How cartoonists around the world reacted to the murder of journalists and cartoonists at the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo.
Egypt
Saudi Arabia
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To see all the cartoons click link below.
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/01/cartoons-global-response-attack-charlie-hebdo
Posted By F. Sheikh
Shared by Tahir Mahmood
Kay Hagan just wanted to swim. It was late 2008, and the Democrat was newly arrived on Capitol Hill as North Carolina’s junior senator-elect. But Hagan was told that the Senate pool was males-only. Why? Because some of the male senators liked to swim naked.
It took an intervention by Senator Chuck Schumer, head of the Rules Committee, to put a stop to the practice, but even then “it was a fight,” remembers pollster Celinda Lake, who heard about the incident when the pool revolt was the talk among Washington women.
The pool wasn’t the only Senate facility apparently stuck in the Dark Ages. The restroom closest to the Senate floor that was set aside for women senators had only two stalls. By 2013, with 20 women in the Senate, restroom traffic jams were commonplace, forcing some of the female senators to traipse to a first-floor restroom far from the chamber. Two additional stalls, an extra sink and more storage space were added in the fall of 2013, after several female senators raised the issue publicly.
The great potty controversy received news coverage in both theWashington Post and the New York Times, where the female senators were reduced to raving perkily about their new facilities. “We’re even going to have a window,” New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a former governor and foreign policy specialist, was quoted as enthusing.
Yet some indignities have nothing to do with a lack of accommodations.
Debbie Stabenow, a veteran lawmaker, recalls meeting with a senior agricultural lobbyist several years ago, when she was chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee and shepherding the massive farm bill.
As they were talking in her office, the lobbyist, an older man, reached over and patted her hand. “I know it’s going to be tough,” he assured her, “but you’ll do the best you can.”
“My blood pressure went up about 20 points,” Stabenow remembers, tension rising even now, long after the farm bill made it through to passage.
In the entire history of the United States Senate, a mere 44 women have served. Ever. Those few who have were elected to a club they were never meant to join, and their history in the chamber is marked by sexism both spectacular and small. For decades in the 20th century after women first joined, many male senators were hardly more than corrupt frat boys with floor privileges, reeking of alcohol and making little secret of their sexual dalliances with constituents, employees and any other hapless subordinate female they could grab. But perhaps more striking is what I found after interviewing dozens of women senators, former senators and their aides over the past several months: Even today, the women of the Senate are confronted with a kind of floating, often subtle, but corrosive sexism, a sense of not belonging that is both pervasive and so counter to the narrative of real, if stubbornly slow, progress that many are reluctant to acknowledge this persistent secret.
A few months ago, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand published a memoir, Off the Sidelines, in which she revealed that after she went on a diet and lost 50 pounds, one of her “favorite older members of the Senate”—later reported to be the late Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye—approached her from behind, “squeezed my waist, and said, ‘Don’t lose too much weight now. I like my girls chubby!’” Gillibrand’s memoir sparked a kind of public outrage that it might not have a few decades ago. But to many of the women senators I spoke with, Gillibrand’s story is so run-of-the mill that they marvel she considered it worthy of mention. “People have commented on my looks,” says Kay Bailey Hutchison, the retired Republican from Texas. “I just think that there are some things you just ought to brush off.”
For many of the women, things are still immeasurably improved from their days as a truly embattled minority. It is, after all, progress of a sort that the 20 women senators today have outgrown their single tiny restroom; that they are committee chairs (six of the panels under the outgoing Democratic Senate were led by women); and legislative leaders who get things like December’s giant omnibus spending bill done. It’s a “sea change,” says Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill.
But there’s another present too, of exclusion and unstated assumptions; these women have all found themselves at one point or another uncomfortably aware of being outsiders in an environment conceived and constructed for men. Sometimes it’s the tacit dismissal of their expertise; like Stabenow, Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, finds that people who approach her to impart information, or extract it, sometimes will turn to her male aide, “and won’t make the eye contact or have the conversation with a woman senator.”
Even in the not-so-recent past, this was not merely a matter of making women feel excluded; some of what the female senators have experienced bordered on sexual harassment or the threat of it. In one infamous 1993 episode, the late South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond tried to fondle Washington Democrat Patty Murray’s breast on the Senate elevator. So notoriously predatory was Thurmond that when Susan Collins came to the Senate in 1997, she was warned to avoid getting on an elevator alone with him. A Republican from Maine, Collins describes publicly for the first time being headed for the senators-only elevator and seeing Thurmond walking in the same direction. She did a U-turn and took the stairs. “The reason I remember the incident so well is because it was observed by one of my Republican male colleagues,” recalls Collins. He “started laughing because he knew exactly why I was turning around and not getting on the elevator.”
That was nearly 20 years ago, yet women still are seen as intruders into many of the Senate’s formerly all-male spaces. Even McCaskill, who lauds the progress made over the past three decades, has stories to tell. The first time she tried to venture onto the Senate floor after taking office in 2007, she was barred by a doorman who told her there were no floor passes for staffers. “I said, ‘I think I deserve my floor pass,’” recalls McCaskill. “He was mortified.”
***
For most of the 20th century, the few women who served as U.S. senators usually did so briefly, upon the death of a husband. They were appointed to keep the seat warm, which is to say, safe, until the political establishment could choose a real successor—a man, of course.
This article is shared by Zafar Khizer and Muhammad Waheed.
THE gut-wrenching massacre in Peshawar’s Army Public School has left Pakistan aghast and sickened. All political leaders have called for unity against terrorism. But this is no watershed event that can bridge the deep divides within. In another few days this episode of 134 dead children will become one like any other.
All tragedies provoke emotional exhortations. But nothing changed after Lakki Marwat when 105 spectators of a volleyball match were killed by a suicide bomber in a pickup truck. Or, when 96 Hazaras in a snooker club died in a double suicide attack. The 127 dead in the All Saints Church bombing in Peshawar, or the 90 Ahmadis killed while in prayer, are now dry statistics. In 2012, men in military uniforms stopped four buses bound from Rawalpindi to Gilgit, demanding that all 117 persons alight and show their national identification cards. Those with typical Shia names, like Abbas and Jafri, were separated. Minutes later corpses lay on the ground.
If Pakistan had a collective conscience, just one single fact could have woken it up: the murder of nearly 60 polio workers — women and men who work to save children from a crippling disease — at the hands of the fanatics.
Hence the horrible inevitability: from time to time, Pakistan shall continue to witness more such catastrophes. No security measures can ever prevent attacks on soft targets. The only possible solution is to change mindsets. For this we must grapple with three hard facts.
First, let’s openly admit that the killers are not outsiders or infidels. Instead, they are fighting a war for the reason Boko Haram fights in Nigeria, IS in Iraq and Syria, Al Shabab in Kenya, etc. The men who slaughtered our children are fighting for a dream — to destroy Pakistan as a Muslim state and recreate it as an Islamic state. This is why they also attack airports and shoot at PIA planes. They see these as necessary steps towards their utopia.
No one should speculate about the identity of the killers. Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani released pictures of the eight ‘martyrs’, justifying the killing of minors with reference to Hadith (a horrific perversion, of course). Dizzied by religious passions, the men roamed the school searching for children hiding under desks and shouted “Allah-o-Akbar” before opening fire. Shot in both legs, Shahrukh Khan, 16, says he survived by playing dead. Another surviving student, Aamir Ali, says that two clean-shaven gunmen told students to recite the kalima before shooting them multiple times.
Second, Pakistan must scorn and punish those who either support terrorism publicly or lie to us about the identity of terrorists. Television anchors and political personalities have made their fortunes and careers by fabricating wild theories. For example, retired Gen Hamid Gul and his son Abdullah Gul have adamantly insisted multiple times on TV that suicide attackers were not circumcised and hence not Muslim. Though body parts are plentifully available for inspection these days, they have not retracted earlier claims.
Those on the state’s payroll that encourage violence against the state must be dismissed. Maulana Abdul Aziz of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid — a government mosque — led an insurrection in 2007 against the Pakistani state. He flatly refuses to condemn the Peshawar massacre. Other state employees have called upon all to not pray for army soldiers killed in action. At another level is Jamaatud Dawa’s supremo, Hafiz Saeed. He blames India for the Peshawar massacre and, ignoring ironclad evidence, misguides Pakistanis about the identity of the enemy.
Among political leaders, none is more blameworthy than Imran Khan, the icon of millions of immature minds. He has never named the Taliban as terrorists even when they claimed responsibility for various atrocities. That the TTP may be involved in the Peshawar massacre is the first exception, but this is contained only in a tweet. For a man who uses the strongest language against political opponents and has hogged TV channels for months, he has yet to condemn TTP before a national audience. Why the reticence?
It was even worse earlier. In 2009, as the Taliban took over Swat, on Hamid Mir’s Capital Talk he claimed that the Swat Taliban were fighting a war of liberation against the Americans. When I asked why they were fighting in Pakistan and killing our policemen and soldiers, he accused me of being an American agent and then, later, attempted to physically attack me. Readers can google this video.
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Pakistan has undergone a 9/11 moment. The unprecedented scale of the attack on school children and teachers by Taliban elements has shocked the nation and its political and defense establishment to form a united front. It is too early to tell what concrete results may emerge but the beginning is at least promising. Imran khan has called off his long boycott and national disobedience against the present government to face the crisis in the part of the country run by his political party which was the focus of the terrorist outrage.
Pakistan is a country of pent up rage and needs. Imran khan has given voice to grievances of the common folk but his tactics of boycotts, vilification of government and judicial figures do not create a model of good governance. The democratic process in Pakistan is shaped by vested dynastic interests, crony capitalism, religion and an elitist mindset that sets up privilege as a right for the haves.
Clearly there is a pressing need to make the process more inclusive. Demanding the forced resignation of a prime minister through the sheer will of a determined personality does not foster national reforms. The movement becomes yet another manifestation of personality driven agendas that have a lock on the existing political system.
The true drive for reform needs to focus on making institutions of government more open and accountable. The direct political interference into the routines of government has to cease. The bureaucrats and agency heads should function as professionals openly accountable for their performance to the public rather than the political paymasters. People recognize but putting programs into shape is going to be a torturous process.
For the immediate future the country is in a reactive mode. The national revulsion demands revenge. The government has lifted the EU inspired moratorium on executions and has started to hang people on a regular basis. The reactions by the militants are sure to be even more violent. The government has to be judicious in its use of force and corner the militants through an organized campaign of interdiction. At this point it remains a wish as a befitting memorial in memory of the innocent victims of a heinous act.