UNICEF's photo of the year: This is wrong
I found this story at Spiegel Online. A 40 year old man marries an 11 year old girl. And this is not unusual in Afghanistan. I hardly know what to say, except that this disgusts me to no end. Translated from German:
Hamburg - The winning picture comes from the American photographer Stephanie Sinclair and shows an unhappy married couple: the groom Mohammed appears like an old man, the bride, the girl Ghulam, is just eleven years old. This is part of a photoseries recording child marriages, that Sinclair has photographed in the past two years in Afghanistan, Nepal, and Ethiopia.Later, a caption in the photo essay (with several other striking pictures) reads:
During a stopover in Afghanistan it was apparent to the 34-year old freelance photographer, that many girls were married with much older men. She decided to draw attention to this topic with pictures. "How do you feel today?", Stephanie Sinclair asked the girl Ghulam on the day of their engagement. The somewhat confused girl said "nothing". "I do not know this man - what should I feel?"
"The UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 draws attention to a worldwide problem. Millions of girls are married while still in childhood - a life of self-determination will remain forever denied to most of these child brides," said UNICEF patron Eva Luise Köhler at the award ceremony in Berlin. According to UNICEF, worldwide more than 60 million living young women were married before they hit the age of maturity, half of them in South Asia.
Desperate engagement: He is 40, she eleven. "we needed the money", say parents of the girls. Her husband-to-be maintains that he wants to send her to school. But the women in the village Damarda in the province Ghor know it better: "our men do not want educated women." They predict that the child will soon have a baby on the way.
I'll put this in my own perspective; I am 40 years old (although I look a heck of a lot younger than this guy). And I could never, in my wildest dreams imagine getting married to someone that age - a girl who likely has not even hit puberty yet, and has no idea what she's getting into. Even when I was 20, even when I was 16... heck, for that matter, even when I was 11 it never even crossed my mind to get married to an 11 year old girl. Furthermore, I have a daughter 9 years old - only two years younger than this "bride". Do these parents value this girl so little? No amount of money is worth this kind of disgrace, and nothing will bring another stolen childhood back.
Since I am not desperately poor, I know that it is presumptive to put myself in the shoes of Ghulam's parents. There are a lot of things I might do if I were poor enough. But since my children are my greatest treasure, I know I would never sell them. No matter what. Moreover, even in a poor country, there are plenty of adult women who would like to find a husband. Why does this man need a child, unless pedophilia is his thing? Why does his society condone it?
Unfortunately, Mohammed is just following the example of his namesake, the prophet Mohammed. From the Sahih Bukhari Hadith:
Bukhari vol. 7, #88:"Narrated Urwa: "The prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death).""
In other words, Mohammed was 52 and had sex with a 9 year old girl. Not surprisingly, this is a topic that is not often openly discussed among Muslims today. But as the article says, these marriages are not as rare as you might think.
According to a UNICEF report:
Surveys of five Afghan refugee camps on the Pakistan border of girls aged 8 to 13 indicate rates of marriage that exceed 50 percent, with the largest concentration of marriages occurring between 10 and 11 years.It gets worse:
The girls’ primary school of about 150 students, run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, forms a sort of oasis. Classrooms, though spare, are made of cement and brick. Floors are stone rather than dirt. If only for a few hours a day, laundry, cooking and husbands seem far away for this second grade class.
Husbands?
According to Mrs. Habiba, the second grade teacher, and Mrs. Q’rmrun, the principal, over two-thirds of the nine-year-old girls sitting on the stone floor in a classroom an hour from Tora Bora were either already married or soon to become wives. Almost all of the older children were married, and only about one-third of the children who attended school in second grade continued to sixth grade.
In Iran, the legal age of marriage is nine years old (14 for boys), and it is widely believed that the Ayatollah Khomeini married a ten year old girl when he was 28.
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11 comments:
Well, maybe with a little more bombs dropped on these countries, they will see the light, drop the bad things they do and become happy Wal-Mart shoppers one day.
ian in hamburg
Ian,
That may be just the ticket.
Got rid of Hitler's worthless ass. Maybe these hypocritical "peaceful" suicide-murderers and pedophiles should be next on the permanent slap-down list.
Kind of like the Nazis in Hamburg were.
Oh, and judging by Mohammed's fancy dress weddin' duds in the photo, a little Wal-Mart action might be just the thing for his semi-human type.
We imperialists long for the day when all of the Muslim world shops at the Piggly-Wiggly--by force.
To Ian, I can't help pointing out that your country, Canada, is part of the occupation forces of Afghanistan. So is Germany, your country of residence.
Yeah yeah ... typical Christian blind judging of cultures they don't know anything about. Drop more bombs ... and kill the children you're all claiming to care about?? Hypocrites!
NoHypocrisy,
Yeah, satirical fascetiousness make-um head hurt, huh?
Stick with Dr. Seuss.
And learn that you can't have moral relativism without an actual basis in morality. As in, "it is immoral to have sex--or marriage--with children," or "it is immoral to blow oneself up in order to kill other people, including children." Right up there with "it is immoral to put people into ovens and turn them into soap".
If bombing them makes such immorality go away, then more bombs--and less PC cowardly sniveling dhimmitude such as you embody--are needed.
You're not a hypocrite, are you? You just condone evil by giving it moral equivalency to decency. Nah, that's not hypocritical, or cowardly.
The hell it's not.
Stick to the left-wing spoon-fed zombie indoctrination sites, learn lots of swell new catch-phrases and slogans, and prepare your forehead for the future by banging it in subservient fashion against the floor five times a day.
What a disgusting world view. More bombs will kill the kids you claim to care about. Anyone responsible for dropping bombs on children should be burned alive. Their motives are irrelevamt. It's still murder. And it's perpetrators are childkillers. This is true of Islamic terrorists, the British and American militaries, Hitler, Stalin, Bush, Blair etc.... the left/the right ... they all do it. They all KILL KIDS, intentionally or not. "Oh I'm sorry, we were only targetting military sites; what a pity we blew up schools and hospitals too" Please!
So many America-haters make a good point. "Pedophilia is a good thing because we drop bombs." This raises moral equivalency to a whole new level.
AuburnTom,
Yep, you're right. This is leftist reasoning at its best (worst).
For these rationality-retarded mouthers of PC propaganda, programmed as they are, logical reasoning (as in "it therefore follows that...") is completely, totally, and always trumped by knee-jerk emotional reaction--whether all the facts are in evidence, or consideration, or not. Morality is relative as long as the "preferred" and "programmed" ideological agenda is advanced or mollified--as in the case of "nohypocrisy's" insipid understanding of reality.
When a muslim extremist straps a bomb to an infant in an effort to hand said infant to, and kill, a Muslim politician (Bhutto), the Left is silent. When Saddam and Sons raped, pillaged, and TRULY tortured at will (you know , human beings put live into industrial plastic shredders, beaten til the skin hangs off and then dipped in raw sewage, bathed in acid, etc. etc. etc.), the "concerned" and "compassionate" Left are utterly, totally SILENT. For these people, all the advances of Western rationality, science, religion, ethics, etc. are to be rejected and villified unless they in some way support a radical new-age agenda with underpinnings in socialist/communist utopian hogwash (and isn't it interesting that more people--by the millions--have died at the hands of secular communists/socialists like Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Phol Pot, Castro, etc., than have been killed by all religious or cultural wars in human history combined?)
Let's make is simple for NH. Bad people who endlessly, culturally, institutionally, do horrible things to women, children, and other people of other belief-systems, IN PERPETUITY because their dogma (politico-religious as in Islam or political as in Communism) demands it, have to be STOPPED. Period. Short-term war sometimes makes for a long-term solution, hence no more Germans marching through Poland and no more Jews going into ovens. Without war, and bombs, that situation would have gotten worse, rather than being "corrected".
But you can't argue with the clueless--you can only give them a clue. Hopefully.
Hey JR, just because NoHypocrisy is an ignorant hypocrite, doesn't mean you can't be one too!
Wow.
Too different "anonymous" posters.
I'm the first one, and my initial is M.
And I tend to agree with the vast majority of J.R.'s well-reasoned posts and observations.
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