Last week, I wrote about my disgust with all things Mushie. When women rightfully rallied against him in New York on September 17th, he criticized them as if they were just anomalous Vestern Feminazis:
As the human rights and women groups protested outside the Roosevelt Hotel against the treatment of rape victims in Pakistan, Gen Musharraf said that such protests should be held in and not outside Pakistan.
Okay, fine.
On Thursday, women in Pakistan protested his utterly inappropriate remarks and I wholeheartedly supported their rage against an insensitive jerk. Ever-excellent and on top of things, The Acorn points me to an editorial which I missed, since I haven’t opened the Saturday paper yet (Note to self: retrieve newspapers or purchase canine for said task).
I’m pink-cheeked with joy over how the Washington Post let him have it:
PAKISTANI President Pervez Musharraf complains that his country is unfairly portrayed as a place where rape and other violence against women are rampant and frequently condoned. In fact, it deserves such a reputation. According to Pakistani human rights groups, thousands of attacks are reported every year, including gang rapes and “honor killings” of women who are accused of having affairs or who refuse an arranged marriage. Most of these attacks go unpunished. So retrograde are Pakistan’s laws that there are more than 1,500 women in prison as a result of rapes — they were prosecuted for adultery — while arrests of men occur in only about 15 percent of reported cases. [WaPo]
1,500 victims of sexual assault, rotting in the prisons of a nation which harbors OBL, a nation we are buddy-buddy with…I’m so proud. Musharraf’s voice from the “WaPo tape” plays on loop in my head, insisting that he is the emancipator of women. I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth. Get to emancipating then, you lying hypocrite.
Laura Bush can bend her husband’s ear when it comes to the gender of nominees for the Supreme Court; I wish she were as persuasive on behalf of other, less privileged women.
In an interview with The Post last month, he claimed that he had relented. But then he said this: “You must understand the environment in Pakistan. This has become a money-making concern. A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.” This statement was, as Pakistani activists and the Canadian government soon pointed out, an outrageous lie. There is only one known case of a rape victim moving to Canada, a doctor who was assaulted by a military officer. A far more common outcome for rape victims is to be ostracized by their communities or jailed.[WaPo]
When Gen. Musharraf’s statement provoked an uproar, he responded with another lie: He claimed that he had never made it. In fact, a recording of him speaking is available on The Post’s Web site, washingtonpost.com. His words are quite clear. “These are not my words, and I would go to the extent of saying I am not so silly and stupid to make comments of this sort,” the general said. Well, yes, he is.[WaPo]
‘Nuff said.
What insensitive jerk? Google squib is more like it (mumble mumble).
The trouble is with us South Asians. We let freaks like Mushie and Laloo get away with their foolish, scatterbrain talk.
The sad thing is, knowing very little about Pakistan and Musharraf, when I saw The Rock Star and the Mullahs documentary a while back, I thought he came off fairly progressive, for a dictator. He seemed to have disgust for the weird beards trying to tell people what to do, like he was more secular-minded and trying to bring the country into the 21st century. So this recent nonsense is just depressing. Even my liberal Pakistani Brit “uncle” thought he had a point, and laughed when I went ballistic.
As for Laura Bush and any imagined feminism on her part, pfffft. When I was interning at a feminist org in D.C. in college one semester, I got to read all the newswires of what Hillary was doing and saying abroad. Man, she was WAY more vocal about women’s rights when she was overseas! It just didn’t get reported on. I was like, woman, just be outspoken HERE and we’ll love you for it. But no, Amurricans hate femuhnazis. Third-world women remain illiterate, and rural American women can’t get the morning-after pill. It’s all just points on the same annoying spectrum.
“He seemed to have disgust for the weird beards trying to tell people what to do, like he was more secular-minded and trying to bring the country into the 21st century.”
That doesn’t make Musharraf a progressive, it simply makes him part of the pseudo-Ataturk crowd, authoritarian to the core, and irredeemably communal (communal because, unlike the beards, for the Musharrafs of the world it’s not about Islam = religious observance, but about Islam = “blood” and “nation”). I think people like Musharraf are way more unpleasant and dangerous than the traditional stereotypical bearded maulvia, partly because of their views (see above), but also because they help pave the way for the radicals, who fuse the notion of traditional religiosity with the sort of “modernity” that Musharraf-types believe is the summa of progress.