inspired to aspire

Faith Amid the Absurd**: As an Afghan woman, I have learned to live with folly as a constant companion. My nation’s tragedy is treated as an exemplary tale rather than a call for justice. When an Afghan woman speaks, she is told to stay silent. *The Modern Empire’s Favorite Performance*: Meanwhile, in the world’s grand theater, state violence is not hidden; it is performed. There are scripts for everything: democracy delivered by drone, humanitarianism enforced through sanctions, and feminism exported through occupation. The actors are the same: presidents, generals, CEOs, and UN ambassadors applauding one another for “courageous restraint.” The victims play their roles too. They appear on screens long enough to draw sympathy, then vanish once the next crisis auditions for attention. The news cycle moves on, empathy resets. The audience claps. Curtain down. Behind it all lies one of the most grotesque jokes of modern history: the oppressor’s monopoly on morality. The same nations that lecture the world on freedom built their empires on slavery. The same powers that condemn extremism have armed dictatorships to serve their markets. The same voices that call for peace manufacture weapons that guarantee war. *The Irony of Liberation*: I often find myself defending the Palestinian nation, not out of politics but out of faith, because in Islam, to stay silent in the face of oppression is itself a sin. Yet, another truth burns within me: my primary duty is to the women of Afghanistan, my sisters who are imprisoned without walls. They are being tortured under the guise of purity, sexually violated by the same men who preach virtue and stripped of education, work, and voice, all to ensure they remain invisible enough to be forgotten. They are being humiliated into silence. Every law passed in their name becomes another chain around their necks. And every time the world calls it “complex,” another door to their freedom shuts. The international community loves its metaphors, resilience, empowerment, capacity building, as long as those words don’t require them to act. Feminist movements chant “sisterhood,” but go mute when the sisters don’t look European enough for the photo op. The hypocrisy would be laughable if it weren’t so lethal. *Colonial Logic in Postcolonial Packaging*: As Fatima Bhutto observed, the crises of the global South are still filtered through European frameworks as if the same colonial lens that created these disasters can somehow heal them. Western think tanks hold symposiums on “developing nations,” much like doctors congratulating themselves on the infection they caused. The United Nations, that supposed temple of global morality, bends not toward justice but toward power. It was never meant to hold European or American leaders accountable; its purpose is to discipline everyone else. They call it international order, but what it truly represents is a hierarchy of impunity. And so, Biden remains off the hook. Netanyahu remains off the hook. They can bomb, starve, and occupy with the confidence of men who know the judge is a friend and the jury is asleep. The UN’s judges and lawyers are bullied into silence, forced to recite the same tired lines about “complex geopolitics.” The chamber that once promised justice now hosts a theatre of selective outrage, a tragicomedy written by those who fund it. *The Forgotten Grave of Afghanistan*: Afghanistan, of course, has been retired from global empathy. Once a stage for televised liberation, it is now just another bureaucratic file gathering dust at the UN. Its tragedy has been downgraded to a “state issue,” a polite way of saying it is “no longer profitable.” Women there are dying beneath earthquake rubble because non-mahram men are forbidden or too afraid to touch them. Their deaths are not accidents; they are policies disguised in religious language. Their lives are worth less than the fabric that covers them. Yet, to the world, this is not news; it’s merely a local custom, a cultural tragedy, something too inconvenient to indicate. *Democracy and Eloquence*: Something is often taken for granted, perhaps because it wears a flag and a necktie or, in our case, a turban and a long beard. This is state violence itself. We have been conditioned to perceive violence only when it bleeds in the streets, not when it signs legislation, issues decrees, or delivers humanitarian speeches with a trembling voice and a clean conscience. Representative democracy is dissolving before our eyes, quietly, like a sugar cube in warm water. Dissent has become a decorative slogan, and authoritarianism no longer storms through the door; it enters politely through policy. We are asked to welcome it, even to thank it, because it arrives in the name of security, order, and democracy. From the surge in political violence to the unholy alliance of legacy media and corporate interests, from the suffocating nationalism on our screens to the comfortable silence of many feminist movements regarding Gaza, this is a conversation no one wants to have. Speaking about it honestly means admitting that the freedom that sacred word we all proclaim so proudly has been quietly sold to the highest bidder….

Read Full Post »