Nikki Haley Puts Women’s Marchers to Shame With Just 1 Photo From Afghanistan
One year ago, members of the distaff gender from around the world took to the streets for a series of Women’s Marches, the goal of which was — well, that was rather indeterminate. It seemed to have a lot to do with anti-Trump/#notmypresident sentiment, knit hats fashioned with feline ears and a lot of inchoate speeches from sorta-celebrities.
Fast forward a year, and what was accomplished? Donald Trump is still your president (if you’re a U.S. citizen, that is) and had a pretty solid 2017. In the interim, we found out the most prominent abusers of women were, in fact, the Hollywood cohort of those same celebrities railing so diligently and incoherently against the president. And, last but not least, there’s a glut of cheap knit pussy caps on Etsy.
Having had such unparalleled success in achieving their aims, marchers reconvened across the country and globe this weekend, albeit to far lower attendance and interest. The media tried to put a pleasant spin on the reduced turnout; “This year’s march was less an assertion of outrage and shell-shocked solidarity than a goal-setting exercise,” The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot assured readers, just two paragraphs below a shot of the National Mall on Sunday, which evinced attendance that would have been dwarfed by an XFL reunion game.
In a mostly overlooked tweet few days before the marches trickled on throughout the streets of the United States, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley had a thing or two to say about goal-setting. Surprisingly, it did not involve knit pussy hats.
Haley, along with other U.N. Security Council diplomats, had traveled to Afghanistan for a two-day trip to see conditions there firsthand. According to Voice of America, Haley met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah and a number of other Afghan officials.
However, it was a meeting arranged by the first lady of Afghanistan, Rula Ghani, that should have garnered the most attention.
RT@USUN: Thank you First Lady Ghani for introducing us to this group of women. Today in Afghanistan, more girls are going to school & women are serving their government & starting businesses. They're using the power of their voices to create a brighter future for their country.
“Thank you First Lady Ghani for introducing us to this group of women,” Haley tweeted last week.
Do you think the Trump administration is winning in Afghanistan?
“Today in Afghanistan, more girls are going to school & women are serving their government & starting businesses. They’re using the power of their voices to create a brighter future for their country.”
Three days after that tweet, women across America took to the streets in a series of marches on Saturday and Sunday that one can safely assume were in support of the Democrat Party.
That party’s last president, Barack Obama, pulled out of Afghanistan abruptly, leaving a power vacuum in which the Taliban was quickly resurgent. The Taliban, for those of you who with short memories, is a group that tends to frown upon women going to school, going to work, or going pretty much anywhere outside the home.
Razia Jan, who founded a girls’ school outside the Afghan capital of Kabul, described to CNN the horrors she and others who dared to educate young women faced on a daily basis.
“The day we opened the school, (on) the other side of town, they threw hand grenades in a girls’ school, and 100 girls were killed,” Jan said back in 2016. “Every day, you hear that somebody’s thrown acid at a girl’s face … or they poison their water.”
In 2015, there were 185 documented terrorist attacks in Afghanistan on schools and hospitals, the majority of which were attributable to groups opposed to female education.
Meanwhile, in 2018, Haley says that the U.S. strategy under the Trump administration is working. The Afghan government, she says, “are starting to see the Taliban concede, they are starting to see them move towards coming to the table.”
Were the women who assembled in cities across America this weekend explicitly looking for a return to the old order in Afghanistan? Of course not. They weren’t considering it — just as they weren’t considering a whole lot that didn’t involve midterm victories in 2018. (“The real march is on Election Day,” one protester put it.)
Presumably, however, they’ll be voting for the same party whose pull-out strategy was partly responsible for the misogynistic terror that has so long haunted the nation of Afghanistan. They’re also the same party currently crippling the military tasked with protecting Afghani citizens from the Taliban, thanks to the party’s insistence on attaching amnesty without border security to any resolution that would keep the federal government open.
Let’s not pretend, therefore, that the weekend’s marches were about women. They were about stoking the embers of rage from the Nov. 8, 2016 bonfire that still dimly glow from the more privileged corners of the Democrat Party base yet one more time.
Thankfully, it only took one photograph to put them to shame.
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What are your thoughts on the situation in Afghanistan?
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