Category: Protests and Rallys (Page 2 of 2)

At Zombietime c/o Instapundit: lots of encouraging pictures from a March 22nd rally in support of U.S. troops, which was held at the same Berkeley Marine recruiting center that has been a frequent focus of antiwar activists. Slightly old news at this point, but worth a look.

My kind of feminist!

At Tim Blair’s (hat tip: Instapundit)

A deeply-bowed, indebted tip of the hat to Instapundit for pointing this article out.  It is without a doubt one of the best pieces of work I have had the good fortune of reading in a long while, and I’m so glad not to have missed it.  By all means, please do “read the whole thing” as Glenn suggests!

IN Tehran in June, several thousand people held a peaceful demonstration calling for legal changes that would give a woman’s testimony in court equal value to a man’s. The demonstrators, most of them women, were attacked with tear gas and beaten with batons by men and women from Iran’s State Security Forces, according to Amnesty International.

Iranian women may not travel without their husband’s permission but they are allowed to wield a truncheon against other women.

Do you think women in Western countries marched in solidarity with the Iranian women demonstrators? Of course not. Do you think there are posters and graffiti at universities condemning the Iranian President? Of course not. You know, without needing to go there, that any graffiti at universities will be condemning George W. Bush, not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (I concede Bush is easier to spell.)

You know, before you get there, that at the Melbourne Writers Festival starting this weekend the principal hate figures are going to be Bush and John Howard. You know there will be many sympathetic references to David Hicks but probably none to Ashraf Kolhari, an Iranian mother of four who has been in jail for five years for allegedly having sex outside marriage and, until last week, who was under sentence of death by stoning.

Thank goddess, as they used to say: a few Western feminists have begun to wonder why women who once marched for women’s rights are marching alongside people who would take away even the most basic of those rights.

It has bothered me for a long while now that Western feminists seem to have been largely and conspicuously silent on issues of women’s rights in the Muslim world, and on the subject of precious advances in that arena that have been made and ought to continue to be made in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.  Ironically, such feminists have often chosen to instead focus their ire on the very country and culture whose efforts have made most of those recent liberating advances possible.  It does seem to me that Western feminism has taken a passive and obedient back seat to multiculturalism’s demand that we pander to notions of cultural equivalence, which I find has worrisome implications for women elsewhere in the world and for the future success of freedom at large.  I sincerely hope we’ll start to hear more from corageous, independent-minded feminists like Pamela.

I’ve gone and gotten hooked on Penn Jillette’s weekday radio show recently, thanks to the podcast that enables me to catch it out here in the Bay Area at times when I can manage to listen. In addition to being frequently hilarious, Penn very often has interesting things to talk about and insightful things to say about them. To borrow terms in which Penn frequently describes himself: He’s my kind of nutty libertarian atheist wack-job.

Monday’s episode regarding the pro-immigrant / “Day Without Immigrants” rallies held around the U.S. was especially good, and Penn managed to express almost verbatim what I’ve been thinking on the subject.

Open up the borders entirely. Let anyone in. In order to do that — in order to let anyone in — you have to stop running a socialist country.

Given sufficient attention to security concerns, I’m all in favor of there being a reasonable legitimate means for immigrants to enter the U.S. and petition for and obtain citizenship. It’s been said so often as to have become a cliché, but it’s an accurate one: We truly are a nation of immigrants — and who are we, once in the “club”, to shut the doors? Immigrants, on balance, contribute far more to this country than they take, and I think we should welcome anyone who wants to come here and contribute to and be a part of this way of life we’ve defined with open arms (though unlike some advocates of open immigration I think it’s reasonable to expect immigrants to assimilate to some extent). It should come as no surprise, however, that this desire for openness to immigration comes into conflict with the desire many people have for our government to guarantee citizens a growing array of social service provisions. Having the latter only lends fuel to the otherwise specious counter-argument that immigrants are a net drain on resources and here to take more than they give back.

On a related note: Given that there appears to be a fair amount of overlap between those who advocate on behalf of immigrants and the folks who continually insist that the U.S. is such a dreadful place to have to live, I can’t help but wonder how such people proceess the fact that there are so many people who want so desperately to come here and live in this supposed cornucopia of crises that they routinely endure great hardships and take great risks in order to do so. Do they simply think these people have been misled about the promise of America?

Seems like if it was that big a disappointment, word would eventually get around and the immigrants would stop coming in droves. And yet, they keep coming. Fancy that.

As anti-war, anti-Bush, and, it appears to me, anti-U.S. protestors descended (from the moral high ground?) on Washington D.C. yesterday, I found it heartening to see counter-demonstrators making their own appearance in support of our country, our troops, and our fight. I wish I had been there to stand with them.

Instapundit has linked to various efforts to photoblog the day, here and here. Boatloads of interesting pictures at Ed McNamara’s site and also at this blog.

I’m having trouble getting Blogger’s image upload support to work at the moment, so I hope these folks won’t mind my linking a few pics directly.

UPDATE: More pictures at Instapundit.

International A.N.S.W.E.R.: Authentically anti-war, or “pro-war, but on the other side”?

MORE: Pictures from the San Francisco rally.