Ban, ban, taliban
Update: an attentive reader noticed what I didn’t: this story is dated 2003. This of course doesn’t make it an atom less revolting, it just makes it not Breaking News. (I must say, I didn’t know NWFP was that bad five years ago…)
What was that I was saying about what worthless malevolent thuggish bastards the Taliban are?
Male doctors and technicians have been banned from carrying out ultrasound examinations and using electrocardiographs (ECG) on female patients by the Islamist government of Pakistan’s North West Frontier province in its latest step towards “Talibanisation”. The ban effectively excludes all women from undergoing such crucial medical examinations as the province has only one female ECG technician and none trained in ultrasound. “We think that men could derive sexual pleasure from women’s bodies while conducting ECG or ultrasound,” explained Maulana Gul Naseeb Khan, the provincial general secretary of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), the six-party religious alliance which now governs the North West Frontier. “Similarly some women could lure men under the pretext of ECG or ultrasound. Therefore to uphold the supreme values of Islam, the MMA has decided to impose the ban in line with the May 8 resolution of the province’s assembly that nothing repugnant to Islam will be allowed.”
Listen, you stupid evil pile of dung – anybody could do anything. You could get a hard-on every time you open your foul malodorous mouth to explain why you and your horrible friends want to see women forbidden to use medical technology – and I bet you do. Men could derive sexual pleasure from rubbing themselves against the nearest goat, and some women could ‘lure’ men by being alive within 50 kilometers of one – but that’s not a reason to impose yet another idiotic prurient goggle-eyed jerk-off restriction on women and their ability to get health care.
‘The supreme values of Islam’ – the ones that are more important than health, education, development, prosperity, decent relations between people, sanity, pleasure, happiness, fun, laughter, jokes, music, dancing, kites – have we left anything out? ‘Nothing repugnant to Islam will be allowed’ – and since everything is repugnant to stupid medieval brutalist backward life-hating woman-hating Islam, at least in your version of it, then nothing will be allowed, and everybody will just dry up and blow away like an old piece of dust. That’s the plan, is it?
The clerics have already banned public dancing and music, kite flying and satellite television. They have closed cinemas, photographic shops and beauty parlours, and have torn down billboards displaying female images.
That’s what I said – they’ve banned pretty much everything. Let’s see, what else is there – flowers, birds, colour, spices, scents, sport, games, bicycles, roller skates, pictures, fruit, wind, rain, stars, planets, sunrise, sunset – have you banned all those yet? Better get on it.
Human rights activists are concerned that the ban will result in more stillborn babies and deaths in pregnancy. Pakistan already has one of the world’s highest rates of deaths in pregnancy, with an estimated 30,000 women dying in childbirth each year.
Oh who cares about that – at least all those dead women won’t be luring men, or working as police officers, or otherwise violating the ‘supreme values of Islam.’
Stop it Amos, I’m getting aroused.
Freud, where are you now…?
Seconded, Dave. Freud, for all his faults, certainly got some things right. Unfortunately, this is a world away from upper-middle class neurosis and the Taleban are beyond any sort of treatment.
“the six-party religious alliance”
Do they need six parties? Wasn’t there just one revelated truth? Damn – these suckers can’t even muster the internal consistency!
Six parties! What is the difference in policy: whether to use C4 or guns when killing innocent bystanders?
PS: OB, you missed a ‘ban’ in the title of the piece – let’s be accurate in the things that matter ;-)
“Freud, for all his faults, certainly got some things right.”
Well there was the bit about billing at an hourly rate, but apart from that he was a bit of an old fraud.
This is a shocking story. And yet I know that some people will justify the Taliban’s actions as anti-imperialism or as different ways of knowing.
An estimated 30,000 women die in childbirth each year.
What kind of world would it be, I wonder, if it was the other way around.
There is no fear, either, of 30,000 Taliban dying in childbirth.
As the old saying goes: ‘it is a man’s world”
I think I’ve figured the Taliban out.
Their secret lust is entirely for
female corpses.
I notice that this article is dated 2003. I wonder if things have improved for them any in the last five years.
2003!! I hadn’t noticed that – saw the link somewhere else, forgot to look at date. Jeezis – things were that bad in NWFP five years ago?
It’s most unlikely that things have improved since then, since the overall trend has been worse worse worse and still worse.
Ophelia,
I fear you’re right on this one:
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2008-05/2008-05-27-voa23.cfm?CFID=45807109&CFTOKEN=25461118
” On the 2nd Sept, 2008 – “The war in Afghanistan spilled over on to Pakistani territory for the first time yesterday when heavily armed commandos, believed to be US Special Forces, landed by helicopter and attacked three houses in a village close to a known Taliban and al-Qaida stronghold.” (UK Guardian).
One way or the other women’s lives in those regions – over the past five years, would not have changed one iota, considering the fact that they are Taliban and Al-Qaida strongholds in Pakistan, as opposed to Afghanistan.
It would, on our part, be mere wishful thinking.
Nevertheless, with the arrival of the US Special Forces – who knows what may lay in store for the downtrodden people.
Lars Hedegaard of the Danish Free Press Society has an excellent summary (from 2007) of the relation of various forms of blasphemy and freedom to secular civilization, vs. the effects of “The supreme values of Islam” on the same:
Free Speech: Its Benefits and Limitations.
Thanks for that Geoffrey.