The tragedy of poverty and ignorance is embodied by the ugly case of the 13-year old Yemeni child Elham who died three days after her marriage to a man many years older than her. He treated her harshly and stole her innocence and childhood from her which is a vital time for character building for any human being.
Elham's tragedy is an outrageous violation of what humanity at large has unanimously agreed upon -- regardless of religion or culture -- with regards to children's rights to care, education, and protection against violence, until they reach an age when they are physically and intellectually independent, which is usually the period following adolescence.
Given the prevalence of stories such as this, it's clear that a substantial portion of humanity does not agree with what humanity at large -- whatever that means -- has agreed to. In fact, given the laws and customs of marriage in entirely too many countries, it is obvious exactly which portion of humanity has a different understanding than humanity at large.
Most countries in the world -- regardless of their different ideologies -- recognize a set minimum age for marriage, which is usually set between 16 and 18 years old. This is in order to protect children and teenagers from the transgressions of some families or the misconceptions of some societies, which is something that in most cases causes harm to [young] girls, rather than boys.
Yemen is no exception in this regard and there is a Personal Status Law that sets the minimum age for marriage at 17, however like many other developing societies that suffer from high rates of poverty and illiteracy and ignorance there is a difference between the existence of legislation and its application on the ground. This is because any law requires social cooperation in order for it to be enforced, and no government or agency can enter every house in order to ensure that this law is being implemented, especially if there is a culture that goes against this law. Therefore this is a phenomenon that exists in the poorest regions in many countries around the world.
If we are being realistic about underage marriage in Yemen, the case of the child bride Elham which ended so tragically was not the first nor will it be the last such case. There was also the case of 10-year old Nujood [Ali] who received international acclaim and awards after succeeding in obtaining a divorce. Yemeni statistics reveal that there is a high rate of underage marriage, especially in poor rural areas, largely due to economic reasons.
This problem will not disappear overnight through oversight or executive legislation, and there are many methods to circumvent Personal Status Law so long as families consent to this. It is important that a law is applied to cases that are brought to the attention of the government; however it is also important to raise the cultural and religious awareness against underage marriage.
What is strange in the case of Yemen, and this is something that is present in other Arab countries, is the position taken by some extremist trends who utilize religion in their political activity and who reject the setting of a legal minimum age for marriage, or to be more explicit, child marriage. This extremist trend organized demonstrations outside of Yemen's parliament protesting the setting of legal minimum age for marriage as being against Islamic Shariaa law, demanding a review of the Personal Status Law and the elimination of the [legal] article [with regards to a legal minimum age].
It is likely that this [extremist] trend will be quiet for a time following the tragedy of child bride Elham, before retuning once again to put forward its agenda and claim that this law is derived from the western viewpoint and is evil and imperialistic and other similar terms that it will utilize to object to the setting of a legal minimum age for marriage.
The question that must be asked to the figures and leaders of this [extremist] trend who are mostly well-off is; would you accept this for your daughters? Or is the issue one of spreading poverty and promoting ignorance in order to better serve your agenda?
Posted by: Fred ||
04/16/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Granted I haven't lived there in about 25 years but I remember that greeks were proud of tax loopholes and lavish goverment programs. I guess this is the result. Also, where is are old friend Aris when we need him most?
#1
Among the many transformative experiences President Obama says he has planned for us, one in particular has gone relatively unnoticed. He has vowed to remake the methods by which the federal government regulates our homes, our offices, our roads and brooms and thimbles, our roller skates and garden tools and tortilla chips and sunglassesnearly everything. The federal government regulates nearly everything already, of course, but now the new administration wants to regulate by different lights. A few days after taking office last year, Obama signed a presidential memorandum to set our new transformative experience in motion.
The memorandum began by noting that federal regulatory policy has lately been governed by an executive order issued in 1993. Political activists disliked the old orderEO 12866, as its known among regulation buffsbecause they saw it as a hindrance to new and ever more sweeping regulations. EO 12866 made the job of regulating difficult by requiring a federal agency to perform onerous cost-benefit analyses on each regulation it proposed and to rework the rules that proved too costly. In his memorandum, the president suggested that this approach, while perhaps well-meaning, was the product of a less sophisticated, pre-Obama era.
A great deal has been learned since that time, he wrote. Far more is now known about regulationnot only about when it is justified, but also about what works and what does not. . . . In this time of fundamental transformation, that processand the principles governing regulation in generalshould be revisited.
The young, immaculately turned out Pakistani soldiers responsible for guarding the world's most inhospitable terrain were finding it hard to conceal their frustration. For the past 18 months, they had been fighting to drive thousands of Taliban militants from their strongholds in the remote tribal regions that straddle Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. The campaign reached its climax last month, when Pakistani forces finally dislodged the Taliban from heavily fortified positions in Bajaur, just a few miles from the forbidding mountain passes that lead to Afghanistan.
This week, when I became one of the first Western journalists to reach Bajaur following the Taliban's defeat, the detritus of battle lay everywhere. Along the roads to the border villages stood semi-demolished houses riddled with bullet holes, where Taliban fighters had made their last, desperate stands. Occasionally, frightened children would peer from dilapidated alleyways and wave nervously at our passing convoy of military lorries. At the border village of Damadola, where the insurgents lost their final battle, all that remained from their reign of terror was the network of caves they had carved into the surrounding mountains, which were filled with the dusty sleeping bags and clothes abandoned in their haste to escape the military's advance.
But even though Pakistani forces have inflicted a crushing defeat on the Taliban in the semi-autonomous tribal region of northern Pakistan, their senior officers are furious that hundreds of fighters escaped across the border into Afghanistan, where they are being housed and protected in camps set up by Afghan supporters. Pakistani commanders insist that they informed their American opposite numbers that large numbers of Taliban were fleeing into territory that is supposed to be under US control, but they failed to intervene.
*sigh* It's so difficult with limited resources to guard every mountain pass when one's forces are tied up dealing with the Taliban the ISI sent through previously. But if there truly are new Taliban camps in Afghanistan, no doubt the satellites will reveal new targets for Western Air Force bombing runs.
Now the Pakistanis fear the Taliban will regroup in Afghanistan and launch a fresh offensive to re-establish its presence in northern Pakistan. "We have done everything the West asked us to do," Col Nauman Saeed told me when we met at the headquarters of the Bajaur Scouts, who spearheaded the campaign against the Taliban. "We feel badly let down."
Or at least talked loudly about doing so, while aiming groups of Afghan Taliban toward the ISI's chosen target du jour.
Previously, Nato commanders had accused the Pakistani authorities of not taking effective action against Taliban bases on their soil, which have been used to plan terrorist attacks against Western targets in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now the Pakistanis are turning the tables on Nato. The irony of these claims will not be lost on the Americans, who faced similar accusations in late 2001, after they led the coalition that overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan. On that occasion, US forces failed to prevent the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies from escaping across the border to Pakistan, undermining attempts to capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban's leader.
Since then, the insurgents have exploited the goodwill of Pashtun leaders in Pakistan's remote tribal areas to build a new administrative structure. They used this to terrorise the population through the strict application of sharia law, and also provided a haven for al-Qaeda terrorists. Pakistani intelligence sources believe that Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of bin Laden's key lieutenants, was given shelter in Bajaur itself. The Pakistani military was finally forced to intervene after al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, and the Taliban moved south and seized control of the Swat Valley, close to the capital of Islamabad.
But the fact that, nine years after Western forces first deployed to the region, there appears to be no proper co-ordination between Nato commanders in Afghanistan and their Pakistani counterparts does not bode well for the future success of this campaign. After all, the whole point of the new strategy devised by General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander of Nato forces, is that it involves those on both sides of the border working together to defeat their common enemy.
What I found particularly disconcerting during my visit this week to the war zone in Pakistan was that the complaints I heard from Pakistani officers were not dissimilar to those I heard from their British counterparts when I visited Helmand this year. While both sides have made significant military gains against the Taliban, they are critical of the lack of support they are receiving from their allies. The British and Americans accuse the Pakistanis of not doing enough to stop Taliban fighters fleeing across the border, while the Pakistanis complain about the ease with which the Taliban can move in the opposite direction.
It is clearly in the interests of everyone that this impasse is resolved quickly, as the glaring disconnect between Nato and Pakistan threatens to undermine the entire international effort to prevent this region from being a haven for Islamist terrorists. And with President Obama sticking to his pledge to start withdrawing American troops from the region in July next year, time is of the essence.
Dr. Helen (otherwise known as "Insta-Wife"), Pajamas Media
I often get books on psychology sent to me by publishers, and the other day I received Jeffrey Kottler's On Being a Therapist. The book is now in its fourth edition, and this latest edition puts the spotlight on the therapist's role and responsibility to promote issues of diversity, social justice, human rights, and systemic changes within the community and the world at large.'
Whoa: I thought the therapist's role was to increase the client's well-being and treat mental illness....
...For whatever reason, Jeffrey Kottler is not alone. I've noticed that psychology programs around the country have shifted from an emphasis on individual mental health to an emphasis on promoting social justice.' In practice, this always means liberal politics.
And maybe there's a connection there. Could it be that for liberals and certain therapists endowed with self-importance but without religion, influencing others is all they have? Forcing others to do as they wish fends off their fear of insignificance, which is why it is so urgent that others go along. It keeps their legacy alive. Notice how many times people bring up Ted Kennedy's legacy' of health care. Is this more about keeping Kennedy's name immortal and his image alive than about real solutions to real-world problems?
Could it be that many liberals, (including, perhaps, the occasional teleprompter-dependent ex-legislator in his first executive position, IYKWIMAITYD)
like narcissistic therapists, are so insistent that others go along with them because they fear being obscure and crave feeling powerful more than they care about whether their solutions actually work?
I realize this is a theory, but it's one I have pondered for quite some time.
Posted by: Mike ||
04/16/2010 10:56 ||
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I always thought many far-lefty's have a weird case of acute co-dependency issues - the need to be needed - hence their obsessions w/helping as many zero-liability voters as possible through gov't largesse and fiscal malfeasance.
#4
This is an old phenom that goes back to the late 1800s/turn of the century and the original progressive movement's "social gospel." Educated, religious protestants fearing the loss of their faith and transferring their piety and good works instincts into political-social reform campaigns of one kind or another.
Funny how the class enemy of these types doesn't seem to change: rising numbers of politically assertive, less-educated urban Catholics in the early 1900s, and large numbers of conservative, politically powerful evangelicals today.
This is as much about class as about ideas or ideology.
#5
Funny how the class enemy of these types doesn't seem to change:
That's certainly an amusing thought when coupled with the claim I heard on NPR this morning that as a group the Tea Partiers are more highly educated and better paid than the general population.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The young, immaculately turned out Pakistani soldiers responsible for guarding the world's most inhospitable terrain were finding it hard to conceal their frustration. For the past 18 months, they had been fighting to drive thousands of Taliban militants from their strongholds in the remote tribal regions that straddle Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. The campaign reached its climax last month, when Pakistani forces finally dislodged the Taliban from heavily fortified positions in Bajaur, just a few miles from the forbidding mountain passes that lead to Afghanistan.
