BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

More Afghan women are choosing suicide to escape the violence and brutality of their daily lives, says a new human-rights report prepared by Canada's Foreign Affairs Department. The 2008 annual assessment paints a grim picture of a country where violence against women and girls is common, despite rising public awareness among Afghans and international condemnation. "Self-immolation is being used by increasing numbers of Afghan women to escape their dire circumstances and women constitute the majority of Afghan suicides," said the report, completed in November 2009. The document was obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act. The director of a burn unit at a hospital in the relatively peaceful province of Herat reported that in 2008 more than 80 women tried to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire, many of them in the early 20s. Many of those women died, the report said. The frank evaluation of the plight of women was written against the bac...

by David Warren President Barack Obama announced this week, in his latest glamour speech -- this one choreographed among cadets at West Point -- the substance of the new U.S. "Afghan strategy." I last wrote about this on Oct. 28, when we'd been waiting seven months for particulars to accompany the glamour-speech "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan," that was delivered last March. I suggested that Obama had shown himself to be a president unable to make hard decisions. He makes speeches instead -- vacuous speeches that sound very grand to a poorly-informed mass audience, but on reading we find only posturing narcissism. This is a serious flaw in the "leader of the free world." But even presidents who can't make decisions get cornered by "events," and eight months after his initial rhetorical offering, with much additional posturing, Obama finally gave the U.S. and allies a policy of sorts. It was designed to provide ...

More from the great Uppity Woman. And more reasons I adore Uppity and Phyllis Chesler. I can't improve on what UW says so I am giving her some bandwith. How long are we going to put up with nonsense like Naomi Wolf's in trying to sanitize these monsters? A WINCINGLY AWFUL ARTICLE For those of you who don’t know of Naomi Wolf, here she is at roughly 2:35. IF YOU ARE ON AN AGGREGATOR - CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ABOVE VIDEO Now that you are refreshed, please read Naomi’s article, ”Behind The Veil Lives A Thriving Muslim Sexuality” . No kidding. That’s the title. Please read the entire piece before you read the rest of my post. Take your time. I want you to get it all. I’ll wait…. Dum De Dum, De Da Da………………… …………..All done reading? How ya doin’? Are your eyes bulging? Is that a head explosion I just saw in the second row? Honestly, at first I thought this article was a satire. To recap, Ms. Wolf wore a head scarf and a ”shalwar kameez“ (a far cry from a burqa) during her visit...

From THE REAL BARACK OBAMA Klein: Women stoned protesting sex-every-four-days law. ‘Death to the slaves of the Christians,’ yells rowdy crowd pelting rocks Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images for The New York Times Hundreds of Afghan women were reportedly pelted with stones today while protesting a law that gives husbands the right to demand sex with a wife every four days unless she is ill or would be physically harmed by intercourse, Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief at World Net Daily , reports. The law, passed last month, would legalize marital rape, according to critics. It also requires a wife to seek her husband’s permission to go outside in public. “We don’t want Taliban law,” said one female protester, referring to the fundamentalist Islamist movement that governed Afghanistan until the U.S. invasion following the 9-11 attacks. The law only applies to Shiite families in Afghanistan, who comprise about 10 to 20 percent of the country’s 30 million strong population. The law state...

What a country! And Barfy thinks we can TALK to these neaderthals? New Afghanistan law allows men to demand sex from wife every 4 days by Helen Kennedy A new Afghan law saying Shiite men can demand sex from their wives every four days and keep them indoors indefinitely is causing an uproar. Hillary Clinton's State Department is trying to force a repeal of a law more restrictive than even the old Taliban regime. "We're very concerned about these reports with regard to the legislation," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood. The passage of what some call "legalized rape" means American women have died fighting in Afghanistan to give men there the right to subjugate women. Clinton and Afghan President Hamid Karzai met privately Tuesday at The Hague, but Wood could not say if she pressed him to reverse the law he just signed. "She may have. I don't know," Wood said. "President Karzai is certainly well-aware of our views with regard to t...

Hey Barry? CAN YA' HEAR ME NOW? By Sayed Salahuddin Taliban insurgents rejected on Wednesday a U.S. offer of "honorable reconciliation" as a "lunatic idea" and said the withdrawal of foreign troops was the only way to end the war in Afghanistan. With the Afghan conflict now in its eighth year, NATO-led forces and the Taliban are locked in a bloody stalemate with violence set to rise further this year as more U.S. troops arrive and seek to contain the insurgency ahead of August elections. President Barack Obama is redoubling U.S. efforts with more troops, more diplomatic effort and more economic assistance, but he has also already spoken of the need for an "exit strategy." If the U.S. plan fails to show results, analysts say, time is on the Taliban side. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an international conference on Afghanistan on Tuesday that those members of the Taliban who abandoned extremism must be granted an "honorable form of re...

German Muslim Sentenced for Stabbing Rabbi (he's the guy in the black jacket/ white pants) An Afghanistan-born German Muslim has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail after he stabbed a rabbi in a Frankfurt street last September. The Jewish cleric believes the man was trying to kill him and that the sentence is too lenient. A German court sentenced a 23-year-old man Afghanistan-born man to three-and-a-half years in jail on Tuesday for stabbing and seriously injuring a rabbi in Frankfurt last September. The unemployed German Muslim, named only as Sajed A., stabbed rabbi Zalman Gurevitch, 42, in an altercation with the orthodox Jewish cleric who had been walking down a street with two companions. The court convicted him of causing grievous bodily harm. The Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office had initially planned to charge him with attempted manslaughter but refrained from doing so after investigating the case. During the trial an eyewitness said the two men had been invo...

SUPPORT OUR HEROES - THE ONES WITH PTSD WHO ARE SUICIDE RISKS! Little Relief on Ward 53 At Walter Reed, Care for Soldiers Struggling With War's Mental Trauma Is Undermined by Doctor Shortages and Unfocused Methods By Anne Hull and Dana Priest On the military plane that crossed the ocean at night, the wounded lay in stretchers stacked three high. The drone of engines was broken by the occasional sound of moaning. Sedated and sleeping, Pfc. Joshua Calloway was at the top of one stack last September. Unlike the others around him, Calloway was handcuffed to his stretcher. When the 20-year-old infantry soldier woke up, he was on the locked-down psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A nurse handed him pajamas and a robe, but they reminded him of the flowing clothes worn by Iraqi men. He told the nurse, "I don't want to look like a freakin' Haj." He wanted his uniform. Request denied. Shoelaces and belts were prohibited. Calloway felt naked without his M-...

OSAMA SAYS: "QUIT AFGHAN WAR", BARBARA SAYS: "SCREW YOU, OSAMA!" You know what I would take away from this? That the U.S. and our allies should not only get out of Iraq, but go BACK to Afghanistan and start STRAFING THE PLACE 24/7!! Whine away, Bin Laden. Bush may have forgotten but the people of NYC have NOT! Afghanistan, if you know what's good for you - drive this piece of pond scum out of your country before we do it for you! Europe - help us get rid of this sick **** once and for all. And his 'flying monkeys' too. And make sure there's a big ole' Magen David on the bombs you drop too. (Pardon my very unladylike talk as well. - Barbara) Al-Qaida chief: Nation shouldn't be punished for sheltering me after 9/11 Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden called on the Europeans to stop helping the United States in the war in Afghanistan, according to excerpts of a new audiotape broadcast Thursday on Al-Jazeera television. Bin Laden said it was unj...

Two Years after I Called for a Redeployment of U.S. Forces from Iraq, Bush Refuses to Provide the American People with a Responsible Exit Strategy (one comment - when did EXIT STRATEGY = SURRENDER? It doesn't. And no right wing nutjob's semantics is going to make me believe getting our troops out in an orderly and sane manner is the same as surrender. No matter how many times they say it.) "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." - Pres. Bush, at the Athena Performing Arts Center at Greece Athena Middle and High School Tuesday, May 24, 2005 in Rochester, NY - SOURCE by Rep. John Murtha [November 17, 2007] marks the two year anniversary of my public call for the redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq. Two years ago, I was convinced that the President's lack of strategy in Iraq was harming our military, our international credibility, and the strength of our...

REALITY, WHAT A CONCEPT... FOR BUSHIES Did anyone else see that interview with Donald Rumsfeld in GQ magazine? I had to pinch myself and make sure that I hadn't stepped through the looking glass: “Look at Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, 28 million people are free. They have their own president, they have their own parliament. Improved a lot on the streets. […] “It’s been a big success!” HUH WHAT? Big success? Splinter groups, sectarian fighting...? uh, okey dokey then. So if you hit a ball of mercury, and it then becomes 10 balls of mercury, and then you strike those ten balls and they become 100... according to Rummy's pretzel logic - that would be a "containment success." And Osama's still there and ALIVE. Success? To say it was a relative term to that guy is to compare a tornado to a gentle breeze. As the Bush-Wacked Blog says: ...I guess that depends on what your definition of success is… if it’s allowing the Taliban to get back to pre-war strength than, b...