Afghani rape victim freed from jail, on condition she marry rapist

According to the Western world.

We wouldn't like having someone else dictating our morals to us, obviously. But in developing a set of them, we've decided that our moral guidelines are superior to others.

When a people deviate from what we've determined to be acceptable behavior, it is the duty of the just society to criticize. It's the only way progress is made.

 

Yeah, I watched Restrepo finally the other day on NatGeo.

My first thought was, from a documentary perspective, I didn't find it Oscar worthy. It needed more depth. And, frankly, although it claimed to show how dangerous the work was, it appeared that the unit had 1 firefight in a year, and fortunately lost just 2 soldiers. Not downplaying their sacrifice, mind you, but I just think veterans of Viet Nam and especially WWII saw far more constant danger.

Secondly, it really illustrates how futile our efforts over there are. The Captain who was in charge of winning the hearts and minds of the natives was completely clueless about their 1,000 years of cultural ways. At one point, a key village elder asks for $400 to replace a cow that we inadvertently killed. We tell him no, but we'll give him rice instead. Yikes.

And third, I find it very hard to believe that anyone in that valley could be considered a sizeable enough threat to America that we needed to spend millions per week protecting ourselves from them.

Pack 'em up and come on home.

Oh, and I'll repeat my assertion that Islam at its root is violence based.

 

We've all agreed to live in a society with these morals. So, as a group, we've decided that these are the right ones.

Do you think it's proper to force a woman to marry her rapist?

 

We'd grab our weapons and say, "You want to impose your beliefs on us? Go ahead and try!"

I suggested this one other time, but if we truly wanted to make things better for the women in these countries, we'd ship over numerous guns and weapons and put them directly in the hands of the women. The men would be respecting them a heluva lot more then.

 

You really can't be serious.

First of all, most of the atheists on the board are insistent that their morals do not spring from Biblical inspirtion.

That aside, this isn't a case of a culture that lives "differently" than us.

If some Amazonian tribe is still living a simple hunter/gatherer lifestyle, it's not up to us to impose modernity upon them.

If a billion people across the globe are living under an ideology, disguised as religion, that oppresses women to such a degree that it cuts off their clitoris, or forces them to marry their rapist, and condones honor killings, then yes, we should determine that our morality is "better" than theirs.

And, maybe we don't have to "impose" our morality upon them, but we sure as shit shouldn't pretend that they're not morally bankrupt. We don't have to pretend their morally equivalent to Western culture. We don't have to patronize them, trade with them, defend them militarily.

And we don't have to remain silent.

Apartheid was identified for what it was. It wasn't just "different", it was wrong.

The treatment of women throughout the Middle East, throughout the Muslim world is wrong. It's brutal. Brutal.

We shouldn't be afraid to say so.

 

Agree with YF. (And I'll be goddamned for saying that for what seems like way too many times recently, WTF is wrong with me?) If we don't try to impose morality on them, that's a fair argument. If we act like they are our partners in forging a new path for the 21st century -- funding them, legitimizing their government, tiptoeing around them to find terrorists -- we are implicitly condoning this sort of behavior.

I'd challenge anyone to find more brutal and backward punishments than this in Iran or Cuba, which continue to receive the back of our hand economically and diplomatically.

 

Yeah, what on earth makes you think that forcing a rape victim to marry her rapist is wrong? Do you not respect other cultures? Have you ever walked a mile in an Afghani rapist's shoes?

What is wrong with you?

 

So, I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh while pretending to do paperwork.

I think he's using this thread for show prep.

He just transitioned from the driving will lead to no virgins story to the woman forced to marry her rapist story.

 

Bravo, dude.

 

Professor Subhi has an awfully inflated idea of how much chicks dig him.

 

Let me complicate the discussion thus: Is this a political issue? Or a religious issue?

 

Maybe that's the question that gets to the crux of the disagreement here.