Several weeks ago I wrote a post about the new National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (NAP). In this piece for the Women’s Media Center (WMC), I elaborate on the concerns women’s peace and human rights organizations have about the NAP. which to be very clear, is a very positive addition to the tools we have to advocate and work for women’s human rights. But as I conclude in the WMC piece,
The National Action Plan On Women, Peace and Security offers a powerful opportunity to move towards a gender responsive and informed framework of peace and security, but it will require vigilance to insure that it is truly implemented in a way that assures women’s human rights.
On the inaugural episode of Feminist Peace Network Radio, I had the pleasure of talking with feminist shero Robin Morgan about feminism and the role it plays in the Occupy movement and as Robin so aptly pointed out, the role Occupy should play in the feminist movement.
My great thanks to Allie McNeil of A World of Progress Radio (AWOP) for helping with the chat room and providing much needed support for my pre-first show jitters and to everyone who listened in. For those of you who are wondering, yes there will be more shows after the first of the year, stay tuned!
When the United States attacked Afghanistan ten years ago, we were told that not only were we going after those who had attacked us but also that we would liberate Afghan women from the Taliban. It was a very effective selling point, there is nothing we tend to like better than rescuing helpless women. But let’s be clear–that was not the reason we invaded Afghanistan–women had been being abused by the Taliban and the warlords before them for quite some time by then. As we observe the 10th anniversary of what now seems like an endless war, it is important to look at what Afghan women have experienced since the U.S. invasion and what needs to be considered going forward.
ActionAid and Oxfam have both issued lengthy reports addressing these issues. In a survey of 1000 Afghan women, ActionAid found that,
72% of Afghan women believe their lives are better now than they were 10 years ago, while 37% think Afghanistan will become a worse place if international troops leave. A massive 86% are worried about a return to Taliban-style government, with one in five citing their daughter’s education as the main concern…
…However women’s rights groups in Afghanistan say they are being kept in the dark regarding the talks with the Taliban, as well as being frozen out of an important international conference on the country’s future and transition of power, which will take place in Bonn, Germany in December 2011…
…Women who have stood up for women’s rights in the past 10 years are also worried about their own personal safety if the Taliban returns to power, with some activists making plans to leave the country.
The report goes on to say that today,
39% of children who attend school are girls
27% of MPs are women (higher than the world average)
5% of positions in the army and police force are filled by women
25% of government jobs are filled by women
These achievements are real and should not be underestimated. Yet huge challenges remain and too many women are still denied rights that should be taken for granted. Even now, a woman who runs away from home to escape domestic abuse is seen as dishonouring her family and often loses the right to see her children.
Forced and child marriage are common and only 13% of women are literate (the figure for men is 43%). Eighty-seven per cent of all women in Afghanistan suffer domestic abuse, according to a UN survey and life expectancy for both men and women is around 45 – more than 20 years lower than the world average. The Save the Children index this May described Afghanistan as the worst place in the world to be a mother – one in 11 women perishes in pregnancy (one every 30 minutes) while one child in every five dies before reaching its fifth birthday. This means that every mother in Afghanistan is likely to face the loss of a child. And many women remain isolated. The ActionAid poll found that four in 10 women never leave their village or neighbourhood.
It is important to note, which this report does not, that not only do women run away from home to escape domestic abuse, but all too often they attempt suicide to escape, frequently setting themselves on fire to do so. The abuse itself is often horrific beyond description, including brutal disfigurement and outright murder.
As for where we are now, ActionAid reports,
“After the fall of the Taliban things got better. But then gradually, after 2006, the situation got worse,” says Selay Ghaffar, executive director of ActionAid partner HAWCA. “All these efforts were undermined because of security and the presence of people who committed crimes and abuses in the past who are still in power. Girls’ schools shut down, acid was thrown in girls’ faces, schools were burnt down.”…
…And despite the early statements from international leaders, women’s rights seem to have been deprioritised as the military operation against the Taliban and other insurgents has been stepped up…
This is delusional phrasing–women’s rights have never been the priority in Afghanistan except to the extent that they are politically expedient towards other ends. The report continues,
…In September last year the Afghan government set up a High Peace Council – a 79-member body which is tasked with talking to the Taliban. There are just nine women on the council and many women’s rights activists say they hold merely symbolic positions and are not part of the real negotiations.
…The international community can also support Afghan women through deeper engagement with women’s civil society and community-based organisations. Direct funding to women’s organisations to build their capacity as advocates and leaders will enable funds to aid transformation to a more democratic society, not just facilitate transition without the promise of sustainable change…
…However, providing this support will require a fresh look at funding priorities, and methods to ensure aid reaches women and can address the root causes of women’s inequality. Women’s organisations working to reduce poverty and empower women and girls say they receive little or no funding, forcing them to operate hand to mouth and limit activities to practical services rather than also being able to lobby for long-term changes for women….
…In addition the international community should broaden diplomatic efforts to include consultations and information sharing with women’s organisations. Amplifying the concerns of women’s organisations and ensuring women’s voices are heard is a valuable role the international community can play.
Conspicuously absent in ActionAid’s analysis is the existence of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1889 as framework for conflict resolution and peace negotiating which are however addressed by Oxfam (see below).
According to Oxfam,
Western leaders have a responsibility toward Afghan women, not least because protection of women’s rights was sold as a positive outcome of the international intervention in October 2001. Ten years on, however, time is running out to fulfill these promises.
The Afghan government and the international community must:
Ensure women’s rights are not sacrificed, by publicly pledging that any political settlement must explicitly guarantee women’s rights;
Make a genuine commitment to meaningful participation of women in all phases and levels of any peace processes.
The Afghan government must:
Enhance efforts to increase representation of women in elected bodies and government institutions at all levels to 30 per cent;
Encourage religious leaders to speak out on women’s rights in Islam;
Intensify efforts to promote female access to education, health, justice, and other basic services.
The Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defence must:
Improve awareness of women’s rights and human rights law in the justice and security sector, and ensure effective imple- mentation of these laws;
Increase substantially women recruits in the security and justice sectors.
The international community must:
Support expanded civic education programmes to raise awareness of women’s rights at community level;
Support efforts to improve female leadership;
Intensify support to promote access to education and other key services, and ensure this support will continue at current or in- creased levels even as international military forces prepare to withdraw.
The UN must:
Continue to monitor all government actions including the peace processes and provide increased support to the Afghan government on all negotiation, reconciliation, and reintegra- tion processes.
The report points to the dichotomy between the current lip-service regarding Afghan women and the realities of how the issue is being approached,
Publicly, Western politicians are still backing Afghan women. In July 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated her commitment to women, saying: ‘Any potential for peace will be subverted if women and ethnic minorities are marginalised or silenced…And so when we look at what will happen in Afghanistan, the United States will not abandon our values or support a political process that undoes the progress that has been made in the past decade.’ But behind the scenes it is less clear what will happen if the Taliban make demands that require compromise on women’s rights, as the US government prepares to withdraw the majority of its troops by the end of 2014 and seeks a political settlement to bring an end to the fighting. In July 2011, a Washington Post article reported one USAID official as saying ‘gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities’.This reflects ‘growing realism’ tempering expectations of what they can achieve on the ground after ten years. As one analysis puts it, ‘On this list of priorities, ‘gender’ is generally seen as a luxury to be left aside until the supposedly gender-neutral objectives in the domains of security and governance have been achieved.’ (Emphasis mine.)
Let’s be very clear here–gender issues have always taken a back seat. This isn’t a question of ‘growing realism’, it is a question of persistent, pandemic misogyny that has infested and damaged life on this planet since the dawn of patriarchy. It is precisely the stupidity of seeing these issues as a luxury that undermines any realistic achievement of security since the day men first started going to war. But as Oxfam points out,
The vital role of women in peace-building at the national level and in peace negotiations has been recognised in UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1889, applicable to all UN member states, including Afghanistan. The Afghan government reaffirmed its support for women’s role in peace-building in its national peace plan, the donor-funded Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme (APRP), which began to be rolled out nationwide in early 2011.
Yet women are currently under-represented or not represented at all in the APRP, which augurs poorly for female participation in any future formal peace talks with the Taliban. There are just nine women on the 70-member High Peace Council (HPC), which was created to lead the peace process. Many of the male members are former warlords and powerbrokers who do not take their female counterparts seriously. The APRP has also established provincial peace councils under the HPC, composed of between 20 and 35 members, with a minimum of three women, one of whom must be a representative from the Department of Women’s Affairs (DoWA). However, no council as yet has more than three female members. Women at the community level have little understanding of APRP; their formal role, at the moment, is unclear but is likely to be limited to involvement in community development programmes. According to a provincial DoWA head, ‘although women have great potential as negotiators and peacebuilders, the will and commitment from Kabul to involve them is almost nil.’
In their conclusions, Oxfam writes that, “words must be matched with action and firm guarantees,” and this is indeed true but not sufficient. Our words in regard to Afghan women were used in 2001 as a tool to garner support for the invasion of Afghanistan, not a call on its own merits to address Afghan human rights issues. Just bringing women to the table will not be enough–it must be insured that the women who come to the table are not puppet window dressing proxies for warlords or the Taliban and that they are allowed to safely speak freely and that their words be taken seriously.
The most crucial point to be made however is that while women’s human rights, progress and security are a huge concern, they should not be construed as a reason for continued, never ending foreign military presence in Afghanistan, which is only aggravating the continuing violence that pervades the country. Killing and maiming people does not secure human rights, it destroys them. There is no possibility of living in peace until the violence ends. It is time to disarm the warring factions within Afghanistan and for the U.S. military to leave–only then will there be a realistic chance for women’s human rights in Afghanistan.
In a country that has spent the last 10 years fighting wars that we can’t win and which have cost so much in every sense of the word, it is understandable that Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea describing the journey that led him to want to build schools, especially for girls, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, struck a chord. It was a story that many wanted to believe. We wanted there to be a romanticized way that the white colonizer could convince the dark heathens that we would save them. We needed a Lawrence of Arabia looking hero and Mortenson fulfilled our fantasy.
Even the U.S. military, which has waged the counter-productive, impossible to win war in Afghanistan wanted to believe, to the extent that they invited Mortenson to advise and speak to troops on many occasions. As Greg Jaffe writes in the Washington Post, Mortenson provided a kinder, gentler way of winning hearts and minds that the military badly wanted to be true,
Mortenson’s narratives of wise, patient and kind Afghan and Pakistani elders made it seem as though progress in Afghanistan was achievable. All U.S. troops had to do was learn the Afghan culture, show some patience and deliver a little bit of progress, and the Afghans would see the U.S. military’s good intentions and turn against the Taliban. In this formulation, counterinsurgency — a complex, morally ambiguous and frequently bloody type of war — came to look a bit like social work with guns.
The allegations made by 60 Minutes and Jon Krakauer have however severely dented the armor of our hero. While no one disputes that Mortenson has built schools, it is deeply disturbing that,
a financial statement from the Central Asia Institute (CAI), which Mortenson co-founded in 1996 and is acting executive director of, show that only 41 per cent of funds raised actually went towards schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to the American Center for Philanthropy, a charity watchdog, CAI claims that $1.7 million was spent on Mortenson’s “book-related expenses,” more than they spent on all of their schools in Pakistan last year.
Also, as Michelle Goldberg points out, while indeed CAI built numerous schools, education requires more than just a building–ongoing funding for books, teachers, etc. are key. But as Goldberg writes, while we want to believe in the white knight in shining armor image that Mortenson presents, it isn’t the best model for making a sustainable difference.
Mortenson became as famous as he did because people love the idea that one intrepid humanitarian can solve intractable problems in the world’s most desperate places. Schimmelpfennig calls it the “White in Shining Armor” approach to development. It makes for good stories, but it usually doesn’t work. In nearly every country in the world, there are people on the ground trying hard to improve things in their communities, and the most successful programs work through them. The Global Fund for Women, for example, takes applications for grants in any form and any language. It supports organizations like the Afghan Institute of Learning, which began by running underground girls schools during Taliban rule, and which has since trained more than 7,000 female primary school teachers. The problem isn’t that the world of development lacks real heroes. The problem is that they’re rarely the ones we hear about.
Kalsoom Lakhani wisely offers this perspective on the Mortenson saga, saying,
We should also use this opportunity to look inwards at ourselves, at our ability to get carried away by a charismatic personality and digestible narrative, in which Mortenson was the John Smith in the Pakistani version of Pocahontas. Rather than society questioning whether good intentions truly equaled good aid, we gave him a platform, feeling warm and fuzzy for the part we indirectly played in saving schoolchildren. This thinking is endemic of a larger problem with charity and non-profit giving, in which show ponies and personalities often sweep us off our feet. We forget that we must demand transparency, and that we need to go beyond giving, remembering instead to give well, and who our money should be ultimately going to. This means supporting institutions and organisations that are not built on personality alone, but on community engagement and sustainability.
There is no question that CAI’s finances need to be thoroughly investigated and Mortenson needs to be given a chance to fully respond (the 60 Minutes story unfortunately came out just before Mortenson underwent a heart proceedure from which he is currently recovering and therefore it may be some time before he is able to respond).
Regardless of that however, the Mortenson story is merely a variation of the we are better than everyone else therefore we must save them and show them the wisdom of our ways mythology that poisons so much of our public dialog.
And let’s remember that Mortenson is hardly the first person to observe that educating children, especially girls, is a very effective way to better a society. Human rights groups have been saying this six ways to Sunday for a very long time. If we truly bought into this theory however, we would be spending a great deal more on education and a great deal less on military action. Women’s rights groups such as RAWA have been operating schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan long before Mortenson showed up to discuss the matter with the male elders of remote villages. Yet RAWA, which operates on very minimal funds and in the face of great danger and usually the disapproval of those very same warlords and elders, only generates niche support in this country while Mortenson catches the attention of the whole country for the simple reason that we were brought up to believe that this was the model of heroism that will save the world.
Never mind that for the most part I am a huge fan, at the moment I am just the teensiest bit annoyed with Michael Moore for having this to say about the Assange rape charges,
For those of you who think it’s wrong to support Julian Assange because of the sexual assault allegations he’s being held for, all I ask is that you not be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey. Please — never, ever believe the “official story.” And regardless of Assange’s guilt or innocence (see the strange nature of the allegations here), this man has the right to have bail posted and to defend himself.
Yes, I agree, the charges do seem strange, and I do support Assange’s work (we’ll get to that in a few paragraphs) and of course he should have the right to defend himself. But treating the charges dismissively because Assange’s work is for the greater good isn’t okay because men, powerful dudes included, do have a wee bit of a history of using their penises in inappropriate ways while their accusers get trashed (1), even by so-called progressives who all too often are dismissive and trivializing of the charges (2).
just because the vigor with which Assange was pursued was clearly politically motivated doesn’t mean that the accusations against Assange are totally incredible, or that it’s unjust that he will have to face them.
And Feministing’s Jessica Valentipoints to the absurdity of the way the case is being deliberately described,
The truth? There’s nothing in Swedish law about “sex by surprise” or broken condoms. (Here’s the penal code, see for yourself.) And despite reports to the contrary, Assange’s accusers have always said that this was not consensual sex.
For more thoughts on this, see Footnote 2 below.
Troubling as the dismissiveness of rape charges for the greater good line of reasoning is, Grit TV’s Laura Flanders makes this additional and very salient point that regardless of the integrity of the rape charges, since when did rape charges become such an almighty Interpol priority, not that it wouldn’t be a good idea if they did, but the answer of course is when they are politically expedient, and certainly not out of sudden concern for the welfare of the alleged victims:
let’s be clear, he should face the charges. But since when is Interpol [the investigative arm of the International Criminal Court at The Hague] so vigilant about violence against women? If women’s security is suddenly Interpol’s priority — that’s big news!Tell it to hundreds of women in US jails and immigration detention centers — who charge that they can’t get justice against accused rapists — or women in the US military (two of out three of whom allege they’ve experienced assault.) In Haiti hundreds of unprosecuted cases of rape in refugee camps could use some of Interpol’s attention…
…It seems we only care about women’s bodies when there’s a political point to be proved.
And there we get to another point of great dis-ease; it serves a lot of powerful agendas to prosecute Assange for rape, but for the overwhelming majority of rapes, that is not the case. As Meredith Taxpoints out, never mind Interpol, even the International Criminal Court which is supposed to prosecute rape cases is doing a piss poor job of it.
At the crux of it, women’s human rights are routinely and systemically ignored unless it serves the political agenda of patriarchy to shine a light on the pandemic abuse of women. We only trot out women’s rights when they are convenient. The examples are endless.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently made a surprise appearance at the TED Women conference. She told the audience that if you give women equal rights, the whole nation will be more stable and secure. Indeed. Maybe we could try that in the United States? Passing an Equal Rights Amendment, ratifying CEDAW, and insisting on equal pay would be a good place to start. Imagine if we took that approach to security instead of waging endless wars against other countries.
And what about the rights of women in Afghanistan that we are allegedly defending? As MADRE’s Diana Duartesays so succinctly,
It is not only valid but also necessary to reject the conflation of support for Afghan women’s rights with support for the war. This conflation has obstructed our view of what alternatives may exist. It has blocked us from recognizing that perpetual war clamps down on the space that women have to build solutions for their future.
And then there is the U.S. military which is being sued for access to rape records in an effort to determine the extent to which the military has addressed the appalling rates of sexual assault and lack of prosecution thereof in the ranks,
“Much of the information about the extent and cost of the (military sexual trauma) problem, along with the government’s reluctance to prosecute offenders and treat victims, is not in the public sphere,” the lawsuit states. “The public has a compelling interest in knowing this information, given the potential enormity of the problem, the emotional and financial cost that it imposes on military service members and the increasing number of women serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
until exposed through a series of recordings as well as an FBI report, New York City police officers had been covering up sex crimes with the full knowledge and even the direction of their superiors. In fact, it seems likely it’s still happening.
So those rapes should be covered up, but the charges against Assange are the stuff of Interpol charges? Just a bit of a double standard.
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I have been thinking a great deal about the juxtaposition of the issue of Assange’s exposure of government and corporate secrets while being accused of a crime that all too often is also shrouded in secrecy. In the end, the common thread is power, which so often depends on secrecy at the expense of truth, be it in the personal or political realm.
Many intelligent and thoughtful people, while acknowledging that much of what has been exposed thus far is quite troubling, are concerned that Wikileaks endangers the secrecy necessary to function in the corporate and political world. (3) That however makes the assumption that keeping those systems functioning as they are is a good idea, and that is what we need to re-examine because for the most part, if there wasn’t something offensive if not illegal about what is being kept secret, those in power would not be so concerned about keeping those secrets. And in the end, wouldn’t we be better served by those in power acting honorably in a way that would pass the test of transparency?
And so we need to ask ourselves, just what is it that the powers that be are afraid will be exposed and subsequently lost by these revelations. And the answer is one word, Patriarchy, and this is why: In the process of leaking documents, Wikileaks and Assange have gifted the power and commodity of secrecy.
In an essay by Israeli writer Erella Shadmi, Trapped By Patriarchy in the anthology Women and the Gift Economy we get an understanding of why gifting secrets that are needed to maintain power is so terrifying to patriarchal structure in both the public and private realm. While she refers to Muslim and Israeli societies, her analysis is universal to patriarchy.
Muslim tradition puts revenge and honour up on the private and public agenda of every believer. And Israeli modern culture is dominated by the Culture of the Freiher. Freiher is a vulgarism meaning “sucker.” The culture of freiher defies a person that is ready to give way, to be used, to forgive. Such a person is viewed as one that does not care for his honour or power. For example: you are a freiher if you yield to other drivers. And especially, you are a freiher if you talk with “terrorists,” if you let your wife dominate you. In a culture of the freiher you do not take responsibility for your mistakes, you do not share your ideas lest they be stolen, you are never weak lest you are exploited. So you learn to manipulate, to lie, to exploit people, to hide your feelings.
Wikileaks has dared to question the culture of freiher and the very structure of patriarchy in a way that we must defend and from which we cannot go back. Yet that very act also demands that we respect and fully address the personal charges against Assange, no matter how badly brought they have been, while at the same time not allowing them to be used as an excuse to undermine the defense and imperative of freeing ill-conceived secrets.
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In an effort to keep the body of this essay at a manageable size, I have pulled a lot of important material into the footnotes because it is crucial to the full understanding of the issues addressed above.
(1) In this case, this has been done in particularly frightening ways. The Washington Examiner reports,
Posting their addresses and phone numbers isn’t intended to encourage vigilantism, but to send a bigger message to women like Ardin and Wilen – if you lie about being raped, this is what will happen to you. Your anonymity will be compromised, your life will be laid bare for all to see, and your name will be destroyed. No rape shield law or journalistic ethic can protect you. You will suffer as the man whose name you vindictively dragged through the mud has suffered.
I want women to see that their choices have consequences. If enough false rape accusers have their identities and personal data exposed to the jeering Internet hordes, others will think twice before they accuse men of heinous crimes for petty and selfish reasons.
(2) A few non-negotiable facts that we should get straight from the get-go in this conversation: Rape and sexual assault are the most under-reported and prosecuted crimes in the world. Yes, a few rape charges are false, most aren’t. And yes some rapes are committed by women and some of the victims are men, but mostly it is men that commit these crimes and women who are the victims. And to be clear–the basis of these claims comes from the U.S. Department of Justice, the World Health Organization, etc.
Keith Olbermann used scare quotes around the word rape as though the charges themselves (which are that Assange held one woman down against her will, and in a separate incident raped another while she was sleeping) were silly, and everyone from Glenn Beck to Naomi Wolf rushed to belittle the accusers, along the way employing every victim-blaming, rape-denying, slut-shaming trope ever invented, from “they’re just lashing out because they got their feelings hurt” (that’s both Beck and purported feminist Wolf, paraphrased) to my personal non-favorite, popular blogger Robert Stacy McCain’s suggestion that women who consent to any kind of sex are sluts who deserve whatever happens: “You buy the ticket, you take the ride.”…
…As soon as a rape accusation makes it into the news cycle (most often because the accused is famous), it’s instantly held up against our collective subconscious idea about what Real Rape (or, as Whoopi Goldberg odiously called it, “rape-rape”) looks like. Here’s a quick primer on that ideal: The rapist is a scary stranger, with a weapon, even better if he’s a poor man of color. The victim is a young, white, conventionally pretty, sober, innocent virgin. Also, there are witnesses and/or incontrovertible physical evidence, and the victim goes running to the authorities as soon as the assault is over.But let’s face it, actual rapes almost never match up to this ideal. Most rape victims know their attacker (estimates range from 75 percent to 89 percent), most rapists use alcohol or drugs to facilitate the assault (More than 80 percent, according to researcher David Lisak), not weapons, and most of the famous men whose accusers receive media attention aren’t poor men of color. But once the accusation hits the news cycle, whatever pundit gets there first uses the non-ideal details of the alleged assault to argue that surely, we shouldn’t take this seriously, and other pundits nod their head in agreement.
It is curious that charges against Assange were brought, dropped almost immediately, and later reinstated. The fact that authorities were so quick to charge Assange based on uncorroborated testimony should raise questions about whether prosecutors are treating him differently from your run-of-the-mill alleged sex criminal. However, it’s pure rape culture apology to argue that so-called “he said/she said” cases should be automatically dismissed in favor of the alleged rapist.
We can agree that the legal response to what Assange allegedly did reeks of politically-motivated prosecution without passing judgment on the merits of the allegations against him.
(3) Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW)’s Anne L. Weismann also makes the peculiar argument that Wikileaks endangers freedom of information by not working within the system,
At first blush, WikiLeaks’ disclosure of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables seems like a win for transparency and accountability in government. After all, these documents offer a never before seen window into U.S. diplomacy. But upon closer inspection, WikiLeaks’ document dump illustrates the perils of going outside the system, and is likely to result in less transparency in the long run.
For those of us in the transparency business, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) offers a useful tool to pierce government secrecy. Designed to let the public know what its government is up to, the FOIA mandates disclosure upon request, subject to nine limited exemptions. Those exemptions represent a congressional balancing of governmental interests, such as national security and investigative needs, against the public’s need to know. For agencies that stray off course, the FOIA provides judicial review, allowing courts to view requested documents in camera to determine if they were properly withheld. While the FOIA is far from perfect, it provides the public with a useful tool for scrutinizing government actions and policies balanced by oversight and procedural safeguards.
Also worth noting, Deanna Zandt has some excellent commentary on the issue of internet rights and access,
When we face issues of free speech on the Net, we’re confronted with a severe reality in the harshest moments: we consider this here to be public space, but in reality it’s owned and operated by private companies. There is currently no set of accepted standards that say we have a set of rights online.
This is a crucial issue and with Net Neutrality in grave peril as I write this, if nothing else, we should seriously be thinking about the issue of how we access the internet and as PayPal, Amazon, Mastercard, etc. have proven, how easily that can be cut off.
Finally, I want to point to this weird example of the oft ignored sexism of the left. CommonDreams, in its ongoing coverage of Wikileaks, ran this illustration without comment, the use of “Gentlemen” in the graphic apparently was not considered remarkable. It should have been.
In a country that has spent the last 10 years fighting wars that we can’t win and which have cost so much in every sense of the word, it is understandable that Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea describing the journey that led him to want to build schools, especially for girls, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, struck a chord. It was a story that many wanted to believe. We wanted there to be a romanticized way that the white colonizer could convince the dark heathens that we would save them. We needed a Lawrence of Arabia looking hero and Mortenson fulfilled our fantasy.
