#Pakistan Television

[risingpakistan]

پاکستان میں ٹیلی ویژن کے آغاز کی کہانی

پاکستان میں ٹیلی ویژن کا آغاز 59 سال قبل 26 نومبر 1964 میں ہوا۔ حسن اتفاق ہے کہ اقوام متحدہ نے ٹیلی ویژن کا عالمی دن منانے کے لیے نومبر کی 21 تاریخ کا تعین کیا ہے۔ ٹیلی ویژن کی ایجاد کی کہانی تحیر انگیز ہے۔ ٹیلی ویژن آواز، ت��ویر اور روشنی کے امتزاج کا نام ہے۔ ٹیلی گراف، ریڈیو اور فلم کی ایجاد نے ٹیلی ویژن کی راہ ہموار کی۔ ٹیلی اور ویژن دو لفظ ہیں۔ ٹیلی رومن لفظ ہے جس کا مطلب ہے ’’دور‘‘ جب کہ ’’ ویژن‘‘ انگریزی لفظ ہے جس کا مطلب ’’دیکھنا‘‘۔ اس طرح ٹیلی ویژن کا مطلب دور سے دیکھنا یا ’’دور درشن‘‘ ہے۔ ٹیلی ویژن کی ابتدا 1930 کی دہائی میں ہوئی۔ 1950 کی دہائی میں امریکا اور یورپ میں ٹیلی ویژن کی ترقی اور ترویج میں تیزی آئی۔ 1960 کی دہائی اس کے پھیلاؤ کی دہائی ہے۔ پاکستان میں ٹیلی ویژن کی کہانی بھی بہت دلچسپ ہے۔ پاکستان میں ٹیلی ویژن کا لفظ تیسرے وزیر اعظم محمد علی بوگرا کی زبان سے سنا گیا، وہ امریکا میں دو مرتبہ پاکستان کے سفیر رہے تھے، انھوں نے ایک نجی محفل میں ٹیلی ویژن کا تذکرہ کیا۔ 

جنرل محمد ایوب خان کے دور میں تعلیمی اصلاحات کمیشن بنایا گیا، اس کمیشن نے باضابطہ طور پر پاکستان میں تعلیم کے فروغ کے لیے ٹیلی ویژن کے آغاز کی سفارش کی۔ اکتوبر 1963 میں ٹیلی ویژن نیٹ ورک شروع کرنے کے احکامات جاری ہوئے اور 26 نومبر 1964 کو پاکستان کے پہلے ٹیلی ویژن مرکز کا لاہور میں ایوب خان نے افتتاح کیا۔ ابتدائی دفاتر لاہور آرٹس کونسل کی پرانی عمارت کے لان میں ٹینٹ لگا کر قائم کیے گئے۔ کچھ عرصہ بعد ریڈیو پاکستان لاہور کی کینٹین میں پہلا ٹی وی اسٹوڈیو بنایا گیا۔ ریڈیو پاکستان لاہور کی عمارت کے ساتھ خالی پلاٹ پر ملک کے پہلے ٹیلی ویڑن سینٹر کی عمارت بھی تعمیر ہوئی۔ اس وقت ملک کے چاروں صوبوں اور آزاد کشمیر میں پاکستان ٹیلی ویژن کے اسٹیٹ آف دی آرٹ اسٹوڈیوز اور عمارتیں ہیں، یہ ادارہ ہزاروں افراد کو ملازمت دینے کے ساتھ ساتھ پاکستان میں تمام نجی ٹی وی چینلز میں ’’مدر چینل‘‘ کی حیثیت رکھتا ہے۔ 26 نومبر 1964 کو پی ٹی وی نشریات کا آغاز پونے چار بجے شام ہوا۔

تلاوت کلام کے بعد صدر جنرل محمد ایوب خان نے افتتاحی تقریر کی۔ شام 7 بجے اردو خبریں نشر ہوئیں اور رات نو بجے ٹرانسمیشن قومی ترانے کے ساتھ ختم ہوئی ابتدا میں پاکستان ٹیلی ویڑن کی نشریات ہفتے میں چھ دن، صرف پانچ گھنٹے کے لیے ہوتی تھیں جب کہ سوموار کے دن ٹی وی نشریات نہیں ہوا کرتی تھیں۔  ابتدائی ایام میں اردو اور انگریزی خبروں کے حصول کے لیے کوئی نیوز ایجنسی نہ تھی تازہ ترین خبریں دنیا بھر کے ریڈیو مانیٹر کر کے حاصل کی جاتی تھیں۔ پی ٹی وی کے پاس صرف دو اسٹوڈیو کیمرے تھے، بیرونی فلم بندی کے لیے کوئی فیلڈ کیمرہ نہ تھا بعد ازاں چابی سے چلنے والے دو کیمرے لیے گئے جن میں 100 فٹ فلم کا رول آتا تھا۔ فلم بندی کے بعد نیگٹیو فلم کو ایک پرائیویٹ لیبارٹری میں دھلوایا جاتا تھا اور پھر ’’ ٹیلی سینی‘‘ برقی الے کے ذریعے اسے پوزیٹو بنا کر ٹی وی پر دکھایا جاتا تھا۔ 

کئی سال تک پی ٹی وی کے مراکز سے پانچ گھنٹوں کے دوران کل 20 منٹ کی خبریں پیش کی جاتی تھیں۔ مغربی پاکستان اور مشرقی پاکستان ( لاہور اور ڈھاکا) ٹیلی ویژن کے درمیان ٹیلکس، ٹیلی پرنٹر اور ٹیلی فون کنیکشنز قابل اعتماد اور تیز رفتار نہ تھے، اس لیے مغربی اور مشرقی پاکستان کے درمیان نیوز فلموں کو ہوائی جہاز کے ذریعے بھیجا جاتا تھا اور دوسرے دن ان کی نشریات ممکن ہوتی تھیں۔ 1970 میں پہلی بار 25 منٹ کا خبرنامہ کراچی مرکز سے شروع کیا گیا۔ مشرقی پاکستان کی علیحدگی کے بعد 1975 میں جب مغربی پاکستان کے تمام صوبوں کو مائیکرو ویو اور بوسٹرز کے ذریعے قومی نشریاتی رابطے سے منسلک کیا گیا تو راولپنڈی اور اسلام آباد ٹیلی ویڑن سینٹر سے خبریں بیک وقت پورے ملک میں نشر ہونے لگیں، ہر صوبائی دارالحکومت کے ٹی وی مرکز سے مقامی خبروں کا اغاز بھی ہوا۔ صبح کی روزانہ نشریات کا باقاعدہ آغاز پہلی بار 1989 میں ہوا جب کہ جولائی 2002 سے پی ٹی وی نے ہفتے میں ساتوں دن 24 گھنٹے کی نشریات شروع کی اور ہر گھنٹے کے آغاز پر نیوز بلٹن نشر کیا جانے لگا۔ 

نیوز اور کرنٹ افیئرز کے لیے ایک الگ ٹی وی چینل بھی بنایا گیا۔ اب جب کہ پاکستان ٹیلی ویژن 60 سال کا ہونے کو ہے اگر اس کی کارکردگی کا اختصار سے جائزہ لیا جائے تو یہ کہا جا سکتا ہے کہ پی ٹی وی کی پہلی دہائی کو گولڈن پیریڈ کہا جا سکتا ہے۔ دوسری دہائی پی ٹی وی کی ٹیکنیکی اور پیشہ ورانہ ترقی سے عبارت ہے۔ تیسری دہائی گلیمر اور میلو ڈرامہ یعنی رومان اور جذباتیت کی دھائی شمار کی جا سکتی ہے۔ جب کہ چوتھی دہائی میں پی ٹی وی کی اجارہ داری بتدریج ختم ہونے لگی اور نجی چینلز مقابلے میں آنا شروع ہوئے۔ اور اب تو صورتحال یہاں تک پہنچ گئی ہے کہ پی ٹی وی کو اپنے اخراجات پورے کرنے کے لیے حکومت سے مالی مدد لینے کی ضرورت پیش آتی ہے۔ ان تمام عوامل کے باوجود سرکاری ٹی وی ہر ملک کی ضرورت ہے، اسے حکومت وقت اور ریاست کا ترجمان بھی سمجھا جاتا ہے۔ سرکاری ٹی وی کو قومی ٹیلی ویژن کا درجہ بھی دیا جاتا ہے۔ اس کی کارکردگی کا موازنہ نجی ٹی وی چینلز کی پالیسیوں اور ابلاغی اقدار سے نہیں کیا جا سکتا کیونکہ اس کی کارکردگی اور تخلیقی صلاحیتوں کا دائرہ حکومت وقت کی پالیسیوں کے گرد گھومتا ہے اور ان کا تحفظ بھی کرنا ہوتا ہے۔

سرور منیر راؤ  

بشکریہ ایکسپریس نیوز

[blackkitchen]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Anthony Goodwin | The landlord (@workout_landlord)

[informationnewsever]

Pakistani Mobile V/S China Mobile

Friends, do you know that in the company of men.China's government to mobiles,Manufactures and do you know,That mobile is a Pakistani brand and who made it plus do you know,That is China's mobile company.The company was acquired by China's entrepreneur Sky.This company was established by making more

[newsbluster]

ICC World Cup 2023 Scandal: Zainab Abbas Speaks Out!

ICC World Cup 2023 Scandal: The buzzing excitement of the ICC World Cup 2023 took a surprising turn when Pakistani sports journalist Zainab Abbas found herself at the center of a social media storm. 🌪️ Zainab, known for her sports coverage prowess, landed in India to cover the much-awaited tournament, only to face unexpected challenges. 👀 The Deportation Drama Unraveled! 👀 The incident gained…

[callmebrycelee]

MAN CRUSH MONDAY

KUMAIL NANJIANI

Kumail Ali Nanjiani was born May 2, 1978 in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. The Pakastani-American stand-up comedian and actor is best known for portraying Dinesh in the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley and for co-writing and starring in the romantic comedy film The Big Sick with his wife, Emily V. Gordon. Kumail has been in the films Sex Tape, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Goosebumps, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Men in Black: International, Eternals, and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. His TV credits include Franklin & Bash, Veep, Broad City, Archer, The X-Files, The Twilight Zone, The Simpsons, Welcome to Chippendales, and The Boys. Kumail can currently be seen in the fourth season of the mystery comedy-drama television series Only Murders in the Building and will be seen in the upcoming second season of Poker Face.

[beardedmrbean]

At least 28 Pakistani pilgrims travelling to Iraq for a Shiite Muslim ritual were killed as their bus crashed in central Iran, state media reported early Wednesday.

"A bus carrying 51 Pakistani pilgrims overturned and caught fire in front of Dehshir-Taft checkpoint in the central province of Yazd on Tuesday night," Iranian state television reported.

It said "28 people have been killed and 23 injured so far with the possibility of the death toll increasing".

Yazd province crisis management chief Ali Malek-zadeh told the broadcaster that some of the injured were in critical condition.

"Of the 23 injured, six have already been discharged from hospital, while the condition of seven others is critical," Malek-zadeh said.

"The dead consisted of 11 women and 17 men," he added.

Head of Iran traffic police, Teymour Hosseini, cited "technical failure in the brake system" and the "high inclination of the road" as the reasons for the crash.

The Iranian and Pakistani foreign ministries expressed their condolences and sympathies to the families of the bereaved.

Pakistan's Foreign Office further said the consul of Pakistan in Zahedan has been asked to visit the accident site to ensure medical relief to the injured and arrange the repatriation of the dead bodies to Pakistan.

Most of the victims are residents of Pakistan's southeastern Sindh province where the bus journey began.

Syed Sultan Ali, the brother of the tour operator, told AFP: "My older brother Syed Shamsi has been running this service since 2010, and it has always gone so well. We have been deeply upset since last night."

He added that his brother is "unhurt" because he was travelling in a separate vehicle.

The Pakistani pilgrims were headed through Iran to Iraq to attend the Arbaeen commemoration, one of the biggest events of the Shiite calendar which marks the 40th day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed.

Last year, some 22 million pilgrims attended the commemoration in the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala, where Hussein and his brother Abbas are buried, according to official figures.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Dec 12, 2023

Towards the end of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine Part Two, our marauding anti-hero burns a copy of the Quran, along with other Islamic books, as a kind of audacious test. “Now, Mahomet,” he cries, “if thou have any power, come down thyself and work a miracle.” Two scenes later, he is dead.

We might see this as a cautionary tale for our times. After all, it isn’t only Turco-Mongol conquerors who find themselves punished for Quran-burning. Last week, the Danish parliament voted to ban the desecration of all religious texts following a spate of protests in which copies of the Qur’an had been destroyed. Inevitably, the new law has been couched as a safety measure. This burning of the book, claims justice minister Peter Hummelgaard, “harms Denmark and Danish interests, and risks harming the security of Danes abroad and here at home”.

He has a point. Even unconfirmed accusations of Quran-burning can be sufficient to prompt extremist violence. In 2015, being accused of defiling the holy book, Farkhunda Malikzada was beaten to death by a ferocious mob in Afghanistan while bystanders, including police officers, did nothing to intervene. Many filmed the brutal murder on their phones and the footage was widely shared on social media. In 2022, a mentally unstable man called Mushtaq Rajput was similarly accused and tied to a tree and stoned to death in Pakistan. Earlier this year in Iran, it was reported that Javad Rouhi was tortured so severely that he could no longer speak or walk. He was sentenced to death for apostasy and later died in prison under suspicious circumstances.

But while we might anticipate that the desecration of the Quran would be proscribed in Islamic theocracies, it is troubling to see similar laws being passed in secular nations such as Denmark. The government had not been so faint-hearted when faced with similar problems in 2005. After cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were published in Jyllands-Posten, a global campaign from Indonesia to Bosnia demanded that the Danish authorities take action. The government stood firm and the judicial complaint against the newspaper was dismissed.

In a free society this is the only justifiable response, albeit one that takes considerable courage. And the climate of intimidation that has descended since is a product of our collective failure to defend freedom of speech against the demands of militants. When the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, one would have hoped for a unified front on behalf of one of our finest writers. Instead, much of the literary and political establishment abandoned or even censured him. In the Australian television show Hypotheticals, the singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, implied that he would have no objections to Rushdie being burned alive.

That a work of fiction such as The Satanic Verses could not even be published today gives us some indication of the extent to which we have forsaken the principle of free speech. If we are so squeamish about the burning of Qurans, why were so many of us indifferent to the burning of Rushdie’s book on the streets of Bolton and Bradford? Yusuf Islam’s remark about the author’s immolation might have been flippant but, as Heinrich Heine famously wrote: “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.”

The ceremonial burning of books in Germany and Austria in the Thirties has ensured that the act will always have a unique charge, and a disquieting, visceral effect. It is why, for instance, the most memorable scene in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan is when the villain Steerpike sets fire to his master’s library. It is a gesture designed to repudiate the very heights of human achievement, to hurl his victim into a spiral of despair. When Rushdie saw his own novel publicly incinerated, he confessed to feeling that “now the victory of the Enlightenment was looking temporary, reversible”.

The burning of the Quran leaves many of us similarly troubled. We do not need to approve of the contents to sense that the destruction of a book is symbolic of a desire to limit the scope of human thought. When activists post footage of themselves gleefully setting fire to copies of Harry Potter, one cannot shake the similar suspicion that they would happily substitute the books with the author herself.

But while many of us find the burning of books instinctively rebarbative, to outlaw this form of protest is essentially authoritarian. And to reinstate blasphemy laws by specifying that only religious books are to be protected is fundamentally retrograde. Of course, such laws already exist in most Western countries in an unwritten form. In March, a 14-year-old autistic boy was suspended from his school in Wakefield, reported to the police, and received death threats after he accidentally dropped a copy of the Quran on the floor, causing some of the pages to be scuffed. He may not have committed a crime, but many people behaved as though he had.

And the same unwritten laws are in force in the fact that few would be brave enough to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed after the massacre at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Five years later, the schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on the streets of Paris simply for showing the offending images during a lesson on free speech. Closer to home, a teacher at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire is still in hiding after showing the images to his pupils and stirring the ire of a righteous mob.

The failure of the school’s headmaster, as well as the teaching unions, to support this man against the demands of religious fundamentalists is revealing. Why must those who claim to be defending the dignity of Muslims treat them as irascible children? At the same time, as Sam Harris recently pointed out, there is an oddity in the fact that so many Muslims do not appear to be alarmed that “their community is so uniquely combustible”.

The bitter reality is that terrorism works, particularly when so many governments across the Western world are seemingly willing to fritter away our bedrock of liberal values. This has been actuated, in part, by an alliance of two very different forms of authoritarianism: ultra-conservative Islamic dogma and the safetyist ideology of “wokeness”. The latter has always claimed that causing offence is a form of violence, and the former has been quick to adopt the same tactics. This is why protesters outside Batley Grammar School asserted that the display of offensive cartoons was a “safeguarding” issue, and the Muslim Council of Britain criticised the school for not maintaining an “inclusive space”. The same censorious instincts have been updated, and are now cloaked in a more modish language.

In a civilised and pluralistic society, the burning of a holy book might provoke a variety of responses — anger, disbelief, or just a shrug of the shoulders — but it should never lead to violence. Back when The Onion still had some bite, the website satirised this “unique combustibility” through the depiction of a graphic sexual foursome between Moses, Jesus, Ganesha and Buddha. The headline said it all: “No One Murdered Because Of This Image”.

Freedom of speech and expression still matters, and if that means a few hotheads and mini-Tamburlaines might burn their copies of the Quran then so be it. It is unfortunate that we have reached the point where Islam must be ring-fenced from ridicule or criticism, whether due to fear of violent repercussions or a misguided and patronising effort to promote social justice. But for this state of affairs we ultimately have only ourselves to blame, and in particular our tendency to capitulate to religious zealots when they seek exemption from the liberal consensus.

==

[mlmxreader]

Disregarded Demand | Alejandro Vargas x trans!m!reader

anonymous asked: The third request was for alejandro vargas x pakitani!ftm reader (they are husbands) where reader does some thing dangerous/doesn't listen to alejandro's instruction when price had clearly said alejandro was in charge with the prompts "Do not ever disobey me again" and "You've never kissed me that much before"

Hope this is okay :)

-🦝

summary: war is not glorious, it is not beautiful or courageous, and that's something that you and Alejandro know all too well.

tws: gun violence, guns, death/injury, swearing

Charging headfirst into the fray didn't seem so heroic; in films and television, they always made it seem like such a confident and refined act, as if bravery and courage did not take an incredible amount of fear.

As if bravery and courage was something born and bred into the confines of your genes and your DNA, not something that had to be fought for, something that had to be found and discovered; they always made it seem as if charging into danger was glorious, was something to be proud of, something to commend and compliment.

It didn't feel like it. Shaky hands, tears in your eyes, heavy breathing, pounding heart, sweat, weak legs, stumbling. Mud clung to the ends of your trousers to about halfway up your calves.

Your mind raced, throat raw from panting heavily, your eyes stung and your chest felt tighter than you could ever imagine; you thought you were going to collapse as you charged forward. Your legs were weak, giving out as you continued to push yourself further and further, towards enemy lines.

They always made it look so easy in films. Glamorous. Soldiers running with steady forms and steady hands, hardly breaking a sweat, far from crying and breaking apart. It always looked so easy, glamorous, confident, refined.

In truth, you were shitting yourself, and your body was beginning to betray you as you pushed it over its limitations; you wondered if the anxiety from knowing that you were disregarding demand had anything to do with it. Knowing you disobeyed your husband's orders.

Alejandro told you, now that Price had put him in charge, to fall back and to hide; there were too many of them to take on, and not enough of you to fight back. Joint forces, task force one four one, the Los Vaqueros, and the Pakistan army, were not enough.

Alejandro wasn't stupid, he had been a soldier for long enough, he had been a Colonel for long enough too, to know when he was in over his head and when the choices were either to risk his men - including his own husband - or to admit defeat and fall back.

But you knew that you had to buy them all some time.

You had been serving with the Pakistan army for more than long enough to know when a sacrifice was needed in order to buy the others some time, and if it was going to be anyone, it was going to be you; you always did know that you would die in combat, you made peace with it a long time ago and figured that it would at least be a quick death anyway.

You weren't a Gurkha, though, you were terrified of dying.

You fell into a foxhole when your legs gave out, but you were thankful that you had at least made it across to the enemy lines, and as you lined your gun up and took aim, you felt everything go quiet; the only thing you could hear was your harsh and rapid breathing and the thundering of your own heart. Calm. You pulled the trigger.

They shot back, but you were quicker and pulled down one soldier at a time; there was no glory in it, no self righteous speech about honour and valor and courage to be made. It was war. The mud and the shit and the blood stains would never wash from your hands, so thick and so imprinted upon your skin that it could never be taken off again. The weight of the lives you had taken, lives and families you had ruined, would forever haunt your every moment.

There was no escape. War was not brave, it was not glorious, it was not heroic, it was not valorous, it was not beautiful. It was bloody, it was scary, it was upsetting, it was cruel, it was inhumane, it was burdensome, it was gruelling, it was shameful and disgraceful. It was war. Good for nothing, of no benefit to anyone except gravediggers and propagandists on the far right, it was a hateful and vile thing.

There was no escape. The enemy kept firing, and although you knew that you had brought some of them down, it wouldn't be long until they had you surrounded. You were terrified, wild and wide eyed, jaw slack and praying to Allah that it would at least be quick. Not a heroic or glorious death - a quick death. Painless. A painless death for a disregard demand. A disobeyed order. A disobedient dog of war.

But then they pulled back, retreating and giving you enough time to make your way back towards the others; you could hardly walk, but you ran as fast as you could, even dropping your gun on the way so that you could be a little faster. You were certain that you were going to pass out, certain that you were finally going to collapse as a sick feeling crept up your throat and nestled tightly right in the middle of it. You were glad when you crashed into a familiar body.

"¡Amor!" Alejandro sounded both relived and pissed. "¿Estás herido?"

You shook your head, gaging a little as your chest burned slightly, stomach churning as you pulled away. You wanted to be sick. "No, no, I'm good, Ale..."

He sat you down on the dirt beside one of the armoured vehicles, his hands on your face as he glared at you; he didn't care that your sweat stuck to his skin, or that you smelled worse than death. He didn't care that there was a chance you would coat him in vomit. He didn't care about any of that, only two things were on his mind: you were back safely, but you had disregarded demand. Disregarded his command.

Your mouth was dry, your throat stung when you attempted to swallow thickly.

"Bueno," he nodded slowly. "So you can hear that I'm fucking pissed at you, sí?"

You nodded, still more than breathless.

"You disobeyed me, amor," Alejandro started, "you deliberately disregarded demands from a superior officer. Do not ever disobey me again, (y/n). Price put me in charge of this, you should follow orders."

You looked down at the ground for a moment, but then he gently took your chin between his forefinger and thumb, and kissed you; it was desperate and needy, sloppy and messy as Alejandro poured every ounce of his devotion, anxiety, worry and anger into it.

You kissed him back as much as you could, but you were too breathless and too nauseous to go more than a few seconds, your hands going to his chest as you gently pushed him away. Alejandro waited, getting you a drink of water and giving you a place to be sick if you needed it, but when you told him you felt better, he couldn't stop himself. Kissing you over and over and over, again and again and again and again and again until you were breathless once more.

"Ale... you've never kissed me that much before."

"I couldn't help it," he whispered, resting his forehead against your neck as he frowned. "I'm fucking angry at you, you pendejo, but... I was worried you wouldn't make it back. I wanted my husband back, even if he disobeyed my orders."

"I'm here," you murmured. "I haven't gone anywhere."

"That's the last letter I want to send," he admitted as he pulled away. "I don't wanna tell the Pakistan army that you were killed in action and I didn't do anything. I couldn't protect you."

"You don't need to send that letter," you told him, shaking your head. "Ale... I'm here."

if you liked this fic, REBLOG IT - you SHOULD reblog it; if you don't wanna reblog, then you'll get blocked; reblogging is the BARE MINIMUM.

[blackkitchen]

Poo Poo

Poo pin o

Polo l pic oo

Ll KY

[intriguingpeoplebyangelafloyd]

JOANNA LUMLEY

JOANNA LUMLEY

1 May 1946

Joanna Lumley is a British actress, model, writer, producer and activist. She is best known for playing the drunken fashion director Patsy Stone in the comedy television series Absolutely Fabulous (1992-2016). She has also appeared in: Trail and Curse of the Pink Panther (1982 & 1983), Shirley Valentine (1989), James and the Giant Peach (1996), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Paddington 2 (2017), The Picture of Dorian Gray (2021), Are You Being Served? (1973), A Ghost in Monte Carlo (1990), Cluedo (1993), Roseanne (1996), Agatha Christie’s Marple (2004 & 2011), Joanna Lumley’s Nile (2010), JL Greek Odyssey (2011), JL Great Cities of the World (2022).

            Lumley was born in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, British India, her grandfather Colonel Leslie Weir was an army officer in Kashmir and was a close friend of the 13th Dalai Lama. Her parents had Scottish and English ancestry, her father was born in Lahore (Pakistan), the family returned home to England on the HMT Empire Windrush.

            Lumley is involved in many charities and causes (too many to write here). She supports the Gurkhas, exiled Tibetan people and Khonds indigenous people of India. She has also called for the Great Barrier Reef, QLD, Australia to be placed on the list of world heritage sites which is currently in danger.

Lumley has been married twice and has one child. She has been a vegetarian for 40 years. She attended the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla in 2023.

#joannalumley

[mugiwara-lucy]

I just assume anyone begging me to vote for Joe Biden with 0 mentions of Palestine on their blogs are racist white supremacists who, at the minimum, think killing arabs will bring them rights. Guessing you cheered when they televised Shock & Awe when we invaded Iraq. When you racists lose I will cheer :)

Okay let's break this down piece by piece.

First of all I don't "beg" anyone to do anything. More so I advise people TO VOTE because he is LITERALLY the only thing standing between a CONVICTED FELON RAPIST taking not only control of the company but becoming a Dictator "only for a day though" and talks all this stuff about being a "President for Life":

And with the Supreme Courts' ruling of giving Presidents immunity alongside the case for him STEALING FEDERAL DOCUMENTS BEING DROPPED:

If people do NOT vote, we could get our society turned upside down to NORTH KOREA.

And I bring that up since Trump is good buddies with its dictator Kim Jong Un alongside being buddies with Putin and Viktor Orban.

And need I remind you if Trump's Project 2025 goes into fruition, the US will become a CHRISTIAN THEOCRACY.

Do you KNOW how many people will DIE in that??

Is Palestine important? Yes BUT we HAVE to take care of our country since if we don't how can we help another?

So what on earth are you even talking about with cheering and killing arabs?

No I'm trying to make sure my country doesn't become China, North Korea, Russia, Iran or Pakistan.

[mithliya]

Here is a critique: Argue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with feminism’s core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists? Where’s the outrage? For a brief moment after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.

But the rest is feminist silence. You haven’t heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them—“provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,” in the words of the Gulf News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can’t talk to men over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the professor’s lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.

You didn’t hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much attention—stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world—except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant.

You didn’t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, “defending my honor, family, and dignity,” who cut off his seven-year-old daughter’s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.

The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment’s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.

In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations—an accusation leading to his sister’s barbaric punishment—as a way of covering up their crime.

Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities “among educated and liberal families.” In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times “to cleanse the family honor,” and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her “immoral behavior,” had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. “The whore is dead,” the family announced.

As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women’s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.

To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women’s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to “lose their voice” in the face of women’s oppression.

The first variety—radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers’s term)—starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending, every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March: “The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime.”

Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence—and specifically, male violence against women. “Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money,” according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches “The Sexuality of Terrorism” at California State University in Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists’ view. As Sharon Lerner asserted bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists’ “discomfort” with the Afghanistan bombing was “deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a result of most wars.”

If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable—“Antiwar and Pro-Feminist,” as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they believe, would never justify war. “Most women, Western and Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives,” wrote the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. “They are concerned with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic], liberation, and pluralism.”

Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn’t have Joan Crawford in mind), that’s because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as “renunciation,” “resistance to injustice,” and “reconciliation.” The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking after the United States invaded Afghanistan. “I feel like I’m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming ‘He started it!’ and throwing rocks,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “I keep looking for somebody’s mother to come on the scene saying, ‘Boys! Boys!’ ”

Gender feminism’s tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naiveté hasn’t stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in Foreign Policy: “The key reason behind women’s marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace.” Even female elected officials are on board. “The women of all these countries should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace,” urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. “If we’d had women at Camp David,” he said in July 2000, “we’d have an agreement.”

Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan Women’s Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her website, the summit was made up of “meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops, tears, and dancing.” “Defense was mentioned nowhere in the document,” Ensler wrote proudly of the summit’s concluding proclamation—despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. “[B]uilding weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category,” Ensler cooed. “Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights.”

Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born female.

Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: “When you’re wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.” Now it’s clearer than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons’ efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel, killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of 26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking, indeed.

The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn’t an authentic, indigenous—and therefore appropriate—expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.

The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against “global hegemony.” He was mesmerized by this new form of “political spirituality” that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, portended the “transfiguration of the world.” Even after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the husband’s demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small matter like women’s basic rights, when a struggle against “the planetary system” was at hand?

Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism—not to mention with women’s rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men.

The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress “gender complementarity” rather than equality and that would pay full respect to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and jobs.

Attacking from the religious front, a number of “Islamic feminists” are challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur’an. These scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur’an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity’s challenge to traditional arrangements between the sexes.

What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic world—and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam—in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious elite—Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the charge.

At the same time, though, the issue of women’s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur’an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment—the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women’s equality—except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there’s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.

To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she might refer to Israel’s “masculinist military culture”—Israel being white and Western—though she would never dream of pointing out the “masculinist military culture” of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the “degradation” of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of “the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,” as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a “device for ranking the ‘other’ men as inferior or as ‘uncivilized,’ ” according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak called “white men saving brown women from brown men.”

Spivak’s phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. “When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women,” Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. “Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context of globalization,” she says. “What is driving Islamist men is globalization.”

It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating “agency” against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. “Polygamy can be liberating and empowering,” Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her about it. “Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working,” she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won’t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn’t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? “I don’t know,” Cooke answers, “I’m interested in discourse.” The irony couldn’t be darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of the “Other” endorse that Other’s repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda—subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.

The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing “group rights for minority cultures” over the well-being of individual women. Okin admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision, and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a “barely tolerable institution.” Some women, she went so far as to declare, “might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . . . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.”

But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women’s Day—“Afghanistan Is Everywhere”—was in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don’t women in the West parade around in bikinis? “It’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive,” columnist Jill Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria.

As Nelson’s statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it doesn’t really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive vision of “women’s human rights,” meaning not simply women’s civil and political rights but “economic rights” and “socioeconomic justice.” Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state “as an emancipatory institution,” in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are “unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members” and seeped in “nationalist ideologies” as well as in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, nations “depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood,” writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University.

Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the “gender perspective” in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: “Gender Perspectives on Landmines” and “Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,” whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)

The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement’s ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women’s right to vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from above, requiring nations to “take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women” and to eliminate “stereotyped roles” to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child care. The treaty’s 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, “the personal is international.” The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating Mother’s Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya for not interpreting the Qur’an in accordance with “committee guidelines.”

Confusing “women’s participation” with self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women’s Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections “to leapfrog women to power.” Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the totalitarian.

That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn’t feminists want to shout out their own profound discovery for the world to hear?

Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it would be bad for business.

The truth is that the free institutions—an independent judiciary, a free press, open elections—that protect the rights of women are the same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly, feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same things—and that those are things that they themselves already have. And recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.

There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury. Consider, for instance, women’s attitudes toward war, a topic on which politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46 percent of men cited national security as the country’s top priority. There has been a “seismic gender shift on matters of war,” according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there’s little to compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are threatened.

Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase “America the Horrible,” went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war “was worth it.” Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go out alone now.

As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of women is a universal demand—that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.

my god this dude wrote the world’s worst thesis and sent it to the worst candidate possible (a muslim-born woman from the middle east that regularly talks about the issues feminists apparently never talk about)

[truecrimewithsami]

The case of Shafilea Ahmed - an honour killing.

Shafilea Ahmed was a 17 year old British-Pakistani girl who was murdered by her parents, iftikhar Ahmed and Farzana Ahmed. She was killed in an honour killing due to the fact that she refused to accept an arranged marriage.

Shafilea was born on 14 of july 1986 in Bradford England. She was described as a confident and very kind young girl who the community loved.

On 11th of September 2003, shafilea was reported missing for a week by her teachers, so missing posters were put up by the police in order to find the young girl,

The police were convinced that she could have been Murdered in a possible honour killing due to shafilea coming back to England from pakistan with a damaged throat, from her drinking bleach in a suicide attempt, which her parents played off as an accident. Shafilea had also been reported to have run away many times before her disappearance.

In February 2004, some dismembered remains were found in river Kent, near Cumbria after heavy flooding. The police had a suspicion that the body was Shafilea so they asked the parents to identify the body, and they were Correct. The body was Shafilea’s. They identified her body by her golf zigzag bracelet and blue topaz ring. Since her body was very badly decomposed, the cause of death couldn’t be determined. Another way they identified that the body was Shafileas was by examining the dental work on it. Her dentist was 90% sure that the body was shafileas.

The police had no idea what to think, most of them thought it was her parents but had no evidence to say it was definitely them. The only evidence they had was shafileas friends telling them that her parents were kind of abusive, like one time a friend of Shafilea recalled that farzana called shafilea a “slut” for wearing nails and dying her hair and that shafilea wrote poems saying “I’m trapped.” Even when they tried to ask iftikhar and farzana, the two straight out refused and didn’t allow any questions.

Also at a press conference that spoke about shafileas death, iftikhar and farzana appeared after saying that they were not going to be making an appearance. Since the police did not trust them, the parents had to guilt trip the police and act all innocent. Iftikhar and farzana cried on television, praying for their daughter.

The family was left alone for many years until on 25th August 2010, Shafileas younger sister alesha had called the police saying that a robbery had taken place. When they police got there, it was a lie so they took alesha into custody, that’s when alesha told them everything. She told them that her parents had murdered Shafilea in front of her and her younger siblings by putting a plastic bag over Shafileas head and suffocating her. All because Shafilea refused to marry somebody. Alesha had also told them that iftikhar had driven to Cumbria all the way from bradford just to dump her body in the river Kent. T

So on the 7th September 2011, the police had announced that shafileas parents were charged with murder and in may 2012 their trial will begin. Farzana and Iftikhar were both found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, with the minimum sentence of 25 years on 3 August 2012.

Honour killings are not legal or good under any circumstances. Don’t let these continue.

R.I.P shafilea Ahmed ❤️‍🩹🕊️

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Why This Misunderstood Neighbourhood 9000 Miles From Brazil Has Its Biggest Superfans

“They’re our brothers. They look just like us. They dance just like us, they call it Samba, we call it Lewa.”

There was no place to move in the sea of green and yellow. By the time the game started, the football stadium sandwiched in this densely-populated neighbourhood was packed. 

Lyari is 9,000 miles away from Brazil, but this neighbourhood of 2-3 million people in Pakistan’s largest city Karachi is home to some of its biggest superfans.

With Brazil football shirts on their back or Brazil flags as capes, everyone’s eyes were glued to a public screen showing a do-or-die quarter final FIFA World Cup match between Brazil and Croatia. Some sat on the roofs of police vans surrounding the crowd; gang violence has been down in this neighbourhood for years, but a police presence is constant.     

Each time Brazil scored, music blared and the crowd went wild.

“All day I think about Brazil. I eat, sleep and breathe only Brazil. If Brazil is eliminated, my World Cup is over,” Javaid Carlos, told VICE World News, swinging his hips as he performed the traditional Baloch dance of Lewa on top of a police van. Carlos used to have the last name Ibrahim, but renamed himself after legendary Brazilian defender Roberto Carlos. 

“They’re our brothers. They look just like us. They dance just like us. They call it Samba, we call it Lewa.”

In Pakistan, Lyari is often called “Mini Brazil,” because of its obsession and love for the Brazilian national football team. During the World Cup, images of Pakistan’s “Mini Brazil” have gone viral; A live telecast of fans celebrating in Lyari even made it to Globo Television, Latin America’s largest television network. Brazilian audiences were transfixed, fascinated and confused. Online comments ranged from, “We love this, but we don’t understand. Why?” and “How? We’re so far away.”

But distance aside, there are commonalities between the two disparate cultures. 

Continue reading.

[retropakistan]

 ‘Quratul Ain’ (1975)

A still from one of the most famous one-off plays on Pakistan television, ‘Quratul Ain’ (1975).

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 9.6 (after 1940)

1943 – The Monterrey Institute of Technology is founded in Monterrey, Mexico as one of the largest and most influential private universities in Latin America. 1943 – Pennsylvania Railroad's premier train derails at Frankford Junction in Philadelphia, killing 79 people and injuring 117 others. 1944 – World War II: The city of Ypres, Belgium is liberated by Allied forces. 1944 – World War II: Soviet forces capture the city of Tartu, Estonia. 1946 – United States Secretary of State James F. Byrnes announces that the U.S. will follow a policy of economic reconstruction in postwar Germany. 1952 – A prototype aircraft crashes at the Farnborough Airshow in Hampshire, England, killing 29 spectators and the two on board. 1955 – Istanbul's Greek, Jewish, and Armenian minorities are the target of a government-sponsored pogrom; dozens are killed in ensuing riots. 1962 – The United States government begins the Exercise Spade Fork nuclear readiness drill. 1962 – Archaeologist Peter Marsden discovers the first of the Blackfriars Ships dating back to the second century AD in the Blackfriars area of the banks of the River Thames in London. 1965 – India retaliates following Pakistan's Operation Grand Slam which results in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 that ends in a stalemate followed by the signing of the Tashkent Declaration. 1966 – Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, is stabbed to death in Cape Town, South Africa during a parliamentary meeting. 1968 – Swaziland becomes independent. 1970 – Two passenger jets bound from Europe to New York are simultaneously hijacked by Palestinian terrorist members of the PFLP and taken to Dawson's Field, Jordan. 1971 – Paninternational Flight 112 crashes on the Bundesautobahn 7 highway near Hamburg Airport, in Hamburg, Germany, killing 22. 1972 – Munich massacre: Nine Israeli athletes die (along with a German policeman) at the hands of the Palestinian "Black September" terrorist group after being taken hostage at the Munich Olympic Games. Two other Israeli athletes were slain in the initial attack the previous day. 1976 – Cold War: Soviet Air Defence Forces pilot Viktor Belenko lands a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 jet fighter at Hakodate in Japan and requests political asylum in the United States; his request is granted. 1983 – The Soviet Union admits to shooting down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, stating that its operatives did not know that it was a civilian aircraft when it reportedly violated Soviet airspace. 1985 – Midwest Express Airlines Flight 105 crashes near Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, killing all 31 people on board. 1991 – The Soviet Union recognizes the independence of the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. 1991 – The Russian parliament approves the name change of Leningrad back to Saint Petersburg. The change is effective October 1. 1995 – Cal Ripken Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles plays in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking a record that had stood for 56 years. 1997 – The Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales takes place in London. Well over a million people lined the streets and 21⁄2 billion watched around the world on television. 2003 – Mahmoud Abbas resigns from his position of Palestinian Prime Minister. 2007 – Israel executes the air strike Operation Orchard to destroy a nuclear reactor in Syria. 2013 – Forty-one elephants are poisoned with cyanide in salt pans, by poachers in Hwange National Park. 2018 – Supreme Court of India decriminalised all consensual sex among adults in private, making homosexuality legal on the Indian lands. 2022 – Boris Johnson resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and is replaced by Liz Truss. Their meetings with Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral Castle were the Queen's final official duties before her death two days later. 2022 – Russo-Ukrainian War: Ukraine begins its Kharkiv counteroffensive, surprising Russian forces and retaking over 3,000 square kilometers of land, recapturing the entire Kharkiv Oblast west of the Oskil River, within the next week.