Had your fill of news footage of Wednesday’s Tea Party protesters? Be sure to check out the nytimes.com video of some Afghan women in Kabul who were also yesterday protesting. Sure, you don’t get adults in tri-corner hats and Betsy Ross costumes tossing cardboard boxes into a canal while Neil Cavuto and Michelle Malkin stand by, but you do get… well, get a taste of what you get from Dexter Filkins’s accompanying article (and, scroll down mid-way in the article for the video; annoyingly, I can’t seem to directly link it or embed it):
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.
“Get out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”
The women scattered as the men moved in.
“We want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want equality!”
The women ran to the bus and dived inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.
“Whores!”
But the march continued anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.
It was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning.
