Sharia

A street preacher’s remarks about the way Canadian women dress fuels a tired debate

The video depicting the abhorrent flogging of a Pakistani teenage girl by the Taliban in the Swat region has sent shockwaves around the world. Rightly so. The recent controversy over a law that was passed (and is now under review) by the Karzai government in Afghanistan illustrates that, eight years after the fall of the Taliban, there is still a long way to go for women’s rights in the region. We now know that Karzai is far from the patriot the Bush administration would have had us believe. Fortunately, Barack Obama has distinguished between his new Afghan strategy and the issue of women’s rights in that part of the world.