Malalai Joya In The NYT

Lacking access to broadcasters and the media within Afghanistan means that her message “for women’s rights, for human rights, against injustice and occupation,” can be spread only by telephone, by clandestine meetings in safe houses and through a poster campaign.

The United States cited the status of women among reasons for its intervention in Afghanistan. Yet Ms. Joya, who taught girls in secret basement schools during the Taliban years, argues that the situation of women has not improved.

Pointing to the 1920s, when Afghan women traveled to Turkey to study without head scarves or male relatives to accompany them, and to the 1950s, when Afghan women had professional careers, she said that the decline of women’s rights in her country was above all an issue of power.

Levels of domestic violence, rape, forced marriage and suicide make the condition of women today “worse than hell,” she says. For that she blames what she calls President Hamid Karzai’s “corrupt, misogynistic government and his circle of warlords” and on his appointments to Afghan courts.

Hamed Elmi, deputy spokesman for Mr. Karzai in Kabul, discounted Ms. Joya’s accusations. “The government is not corrupt, but we have some corrupt people in government — we try to identify and tackle the issue,” Mr. Elmi said by telephone.

He added that Afghanistan had made progress in involving women at all levels of government and that it could not be ascertained that there were warlords in Parliament since the courts had not proven them guilty. “We have an independent judiciary system,” he said. As for whether the government was misogynistic, he said simply: “She is wrong.”

Back in her homeland, Ms. Joya said, the NATO forces were perpetuating the repression of women by propping up warlords she described as interchangeable with the Taliban.

She called for the immediate departure of foreign troops, even if it would lead to more violence in the civil war. “It is better to leave us alone,” she said. “We will know what to do with our destiny.”

And Another White Terrorist

Ex Territorial Army made bombs and possessed the White Resistance Manual,

A firework containing a lightbulb, a plastic shell attached to a nine volt battery, an electrified wooden clothes peg, and a tub of aluminium powder were all found when officers searched his house in April last year. A polystyrene block painted black, which was designed to contain mercury, was also discovered, the court heard.

Three terrorist training manuals were uncovered on his computer – The White Resistance Manual, The Proper Anarchist’s Cookbook and an explorer’s handbook for Muslim extremists. The Army was called to evacuate his house, which he shares with his parents, and that of his neighbours.

Cartwright was arrested then let out on bail with an electronic tag two months later, but he was arrested again in October when police found similar devices at his house. However, it later emerged the items were missed by officers who conducted the original search.

The cops say-

Acting Detective Chief Inspector Chris Wilde, of Lancashire Constabulary’s Counter Terrorism Branch, said: “Although it became clear during the course of the investigation that Cartwright has no affiliations to any extremist or political groups or organisations or any particular cause or agenda, these were serious offences and we welcome today’s guilty pleas.

Joiner Justin Cartwright, 38, from Penwortham, made crude explosive devices at his home in Woodville Road, and downloaded several terrorist training manuals.

The defence argument ‘his purpose was to stop terrorists, and he hoped to start a business training security officers.’ Was ridiculed but no one tried to connect him to anything wider-

David Farrell QC, prosecuting, told the court Cartwright was “a fantasist” who was “plainly misguided and extremely foolish”.

He added: “What he was proposing was out of touch with reality. It had no place in the real world of close protection training. It was his fantasy world feeding his fascination with the military.”

Judge Anthony Russell told Cartwright: “I accept you have no connection with any terrorist organisation or extreme political organisation. The devices could have been used for some form of terrorist act and could have caused some harm and fear. You made them in your own home with no proper safeguarding for your family or the public.”

Now then would a non-white person having a document about Al Qaeda be seen as having no connection? No. But a militarily trained white man having a white supremacy tract and making IED’s to ‘stop terrorists’ no wider context to that is there-

The MoD has launched an investigation after a photograph of a soldier who had an offensive message written on his kit appeared in its official magazine. The serviceman’s left kneepad has “Get some P*ki” scrawled on it. His picture featured in Soldier magazine alongside a story about new rations for troops.

The picture was printed in January’s edition of Soldier, the magazine of the British army published for the UK armed forces by the Ministry of Defence. Officials airbrushed the online version, but thousands have already been put on sale, with 70,000 sent to serving British troops – many in Afghanistan.

PS. Although the BBC delightfully call photoshopping airbrushing still, that shows that the Army knew what was in the picture, now did they panic after a big print run so the mags were out there and pulping was deemed too costly (although the mag has to be laid out and so that picture got looked at and passed by someone), or did they happily have it out there but for the wider non army online audience they hid something they tacitly approved. No wider context.