Author: Alexia Gilmore

Taliban Targeting Women in Afghan Election Registration Efforts

Those loathsome dudes, the Taliban, are doing their despicable best to squelch the women of Afghanistan, having killed two Saturday and an unknown number on Friday when 16 folks were gunned down for carrying – voter registration cards! The Friday attack was reported by various news sources as having resulted in 16 deaths, but then, no, a man claiming to represent the ousted militia called to correct this: It was 19 – not a mere 16, he claimed. This is like something out of a really, really bad Western, say, The Good, the Bad, and the Taliban, where the banditos brag to the world about how many innocent townspeople – including women and children – they’ve slaughtered. Yes, we’ll remember this, too.

Although the Taliban vowed continued efforts to destroy the upcoming elections, of the 4.5 million people registered to vote so far one-third are women. This is not bad considering the obstacles geographical, logistical, and, of course, sociological these women have to overcome to get registered to vote. And I’ll bet that voter turn-out will be better in Afghanistan in September than it will in the US.

“Taliban Say They Killed Women Poll Workers” – the Taliban still show themselves to be heartless scum, proudly vaunting the fact they killed women poll workers and children. Let us remember the immense courage RAWA displayed showed for many, many years in the face of these truly deficient human beings. Even now, however, the Taliban is still acting against women and this shouldn’t be forgotten. The Taliban treatment of women bears a macabre resemblance to an anti-Darwinian approach to life, and my fervent hopes go out to the Afghani women that their right to vote and make themselves a part of the political process succeeds.

Terrorist attacks in Europe have been numerous and ongoing, but the sheer scale of Spain’s “3/11” and the concomittant carnage are new and shaking. Spain is frightened — and lashing out. Remember how badly the US needed to act, to do something, practically anything, after 9/11? Well, what’s happening is a re-direction of anger away from the ever-elusive actual terrorists to a more convenient target: here, the US.

A terrible countenance is emerging in Europe: it is that of a Europe gleeful in its anti-Americanism, guised as anti-Bushism at present — Madrid has provided the catalyst. For those of us opposed to US intervention abroad, but who deeply care about our country, this augers very poorly for the state of the world: the US historically hasn’t responded well to isolation, but over-engages as if in compensation; Spain and Britain and other US allies will suffer as they regress to a time of consolidation with the elderly attitudes of an aging European intellectual elite, who truly do not care about the common citizen or their economic plights, or respect their ability to make decisions. In the past four years, Spain has been making strides toward increased economic growth, cultural revitalization, and improved internal security vis-a-vis ETA — but that is gone now — in the time it takes to cast a reactive ballot. So — another unintended consequence of the US war on Iraq is that of disrupting the somewhat emerging era of greater freedoms in Europe — and precipitated by the US itself lashing out at the wrong party, Iraq, instead of focusing on the terrorists who imminently caused our 9/11.

The Passion: Redemption through Pain, Not Anti-Semitism

Yes, The Passion is a jolting shocker of a movie. And my immediate reaction as a white, middle-class, non-religious American was pretty much that of Tikkun: If Jesus was about love, why focus on the violence and cruelty? But it is a stunning film, tells the Gospel story in a naturalistic, non-artificial way, completely unlike earlier “Bible” movies. Which include, to my mind, The Last Temptation of Christ, always a favorite book, that as a movie nevertheless remained an intellectual construct punctuated by telling details of brutal "realism." (In 1954, the Pope placed it on the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.)

Kazantzakis yearned to go beyond Tolstoy, to leave off writing for religion — but in the end he was a political person too much involved in the tumultuous events of Europe in the 20^th Century to remain aloof, who spent his entire adult life as a political activist (nationalist to communist to socialist) and passionate student of not just Christianity but the Buddha. Mel Gibson, too, is on a quest as a film-maker. We have seen his nationalistic concerns in Brave Heart and The Patriot, and now we see the expansion and explicit spiritualization of the quest to its most magnified form in The Passion. Gibson’s heroes seek freedom and redemption in a world where pain is the norm (also true of The Road Warrior and even Lethal Weapon). Given this predilection, what other kind of religious movie could we expect from him than the one we got, focusing on the last 12 excruciating hours of Christ’s life?

However discomfited my reaction The Passion may have been, most of the audience, which was Hispanic and therefore probably Catholic, was visibly moved by the experience, many in tears. While I was concerned that the Jewish temple priests were the political villains they probably actually were and that Pontius Pilate was portrayed as a thoughtful, sensitive kind of 2004 guy who really respected his wife’s opinion (unlikely given what we know about him), this is not the take-away of believers who see it as an uplifting reaffirmation of the willingness of God to manifest and share and redeem human evil. (Chatting with the Catholic family who own our favorite Mexican restaurant before the movie, this was also their opinion.)

So, I wondered about Gibson’s own views, and quickly discovered a large part of his inspiration came from a 19^th Century book written by a Catholic nun entitled The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a retelling in first-person of more-or-less the same events as the movie. The Amazon reviewers, mostly Catholic, found the work inspiring and uplifting – not having read the book I can’t say what its attitude to the Jews or Romans was, but there was no mention whatsoever of either group in the comments. Rather these readers took it as an internal tale about a being who literally suffered in their stead.

My final thought about The Passion was that however imperfect the Christian church has been and is, it has helped shape the modern world in which we view with opprobrium what were in earlier time’s really quite ordinary forms of punishment and legal practices.