Puttin’ the Pressure on Putin

Puttin’ the Pressure on Putin
By Ray McGovern
July 28, 2013

Exclusive: The Obama administration continues to compound the diplomatic mess around former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The latest blunder was announcing that the U.S. wouldn’t torture or execute Snowden, a reminder to the world how far Official Washington has strayed from civilized behavior, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

The main question now on the fate of truth-teller Edward Snowden is whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will see any benefit in helping stop the United States from further embarrassing itself as it prances around the globe acting like a “pitiful, helpless giant.” That image was coined by President Richard Nixon, who insisted that the giant of America would merit those adjectives if it did not prevail in South Vietnam.

It is no secret that Putin is chuckling as Attorney General Eric Holder and other empty-shirts-cum-corporate-law-office-silk-ties – assisted ably by White House spokesperson Jay Carney – proceed willy-nilly to transform the Snowden case from a red-faced diplomatic embarrassment for the United States into a huge geopolitical black eye before the rest of the world.

Reminding the planet how out of step the United States has been from most of the civilized world, Holder offered a written promise to the Russians on July 9 (and released on Friday) that Snowden would neither be tortured nor put to death for disclosing secrets about how the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans and pretty much everybody else on Earth.

Holder assured the Russian Justice Minister that the U.S. “would not seek the death penalty for Mr. Snowden should he return to the United States.” Holder also saw fit to reassure his Russian counterpart that, “Mr. Snowden will not be tortured. Torture is unlawful in the United States.” Wow, that’s a relief!

The United States is so refined in its views on human rights that it won’t torture or execute a whistleblower. Of course, that only reminded everyone that the United States is one of the few advanced societies that still puts lots of people to death and was caught just last decade torturing detainees at CIA “black sites,” not to mention the brutal treatment of other prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

And, there was the humiliating treatment afforded another American whistleblower, Private Bradley Manning, whose forced nudity and long periods in solitary confinement during eight months of confinement at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C. prompted international accusations of torture.

Holder’s strange promise may have been designed to undercut Snowden’s bid for asylum, but it also reminded the world of America’s abysmal behavior on human rights. And, even if the United States promises not to torture someone, government lawyers have shown how they can play games with the definition of the term or just outright lie. Holder’s reputation for veracity is just a thin notch above that of National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who admits he has chosen to testify under oath to the “least untruthful” things.

Perhaps no one has told Holder how shockingly out of step with other civilized nations the U.S. finds itself on the issue of capital punishment. Just calling attention to that is a diplomatic gaffe of some proportion. The global trend toward abolition of the death penalty is unmistakable and increasing. The United States even is the outlier on this issue when compared to “brutal” Russia. In Russia, there has been a moratorium on executions since 1996, although it is still technically lawful.

The European Union holds a strong and principled position against the death penalty, and the abolition of capital punishment is a pre-condition for entry into the Union. The U.S. enjoys the dubious distinction of joining a list with China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia as the leaders in executing people.

Closing the Barn Door Too Late

Holder’s high-profile push to get the Russians to hand over Snowden damages the United States in other ways, too, such as reminding the world how the U.S. government has violated the privacy rights of people everywhere, including in allied countries. There is a reasonable argument to be made that the smartest U.S. move would be to simply leave Snowden alone.

Depending on your perspective, Edward Snowden has already done his damage – or, in my view, accomplished his patriotic duty of truth-telling – demonstrating with documents how the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have trashed the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Moreover, Snowden apparently had the foresight to handle his revelations in such way that, to the degree there are still more genies about to be let out of the bottle, it will be near impossible to stuff them back in. Indeed, he has said as much, in indicating how easily he can accede to Putin’s condition that he does “no further harm” to the U.S. Snowden has even been specific in acknowledging that he cannot prevent journalist Glenn Greenwald and others from publishing more of the material he made available.

So why the hue and cry from Washington? While the Obama White House has utterly failed to honor Obama’s earlier promises to run a transparent administration, there is one area in which it has been as transparent as Saran Wrap. And that is its fixation with pursuing whistleblowers “to the full extent of the law” … and then some.

The administration has been transparently vindictive, revengeful and determined to exact retribution on “leakers” as a warning to others whose consciences might trouble them enough to reveal war crimes, as Bradley Manning did, or crass violations of our rights as citizens, as Edward Snowden did.

But the recent thrashing around — demanding and cajoling Putin to turn over Snowden — has further made the United States look petulant and inept. Meanwhile, Putin has demonstrated a much more deft touch in handling this delicate international incident.

After making it clear that “we do not extradite,” Putin has had the good sense to put some distance between himself and the Snowden affair. As Secretary of State John Kerry bemoaned (from Saudi Arabia, of all places) about “standards of behavior between sovereign nations,” and (of all things) “respect for the rule of law,” Putin said the issue is simple:

“Should such people [as Snowden] be extradited to be jailed, or not? In any case, I would prefer not to deal with such issues, because this is just the same as shaving a piglet – too much noise but too little hair.”

Will Putin Cave?

Do the feckless folks running President Barack Obama’s foreign policy really think they can force Putin to back down? Can they actually believe they can achieve that by putting into play what they apparently consider a diplomatic “nuclear option”? The thinly veiled threat surfaced ten days ago that Obama will snub Putin by canceling their planned tete-a-tete before the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg in September.

Can they possibly think that by pouting, jibing and stamping their feet, they will frighten Putin into “behaving” as obediently as the malleable Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Austrians did when they forced down Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane for inspection? Morales was en route home from a visit to Russia when someone provided the U.S. with a “tip” that Snowden was hiding on Morales’s plane.

I find myself wondering who provided Washington with that great tip, and whether it is no longer the practice among U.S. intelligence agencies to take rudimentary steps to verify such tips before they let their masters get greasy diplomatic egg all over their faces?

Finally, how many more times does Putin have to say, as he did through his spokesman again Friday that: “Russia has never extradited anyone, and will not extradite [Snowden].”

Months ago, former UK MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon coined the term “asymmetric extradition law” referring to U.S. policy, which, in the vernacular, might be called “pick-and-choose.” While there is no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Russia, there has been one between the U.S. and Italy for 30 years. Yet, Washington has turned a deaf ear to Italy’s appeals to extradite convicted kidnapper Robert Seldon Lady, former head of the CIA worker bees in Milan where the CIA mounted an “extraordinary rendition” against the Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar off the streets in 2003. Omar was given over to the tender mercies of Egyptian intelligence interrogators.

In 2005, when Lady got a tip that the Italian police were coming for him, he reportedly fled his villa without destroying sensitive files on the CIA’s mission. Italy convicted Lady and 22 other U.S. operatives in absentia and gave them hefty jail sentences. Last December, Italy’s justice minister signed a warrant for Lady’s arrest. On July 18, Lady was identified and detained in Panama, but slipped away the next day on a plane headed toward the U.S.

Few were surprised that Panama was pressured into joining the servile company of the four U.S.-crony European countries that had already embarrassed themselves as accessories to the Washington’s latest Excellent Adventure regarding Evo Morales’s plane – a fiasco code-named OARR (for Operation Airline Rest Room) after the suspected place where Snowden was believed stowed away.

But when it came to extraditing a convicted kidnapper from Panama to Italy? Puleeze. Great powers don’t have to do that kind of thing, treaty or not. Except for Russia, you see. Moscow must surrender Snowden, even absent a U.S.-Russia extradition treaty. And Putin should understand that, no?

It must have been that kind of superpower-think that prompted Jay Carney on July 12 to add insult to injury, as he jibed at the Russian government to “afford human rights organizations the ability to do their work in Russia throughout Russia, not just at the Moscow transit lounge.” That kind of comment is sure to endear the White House to the Kremlin.

Vladimir Volokh, head of the Russian Migration Service, seemed to welcome a chance to retaliate in kind. Rubbing in the awkwardness of Snowden’s present status because of actions by Washington, Volokh told the Interfax news agency Friday: “We know that he is Edward Snowden only from his words. The passport he has has been canceled. … He is under protection in the transit area for his safety. He is an individual being pursued and his life is in danger.”

The Russians, and pretty much everyone else, are smart enough to realize that, given Washington’s transparent motives, there is nothing to be gained by serving Snowden up to American “justice,” such as it has become. Russia is no banana republic, so it beggars belief that President Putin will follow the supine example of Panama. Nor is the fawning example of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal something Putin would wish to emulate.

Russian History more

If Ever a Pair of Eyes Promised Paradise Jezebel It Was You.

Far too early in the morning for a rant, drive on.

Saudi moral committee threatens to cover “tempting” women’s eyes 
Manar Ammar
16 November 2011

 Women with sexy eyes in Saudi Arabia may be forced to cover them up, according to the spokesperson of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) in the conservative Gulf kingdom.

Spokesman of the Ha’eal district, Sheikh Motlab al-Nabet said the committee has the right to stop a women whose eyes seem “tempting” and order her to cover them immediately.

Saudi women are already forced to wear a loose black dress and to cover their hair and in some areas, their face, while in public or face fines or sometimes worse, including public lashings.

The announcement came days after the Saudi newspaper al-Watan reported that a Saudi man was admitted to a hospital after a fight with a member of the committee when he ordered his wife to cover her eyes. The husband was then stabbed twice in the hand.

The CPVPV is Saudi’s Sharia, Islamic law, executive arm and was founded in 1940 to ensure Islamic laws are not broken in public, yet over the years, the committee has been largely criticized over its human rights violations.

In 2002, the committee refused to let female students out of their burning schools in Mecca for “not wearing the proper head cover,” which contributed to a large number of dead. (See previous)

15 young girls died in the fire and dozens more were injured. The CPVPV men banned the firemen and policemen from accessing the girls as “it is not okay for girls to be seen without their full Islamic dress in front of strangers.”

The committee, which only accepts and trains volunteers, has questionable powers on the Saudi street, as they operate under the supervision of the King himself.

A Wikileaks document released last year mentioned that “wild Western-style parties” are regularly held at royal palaces in Jeddah, away from the reach of the committee, who stands helpless against any royal violations.

It was reported that the parties had alcohol, drugs, dancing and sex, according to American consulate wires published by the whistle-blower organization. bikyamasr.com

Saudi cleric favours one-eye veil

Toronto Tarts: Cover Up - Muslim Cleric

Brings a whole new meaning to 'fuck me shoes' I guess.

Just another misogynist Muslim headbanger sharing his Islamic wisdom with us, because if I had a nickel for every time I have heard the same argument, I could retire.

Or better still, Atangana and his ilk, could apply to join the twenty first century.

Muslim Cleric: If Women Don’t Want to Get Raped, Politicians Should Make it Illegal for Them to Dress Provocatively

York University (in Canada) has been the site of several sexual assaults over the past few weeks and students are angry because they don’t feel the school has done enough to prevent future attacks.

They’re really not going to like this.

Al-Haashim Kamena Atangana, a Muslim cleric, wrote to the Toronto Sun to offer his own suggestions as to how these crimes can be stopped:

Brings a whole new meaning to 'fuck me shoes' I guess.

Just another misogynist Muslim headbanger, because if I had a nickel for every time I have heard the same argument, I could retire.

I wanted to mention that the reason why these sex attacks are continuously happening is because the Canadian laws, which gives too much freedom to women, are the cause of these sex attacks. It has been revealed that every 5 seconds a woman is being sexually assaulted in North America. Women in North America are falling victims of the Democratic Freedom that you they passionly believe in. The reason why a woman gets raped is because of the way she dress. Women dress so provocatively so much that they receive too much attention for themselves and that attention at times leads to death.

If the law enforcements and the Canadian politicians were very serious about solving this problem, they would introduce laws that would make it illegal for women to dress provocatively in the streets. It is true that many people would object to this if that were to happen. and this will definitely create protests and opposition. However by arresting sexual predators is not going to solve the problem because as long women continue to dress like this there will always be perverts and rapist who will continue to remain on the loose. more

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Saudi cleric favours one-eye veil
A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye.
3 October 2008
Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.
The question of how much of her face a woman should cover is a controversial topic in many Muslim societies.
The niqab is more common in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but women in much of the Muslim Middle East wear a headscarf which covers only their hair.
Sheikh Habadan, an ultra-conservative cleric who is said to have wide influence among religious Saudis, was answering questions on the Muslim satellite channel al-Majd. BBC

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The 1-eyed burqa
Exclusive: Marylou Barry shakes head at Saudi sheikh's demand for female dress
10/07/2008

From the You-Couldn’t-Make-This-Stuff-Up-If-You-Tried Department:

Over the weekend a short but remarkable news article made its way around the Internet. It was remarkable not so much for its content – which was only about what we Westerners have come to expect from the seventh-century barbarians who also inhabit the planet – as for the fact that it was published by the normally very liberal British Broadcasting Corporation.

“A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia,” the story states without comment, “has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye. Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.”

Now, I am aware that the Brits are known for their tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and “the Beeb” for its tolerance of politically correct insanity, but, boy, not embroidering on that must have been tough. Wouldn’t you have just loved to be a fly on the newsroom wall when the editor read that guy’s report? Wouldn’t you have loved to be at the unscheduled meetings that must have resulted, as corporate lawyers and risk-assessment teams conspired to run the blurb, but inoffensively enough to keep from hearing from the Wahhabi Lobby? more

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A reader left a link to this website, which is replete, nay, encyclopedic in superstitious nonsense. Below are just some random examples of the glory of Islam.

I thought to include the subtle graphic that headed the piece, entitled 'notpraying' just in case you don't get the message.

The Terrible Consequences of not Praying Salah

Bismillah. Today, insha’Allah we’re going to touch on a slightly different angle on the concept of salah. Now, you know that salah is fard–the 5x daily prayers–and that the reward of doing so is great, and the sin of doing so are terrible. Hellfire, punishment on the Day of Judgment, punishment in this life, all these things are but possibilities.

But let’s take a look at a slightly different angle: scholars. What’s the position of the scholars on someone who doesn’t pray?

The position of all four madhaahib–Maliki, Shafi’ee, Hanbali, and Hanafi–with no difference of opinion–is that a person who does not pray, ever, is not a Muslim.

Think about that. Not a Muslim. Not anyone who has a chance of Paradise.

Why? There’s a very explicit hadith on this–the hadith of the Prophet

The contract between us and them is salaah. Whoever leaves it, he has disbelieved.

This is a very direct, explicit hadith–salaah is the contract, part of the mithaaq, the original contract, with Allah that all humans took. And this is only one of the explicit ahadith like this.

What’s more, it was inconceivable in the time of the sahaba that someone could be a “Muslim” and not pray. It just doesn’t make sense.

Scared yet?

No? Well, there’s more. What is the position of the scholars of Islam on someone who doesn’t pray, today, who lives in that now-extinct species of Islamic State? Then what happens?

Again, there’s no difference of opinion on this.

The position of a Muslim in an Islamic state, who doesn’t pray, is to be jailed.

And once they’re in jail, they should be advised. That what they’re doing is haram. That prayer is so, so important. That it is a major sin. That it just takes five minutes, five times a day–less than one sitcom.

And if they don’t repent? Keep advising them for a day. Then, a second day. Then, a third day.

And if they still don’t repent?

Then they are executed.

So think about that, next time you feel like skipping a salah. Honestly, it just takes five minutes. Don’t let your lame excuses side-track you. Just do it. Not Praying

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I thought this sounded rather familiar; perhaps I was just thinking of Catholicism.

The fear of Allah

The Arabic word for the “fear of Allah” is taqwâ . It comes from the root word meaning “to protect from something, to prevent”. Indeed, a person exhibits the fear of Allah by seeking to prevent Allah's punishment by carrying out what Allah has commanded of him and abstaining from what Allah has prohibited him.

Allah had called upon all people in every era to fear Him. Allah says: “And We had enjoined upon those who were given the Scripture before – as well as yourselves – to fear Allah.”

It is Allah's right over His servants that they fear Him as He ought to be feared. Allah says: “O you who believe! Fear Allah as He ought to be feared and do not die except as believers.”

Ibn Mas`ûd explained what it means to fear Allah as He ought to be feared by saying: “It means that He is to be obeyed not disobeyed, remembered not forgotten, and shown gratitude not ingratitude.”

The fear of Allah is the path to forgiveness, salvation, and the attainment of Allah's mercy. Allah says:

“Indeed, Allah is with those who fear Him and those who do good.”

“And My mercy encompasses all things, and I shall decree it for those who fear Me.”

“He is worthy of being feared and worthy of granting forgiveness.”

“And whoever fears Allah – He will pardon him his sins and grant him a great reward.”

“Indeed, those who fear Allah will be among gardens and rivers, in a seat of truth near an All-Powerful Sovereign.”

Allah promises those who fear Him that He will provide for their needs and grant them a way out of their worldly difficulties. Allah says: “And whoever fears Allah, He will make for him a way out, and provide for him from whence he could never imagine.”

This is Allah's promise. We should draw strength from it when we are tried in life with difficulties that tempt us to resort to what Allah has forbidden.

The relationship between knowledge and the fear of Allah

Allah says: “It is only those who have knowledge among Allah's servants who fear Him.”

There are two ways in which knowledge and the fear of Allah are related. The first is that true fear of Allah comes about as the result of having proper knowledge of Allah and His perfect attributes.

Ibn `Abbâs said about this verse: “They are those who know that Allah is capable of all things.” blah blah

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I wouldn't even attempt to single out anything on the subject of homosexuality, but there is this from heaven on earth, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Treatment of homosexuals within Islam:

........The Sha'fi school of thought (also seen in the Arab world) requires a minimum of 4 adult male witnesses before a person can be found guilty of a homosexual act. Al-Fatiha estimates that 4,000 homosexuals have been executed in Iran since their revolution in 1979. 10 public executions of homosexuals have been performed in Afghanistan by the Taliban army. Blah

Johann Hari: Why should I respect these oppressive religions?

Why should you respect any religion for that matter?

If the utter nonsense that people come out with, didn't have the 'Religion' tag attached, it would qualify them for the funny farm.

And people who actually think that there is some invisible entity who not only listens to, but acts on their prayers and beseechings and intercedes on their behalf in a physical manner here on earth, well quite frankly, they are fucking insane.

An old draft I found of an even older article.

Johann Hari: Why should I respect these oppressive religions?

Whenever a religious belief is criticised, its adherents say they're victims of 'prejudice'
28 January 2009

The right to criticise religion is being slowly doused in acid. Across the world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism – giving us the space to doubt and question and make up our own minds – are being beaten back by belligerent demands that we "respect" religion. A historic marker has just been passed, showing how far we have been shoved. The UN rapporteur who is supposed to be the global guardian of free speech has had his job rewritten – to put him on the side of the religious censors.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated 60 years ago that "a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest aspiration of the common people". It was a Magna Carta for mankind – and loathed by every human rights abuser on earth. Today, the Chinese dictatorship calls it "Western", Robert Mugabe calls it "colonialist", and Dick Cheney calls it "outdated". The countries of the world have chronically failed to meet it – but the document has been held up by the United Nations as the ultimate standard against which to check ourselves. Until now.

Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants, led by Saudi Arabia, demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think and speak freely failed to "respect" the "unique sensitivities" of the religious, they decided – so they issued an alternative Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. It insisted that you can only speak within "the limits set by the shariah [law]. It is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves encouraging abomination or forsaking the Islamic community".

In other words, you can say anything you like, as long as it precisely what the reactionary mullahs tell you to say. The declaration makes it clear there is no equality for women, gays, non-Muslims, or apostates. It has been backed by the Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.

Incredibly, they are succeeding. The UN's Rapporteur on Human Rights has always been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech – including the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that his job description be changed so he can seek out and condemn "abuses of free expression" including "defamation of religions and prophets". The council agreed – so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of condemning the people who wanted to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be condemning Salman Rushdie himself.

Anything which can be deemed "religious" is no longer allowed to be a subject of discussion at the UN – and almost everything is deemed religious. Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union has tried to raise topics like the stoning of women accused of adultery or child marriage. The Egyptian delegate stood up to announce discussion of shariah "will not happen" and "Islam will not be crucified in this council" – and Brown was ordered to be silent. Of course, the first victims of locking down free speech about Islam with the imprimatur of the UN are ordinary Muslims.

Here is a random smattering of events that have taken place in the past week in countries that demanded this change. In Nigeria, divorced women are routinely thrown out of their homes and left destitute, unable to see their children, so a large group of them wanted to stage a protest – but the Shariah police declared it was "un-Islamic" and the marchers would be beaten and whipped. In Saudi Arabia, the country's most senior government-approved cleric said it was perfectly acceptable for old men to marry 10-year-old girls, and those who disagree should be silenced. In Egypt, a 27-year-old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman was seized, jailed and tortured for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah.

To the people who demand respect for Muslim culture, I ask: which Muslim culture? Those women's, those children's, this blogger's – or their oppressors'?

As the secular campaigner Austin Darcy puts it: "The ultimate aim of this effort is not to protect the feelings of Muslims, but to protect illiberal Islamic states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices of internal dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom."

Those of us who passionately support the UN should be the most outraged by this.

Underpinning these "reforms" is a notion seeping even into democratic societies – that atheism and doubt are akin to racism. Today, whenever a religious belief is criticised, its adherents immediately claim they are the victims of "prejudice" – and their outrage is increasingly being backed by laws.

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him.

I don't respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of "prejudice" or "ignorance", but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.

When you demand "respect", you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.

But why are religious sensitivities so much more likely to provoke demands for censorship than, say, political sensitivities? The answer lies in the nature of faith. If my views are challenged I can, in the end, check them against reality. If you deregulate markets, will they collapse? If you increase carbon dioxide emissions, does the climate become destabilised? If my views are wrong, I can correct them; if they are right, I am soothed.

But when the religious are challenged, there is no evidence for them to consult. By definition, if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in the absence of evidence. Nobody has "faith" that fire hurts, or Australia exists; they know it, based on proof. But it is psychologically painful to be confronted with the fact that your core beliefs are based on thin air, or on the empty shells of revelation or contorted parodies of reason. It's easier to demand the source of the pesky doubt be silenced.

But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.

Yet this idea – at the heart of the Universal Declaration – is being lost. To the right, it thwacks into apologists for religious censorship; to the left, it dissolves in multiculturalism. The hijacking of the UN Special Rapporteur by religious fanatics should jolt us into rescuing the simple, battered idea disintegrating in the middle: the equal, indivisible human right to speak freely. Independent

Jesus Christ! You Can't Do That, It's 2012: Spain Blasphemy Trial

Update: Not Guilty.

From reading this short report, and his "previous," a fellow might be forgiven for thinking that the decision to prosecute Spanish artist, Javier Krahe for blasphemy, was a tad political. But whatever the reason, their are certainly dark forces at play here. As I say in the header, it's 2012, not 1512.

But to actually prosecute someone for blasphemy in 2012 Western Europe, is simply staggering. But then the fellow isn't actually being prosecuted for blasphemy, he is being prosecuted for "offending religious feelings," which surpasses staggering to go far beyond the pale.

How dangerous a precedent is that; what next trials for witchcraft? Jesus wept! this is Spain we are talking about here, not Saudi bloody Arabia. Perhaps Spain too should kick the Gregorian calendar into touch and join the Saudi goatherds back in the year 1433, because that's the message Spain is sending the world. Our level of sophistication has reverted to that of Saudi, land of darkness, Arabia.

Offending religious feelings! what about my feelings and all those like me? All those people who are rational, does Spain realise just how offensive this trial is to the likes us?

And is Spain so culturally far removed from Portugal, that it, Spain, prosecutes artists, yet a Portuguese artist, Jose Saramago, whose writings include at least two works that were labelled blasphemous, is awarded the title, Nobel Laureate? But much I suppose depends on who is adjudicating and upon what. A committee of rational thinkers for the Nobel and the Catholic bloody Church on what is considered blasphemous. Theocrats determining what is, or what isn't, offensive. What could possibly go wrong?

Which only leaves me now, to have a look in my 'blasphemy' folder for a bit of something to decorate this post with.

Oh! and perhaps inquire of my contacts in Spain to see if I can get a better insight into what is actually going on in this case.

Update, opinion from Spain:

My personal opinion about that case, fortunately like nearly everyone in this country, is that this judgment is an absurdity.

The case hase been kicking around the courthouses for eight years, has already been filed twice, but this time a Madrid court has applied for "first time" Article 525 of our Penal Code that prescribes a sentence of up to 12 months for offending "the feelings of the members of a religious denomination."

I hope that everything stays in nothing. When I get information about the sentence I'll get in touch with you, for now we are still waiting. Mercedes: Hasta que se sepa la Verdad

Spanish artist faces prison over 'how to cook Christ' film

Javier Krahe prosecuted for 'offending religious feelings' after 1978 short film was broadcast on Spanish TV
Ben Child
28 May 2012

A leading Spanish artist faces up to a year in prison after being prosecuted for "offending religious feelings" in relation to a short film he made more than 30 years ago that claimed to show "how to cook Jesus Christ".

Javier Krahe, who has been a popular and provocative figure in Spain for nearly half a century, made the film in 1978 but it was only shown on Spanish TV in 2004 as a backdrop to an interview with its creator. The little-known charge – comparable with but not identical to Britain's blasphemy law, remains part of the penal code despite never having been applied before in Spanish legal history.
Krahe's 54-second film uses the tone of a cooking programme, with chefs advised to remove Jesus' nails and separate him from his crucifix, which should be left to one side. Christ's tiny white body – a small figurine is used – is then shown being washed, lightly smothered in butter, placed on a bed of aromatic herbs in a glass tray and popped into an oven. "One gaunt Christ" is apparently enough to feed two, and when the dish is ready (after three days) it miraculously emerges from the oven without assistance.
There have been two previous failed attempts to prosecute Krahe, who is currently on bail for €192,000 (£153,000). The latest prosecution is the result of a court action by the Catholic legal association the Centro Juridico Tomas Moro.
"How do you show that someone's religious feelings have been hurt?" Krahe told El Pais newspaper, adding that he considers the prosecution to be absurd. "I'm accused of a series of things that I haven't done. I don't appear on television cooking Christ, and I haven't ever used these images [in a performance]." His supporters say freedom of speech laws should be changed to allow room for blasphemy.
Krahe is due to appear in Madrid's regional court, where statements from witnesses in the case are due to be heard on Monday. Gruniad

Other: Spain Review
Just the one above for decoration, but a small gallery of Jesus and Mo below. Two birds with one blasphemous stone as it were.

Poor Muhammad Poor Kuwaiti Ten Years For a Tweet

I despair, I really do; these people are insane.

Muhammad brutally assaulted via Twitter; criminal sentenced to 10 years
by: Mike Daniels
June 4, 2012

Rather than defending the all-powerful Allah from nasty words, a Kuwait court has instead defended a collection of dead people from “blasphemy”.

A court sentenced a 26-year-old Kuwaiti to 10 years in prison on Monday after ruling that he had endangered state security by insulting the Prophet Mohammed, his wife Ayesha and his companions on social media, his lawyer Khaled al-Shatti said.

“We plan to challenge the ruling against my client Hamad al-Naqi in the appeals court and we are very optimistic that the higher court will cancel the sentence,” Shatti told AFP.

Naqi was also charged with insulting the Gulf regimes of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and for spreading false news that undermined Kuwait’s image abroad.

The charges were based on a number of tweets on his Twitter account, but Naqi told the interrogators that his account had been hacked, the lawyer said.

The particular assaults–that is, tweets–are not available for review, so we don’t know exactly what he said. We do know that the plaintiff and some Kuwaiti politicians called for the death penalty:

The civil plaintiff arguing the case against Naqi, as well as some Kuwaiti politicians, had called for Naqi to be executed in a case that stoked sectarian tensions in the Gulf state.

“This verdict is a deterrent to those who insult the Prophet Mohammad, his companions and the mothers of the believers,” civil plaintiff Dowaem al-Mowazry said in a text message.

Naqi was also attacked in prison by a fellow inmate.

If the fellow inmate is so devout, why is he in prison? Always a curious situation.

Last month, Kuwait’s parliament approved an amendment to their constitution making insulting Allah and Muhammad (by Muslims) punishable by death. Kuwait being a constitutional monarchy, Sheikh Sabah would have to approve the measure, and has not yet done so. He recently declined to approve a proposal to make all Kuwait law comply with Shariah law. secularnewsdaily

How America's Death Penalty Murders Innocents

The US judicial system has a thousand faults and is rotten to the core. One of the first things that needs outlawing is the use of testimony from jailhouse snitches.

Do check out the exonerationregistry.org link, it's scary I tell you. The figures are astonishing.

How America's Death Penalty Murders Innocents

The evidence is in: the US criminal justice system produces wrongful convictions on an industrial scale – with fatal results
David A Love
21 May 2012

The US criminal justice system is a broken machine that wrongfully convicts innocent people, sentencing thousands of people to prison or to death for the crimes of others, as a new study reveals. The University of Michigan law school and Northwestern University have compiled a new National Registry of Exonerations – a database of over 2,000 prisoners exonerated between 1989 and the present day, when DNA evidence has been widely used to clear the names of innocent people convicted of rape and murder. Of these, 885 have profiles developed for the registry's website, exonerationregistry.org.

The details are shocking. Death row inmates were exonerated nine times more frequently than others convicted of murder. One-fourth of those exonerated of murder had received a death sentence, while half of those who had been wrongfully convicted of rape or murder faced death or a life behind bars. Ten of the inmates went to their grave before their names were cleared.

The leading causes of wrongful convictions include perjury, flawed eyewitness identification and prosecutorial misconduct. For those who have placed unequivocal faith in the US criminal justice system and believe that all condemned prisoners are guilty of the crime of which they were convicted, the data must make for a rude awakening.

"The most important thing we know about false convictions is that they happen and on a regular basis … Most false convictions never see the light of the day," said University of Michigan law professors Samuel Gross and Michael Shaffer, who wrote the study.

"Nobody had an inkling of the serious problem of false confessions until we had this data," said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University.

The unveiling of the exoneration registry comes days after a groundbreaking study from Columbia law school Professor James Liebman and 12 students. Published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, the study describes how Texas executed an innocent man named Carlos DeLuna in 1989. DeLuna was put to death for the 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez, a young woman, at a gas station. Carlos Hernandez, who bragged about committing the murder and bore a striking resemblance to DeLuna, was named at trial by DeLuna's defence team as the actual perpetrator of the crime. But DeLuna's false conviction is merely the tip of the iceberg, as the database suggests.

Recently also, Charlie Baird, a Texas judge, was prepared to issue an order posthumously exonerating Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the 1991 arson-related deaths of his three young daughters. Based upon "overwhelming, credible and reliable evidence", Baird concluded Willingham had been wrongfully convicted; this in addition to a jailhouse witness who recanted his testimony, and scientists who challenged the evidence at trial that the fire that destroyed the Willingham home was caused by arson. Baird was blocked by a state appeals court from issuing the order before he left the bench to pursue private practice.

And again in Texas, lawyers for Kerry Max Cook, a former death row prisoner who was wrongfully convicted of a 1977 murder in East Texas, claim that the district attorney in the case withheld in his possession the murder weapon and biological evidence in the case.

In 2012, the American death penalty has reached a crossroads. Public support for executions has decreased over the years, with capital punishment critics citing its high cost, failure to deter crime, and the fact that the practice places the nation out of step with international human rights norms. Last year, the US ranked fifth in the world in executions, a member of a select club of nations that includes China, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. Further, in the US states that have repealed the death penalty in recent years – including New Mexico, New Jersey, Illinois and, most recently, Connecticut – the killing of the innocent has been cited as a pivotal factor in favor of abolition.

Meanwhile, thanks to an EU embargo on lethal injection drugs to the US, states that practice capital punishment are faced with a shortage of poison to execute prisoners. Some have resorted to purchasing unapproved drug supplies on the black market, or using different chemicals altogether. For example, Ohio has abandoned its three-drug protocol for executions in favor of a single drug called pentobarbital, a barbiturate used to euthanize animals. And Missouri has decided to execute prisoners using propofol, a surgical anesthetic implicated in Michael Jackson's death.

Apparently desperate and lacking in options to kill, these states would be better-served by joining the civilized world and devoting their efforts to end the death penalty, rather than find new methods to satisfy their bloodlust – which, as the new evidence makes abundantly clear, cannot but cause them to execute innocent citizens. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 140 men and women have been released from death row since 1973 due to innocence. That death row inmates are exonerated much more often than other categories of prisoner – even when a person's life is at stake – should shatter anyone's faith in the presumed infallibility of the court system.

It is now transparent to the public that, at best, the application of the death penalty is rife with human error and incompetence. At worst, we know there is prosecutorial misconduct: that the courts shelter and nurture officials who are rewarded for gaming the system by career advancement, rather than determining true guilt or innocence and ensuring that justice is done. Guardian

How Very Apt Official Saudi Calender Says It Is The Year 1433

Extremely civil of them to acquiesce to such modernity. But must be said, it strikes me as fairly accurate; about six hundred years behind the times.

Saudi Arabia bans using Gregorian dates

The use of the English language to answer calls or communicate, mainly in companies and hotels, has also been banned
May 17, 2012

Saudi Arabia has banned all government and private agencies from using the Gregorian calendar in official dealings.

The use of the English language to answer calls or communicate, mainly in companies and hotels, has also been banned, a local daily said.

All ministries and agencies have to use the Hijri dates (Islamic calendar) and the Arabic language, the interior ministry said. The ministry attributed its decision to preserving the Islamic calendar and the Arabic language, Arabic daily Al Watan reported.

In the statement to the ministries and establishments, the ministry said that it noted that some government entities were using Gregorian dates "unnecessarily", in a violation of high orders and instructions. Several hotel and company receptions used English in their communications, the ministry said.

However, ministries and agencies could use the Gregorian calendar, whenever needed, on the condition that it is associated with the corresponding Hijri date. Gulfnews

Plenty more on the Land of Darkness in the side-bar, tagged, Saudi and Us and Them.

Department of Fear: Must Try Harder

Updated below.

It's the middle of the night here, so I will try and update this latest "bomb plot foiled" nonsense when I can find a more trustworthy source of information than the BBC, who bring you this story:

Al-Qaeda underwear bomber 'was US double agent'

But for now, I shall just utilise this short passage.

US officials told ABC News that Quso had been planning an attack similar to the failed 2009 attempt to blow up a passenger plane.

The device seized from Yemen shares some features with the bomb sewn into the underwear of would-be suicide bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab during that attempt, officials said.

The Nigerian was arrested when his device failed to explode fully while on a plane bound for Detroit.

Now go here and read this piece which ends: “Umar, you are not a Muslim martyr. You are merely a government patsy.”

Another Foiled False Flag
By Stephen Lendman
May 09, 2012


Wikipedia defines false or black flags as "covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities."



"The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is: flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations and can be used during peace-time."



Big lies substitute for truth. Stories are fabricated. Media scoundrels promote them. At issue is heightening fear for planned policies. Pretexts are needed for militarism, imperial wars, and homeland repression. If and when people learn they were duped, it's too late to matter.



It's an American tradition. Incidents are strategically timed. Innocent victims suffer. So does everyone living under heightened national security state conditions.



Threats are manufactured. States of emergency are declared. Rule of law principles are discarded. Unchallenged dominance alone matters. Wars on humanity follow. Big lies facilitate them. False flags play their part.



Here we go again. This one's a sequel. Perhaps Hollywood blockbusters will follow, first the original plot, then the latest. More on the earlier one below.



On May 7, AP headlined "US: CIA thwarts new al-Qaida underwear bomb plot," saying:



Agents foiled "an ambitious plot by al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen to destroy a US-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, The Associated Press has learned."



AP described an upgraded underwear bomb plot. Like the earlier one, it was "designed to be used in a passenger's underwear, but this time" US officials called it "more refined."



On May 7, the FBI issued a brief statement, saying:



"As a result of close cooperation with our security and intelligence partners overseas, an improvised explosive device (IED) designed to carry out a terrorist attack has been seized abroad."



"The FBI currently has possession of the IED and is conducting technical and forensics analysis on it. Initial exploitation indicates that the device is very similar to IEDs that have been used previously by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in attempted terrorist attacks, including against aircraft and for targeted assassinations."



"The device never presented a threat to public safety, and the US government is working closely with international partners to address associated concerns with the device."



"We refer you to the Department of Homeland Security, including the Transportation Security Administration, regarding ongoing security measures to safeguard the American people and the traveling public."



The device contained no metal. It's not clear if body scanners could have detected it. Officials said an alleged Yemen-based bomber hadn't yet picked a target or bought plane tickets. CIA agents seized the device before he had a chance. The suspect wasn't identified.



AP learned of the plot earlier but agreed to White House and CIA requests to delay publishing because intelligence operations were ongoing.



On May 8, the White House and FBI confirmed AP's report. Deputy national security council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said Obama knew last month. "The disruption of the IED plot underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism here and abroad," she said.



"While the president was assured that the device did not pose a threat to the public, he directed the department of homeland security and law enforcement and intelligence agencies to take whatever steps necessary to guard against this type of attack," she added.



Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesman Matt Chandler said:



The latest plot "demonstrates our adversaries' interest in targeting the aviation sector." Protective "layers" are thus used.



They "include threat and vulnerability analysis, prescreening and screening of passengers using the best available technology, random searches at airports, federal air marshal coverage, and additional security measures both seen and unseen."



"It's not clear who built the bomb," AP reported. Authorities "suspect it was the work of master bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri." A Saudi citizen, he's one of their most wanted. Earlier he was imprisoned and released.



He's reportedly in Yemen with his brother Abdullah. He's another Saudi most wanted. Washington claims they're both Al Qaeda connected. He's blamed for earlier bomb plots.



On March 24, 2011, the State Department included Ibrahim on its terrorist watch list. He's also on an Interpol Orange Notice one. It "warns police and other international organizations about potential threats from disguised weapons, parcel bombs, or other dangerous materials."



Washington considers Yemen strategically important. It's mostly for its location near the Horn of Africa on Saudi Arabia's southern border, the Red Sea, and Bab el- Mandeb strait.



It's a key chokepoint separating Yemen from Eritrea. Around three million barrels of oil pass through it daily. The Gulf of Aden connects to the Indian Ocean. Since 2009, Obama waged drone war on the country. CIA and Special Forces operate on the ground. Death squads are deployed.



America's at war with Yemen without declaring it. Predator drones escalate killing. Media scoundrels say little. Yemen gets attention when foiled bomb plots are claimed. They're pretexts for stepped up measures there and at home.



Washington's targets are global. US citizens share risks with foreign ones. Waging war on humanity leaves no one safe. Everyone everywhere is fair game. Any place could erupt in free-fire zone violence. Anyone can be accused of terrorism or conspiracy to commit it.



America's hegemonic ambitions threaten humanity. Too few at home understand. Public ignorance and indifference let Washington get away with murder. It's a global killing machine to remove all challenges.



The Earlier Underwear Bomber False Flag



It was fake like the sequel. In December 2009, US officials claimed Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab traveled to Yemen, got Al Qaeda training, and explosive PETN chemicals.



Supposedly he tried using them to blow up an Amsterdam-Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day. In fact, he was a fall guy for a joint CIA/Mossad/India Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) false flag.



The same alliance staged coordinated 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Dozens were killed and hundreds wounded. They also were behind former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's 2007 assassination.



The same issue then remains US policy now. Destabilizing and balkanizing Pakistan is planned. It's also perhaps intended for Afghanistan and Libya. Iraq's already divided. Always it's for easier control and exploitation.



Abdulmutallab was a convenient patsy. He was used to facilitate America's war on Yemen. Britain denied him an entrance visa. His name was on a State Department terror watch list.



Yet he wasn't on a No Fly List. He paid cash for a one-way ticket to Detroit, checked no luggage, had a US visa but no passport, and was helped onboard by a "well-dressed Indian" gentleman (a RAW agent) to facilitate Washington's scheme to use him as a convenient dupe.



His PETN was virtually harmless. It was technically deficient, failed to go off properly, and had fire cracker strength. Following the incident, Washington's war on Yemen escalated and enhanced airport screening began. Full body scanners the ACLU calls "virtual strip search(es)" are used.



False flags create opportunities to advance America's imperium. They also facilitate its war on dissent. In May 2011, three key Patriot Act powers were extended for another four years. Little debate assured swift passage. As a result:



(1) Unlimited roving wiretaps continue unchecked.



(2) Section 215 pertains to alleged suspects. It authorizes government access to "any tangible item." They included financial records and transactions, student and medical records, phone conversations, emails, other Internet use, and whatever else Washington claims essential.



(3) Alleged suspect organizations and individuals can be surveilled, whether or not evidence links them to terrorism or complicity to commit it. In other words, police state powers to monitor anyone for any reason or none at all remain unchecked.



Racial profiling and waging war on Islam got boosts. Abdulmutallab benefitted Washington at his own expense. Expect the underwear bomb sequel to provide more.



Washington will take full advantage. Perhaps Obama has another war in mind.



A Final Comment



On May 8, The New York Times headlined "Rare Double Agent Disrupted Bombing Plot, US says."



Most likely it's double-dealing official lies and misreporting. According to Times-speak, a Saudi intelligence agent "infiltrated (a) terrorist group and volunteered for the mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday."



Washington claims he provided an "innovative bomb" designed for "aviation attack." The Times reported the story without checking for reliability. If official sources say it, accounts follow true or false.



The agent is back in Saudi Arabia, The Times said. CIA agents were involved.



What's true or false isn't clear. What's certain is another false flag for reasons similar to previous ones. They repeat well-timed for strategic advantage.



They're manufactured to look real. Media scoundrels headline them. Most people don't know they've been had. The scam repeats because it works. No wonder America gets away with murder and much more. ICH

The Kingdom in the Closet 'The land of sand and sodomites'

The first of three posts on religion and sex. (2) (3)

The article below was linked from, and is the essence of, Pat Condell's video.

The Kingdom in the Closet
Nadya Labi
May 2007

Sodomy is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, but gay life flourishes there. Why it is “easier to be gay than straight” in a society where everyone, homosexual and otherwise, lives in the closet
By Nadya Labi

Yasser, a 26-year-old artist, was taking me on an impromptu tour of his hometown of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on a sweltering September afternoon. The air conditioner of his dusty Honda battled the heat, prayer beads dangled from the rearview mirror, and the smell of the cigarette he’d just smoked wafted toward me as he stopped to show me a barbershop that his friends frequent. Officially, men in Saudi Arabia aren’t allowed to wear their hair long or to display jewelry—such vanities are usually deemed to violate an Islamic instruction that the sexes must not be too similar in appearance. But Yasser wears a silver necklace, a silver bracelet, and a sparkly red stud in his left ear, and his hair is shaggy. Yasser is homosexual, or so we would describe him in the West, and the barbershop we visited caters to gay men. Business is brisk.

Leaving the barbershop, we drove onto Tahlia Street, a broad avenue framed by palm trees, then went past a succession of sleek malls and slowed in front of a glass-and-steel shopping center. Men congregated outside and in nearby cafés. Whereas most such establishments have a family section, two of this area’s cafés allow only men; not surprisingly, they are popular among men who prefer one another’s company. Yasser gestured to a parking lot across from the shopping center, explaining that after midnight it would be “full of men picking up men.” These days, he said, “you see gay people everywhere.”

Yasser turned onto a side street, then braked suddenly. “Oh shit, it’s a checkpoint,” he said, inclining his head toward some traffic cops in brown uniforms. “Do you have your ID?” he asked me. He wasn’t worried about the gay-themed nature of his tour—he didn’t want to be caught alone with a woman. I rummaged through my purse, realizing that I’d left my passport in the hotel for safekeeping. Yasser looked behind him to see if he could reverse the car, but had no choice except to proceed. To his relief, the cops nodded us through. “God, they freaked me out,” Yasser said. As he resumed his narration, I recalled something he had told me earlier. “It’s a lot easier to be gay than straight here,” he had said. “If you go out with a girl, people will start to ask her questions. But if I have a date upstairs and my family is downstairs, they won’t even come up.”

Notorious for its adherence to Wahhabism, a puritanical strain of Islam, and as the birthplace of most of the 9/11 hijackers, Saudi Arabia is the only Arab country that claims sharia, or Islamic law, as its sole legal code. The list of prohibitions is long: It’s haram—forbidden—to smoke, drink, go to discos, or mix with an unrelated person of the opposite gender. The rules are enforced by the mutawwa'in, religious authorities employed by the government’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The kingdom is dominated by mosques and malls, which the mutawwa'in patrol in leather sandals and shortened versions of the thawb, the traditional ankle-length white robe that many Saudis wear. Some mutawwa'in even bear marks of their devotion on their faces; they bow to God so adamantly that pressing their foreheads against the ground leaves a visible dent. The mutawwa'in prod shoppers to say their devotions when the shops close for prayer, several times daily. If they catch a boy and a girl on a date, they might haul the couple to the police station. They make sure that single men steer clear of the malls, which are family-only zones for the most part, unless they are with a female relative. Though the power of the mutawwa'in has been curtailed recently, their presence still inspires fear.

In Saudi Arabia, sodomy is punishable by death. Though that penalty is seldom applied, just this February a man in the Mecca region was executed for having sex with a boy, among other crimes. (For this reason, the names of most people in this story have been changed.) Ask many Saudis about homosexuality, and they’ll wince with repugnance. “I disapprove,” Rania, a 32-year-old human-resources manager, told me firmly. “Women weren’t meant to be with women, and men aren’t supposed to be with men.”

This legal and public condemnation notwithstanding, the kingdom leaves considerable space for homosexual behavior. As long as gays and lesbians maintain a public front of obeisance to Wahhabist norms, they are left to do what they want in private. Vibrant communities of men who enjoy sex with other men can be found in cosmopolitan cities like Jeddah and Riyadh. They meet in schools, in cafés, in the streets, and on the Internet. “You can be cruised anywhere in Saudi Arabia, any time of the day,” said Radwan, a 42-year-old gay Saudi American who grew up in various Western cities and now lives in Jeddah. “They’re quite shameless about it.” Talal, a Syrian who moved to Riyadh in 2000, calls the Saudi capital a “gay heaven.”

This is surprising enough. But what seems more startling, at least from a Western perspective, is that some of the men having sex with other men don’t consider themselves gay. For many Saudis, the fact that a man has sex with another man has little to do with “gayness.” The act may fulfill a desire or a need, but it doesn’t constitute an identity. Nor does it strip a man of his masculinity, as long as he is in the “top,” or active, role. This attitude gives Saudi men who engage in homosexual behavior a degree of freedom. But as a more Westernized notion of gayness—a notion that stresses orientation over acts—takes hold in the country, will this delicate balance survive?

‘They will seduce you’

When Yasser hit puberty, he grew attracted to his male cousins. Like many gay and lesbian teenagers everywhere, he felt isolated. “I used to have the feeling that I was the queerest in the country,” he recalled. “But then I went to high school and discovered there are others like me. Then I find out, it’s a whole society.”

This society thrives just below the surface. During the afternoon, traffic cops patrol outside girls’ schools as classes end, in part to keep boys away. But they exert little control over what goes on inside. A few years ago, a Jeddah- based newspaper ran a story on lesbianism in high schools, reporting that girls were having sex in the bathrooms. Yasmin, a 21-year-old student in Riyadh who’d had a brief sexual relationship with a girlfriend (and was the only Saudi woman who’d had a lesbian relationship who was willing to speak with me for this story), told me that one of the department buildings at her college is known as a lesbian enclave. The building has large bathroom stalls, which provide privacy, and walls covered with graffiti offering romantic and religious advice; tips include “she doesn’t really love you no matter what she tells you” and “before you engage in anything with [her] remember: God is watching you.” In Saudi Arabia, “It’s easier to be a lesbian [than a heterosexual]. There’s an overwhelming number of people who turn to lesbianism,” Yasmin said, adding that the number of men in the kingdom who turn to gay sex is even greater. “They’re not really homosexual,” she said. “They’re like cell mates in prison.”

This analogy came up again and again during my conversations. As Radwan, the Saudi American, put it, “Some Saudi [men] can’t have sex with women, so they have sex with guys. When the sexes are so strictly segregated”—men are allowed little contact with women outside their families, in order to protect women’s purity—“how do they have a chance to have sex with a woman and not get into trouble?” Tariq, a 24-year-old in the travel industry, explains that many “tops” are simply hard up for sex, looking to break their abstinence in whatever way they can. Francis, a 34-year-old beauty queen from the Philippines (in 2003 he won a gay beauty pageant held in a private house in Jeddah by a group of Filipinos), reported that he’s had sex with Saudi men whose wives were pregnant or menstruating; when those circumstances changed, most of the men stopped calling. “If they can’t use their wives,” Francis said, “they have this option with gays.”

Gay courting in the kingdom is often overt—in fact, the preferred mode is cruising. “When I was new here, I was worried when six or seven cars would follow me as I walked down the street,” Jamie, a 31-year-old Filipino florist living in Jeddah, told me. “Especially if you’re pretty like me, they won’t stop chasing you.” John Bradley, the author of Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis (2005), says that most male Western expatriates here, gay or not, have been propositioned by Saudi men driving by “at any time of the day or night, quite openly and usually very, very persistently.”

Many gay expatriates say they feel more at home in the kingdom than in their native lands. Jason, a South African educator who has lived in Jeddah since 2002, notes that although South Africa allows gay marriage, “it’s as though there are more gays here.” For Talal, Riyadh became an escape. When he was 17 and living in Da­mas­cus, his father walked in on him having sex with a male friend. He hit Talal and grounded him for two months, letting him out of the house only after he swore he was no longer attracted to men. Talal’s pale face flushed crimson as he recalled his shame at disappointing his family. Eager to escape the weight of their expectations, he took a job in Riyadh. When he announced that he would be moving, his father responded, “You know all Saudis like boys, and you are white. Take care.” Talal was pleased to find a measure of truth in his father’s warning—his fair skin made him a hit among the locals.

Marcos, a 41-year-old from the Philippines, was arrested in 1996 for attending a party featuring a drag show. He spent nine months in prison, where he got 200 lashes, before being deported. Still, he opted to return; he loves his work in fashion, which pays decently, and the social opportunities are an added bonus. “Guys romp around and parade in front of you,” he told me. “They will seduce you. It’s up to you how many you want, every day.” Go to page two.

A Woman's Lot Is Not a Happy Lot: Afghanistan

It's a big article posted in its entirety, but I make no excuses for that, it being essential reading on the plight of Afghani women.

A plight, that once upon a time, under Soviet influence, started to show real progress in freeing women from the control of the misogynist, backward clerics and the equally backward and misogynist Mujahedin.

Until that was, the entry into the conflict by the USA.

U.S./NATO Troops Out Now!

Afghanistan: Women Under Imperialist Occupation

We Said: Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!

16 March 2012

On March 6, two days before International Women’s Day, Washington’s Afghan puppet president Hamid Karzai announced that he had approved a new “code of conduct” issued by the Ulema Council of senior Muslim clerics. This edict legally confines women to their homes, barring them from going out without a male guardian or mingling with men in schools, offices or markets. It also officially condones wife-beating. “Men are fundamental and women are secondary,” said the statement, which Karzai saluted as “the sharia law of all Muslims and all Afghans.”

Throughout the past ten years of U.S. occupation, Afghanistan has been a living hell for women. To sell their predatory war in retribution for the September 11 attacks, the U.S. and its NATO allies pointed to the crimes against women under the then-ruling Taliban, pledging that an American-led takeover would bring liberation. After U.S. forces seized control of the country in 2002, George W. Bush proclaimed that “today, women are free.” In reality, the U.S. rulers merely handed power to another wing of the anti-woman fundamentalist forces that they had backed against the Soviet Union and the leftist regime of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) from the late 1970s to the early ’90s.

In Afghanistan today, women are forced to wear the suffocating head-to-toe burqa almost everywhere. The sight of women begging for money to feed their starving families is commonplace on the streets of Kabul, the capital city. To survive or pay off debts, families sell their daughters in marriage or to the many brothels servicing U.S. troops and contractors. More than half of all girls are forced into marriage before the age of 16.

There is a saying in Afghanistan that a woman belongs either to her husband’s house or to her grave. Half of the inmates at the Badam Bagh women’s prison in Kabul have been imprisoned for years for refusing to marry or for fleeing abusive husbands. Returned runaways are often shot or stabbed by family members in “honor killings.” Other women are jailed for being victims of rape or assault. For a woman in Afghanistan, any sex outside marriage is considered a crime—including when she is raped. The rapist, meanwhile, almost always goes unpunished.

Barely a quarter of Afghan girls go to school. Religious fanatics attack those who do, including by spraying acid in their faces, as happened at a school in Kandahar in 2008. The following year, the education ministry reported that nearly 500 schools, mostly schools for girls, had been destroyed, damaged or forced to close. Between March and October 2010, at least 126 students and teachers were killed. The literacy rate for women is 12 percent, while their average life expectancy is 44, some 24 years below the world average. To escape their unbearable lives, many women turn to suicide. Even according to official Afghan statistics, some 2,300 women and girls kill themselves every year—more than six each day. The most common method is self-immolation with cooking oil.

The atrocities endured by Afghan women are not in the main the actions of rogue elements breaking the law. In 2004, the U.S. overseers brokered a constitution that enshrined Islamic sharia law. Despite the token presence of women in the constituent assembly and a claim that women have “equal rights,” the constitution states that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” In 2006, Karzai’s cabinet reestablished the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was notorious under the Taliban for its brutal imposition of sharia, including stoning to death women who defied its edicts.

Calling Afghanistan “the good war,” in 2009 the Obama administration reinforced the U.S. occupation with another 30,000 troops. The imperialist troops, full of racist contempt, continue to massacre untold numbers of civilians. American soldiers have murdered Afghans for sport, cut off their fingers as trophies and urinated on their dead bodies. Marine snipers have posed for photos with a flag bearing the Nazi SS insignia. Soldiers regularly stage night raids in which they go after suspected opponents of the Afghan regime at private homes and shoot dead whoever opens the door. The explosion of anger that followed the revelation that the U.S. military had burned copies of the Koran last month shows the depth of resentment that has built up among the Afghan peoples.

In the latest atrocity, a U.S. Army staff sergeant went door-to-door in a village in southern Afghanistan overnight on March 11, gunning down at least 16 civilians, including nine children. This outrage provoked an immediate condemnation from the Karzai government and vows for vengeance from the Taliban, further complicating the U.S. rulers’ efforts to extricate themselves from the Afghanistan quagmire.

After repeated instances of Afghan forces turning their guns on American soldiers, the Obama administration announced last month that it was moving up the timetable for ending U.S. troops’ “combat role” to some time next year and withdrawing them in 2014. The U.S. is looking to open negotiations with the Taliban, which continues to control large parts of the country, in order to somehow cobble together a “political solution” that would create a modicum of stability after U.S. troops are withdrawn. Karzai’s approval of the clerics’ woman-hating “code of conduct” is widely seen to be an overture to the Taliban on the part of his regime.

As Marxists, our starting point in opposing the U.S. occupation is proletarian class opposition to America’s capitalist rulers and their imperialist predations. In the lead-up to the 2001 invasion, we called for the military defense of Afghanistan against the U.S. and allied forces without giving any support to the Taliban reactionaries. In the face of the ongoing occupation, we emphasize that every blow struck against the blood-soaked U.S. ruling class is a blow against the chief enemy of working people and the oppressed around the world. All U.S./NATO troops out of Afghanistan now!

Afghanistan: Front Line of the Anti-Soviet War Drive

In their drive for world domination, the U.S. imperialists have never had any compunction about siding with the most retrograde social forces. It is impossible to comprehend the current plight of Afghan women without examining Washington’s role in backing the forces of Islamic reaction against the Soviet Union and its PDPA allies starting in 1978.

Many of the modernizing left nationalists who led the PDPA were educated and trained in the Soviet Union, which they rightly saw as a source of social progress. The Soviet Union was a workers state that embodied key social gains of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, centrally a planned economy and collectivized property, despite its subsequent degeneration under a nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy. Progressive-minded activists in Afghanistan in the 1970s looked at the example of Soviet Central Asia, just across the border, which was a modern society where women went unveiled, were educated and participated in public life and where everyone had access to free education and health care.

On coming to power in April 1978, the PDPA began to implement serious reforms favoring women and poor peasants, such as redistributing the land, lowering the bride price, educating women and freeing them from the burqa. In the context of this cruelly backward country, which had far more mullahs than industrial workers, such reforms had an explosive impact. They fueled a revolt by reactionary traditionalists who sought to maintain the old society, including its all-encompassing degradation of women. When the Muslim insurgency threatened the PDPA’s hold on power, the government made repeated requests for Soviet assistance, until the Soviets finally dispatched tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan in December 1979.

This was the only war in modern history fought centrally over women’s rights. From the start, the U.S. imperialists, determined to strike a blow against the Soviet Union, took the side of benighted reaction. Democratic president Jimmy Carter and his successor, Republican Ronald Reagan, backed the mujahedin holy warriors to the hilt in the biggest covert CIA operation in history. Billions of dollars in aid went to an array of Islamist groups based in Peshawar, Pakistan, and to that country’s ISI intelligence service. The CIA used the ISI and the Egyptian and Saudi intelligence services to create, train, finance and arm a network of 70,000 Islamists (including Osama bin Laden) from more than 50 countries to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, giving a huge boost to Muslim fundamentalist movements the world over.

We wrote at the time of the Soviet intervention: “For revolutionary socialists there is nothing tricky, nothing ambiguous about the war in Afghanistan. The Soviet Army and its left-nationalist allies are fighting an anti-communist, anti-democratic mélange of landlords, money lenders, tribal chiefs and mullahs committed to mass illiteracy.... The gut-level response of every radical leftist should be fullest solidarity with the Soviet Red Army” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 29, Summer 1980). The threat of a CIA-backed Islamic takeover on the USSR’s southern flank posed directly the need for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the extended Soviet presence opened the possibility of social liberation for the Afghan masses, particularly women. We proclaimed: Hail Red Army! Extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!

In contrast, the bulk of the left internationally, with few exceptions, eagerly joined the imperialist chorus against the Soviet Union and whitewashed the mujahedin. The International Socialist Organization and its then ally in Britain, Tony Cliff’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP), stood foursquare with the imperialists. The 12 January 1980 issue of the SWP’s Socialist Worker blared, “Troops Out of Afghanistan!” In 1981, the then fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat of Ernest Mandel called for “stopping Soviet occupation in Afghanistan.” In howling with the imperialist wolves against the Soviet intervention, these groups made common cause with the worst enemies of the rights of women and all the oppressed.

Huge Gains for Afghan Women Under Soviet Presence

Freeing Afghan women from purdah (seclusion) and giving land to the peasants required ending the domination of the mullahs and tribal khans and overturning the country’s entire social structure. But the popular base of support for such moves within Afghanistan was very narrow. The country utterly lacked a proletariat with any social weight. Its tiny manufacturing workforce of some 35,000 was dwarfed by the quarter million Islamic clerics. Those elements in the cities aspiring to progress were surrounded by a sea of nomadic herdsmen and landless peasants beholden to the khans and the landlords. Thus, the presence of the Red Army, together with substantial Soviet aid, was essential to social progress.

Afghan women made unprecedented gains under the Soviet umbrella. While the 1964 constitution had declared women equal to men, equality largely remained on paper except for a few women in the upper strata of urban society. A thin layer of women had taken off the burqa and obtained education and employment outside the home, but even in Kabul, the main urban center, half of all women still wore the full veil in the late 1970s. Throughout the country, 98 percent of women were totally illiterate. In the 1980s, in contrast, there were vast opportunities for women to escape at least the strictest restraints of purdah. Many thousands became university students, workers, professionals and leftist activists.

Suraya Parlika, a founder of the PDPA-affiliated Democratic Women’s Organization, recounted some of these accomplishments in the 2007 documentary Afghan Women: A History of Struggle: “Women worked very hard to get their rights. They formed childcare centers in their workplaces to make it easier for women to work. Maternity leave was extended to three months from six weeks and they were still getting their salary.” The Afghan government also began mass literacy campaigns and provided free medical care.

By the late 1980s, women made up 40 percent of the country’s doctors (women doctors were in high demand, especially in rural areas, where women were still strictly secluded and barred from consulting male doctors). Sixty percent of the instructors at Kabul University and 65 percent of the student body were women. Family courts, in some cases presided over by female judges, had replaced the mullahs’ sharia courts. The number of working women increased 50-fold. By 1987, there were an estimated 245,000 women working in fields ranging from construction, printing and food processing to radio and TV journalism and especially teaching, where they made up 70 percent of the workforce.

In a 1994 PhD thesis, Educated Afghan Women in Search of Their Identities, the Afghan-born academic Sharifa Sharif reported on her 1987 interviews with 30 women workers in Kabul, undertaken as part of a survey for the United Nations Development Program. The sharp increase in women’s participation in economic life was partly due to the war, which had taken away many men and brought women from the countryside into Kabul. But it was also the result of greater legal rights, supportive government policies and economic development, including the construction of new homes, factories, schools and hospitals.

The transformation of these women from backward traditionalist areas into skilled workers gives a glimpse of what might have been achieved if Afghanistan had been able to continue its Soviet-assisted development. While initially encountering fierce resistance from their families, women workers were exposed to technology, education and literacy. They took pride in acquiring job skills and becoming ustad (expert masters) in their fields. Some were sent for training to the Soviet Union. At a construction site, Sharif interviewed a 23-year-old widow and mother of two children, who was one of three female crane operators, a job never before done by a woman in Afghanistan.

Many women took up arms against the mujahedin threat. Four of seven military commanders appointed in 1986 were women. By 1989, the regime reported having armed some 15,000 women. The same year, all female members of the PDPA received military training and arms. The arming of unveiled women with Kalashnikovs symbolized the social transformation then under way in Afghanistan. As early as 1984, Indian journalist Patricia Sethi reported encountering 15-year-old girls carrying rifles who were members of a civilian brigade in a village near Kabul: “They spoke fervently and passionately about their revolution and what it meant for young women in Afghanistan: it meant ‘an education, freedom from the veil, freedom from feudalists who want to keep us down,’ said Khalida. ‘We do not want to become the fourth wife of a 60-year-old man, existing solely for his whim and pleasure’” (India Today, 31 July 1984).

Soviet Withdrawal Betrayed Afghan Women

The Soviet military presence posed the possibility not only of defeating the U.S.-backed Islamists but also of incorporating Afghanistan into the Soviet system. In the 1920s, Soviet Central Asia looked remarkably like Afghanistan in the 1970s—a miserably backward and desolate place where women were bought and sold. Every step toward emancipation taken by the Soviet regime was met with fierce resistance from the khans, mullahs and their armed gangs of basmachi (the mujahedin of the time), including the wholesale murder of Communist agitators and women who rejected the veil.

The imposition of Soviet power under the umbrella of the Red Army created the conditions for dismantling centuries-old tribal/clerical domination and developing the region’s vast natural resources. Once the Soviet Army got the upper hand against the basmachi in 1922, Bolshevik women activists were sent in to work among the horribly oppressed women, who stood to benefit most from the extension of the gains of the October Revolution. Under Lenin’s guidance, they set out to gradually undermine the power and authority of the khans’ and mullahs’ institutions through legal and administrative measures, demonstrating that the Communists were the foremost fighters for the oppressed.

Beginning with the Stalinist political counterrevolution in 1923-24, the USSR underwent a qualitative bureaucratic degeneration in which the working class was deprived of political power. Even after this, however, the necessities of industrialization and economic planning continued to produce particularly huge benefits for Central Asia. As the USSR was transformed from a largely peasant country into an industrial power starting in the late 1920s and early ’30s, Soviet women were increasingly mobilized to work in industry. In Central Asia, women entered the industrial workforce in large numbers during World War II, when many Soviet factories were relocated to the region away from the front lines of the war.

Had the Soviet leadership been determined to see the war in Afghanistan through to victory, the country could have undergone similarly immense social progress through the construction of a modern infrastructure, the creation of a significant urban proletariat and the institution of economic planning. But the Stalinist bureaucrats in the Kremlin did not pursue this course. Instead, the regime of Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew the Red Army in 1988-89.

This was not because it faced military defeat; to the end, the Soviet Army had the upper hand militarily. The Soviet withdrawal was a political decision by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow carried out with the fatuous aim of appeasing U.S. imperialism. It was a betrayal of the Afghan masses, especially women, that helped pave the way for capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union itself in 1991-92.

The Stalinist bureaucracy was a contradictory caste whose nationalist outlook subordinated the interests of the world proletariat to the defense of its own privileged position as a parasitic layer resting on the collectivized economy. The 1979 Red Army intervention was a decent and progressive act, even if it was carried out by the corrupt and conservative regime of Leonid Brezhnev, that cut against the grain of the Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country.” However, we warned from the outset that the bureaucracy might cut a deal at the expense of the Afghan peoples as part of its quest for “peaceful coexistence” with Washington. We fought for a proletarian political revolution to oust the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracy and return the Soviet Union to the Bolshevik internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky.

After the Soviet withdrawal, the Afghan government fought on valiantly for three years. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—wrote to the PDPA government in 1989 offering to organize an international brigade to help fight the forces of Islamic reaction. When that offer was turned down, the PDC, at the request of the Afghan government, launched an international fund drive to aid civilian victims of the mujahedin siege of the city of Jalalabad, raising over $44,000. The Afghan forces were able to repel this attack.

When the mujahedin finally took Kabul in 1992, re-enslaving Afghan women, the various tribally-based militias carried out a vengeful war of mass murder, torture and rape of rival ethnic populations, which left at least 50,000 people dead in Kabul alone. This led to four years of horror under the rule of various warring fundamentalist factions which brought the city to the point of famine and total devastation.

A recent New York Times article (“In Afghanistan, a Soviet Past Lies in Ruins,” 11 February) captured some of the destruction wrought by these U.S.-backed cutthroats. The article notes that in the Soviet House of Science and Culture during the 1980s, “Soviets and Afghans gathered for lectures, films and the propagation of modernizing ideas that for a while refashioned Kabul, including a time when women could work outside the home in Western clothing.” It continued:

“But during the civil war of 1992-96, the House of Science and Culture was occupied by one faction and wrecked as another lobbed shells down from a nearby hill. Today, the auditoriums are littered with rubble; cold air comes in through rocket holes; and once-bold Soviet murals of men and women, Afghans and Russians, are hidden in the squalid darkness near cartoon images depicting a Taliban fighter instructing children to become suicide bombers.”

Eventually the Taliban, recruiting from the historically dominant Pashtun ethnic population, emerged as the strongest of the mujahedin factions. Backed by Pakistan and supported by the U.S., it came to power in 1996. A year later, an American diplomat declared: “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that” (quoted in Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia [2000]). Only when the U.S. rulers realized that there would be no Aramco (or any other oil company) and no pipelines did they start talking about the Taliban’s barbaric treatment of women.

Many of the CIA-financed fundamentalists who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s turned against their former paymasters over the following decade. This was the case with the September 11, 2001 attacks carried out by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, which led in turn to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. After ousting the Taliban, the Bush administration installed a regime based largely on the same mujahedin warlords who devastated the country from 1992-96.

The Impact of Counterrevolution in the USSR

The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union has fed the bonfires of social reaction on a global scale. In many countries, women’s rights and social progress in general have been thrown back by generations. For working people in the ex-Soviet Union and the former deformed workers states of East and Central Europe, the return of capitalism has been a calamity measured in unemployment, homelessness, collapsing life expectancy and intercommunal violence.

In ex-Soviet Central Asia, while the effects of more than seven decades of socialized economic development did not permit a quick and easy victory for the Islamic fundamentalists, millions of women have found themselves again trapped under veils and classified as second-class citizens. Fewer and fewer girls attend secondary schools. In much of the region, women can no longer initiate a divorce. The resurgence of nationalism has led to interethnic strife, as in Tajikistan in 1992-97 and more recently in Kyrgyzstan. The region remains a powder keg, where ethnic clashes continue to rage.

The horrors produced by U.S. imperialism’s “holy war” against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, as well as its present occupation of the country, underline how the capitalist system is a barrier to social progress and a breeding ground for reaction. As in Afghanistan, U.S. occupation forces devastated Iraq during their occupation of that country, fueling sectarian massacres and throwing back the rights of women and other oppressed.

Through its “war on terror,” U.S. imperialism aims to impose its will on oppressed peoples around the world. The despotic bourgeoisies of the neocolonies subjugate and plunder their “own” people for their own profit and that of the imperialists to whom they are beholden. There is plenty of hatred among the masses for these parasites and their overlords, however the aspirations of the downtrodden have increasingly been channeled into religious reaction. Islamist forces continue to grow in influence throughout North Africa and the Near East, from Egypt to Gaza to Turkey and beyond.

The only way forward is the struggle for an internationalist revolutionary leadership dedicated to the fight for workers revolutions in both the neocolonies and the heartlands of world imperialism. While this may seem a distant prospect in this very reactionary political period, the bitter truth is that no other road can put an end to ethnic and national oppression, the oppression of women and the exploitation of working people.

The domestic complement of the murderous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is an escalating war on the U.S. working class, black people and immigrants. While a handful of wealthy capitalists accrue massive profits, the rest of the population is faced with increasing assaults on its living standards or utter poverty. Moreover, anti-woman religious fundamentalism is also rampant on the home front, as bourgeois politics is saturated with God and the right to abortion and even contraception is under siege.

The purpose of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), of which the Spartacist League is the U.S. section, is to forge revolutionary Marxist parties modeled after Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party that led the October Revolution. Only the working class has the social power and objective interest to sweep away the deeply irrational and inhumane capitalist system through socialist revolution, replacing it with a planned economy in which production is based on the human needs of all, rather than profits for the few.

Particularly in the neocolonial world, where women’s oppression is so acute, women workers will be in the front ranks of such parties. The overthrow of the imperialist-dominated world order will lay a material basis to free women from age-old family servitude and reorganize society in the interest of all. The social functions of the family—housework, child rearing, preparation of food, etc.—will be replaced by collectivized institutions. When the bloody rule of capital is swept away by the workers of the world, the veil, the bride price, purdah, “honor killings” and the social degradation of women in all its forms will become but bitter memories of a barbaric past. ICL

H/T Maren.

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