In the last 24 hours or so, a passel of IDF girlfriends had some play with a camera, a la “a boo grab” showing off some string bikini bootay and backsides bare of all but the guns, which got me curious as to who else has been snapping pictures or recording videos along the themes of beauty in uniform, girls with guns, platoons just havin’ a little fun, and despite the job description — or because of it — just a whole lot of love and bonding going on.
Choose one or a few — I couldn’t watch all of these again . . . well, let me think about that.
Many of these do raise the question: what is was will the fighting be about?
Even the lasses covered in black burqa and holding big sticks for weapons look pretty good.
Maybe it’s the music that most changes how everything looks . . . .
Also: Anyone, I know, may experience YouTube videos in serial fashion, but there’s something about having a whole collection on one page, a kind of From Russian to Israel With Love — and some grins between — that holds this experience in one place.
A retired drill instructor taught me and a lot of other folks how to dance in the country-western way (knowledge that I handily passed along by teaching coach Joe Gibbs how to dance the “Macharina”, but I’ll leave that story for another day), so it was with the memory of good times that I found this cafeteria “flash mob” video from Afghanistan.
I don’t know what all the fighting’s about, but I know what peace is about. I’m a little prejudiced here, but I think this is what peace looks like and this, this peace, especially in the eternal oasis of the Jewish heart.
In the previous post, I played around with an hypothetical concept possibly undergirding the west’s approach to the Islamic Small Wars: “The Least War Possible”. What is there to greet me when I’ve finished with it? The above referenced article in Dawn.
Here I’m arguing for managed change, evolutionary adjustment, a slow but least costly working out of many things, and with many things to be observed and discovered as we go, and the news from overseas is telling me that someone’s idea of progress divides over whether ” . . . women will be completely banned from obtaining an education . . . or just limited to a fifth-grade education.”
What would Malala say?
I am not the only one asking the question.
How should the young Malala see the incoming Prime Minister’s reaching out to the Taliban? They are her tormentors but he wants to mend fences with them.
Much of the foreign invasion of Afghanistan was advertised as a measure to liberate the Malalas from the patriarchal country’s hand-reared medieval rulers. Are we looking at a U-turn ahead, on both sides of the Durand Line?
In the direction suggested by each article, Prime Minister Sharif’s Pakistan may be heading toward the kind of freedom known to North Koreans, i.e., an isolated state of affairs best preserves the narcissist’s bubble.
However, as elsewhere among the Muslim-majority states of the world, that bubble has been popped in some places and pressured in others: mining, productivity, and trade remain essential to the world’s economies, and none are so grand or great as to get away with removing themselves from the world altogether.
Perhaps with more assuredly secure dangerous nuclear power sources and fragile alternative energy systems in place, state reliance on deep global economic integration and cooperation may be reduced, giving local to regional cultures greater ability in “sustainable development” (hark ye back to McRobie and Schumacher and Brown).
However, the world will not get there with women held captive in cruelly imposed ignorance.
Q: What is the cruelest thing an adult may do to a child?
A: Fail to educate the same.
There are zero dull days for anyone “tracking” conflicts via the World Wide Web, but the past several days have been especially touched by the attempted murder of Malala Yusufzai, a 14-year-old schoolgirl braving the Taliban — insulting them, actually — by merely taking ownership of her right to go to school.
This video featured Malala in 2009, and it starts this way: “In the area where I live, there are some people who want to stop educating girls through guns.”
Given the rush of expanding attention those intending to “stop educating girls through guns” have brought upon themselves by demonstrating the kind of thing they themselves seem to have learned to do best, they may have brought to the Swat Valley Region of Pakistan a more committed and vigorous national and international effort to renew civility, education, and global modernity — its freedoms and its values — all around themselves.
Reported by Reuters yesterday: “”We targeted her because she would speak against the Taliban while sitting with shameless strangers and idealized the biggest enemy of Islam, Barack Obama.”
If you think that’s a bit upside-down, considering what the conservative right in America and elsewhere has been saying about Obama these past and long four years, consider the same source said to Reuters, “The Quran says that people propagating against Islam and Islamic forces would be killed.”
A careful and close reader might catch the ambiguity and ambivalence embedded in that claim.
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