Baghdad's Widows

"Abandoned Women - Baghdad's Widows.

Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues

I was once called a black Widow...that's fine with me...I consider my ex-husband as good as dead. And I stopped mourning him on the day of our divorce. Have you ever seen anyone mourn Chernobyl ? Well my ex was the second disaster after Chernobyl or should I say Iraq ?

Baghdad's widows on the other hand, don't share the same predicament. They are not "black widows" by choice.

I was watching a program the other day, and they interviewed a couple of those "black widows". It's funny, how the black obliterates all sects, all classes, all backgrounds...it's funny how black obliterates it all...

There was this woman, very beautiful, living in a slum..slum is too nice of a word..her "home" consisted of a few bricks covered with plastic garbage bags, for a roof top...
She was a mother of 4. Her husband was tortured and killed by the death squads/militias. She borrowed money and built a little kiosk selling colored balloons...the puppet government's bulldozers arrived one morning and bulldozed her kiosk, her only income...

She said : " I don't want anything for myself...but who will feed my kids ? If Maliki is incapable of paying attention to us (widows) then let him leave that golden chair of his, and let someone else take over...I need to feed my kids. "

Another woman was also interviewed, same scene, pools of sewage, mountains of garbage surrounding her "home", which consisted again of a few bricks covered with plastic for a roof top...

Same story, husband killed by militias...left all alone, lost her family, her home, her job...and had to care for several kids...She cried and cried...the cameraman filmed her and produced a scoop...Tonight, she is still alone, crying...

Many stories...too many. If I tap into that, if I tap into the abandonment, if I tap into the scarcity, if I tap into the solitude, if I tap into the pain and the loss, if I tap into the grief...I will run out of pages.

I am not ready to lift that lid from that well...

Besides, words are words...they did not affect you before, they will not affect you today. Neither words, nor a thousand pictures...

I have become solution oriented...Sometimes the solutions are like some loose patchwork, sometimes they are just a band aid...sometimes they are very imperfect...but this is our Reality and this is what IS.

Facts, you hate them...I love them. Facts, you abhor them, I turn them into statues of worship because they are REALITY - OUR REALITY - OUR TRUTH.

A bit of history for you.

After the Iraq-Iran war, when we had over 1 Million of our men killed fighting off the madness of Iranian Khomeinism, which finally took over Iraq thanks to the American occupation...

After those 8 years of a bleeding war, President Saddam Hussein agreed for the re-insertion of polygamy i.e marrying a second wife, in parallel to the State providing for widows of the Iraq-Iran war : pensions, a piece of land, and having all their financial needs looked after by the State - from their children schooling to everything else; for being wives of martyrs.

President Saddam Hussein was greatly criticized by so called Feminists for this move in that particular context. The allegation was/is, by so called feminists one of them, an Iraqi American, who goes by the name of Zainab Salbi - is " Saddam reintroduced polygamy" thus usurping women's rights, that he and his regime have themselves encouraged and enacted...

Of course Zainab Salbi fails to mention that the ratio of women to men was more than double...in other words there were more women than men...then, in the aftermath of the Iraq-Iran war.

Well, Zainab Salbi was blessed by the Clinton administration...I guess that absolves her blatant ignorance about the fate of Iraqi women, even though she tries to purport herself as the expert of that cause, amongst her western feminist circles...

That was then...

Today the ratio is 10 women or so to 1 men. Today, after 2003...after our "liberation". It's funny how our liberation finished off our men and tortured, raped and made widows out of our women. Don't you think ?

So what do Western "feminists" suggest, including the Zainab Salbi's of this world ?
While they're living safely and well tucked away in England and in the U.S, pontificating about women's rights...

The puppet Iraqi government that the majority of Western feminists and their lapdogs either supported or failed to out rightly condemn, is no longer supporting it's 2-3 million widows, 2-3 million widows since 2003...It has simply abandoned them.

Abandoned women to gangs, militias, prostitution, trafficking, poverty, disease, forgetfulness, indifference, callousness...

And we have junk feminists, assuring us that the Iraqi parliament has a ratio of 25% of puppet/junk females.

Who cares about puppet women? There are well over 2 million widows in Baghdad alone.

So what do you suggest "dear" sisters of Feminism ? What do you and your female lapdogs suggest ?

What theory will you come up with now ? How many hours, days, weeks, and years of debate do you need to come up with a solution ?

Because I want a solution...and fuck your theories.

Even though some Iraqi widows are forcing themselves into accepting marriage as second wives to feed their kids...many others are totally marginalized and forgotten...

What woman does not hate polygamous men ? All of us do...deep down, even the most "religious" amongst us.

But there is a greater Wisdom than yours and mine...

Polygamy or more aptly bigamy in the case of "liberated" Iraq and it's million of widows is a blessing.

Yes it is.

Widows, war widows, in a country torn to pieces thanks to you and your fucking democracy...are AS ENTITLED as any woman and as any Western woman to a decent life.

Baghdad's widows are entitled to husbands/partners, mates, fathers for their kids, support, emotional bonding, sex and the rest...

And those who are WILLING to be remarried, should be encouraged...

And in a country where your "brave" U.S men and "revolutionary" Iranian "Islamic" militias massacred thousands of our men, leaving 1 man to 10 women, then it is your duty to support Iraq's widows. Not just materially, but also morally...

And if that means a return of male polygamy/bigamy...then so be it.

In my opinion, it would be most hypocritical to bark about women's rights and assume that Iraq's widows will have to be relegated to lives of stoic austerity and celibacy just to fulfill your ideal of what gender relationships should be like -- when you yourselves, are unable to reach it in a state of "peace", i.e when you're not living or are products of war-occupation torn/massacred societies.

Besides, why are you so shocked ? 3/4 or more, if not more, of your men have affairs, outside of marriage/and so-called "committed relationships"...leaving you and her in the Dark/Obscurity for months and years...At least in our case, it's all legal and in the Light.

--MORE--"

h/t

Toasting the Ladies!

:-(

"Gloria Steinem: How the CIA Used Feminism to Destabilize Society

March 18, 2002

by Henry Makow Ph.D.

"In the 1960's, the elite media invented second-wave feminism as part of the elite agenda to dismantle civilization and create a New World Order."

Since writing these words last week, I have discovered that before she became a feminist leader, Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA spying on Marxist students in Europe and disrupting their meetings. She became a media darling due to her CIA connections. MS Magazine, which she edited for many years was indirectly funded by the CIA.

Steinem has tried to suppress this information, unearthed in the 1970's by a radical feminist group called "Red Stockings." In 1979, Steinem and her powerful CIA-connected friends, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas prevented Random House from publishing it in "Feminist Revolution." Nevertheless the story appeared in the "Village Voice" on May 21, 1979.

Steinem has always pretended that she had been a student radical. "When I was in college, it was the McCarthy era," she told Susan Mitchell in 1997, "and that made me a Marxist." (Icons, Saints and Divas: Intimate Conversations with Women who Changed the World 1997. p 130) Her bio-blurb in June 1973 MS. Magazine states: "Gloria Steinem has been a freelance writer all her professional life. Ms magazine is her first full-time salaried job."

Not true. Raised in an impoverished, dysfunctional family in Toledo Ohio, Steinem somehow managed to attend elite Smith College, Betty Friedan's alma mater. After graduating in 1955, Steinem received a "Chester Bowles Student Fellowship" to study in India. Curiously, an Internet search reveals that this fellowship has no existence apart from Gloria Steinem. No one else has received it.

In 1958, Steinem was recruited by CIA's Cord Meyers to direct an "informal group of activists" called the "Independent Research Service." This was part of Meyer's "Congress for Cultural Freedom," which created magazines like "Encounter" and "Partisan Review" to promote a left-liberal chic to oppose Marxism. Steinem, attended Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe, published a newspaper, reported on other participants, and helped to provoke riots.

One of Steinem's CIA colleagues was Clay Felker. In the early 1960's, he became an editor at Esquire and published articles by Steinem which established her as a leading voice for women's lib. In 1968, as publisher of New York Magazine, he hired her as a contributing editor, and then editor of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Warner Communications put up almost all the money although it only took 25% of the stock. Ms. Magazine's first publisher was Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy's Dallas motorcade route. Despite its anti establishment image, MS magazine attracted advertising from the cream of corporate America. It published ads for ITT at the same time as women political prisoners in Chile were being tortured by Pinochet, after a coup inspired by the US conglomerate and the CIA.

Steinem's personal relationships also belie her anti establishment pretensions. She had a nine-year relationship with Stanley Pottinger, a Nixon-Ford assistant attorney general, credited with stalling FBI investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King, and the ex-Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Latelier. In the 1980's, she dated Henry Kissinger. For more details, see San Francisco researcher Dave Emory.

Our main misconception about the CIA is that it serves US interests. In fact, it has always been the instrument of a dynastic international banking and oil elite (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan) coordinated by the Royal Institute for Internal Affairs in London and their US branch, the Council for Foreign Relations. It was established and peopled by blue bloods from the New York banking establishment and graduates of Yale University's secret pagan "Skull and Bones" society. Our current President, his father and grandfather fit this profile.

The agenda of this international cabal is to degrade the institutions and values of the United States in order to integrate it into a global state that it will direct through the United Nations. In its 1947 Founding Charter, the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic activities. However this has never stopped it from waging a psychological war on the American people. The domestic counterpart of the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" was the "American Committee for Cultural Freedom." Using foundations as conduits, the CIA controlled intellectual discourse in the 1950's and 1960's, and I believe continues to do so today. In "The Cultural Cold War," Francis Stonor Saunders estimates that a thousand books were produced under the imprint of a variety of commercial and university presses, with covert subsidies.

The CIA's "Project Mockingbird" involved the direct infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets. "By the early 1950's," writes Deborah Davis, in her book "Katherine the Great," the CIA owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communication vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all." In 1982 the CIA admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field. Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who ran the operation until his "suicide" in 1963, boasted that "you could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple of hundred dollars a month."

I was born in 1949. Idealists in my parent's generation were disillusioned when the Communist dream of universal brotherhood turned out to be a shill for a brutal despotism. My own generation may discover that our best instincts have also been manipulated and exploited. There is evidence that the 60's drug counter culture, the civil rights movement, and anti-war movement, like feminism, were CIA directed. For example, the CIA has admitted setting up the (National Student Association as a front in 1947 http://www.cia-on-campus.org/nsa/nsa2.html). In the early 1950's the NSA opposed the attempts of the House Un American Activities Committee to root out Communist spies. According to Phil Agee Jr., NSA officers participated in the activities of SNCC, the militant civil rights group, and Students for a Democratic Society, a radical peace group.

According to Mark Riebling, the CIA also may have used Timothy Leary. Certainly the agency distributed LSD to Leary and other opinion makers in the 1960s. Leary made a generation of Americans turn away from active participation in society and seek fulfillment "within." In another example of the CIA's use of drugs to interfere in domestic politics, Gary Webb describes how in the 1980's, the CIA flooded Black ghettos with cocaine.

I won't attempt to analyze the CIA's motivation except to suggest what they have in common: They demoralized, alienated and divided Americans. The elite operates by fostering division and conflict in the world. Thus, we don't realize who the real enemy is. For the same reason, the CIA and elite foundations also fund the diversity and multicultural movements.

Feminism has done the most damage. There is no more fundamental yet delicate relationship in society than male and female. On it depends the family, the red blood cell of society. Nobody with the interests of society at heart would try to divide men and women. Yet the lie that men have exploited women has become the official orthodoxy.

Man loves woman. His first instinct is to nurture ("husband") and see her thrive. When a woman is happy, she is beautiful. Sure, some men are abusive. But the vast majority have supported and guided their families for millennium.

Feminists relentlessly advance the idea that our inherent male and female characteristics, crucial to our development as human beings, are mere "stereotypes." This is a vicious calumny on all heterosexuals, 95% of the population. Talk about hate! Yet it is taught to children in elementary schools! It is echoed in the media. Lesbians like Rosie O'Donnell are advanced as role models.

All of this is calculated to create personal confusion and sow chaos among heterosexuals. As a result, millions of American males are emasculated and divorced from their relationship to family (the world and the future.) The American woman has been hoodwinked into investing herself in a mundane career instead of the timeless love of her husband and children. Many women have become temperamentally unfit to be wives and mothers. People, who are isolated and alone, stunted and love-starved, are easy to fool and manipulate. Without the healthy influence of two loving parents, so are their children.

Feminism is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on society by its governing elite. It is designed to weaken the American social and cultural fabric in order to introduce a friendly fascist New World Order. Its advocates are sanctimonious charlatans who have grown rich and powerful from it. They include a whole class of liars and moral cripples who work for the elite in various capacities: government, education and the media. These imposters ought to be exposed and ridiculed.

Women's oppression is a lie. Sex roles were never as rigid as feminists would have us believe. My mother had a successful business in the 1950's importing watchstraps from Switzerland. When my father's income increased, she was content to quit and concentrate on the children. Women were free to pursue careers if they wanted to. The difference was that their role as wife and mother was understood, and socially validated, as it should be.

Until Gloria Steinem and the CIA came along.

--MORE--"

"The Feminist Movement was a CIA project of social programming; The CIA and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations funded Ms. Magazine and Gloria Steinem and elements of the feminist movement

No, I’m not some sexist that believes women should be bare foot and pregnant, slaving away take care of the home. I believe that all people regardless of sex, ethnicity and whatever qualifier you come up with should have equal rights, equal pay and respect and dignity given as a human being.

And the feminist movement was social programming by the CIA, the Ford Foundation and other globalist organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR is a creation of John D. Rockefeller and is run by his grandson, David Rockefeller. This is all well documented. Ms. Steinem herself has admitted this, although she didn’t want the information to get out in the 1970’s. Under “Operation Mockingbird” the CIA infiltrated the US media organizations and recruited writers and broadcasters to control what we refer to as the “main stream media.” The CIA has been practicing spying on dissidents since the 1950’s in what they call COINTELPRO operations, or “Counter Intelligence Programs.” Cord Meyers of the CIA recruited Steinem into the CIA in 1958. Her job was to direct “activists” in a group called the “Independent Research Service.”

The following some snips from an article published in The Village Voice on May 21, 1979.

http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listse rv.aol.com/msg02217.html

“Inside the CIA with Gloria Steinem”

by Nancy Borman

The near-total blackout on the Steinem/Random House censorship story is reminiscent of the level of enthusiasm Redstockings encountered when they first tried to get coverage for the story of Steinem and the CIA.

Their 16-page tabloid "press release" charging that Steinem had covered up a 10-year association with the CIA and that Ms. magazine, which she had founded, was endangering the women's liberation movement struck the 1975 MORE conference like a new war coming over the wire. The hotel was abuzz and people snatched up the releases, but when it came to actually writing the story, nearly everyone bowed out. One reporter criticized the women for not obtaining Steinem's side of the story before publishing the release. Others skimmed the material and dismissed it as old news, which was partially true. Still others thought it was McCarthyistic both in tone and casual conclusions.

In 1967 both the New York Times and the Washington Post carried interviews with Steinem in the wake of Ramparts' expose of CIA funding of the National Student Association and other organizations. Steinem was the founder and director of one of those groups, Independent Research Service, for which she had solicited and obtained CIA money to carry out covert operations at Communist youth festivals in Vienna and Helsinki in 1959 and 1952. Unlike most of the other principals in the scandal, who had repudiated their past work with the agency and turned over information to the press, Steinem defended her secret deal with the CIA, calling the undermining of the youth festivals "the CIA's finest hour."

There’s a lot more background in the article, but I’ll let you go to the link above and read it yourself. Basically, Gloria Steinem was part of the CIA's "Operation Mockingbird."

“Operation Mockingbird”

This CIA operation was the infiltration of corporate media in an effort to take over major news outlets. Deborah Davis’ book, “Katharine the Great : Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire,” shows that the CIA “owned” journalists of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other media outlets. A quote from Ms. Davis’ book.

“By the early 1950´s, the CIA owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communication vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all according to a former CIA analyst."

The CIA admitted in 1982 that reporters on the CIA payroll had acted as case officers for field agents. Philip Graham, who published the Washington Post, ran the operation until his suicide in 1963. Graham has been quoted as saying, “you could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple of hundred dollars a month.” Allen Dulles of the CIA oversaw the operation.

Here’s a link to an article by writer, Alex Constantine on Operation Mockingbird that gives a good overview of the project. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCH O/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html

Tales from the Crypt: The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD

Here’s a link to an article about Operation Mockingbird.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JF Kmockingbird.htm

There are numerous links in the about article on a lot of the prominent players in this project.

There is ample documentation on the internet and in books making the CIA-Steinem connection and Operation Mockingbird. Do the research if you’re still skeptical about this issue.

The next big question is “why.” Why would the CIA want to infiltrate the mainstream media? If you read enough about Operation Mockingbird, the original impetus was to counteract communist groups and provide propaganda that would produce loyalty to the American government. It sounds innocent enough, but it got twisted into a total control of what is supposed to be a “free press.” It hasn’t been “free” for decades. Another interesting topic to research is the CIA’s “family jewels” information released on June 26, 2007 under a Freedom of Information request. It documents the CIA’s meddling in US media and the illegal wiretapping of journalists and dissidents. Here’s a link to a site that has all the details.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSA EBB222/index.htm

Another big “why” question, is why did the CIA want to infiltrate and guide the women’s liberation movement? Nicholas Rockefeller, of the powerful Rockefeller family, had befriended filmmaker Aaron Russo, during the 1990’s. According to Russo, Rockefeller had told him that the Rockefeller Foundation had helped to fund the feminist movement. There were several reasons for this. One, it got women into the work force. This provided more income for taxation. If you haven’t read it, you might want to check out the article I wrote on the income tax system, “There Is No Law Requiring Most People to File and Pay Income Tax in the US.”

http://www.thisisby.us/index.php/conten t/there_is_no_law_requiring_most_people _to_file_and_pay_income_tax_in_the_us

Second, it got kids in government funded schools at an earlier age for indoctrination. The intent was to break up the traditional family and the acceptance of the government as the primary family. Here’s an article on Russo and his memories of his relationship with Nick Rockefeller.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/ja nuary2007/290107rockefellergoal.htm

Russo reveals a lot more than just the manipulation of the women’s liberation movement in this article. There are also a few videos of Aaron Russo being interviewed about his relationship with Nick Rockefeller. Here’s a link to a 15-minute clip from the interview.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid =1263677258215075609&q=aaron+russo&total= 414&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex= 2

Rockefeller Admitted Elite Goal Of Microchipped Population

Here’s the expanded version of the interview, 1 hour and 9 minutes long. Fascinating stuff to say the least.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid =5420753830426590918&q=aaron+russo&total= 414&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex= 9

Historic Interview with Aaron Russo, Fighting Cancer and the New World Order

I know all this sounds like “conspiracy nutjob central” stuff. It’s hard to accept. But Aaron Russo was no fool. He was an accomplished filmmaker and entertainment big shot. He was a true patriot. And the chip is coming. Do some research on the Real ID Act, which will require “chipped” identification cards for anyone who wants to enter federal buildings, use public transportation (flights, trains, busses, ships), have a bank account at a federally chartered bank, have an investment account with a registered investment firm, receive federal benefits (Social Security, Medicare, etc.). This is supposed to be in effect by May 2008. Several states have voted not to participate in the program. US passports are now being chipped. Several companies are requiring RFID chips for employees for “security” reasons. RFID chips are being touted on networks like CNBC as the wave of the future. There is a movement in the medical community to have people chipped so that medical records could be accessed in emergency situations. The movement is to have the chips implanted in people eventually. You can take one if you want to, but I’m not getting chipped like an animal.

So believe what you will about what’s really going on behind all this. The information is out there if you’re willing to look.

--MORE--"

Code Pink Makes Me See Red

Can you say CONTROLLED OPPOSITION, America?

Sorry, ladies, but the TRUTH HURTS!

"Code Pink, fearful of setbacks for women, rethinks call for U.S. troops to withdraw from Afghanistan

.... Now the left-wing activist group is rethinking its call for a deadline to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The reason: After a week spent in Kabul talking to female Afghan leaders, the group now understands their fears that a resurgent Taliban would probably target women and girls who have made tremendous progress since U.S. troops routed the fundamentalist militant group in 2002.

See: How I Came to Love the Veil

Sick of the Zionist lies about Muslims yet?

"We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban," Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin said in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor. "So many people are saying that if the U.S. troops left, the country would collapse. ... A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider" a deadline for troop withdrawal.

Isn't that a Jewish name?

Of course, US missiles and bombs are liberating Afghan women by killing them, their children, and their men. Is that what Code Pink is standing for?

Code Pink says it continues to oppose sending fresh troops to Afghanistan and will advocate for more humanitarian funding. What might get relaxed is its call for an immediate pullout...."

Oh, I'm all with humanitarian funding -- I call it REPARATIONS for WAR CRIMES after we LEAVE!!!

Additional commentary:

"Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, that's a good reason to send more American soldiers to be killed; women's rights in Afghanistan, sure, sure! After all those soldiers are just icky-poo men anyway, right? Well, mostly. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure."

(Ahem)

Frankly, I don't buy this, and I am very disappointed in Code Pink.

I have to wonder if they might have been funded by the newly emergent recreational pharmaceutical industry in Afghanistan, because they sure sound like they are smoking opium here. But more likely, Code Pink is willing to turn a blind eye on the wars because now they are Obama's wars instead of Bush's wars and that makes it all just hunky dory!" -- Wake the Flock Up

Related:

".... Medea Benjamin and Code Pink are no threat to the established order, a fact that should be obvious when Code Pink’s finances are examined—the group is supported by the Winston Foundation, an organization linked to the National Endowment for Democracy, a documented CIA front, and connected as well to the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, the Heinz Family Foundation, and the Soros Foundations (see the Zmag wiki entry for the Winston Foundation for World Peace).

“Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, a director for Global Exchange, says they are paying a bargain $400 a month for a cubicle office at 15th and H streets in the District. More space for Code Pink is on loan from two organizations down the hall, the National Organization for Women and the Institute for Policy Studies,” Julia Duin wrote for the Washington Times on April 3, 2003. At the time, the Institute for Policy Studies was receiving $2.2 million from the Turner, Ford, MacArthur and Charles Stewart Mott foundations.

No, the threat, as perceived by Bill and his global elite handlers, does not emanate from Code Pink or MoveOn.org, the latter funded by the Iraq Peace Fund, an effort of the Tides Foundation, a “progressive” organization that has received more than $36,000,000 from the Ford Foundation since 1989....

--source--"

So it is all to present the ILLUSION of DISSENT and DEMOCRACY, when we really have neither.

Also see: Amy Goodman, Left Gatekeeper

WHERE is the left on 9/11, huh, truthers?

Update:

Btw, readers, I receive NO JOY from POSTING THIS INFORMATION! I LOVED THEM at one point and WANTED to BELIEVE!

Once again, a myth is shattered and I am devastated.

"Confused?; Code Pink rethinks Afghan withdrawal

by Scott Horton, October 08, 2009

When I heard that there would be antiwar protests across the country on October 7, 2009, mourning the 8th anniversary of the start of the invasion of Afghanistan, I immediately picked up the phone to get one of the great anti-warrior women of Code Pink to join me on Antiwar Radio for the occasion.

Imagine my shock at seeing this story in the Christian Science Monitor describing the new, post-trip-to-Afghanistan-position of Code Pink’s co-founder and most famous leader, Medea Benjamin.

"’We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline,’ says Benjamin. ‘That’s where we have opened ourselves, being here, to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the U.S. troops left the country, would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that.’"

"Did you just read that right?" said one half of my brain to the other. Is this reporting accurate? Has Code Pink turned pro-war?

Well, the interview took place, as scheduled, and this is the result:

Interview recorded October 7, 2009. Listen to the interview.

EXCERPTS:

Benjamin: Well actually, there were many different opinions in Afghanistan and unfortunately because of the security situation we were very limited in who we talked to. We didn’t get out to the countryside, we didn’t talk to people who had been the targets of U.S. bombing, we didn’t talk to people who lived under Taliban control....

Horton: Well Medea, as you know, America has been adopting Taliban justice and destroying our own rule of law. And I wonder how well you think that this government can export a rule of law that we’ve abandoned to a country like Afghanistan. I mean if they get rid of Dostum and the heroin dealers and the worst of Karzai’s allies, maybe even Karzai, who’s to replace them with? I mean, it’s like, you know, the coup against Diem. Well now who’s going to be the puppet dictator of South Vietnam? You know?

Benjamin: Yeah, well that’s a good question. There are a lot of great people in Afghanistan and many of them working inside the government. The women that we’ve met who are members of parliament are really extraordinary. A number of them are medical doctors, they are professionals, they are putting their lives at risk just by being members of the parliament, both by targets that they might be from the Taliban as well as targets inside the government, inside the parliament itself where…

Horton: Right. But so the question is does it make any sense to prop up a bunch of western educated female doctors to be the rulers of this country when they have no indigenous support whatsoever? It’s like this is a fantasy being played out in a sociology class somewhere in an American college or something.

Benjamin: Well, you just assume that these were western educated and didn’t have support. One of the doctors we met is from Wardak province and she said that it was actually her villagers who forced her to run, that she wasn’t interested in running. She didn’t spend a penny on her campaign and she was elected by a great majority from her area because people really wanted her to get into government. So what I’m saying is there are some good people. But your questions are good questions. What do you have when you have an outside foreign force, i.e., the U.S. and NATO that has been propping up a government that’s full of people who have in the past and continue to commit crimes, live off of drug money? You don’t have a very pretty picture and that also means that a lot of the soldiers don’t have great reasons to fight.

Horton: Right. And of course fight is just a euphemism for killing people, which is what’s been going on there for eight years now. And of course Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are already doing their best to spread the war into Pakistan. So far they hired the prime minister there, Zadari, to start a civil war. They created three million refugees. When you talk about women’s rights, how about women with their little baby daughters in their arms being forced out of their homes by the millions, by America?

Benjamin: Well, I don’t think that war is the answer, that drones is the answer. Every time we drop a bomb we create more people who join the insurgency and want to attack us and it’s an endless vicious cycle and it’s got to end.

Horton: So we need occupation, but without soldiers.

Benjamin: Where are you getting that from?

Horton: Well, I mean I’m just trying to understand. Because you’re saying we need to build up their court system and we need to do all these things to have a proper exit… a responsible exit strategy rather than just leaving and letting them call their own shots, work out their own problems. And I just wonder how these things all go together. We’re supposed to occupy the country, but without killing anybody. And we’re supposed to have soldiers to protect women’s rights, but not to, whatever it is that they’re actually doing there, which of course has nothing to do with women’s rights in the first place. You follow me?

Benjamin: Yeah. I don’t think the soldiers are protecting women’s rights. We did hear a lot of people say that they fear the Taliban coming back in. We spoke to a lot of women who lived under the Taliban times who couldn’t go to school, who couldn’t do their jobs, were stuck inside their homes. And I think we have to recognize that. But on the other hand there is supposedly only about 5 or 10% of the Taliban that are ideologically motivated. So my point is that we have been shoring up the Taliban with their policies of occupation, that as part of an exit strategy has to be peace talks, that women are at the table, and they have to figure out how people who have joined the Taliban out of economic desperation and joined the Taliban out of revenge because their loved ones have been killed by foreign forces, how they can be brought back into their villages and live productive lives.

Horton: Um, okay. Well, I guess, you know, I’m for that. You know, I’m an individualist and a libertarian and I believe in natural rights for all people no matter where they are. It’s just a question of, you know, who’s going to do the guaranteeing of them....

I don’t really want to fight with you. It seems like you and I must already agree so much that it’s just got to be a communication breakdown here somewhere or something. I mean I’m not phrasing it right. Well, okay: Remember a few weeks ago when some locals stole a German fuel truck and the Germans called in an airstrike and the Americans blew up the fuel truck all over a bunch of civilians. A hundred or so who were lined up to get some fuel and burned them to death.

Benjamin: Mm-hmm.

Horton: I wonder how many more of those before you say, "You know what? The U.S. government must get out of Afghanistan yesterday, that’s it. And whatever happens after this, at least it won’t be our government burning little kids to death."

and see here’s the thing too though: The Taliban at this point, what does that even mean? You know what I mean? It was a very small number of people. A lot of them were killed years and years ago. It basically seems to be the NATO, U.S. government, U.S. media euphemism for anybody in Afghanistan who resists our occupation.

Benjamin: Well that’s why I think as part of the exit strategy is the peace process. And if there are 20,000 Taliban at the most, the vast majority of them are people who are not ideologically driven who want to go back to their villages, would probably much prefer to do something other than be shooting at people. And that if we gave them the opportunity for that by announcing that we were going to be leaving, that we were going to be helping to allow their community leaders to reincorporate them into society, then you would be basically taking away the strength of the Taliban.

Horton: Yeah. Well, I certainly think that’s true. We saw the same thing in Iraq where the occupation is a perpetual motion machine. In fact I was just reading a little something about American occupations in Central America, I think in, I forget if it was in Nicaragua. Way back in the day, you know, 80 years ago or something, where of course the longer they stayed the more the people resisted and that was the excuse for staying, and we can’t just leave with Nicaragua in such a mess and all these people fighting each other and whatever, when of course the occupation is the basis of in the first place. And I think, wasn’t Code Pink’s argument about Iraq not "We have to leave responsibly but we’ve got to get the hell out of there because staying there is irresponsible"?

Benjamin: Yeah, in the case of Iraq I think it was a little bit different. It was absolutely clear our troops should never been there beginning and you didn’t have a Taliban like government…

Horton: Yeah, but I mean Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri escaped eight years ago. They haven’t been in Afghanistan for eight years.

Benjamin: But you do have the Taliban in Afghanistan and you have…

Horton: Yeah, but what did the Taliban ever do?

Benjamin: Well the Taliban…

Horton: To us.

Benjamin: Huh?

Horton: What did they ever do to the United States?

Benjamin: Well see, if your perspective is just from the United States. My perspective is also from what they did to the women of Afghanistan. But if your perspective is truly from the United States, what people say is that if we allow the Taliban to take over Afghanistan then that will be a safe haven for Al Qaeda....

That answers my question about 9/11. What a bummer.

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And let's close with this UNMENTIONED GEM (and what seems to be where the U.S. is headed under Obama with the "Al-CIA-Duh" fiction in full swing):

"The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban's reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA," according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. "The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul," adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw "nothing objectionable" in the Taliban's plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: "The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan." "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that," said another U.S. diplomat in 1997."

No kidding?

Oh, that's a real kick to the lower groans, isn't it, ladies?

The TALIBAN was established under U.S. AUSPICES?

We can "LIVE WITH THAT?"

Well, I SURE CAN as long as the KILLING STOPS -- especially since (sorry) I NO LONGER BELIEVE the LIES PROMOTED by my WAR-MONGERING, MUSLIM-HATING, AGENDA-PUSHING AmeriKan PRESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bikini vs. Burka

"Bikini vs. Burka: The Debauchery of Women

By Henry Makow Ph.D.
September 18, 2009

On my wall, I have a picture of a Muslim woman shrouded in a burka.

Beside it is a picture of an American beauty contestant, wearing nothing but a bikini.

One woman is totally hidden from the public; the other is totally exposed. These two extremes say a great deal about the clash of so-called "civilizations."

The role of woman is at the heart of any culture. Apart from stealing Arab oil, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are about stripping Muslims of their religion and culture, exchanging the burka for a bikini.

I am not an expert on the condition of Muslim women and I love feminine beauty too much to advocate the burka here. But I am defending some of the values that the burka represents for me.

For me, the burka represents a woman's consecration to her husband and family. Only they see her.It affirms the privacy, exclusivity and importance of the domestic sphere.

The Muslim woman's focus is her home, the "nest" where her children are born and reared. She is the "home" maker, the taproot that sustains the spiritual life of the family, nurturing and training her children, providing refuge and support to her husband.

In contrast, the bikinied American beauty queen struts practically naked in front of millions on TV. A feminist, she belongs to herself. In practice, paradoxically, she is public property. She belongs to no one and everyone. She shops her body to the highest bidder. She is auctioning herself all of the time.

In America, the cultural measure of a woman's value is her sex appeal. (As this asset depreciates quickly, she is neurotically obsessed with appearance and plagued by weight problems.)

As an adolescent, her role model is Britney Spears, a singer whose act approximates a strip tease. From Britney, she learns that she will be loved only if she gives sex. Thus, she learns to "hook up" furtively rather than to demand patient courtship, love and marriage. As a result, dozens of males know her before her husband does. She loses her innocence, which is a part of her charm. She becomes hardened and calculating. Unable to love, she is unfit to receive her husband's seed.

The feminine personality is founded on the emotional relationship between mother and baby. It is based on nurturing and self-sacrifice. Masculine nature is founded on the relationship between hunter and prey. It is based on aggression and reason.

Feminism deceives women to believe femininity has resulted in "oppression" and they should adopt male behavior instead. The result: a confused and aggressive woman with a large chip on her shoulder, unfit to become a wife or mother.

This is the goal of the NWO social engineers: undermine sexual identity and destroy the family, create social and personal dysfunction, and reduce population. In the "brave new world," women are not supposed to be mothers and progenitors of the race. They are meant to be neutered, autonomous sex objects.

Liberating women is often given as an excuse for the war in Afghanistan. Liberating them to what? To Britney Spears? To low-rise "see-my-thong" pants? To the mutual masturbation that passes for sexuality in America? If they really cared about women, maybe they'd end the war.

Parenthood is the pinnacle of human development. It is the stage when we finally graduate from self-indulgence and become God's surrogates: creating and nurturing new life. The New World Order does not want us to reach this level of maturity. Pornography is the substitute for marriage. We are to remain single: stunted, sex-starved and self-obsessed.

We are not meant to have a permanent "private" life. We are meant to remain lonely and isolated, in a state of perpetual courtship, dependent on consumer products for our identity.

This is especially destructive for woman. Her sexual attraction is a function of her fertility. As fertility declines, so does her sex appeal. If a woman devotes her prime years to becoming "independent," she is not likely to find a permanent mate.

Her long-term personal fulfillment and happiness lies in making marriage and family her first priority.

Feminism is another cruel New World Order hoax that has debauched American women and despoiled Western civilization. It has ruined millions of lives and represents a lethal threat to Islam.

I am not advocating the burka but rather some of the values that it represents, specifically a woman's consecration to her future husband and family, and the modesty and dignity this entails.

The burka and the bikini represent two extremes. The answer lies somewhere in the middle.

--MORE--"

More Polished Than the Last Puppet

"Obama: More Polished Than the Last Puppet

By Cindy Sheehan

“When a government lies to you, it no longer has authority over you.” Cindy Sheehan. Dallas, Tx; 2005

July 22, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- Okay, so the United States of America has had a new puppet regime for six months now. I was never so much into giving Obama a “chance” and I think it’s way past time to call Obama and his supporters out, like we called Bush and his supporters out. Our Presidents are merely puppets for the Robber Class and Obama is no exception.

I am observing very little “change” in actual policy, or even rhetoric from an Obama regime. Granted, his style and delivery are more polished than the last puppet, but especially in foreign policy, little has changed. Evidently we elect Presidents based on empty rhetoric and if we can find someone who can say very little using many words, that’s better. I knew a year ago when Obama and his ilk were blathering on about “change” that they didn’t mean positive “change” for us, but it’s a shame Obama’s voters didn’t ask him to be a little more specific or demand some good “change.”

Besides foreign policy where he is a complete disaster, it appears Obama’s jobs program is little more than adding tens of thousands of troops to an already bloated military, instead of bringing troops home from anywhere. Billions will go to the money trap of the Pentagon to invest in recruiting, where the budgets of peace groups who do counter recruitment are tanking.

This is the 3rd week in July and already it’s the deadliest month for US and coalition troops deaths in Af/Pak. Who would ever have thought when violence is surged, then deaths would surge, also? I think I’ve seen this movie before.

The blueprint for this disastrous administration came early when O appointed nothing but neocons to his foreign policy team. The Secretary of State and the National Security advisor have even both admitted that the Council on Foreign Relations/Henry Kissinger are calling the shots.

Sec. Clinton at a speech at the new HQ for the Council on Foreign Relations:

I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council (Council of Foreign Relations), so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.

National Security Advisor, James Jones, who also VERY coincidentally, I’m sure, was on the boards of directors of Chevron and Boeing, had this to say earlier this year:

As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger. Jones was also giving a speech to the Council on Foreign relations at the time. Kissinger is a fabulous role model for war, don’t you think.

How many deaths will Kissinger be forced to atone for when he goes to the same place as McNamara? Wherever prosperous war criminals go to when they die?

As an early, ardent and unapologetic supporter of the Bush Pre-emptive Wars of Aggression Doctrine, Sec. Clinton showed her true colors early on in her tenure as an elected official and, of course, Jones is a war profiteer. Added to this mix is George Bush’s SecDef, Robert Gates, and these are just the main players. Contrary to his “promise” Obama has appointed former lobbyists to key positions in the Pentagon.

We all know all of these things, but the more things “change” the more they stay the same. Apparently the OBots are co-opting the excuses of the BushBots to justify their savior’s surge in Afghanistan and Pakistan and broken promise after broken promise in Iraq.

The other day Howard Dean, on DemocracyNow!, told Amy Goodman that although Iraq was bad, we need to stay in Afghanistan because, first and foremost, for the women:

And if we leave, women will experience the most extraordinary depredations of any population on the face of the earth. I think we have some obligation to try and see if we can make this work, not just for America and our security interests, but for the sake of women in Afghanistan and all around the globe. Is this acceptable to treat women like this? I think not.

Laura Bush earlier this year:

“There’s still a risk to women in Afghanistan. I hope the people of the United States will stay committed. We don’t want to see Afghanistan go back to what it was before.”

I have been on my Myth America Book Tour for three months now and almost everywhere I go, an older white male will stand up and say: “Cindy, we really need to stop allowing Iraq to distract us. Afghanistan always was the place we needed to focus our attentions!” And besides the other neocon reasons given for why US troops need to decimate that country further and kill more innocent women and children is: you guessed it: For the women!

So, we are literally sending in the cavalry to rescue the poor women of Afghanistan, and the patriarchal state apparatus and its zombie adherents don’t care how many women we have to kill to save them.

Disgusting.

I give Obama an “F” for his first six months. There has been nothing to like from his continuing the Bush failed economic policies to excluding single-payer advocates from the table. Not to mention reinforcing and protecting Bush Crimes.

The good news is: He’s got plenty of room for improvement!

--MORE--"

Related: Feminists For War

Feminists For War

Then I call them frauds.

"Why Is a Leading Feminist Organization Lending Its Name to Support Escalation in Afghanistan?

by Sonali Kolhatkar and Mariam Rawi, AlterNet. Posted July 8, 2009

Waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere -- even if you call soldiers "peacekeeping forces."

Years ago, following the initial military success of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the temporary fall of the Taliban, the people of Afghanistan were promised that the occupying armies would rebuild the country and improve life for the Afghan people.

Today, eight years after the U.S. entered Kabul, there are still piles of garbage in the streets. There is no running water. There is only intermittent electricity in the cities, and none in the countryside. Afghans live under the constant threat of military violence.

The U.S. invasion has been a failure, and increasing the U.S. troop presence will not undo the destruction the war has brought to the daily lives of Afghans.

As humanitarians and as feminists, it is the welfare of the civilian population in Afghanistan that concerns us most deeply. That is why it was so discouraging to learn that the Feminist Majority Foundation has lent its good name -- and the good name of feminism in general -- to advocate for further troop escalation and war.

On its foundation Web site, the first stated objective of the Feminist Majority Foundation's "Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls" is to "expand peacekeeping forces."

First of all, coalition troops are combat forces and are there to fight a war, not to preserve peace. Not even the Pentagon uses that language to describe U.S. forces there. More importantly, the tired claim that one of the chief objectives of the military occupation of Afghanistan is to liberate Afghan women is not only absurd, it is offensive.

Waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere. Women always disproportionately suffer the effects of war, and to think that women's rights can be won with bullets and bloodshed is a position dangerous in its naïveté. The Feminist Majority should know this instinctively.

Here are the facts: After the invasion, Americans received reports that newly liberated women had cast off their burquas and gone back to work. Those reports were mythmaking and propaganda. Aside from a small number of women in Kabul, life for Afghan women since the fall of the Taliban has remained the same or become much worse.

Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not allowed to work or attend school. They were poor and without rights. They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced into marriages, often as children.

Today, women in the vast majority of Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable difference: they are surrounded by war. The conflict outside their doorsteps endangers their lives and those of their families. It does not bring them rights in the household or in public, and it confines them even further to the prison of their own homes. Military escalation is just going to bring more tragedy to the women of Afghanistan.

In the past few years, some cosmetic changes were made regarding Afghan women. The establishment of a Ministry of Women's Affairs was one celebrated example. In fact, this ministry is so useless many think that it should be dissolved.

The quota for 25 percent women in the Afghan parliament was another such show. Although there are 67 women in the Afghan parliament, most of them are pro-warlord and are themselves enemies of women's rights. When the famed marriage rape law was passed in the parliament, none of them seriously raised their voice against it. Malalai Joya, an outspoken feminist in the parliament at the time, has said that she has been abused and threatened by these pro-warlord women in the parliament.

The U.S. military may have removed the Taliban, but it installed warlords who are as anti-woman and as criminal as the Taliban. Misogynistic, patriarchal views are now embodied by the Afghan cabinet, they are expressed in the courts, and they are embodied by President Hamid Karzai.

Paper gains for women's rights mean nothing when, according to the chief justice of the Afghan Supreme Court, the only two rights women are guaranteed by the constitution are the right to obey their husbands and the right to pray, but not in a mosque.

These are the convictions of the government the U.S. has helped to create. The American presence in Afghanistan will do nothing to diminish them.

Sadly, as horrifying as the status of women in Afghanistan may sound to those of us who live in the West, the biggest problems faced by Afghan women are not related to patriarchy. Their biggest problem is war.

More than 2,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2008. And disastrous air strikes like the one in Farah province in May that killed an estimated 120 people -- many of them women and children -- are pushing the death toll ever higher. Afghans who survive these attacks often flee to cities, where overcrowded refugee camps strain to accommodate them. Living in tents without food, water and often blankets, the mortality rate soars.

For those who do not flee, life is not better. One in three Afghans suffers from severe poverty. With a 1 in 55 chance of mothers surviving delivery, Afghanistan has been, and still, is the second most dangerous place for women to give birth. Afghan infants still face a 25 percent risk of dying before their fifth birthdays. These are the consequences of war.

In addition, in the eight years since the U.S. invasion, opium production has exploded by 4,400 percent, making Afghanistan the world capital of opium. The violence of the drug mafia now poses greater danger to Afghanistan and its women than the rule of the Taliban.

Some of the biggest drug-traffickers are part of the U.S. puppet regime. To make matters worse, corruption in the Afghan government has never been so prevalent -- even under the Taliban. Now, even Western sources say that only pennies of every dollar spent on aid reach the people who need it.

If coalition forces are really concerned about women, these are the problems that must be addressed. The military establishment claims that it must win the military victory first, and then the U.S. will take care of humanitarian needs. But they have it backward.

Improve living conditions and security will improve. Focus on security at the expense of humanitarian goals, and coalition forces will accomplish neither. The first step toward improving people's lives is a negotiated settlement to end the war.

In our conversations arguing this point, we are told that the U.S. cannot leave Afghanistan because of what will happen to women if they go. Let us be clear: Women are being gang raped, brutalized and killed in Afghanistan. Forced marriages continue, and more women than ever are being forced into prostitution -- often to meet the demand of foreign troops.

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan is doing nothing to protect Afghan women. The level of self-immolation among women was never as high as it is now. When there is no justice for women, they find no other way out but suicide.

Feminists and other humanitarians should learn from history. This isn't the first time the welfare of women has been trotted out as a pretext for imperialist military aggression.

Columbia Professor Lila Abu-Lughod, a woman of Palestinian descent, writes: "We need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives; so we need to be wary when Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Algeria, and Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them, claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women."

Feminists around the world must refuse to allow the good name of feminism to be manipulated to provide political cover for yet another war of aggression.

The Feminist Majority Foundation would do well to heed the demand of dissident Member of Parliament Malalai Joya, representing Farah province, who was kicked out of the parliament last year for courageously speaking out. Addressing a press conference in the wake of the U.S. bombing of her province she was clear: "We ask for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan and a stop to such tragic war crimes."

That should be the first action item for the Feminist Majority Foundation's Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls.

Sonali Kolhatkar is co-cirector of the Afghan Women's Mission, a U.S. nonprofit that funds health, educational and training projects for Afghan women. She is also the host and producer of Uprising Radio.

Mariam Rawi is a member of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan writing under a pseudonym.

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Related: Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)

Swat girl flogging video fake

I used to believe in the women's rights groups, until I found out that CodePink is a CIA Front of Controlled Opposition; that the Feminist Movement was a CIA project of social engineering; and the REAL ROLE of Feminism in the New World Order.\

Also see: Using Women as War Propaganda