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If they gave an Oscar for the movie that best calls forth the moral imagination — our inherent ability to feel life as others live it — the winner would easily be a little film, just 83 minutes long, called OSAMA.
Not the Osama you're thinking of, not the butcher of 9/11. This Osama is a young girl growing up in Afghanistan under the tyranny of the Taliban, Islam's horrific fanatical gangsters who emerged out of the chaos after the Russians left the country.
After that war, before 9/11, the Taliban turned their full and frightening talents back to the repression of women.
Women exist, in this fundamentalist reading of sacred scripture, to be impregnated, indentured, and for disobeying the mullahs, stoned to death.
The film dramatizes an extraordinary moment in Kabul, the capitol, when hungry impoverished desperate women, mostly widows, protest for the right to work and are driven back by their masters.
Since only males are eligible for jobs, it is decided that Osama will be passed off as a boy. Her meager wages the family's only hope to stave off starvation.
It works for a while, though under the ubiquitous eyes of Taliban vigilantes, she is soon found out and imprisoned.
For her sin of posing as a boy, defiling the faith, she is given as a wife to a sadistic old cleric, condemned to bondage for the rest of her life in the name of god.
See this movie if you can. It cuts deep and stays long. Which is one reason OSAMA won the Golden Globe award as the best foreign language film of the year. But when you see it, keep in mind that the theological thuggery has returned to Afghanistan.
Human rights observers there say the situation for women and girls there is once again appalling. They can be stopped in public by the virginity police and examined for evidence of sexual intercourse. Young girls are often given over to settle blood feuds. One teenager who ran away from the octogenarian husband she had been forced to marry was arrested and sentenced to more than two years in prison.
On and on the litany goes·abductions, rape, harassment, suicides. Of course, Afghanistan is not the only place where women suffer from religious tyranny, but our honor as a nation is invested there. "The rights of the women of Afghanistan will not be negotiable." So said Secretary of State Colin Powell soon after the US started hunting for bin Laden.
And two months after 9/11 our first lady said: "Because of our recent military gains [there], women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. The fight against terrorism," she said, "is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."
They surely meant it. But misogynist fundamentalist warlords have taken up where the Taliban left off, and a country liberated by American power remains for women a totalitarian society. And for us, a broken promise.
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