Until I visited the Middle East this past August, I really had no idea what was going on there. I mean I knew the bearded troglodyte made the airplanes go into the buildings, but I’m ashamed to say I was pretty ignorant of what was happening. After seeing things first hand, I can’t stop thinking about it. I mean for over 2 months now I can’t stop thinking about the Middle East. Sometimes I have dreams I’m still there, getting arrested for drinking a beer during Ramadan or getting caned for making fun of pictures of sheiks.
To sum up my thoughts on the Middle East in a sing blog post is really inappropriate, so I’ll start with the superficial observations. It was scary being a white, Western woman in a place I really did not belong. The thing Westerners can’t grasp if they haven’t seen it first hand is the mixing of church and state. It’s a Theocracy there, so you will be standing in the airport and hear prayer calls, which sound more like calls to cover your ears and cry uncontrollably. They sound really fucking scary. And I know they are sacred and holy and I’m not making fun of the content of the prayer calls, but the sound. Because to a foreigner they sound really terrifying and it makes you want to shit your pants and run away.
Here, take a listen…and imagine standing in line at McDonalds and hearing this siren call:
But what was really special is how women are treated. Now first let me say that the Quran says that women and men are equal and nowhere does it say that women should be treated as second class citizens. It’s only the people misinterpreting the Quran that treat women like dogs. Again, let me reiterate, not all Muslim coutnries treat women poorly, just the cool Fundamentalist ones like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia where women aren’t allowed to drive, or go in public without their husbands, or more extreme cases like what’s happening in Afghanistan where rape is legal (Yup, legal.) and women are setting themselves on fire to avoid the horrors of their daily lives. Women also cannot own property, work, go to school without fear of being assaulted, or wear jeans in public. The weirdest thing in the world was being in Saudi Arabia and not seeing a single woman on the street. It reminded me of being in the Castro of San Francisco, only there weren’t velvet painting of dudes fisting each other.
In 2001, the US and NATO were supposed to be in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and institute democracy. It’s been 8 years and so far the current leadership we put in is still corrupt, as warlords and drug lords fill government positions. Conditions for women and children are actually worse than they were under the Taliban.
People have said that this war is different from the Vietnam war in that we don’t see war images televised nightly as we did back then. This is true for television, but now we have access to the internet and can read blogs written by people in this war and see pictures and video of real accounts. I found this site www.rawa.org , this is a women’s organization that reports on what is really going on in Afghanistan and how their lives are affected. It is horrifying and sad and hard to see. I encourage anyone who is interested in what’s going on there to please read the articles on this site and donate any money they can to this organization.