Shaima Rezayee is Dead
Charles Paul Freund | May 22, 2005, 11:22am
An Afghan female veejay famous for presenting racy music videos from Turkey to her young Kabul audience has been found shot to death, according to a story in the Times of London that was headlined, "The woman killed for pop music."
Shaima Rezayee had been the only woman veejay on the hugely popular music service, Tolo TV, though her show had been cancelled recently under pressure from religious conservatives. Police believe her murder was linked to her TV notoriety, the Times reported.
"Like other young women," wrote reporter Catherine Philp, "Ms Rezayee was denied five years of schooling while the Taleban were in control and like them was forced to wear the burkha whenever she ventured out of the house. When the Taleban were driven from power, she was one of the first to drop the veil. Then in October she burst on to Kabul television screens presenting an hour-long music and chat show airing videos of Western singers such as Madonna, as well as Turkish and Iranian pop stars."
Tolo TV was established by an Afghan expat who had returned from Australia. "Tolo quickly became the most watched station in the city with a reported 81 per cent audience share," notes the story. The service has since gone national.
In the Arab world, women veejays have become ubiquitous. And if music video channels can draw 80 percent of Kabul's audience, then the campaign by Afghan religious conservatives against "unIslamic" TV fare is plainly a lost cause. A look at post-Taliban "vulgarity" in Afghanistan opens this story.
Virginia Postrel passed along this link; her excellent blog is here.
gaius marius | May 22, 2005, 6:00pm | #
I thought to myself that my personal sacrifice in going to Iraq would be worth it if more young men like this can express themselves freely in monotonous tonic chords, without some goddamned "Religious Leader" (insert Darth Vader Imperial Theme Music here) wagging their fingers, clicking their tongues and telling them that they are not on God's good side for loving the Devil's Music (GASP!!!!!)
that's your ridiculous problem, not iraq's nor islam's nor what's left of sensible america's. and, as you've either forgotten or never knew, the saddam we destroyed repressed the religious expression of his peoples, thereby holding his nation together. we will resort to the same tactic before it's over, if we don't come to our sense and tuck tail.
don't see it as imperialism, but the freest form of personal expression.
undoubtedly. why we should kill tens of thousands and attempt to destroy a 1300-year-old faith for them to choose to watch ass-shakin' on the telly is utterly beyond me, however. OOOOH, right -- i'll be safer. i forgot. :)
and that's not even to address the more difficult question -- which is, even if we want to, can we? or are we just another bloody-handed empire with wrongheaded pious intentions, murdering for what we think is right but is really just narrowminded utopian futility bolstered by the new whig history?
let's not sit here and pretend that because the afghani mark goodman got shot, religion is of no value and we must start bombing for Freedom(TM). that's for the idiots over at the corner to defecate into the internet. is it any different at all from crackpot "christians" who murder ob-gyns in america? why aren't we addressing the moral bankruptcy of american protestantism? after all, america has become totalitarian in a way that most despots can only dream of for lack of funding. why aren't we staging an invasion of middle america?
because all that "reason" isn't. it's propaganda, misleading hyperbole that only some westerners unfamiliar with complexity seem to listen to in any great degree -- and they because it's what they want to believe. it's mentally lazy, yields a path to wildeyed conviction, and it offers the course of action that
some powerful american postmoderns falsely find vitally affirming and butressing for their decaying civilization: total war.
(as an aside: it's despicable, frankly, that a magazine ostensibly called "reason" has become home to such nonsensical ideological drivel -- for shame! where is your rigor? where is your empiricism?? have the decency to change the name of the rag to "nietzschean ideologue" before you run bits about how the only sensible muslims are into christina aguilera.)
thoreau | May 23, 2005, 2:39am | #
Jason-
It's not that I want ONE reason and no more. It's just that I'm skeptical of any government plan that involves second and third order effects. Given government's lousy track record at accomplishing it's objectives, I think the ambitions should be limited to first order effects.
If somebody wants to argue that Hussein posed a military threat and that the US military could achieve the military objective of removing that military threat, well, that's a manageable proposition. We can debate the magnitude of the threat and the necessity of the action, but the argument involves a military solution to a military problem. And the US just happens to have the best military on the face of the earth, so I am confident that the military objective can be achieved. The only real question then is the magnitude of the threat posed by Iraq, or at least the
potential threat and whether the risk of that potential merits a war despite the unknowns.
But when somebody starts talking about using the military to achieve a social objective in one place, and then hope that the social objective (if achieved) causes a ripple effect that causes changes in other places, well, is it OK if I'm skeptical? Building a stable, liberal democracy takes more than an election held under the supervision of foreign soldiers. That may be a necessary condition, but it's usually not sufficient. And success can't be measured until the second election, or whenever the winners of the first election are defeated at the ballot box.
And then there's the ripple effect. We have to hope that it happens despite uncertain mechanisms.
So, I know I've said all this before, but here's an angle that I haven't really articulated before:
Somebody comes up to me and says that he wants to use a government agency to achieve a difficult goal that the agency wasn't really designed to accomplish. And that success or failure could take up to a decade to measure. And that the ultimate success or failure will hinge on a ripple effect and broader social changes via mechanisms that are difficult to explain.
Am I really so out of line for being skeptical? If this were domestic policy I know that everybody on this forum except joe would share my skepticism.
So, basically, my simple request is that military actions be justified by clear military objectives that have clear metrics and time frames for success or failure, rather than less clear social objectives that can only be properly measured after a decade.
Remember, this is the government that we're talking about.
