TIME’s ‘feminist’ fake pro-war story

This video, recorded in 2009 in Britain, says about itself:

The inspirational anti-war Afghan MP Malalai Joya was joined on the platform by Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, a serving British soldier who was speaking in public for the first time against the horror caused by the war in Afghanistan.

Malalai Joya really is one of the bravest women in Afghanistan. She told the 300-strong audience at Conway Hall in central London that shes survived five assassination attempts and is still not safe with personal security guards or by wearing a burkha to cover her identity. Yet she continues to campaign against foreign occupation and fundamentalist warlords, and for womens rights and education. She believes all NATO troops must leave Afghanistan immediately.

Now, it seems that the infamous pro-Afghan war story in TIME magazine, using a cover photograph of a horribly mutilated Afghan woman, was not only written by a reporter married to a war profiteering businessman … not only falsely said that this mutilation would happen if United States occupation would end, while the atrocity in fact happened AFTER years of occupation, and not by opponents of that occupation … but the TIME story also fraudulently rehashed a three-year-old tragedy.

From the Afghan feminist site of RAWA:

Is Time’s Aisha Story Fake?

Nazia said her husband first shaved her head, and cut her nose and ears with a sharp knife and beat her until she was unconscious.

Abdulhadi Hairan

In July this year, Time magazine published on its cover page the photo of an Afghan woman whose nose was cut off; the title bellowed: ‘What happens if we leave Afghanistan.’

According to the Time story, the woman, identified as Aisha, had run away, after which a Taliban court ordered her nose and ears mutilated in the southern Uruzgan province.

Before the Time story, CNN also published a similar story in March this year, naming the woman as ‘Bibi Aisha,’ and reporting that her nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban. (Read that report and see the photo here)

After reading both the stories, and having a close look at the photos, I must conclude that the Taliban story of cutting off the woman’s nose and ears as told by CNN and Time is false. The reason behind this conclusion is that I had myself reported this incident in December 2007.

The incident took place in December 2007, just before Eid ul Adha, a muslim ritual of sacrifice. Aisha or Bibi Aisha was at that time Nazia. We found her in a hospital in Qalat, the center of southern Zabul province. She and the police told us that she was beaten by her husband, an old man who had already killed his first wife.

Nazia said her husband first shaved her head, and cut her nose and ears with a sharp knife and beat her until she was unconscious. The husband then fled and the neighbors took her to the hospital. I had posted that story on a blog site with her only photos, which were later posted on many other sites that helped attract NGO attention and to her being taken to Kabul for better treatment. See that blog post and Nazia’s first photos, which were taken just a few days after the incident, here. (Please don’t mind the poor English, I had just started learning English at that time).

The BBC Pashto website also published a story about Nazia. The BBC Pashto report at that time, which can be accessed on this link, says: (translated from Pashto) ‘Several women in Afghanistan’s Zabul province have demanded for the trial of a man who cut off his wife’s ears and nose.’

The BBC report further mentions that the couple was originally living in Paktia and had been shifted to Kandahar province. The Time and CNN stories, however, takes her from Uruzgan to Kandahar.

All these accounts and the photos prove that Aisha and Nazia is the same woman and that this is a domestic problem which prevails widely in the Afghan society. There is a strong need to work for reducing domestic violence instead of making fake stories by the well-established media organizations.

This is what “making progress” in Afghanistan looks like: 14 US soldiers killed in the last three days: here.

By Keith Jones:

The Taliban’s attack on Yousafzai attests to their reactionary Islamic fundamentalist politics.

That said, the attempt of US imperialism to use the Pakistan Taliban’s murderous assault on Yousafzai to posture as defenders of the rights of girls and women should evoke only disgust and contempt from class-conscious workers and youth.

The moral sensitivities of the US elite are remarkably selective and inevitably correspond with the pursuit of its predatory foreign policy.

Where was the US media outcry when NATO warplanes killed nine young women collecting firewood on a mountainside near Kabul, Afghanistan, an atrocity the US-led occupation forces initially tried to cover up with the claim it had killed insurgents?

U.S. Military Loses Control Of Subcontractor Spending, Warlords Benefit: here.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and 9/11 in particular, a new type of nationalism has emerged in Europe. Nationalists and opponents of multiculturalism are embracing the demands and the vocabulary of feminists, and gay and lesbian activists. Western Europe is presented as a beacon of modernity and freedom, which must protect itself from conservative, traditional and intolerant migrants. During the international conference entitled Sexual Nationalisms. Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Belonging in the New Europe, more than eighty academics will come together to examine and discuss the relationship between sexuality and nationalism in the ‘new Europe’. The conference will take place on 27 and 28 January at the University of Amsterdam (UvA): here .