerns brought us to this battle, but all of us knew that as women, along with struggles for a living wage, affordable housing, and access to health care, we were fighting for our lives.

Welcome to Gilead. Enjoy Your Stay.

In Donald Trump we confronted a candidate who’d promised to “protect” women — “whether the women like it or not.” He’d bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who’d overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively ending bodily autonomy for millions of women. He’d claimed that handing control of women’s bodies over to 50-odd state and territorial governments was what “everybody wanted.” I doubt it was the kind of “protection” Jessica Barnica wanted when Texas doctors refused her abortion care in the midst of a miscarriage, causing her to die of sepsis three days later. And it probably wasn’t what any of the other women wanted whose horror stories about suffering — and death — after the end of Roe were recently recounted in a New York magazine article, “Life after Roe.” No, we did not “like” the kind of protection that Donald Trump was offering us at all.

Here was a man whose earlier boasts about sexual assault hadn’t kept him out of the White House in 2016. Here was one who claimed that his female opponent in 2024 was born “mentally disabled.… There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it is, but there’s something missing and you know what? Everybody knows it.” It’s hard not to conclude that, to Trump, the “something missing” was a penis.

Buy the Book

Penises were certainly on Trump’s mind when he reposted a photo of Harris with Hillary Clinton over the caption: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” That was, in part, an allusion to the right-wing trope that Harris had slept her way to the top, getting her start in politics through a brief relationship with California powerbroker Willie Brown. And Trump was a candidate whose sprint to the electoral finish line was fueled by attacks on some of the most vulnerable women of all — transgender teenagers.

He’d chosen as his running mate one J.D. Vance, a man who had complained that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” In his view, women exist, indeed were created by God, to be little more than vessels and caregivers for children. He cloaked his disdain for women’s actual desires or aspirations in a supposed concern for our happiness, warning that pursuing fulfilling work outside the home, “instead of starting a family and having children” was “actually a path to misery.” He added that the misery of the woman who is not a mother is a danger to the rest of us, because such women “get in positions of power and then they project that misery and [un]happiness on the rest of society.”

Welcome to the Republic of Gilead, where they really do hate us that much and they’re not afraid to say so.

Your Body, My Choice, Forever

Before readers go all “#notallmen” on me, let me stipulate that my brother doesn’t hate me. Nor does his son, my much-loved nephew. Nor did my father, nor my high school or college boyfriends for that matter. None of them hated me then or hate me now. A few of them have, however, held — largely unexamined — beliefs about women’s essential inferiority in one realm or another. And curled within such beliefs like a secret infection lurks a bacillus of contempt.

When that contempt festers, it can poison the blood of a nation, provoking a fever of women hatred like the one that has emerged in this country since Donald Trump’s recent election. Perhaps the first drop of sweat appeared in white supremacist (and erstwhile Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes’s election-night post on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Although even the liberal press has treated this dictum as if it referred primarily to reproductive rights, it’s clear that Fuentes and men like him are celebrating Trump’s victory as a referendum on rape.

Within a day, that post had 90 million views. Between Thursday and Friday of that week, as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported, online repetitions rose by 4,600%. Nor was Fuentes’s post unique. The Institute also observed that “Manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate, in a post on X on November 7th, stated: “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights.”

It seems as if it’s just a short step from thoughts of rape to thoughts of murder in Gilead. And a popular step, too. Tate’s post garnered almost 700,000 views within a couple of hours. A day earlier another Xer, Jon Miller, wrote, “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say.” (And in case you don’t know, LMAO is “laughing my ass off” in text-speak.) Like Fuentes’s post, this one has received almost 90 million views.

Nor does what happens in the Manosphere stay in the Manosphere. As Vox reports, “Girls and young women are also hearing the line in schools, according to family members, with one mom posting on Facebook that her daughter had heard it three times on campus, and that boys told her to ‘sleep with one eye open tonight.’”

#yesmostmen

Exit polls show that 55% of male voters went for Donald Trump. That figure includes 49% of men aged 18 to 29 and over half of all other men, including 60% of men aged 45 to 64. Had only women voted in this election, Kamala Harris would have won handily. Is it any wonder then that, in addition to invitations to rape, calls for the repeal of the 19th amendment (which in 1920 gave people like me the right to vote) are also trending on social media?

One such call came from John McEntee, who served as Trump’s personal aide and later as the White House director of personnel during his first term. He also worked in personnel in the 2024 Trump campaign and, according to Newsweek, is “reportedly a senior adviser for the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a political initiative more commonly known as Project 2025.” In late October he posted a video on X, in which he explained, “So I guess they misunderstood. When we said we wanted mail-only voting, we meant male — ‘M-A-L-E.’” In the video’s caption, McEntee wrote, “The 19th might have to go.”

Yes, a majority of men voted for the candidate who has bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, who has been found liable in a civil suit for the rape and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, who happily allowed vendors at his rallies to sell “Say No to the Hoe” tee shirts, implying — in case you didn’t catch the “joke” — that Kamala Harris is a prostitute. A Google search on the phrase brings up pages of offers for that item, including this one from Etsy.com: “Just Say No to the Ho Campaign Style Shirt [from] Etsy. Magical, Meaningful Items You Can’t Find Anywhere Else. Handmade, Handpicked, and Designed By Humans.” Humans indeed.

The Four Bs

Like my young co-campaigner (for whom it took a second Trump electoral victory to fully grasp the depths of misogyny in this country), I was also in my early twenties when I first allowed myself to face just how much some men hate women. Until then I think I believed that men’s contempt for us was at least partly deserved. I did believe that we really were weaker, less intelligent, less courageous — in general, lesser. Perhaps history recorded the acts of a few exceptional women who excelled in some field or other, but the point was that they were indeed exceptions. The classic British writer Samuel Johnson had expressed this pithily some centuries earlier, when he told his biographer James Boswell, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

I attended a small liberal arts college that employed only two female professors. I had a friend whose history professor failed her because, as he explained to her, a woman shouldn’t be occupying a place in college that could have gone to one of her intellectual superiors (i.e., a man). Another friend succumbed to a professor’s sexual demands in return for a passing grade in his course. Others reluctantly slept with the male student gatekeeper at the college library — the price of snagging one of the most coveted work-study jobs on campus. I accepted these as unfortunate, but unremarkable realities. Such things might not be right, but neither could they be changed.

Then came the international explosion of thought and action that was the second wave of feminism. Suddenly, the world flew apart. As Muriel Rukeyser asked in her poem about the German lithographer Käthe Kollwitz,

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about

        her life?

 The world would split open”

The answer to Rukeyser’s question came in the form of a global movement for women’s liberation and a world — this one — did split open. For me, that movement was as unexpected as a flash flood filling a dry arroyo. Suddenly, so much seemed possible that not long before had been unimaginable. Perhaps most of the world’s women were not, after all, made just to be the bearers of burdens, or indeed of children, but also of hope.

Recognizing women’s full humanity came at a cost, however. It meant also recognizing who wanted to deny us that very humanity.

About a year ago, the Washington Post’s editorial board published an essay lamenting “the collapse of American marriage.”

“A growing number of young women,” its authors wrote, “are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners.” Why not? They continued:

“As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives. But it’s not just that. There’s a growing ideological divide, too. Since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of single women ages 18-30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.”

The Post’s prescription: “This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise.” And that “someone” was, of course, young women. I could, in fact, imagine young women compromising if it were differences of taste in music or in food that were dividing them from the men they might otherwise want to marry. However, the problem, according to the Post, is that politics is “becoming more central to people’s identity.” Well yes, when “conservative” views include explicit misogyny, then opposition to those views is indeed central to my identity. What the Post blithely referred to as “ideological” differences are, in fact, differences over the fundamental question of women’s humanity.

So, tell me this: Why should women be asked to compromise over that?

I’ve written elsewhere about the situation of young American men, including the ones missing from the college classrooms where I taught for almost 20 years. I don’t doubt that half a century or more of neoliberal economic policies (embraced by both major parties) have greatly reduced the life chances of many young men. And I don’t doubt that, in blaming women for their misery, men are deceived into looking away from the actual powers that constrain their lives. But that doesn’t make it okay to mistreat, rape, or kill us.

So, in November 2024, I’m not surprised to read that many young, heterosexual American women are embracing a movement that started in South Korea: they are rejecting the 4Bs, four actions which, in the Korean language, begin with the letter B: marrying, having children, dating, and having sex with men. “In the hours and days since it became clear that Donald Trump would be re-elected president of the United States, there’s been a surge of interest in the U.S. for 4B,” according to a CNN report. Ashli Pollard, a 36-year-old in St. Louis, sums it up this way:

“We have pandered and begged for men’s safety and done all the things that we were supposed to, and they still hate us. So if you’re going to hate us, then we’re going to do what we want.”

Reading this reminded me of a saying popular in the heady days of the early women’s liberation movement: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

Just as fish don’t need bicycles, there are some things women don’t need. And men who hate women are one.

Copyright 2024 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – Last month, the Taliban passed a new “vice and virtue” law, making it illegal for women to speak in public. Under the law, women can also be punished if they are heard singing or reading aloud from within their homes.

It was approved by the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and will be enforced by the Ministry for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice.

Ahead of an international conference on the future of Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, earlier this year, the United Nations’ mission head for Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, said it would “take time” for the Taliban to accept women. The Taliban specifically mandated no women attend the conference, which the UN agreed to.

But as gender experts have been saying for years, Taliban leaders have not – and will not – change. Three years after they regained control of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s efforts to publicly erase women from Afghan society have reached a new low.

Gender apartheid

The Taliban’s burgeoning body of laws and practices restricting the rights of women and girls is a clear case of gender apartheid. Gender apartheid is defined as a regime of systematic gender-based oppression and domination.

Because there is no conventional legal framework in place in Afghanistan, the country is ruled by an increasingly tightly woven patchwork of decrees, policies and systematised practices, some written, others verbal.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has enacted more than 100 edicts, orders and directives restricting the rights of women and girls. These apply in a range of jurisdictions – nationally, provincially and in specific districts.

The most significant of these edicts prevent women and girls from attending school beyond grade six, working in many organisations, and travelling a certain distance to seek health care.

Restricting girls’ education

The ban on education for Afghan girls has had a dire effect on their wellbeing. Modelling from UN Women shows this has correlated with a 25% increase in child marriage and 45% increase in early childbirth. The loss of hope for young women has been profound.

Civil society groups in Afghanistan and around the world have clapped back at the Taliban’s ban on girl’s education with the hashtag “Let Afghan Girls Learn”.

Myriad small organisations are also running underground schools to continue girls’ education. Sometimes these schools operate under the guise of embroidery classes, or something else the Taliban finds acceptable.

But the ongoing lack of funding to women-led organisations has been a serious barrier to these kinds of programs, despite the fact they are primarily Afghan-led.

A range of internationally certified online programs have also been established, providing important educational and employment opportunities for smaller numbers of Afghan women and girls.

But these online options remain limited, and not just by funding. Data shows only 6% of Afghan women have internet access, and the Taliban is making it increasingly difficult for Afghans to access SIM cards for mobile phones.

Hurting women and children’s health

Women’s health has also suffered due to the brain drain of highly-skilled workers fleeing the country and the sharp reduction in international technical and financial assistance to Afghanistan’s public health system.

Human Rights Watch reports “women and girls have been disproportionately affected by the healthcare crisis” in the country, particularly because of the Taliban’s abuses of women’s rights.

For example, restrictions on women’s movement has meant that maternal and infant mortality rates have skyrocketed in recent years as women are prevented from reaching health facilities.

Data published in the British Medical Journal shows that eight in ten women in urban areas have reported symptoms of depression and/or anxiety living under the Taliban.

Fighting against the silence

Over the past year, the Taliban have also increasingly targeted women’s human rights defenders. Activists have been “disappeared”, arbitrarily detained, and egregiously abused in prison.

The Guardian recently published evidence of a woman being raped in prison.

In my own work, I’ve documented a pattern of Talibs using sexual torture against imprisoned women’s human rights defenders in a bid to shame them out of their activism and isolate them from familial and community support.

Yet, Afghan women continue to push back against the draconian authorities ruling the country.

In response to the latest “vice and virtue” law, for example, women all over the country have taken to social media posting videos of themselves singing and reciting poetry to show they cannot be silenced.

Some recite the Quran. Many wear traditional Afghan dress, while others wear the Taliban’s required burka. But they sing to prove they exist. To show they are Afghan, and that they are not impure, regardless of what the Talibs say.

Activists are also continuing to push for the international recognition of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity, and the International Criminal Court continues its investigations into alleged crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Taliban.

But Afghan women cannot be left alone in their struggle. The international community must follow through on its commitments to protect Afghan women’s rights defenders. It must also maintain long-term support, including through funding pathways, for women-led organisations helping women in Afghanistan.

Susan Hutchinson, PhD Candidate, International Relations, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

‘Becoming a doctor is my dream’: Afghan women continue studies in Scotland | AFP

A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare. -Mahmoud Darwish

Newark, Del. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – A few days before the invasion of Iraq by American forces under G.W.  Bush, on March 16, 2003, a young woman from Seattle, Washington, who had gone to Rafah, in Gaza to help Palestinians halt the demolition of homes died under the bulldozer of the Israeli army.  

Her name was Rachel Corrie. 

She was 23 years old. She was a member of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) 

Her parents fought the judiciary system in Israel for two decades to no avail.  The court rejected their appeals, and no one was prosecuted.  It is the usual case in Israel, the only “democracy” in the Middle East.

On May 11, 2022, the renowned Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, while reporting at the Jenin refugee camp and having reported from the occupied territories for nearly 25 years, was shot in the neck by IDF while reporting for Al Jazeera.   It took more than a year for the Israeli officials to admit that their army was responsible for her death.   Was anyone put on trial for her murder?  No. 

She was wearing a blue vest with the word Press on it.  An Israeli solider shot her just below her helmet.  While her funeral was being held, all kinds of barriers were set to prolong the procession.  She was finally laid to rest in the Mount Zion cemetery in Jerusalem where she was buried next to her parents.  She was a Roman Catholic.

On September 7, 2024, a young woman also from Seattle, this time a Turkish American aged 26 had gone to the West Bank for the very same reasons.  She was shot in the head by the Israeli Army.

Her name was Ayşenur Eygi.

She was also a volunteer with the ISM and had recently graduated from the University of Washington.  She and others including many Jewish activists had been demonstrating against an illegal outpost called Evyatar, an offshoot of the settlement of Beita. 

She had arrived there only two days before her untimely death by a gunfire of an Israeli soldier. Jonathan Pollack, an Israeli peace activist, participating in Friday’s protest was an eyewitness. He held her bleeding head before the ambulance arrived.  She died at the hospital.

She, like Rachel, had a full life ahead of her. 

Not only did these women want a better world but they also put their aspirations into action. They could have had a career like so many others but instead they took a different route: To be instrumental in making a change in this very unjust world of ours. 

Rachel had been born into a middle class, peace-loving family.

Ayşenur was born into a Turkish American family. She resisted and struggled for the right of a people whose livelihood and land were being stolen by settlers, guarded by the most immoral army in the world.

She was shot to death like countless others since and before October 7. 

The Americans and the Israelis did nothing to secure justice for any of these women. 

 In another part of the Middle East, on 16 September 16, 2022, a young woman named Mahsa Amini, also known by her Kurdish name Jina, went to Tehran with her brother and friends to have a good time.  She was twenty-two.   She was stopped by the morality police and taken to a van by force.  She was interrogated viciously for not having the right hijab and was hit hard on her head.  She was taken to the hospital and a few days later, after going into a coma, she was pronounced dead.  She was not political.  Her only sin was that her attire was not to the liking of the authorities.   What followed later after her shocking death was the largest uprising in Iran called Woman Life Freedom, perhaps the largest feminist movement in our time.  

Photo by Inimafoto A: https://www.pexels.com/photo/plate-with-a-slogan-woman-life-freedom-14413071/

In the Middle East and elsewhere, women have proven that they will take to the streets and encounter the oppressors to fight for freedom whether for others or themselves. 

It will not be the last time nor the only time.

Just like a century ago,  Mary Harris Jones—aka “ Mother Jones ” who was also called “the most dangerous woman in America”,  walked miles to fight for freedom and the rights of workers,  these young women also took their fight to the streets of Jerusalem, Rafah, the West Bank, Tehran and elsewhere to prove that women will not be stopped — not by guns, by bulldozers nor intimidation.

(The Conversation) – Until the collapse of Afghanistan’s US-backed government in August 2021, few knew clearly what the Taliban wanted once they had returned to power. Some western officials and observers hoped for a big change from the regime, which had governed the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in the 1990s.

This time, they hoped, a more sophisticated and pragmatic vision might have replaced the Taliban’s previously extremist approach.

Some also argued that the rest of the world had a moral responsibility to approach Afghanistan’s new rulers with cautious optimism. Engagement should be the key. Anything else risked condemning the country and its population to isolation and economic hardship.

Others weren’t convinced.

During the negotiations that led to the February 2020 Doha agreement, the Taliban’s position on post-settlement Afghanistan’s politics remained ambiguous. The group continued this vague posture during the subsequent intra-Afghan dialogues with the former Afghan government.

Then, appearing in a press conference three days after Taliban forces took control of Kabul, its spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, appeared to give reassurances the new regime would respect women’s rights “within the norms of Islamic law”.

In the ensuing three years, the Taliban’s fundamentalist regime has continued to suffer from weak legitimacy, despite taking pains initially to cultivate a conciliatory image compared to its harsh rule in the 1990s.

However, what had appeared to some be Taliban 2.0 has increasingly looked like the old, harsh and fundamentalist Taliban as the regime has grown more confident in its hold on power.

Since 2021, Hibatullah Akhundzada, the leader of Afghanistan’s Islamic Emirate, has gradually issued more than 50 decrees that affect most areas of society.

Many hard-won achievements under the former republic, such as freedom of expression and the press, have been suppressed. The regime has forced into disappearance, imprisoned or murdered many former government members, despite announcing a general amnesty.

“Burqa,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

In their treatment of women, including forbidding education after the age of 12, restrictions have become so harsh that the resulting subjugation has been labelled “gender apartheid” by many journalists, academics and activists.

Many female students have had to flee the country. Most recently a group of women medical students made the news after they were granted scholarships to go to UK to complete their studies.

The regime has also revived public executions and flogging reminiscent of their 1990s practices. An edict issued in March 2024 stated the regime will also resume public stoning.

The regime has now introduced a series of new “vice and virtue” laws, to be enforced by the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (PVPV).

Until now, government has been mainly by decrees from the Taliban leadership. But these, while giving an indication of the regime’s increasingly extremist and authoritarian nature, have not been accompanied with details of how they should be enforced. This uncertainty could, at times, allow local authorities a degree of leeway, including the ability in some cases to ignore decrees when it suits.

But the recent law chnage removes these ambiguities, empowers the Taliban’s morality police and is enforceable on everyone residing in Afghanistan.

Blueprint for oppression

The new laws are particularly harsh on women. They enforce the wearing of the hijab and stipulate this garment must be made of thick enough material to fully cover a woman’s face and body and avoid offering temptation to men.

Women’s voices are also deemed to be a source of temptation, so women are now not allowed to speak outside the family home. If a woman can be heard singing, even from within her own home, this is considered a violation of the law and can be punished. Women are even forbidden from looking directly at a man who is not their husband or blood relative.

Enforcement can be undertaken by anyone in society “who is capable”. Reports by two “trustworthy” individuals is enough to bring a prosecution. This is a worrying prospect, as it could lead to arbitrary accusations based on personal or political vendettas.

Officially enforcement will be carried out by the ministry’s appointees, the morality police or mohtaseb. “Fairness and kindness” are stipulated as guiding principles for how the new rules should be enforced, although these terms are not defined and the law is replete with subjective terminologies open to interpretation by those enforcing them.

New media laws introduced as part of the package prohibit “un-Islamic content” and empower the morality police to compel media officials to prevent the publication of content deemed contrary to Sharia and images of living beings. This last measure will effectively throw into doubt the future of TV broadcasting in Afghanistan.

The laws also forbid music in public and “un-Islamic” hairstyles. Men must grow beards at least as long as a fist. As a worrying sign for continued humanitarian engagement involving non-Muslim foreign workers, the law prohibits befriending, helping or imitating “nonbelievers”.

Violations will be met with on the spot fines issued by the mohtaseb or imprisonment for one-to-three days and prosecution in the regime’s courts for repeat offenders. The morality police also has the power to compel attendance at the mosque, with prosecution for those who do not obey, regardless of whether they pray at home.

As recently as June, Taliban representatives attended UN-sponsored talks in Doha at which spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid called for funds frozen by the west to be released and for the relaxation of sanctions on the regime. He dismissed western concerns over the regime’s treatment of women as “cultural differences”.

But these new laws have effectively removed any remaining differences between the current regime and its 1990s predecessor, a fundamentalist pariah that turned Afghanistan into an isolated outcast.

Kambaiz Rafi, Teaching Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

() – The world has long been aware of the scourge of apartheid — the systemic segregation or discrimination of people based on their race. But what about the institutionalized practice of singling people out for ill-treatment due to their gender?

The push to recognize “gender apartheid” under international law is gaining steam, with oppression against women and girls in Afghanistan and Iran fueling calls for immediate action, but tremendous obstacles remain.

What Do They Want?

Advocates want to clearly define gender apartheid as a crime under international law. Currently, only “persecution” on the basis of gender is recognized as a crime against humanity. But rights groups and activists say the concept of persecution does not fully capture the scope of the abuses committed under a system of institutionalized gender apartheid.

The goal is for the United Nations to make up for this gap by legally shielding women and girls from systemic abuse and violence.

Afghan women’s rights defenders are credited with being the first to articulate the concept of gender apartheid in the 1990s, during the Taliban’s first regime.

Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, the hard-line Islamist group has reimposed its oppressive policies against women and girls, including severe restrictions on their appearances, freedom of movement, and right to work and study.

Hoda Khamosh, an Afghan women’s rights activist, says the recognition of gender apartheid would greatly benefit women’s rights in the country.

“We would be able to hold accountable the authorities and perpetrators of gender-based violence and discrimination against women,” Khamosh told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.

Meanwhile, Iranian women’s rights activists have said the institutionalized discrimination against women in the Islamic republic amounts to gender apartheid.

UN experts have said the violent enforcement of the hijab law and punishments on women and girls who fail to wear the head scarf could be described as a form of gender apartheid.

The international community made a mistake in allowing the Taliban to exclude the voices of women and civil society in a recent meeting in Doha.

By Tarique Niazi | –

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The United Nations recently hosted a third round of talks on Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, to weigh the prospects for the country’s return to the international system. The talks were attended by special envoys on Afghanistan from 30 world nations, including the United States. That the world’s 30 leading nations have appointed “special envoys” on Afghanistan shows how concerning Afghanistan is to the globe. The UN sponsored the earlier two rounds in May 2023 and February 2024. Doha I and Doha II were, however, focused on the international obligations of Afghanistan’s de facto rulers, i.e., the Taliban regime.

The Taliban boycotted Doha I and Doha II, dismissing the “international obligations” as interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Also, they refused to attend Doha III until the UN dropped human and women rights from its agenda, and barred Afghan women and civil society organization leaders from attending the talks. This capitulation is a step toward accepting the Taliban as the sole and legitimate representative of Afghanistan that they are not. The Taliban further snubbed the UN and participating countries by sending a delegation led by a low-level official, a government spokesperson, instead of their minister for foreign affairs.

To be fair, cutting and pruning the agenda around the Taliban’s demands was not an easy decision for the UN or special envoys to swallow. There is every indication that the decision irked UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who earlier attended Doha I and Doha II, enough to abstain from Doha III. Many others were dismayed by the decision. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women was “deeply concerned” about the exclusion that it said “will only further silence Afghan women and girls.”

Human Rights Watch found the decision “shocking.” The Afghan Representative at the United Nations, who does not represent the de facto Taliban regime in Kabul and is a holdover from the pre-Taliban Afghan government, was “disappointed” at the decision. He urged the world to hold the Taliban to their international obligation of forming an inclusive and representative government in Afghanistan, engage with all Afghan stakeholders, not just the Taliban, and not look away from human rights violations in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Special Envoy on Afghanistan, speaking at the UN Security Council, lamented that “the harm caused by the Taliban’s restrictions on women and girls cannot be overstated,” noting “that it has now been over 1,000 days since it banned girls from secondary schools.” Yet he seemed more concerned with “Afghanistan’s reintegration into an international system,” and having the UN appoint a “focal point to begin producing a road map” to this effect.

The world, nonetheless, stays united refusing to recognize the Taliban government in the face of their misanthropic and misogynistic policies, which ban girls from seeking an education beyond sixth grade and women from employment even in women-only establishments and organizations. Even diverse nations such as China, India, Iran, Russia, and the United States speak with one voice. More importantly, the UN has refused to accept the Taliban regime as a de jure government that has been constituted and propped up against the will of the Afghans, and with the muscular power of a militia force, i.e., the Taliban.

DW News Video: “Outrage over women’s exclusion from UN-led talks with Taliban | DW News”

The global call on the Taliban to end their misogyny has not gone unheeded, though. There is now a growing chorus of voices, both loud and quiet, within the Taliban regime that wants the ban on female education lifted. One such voice is that of the Taliban’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Stanikzai, who initially was tipped to be the country’s prime minister but got pushed aside because of his outspokenness. He has long been challenging his government’s ban on female education, arguing that Islam makes it obligatory for both men and women to get an education. He calls the ban on women and girls’ education “oppressive and unjust.”

Quieter voices also oppose the ban, prominent among them the ministers for defense and the interior, who see the ban as inconsistent with international norms. Defense Minister Yaqoob Mujahid’s dissent carries greater weight because of his heritage. He is a son of the founder of the Taliban Movement, Mullah Omar, and is widely respected by the rank and file of the movement. So is Sirajuddin Haqqani, the minister for the interior, whose father Jalaluddin Haqqani is credited with crafting military strategies that, years later, paved the way for the Taliban’s return to power.

Who is, then, opposed to women and girls’ right to education and work? It is the Taliban’s Supreme Leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, who is a recluse, hermit, blinkered, bigoted and inveterate misogynist with zero formal education, except for a few years of undistinguished religious instruction. Unlike many world scholars of Islam, Akhundzada has never traveled outside of  his birth country of Afghanistan and the remote village in neighboring Pakistan where he was in exile. This insularity has turned him into a literalist reader of religious texts. His medieval interpretations of Islam are rejected by every single Muslim religious scholar, including the world’s largest Islamic movement of Nahdatul Ulema in Indonesia, which boasts 100 million members.

Similarly, religious scholars in Cairo, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia rebuffed Akhundzada’s orthodox reading of Islam. This universal repudiation has further turned him inward. He now refuses to meet with any visiting Islamic scholars. In parallel, he claims it is Pashtun culture, not necessarily religion, that doesn’t permit women to learn or work outside the home.

This citation of Pashtun culture did appeal to some. In 2021, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose ancestors hail from Ghazni and Kandahar in Afghanistan, echoed Akhundzada’s position and urged the world to be understanding of Pashtun culture that discourages women’s education. His ambassador at the UN defended this stance saying that the Taliban’s ban on women’s education is part of Pashtun culture, which created a huge backlash. Afghanistan’s former President Hamid Karzai admonished Imran Kahn for peddling ignorance about Afghan culture. Afghan women, however, fared best under the Afghan communist regime (1979-1989), when 60% of university students in the country were women. The second best era for them was in 2001-2021, when 25% of university students were women.

If Pashtun culture were to blame for opposing women’s education, then Pashtun women in Pakistan would not be studying in co-ed schools, colleges, and universities. The Nobel laureate Malala Yousufzai, who risked her life for education, is a Pashtun. The 50 million Pashtuns in Pakistan outnumber the entire population of Afghanistan. Pakistani Pashtuns should be the true north of Pashtun culture, not Mullah Akhundzada.

Tragically, Afghanistan has fallen into the hands of those who are impervious to rational thought. Millions of Afghans have been fleeing their irrationality. Since 2021, 700,000 Afghans have sought refuge in neighboring Pakistan alone. How to stop Afghanistan from bleeding its best and brightest? All overseas Afghan assets, including the $7 billion that the United States has frozen since 2021, should be released only to Afghan women for their education. Any Afghan woman living inside or outside the country seeking higher education should be entitled to these funds. There are around 12,000 universities in India, Indonesia and the United States alone. If each of these universities offers one spot for them, 12,000 Afghan women can graduate every year. With an investment of just $7 billion, a million Afghan women can receive university education. This should be a realistic way to counter Taliban misogyny.

Unfortunately, the international community has provided the Taliban regime with $10 billion in “international aid and civilian support” since 2021, with zero accountability or transparency. The UN must engage with the Taliban to have them be accountable, transparent, meet their international obligations, and most importantly further women’s interests, i.e., their right to education, work, and public life. If the Taliban are responsive, they should be welcomed into the world community; if not, they should be shunned until they renounce their antiquated ideas. The Doha III meeting that shut out civil society and women’s voices was a nod to Taliban misogyny. This mistake needs to be undone, and soon.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

The war on women is everywhere: in the home, locally, nationally and globally.

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – In 2018, the US National Sexual Violence Resource Center published that 81% of women reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault in their lifetime.  Further, the majority of violence against women is perpetrated by male intimate partners and acquaintances.

There are myriad other misogynist wars on women worldwide – including military wars; sex trafficking, prostitution and pornography; the theft of female and lesbian sexual identity by some in the trans movement; child marriage, female genital mutilation, and so on.  But none at this moment is so intensive as Israel’s and the US’ genocidal war on Gaza: 70 percent of those killed are women and their children.   Israel’s bombing of hospitals with maternity wards; the starvation of pregnant and breast-feeding women and the record-acute malnutrition among newborns and young children speak loud and clear — End Palestinian women’s potential to give life and the survival of Palestinian babies and children.

How cruelly ironic that as US weapons murder life in Gaza and elsewhere in the world with impunity, 14 US states have criminalized women’s choice of abortion as murder, not even allowing abortion for the hateful acts of rape or incest, six more states have early gestational limits. There were 65,000 rape-related pregnancies between July 2022 and January 2024 in those US states banning or putting extreme limits on abortion, with the end of Roe v Wade in the 2022 Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision.

Today a majority of US-adults including from every religion, race, ethnicity; moderate and liberal Republicans and a vast majority of Democrats (women and men), agree that abortion should be legal. Thus, the end of Roe v Wade in the 2022 Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision is a both a War on Women and a War on Democracy, given that the will of the majority of US citizens does not prevail nor influence government policy. 

According to the Economist, the United States ranks among “flawed democracies.”   Another recent, comprehensive study of democracies worldwide concluded that “only 15 percent of people globally live in places where women and lower income groups have at least somewhat equal access to power.”  No surprise that the US, cluelessly vaunted as the indispensable nation, is not one of them.

What fuels the control of women’s bodies in our country?  It is misogyny and injustice.  After all, there is no comparable moral or medical control of men’s bodies.

Yet the moralistic urgency to preserve life in the womb evaporates once a poor child is born.  One in six children under five years of age lives in poverty – the highest rate of all industrial countries; four million youth are homeless.  Clearly, controlling a woman’s right to her own body, is not about the unborn’s right to life; otherwise, all kinds of social legislation for maternal and child health, adequate housing, a living wage, and well-funded education would accompany legislation criminalizing women for abortion. 

Regarding women’s loss of economic democracy, women have higher rates of poverty than men.  And why?  For at least three reasons:

1.)   Domestic violence causes women victims to lose altogether an average of 8 million days of paid work per year and is a strong factor in women’s homelessness.

2.)    Women’s reproductive labor – giving birth, breastfeeding and caring for children is not compensated with free childcare and paid parental leave in the United States, unlike all other comparable countries. Thus, women who give birth are cheated of savings, pensions and Social Security.  No surprise then that the greatest risk factor for being poor in old age is having been a mother..

3.)   More women than men struggle to cover everyday expenses due to the gender wage gap, which has remained stagnant for 20 years – at 82% – a significant factor contributing to the substantial disparity in poverty rates between women and men age 75 and older.  Even for college graduates in 2024 the same economic inequality persists: male college graduates have been hired at an average sightly over $30/hour; women, at slightly over $25/hour. This wage inequality of 82% will follow these women college graduates all their working lives and in retirement.

Salary is symbolic: Why are we women worth 82% of men in the workplace?.

Ponderous realities:

More American lives were lost in the 20^th century through violence against women than during all 20^th century wars and civil strife.  Yet, while thousands of monuments throughout the United States honor those who lost their lives for their country in war, only one —the first of its kind—is currently being planned for women who lost their lives giving birth to the country’s children.  The counterpoint reality is that feminist revolutions to gain human rights and equality for women (however incomplete that goal remains) have freed and saved the lives of millions of women and girls—without weapons, without fists, and without a drop of blood spilled.  

Women have more than a lot that men can learn from: men commit 90% of homicides and almost all sexual violence; men are the primary wagers of war.  Were our skills, our social and intellectual intelligence, and our wisdom valued and promoted in all places of social and political decision-making: in every home and all national governments and the UN, the world might get a chance at global peace and restoring our beautiful planet.

*Given as the keynote talk at Bigger than Dobbs:  The War on Women and War on Democracy, a June 23 event sponsored by the Reproductive Justice Task Force of Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution with multiple co-sponsors.  

Speeches of the presenters will be available soon at http://www.fccpr.us 

Related Video link added by IC: MSNBC: “How GOP may lose 24: Trump conviction collides with MAGA legal ‘war’ on women, minorities, equality”