HUMOUR:

RELIGIOUS MYOPIA:

Yet another winner from Kirktoons.

AMERICAN POLITICS:

OH WHAT AN EVIL SON OF A BITCH !:

At the same time as the American Empire is waging wars abroad that punish millions of people for the actions of a few hundred barbaric religious fanatics the domestic scene of the USA continues to cough up personalities with huge followings who would put Al-Queda to shame for sheer brutality and lack of the common moral values that keep human society together. One of these is the tele-evangelist Pat Robertson who has already become infamous for remarks such as that the devastation of New Orleans was due to "support for abortion". To say the least Robertson would be far ahead of Osama in the line-up for the "scum of the Earth award" if he had political power. It's sobering to think that the Vice-Presidential candidate (and maybe future Presidential candidate) of one of the major political parties in the country in charge of the world's largest nuclear arsenal was of his ilk. Robertson tried and failed in a bid to lead the Republican Party back in 1988, but I'm speaking of somebody more recent.

Robertson's latest is that the tragedy of the Haitian earthquake was because of some mythical "pact with the Devil" that the insurgents who fought against the French slavery system during Haiti's war of independence back in the early 19th century "signed". Yeah, I'm sure. Personally I'm not a Christian, but I hope that sincere followers of that faith recognize what a great slander it is upon their beliefs and respond accordingly. It is, of course, totally insane, and it says buckets that this should be taken as 'legitimate comment' in the homeland of the greatest empire the world has ever seen.

The following article from the Care2 site tells more about this atrocity, and asks you to sign a petition demanding an immediate apology from Robertson. The possibility of this is doubtful, but it's worth the effort to at least go on record as being opposed to barbarism. Robertson is one of the few people on earth that make decent people wish that the income tax bureaucracy was more efficient. If you want to read more about this lowlife, and have the stomach, there is a Wikipedia article on his antics, including all the failed prophecies that the Lord "delivered to him".

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Pat Robertson is Going to Hell:
And he might be taking you with him. Because if there is a god, Pat Robertson is one of the devil's pied pipers.

People who love their fellow man do not expound on the cause of natural disasters and unfathomable human suffering, they just do what they can to help.

Here is what Pat Robertson said on his Christian Broadcasting Network show Wednesday (1/13) about the devastating earthquake in Haiti that many sources are now saying has claimed the lives of as many as 500,000 people:

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French ... and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.'

True story. And the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.' "Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another."

After a firestorm of protest and criticism, CBN released a statement to clarify Robertson's comments, claiming:

"On today's The 700 Club, during a segment about the devastation, suffering and humanitarian effort that is needed in Haiti, Dr. Robertson also spoke about Haiti's history. His comments were based on the widely-discussed 1791 slave rebellion led by Boukman Dutty (examine the actual history of the Haitian Revolution-Molly ) at Bois Caiman, where the slaves allegedly made a famous pact with the devil in exchange for victory over the French. This history, combined with the horrible state of the country, has led countless scholars ("scholars" ?????-Molly ) and religious figures over the centuries to believe the country is cursed."

The statement goes on to detail Robertson's compassion for the Haitian people and his relief efforts already underway.

Of course Robertson has a long history of claiming natural disasters are sent by god as divine retribution for sins he arbitrarily determines:

Robertson linked Hurricane Katrina to abortion.

Robertson blamed Ariel Sharon stroke on his policy on the Gaza Strip.

Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez.

I suspect that the devil knows a lot more about Pat Robertson than he knows about the devil.

Sign the petition to demand an immediate apology from Robertson.

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Go to this link to sign the following brief and to the point petition demanding Robinson apologize.

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"Pat Robertson, your ridiculous treatises are deeply offensive. We demand that you immediately apologize to the people and government of Haiti."

AMERICAN POLITICS:

TEXAS TEXTBOOK WAR COMING TO SHOWDOWN:

Last August Molly blogged on the present situation in the education system of the state of Texas where new "politically correct" (in a right wing sense) textbooks are aiming to eliminate all references to Hispanics from social studies texts ie pretend they never existed. As might be expected the United Farm Workers, with its heavily Hispanic membership, opposes such an attempt to falsify history. Here is a recent repeat of their appeal to join them in protest against this change.

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Stop Texas from erasing Cesar Chavez and Hispanics from school books:

We urgently need your help to stop the Texas state Board of Education from erasing Cesar Chavez and all Hispanic historical figures from public school text books. Since Texas is such a major textbook purchaser, such a move could have a nationwide impact.

This Wednesday, Jan. 13, the state board will take a preliminary vote to adopt new standards for social studies texts. These new standards would eliminate all Hispanics since the conquest of Mexico in the early 16th Century. Cesar Chavez, arguably the most important Hispanic civil rights leader of the 20th Century, is among the historical figures to be eliminated. One of Lowe’s so called "experts" said that Chavez "lacks the stature…and contributions" and should not be "held up to our children as someone worthy of emulation." Also eliminated are a number of key Texas history makers such as Irma Rangel, the first Hispanic woman elected to the state Legislature.

Board members and their appointees have complained about an "over representation of minorities" in the current social studies standards. This is ironic as Hispanics will soon comprise the majority of all Texas public school students.

Please take a few moments right now to send board Chair Lowe an e-mail. Tell the TX State Board of Education not to allow a handful of ideological extremists to revise history by eliminating people of color. Please act now.

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THE LETTER:

Please go to this link to send the following letter to the Texas Board of Education.

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We are outraged that the Texas State Board of Education is taking a preliminary vote Jan. 13 on a proposal to effectively erase Cesar Chavez and all Hispanic historical figures from the state’s public school textbooks. At a time when the majority of public school students in Texas will soon be Hispanic, how can the board allow ideological extremists to revise history by eliminating all Hispanic history makers since the 16th Century conquest of Mexico? It is important that our children learn about historical figures such as Cesar Chavez and Irma Rangel--the first Hispanic woman elected to the state Legislature.

As a supporter of the farm worker movement, please explain to me how Cesar Chavez "lacks the stature...and contributions of so many others" and should not be "held up to our children as someone worthy of emulation," as claimed by one of the "experts" advising your board?
Don’t let a handful of ideological extremists decide what is taught in the public schools by eliminating people of color. A full and accurate teaching of the diverse history of Texas is required in taxpayer-supported school textbooks.
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THE BACKGROUND:
Here's a little background on this issue from a recent edition of the Washington Monthly. Hopefully, after reading this, you may be more inclined to ass your voice to the protest campaign against this latest effort of the 'American Taliban'.
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Revisionaries
How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks:
By Mariah Blake

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.” (by building up debt that has to be paid by future generations-Molly )





Views like these are relatively common in East Texas, a region that prides itself on being the buckle of the Bible Belt. But McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement.





Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”





Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.





Up until the 1950s, textbooks painted American history as a steady string of triumphs, but the upheavals of the 1960s shook up old hierarchies, and beginning in the latter part of the decade, textbook publishers scrambled to rewrite their books to make more space for women and minorities. They also began delving more deeply into thorny issues, like slavery and American interventionism. As they did, a new image of America began to take shape that was not only more varied, but also far gloomier than the old one. Author Frances FitzGerald has called this chain of events “the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place.”





This shift spurred a fierce backlash from social conservatives, and some began hunting for ways to fight back. In the 1960s, Norma and Mel Gabler, a homemaker and an oil-company clerk, discovered that Texas had a little-known citizen-review process that allowed the public to weigh in on textbook content. From their kitchen table in the tiny town of Hawkins, the couple launched a crusade to purge textbooks of what they saw as a liberal, secular, pro-evolution bias. When textbook adoptions rolled around, the Gablers would descend on school board meetings with long lists of proposed changes—at one point their aggregate “scroll of shame” was fifty-four feet long. They also began stirring up other social conservatives, and eventually came to wield breathtaking influence. By the 1980s, the board was demanding that publishers make hundreds of the Gablers’ changes each cycle. These ranged from rewriting entire passages to simple fixes, such as pulling the New Deal from a timeline of significant historical events (the Gablers thought it smacked of socialism) and describing the Reagan administration’s 1983 military intervention in Grenada as a “rescue” rather than an “invasion.”





To avoid tangling with the Gablers and other citizen activists, many publishers started self-censoring or allowing the couple to weigh in on textbooks in advance. In 1984, the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way analyzed new biology textbooks presented for adoption in Texas and found that, even before the school board weighed in, three made no mention of evolution. At least two of them were later adopted in other states. This was not unusual: while publishers occasionally produced Texas editions, in most cases changes made to accommodate the state appeared in textbooks around the country—a fact that remains true to this day.





The Texas legislature finally intervened in 1995, after a particularly heated skirmish over health textbooks—among other things, the board demanded that publishers pull illustrations of techniques for breast self-examination and swap a photo of a briefcase-toting woman for one of a mother baking a cake. The adoption process was overhauled so that instead of being able to rewrite books willy-nilly, the school board worked with the Texas Education Agency, the state’s department of education, to develop a set of standards. Any book that conformed and got the facts right had to be accepted, which diluted the influence of citizen activists.





Around this time, social conservatives decided to target seats on the school board itself. In 1994 the Texas Republican Party, which had just been taken over by the religious right, enlisted Robert Offutt, a conservative board member who was instrumental in overhauling the health textbooks, to recruit like-minded candidates to run against the board’s moderate incumbents. At the same time, conservative donors began pouring tens of thousands of dollars into local school board races. Among them were Wal-Mart heir John Walton and James Leininger, a hospital-bed tycoon whose largess has been instrumental in allowing religious conservatives to take charge of the machinery of Texas politics. Conservative groups, like the Christian Coalition and the Eagle Forum, also jumped into the fray and began mobilizing voters.





Part of the newcomers’ strategy was bringing bare-knuckle politics into what had been low-key local races. In the run-up to the 1994 election, Leininger’s political action committee, Texans for Governmental Integrity, sent out glossy flyers suggesting that one Democratic incumbent—a retired Methodist schoolteacher and grandmother of five—was a pawn of the “radical homosexual lobby” who wanted to push steroids and alcohol on children and advocated in-class demonstrations on “how to masturbate and how to get an abortion!” The histrionics worked, and the group quickly picked off a handful of Democrats. The emboldened bloc then set its sights on Republicans who refused to vote in lockstep. “Either you’d hippity-hop, or they would throw whatever they could at you,” says Cynthia A. Thornton, a conservative Republican and former board member, who refers to the bloc as “the radicals.”





It took more than a decade of fits and starts, but the strategy eventually paid off. After the 2006 election, Republicans claimed ten of fifteen board seats. Seven were held by the ultra-conservatives, and one by a close ally, giving them an effective majority. Among the new cadre were some fiery ideologues; in her self-published book, Cynthia Dunbar of Richmond rails against public education, which she dubs “tyrannical” and a “tool of perversion,” and says sending kids to public school is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames.” (More recently, she has accused Barack Obama of being a terrorist sympathizer and suggested he wants America to be attacked so he can declare martial law.) Then in 2007 Governor Rick Perry appointed Don McLeroy, a suburban dentist and longstanding bloc member, as board chairman. This passing of the gavel gave the faction unprecedented power just as the board was gearing up for the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting standards for every subject.





McLeroy has flexed his muscle particularly brazenly in the struggle over social studies standards. When the process began last January, the Texas Education Agency assembled a team to tackle each grade. In the case of eleventh-grade U.S. history, the group was made up of classroom teachers and history professors—that is, until McLeroy added a man named Bill Ames. Ames—a volunteer with the ultra- conservative Eagle Forum and Minuteman militia member who occasionally publishes angry screeds accusing “illegal immigrant aliens” of infesting America with diseases or blasting the “environmentalist agenda to destroy America”—pushed to infuse the standards with his right-wing views and even managed to add a line requiring books to give space to conservative icons, “such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority,” without any liberal counterweight. But for the most part, the teachers on the team refused to go along. So Ames put in a call to McLeroy, who demanded to see draft standards for every grade and then handed them over to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by his benefactor, James Leininger. The group combed through the papers and compiled a list of seemingly damning omissions. Among other things, its analysts claimed that the writing teams had stripped out key historical figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Pat Hardy, a Republican board member who has sat in on some of the writing-team meetings, insists this isn’t true. “No one was trying to remove George Washington!” she says. “That group took very preliminary, unfinished documents and drew all kinds of wrongheaded conclusions.”





Nevertheless, the allegations drummed up public outrage, and in April the board voted to stop the writing teams’ work and bring in a panel of experts to guide the process going forward—“expert,” in this case, meaning any person on whom two board members could agree. In keeping with the makeup of the board, three of the six people appointed were right-wing ideologues, among them Peter Marshall, a Massachusetts-based preacher who has argued that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were God’s punishment for tolerating gays, and David Barton, former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party. Both men are self-styled historians with no relevant academic training—Barton’s only credential is a bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University—who argue that the wall of separation between church and state is a myth.





When the duo testified before the board in September, Barton, a lanky man with a silver pompadour, brought along several glass display cases stuffed with rare documents that illustrate America’s Christian heritage, among them a battered leather Bible that was printed by the Congress of the Confederation in 1782, a scrap of yellowing paper with a biblical poem scrawled by John Quincy Adams, and a stack of rusty printing plates for McGuffey Readers, popular late-1800s school books with a strong Christian bent. When he took to the podium that afternoon, Barton flashed a PowerPoint slide showing thick metal chains. “I really like the analogy of a chain—that we have all these chains that run through American history,” he explained in his rapid-fire twang. But, he added, in the draft social studies standards, the governmental history chain was riddled with gaps. “We don’t mention 1638, the first written constitution in America … the predecessor to the U.S. Constitution,” he noted as a hot pink “1638” popped up on the screen. By this he meant the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which called for a government based on the “Rule of the Word of God.” Barton proceeded to rattle off roughly a dozen other documents that pointed up the theocratic leaning of early American society, as the years appeared in orange or pink along the length of the chain.





Barton’s goal is to pack textbooks with early American documents that blend government and religion, and paint them as building blocks of our Constitution. In so doing, he aims to blur the fact that the Constitution itself cements a wall of separation between church and state. But his agenda does not stop there. He and the other conservative experts also want to scrub U.S. history of its inconvenient blemishes—if they get their way, textbooks will paint slavery as a relic of British colonialism that America struggled to cast off from day one and refer to our economic system as “ethical capitalism.” They also aim to redeem Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy, a project McLeroy endorses. As he put it in a memo to one of the writing teams, “Read the latest on McCarthy—He was basically vindicated.”





On the global front, Barton and company want textbooks to play up clashes with Islamic cultures, particularly where Muslims were the aggressors, and to paint them as part of an ongoing battle between the West ("western extremists" perhaps-Molly ) and Muslim extremists. Barton argues, for instance, that the Barbary wars, a string of skirmishes over piracy that pitted America against Ottoman vassal states in the 1800s, were the “original war against Islamic Terrorism.” What’s more, the group aims to give history a pro-Republican slant—the most obvious example being their push to swap the term “democratic” for “republican” when describing our system of government. Barton, who was hired by the GOP to do outreach to black churches in the run-up to the 2004 election, has argued elsewhere that African Americans owe their civil rights almost entirely to Republicans and that, given the “atrocious” treatment blacks have gotten at the hands of Democrats, “it might be much more appropriate that … demands for reparations were made to the Democrat Party rather than to the federal government.” He is trying to shoehorn this view into textbooks, partly by shifting the focus of black history away from the civil rights era to the post-Reconstruction period, when blacks were friendlier with Republicans.





Barton and Peter Marshall initially tried to purge the standards of key figures of the civil rights era, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall, though they were forced to back down amid a deafening public uproar. They have since resorted to a more subtle tack; while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr. deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn’t be given credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, “Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society.” Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by whites—in his view, mostly white Republican men.





While the writing teams have so far made only modest concessions to the ideologue experts, the board has final say over the documents’ contents, and the ultraconservative bloc has made it clear that it wants its experts’ views to get prominent play—a situation the real experts find deeply unsettling. While in Texas, I paid a visit to James Kracht, a soft-spoken professor with a halo of fine white hair, who is a dean at Texas A&M University’s school of education. Kracht oversaw the writing of Texas’s social studies standards in the 1990s and is among the experts tapped by the board’s moderates this time around. I asked him how he thought the process was going. “I have to be careful what I say,” he replied, looking vaguely sheepish. “But when the door is closed and I’m by myself, I yell and scream and pound on the wall.”





There has already been plenty of screaming and wall pounding in the battles over standards for other subjects. In late 2007, the English language arts writing teams, made up mostly of teachers and curriculum planners, turned in the drafts they had been laboring over for more than two years. The ultraconservatives argued that they were too light on basics like grammar and too heavy on reading comprehension and critical thinking. “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,” grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree, who often acts as the faction’s enforcer. At the bloc’s urging, the board threw out the teams’ work and hired an outside consultant to craft new standards from scratch, but the faction still wasn’t satisfied; when the new drafts came in, one adherent dismissed them as “unreadable” and “mangled.” In the end, they took matters into their own hands. The night before the final vote in May 2008, two members of the bloc, Gail Lowe and Barbara Cargill, met secretly and cobbled together yet another version. The documents were then slipped under their allies’ hotel-room doors, and the bloc forced through a vote the following morning before the other board members even had a chance to read them. Bradley argued that the whole ordeal was necessary because the writing teams had clung to their own ideas rather than deferring to the board. “I don’t think this will happen again, because they got spanked,” he added.





A similar scenario played out during the battle over science standards, which reached a crescendo in early 2009. Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any reference to the fact that the universe is roughly fourteen billion years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of creation.





McLeroy and company had also hoped to require science textbooks to address the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, including evolution. Scientists see the phrase, which was first slipped into Texas curriculum standards in the 1980s, as a back door for bringing creationism into science class. But as soon as news broke that the board was considering reviving it, letters began pouring in from scientists around the country, and science professors began turning out en masse to school board hearings. During public testimony, one biologist arrived at the podium in a Victorian-era gown, complete with a flouncy pink bustle, to remind her audience that in the 1800s religious fundamentalists rejected the germ theory of disease; it has since gained near-universal acceptance. All this fuss made the bloc’s allies skittish, and when the matter finally went to the floor last March, it failed by a single vote.





But the struggle did not end there. McLeroy piped up and chided his fellow board members, saying, “Somebody’s gotta stand up to [these] experts!” He and his allies then turned around and put forward a string of amendments that had much the same effect as the “strengths and weaknesses” language. Among other things, they require students to evaluate various explanations for gaps in the fossil record and weigh whether natural selection alone can account for the complexity of cells. This mirrors the core arguments of the intelligent design movement: that life is too complex to be the result of unguided evolution, and that the fossil evidence for evolution between species is flimsy. The amendments passed by a wide margin, something McLeroy counts as a coup. “Whoo-eey!” he told me. “We won the Grand Slam, and the Super Bowl, and the World Cup! Our science standards are light years ahead of any other state when it comes to challenging evolution!” Scientists are not so enthusiastic. My last night in Texas, I met David Hillis, a MacArthur Award–winning evolutionary biologist who advised the board on the science standards, at a soul-food restaurant in Austin. “Clearly, some board members just wanted something they could point to so they could reject science books that don’t give a nod to creationism,” he said, stabbing his okra with a fork. “If they are able to use those standards to reject science textbooks, they have won and science has lost.”





Even in deeply conservative Texas, the bloc’s breathtaking hubris—coupled with allegations of vote swapping (see “Money and Power on the Texas State Board of Education”)—have spurred a backlash. In May, the Texas state legislature refused to confirm McLeroy as board chair (Governor Perry replaced him with another bloc member), and, for the first time since he took office in 1998, he is facing a primary fight. His challenger, Thomas Ratliff, a lobbyist and legislative consultant whose father was the state’s lieutenant governor, argues that under McLeroy’s leadership the board has become a “liability” to the Republican Party. Two other members of the ultraconservative bloc are also mired in heated primary battles.





But to date few bloc members have been ousted in primaries, and even if moderates manage to peel off a few seats, by that time it will probably be too late. In mid-January, the board will meet to hammer out the last details of the standards for social studies, the only remaining subject, and the final vote will be held in March, around the same time the first primary ballots are counted. This means that no matter what happens at the ballot box, the next generation of textbooks will likely bear the fingerprints of the board’s ultraconservatives—which is just fine with McLeroy. “Remember Superman?” he asked me, as we sat sipping ice water in his dining room. “The never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way? Well, that fight is still going on. There are people out there who want to replace truth with political correctness. Instead of the American way they want multiculturalism. We plan to fight back—and, when it comes to textbooks, we have the power to do it. Sometimes it boggles my mind the kind of power we have.”

PEOPLE:

MALALAI JOYA:

The following is an interesting mini-bio of that most rare of all breeds, a politician who actually stands on principle. Here, from Z Communications (originally published in The Independent) is the story of the Afghani woman Malalai Joya.

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Joya: The Woman Who Will Not Be Silenced:

By Johann Hari

Source: The Independent

Johann Hari's ZSpace Page
I am not sure how many more days I will be alive," Malalai Joya says quietly. The warlords who make up the new "democratic" government in Afghanistan have been sending bullets and bombs to kill this tiny 30-year-old from the refugee camps for years - and they seem to be getting closer with every attempt. Her enemies call her a "dead woman walking". "But I don't fear death, I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice," she says plainly. "I am young and I want to live. But I say to those who would eliminate my voice: 'I am ready, wherever and whenever you might strike. You can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of the spring.'"

The story of Malalai Joya turns everything we have been told about Afghanistan inside out. In the official rhetoric, she is what we have been fighting for. Here is a young Afghan woman who set up a secret underground school for girls under the Taliban and - when they were toppled - cast off the burka, ran for parliament, and took on the religious fundamentalists.

But she says: "Dust has been thrown into the eyes of the world by your governments. You have not been told the truth. The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women. Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords. (That is) what your soldiers are dying for." Instead of being liberated, she is on the brink of being killed.

The story of Joya is the story of another Afghanistan - the one behind the burka, and behind the propaganda.
"We are our sisters' keepers"
I meet Joya in a London apartment where she is staying with a supporter for a week, to talk about her memoir - but even here, her movements have to be kept secret, as she flits from one safe house to another. I am told not to mention her location to anyone. She is standing in the corridor, small and slim, with her hair flowing freely, and she greets me with a solid handshake. But, when our photographer snaps her, she begins to giggle girlishly: the grief etched on to her sallow face melts away, and she laughs in joyous little squeaks. "I can never get used to this!" she says.

Then, as I sit her down to talk through her life-story, the pain soaks into her face once more. Her body tightens into a tense coil, and her fists close.

Joya was four days old when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. On that day, her father dropped out of his studies to fight the invading Communist army, and vanished into the mountains. She says: "Since then, all we have known is war."

Her earliest memory is of clinging to her mother's legs while policemen ransacked their house looking for evidence of where her father was hiding. Her illiterate mother tried to keep her family of 10 children alive as best she could. When the police became too aggressive, she took her kids to refugee camps across the border in Iran. In these filthy tent-cities lying on the old Silk Road, Afghans huddled together and were treated as second-class citizens by Iran. At night, wild animals could wander into the tents and attack children. There, word reached the family that Joya's father had been blown up by a landmine - but he was alive, after losing a leg.

There were no schools in the Iranian camps, and Joya's mother was determined her daughters would receive the education she never had. So they fled again, to camps in western Pakistan. There, Joya began to read - and was transformed. "Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are," she says. Starting in her early teens, she inhaled all the literature she could - from Persian poetry to the plays of Bertolt Brecht to the speeches of Martin Luther King. She began to teach her new-found literacy to the older women in the camps, including her own mother.

She soon discovered that she loved to teach - and, when she turned 16, a charity called the Organization for Promoting Afghan Women's Capabilities (OPAWC) made a bold suggestion: go to Afghanistan, and set up a secret school for girls, under the noses of the Taliban tyranny.

So she gathered her few clothes and books and was smuggled across the border - and "the best days of my life" began. She loathed being forced to wear a burka, being harassed on the streets by the omnipresent "vice and virtue" police, and being under constant threat of being discovered and executed. But she says it was worth it for the little girls. "Every time a new girl joined the class, it was a triumph," she says, beaming. "There is no better feeling."

She only just avoided being caught, again and again. One time she was teaching a class of girls in a family's basement when the mother of the house yelled down suddenly: "Taliban! Taliban!" Joya says: "I told my students to lie down on the floor and stay totally silent. We heard footsteps above us and waited a long time." On many occasions, ordinary men and women - anonymous strangers - helped her out by sending the police charging off in the wrong direction. She adds: "Every day in Afghanistan, even now, hundreds if not thousands of ordinary women act out these small gestures of solidarity with each other. We are our sisters' keepers."

The charity was so impressed with her they appointed her their director. Joya decided to set up a clinic for poor women just before the 9/11 attacks. When the American invasion began, the Taliban fled her province, but the bombs kept falling. "Many lives were needlessly lost, just like during the September 11 tragedy," she says. "The noise was terrifying, and children covered their ears and screamed and cried. Smoke and dust rose and lingered in the air with every bomb dropped."

As soon as the Taliban retreated, they were replaced - by the warlords who had ruled Afghanistan immediately before. Joya says that, at this point, "I realized women's rights had been sold out completely... Most people in the West have been led to believe that the intolerance and brutality towards women in Afghanistan began with the Taliban regime. But this is a lie. Many of the worst atrocities were committed by the fundamentalist mujahedin during the civil war between 1992 and 1996. They introduced the laws oppressing women followed by the Taliban - and now they were marching back to power, backed by the United States. They immediately went back to their old habit of using rape to punish their enemies and reward their fighters."

The warlords "have ruled Afghanistan ever since," she adds. While a "showcase parliament has been created for the benefit of the U.S. in Kabul", the real power "is with these fundamentalists who rule everywhere outside Kabul". As an example, she names the former governor of Herat, Ismail Khan. He set up his own "vice and virtue" squads which terrorized women and smashed up video and music cassettes. He had his own "private militias, private jails". The constitution of Afghanistan is irrelevant in these private fiefdoms.

Joya discovered just what this meant when she started to set up the clinic - and a local warlord announced that it would not be allowed, since she was a woman, and a critic of fundamentalism. She did it anyway, and decided to fight this fundamentalist by running in the election for the Loya jirga ("meeting of the elders") to draw up the new Afghan constitution. There was a great swelling of support for this girl who wanted to build a clinic - and she was elected. "It turned out my mission," she says, "would be to expose the true nature of the jirga from within."
"I would never again be safe"
As she stepped past the world's television cameras into the Loya jirga, the first thing Joya saw was "a long row with some of the worst abusers of human rights that our country had ever known - warlords and war criminals and fascists".

She could see the men who invited Osama bin Laden into the country, the men who introduced the misogynist laws later followed by the Taliban, the men who had massacred Afghan civilians. Some had got there by intimidating the electorate, others by vote-rigging, and yet more were simply appointed by Hamid Karzai, the former oilman installed by the U.S. army to run the country. She thought of an old Afghan saying: "It's the same donkey, with a new saddle."

For a moment, as these old killers started to give long speeches congratulating themselves on the transition to democracy, Joya felt nervous. But then, she says, "I remembered the oppression we face as women in my country, and my nervousness evaporated, replaced by anger."

When her turn came, she stood, looked around at the blood-soaked warlords on every side, and began to speak. "Why are we allowing criminals to be present here? They are responsible for our situation now... It is they who turned our country into the centre of national and international wars. They are the most anti-women elements in our society who have brought our country to this state and they intend to do the same again... They should instead be prosecuted in the national and international courts."

These warlords - who brag about being hard men - could not cope with a slender young woman speaking the truth. They began to shriek and howl, calling her a "prostitute" and "infidel", and throwing bottles at her. One man tried to punch her in the face. Her microphone was cut off and the jirga descended into a riot.

"From that moment on," Joya says, "I would never again be safe... For fundamentalists, a women is half a human, meant only to fulfil a man's every wish and lust, and to produce children and toil in the home. They could not believe that a young woman was tearing off their masks in front of the eyes of the Afghan people."

A fundamentalist mob turned up a few hours later at her accommodation, announcing they had come to rape and lynch her. She had to be placed under immediate armed guard - but she refused to be protected by American troops, insisting on Afghan officers.

Her speech was broadcast all over the world - and cheered in Afghanistan. She was flooded with support from the people of her country, delighted that somebody had finally spoken out. One dirt-poor village pooled its cash to send a delegate hundreds of miles across the country to explain how pleased they were.

An extremely old woman was brought to her in a rickety wheelbarrow, and she explained she had lost two sons - one to the Soviets, one to the fundamentalists. She told Joya: "I am almost 100 years old, and I am dying. When I heard about you and what you said, I knew that I had to meet you. God must protect you, my dear."

She handed over her gold ring, her only valuable possession, and said: "You must take it! I have suffered so much in my life, and my last wish is that you accept this gift from me."

But the U.S. and NATO occupiers instructed Joya that she must show "politeness and respect" for the other delegates. When Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. Ambassador, said this, she replied: "If these criminals raped your mother or your daughter or your grandmother, or killed seven of your sons, let alone destroyed all the moral and material treasure of your country, what words would you use against such criminals that will be inside the framework of politeness and respect?"

She leans forward and quotes Brecht: "He says, 'He who does not know the truth is only a fool. He who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal.'"

The attempts to murder her began then with a sniper - and have not stopped since. But she says plainly, with her fist clenched: "I wanted the warlords to know I was not afraid of them."�
So she ran for parliament - and won in a landslide. "I would return again to face those who had ruined my country," she explains, "and I was determined that I would stand straight and never bow again to their threats."
"In every corner is a killer"
Joya looked out across the new Afghan parliament on her first day and thought: "In every corner is a killer, a puppet, a criminal, a drug lord, a fascist. This is not democracy. I am one of the very few people here who has been genuinely elected." She started her maiden speech by saying: "My condolences to the people of Afghanistan..."

Before she could continue, the warlords began to shout that they would rape and kill her. One warlord, Abdul Sayyaf, yelled a threat at her. Joya looked him straight in the eye and said: "We are not in [the area he rules by force] here, so control yourself."

I ask if she was frightened, and she shakes her head. "I am never frightened when I tell the truth." She is speaking fast now: "I am truly honoured to have been vilified and threatened by the savage men who condemned our country to such misery. I feel proud that even though I have no private army, no money, and no world powers behind me, these brutal despots are afraid of me and scheme to eliminate me."

She says there is no difference for ordinary Afghans between the Taliban and the equally fundamentalist warlords. "Which groups are labeled 'terrorist' or 'fundamentalist' depends on how useful they are to the goals of the U.S.," she says. "You have two sides who terrorize women, but the anti-American side are 'terrorists' and the pro-American side are 'heroes'."

Karzai rules only with the permission of the warlords. He is "a shameless puppet" who will win next month's presidential elections because "he hasn't yet stopped working for his masters, the U.S. and the warlords ... At this point in our history, the only people who get to serve as president are those selected by the U.S. government and the mafia that holds power in our country."

Whenever she would despair in parliament, she would meet yet more ordinary Afghan women - and get back in the fight. She tells me about a 16-year-old constituent of hers, Rahella, who ran away to an orphanage Joya had helped to set up in her constituency. "Her uncle had decided to marry her off to his son, who was a drug addict. She was terrified. So of course we took her in, educated her, helped her." One day, her uncle turned up and apologized, saying he had learnt the error of his ways. He asked if she could come home for a weekend to visit her family. Joya agreed - and when she got back to her village, Rahella was forced into marriage and spirited away to another part of Afghanistan. They heard six months later that she had doused herself in petrol and burned herself alive.

There has been an epidemic of self-immolation by women across the "new" Afghanistan in the past five years. "The hundreds of Afghan women who set themselves ablaze are not only committing suicide to escape their misery," she says, "they are crying out for justice."

But she was not allowed to raise these issues in the supposedly democratic parliament. The fundamentalist warlords who couldn't beat Joya at the ballot box or kill her chanced upon a new way to silence her. The more she spoke, the angrier they got. She called for secularism in Afghanistan, saying: "Religion is a private issue, unrelated to political issues and the government... Real Muslims do not require political leaders to guide them to Islam." She condemned the new law that declared an amnesty for all war crimes committed in Afghanistan over the past 30 years, saying "You criminals are simply giving yourselves a get-out-of-jail free card." So the MPs simply voted to kick her out of parliament.

It was illegal and undemocratic - but the President, Hamid Karzai, supported the ban. "Now the warlord criminals are unchallenged in parliament," she says. "Is that democracy?"

We in the West have been fed "a pack of lies" about what Afghanistan looks like today. "The media are 'free' only if they do not try to criticize warlords and officials," she says in her book, Raising My Voice. As an example, she names a specific warlord: "If you write anything about him, the next day you will be tortured or killed by the Northern Alliance warlords." It is "a myth" to say girls can now go to school outside Kabul. "Only five per cent of girls, according to the UN, can follow their education to the 12th grade."

And it is "false" to say Afghan culture is inherently misogynistic. "By the 1950s, there was a growing women's movement in Afghanistan, demonstrating and fighting for their rights," she says. "I have a story here" - she rifles through her notes - "from The New York Times in 1959. Here! The headline is 'Afghanistan's women lift the veil'. We were developing an open culture for women - and then the foreign wars and invasions crushed it all. If we can regain our independence, we can start this struggle again."

Many of her friends urge her to leave the country, before one of her wannabe-assassins gets lucky. But, she says, "I can never leave when all the poor people that I love are living in danger and poverty. I am not going to search for a better and safer place, and leave them in a burning hell." Apologizing for her English - which is, in fact, excellent - she quotes Brecht again: "Those who do struggle often fail, but those who do not struggle have already failed."

Today, she fights for democracy outside parliament. But, she says, any Afghan democrat today is "trapped between two enemies. There are the occupation forces from the sky, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and on the ground there are the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban, with their own guns." She wants to help the swelling movement of ordinary Afghans in between, who are opposed to both. "With the withdrawal of one enemy, the occupation forces, it (will be) easier to fight against these internal fundamentalist enemies."

If she were president of Afghanistan, she would begin by referring all the country's war criminals to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. "Anybody who has murdered my sisters and brothers should be punished," she says, "from the Taliban, to the warlords, to George W Bush." Then she would ask all foreign troops to leave immediately. She says that it is wrong to say Afghanistan will simply collapse into civil war if that happens. "What about the civil war now? Today, people are being killed - many, many war crimes. The longer the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan doing what they are doing, the worse the eventual civil war will be for the Afghan people."

The Afghan public, she adds, are on her side, pointing to a recent opinion poll showing 60 percent of Afghans want an immediate NATO withdrawal. Many people in Afghanistan were hopeful, she says, about Barack Obama - "but he is actually intensifying the policy of George Bush ... I know his election has great symbolic value in terms of the struggle of African-Americans for equal rights, and this struggle is one I admire and respect. But what is important for the world is not whether the president is black or white, but his actions. You can't eat symbolism."

U.S. policy is driven by geopolitics, she says, not personalities. "Afghanistan is in the heart of Asia, so it's a very important place to have military bases - so they can control trade very easily with other Asian powers such as China, Russia, Iran and so on.

"But it can be changed by Americans," she adds. She is passionate now, her voice rising. "I say to Obama - in my area, 150 people were blown up by U.S. troops in one incident this year. If your family had been there, would you send even more troops and even more bombs? Your government is spending $18m (�11m) to make another Guantanamo jail in Bagram. If your daughter might be detained there, would you be building it? I say to Obama - change course, or otherwise tomorrow people will call you another Bush."
"It's hard to be strong all the time"
"It's not good to show my enemies any weakness, (but) it's hard to be strong all the time," Joya says with a sigh, as she runs her hands through her hair. She has been speaking so insistently - with such preternatural courage- that it's easy to forget she was just a girl when she was thrust into fighting fundamentalism. She was never allowed an adolescence. The fierce concentration on her face melts away, and she looks a little lost. "Yes, my mother is proud of me," she says, "but you know how mothers are - they worry. Whenever I speak to her on the phone, the first sentence and the last sentence are always 'Take care'."

Two years ago, she got married in secret. She can't name her husband publicly, because he would be killed. Her wedding flowers had to be checked for bombs. She will only say that they met at a press conference, "and he supports everything I do". She has not seen him "for two months", she says. "We meet in the safe houses of supporters. I cannot sleep in the same house two nights running. It is a different home every evening."

Where does this courage come from? She acts as if the answer is obvious - anyone would do it, she claims. But they don't. Perhaps it comes from her belief that the struggle is long and our individual lives are short, so we can only advance our chosen cause by inches, knowing others will pick up our baton. "When I die, others will come. I am sure of that," she says.

She certainly has a strong sense of belonging to a long history of Afghans who fought for freedom. "My parents chose my first name after Malalai of Maiwand. She was a young woman who, in 1880, went to the front line of the second Anglo-Afghan war to tend the wounded. When the fighters were close to collapse, she picked up the Afghan flag and led the men into battle herself. She was struck down - but the British suffered a landmark defeat, and, in the end, they were driven out."

When she ran for office, she had to choose a surname for herself, to protect her family's identity. "I named myself after Sarwar Joya, the Afghan poet and constitutionalist. He spent 24 years in jails, and was finally killed because he wouldn't compromise his democratic principles ... In Afghanistan we have a saying: the truth is like the sun. When it comes up, nobody can block it out or hide it."

Malalai Joya knows she could be killed any day now, in our newly liberated Warlord-istan. She hugs me goodbye and says, "We must keep in touch." But I find myself bleakly wondering if we will ever meet again. Perhaps she senses this, because she suddenly urges me to look again at the last paragraph of her memoir, Raising My Voice. "It really is how I feel," she says. It reads: "If I should die, and you should choose to carry on my work, you are welcome to visit my grave. Pour some water on it and shout three times. I want to hear your voice." I look up into her face, and she is giving me the bravest smile I have ever seen.

'Raising My Voice' by Malalai Joya is published by Rider. All profits will go to supporting the cause of women's rights in Afghanistan.

ANARCHIST THEORY:

AGAINST COLONIALISM AND FUNDAMENTALISM:

The following article from the Anarkismo website was written by a Muslim with sympathies for freedom of speech. It speaks of the way to chart a "middle-course" between support of America's imperial adventures and the desires of America's fundamentalist opponents, supporting neither but advocating against both colonialism and fundamentalism. No doubt a lot more could be said on this subject.

............................................

Against Colonialism and fundamentalism…

It is a big question for us, Muslims who consider freedom as our main aim or our main principle of life, where we stand in the conflict between what can be defined as neo-colonialist policies of the capitalist west and Islamic fundamentalism. In brief, my answer is that I think we must stick to our main principle: that is freedom, away from both.

No doubt that we would not accept, under any excuse, any violation or denial of the freedom of thought, consciousness and speech; let it be against muslims or any other groups. But this position will change at the same moment that such a criticism becomes a justification of occupation or racism.

It is clear that those cartoons, about prophet Mohammad, tells more than just a simple and just criticism of brutal and intolerant Islamic fundamentalism; in fact, this is a part of a broader campaign that aims to confirm that Muslims are backward people; and to justify that colonialism is a necessary project designed to civilize these people; which in a way, resembles "God supports segregation" that could be seen in US and South Africa's streets before the triumph of the human rights movement.

It is not surprising that such an argument was repeated also by Bush's administration. People in the west, like anywhere else, are ready to defend their freedom more than the profits or greed of capital.

On the other side, fundamentalists promote denial of others' basic liberties, non-Muslims and even Muslims, as a prerequisite of resisting neo-colonialism. Totally the contrary, the antidote of colonialism is freedom, not a reactionary repression. Defending the freedom of speech or press is not equal to supporting the Iraq war or occupation, or neo-colonialism, which badly needs such racist arguments as its basic justification. It is also right that resisting this colonialism does not mean imposing Islamic religious dogmas on others.

ANN COULTER NAKED:

Molly often tracks back on her visitors, and thus she came upon the gem (perhaps) illustrated to the left. The original source is a Vancouver Island blog, Word of Mouth Blog, that Molly has just added to her links list under the 'Blogs' section. Seems only fair as Molly's Blog is listed there too. The blog is quite interesting. Its motto is "no word too conservative or too radical". When you go to this blog you will see the connection 'Ann Coulter Naked'. Be prepared to search as it merely connects to a list of links. The photo to the left comes out in one of the links that Molly finally found, but it takes some digging. Other photos can be found as well, some of them far less flattering. Whether they are all "true" or not is a matter that Molly has very little interest in searching down. Better things to do, like pick the dirt out from under my fingernails. The photo to the left, if real, has obviously been "enhanced". Coulter, after all, is one of those people who put the "S" back in "scrawny". Not that I think she wouldn't agree to this sort of thing. Let nobody accuse Coulter of "libertarian sentiments" which might make the posings consistant. "Libertarian" is the last thing you could accuse Coulter of being. If the pics are true then what they are an example of is "the arrogance of a criminal". Many criminals are eventually caught because they come to have a vastly underestimated view of the intelligence and persistance of both their victims and the police. Political would-be baby terrorists take note.

But speaking of Coulter... she's a crook plain and simple. She has discovered a scam that produces reams of money for practically no work. Her potty mouth may not equal Molly's at its worst, but she has the distinction of being able to sustain the the sort of "pissed off" pose in all her writing that others could only hope to achieve. Nobody can achieve it in reality, but Coulter is not real. Who knows what she believes in real life, if she believes anything at all besides the fact that Ann Coulter should have fame and money. Molly has seen this sort of psychopathy in action amongst anarchists where the perpetrator has chosen his victims well. What Molly has seen there says that at least some anarchists are more willing than the conservative audience that Coulter writes for to come out swinging against people who are embarassments to their beliefs. Some conservatives have indeed attacked Coulter in a half-hearted way, but the "tribal politics" has been such that sensible conservatives have generally ignored her, no matter how detrimental she may be to their cause. Well, gonorrhea doesn't go away just because you ignore it.

She's a crook, plain and simple. A con-artist. If the pictures are true they what they show is, once more, "criminal arrogance". In this case Coulter has chosen to mock her victims, conservative Americans who provide her with an inflated income. Will she be caught in this act ? Molly seriously doubts it. Most people are willing to forgive any number of transgressions as long as they can delude themselves that any attack on the enemy is good. That's the way of the world. Offenses by one's own side are considered less than an offense by the other side. Actually much less. No offense to conservative sensibilities will ever lead to any serious withdrawal of the sort of sponsorship that Coulter's income depends upon.

The seemingly endless series of scandals that have exposed the underbelly of American fundamentalism (like they have to a lesser degree exposed same in conservative parties across the world who don't depend on the taliban-like mixture of politics and religion that American conservativism does) is actually living proof that a large number of people (hopefully a minority) in the most powerful country in the world have got their moral priorities all back assward. To them putting your bad thing in the wrong place is such an obviously greater sin than theft (also fraud in the case of not just Coulter but many others) that theft can hardly be seen at all. To such people Molly might reply that the "social" prohibitions of the ten commandments (seperate from the ritual prohibitions) are overwhelmingly against either thievery or fraud (false witness). Jesus was even more emphatic on this point than the Old Testament. According to Jesus "misusing your bad thing" was a minor pecadillo that would always be forgiven while economic oppression (a subset of theft) was the "sin" that desrerved attention and correction.

Coulter's little act would convince any business person dealing with her to only accept cash or a credit card presented at the time of sale. No cheques from her. She might decide to scam you just for the sheer joy of it. Scamming can actually be fun for some sick puppies without a sense of honour, dignity, shame or conscience (pick any of the four). It is a source of pleasure seperate from the financial gain involved. Look at Coulter in this light, and you will understand her very well.