Friday, April 03, 2009

Friday News Dump on Women






Compare the two pictures of the new Israeli government. The female ministers have been disappeared in the second one, because it was published in an ultra-orthodox newspaper. Another ultra-orthodox newspaper just blacked out the women. So nobody gets upset and stuff.

In Swat Valley, Pakistan, the Taliban are flogging women publicly, though I think only men are allowed to watch. The video of the flogging of a seventeen-year old girl has surfaced and caused an uproar in Pakistan. The uproar is good, of course, but the event itself is not very good.

For one thing, nobody appears to know what the girl was punished for (though theories include her leaving her home without a male custodian, leaving the house together with a man married to someone else and just refusing the marriage proposal of a local Taliban leader). It seems that there was no court case over her alleged crimes, either. Sigh.