Nick Kristoff of the NY Times asked in a Tweet:
Want to know why the Int'l Violence Against Women Act, stalled in Congress, is necessary?
Further he wrote in his column:
Terrorism in this part of the world usually means bombs exploding or hotels burning, as the latest horrific scenes from Mumbai attest. Yet alongside the brutal public terrorism that fills the television screens, there is an equally cruel form of terrorism that gets almost no attention and thrives as a result: flinging acid on a woman’s face to leave her hideously deformed.
Kristof's column is disturbing but the images are horrifying. You will be disturbed by viewing them.
Kristof - NY Times
For the last two years, Senators Joe Biden and Richard Lugar have co-sponsored an International Violence Against Women Act, which would adopt a range of measures to spotlight such brutality and nudge foreign governments to pay heed to it. Let’s hope that with Mr. Biden’s new influence the bill will pass in the next Congress.
That might help end the silence and culture of impunity surrounding this kind of terrorism.
Let's not be so singularly focused on health care we can't respond to this and give our support to this legislation.
Photos by Emilio Morenatti, Associated Press (give the AP credit here as it is due) & Jim Verhulst of the St. Petersburg Times writes:
We typically think of terrorism as a political act.But sometimes it’s very personal. It wasn’t a government or a guerrilla insurgency that threw acid on this woman’s face in Pakistan. It was a young man whom she had rejected for marriage. As the United States ponders what to do in Afghanistan — and for that matter, in Pakistan — it is wise to understand both the political and the personal, that the very ignorance and illiteracy and misogyny that create the climate for these acid attacks can and does bleed over into the political realm. Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times op-ed columnist who traveled to Pakistan last year to write about acid attacks, put it this way in an essay at the time: "I’ve been investigating such acid attacks, which are commonly used to terrorize and subjugate women and girls in a swath of Asia from Afghanistan through Cambodia (men are almost never attacked with acid). Because women usually don’t matter in this part of the world, their attackers are rarely prosecuted and acid sales are usually not controlled. It’s a kind of terrorism that becomes accepted as part of the background noise in the region. ...
Warning... Link contains disturbing and horrid images.... caution.
St. Petersburg Times
Unspeakable. And this is a society we send our youth to fight for? This is who we chose as allies? Damned, this world is fucked up as is our body politic, but then there is nothing new in it.
Beyond my emotional response:
• Two very smart, informed observers come to opposite conclusions on the proper U.S. course of action in Afghanistan. Here are excerpts from arguments that each of them has recently made:
Here are excerpts from Steve Coll’s "Think Tank" blog at NewYorker.com, in which he argues why we can’t leave — "What If We Fail In Afghanistan?"
Read in full here
In an essay entitled "The War We Can’t Win" in Commonweal (also reprinted this month by Harper’s), Andrew J. Bacevich makes the case that we are overstating the importance of Afghanistan to U.S. interests. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University and the author, most recently, of The Limits of Power. A retired Army lieutenant colonel, he served from 1969 to 1992, in Vietnam and the first Persian Gulf War. He was a conservative critic of the Iraq war. Several of his essays have run before in Perspective.
in full here