Tag: Taliban

Credit when due

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It’s been quite awhile since TOC’s poster child for woke-feminist cluelessness made an appearance here. She first came to my notice in March, 2006, before “woke” was a thing.

There was a controversy at the time over the admittance to Yale of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, who had been a Taliban ‘diplomat’ in the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad in 1998, then a ‘roving ambassador’ in 2000. He apparently did not even possess a GED.

Sentilles found her new extreme affirmative action classmate unremarkable 5 years after 9/11, when we well knew how the Taliban treat women.

One striking aspect of this controversy is the reaction from Yale’s liberal community. Della Sentilles, a Yale senior, recently wrote a piece for the Yale Daily News denouncing such manifestations of rampant misogyny at Yale as the shortage of tenured female professors and poor childcare options. On her blog, a reader asked Sentilles about the presence at Yale of a former spokesman for one of the world’s most misogynistic regimes. Her reply: ”As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another. American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends.”

No shit, Sherlock, though who is the subject and who the object of the imperialism could be debated. Let’s just say it’s a symbiotic relationship.

So. A “shortage of tenured female professors and poor childcare options” is a result of our horrible misogyny, while any comment on excluding females from education entirely, a national dress code requiring Burqas at pain of severe beating, and mass public execution of women by gun-shot in the back of the head… would be culturally inappropriate?

In June, 2006 I applauded pushback on this from self described radical feminist Phyllis Chesler: An American Jew who had been married to an Afghan and lived in a harem in Afghanistan. Go figure.

Unlike Sentilles, Chesler was able to render an opinion of the culture. It seems her 2005 book, The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom, had not reached Yale.

It looks like Sentilles is now working for the DOJ. Naturally.

Chesler is actually doing something about Afghan women now trapped behind Taliban lines by Feckless Joe. She writes about it here:
Team of Radical Feminists Rescues Thirty Afghan Feminists

Props to Phyllis Chesler! And to those who helped her, even if she’s not sure who all of them are. I say that because I found this a little curious.

“She obtained vital paperwork, helped remotely guide our Afghan women through the streets to the airport, and was perhaps aided by some on-the-ground muscle. Of this, I am not sure.”

I guess there may have been some men involved. And not remotely. They aren’t exactly dismissed, but the word “objectification” comes to mind. I probably wouldn’t have had that reaction if the essay had not been quite so celebratory of radical feminist bona fides.

A nod to the undoubted expertise and courage of such men wouldn’t have been so difficult. Even less difficult would be simply to omit the comment, if you are “not sure.”

There certainly was some of that “muscle” going around in other rescues, and I can’t imagine it would not have been highly appreciated by the evacuees. Maybe critical to their escape.
As Biden Abandoned Afghan Allies, Retired US Special Ops Hatched “Operation Pineapple Express” – Rescuing Over 600 From Taliban Slaughter

In Bari Weiss’ words:

I’ve been thinking a lot these past two weeks about luck. The luck of where we are born. The luck of the parents we are born to. And, right now, the luck of who we know.

Knowing — or having proximity to someone who knows my well-placed friend, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — is a matter of life or death for untold numbers of Afghans…

That’s in an intro to an essay by another woman, Melissa Chen, a classical liberal perhaps less attuned, shall we say, to radical feminism. Bari Weiss introduces Chen:

Melissa co-founded an organization called Ideas Beyond Borders, which digitizes and translates English books and articles into Arabic. And not just any books: Books like Orwell’s ‘“Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now,” and a graphic novel based on John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Works that promote reason, pluralism and liberty. Suffice it to say the translators she works with in places like Egypt, Syria and Iraq do so at great risk.

Because of her connections in the Middle East — and because she is the kind of person who lives by her principles — it did not surprise me that she found herself involved in the efforts to save Afghans from the horrors of the Taliban. She shares some of the details of those remarkable efforts in the essay below.

Inside the Underground Railroad Out of Afghanistan

It was at this point that Esther told me she found out about a WhatsApp group with roughly 15 members including a former CIA agent and a former Marine who had connections on the ground. They had successfully extracted other girls from the school and felt they could do the same for Rahima…

As for me, as Esther had been working on getting Rahima out, I had been fretting over a list. On August 17, I was part of a group that was given access to a list of 500 names of Afghan aid workers, human rights activists, and religious and ethnic minorities. When it became clear that the American government wasn’t doing enough, such lists started circulating among various volunteers. My heart sank when the person in charge of flight manifests asked us to split the list into “high priority” and just “priority.”

By Wednesday night, August 25, shortly after receiving a memo from the U.S. military that signed off with a bleak “may God be with you all,” I was asked to cut my evacuation list down to just five people.

Might there have been a shortage of “muscle?” I’m asking you, Joe.

Finally, compare and contrast Chesler and Chen with what passes for feminism among the #METOO wokerati. It’a not just Afghani women abandoned by the corrupt shell of feminism, it’s any inconvenient female.
TIME’S UP FOR TINA TCHEN

Note to Della Sentilles

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Dear Ms Sentilles,

Earlier this year, in defense of the former Taliban regime’s treatment of women, you wrote that having a former Taliban ambassador (with a 4th grade education) as your fellow student at Yale did not dispose you to comment on Taliban treatment of Afghani women, women whose gunshot-to-the-head executions in a soccer stadium was general knowledge, because:

As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another. American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends.

Judging how the Taliban treated women was beneath you, or above you, or whatever.

You will be glad to know that your forbearance has had positive results. Wife-Beating Is Permitted by Islam in Muslim Countries, but Is Forbidden in the West according to the Mufti of Egypt.

The Mufti has made it official, you no longer even have to explain anything. At least until Sharia is law established here.

H/T Relapsed Catholic

And, by the way, a long overdue H/T to Keith, whose comment got you to display the amoral, narcissist vacuum between your ears to the whole world. Thanks, Keith.

Copyright 2005-2019

Taliban Dude

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A recent email from one James Kirchick invited me to read his article – My Fellow Yalie: The Taliban Dude.

I found it interesting for the insight it granted into the thinking of young Yalies. It is worth a read for that purpose, especially considering that Mr. Kirchick is associated with America’s Future Foundation whose mission:

…is to find and publish young and undiscovered conservative and libertarian writers.

One thing you will learn is that, much as the word liberal has come to describe socialists when it originally meant what we would today call conservatives, or at least libertarians, conservative now means “anything some leftist does not appreciate.”

To wit, Mr. Kirchick acquiesces to the Liberal idea that Bill O’Reilly is a conservative. Liberals base this opinion on their suppositions about O’Reilly’s associations rather than his philosophy. McCarthyism Pelosi-ism rampant. Liberals automatically regard any successful Fox News personality as a rabid right-wingnut.

In fact, O’Reilly is a simplistic pandering populist. If he were a politician he’d be Huey Long’s evil twin. O’Reilly’s reputation as a “conservative” rests, it seems to me, primarily on the fact that he has been able to take apart a few leftists who are not very bright and are so far outside the mainstream that deflating them is easily achieved by just letting them talk. Which they most certainly will.

I mean, and I’m speaking intellectually, could you skewer Madonna or Cher or that blonde ditz, Cameron Diaz, who equated voting for Bush with approving of rape? Could you beat Barbra Streisand in a spelling bee? (Hint, can you spell “Irag”?)

So can Bill. It does not make him a conservative, and certainly not a libertarian.

Michael Moore gets negative mention for his promotion of Hashemi in the fantasy documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11. While I have no respect whatsoever for Michael Moore’s honesty, intellect or dietary practices, I did watch him in an O’Reilly interview. O’Reilly was overmatched. This tells me something. O’Reilly has no principles from which to argue. Populists don’t need any.

It also tells me that George Clooney, subject of several withering O’Reilly attacks, is a real lightweight – since he refuses to come on the show.

Mr. Kirchick writes:

…most liberals on campus have failed to make any statement in opposition to Hashemi–not because they support his being here, but because they cannot stand those calling for Yale’s head.

I think this displays some narcissism and naivete about Yale and academia in general.

The situation was perfectly suited to the right’s popular caricature of America’s institutions of higher education as incubators of extreme cultural relativism.

Yep, the anecdotal evidence, of which this is a prime bit, is overwhelming. Not to mention that the voting patterns of faculty are damning in this regard. Extreme anti-Americanism manifests in the Sally Jacobsens, Noam Chomskys, Juan Coles, Ward Churchills and a vast host of other professors; and it’s fine that students are exposed to such ideas, but when’s the last time any classic liberal/libertarian/conservative professor got such attention as these minions of the extreme left? Simon and Garfunkel should reunite to record Where have you gone Larry Summers?

Mr. Kirchick is overly respectful of the left, perhaps because of his environment. The Yale Campus Liberals have not objected to Hashemi partially because to do so bleeds into asking dangerous questions about affirmative action programs, and primarily because to do so would hold the United States up to repute. That is, disrepute is what they desire. If the “conservative” Bill O’Reilly is foaming at the mouth then it’s OK to dismiss the conservative John Fund’s rational arguments. Taking several weeks to recognize this is possibly just a matter of experience.

Mr. Kirchick’s main point is that this sloppy knee-jerk of fevered Liberal sentiment is the cause of conflating the ideas of these men. But, his acceptance of Bill O’Reilly’s random populism as even remotely related to conservative or libertarian thought is an undersight. Even bringing it up is disrespectful of Mr. Fund.

Overall, Mr. Kirchick does an excellent job of showing the paucity of principle and the shallowness of thought of fellow students like Della Sentilles, though her name never comes up.

As I say, you’ll learn something from reading it. It may not have the conservative intellectual panache of something out of Hillsdale, but it is a more hopeful sign than I would have predicted out of Yale.

Thank you, James Kirchick.

Copyright 2005-2019

Doing Della. A favor.

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Della Sentilles (Yale ’06) is nicely representative of the intellectual disintegration and moral vacuum that is American feminism. In apology for the Taliban she wrote:

As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another. American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends.

Ms Sentilles has complained that Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund did not interview her and that he lifted(?), from her blog(?), her comments out of context. The missing context? – State manipulation of feminism “in order to further its own imperialist ends.” Leaving that out was doing her a favor.

Mark Steyn presents another view of non-relativist cultural attitudes:

Steyn: Will we stick our necks out for his faith?

…In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” – the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Gen. Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

One wonders how Ms Sentilles feels about suttee – cultural-crit speaking – and, for example, forced female genital mutilation as topics appropriate for judging the treatment of women. The judgmentalism, that is, that she purports to be her expertise.

Ms Sentilles and her ilk have only needed 30 years to degrade the meaning of the word “feminism” to the point where most people consider it to be the very definition of pseudo-intellectual, hypocritical, anti-capitalist – and, as demonstrated, racist – harridanism. If a small cadre of females can do so much damage to women in so short a time, and be proud of it, female superiority in masochism is a given.

It took 250 years to similarly damage the word “liberal.” We have Ted Kennedy, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore as the result of that devolution. For “gender” balance, Cynthia McKinney, Harvard professor Nancy Hopkins and Barbra Streisand have been no slouches.

Without the torturous deprecation of the word “liberal” the demeaning of the word “feminist” would probably not have occurred, but the people who confiscate ownership of an ideological label end up defining the ideology itself. Feminism is “Liberal”, and grew from the perversion of that tradition. Islamofascism is a parallel example.

A counter-example is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a person who can easily define what feminism ought to mean, and whose courage in so doing weighs a order of magnitude more, morally, than the sum of all those Americans who proclaim “Feminism” as their virtue. Hirsi Ali in The International Herald Tribune:

Women go ‘missing’ by the millions

…Every year, from 1.5 million to 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect.

How could this possibly be true? Here are some of the factors:

In countries where the birth of a boy is considered a gift and the birth of a girl a curse from the gods, selective abortion and infanticide eliminate female babies.

Young girls die disproportionately from neglect because food and medical attention is given first to brothers, fathers, husbands and sons.

In countries where women are considered the property of men, their fathers and brothers can murder them for choosing their own sexual partners. These are called “honor” killings, though honor has nothing to do with it.

Young brides are killed if their fathers do not pay sufficient money to the men who have married them. These are called “dowry deaths,” although they are not just deaths, they are murders.

The brutal international sex trade in young girls kills uncounted numbers of them.

…What is happening to women and girls in many places across the globe is genocide. All the victims scream their suffering. It is not so much that the world doesn’t hear them; it is that fellow human beings choose not to pay attention.

…The Islamists are engaged in reviving and spreading a brutal and retrograde body of laws. Wherever the Islamists implement Shariah, or Islamic law, women are hounded from the public arena, denied education and forced into a life of domestic slavery.

Cultural and moral relativists sap our sense of moral outrage by claiming that human rights are a Western invention. Men who abuse women rarely fail to use the vocabulary the relativists have provided them. They claim the right to adhere to an alternative set of values – an “Asian,” “African” or “Islamic” approach to human rights.

This mind-set needs to be broken. A culture that carves the genitals of young girls, hobbles their minds and justifies their physical oppression is not equal to a culture that believes women have the same rights as men. [Get it, Della?]

(Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch legislator, lives under 24-hour protection because of death threats against her by Islamic radicals since the murder of Theo van Gogh, with whom she made the film “Submission” about women and Islam. This Global Viewpoint article was distributed by Tribune Media Services.)

American Feminists can’t be bothered outside of their cultural redoubts, but if Della Sentilles had any balls, she’d be first and foremost protesting the murder, mutilation, torture and rape of WOMEN. It really doesn’t have anything to do with culture. It’s murder, torture and rape. They’re women. QED.

Ms Sentilles should try to get those bits of patriarchal malfeasance addressed before she worries about the composition of the hard sciences faculty at Harvard, the imperialist uses of the feminist blather she dispenses, or even date-rape at Yale; at least while her sisters are having forced back-alley clitorectomies.

American Feminists aren’t really afraid to criticize other cultures, they’re afraid their own complaints will be revealed as trivial. They are cowards and hypocrites. They betray the common-sense purposes of their own purported cause for political gain and cultural sabotage.

Ms Sentilles would learn something from listening to another woman under death threat, Dr. Wafa Sultan. From a previous TOC post, “Backward by choice”:

Dr. Sultan is a psychologist and a Syrian expatriate who resides in the U.S. She recently appeared on Al-Jazeera television where she attacked Islamists as “backward.” The video is here. You should watch it.

She is articulate and relentless in her contention that the war with Islamofascism is not a clash of civilizations. To summarize Dr. Sultan’s position: To have a clash of civilizations, you’d need a minimum of two civilizations, and Islam is generally too backward to be so considered.

Mark Steyn explains:

Fate conspires to remind us what this war is really about: civilizational confidence. And so history repeats itself: first the farce of the Danish cartoons, and now the tragedy – a man on trial for his life in post-Taliban Afghanistan because he has committed the crime of converting to Christianity.

The cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were deeply offensive to Muslims, and so thousands protested around the world in the usual restrained manner – rioting, torching, killing, etc.

The impending execution of Abdul Rahman for embracing Christianity is, of course, offensive to Westerners, and so around the world we reacted equally violently by issuing blood-curdling threats like that made by State Department spokesman Sean McCormack: “Freedom of worship is an important element of any democracy,” he said. “And these are issues as Afghan democracy matures that they are going to have to deal with increasingly.”

The immediate problem for Abdul Rahman is whether he’ll get the chance to “mature” along with Afghan democracy.

…as the Canadian columnist David Warren put it: “We take it for granted that it is wrong to kill someone for his religious beliefs. Whereas Islam holds it is wrong not to kill him.”

Read the whole thing.

We can, and must, make judgments. Many of them will involve culture. Culture is not more sacred than religious conviction, nor than a secular belief in the right to abortion on demand.

Ms Sentilles, do you understand what Mark Steyn is saying? Can you appreciate the risk Dr. Sultan has taken in defense of freedom – for men and women? Can you hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali?

We need a worldwide campaign to reform cultures that permit this kind of crime. Let’s start to name them and shame them.

If you cannot hear Hirsi Ali, did you hear Malalai Joya speaking on your own campus last week? The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund did:

The BBC calls Malalai Joya the most famous woman in Afghanistan. On Thursday the 27-year-old women’s rights activist, a member of the Afghan Parliament, mounted a stage at Yale and turned her fire on the university’s decision to admit a former Taliban official as a special student.

“All should raise their voice against such criminals,” she told a crowd of 200. “It is an unforgivable insult to the Afghan people that he is here. He should face a court of law rather than be at one of your finest universities.” The Yale Daily News reported that the large attendance at her speech showed that the former Taliban official “continues to be widely controversial.” Last night the Yale College Council, the undergraduate student government, began debating a resolution urging the university’s administration not to admit Mr. Hashemi as a regular sophomore in the fall.

Ms. Joya has standing to speak for Afghan women. She ran an underground school for women during the Taliban’s rule and today receives frequent death threats after giving speeches in Parliament against “fanatical warlords.” She is strongly critical of U.S. support for her country’s new government, which she claims is increasingly influenced by warlords, as evidenced by the now-abandoned attempt to try an Afghan named Abdul Rahman for the capital crime of converting to Christianity. “Why has $12 billion in foreign aid not made it to my suffering people?” she asked me during an interview. “Fraud and waste have largely diverted your aid to others.”

But it was her criticism of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the 27-year-old Taliban ambassador-at-large turned Yale student, that stuck in the minds of some audience members at a reception afterwards. “Before I was like, who cares if the guy was Taliban or not?” Yigit Dula, a sophomore from Turkey, told the Yale Daily News. “But it means a lot more to [Afghans] to have someone like Hashemi educated at Yale.” Aisha Amir, a physician who fled war-torn Afghanistan, told me she sympathized with the difficult choices people had to make to survive under the Taliban, but added that “there are so many more deserving Afghan students who belong in Hashemi’s place.”

For example, the women of the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women.

…A small effort to help build a modern economy in Afghanistan was launched by Paula Nirschel in 2002, when she founded the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women. Her goal is to match qualified women with at least a GPA of 3.5 or more with U.S. colleges, where they can pursue a degree. The initiative grants all its women full four-year scholarships. They come to college prepared; none need remedial classes. (That’s something that can’t be said of all U.S. students. Last year, only 52% of entering freshmen in the California State University system passed the English placement test.)

As The Wall Street Journal reported in an editorial Friday, Ms. Nirschel sent a letter to Yale in 2002, asking if it wanted to award a spot in its next entering class to an Afghan woman. Yale declined, as did many other schools. Today, the program enrolls 20 students at 10 universities.

Yale has yet to admit these Afghani female applicants who possess better qualifications than the former Taliban Ambassador.

There’s a real feminist cause in there Ms Sentilles; if you can get over your refusal to recognize Afghan women as humans victimized by a “culture” your purported principles would rationally leave you no choice but to condemn.

John Fund:

A documentary that aired on PBS in 2004, [“Afghanistan Unveiled”] … is the work of young female Afghan video journalists working with a French director. … The heart of the film is a searing journey to Bamiyan, a place that made headlines in March 2001, when the Taliban blew up giant 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha there. That month Mr. Hashemi visited me and my colleagues at The Wall Street Journal to launch an impassioned defense of the destruction of the monuments, which had been declared a world heritage site by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

At the time, no one knew what else the Taliban were doing in Bamiyan beyond blowing up Buddhas. Nearby, the Afghan video journalists found the remnants of the Hazara tribe. One survivor told them the Taliban had “tried to exterminate” the entire tribe, starting with the men.

Zainyab, a Hazara woman so thin and wrinkled that her age was indeterminate, was found by video journalist Marie Ayub living in a cave “like an animal.” She told the filmmakers that “from hundreds of women here, not one has a husband. From 100 children, maybe just one still has two parents. They bulldozed houses with women and children inside; they cut off women’s breasts.” But despite the devastation, she hasn’t given up hope. “Bring us looms,” she tells the filmmakers. “Then we can be paid to weave rugs.”

How do you answer her, Ms Sentilles? “No comment, wrong culture.”?

Remember, the only reason Mr. Hashemi did not “launch an impassioned defense” of the butchery of females and the murder of children was that no one asked him about it.

Asking about it would have been a job for the culturally insensitive, as contrasted with the culturally insensate.

Update: 9:18PM. From the Yale Daily News. Read it all.

Afghan politician contrasts with student

…Outrage over religious fascism ought to be the province of American liberals. But in Hashemi’s case it has been almost entirely trumpeted by Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and right-wing bloggers. A friend of mine recently remarked that part of his and his peers’ nonchalance (and in some cases, support for) Hashemi has to do with the fact that the right has seized upon the issue. Our politics have become so polarized that many are willing to take positions based on the inverse of their opponents’. This abandonment of classical liberal values at the expense of political gamesmanship has consequences that reach far beyond Yale; it hurts our national discourse.

In a bold declaration that she will, with any hope, one day come to regret, Della Sentilles ’06 wrote on her feminist Weblog, “Broad Recognition,” “As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another.” While I cringe at the implications of this, I applaud its honesty. It lays bare a method of thinking that is quite pervasive on our campus, and that many, if not most, students claim allegiance to. It is at once racist — for holding non-Westerners to a lower standard of behavior — and dangerous in its cold abandonment of those who suffer under totalitarian and theocratic regimes. “They shamelessly defer to oppressive religious and cultural norms in the name of respecting diversity, betraying the victims of oppression in the process,” British gay-rights activist and self-described “radical, left-wing Green” Peter Tatchell wrote of his comrades on the left who refused to condemn barbaric practices in Muslim societies. Joya has no problem saying Taliban Afghanistan was “more sexist and repressive than” the U.S. Why can’t Sentilles?

Some of these Bulldogs can hunt.

Copyright 2005-2019

Mendacritocracy – Government by herds of accidental liars?

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Cathy Young informs us, in Educating the Taliban at Yale, that Della Sentilles, a Yale senior, recently complained in the Yale Daily News:

[of] rampant misogyny at Yale… [indicated by] the shortage of tenured female professors and poor childcare options.

…On her blog, a reader asked Sentilles about the presence at Yale of a former spokesman [Jihadi Turns Bulldog] for one of the world’s most misogynistic regimes. Her reply: ”As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another. American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends.”

I wonder if Ms Senilles could deign to comment on this, since British culture is more or less similar to her own?

City Journal
Theodore Dalrymple.
British Freedom and Muslim Discipline
The real plight of Mrs. Blair’s clients
13 March 2006

The British prime minister’s wife is appearing in court as counsel for two girls who are suing their local education authority for having allegedly denied them an education, because it prevented them from going to school in their full Muslim regalia. It is, of course, the right of everyone under our legal system to try to obtain redress in the courts. But Mrs. Blair is not just another lawyer, because of who her husband is. Nor can she possibly be unaware of the social meaning and implication of the kind of clothes the two girls were trying to wear at school, at an age when they were not qualified to make the choice.

She must (or at least ought) also to know that there is a genuine problem about the availability of education for Muslim girls in Britain. Parents often keep their girls away from school after the age of 12, or send them to Pakistan for a few years so that they may not be educated, and they may wind up married against their will. The school inspectors, whose job is to ensure that children attend school, never intervene.

It is difficult to establish the scale of the problem, of course, but since, from the vantage point of one ward in one hospital, I became acquainted with scores and even hundreds of cases, it is possible that it is quite large. It is a subject on which Mrs. Blair, no doubt aware of her husband’s electoral situation, has remained silent.

There was a strange paradox about the young Muslim women I saw in the hospital, usually after they had tried to kill themselves. Their manners and deportment were infinitely better than those of young white women of the same economic class, and they were better educated than their white peers, although they had received at least four, and sometimes as many as seven, years fewer education.

In fact, they often were often estimable young women. They wanted desperately to learn, to accomplish something, to enter a profession, and to earn a living. If I had been an employer, they were just the kind of people I would hope to find. But their truncated education clearly had the purpose—usually achieved—of thwarting any ambition they might have. The young women found themselves in an utterly wretched position: hence the suicide attempts.

Yet the Muslim families clearly were doing something right, or at least much better than the white, non-Muslim families around them (if you could call the loose patterns of association found among the whites “families”).

Here, then, is proper material for reflection, of the kind that the opportunistic Blair couple will never give it. Discipline without freedom leads to misery, but freedom without discipline leads to chaos, shallowness, and misery of another kind.

Misery, moreover, of a kind Ms Sentilles refuses to even acknowledge in her crusade to ensure that more than 50% of female professors possess vaginas, or perhaps are possessed thereby, whether said females want to make that choice or not.

Misogyny is, in fact, outside Ms Sentille’s experience. Which is what allows her to maintain that her feminist “principles” only apply to white American females, who are preferably also classmates of one-time Taliban ambassadors. Profiling on the basis of skin-color, on the other hand…

Her mendacrity (defined by Paladin as: Characteristic of someone who lies for the reason that he/she does not think critically. Accidental lies of those who follow the herd.) does indicate that she should not comment about other cultures, however vile may be their treatment of women.

The wonder is that she feels qualified to comment about her own.

Copyright 2005-2019

People hearing without listening

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Yale has adopted a new policy that perfectly opposes Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” mantra regarding gays in the military.

That policy is: “don’t answer, don’t listen.” This is Yale’s response to questions about its admission of the ambassador of the most homophobic, misogynist, religiously fanatical government… arguably of all time.

Practically speaking, it can be summarized as; “We’re not discussing it, and those of you who keep talking about it are retards.” The MTV version, to which Della Sentilles subscribes (see below) is; “Lalalala, I Can’t Hear You!”

In the Wall Street Journal’s OpinonJournal.com, John Fund recounts the intellectual vigor with which those soliciting donations for Yale respond to questions regarding freedom of expression in academia. Update on Intellectual idiots:

He [Alexis Surovov, assistant director of giving at Yale Law School] also largely defended Yale’s refusal to answer questions on the ex-Taliban official by saying, “We can’t respond to every political case. We need to show the university isn’t here to make political decisions.” When I asked him if admitting a key propagandist for the Taliban was a political decision, he claimed he was “only vaguely aware of Taliban practices.” (He clearly shares that information deficit with some other Yale officials.)

If piling on were actually even possible in this case, then Cathy Young would be guilty of it in The Boston Globe, Educating the Taliban at Yale,

One striking aspect of this controversy is the reaction from Yale’s liberal community. Della Sentilles, a Yale senior, recently wrote a piece for the Yale Daily News denouncing such manifestations of rampant misogyny at Yale as the shortage of tenured female professors and poor childcare options. On her blog, a reader asked Sentilles about the presence at Yale of a former spokesman for one of the world’s most misogynistic regimes. Her reply: ”As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another. American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends.”

Transliterated from Gynidiot this renders as: “If it damages my petty case to look outside my relatively trivial set of complaints: A) I’m not qualified to discuss the stoning of women because of their choice of clothing in some other culture, and B) it’s the fault of the patriarchy anyway. Besides, Hashemi was just following chauvinist orders.

Americans, this is an example of what passes for education at an elite University. And you thought the boomers were self-absorbed.

Where is Galt’s Gulch when you need it?

Update: 7:41PM
Maybe Della Sentilles could comment on this from Rantings of a Sandmonkey?

Religious scholars have issued a fatwa prohibiting women from using the Internet without the presence of a mahram (a close relative they are prohibited to marry). This was followed by a call from Saudi businessmen to sue Web sites that call for freedom of thought and secularism, such as the aforementioned Web sites.

The Fatwa was issued by 2 saudi sheikhs called Othman Al Khamees and Saad Al Ghamdy, and it states the following: ” It’s Haram to let women use the internet because of their inside wickedness, and a woamn shouldn’t be allowed on the internet without the presence of a Moharam (close male relative) who is an expert in the deceptive and sexually corrupt nature of the women!”. I am not making this shit up, people. That’s what it said.

She could start with defending her own use of the Internet, I suppose.

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