[Net-Gold] Terrorism That's Personal (12 Images) [EDITOR'S NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT]

[David P. Dillard]

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Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:55:50 -0700 (MST)
From: George Lessard <me...@web.net>
Reply-To: Net-...@yahoogroups.com
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Subject: [Net-Gold] Terrorism That's Personal (12 Images) [EDITOR'S NOTE:
GRAPHIC CONTENT]





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Terrorism That's Personal (12 Images)

EDITOR'S NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT

Text by Jim Verhulst, Times'
Perspective editor |

Photos by Emilio
Morenatti, Associated Press

We typically think of terrorism
as a political act.

[excerpt]

<http://blogs.tampabay.com/photo/
2009/11/terrorism-thats-personal.html>

But sometimes it?s very personal.
It wasn?t a government or a guerrilla
insurgency that threw acid on this
woman?s face in Pakistan. It was a
young man whom she had rejected for
marriage. As the United States ponders
what to do in Afghanistan ? and for
that matter, in Pakistan ? it is wise
to understand both the political and
the personal, that the very ignorance
and illiteracy and misogyny that create
the climate for these acid attacks
can and does bleed over into the
political realm. Nicholas Kristof,
the New York Times op-ed columnist who
traveled to Pakistan last year to write
about acid attacks, put it this way in
an essay at the time: ?I?ve been
investigating such acid attacks, which
are commonly used to terrorize and
subjugate women and girls in a swath of
Asia from Afghanistan through
Cambodia (men are almost never attacked
with acid). Because women usually
don?t matter in this part of the world,
their attackers are rarely prosecuted and
acid sales are usually not controlled.
It?s a kind of terrorism that becomes
accepted as part of the background noise
in the region. ...

?Bangladesh has imposed controls on acid
sales to curb such attacks, but otherwise
it is fairly easy in Asia to walk into a
shop and buy sulfuric or hydrochloric
acid suitable for destroying a human face.
Acid attacks and wife burnings are common
in parts of Asia because the victims are
the most voiceless in these societies:
They are poor and female. The first step
is simply for the world to take note, to
give voice to these women.?

Since 1994, a Pakistani activist who
founded the Progressive Women?s Association

<http://www.pwaisbd.org>

to help such women ?has documented 7,800
cases of women who were deliberately burned,
scalded or subjected to acid attacks, just
in the Islamabad area. In only 2 percent of
those cases was anyone convicted.?

The geopolitical question is already hard
enough: Should the United States commit more
troops to Afghanistan and for what specific
purpose? As American policymakers mull the
options, here is a frame of reference that
puts the tough choices in even starker relief:
Are acid attacks a sign of just how little the
United States can do to solve intractable
problems there ? therefore, we should pull out?
Or having declared war on terrorism, must the
United States stay out of moral duty, to try to
protect women such as these ? and the schoolgirls
whom the Taliban in Afghanistan sprayed with acid
simply for going to class ? who have suffered a
very personal terrorist attack? We offer a reading
file of two smart essays that come to differing
conclusions.

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