11-12-2024, 08:24 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the...r-AA1tSMYR
Two kinds of silence have left me cold recently.
The first is the Taliban’s brutal edicts silencing women’s voices. Its Islamist decrees insisting that not only should women not be seen, they should also not be heard. Their sinful hair, faces and bodies have long been hidden behind the oppressive drapery of the burqa. Now the Taliban is passing laws to ensure their sinful voices are shrouded, too.
The latest diktat from his cruellest, most misogynist of governments says that even when women pray they must take care that no passer-by, including other women, hears their whispered words.
Women, says Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, the Taliban’s minister for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice, “are not even permitted to hear [each other’s] voices while praying”.
…
And the second silence that has unsettled me? The silence of the woke of the West in response to this vile crime against womankind.
You will search in vain for expressions of solidarity with the women of Afghanistan. The hashtag activists of the very online Left are schtum. Unlike the women who live under the sexist boot of Taliban rule, these people have the right to speak, but choose not to.
There hasn’t been a peep from the keffiyeh classes, those smug crusaders who never leave the house without the Palestinian scarf draped over their shoulders so that everyone they encounter will know what a caring, virtuous person they are. Their concern for “the oppressed” seems to shrivel and die when it comes to the women of Afghanistan.
They beat the streets every weekend in noisy displays of pity for the people of Gaza. They wear Palestine pins. They damn Israel as a uniquely malevolent state for its “mass murder” of Palestinians (what the reasoned among us refer to as its “war on Hamas”).
Yet they run out of moral steam where the Taliban is concerned…
Two kinds of silence have left me cold recently.
The first is the Taliban’s brutal edicts silencing women’s voices. Its Islamist decrees insisting that not only should women not be seen, they should also not be heard. Their sinful hair, faces and bodies have long been hidden behind the oppressive drapery of the burqa. Now the Taliban is passing laws to ensure their sinful voices are shrouded, too.
The latest diktat from his cruellest, most misogynist of governments says that even when women pray they must take care that no passer-by, including other women, hears their whispered words.
Women, says Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, the Taliban’s minister for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice, “are not even permitted to hear [each other’s] voices while praying”.
…
And the second silence that has unsettled me? The silence of the woke of the West in response to this vile crime against womankind.
You will search in vain for expressions of solidarity with the women of Afghanistan. The hashtag activists of the very online Left are schtum. Unlike the women who live under the sexist boot of Taliban rule, these people have the right to speak, but choose not to.
There hasn’t been a peep from the keffiyeh classes, those smug crusaders who never leave the house without the Palestinian scarf draped over their shoulders so that everyone they encounter will know what a caring, virtuous person they are. Their concern for “the oppressed” seems to shrivel and die when it comes to the women of Afghanistan.
They beat the streets every weekend in noisy displays of pity for the people of Gaza. They wear Palestine pins. They damn Israel as a uniquely malevolent state for its “mass murder” of Palestinians (what the reasoned among us refer to as its “war on Hamas”).
Yet they run out of moral steam where the Taliban is concerned…
