By SUZANNE DOWNING
Who will save the girls of Afghanistan? Will it be the radical feminists who elected President Joe Biden because they hated with every bone in their bodies the sometimes-odd, always-alpha male presidency of Donald Trump?
Zarifa Ghafari, the 27-year-old mayor of the small Afghani town of Maidan Shar, fled her country on Sunday. She saved herself from certain death.
There were no protests in Washington to demand her safe passage. The radical feminists of America have gone back to their Pilates and Peloton classes. They cannot be bothered. “Biden’s got this, right? He’s one of us.”
Ghafari, an intelligent woman who looks as though she could be a doctor or scholar, was one of Afghanistan’s first women mayors. She was raised by her parents during the time when the Taliban had been driven back into the mountains by U.S. forces and Afghan Armed Forces. While the terrorists attacked and regrouped to attack again, she grew up during the brief window of time when girls in Afghanistan could finally go to school, even in her very conservative town.
Ghafari was born under the Taliban rule, but lived most of her life in a somewhat more modern social setting. She could show her face, for example, rather than be cloaked in a burka. Like so many women of her age, she’s known a world where girls can get educated, although her region is famously illiterate – the literacy rate is just 25 percent.
She attended Halima Khazan High School in Paktia Province, and went on to Panjab University in India.
Girls born just a few years before Ghafari’s birth were not so lucky. In areas under firm Taliban control, girls are limited to just a few years of schooling, or they are banned from education completely. Baby girls born today in Afghanistan will be locked into a life of Taliban subjugation.
Ghafari told a British newspaper in early August that she was waiting for the Taliban to come and kill her. She wouldn’t leave her family.
“I’m sitting here waiting for them to come. There is no one to help me or my family. I’m just sitting with them and my husband. And they will come for people like me and kill me. I can’t leave my family. And anyway, where would I go?” she asked the reporter.
We can presume that Ghafari knows of what she speaks which is why she made the decision to evacuate while she could. Her life had been threatened many times, and her own father, Abdul Wasi Ghafari, an Afghan Army colonel,
was gunned down by Taliban in November of 2020, just days after an assassination attempt on her life failed, the reporter wrote. Ghafari believes her father was killed because of her.
Known for her work on women’s rights in Afghanistan, Ghafari was named an International Woman of Courage in 2020 by then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. That puts a bigger target on her forehead.
Maidan Shar, her hometown, is the capital of the Maidan Wardak province in central Afghanistan.
This month the province was finally retaken by the Taliban, the fundamentalist sect of warrior men who are particularly savage toward women, especially women who do not know their place in the patriarchy.
Women like Ghafari and women in her extended family are going to be marked by the Taliban. She had been hunkered down in Kabul for her own safety, for Maidan Wardak has long been a high-risk province and her town, adjacent to Kabul, is a major travel route for the Taliban.
Wind the clock back to January 19, 2019, when a suicide bomber drove a vehicle into the regional military base and police training center in Maidan Shar, killing a dozen and injuring 30.
Perhaps we can ask the Handmaid’s Tale costuming “cosplay” women who donned red capes and white wimples to protest of Donald Trump on Jan. 19, 2019 to take a passing interest in what real oppression looks like, and to use their abundant sense of righteousness to save 18 million deeply endangered women.
Perhaps the pussy-hatted women with their Dump Trump signs will rescue their sisters in Afghanistan.
Or perhaps the American women pretending they were oppressed and engaging in the worst sort of political theater have now been exposed as simply partisan actors working to remove a president they found offensive.
These pussy-hatted Women’s March feminists own the Biden presidency, and by extension, they own the rape, torture, and debasement of the women of Afghanistan, who are living in a true dystopia, one that even the novelist Margaret Atwood could not imagine.
Millions of Zarifa Ghafaris did not get out in time. Every one of them heading for a life of servitude and sexual slavery matters.
Suzanne Downing is the publisher of Must Read Alaska and Must Read America.
