With friends like these…
Let’s raise a glass to America’s allies in the war against terrorism, who are helping us make the world a better place. Right?
Mukhtaran Bibi is a Pakistani woman who was the victim of a notorious gang rape. The rape was ordered by officials of her own tribe, as punishment for a crime her brother was alleged to have committed. To punish her brother, she was sentenced to be raped by four men and made to walk home undressed in front of the whole village.
Bibi has become an activist working to stop violence against women. She was scheduled to visit the Asian American Network Against Abuse of Women in the United States soon. But the Pakistani government—our allies in the war against terror, remember—don’t want her to talk about that, apparently. Pakistan placed her under house arrest, then coerced her into giving a news conference in which she denied wanting to leave the country.
Meanwhile, in Uzbekistan—another of America’s allies in the so-called war on terror, 700 people were massacred by government troops in a crackdown against dissidents. President Islam Karimov said the dead, many of them unarmed women and children, were “Islamic radicals” and “criminals.” Karimov bans opposition parties, has jailed 6,000 dissidents, and tortures many of them.
Good thing Karimov is on our side in the struggle against evil dictators. Because America takes that democracy shit very seriously.