Rad Geek People's Daily

From Pakistan, there is a horrifying and completely ordinary tale.

In June 2002, the police say, members of a high-status tribe sexually abused one of Ms. Mukhtaran’s brothers and then covered up their crime by falsely accusing him of having an affair with a high-status woman. The village’s tribal council determined that the suitable punishment for the supposed affair was for high-status men to rape one of the boy’s sisters, so the council sentenced Ms. Mukhtaran to be gang-raped.

. . .

In Pakistan’s conservative Muslim society, Ms. Mukhtaran’s duty was now clear: she was supposed to commit suicide. “Just like other women, I initially thought of killing myself,” said Ms. Mukhtaran, now 30. Her older brother, Hezoor Bux, explained: “A girl who has been raped has no honorable place in the village. Nobody respects the girl, or her parents. There’s a stigma, and the only way out is suicide.”

A girl in the next village was gang-raped a week after Ms. Mukhtaran, and she took the traditional route: she swallowed a bottle of pesticide and dropped dead.

But there is something extraordinary, too: Ms. Mukhtaran survived, fought back, won a victory for justice and struck a fragile note of hope.

But instead of killing herself, Ms. Mukhtaran testified against her attackers and propounded the shocking idea that the shame lies in raping, rather than in being raped. The rapists are now on death row, and President Pervez Musharraf presented Ms. Mukhtaran with the equivalent of $8,300 and ordered round-the-clock police protection for her.

Ms. Mukhtaran, who had never gone to school herself, used the money to build one school in the village for girls and another for boys – because, she said, education is the best way to achieve social change. The girls’ school is named for her, and she is now studying in its fourth-grade class.

Unfortunately, that note of hope is fragile not only because of the terrible crime that Ms. Mukhtaran survived, but also because the Pakistani government is threatening to undo, by neglect, the remarkable victory that Ms. Mukhtaran won.

But the Pakistani government has neglected its pledge to pay the schools’ operating expenses. “The government made lots of promises, but it hasn’t done much,” Ms. Mukhtaran said bluntly.

She has had to buy food for the police who protect her, as well as pay some school expenses. So, she said, “I’ve run out of money.” Unless the schools can raise new funds, they may have to close.

Meanwhile, villagers say that relatives of the rapists are waiting for the police to leave and then will put Ms. Mukhtaran in her place by slaughtering her and her entire family.

Don’t let it end in tragedy. You can send contributions directly to Ms. Bibi by writing a check directly to Mukhtaran Bibi and sending it to:

Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036

Or directly to Ms. Bibi by international post at:

Mukhtaran Bibi
Meerwala
Tehsil Jatoi
Post Office Wadowallah
District Muzaffargarh
Punjab
Pakistan

Any amount of money, no matter how small, helps. (Remember that theschools themselves were established on about US$8,500.) Do it. Now. It’ll mean a lot more than anything else you accomplish by sitting around on the Internet. After you’ve done it, you can read my kvetching about Nicholas Kristof below, but this is more important.

Read the rest of Horror and Hope …

Vote early, vote often: enjoy the electronic voting experience with an online Florida Election Ballot.

One of the least respected and most important conversational features of a democratic polity is the question. If you’ve been watching the past two decades of Reaganism, Clintonism, and Busholepsy, you may have noticed the steady progress of politicians sidestepping, evading, ignoring, and otherwise refusing to respect the most simple questions directed at them. So it’s nice to see some rumbling from liberal and Leftist sources–brainstorming hard questions that demand serious answers (pointed out by Sappho’s Breathing: Questions for W.).

Of course, there are the expected stuff. Why have you lost interest in Osama bin Laden, the leader of the organization that attacked the United States of America on September 11? and all that. Good questions, questions that deserve to be answered; but the ones that I would insist on are a bit different. (If I had three questions, I’d include an obligatory war question–on Iraq, and on the killing of Iraqi civilians, specifically. But this is Two Questions for George W. Bush.)

First question:

George, in 2000 you promised to preside over a fiscally conservative administration. Yet over the past four years, with a clear majority of both houses of Congress held by your allies, you have presided over the largest increase in federal spending and programs since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. More than half of the growth in expenditures has had no relation at all to war or civil defense. Who will pay for these spending increases, and the rapidly increasing federal debt?

Second question:

If you had the opportunity to rewrite the laws as you see fit, George, would you make a law banning abortion? If so, what would you do to women who sought abortions, and what would you do to doctors who provided them?

(Sidebar: why in God’s name aren’t John Kerry and his pals drilling George Bush at every opportunity over abortion? Bush has no politically acceptable answer to a question like this–he cannot say he wouldn’t, or else his base will be screaming for his head on a platter; and he cannot say that he would (particularly not if saying that he would entails spelling out the actual means by which such bans would be achieved)–if Democrats make this election a referendum on abortion then Democrats will win. Is it because Kerry doesn’t want to be closely associated with the controversial abortion issue? But why not? A solid pro-choice position is only controversial for the Christian Right. Is Kerry trying to win votes from the Christian Right?)

In any case, even if I only got two questions, this third follow-up would be necessary:

Very well, but what is your answer to my question?

Or, perhaps:

What in God’s name did that even mean?

Last week, while stumping for her husband’s re-election campaign, Laura Bush noted that It’s for our country, and our children and our grandchildren that we do the hard work of confronting terror and promoting democracy, and saluted the fighting men and women in Iraq who make that hard work possible. This is standard Bush administration boilerplate, and of course it’s the kind of boilerplate that the conservative audiences at these speeches lap up. But one ticket-holding audience member, Sue Sapir Niederer, had a bit of a different perspective: her son, Army 1^st Lieutenant Seth Dvorin, who was killed in Iraq while trying to disarm a bomb. Ms. Niederer, wearing a t-shirt that read “President Bush, you killed my son”, Ms. Niederer spoke up in the middle of Ms. Bush’s salute to the veterans to ask why her son was sent to die, and Why aren‘t the senators, the legislators, the congressman, our children serving in this war, if this war is a war that they agree with, there are three…

Well, knowing this administration, you can be sure that Ms. Bush and the event staff showed their compassion, their respect for vigorous public debate, and their deep concern for the lives of soldiers and their families. Specifically, they showed it by trying to talk over Ms. Niederer’s questions by continuing the scripted speech, and then by handcuffing a grieving mother, dragging her out of the building, and arresting her, while the crowd tried to drown out her voice by yelling Your son chose to fight in that war and chanting Four more years.

Greetings citizen! Today, our vigilance protected the Homeland Security of America from yet another looming danger. Thanks to the great patriotic efforts of Midwest Airlines employees in Milwaukee, a flight of 118 innocent passangers was saved from the terrifying threat of non-Latin scripts:

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) — Midwest Airlines canceled a flight ready to take off for San Francisco after a passenger found Arabic-style handwriting in the company’s in-flight magazine and alerted the crew.

The plane, carrying 118 passengers and five crew members, had already pulled away from the gate at Mitchell International Airport Sunday evening. It returned to the gate, the passengers got off, security authorities were notified, all luggage was checked and the aircraft was inspected. Nothing was found.

The passengers were put up in nearby hotels and booked on a Monday morning flight.

The writing was in Farsi, the language used in Iran, said airline spokeswoman Carol Skornicka. She said she didn’t know exactly what the writing said but was similar to a prayer, something of a contemplative nature.

You can rest easy tonight knowing that the War on Terror protects our freedom, our way of life, and our prosperity–by holding up all business for a day and detaining over 100 people over scribbled prayers in languages you don’t understand.