Tearful soldiers carried the casket of Trooper Karine Blais onto a waiting plane at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday during a solemn ramp ceremony honouring a woman described as "full of energy" and "friendly to everyone."Meanwhile, in Kabul, a few hundred Afghan women who had gathered to protest a new law that basically legalizes rape were pelted with stones.
Blais, 21, was killed Monday when the armoured vehicle she was in hit a roadside bomb north of the city of Kandahar.
[...] Blais, who had only been in Afghanistan for two weeks, was the second female Canadian soldier to be killed in the war-torn country. Her death comes nearly three years after Capt. Nicola Goddard was killed in a grenade attack west of Kandahar.
Afghan women protesting against a new law that severely undermines women's rights were pelted with stones in the country's capital Wednesday, say reports.
About 300 mostly young women gathered in Kabul to show their opposition to a recently passed law that forbids women from refusing to have sex with their husbands and requires them to get a male relative's permission to leave the house.
The demonstration was organized by women's rights activists in Afghanistan. Critics of the law say it effectively legalizes rape within marriage and is a return to Taliban-style rule.
[...] "You are a dog. You are not a Shiite woman," one man shouted to a young woman in a headscarf holding aloft a banner that said, "We don't want Taliban law."
"You are a dog"... Picture this scene in your mind. A "man" is throwing rocks at a woman and calling her a "dog". Can any sane person in the entire world imagine a context in which this kind of behavior might be justified? I imagine a scumbag like this crying and screaming and pulling his hair out like a spoiled little sissy over a cartoon depicting his god in an unfavorable light. Then I imagine him beating or stoning or killing his wife, or his sister, or his daughter, for this or that or some other imagined offense. If there is anything more "offensive" in the world than "men" like this, it escapes me.
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ReplyDeleteThis behaviour is incomprehensible. How do you even begin to understand such hatred - for it is hatred - towards women?
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The people that are enraged and clinging to the past seem to remain gripped still gripped in millennial terror. Karen Armstrong makes a good case for this in her overview of fundamentalist religions The Battle for God.
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