Adding Insult to Injury: Afghani/Pakistani Schoolgirls, the Taliban and Greg Mortenson.

Unfortunate news came via CBS's "60 Minutes" Sunday night. Greg Mortensen, author of "Three Cups of Tea" and founder of the charity "Central Asia Institute" whose mission it is to build schools for girls (and boys) in Pakistan and Afghanistan in spite of threat by the Taliban, is having his James Frey moment (remember, Million Little Pieces, Oprah..). Only for Mr. Mortensen, things are worse. Much worse. Besides being found fabricating entire accounts of his memoir recounting his experiences with the kind people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who live under fear of the one of the worlds most violent and repressive regimes, the Taliban; the author has also been found to be using funds from his charity for his own use while vastly exaggerating the work of the charity being done on building schools in these blighted areas. Consequently, Mr. Mortensen, a mountaineer turned writer/lecturer, has sullied an issue so compelling, so completely distilling of the good vs. evil plight of central asians under Taliban rule, he may have permanently set back the cause he has championed. Mr. Frey embarrassed Oprah (admittedly, no minor transgression), while Mr. Mortensen may have stolen the future of a portion of the hundreds of thousands of children whose best ideation of their future is survival at best. Hardly more than a metaphor in common.

Mortensen with schoolchildren.

Its a raw deal to be born a girl on Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. First, with the world's highest infant mortality rate, 25% of children die before they reach school age. Then there's the school thing. Traditional schooling is replaced by madrassas for boys. In some countries, these seminary-like schools teach the Koran just as American Christian schools might teach the bible. But not these Taliban madrasses, they teach the Koran like the KKK teach the bible. And, likely for the better, women are not allowed. 

What is worse, there are no alternatives other than home religious education for girls. For the Taliban, a girls education above the age of 8 is forbidden. And that is just the official version, as schools with younger students have been bombed, gassed or otherwise destroyed. In the 90's, when the Taliban held free reign over Afghanistan, it was decreed that woman would no longer work outside the home. As a result, nearly 7,800 women teachers were dismissed, leaving 148,000 boys and 106,000 girls without teachers.

Government troops inspect the completely demolished 21 room girls school, blown up by Taliban forces 25 miles west of Peshawar in 2009.

Since the fall of the Taliban government, the Taliban, in partial exile, mainly in the area of Waziristan and the Swat Valley in Pakistan bordering Afghanistan, has enforced it's own interpretation of Sharia Law against those sinful enough to educate girls (or any children in a secular fashion). Their brave warriors have blown or otherwise demolished at least 185 schools  (an estimated 130, girls only) and gassed others, and on at least one occasion in 2006 at a girls school in Lakshar Gar, armed gunmen walked through the gates, shooting and killing several young women, forcing another 900 private schools to remain closed under threat. Following one such bombing in Swat Valley in January of '09 a local lawyer,  Shoukat Saleem, was quoted the British paper, The Independent, “Yesterday there was a bombing of a school in Mingora, the main city,” he added. “No one is giving any education. Girls preparing for their matriculation exams in March have had to abandon their education. Unless the government or the Taliban announce that the situation will be ok, no one will take the risk.”

 

Afghan schoolgirls suffering from suspected poisoning are taken to hospital in Kabul. Photograph: Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images

The same Swat Valley lawyer is also credited with filming on his cel phone the flogging of a 17 year old girl and her fiance for allegedly being along in the boys house, a serious offense under the Taliban's Sharia Law. The video follows below. Please be advised, while grainy, it is nonetheless disturbing.


On the upside, this latest media meme has thrust the issue of the Taliban and human rights, especially in relation to young women, back into the spotlight for at least another 15 minutes of infamy. Let us hope, and give us momentum, that the situation becomes the better for it and that it doesn't merely flame brilliant and quick, leaving a generation in darkness.

The full segment, courtesy "60 Minutes":

For more on the Mortensen debacle see:

Mondays NYT article by Julie Bosman and Stephanie Styrom

todays WSJ Blog.

todays LA Times. 

PLEASE NOTE:

The are still plenty of courageous people and organizations doing humanitarian work on behalf of the young women and children of Taliban-controlled Central Asia that need assistance and visibility. These laudable (and credible) charities include:

Help The Afghan Children is dedicated to improving the lives of children in Afghanistan through quality education and helping them become educated, healthy, productive citizens.

Green Village Schools is a Portland, Oregon, based non-profit organization committed to building a generation of hope in Afghanistan.

Women for Women International provides women survivors of war, civil strife and other conflicts with the tools and resources to move from crisis and poverty to stability and self-sufficiency, thereby promoting viable civil societies.

A Few Bad Men: What do Terry Jones, Fred Phelps and Osama bin Laden have in common?

Afghans carry a wounded man following an attack on the UN office during a protest against the burning of a copy of the Quran by a Florida pastor, Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, Friday, April. 1, 2011. Photo courtesy AP

"I would hope that Pastor Terry Jones and his supporters will consider the ramifications of their planned book-burning event. It will feed the fire of caustic rhetoric and appear as nothing more than mean-spirited religious intolerance. Don't feed that fire. If your ultimate point is to prove that the Christian teachings of mercy, justice, freedom, and equality provide the foundation on which our country stands, then your tactic to prove this point is totally counter-productive." Sarah Palin, from her Facebook page prior to the event.

As a direct result of Terry Jones' well-publicized burning of the Koran on March 20th outside his church, the ironically named Dove World Outreach Center (designated as one of the 18 leading "hate groups" by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2010 for his attacks on homosexuality), riots occurred in the Muslim world. One of these riots, as pictured above, led to the deaths of at least 12 people (including 8 UN employees) and left nearly 100 injured.

Mr. Jones has the right to burn any book he wishes. It is a freedom of speech. One of the many freedoms the country has fought to protect for over the past two centuries. Yet, with rights come responsibilities, and his actions are the antithesis of responsible. He has sent teens to school with t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase "Islam is the Devil" and distributed lawn signs of the same verbiage. He has joined with the infamous Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church of the godhatesfags.com infamy for an anti-gay rally, saying last April “[h]omosexuality makes God throw up.”

Just as the invasion of Iraq following 9/11 became al-Qaeda's best recruiting tool, Mr. Jones' actions only solidify the rhetoric of the equally extreme fundamentalists in the Muslim world.

Neither the Dove World Outreach Center, the Westboro Baptist Church, al-Qaeda or the Taliban have any true connection to the faiths they invoke save for the self-serving fictions created and fanned by the likes of Jones, Phelps and bin Laden. What they do share is intolerance, hate and violence; the very opposite of the most basic theology of the world's many faiths.

The onus then falls to the rest of us to do our best to undue the damage done by the promoters of hate. To speak out against such actions as the Koran burning last month. To speak to the vastly greater bulk of similarities between faiths than the differences. To proclaim, even evangelize, and live the most shared edict, the distillation of all of our faiths: the golden rule, to treat others as we would wish to be treated. History teaches that truth, eventually, prevails as Christianity teaches "blessed are the peacemakers" and the Koran teaches that respect for the lives of all is sacred.  We ask that you, the reader, join us in putting our collective shoulder against the side of truth and the golden rule, to move it along so that's it's momentum may never know the slightest restraint as a result of the actions of a few bad men.


Below, an excellent commentary by Cathleen Falsani.

Terry Jones: Holy Hand Grenade Outreach Center
By Cathleen Falsani
courtesy Religion News Service 6 April 2011

(RNS) The website of the Dove World Outreach Center describes the tiny church in Gainesville, Fla., as “a New Testament church based on the Bible, the Word of God.”

Someone might want to tell them that they missed that whole “Blessed are the peacemakers” part.

While there is great debate about what, exactly, Jesus meant by many things he is quoted as saying in the New Testament, the “peacemakers” passage is not one of them. It is eminently clear that Jesus was talking not just about being peaceful, but also creating peace in the world.

As we’re all too painfully aware by now, the church, led by Pastor Terry Jones, put the Quran on trial on March 20 and set it aflame as punishment. That act, in turn, sparked deadly riots in Afghanistan that killed nearly two dozen people, including several United Nations peacekeepers.

To lob a religious grenade into the fragile tinderbox that is the Islamic world is the opposite of what Jesus described.

“We do not feel responsible — no,” Jones said in an interview with ABC News. “We feel more that the Muslims and radical Islam uses that as an excuse. If they didn’t use us as an excuse, they would use a different excuse.”

Whether the kind of violent response witnessed in Afghanistan over the past week was Jones’ intention or not, it is precisely what his actions have wrought.

That is not peaceable. It is wrong. It is sinful. It flies in the face of the message that the Prince of Peace brought to the world, and makes a mockery of the white dove referenced in the very name of Jones’ horribly misled church.

When Jesus said that “peacemakers” would be blessed and called the “children of God,” he wasn’t just talking about people who are peaceful or hope for peace. Jesus was talking specifically about those who “make” peace, those who work for harmony in conflict and unity in divisions.

Jones told ABC that he presided at the “International Judge the Quran Day” event and the subsequent burning to raise “awareness of this dangerous religion and this dangerous element” within Islam.

The irony that his asinine actions portrayed his own Christian faith and values as pretty dangerous themselves seems to be lost on Jones. But it’s not lost on many other Christians, Muslims and people of good faith around the globe: the British government deemed Jones such a danger that in January it barred him from entering the U.K. to protect “the public
good.”

Theologically speaking, Jones shouted “Fire!” in a crowded theater. He caused a riot. Lives were lost. And their blood is on his hands.

The deadly potential of Jones’ Quran burning was something he was well aware of before he lit the match. Jones first threatened to burn the Muslim holy book last fall on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. President Obama, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and a host of international political and religious leaders publicly urged Jones to abandon his plans. And for a time, he did.

But six months later, ignoring political, religious and military warnings about the clear and present danger of his plans, Jones brazenly carried them out anyway.

Although Jones shares culpability for the deaths in Afghanistan with his fellow religious extremists (in this case Muslim rather than Christian fundamentalists) whose insane rage physically took so many lives, Jones was the catalyst, the chief provoker and inciter.

While Jones claims it was within his civil and constitutional rights to burn the Quran, some legal experts, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, are seriously questioning whether the First Amendment should protect speech that directly incites violence at home or abroad.

In a 1919 Supreme Court decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that even the “most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” The question to be answered, Holmes said, “is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”

Breyer, in an interview last September, is trying to figure out what that means in the 21st century.

“Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” Breyer said. “Well, what is it? Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”

Whether Jones’ words and actions are or should be protected by the Constitution is a matter for the courts to decide. But in the court of public opinion and in the realm of religious ethics, Jones stands in violation of all that is right and just.

Jones should remove the dove from his church name and replace it with a more accurate symbol of what it stands for. A holy hand grenade, perhaps?

For the original article go here.