While Joya lives in Afghanistan—under heavy protection of armed body guards due to several assassination attempts—she is currently touring North America to promote her new book, co-authored with Vancouver activists Derrick O’Keefe.

I interviewed Joya by phone yesterday.

Q&A

You’ve been touring all over North America promoting your new book—how has the response been so far?

There is a huge difference between the responses from the people and from policymakers. But I’m so honoured that, on behalf of my people, I’ve received strong solidarity and support. Of course not from everyone—a few that attend my talks stand up and express pro-war sentiments, but most people stand up and cry and show their support for the people of Afghanistan.

Two weeks ago I was in the U.S. and some people said “Apologize for what your government is doing” and I said, “This is your government’s doing, your government should apologize to you and my people and stop the war crime in my country.” I’ve received different forms of support, which gives us more hope, courage and determination, but we need more than your support and solidarity. We need you to put pressure on your government to stop this wrong-doing, this dirty business of politics. And also I’ve told some good politicians—I had an appointment with some Members of Parliament—that the silence of good people is worse than the actions of bad people.

So you think that Canadians should pressure the government to stop the military presence in Afghanistan?

Yes, of course. There is no question that we need a helping hand, an honest hand, a practical hand after the domination of Taliban. But unfortunately under the banner of women’s rights, human rights and democracy they pushed us from the frying pan into the fire. They replaced the Taliban with fundamentalist warlords who are a photocopy of the Taliban and the civil war in Afghanistan. In Kabul alone these warlords have killed more than 65,000 innocent civilians. If you want to know more about this go to the Human Rights and Amnesty International websites and the many books that have been written about this issue. But they were imposed on my people; that’s why my country is a safe-haven for terrorism.

They—the U.S. and Nato including the Canadian government—made my country the center of the drug trade. For example, even the New York Times wrote about the brother of Hamid Karzai, Ahmad Wali Karzai, which my people call the small Bush of Kandahar, being a famous drug trafficker and receives millions of dollars from the CIA. Your government sends taxpayer money and troops to such a mafia system. Eight years is enough to know that this current policy is wrong—even with the presence of thousands of foreign troops in Afghanistan, we don’t have security. And millions of Afghans suffer from injustice, corruption, joblessness and poverty and the situation of women in most provinces is hell. The killing of women is like the killing of birds. I can give you many examples that show how the current government is mentally like the Taliban. The situation is getting much worse—even in Kabul there is no security, even the UN office has been attacked—so it better that the foreigners leave us alone. My people are sandwiched between two powerful enemies: from the sky NATO occupation forces bombing and killing civilians under the guise of democracy, most of them women and children, and on the ground from the Taliban and warlords. These occupation soldiers themselves are the victims of their governments’ wrong policies. Democracy never comes about through war—by the barrel of gun—you should know better than that.

But the Canadian government, as part of Nato, is unjust because they follow the policy of the U.S. government. They invaded Afghanistan for their own strategic, economic and regional interests, not to bring democracy. We have many justice-loving, democratic people in Afghanistan. Since there is no honorable job for them, they are underground activists. And I think that you’ll agree that fighting against one enemy is much easier than fighting against two. So with the withdrawal of the troops it is easier to fight one enemy. No question that we need your helping hand from the justice loving people of this country and the anti-war organizations, we just don’t need these wrong policy makers, this foreign muscle like Prime Minister Harper.

Mr. Harper says that this Afghan election, which was a farce and a non-democratic election, was a successful one and congratulated Hamid Karzai for winning. Hamid Karzai compromised with misogynist warlords and negotiates with the Taliban. But the Harper government has not raised its voice against that, against the corrupt system of Hamid Karzai. Harper follows the U.S. policy in Afghanistan instead of serving my people, he’s serving the criminals, the misogynists, the terrorists. It is better to leave—we don’t need this so-called “helping hand.”

You’re still suspended from the Afghan Parliament, is that correct?

Yes, the parliament is against freedom of speech, which is an elementary part of democracy and in the mean time illegal. I’m an elected member of parliament, not appointed. People voted me in. And also, they were able to stop me from getting into the Parliament again because, as they say, it doesn’t matter who’s voting, it matters who’s counting. They haven’t allowed me back and their cheating is clear.

In another interview someone asked, if the troops leave Afghanistan, what will happen to you, as a woman, an activist woman? And I replied, let’s talk about what’s happening today. Today we already have a civil war. Today, my life is more in danger despite having bodyguards, compared with the time during Taliban rule. There have been assassination attempts on my life.

So you’re saying it’s worse now?

Yes, not only is it worse, it will be even worse if this occupation continues because they will make these misogynist terrorists even more powerful. And now they’re negotiating with the Taliban. The situation now is not only more risky for me as a person, it is also more dangerous for millions of people in Afghanistan, especially the women of my country. The only difference between the Taliban period and now is that day by day they make their crimes legal, as you saw with the disgusting law against Shi’te women that was recently passed. All of these crimes are happening in the name of democracy. That’s the only difference. Now they all negotiate with each other and have no problem—all of them are puppets of the CIA, and the more than 40 countries that are occupying Afghanistan continue this wrong policy.

You’re suspended, but what kind of work are you able to be involved with in Afghanistan? What are you currently doing there? Do you have to stay at home all the time because of security concerns?

Yes, I am an underground activist; I am risking my life for this cause. One day together with my people we will bring them [the warlords and the Taliban] to the international criminal court. My message to brave people, especially those that fight for human rights, is that I’m documenting the crimes of these warlords and the Taliban. In the meantime I’m trying to bring awareness to my people, especially women, whom I meet underground and who have often times been raped, complaining that the government does not listen to them. And you can see by the clips on my webpage that I’m trying to give them hope. The media in Afghanistan has banned me but when foreign media enters Afghanistan, I am able to talk with them. When you speak the truth against the occupation and against the warlords and Taliban, people join you if you’re honest. In the mean time, it’s risky. They want to eliminate me, as you’ve seen with the assassination attempts. I’ve had to move from safe-house to safe-house and not lead a normal existence, but I’m glad. Everyday I say I must be tireless and fearless because I have the support of my people and I carry a heavy responsibility on my shoulders. As always I say, I don’t fear death—I fear political silence against injustice. And I’m glad that we have so much support from people outside Afghanistan. But we need more.

The Islamic punk music scene would never have existed if it weren’t for his 2003 novel, The Taqwacores. Melding the Arabic word for god-consciousness with the edge of hardcore punk, Michael imagined a community of Muslim radicals: Mohawked Sufis, riot grrrls in burqas with band patches, skinhead Shi’as. These characters were entirely fictional.

But the movement they inspired is very real.

Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam follows Michael and his real-life kindred spirits on their first U.S. tour, where they incite a riot of young hijabi girls at the largest Muslim gathering in North America after Sena takes the stage. The film then travels with them to Pakistan, where members of the first Taqwacore band, The Kominas, bring punk to the streets of Lahore and Michael begins to reconcile his fundamentalist past with the rebel he has now become.

By stoking the revolution—against traditionalists in their own communities and against the clichés forced upon them from the outside—“we’re giving the finger to both sides,” says one Taqwacore. “Fuck you and fuck you.”

Sounds to me like a much-needed retort to the kind of reductive, ridiculous, or racist (or all three!) portrayals of Muslims in Western pop culture. Can’t wait to see it. Taqwacore plays this weekend in Toronto, and opens in Montreal on Monday.

Should we be telling bigots to just shut up? Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Bronclune.

A provision governing hate speech in Canada is under the microscope this week, after a tribunal of the Canadian Human Rights Commission concluded that it violates the right to freedom of expression guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This body doesn’t have the power to strike down Section 13(1) of the Human Rights Act, but the tribunal’s reluctance to apply the section against freedomsite.org webmaster Marc Lemire has set an interesting precedent and kicked up renewed debate over the right to free speech.

Queer people being one of the groups that anti-hate speech laws are supposed to protect, the outcome of this debate could have consequences for LGBT advocacy organizations. Queer activists are divided on the subject of hate speech. Some believe that the kind of homophobic and racist rhetoric that appears on websites like Marc Lemire’s contributes to an unsafe environment for the groups it targets, and should be proscribed. Others, wary of censorship, are willing to let the haters say whatever they like and hope that in the process they expose themselves as irrational and crazy.

This has tended to be the approach of LGBT equality campaigners Egale Canada. In 2005, they refused to endorse a complaint before the Alberta Human Rights Commission against conservative pastor Stephen Boissoin, the author of a letter to the Red Deer Advocate newspaper denouncing the “homosexual agenda.” Egale’s Executive Director said at the time that the organization wanted Boissoin’s assertions “aired, debated and subjected to public scrutiny.”

On the face of it, the director’s statement sits a little uneasily with Egale’s ongoing campaign against “Murder Music,” Jamaican dancehall music that features violently homophobic lyrics. A letter Egale sent to HMV and iTunes asking them to cease sales of music by particular dancehall artists last year made specific reference to the Section 13 provision against hate speech.

Clearly, there are cases where silencing homophobic commentators only serves to elevate them. But there are other cases where homophobic speech can contribute to violence against queer people, and where it seems to have genuinely vicious consequences.

Section 13(1) doesn’t require that hate speech include a call for violence, only that it be “likely to expose a person or persons [of a certain protected group] to hatred or contempt,” which is a pretty fuzzy line. Increasingly there are people, both liberal and conservative, who do not believe the Human Rights Commissions are best qualified to decide what sort of speech crosses that line. Partly, this is because the HRCs seem to think everything does: not one person accused of violating this fuzzy provision has yet been acquitted at the first round of hearings.

Section 13(1) is not the only provision that protects queer people and other minority groups from hate speech. Sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code (to which Egale’s Stop Murder Music campaign has also made reference) prohibit public incitements to hatred or violence against protected groups. The only thing distinguishing Section 13(1) is a lower standard of proof, and the fact that lodging a Human Rights complaint is free.

It’s not clear that the mounting convictions under Section 13(1) and the associated penalties are actually doing us any good. While there’s something satisfying about fining someone for spreading bile on the internet, doing so does not actually alter people’s hateful convictions — it just pushes them underground. Or worse, it makes loud indignant martyrs out of the people who hold those convictions.

Are Maclean’s sorry for publishing an article declaring that Muslims were going to breed Western civilization out of existence, for which they were issued an ultimately unsuccessful Human Rights complaint? Not one bit: they’re mad as hell and they won’t shut up about it. Ditto Ezra Levant, whose magazine The Western Standard was the subject of a Human Rights complaint for publishing the infamous Danish cartoons, and who is now one of the country’s most vocal opponents of the Human Rights Commissions.

Breaking down homophobia, racism and religious intolerance takes time and education — the last of which might be a more efficient use of government money than the current human rights apparatus. But ultimately, the Human Rights Commission’s biggest cost might be that it silences our enemies — whom we would be far better off knowing.

These kinds of problems have been around for years, of course, and the most visible public activism around bikes and cyclists’ rights have been the Critical Mass bike rides, where groups of cyclists take an unplanned route through the city, filling at least one lane of traffic, to prove the point that, as the Critical Mass slogan goes, “We’re not blocking traffic—we are traffic.”

However, Critical Mass has also driven away some cyclists who don’t like the tone of the rhetoric or the behaviour of the participants. One of the Critical Mass refuseniks, Jennifer Watkiss of Vancouver, recently started a new bike ride that aims to be a more polite alternative, called Critical Manners.

The first ride, on August 14, attracted about 100 cyclists. Reviews on the group’s website were generally positive, but not without criticism: Changing traffic lights splintered the mass into several groups, and a varied body of hand signal knowledge resulted in a few close calls when inexperienced cyclists stopped suddenly. The next ride takes place on September 11.

Q&A:

This: What made you want to start Critical Manners in Vancouver?

Jennifer Watkiss: The idea came about for the Vancouver police when the Vancouver Police issued their first-ever warning about a Critical Mass ride, for the July 2009 ride. The June ride had had a number of altercations, they had blocked off one of the major arteries in and out of town, and the July ride was set to come up on a long weekend, being the last Friday of the month. So the VPD issued a warning. I was explaining what the ride was to a friend of mine who had been out of the country for the past ten years, and was wondering what the fuss was all about. I’d always been frustrated with Critical Mass, thought it wasn’t the right thing to represent cyclists in Vancouver and hasn’t been for quite a while. So I was explaining to him what this was, and looking up the origins of Critical Mass found Critical Manners, which started in a similar response in San Francisco in, I believe, 2007. So I thought, wouldn’t that be a nice thing to do, and I figured I’d suggest the idea and, you know, 10 friends would show up, but cyclists in Vancouver really jumped on the cry and started to invite their friends, and pretty soon we had about a hundred people come out for a ride about three weeks ago.

Other than the people who came out to ride, what kind of response have you heard?

Most of the feedback has really come from cyclists who are frustrated with Critical Mass. It’s gotten a reputation for being quite antagonistic, and it’s sort of the most noticeable bike protest in Vancouver. So motorists are frustrated with it, and a lot of other cyclists are frustrated with it because they don’t want to be painted with the Critical Mass brush. Because the general consensus is that Critical Mass riders—or that cyclists, because of Critical Mass—are sort of kamikazes and civil disturbers. The biggest response was from cyclists, and then the media really picked up on it, because with the [VPD’s] announcement to stay out of downtown, a lot of people were really, really offended by that, rightly so, because why should they be held hostage downtown by a couple thousand cyclists who think they should have the right to block off traffic without any sort of plan, one Friday every month, especially considering the level it had gotten to.

What are the differences in terms of the actual ride? How is Critical Manners different from Critical Mass?

This is really about taking a positive action to show that something different can be successful. So there are two core differences: one is that Critical Manners has a planned route. One of the biggest disruptions with Critical Mass is that without a planned route—just the people in the front at any given time decide where to go—it throws off traffic, because no one knows where to avoid. Either you avoid the entire downtown core, or you just kind of cross your fingers that you don’t cross their path. So there’s that one. We always have a planned route, so that if anyone should feel the need to avoid us, they can. It’s also a courtesy to the city, there are lots of events that go on, and we don’t want to clash with film shoots, or other special events that people are planning, or road closures. The other thing is we truly ride as part of traffic. So we don’t take up a whole lane of the road, we ride as you would expect cyclists to ride every day. That’s largely single file: mostly because that’s part of the law in B.C., it’s part of the Motor Vehicle Act that bicycles are not supposed to ride “two abreast”, is the specific wording, and bicycles are to ride as far to the right as is practical. Often that means bike lanes, otherwise it’s to the right hand side of the road, that magic sweet-spot where hopefully you won’t get hit by a door opening in front of you, or crushed by traffic that’s going the same direction.

What we’ve seen in the last week, [with the Darcy Allen Sheppard case] is that the low-level, simmering antagonism between cyclists and motorists has boiled over in the last couple of days. Did you feel the same level of ambient hostility to you, as a cyclist, from motorists before you started doing Critical Manners?

Quite a lot. I’ve commuted almost every way you can think: bike, transit, car, walking, and I know, before I started biking regularly about four years ago, I was one of those drivers who thought, “Ugh, bikes, they’re horrible.” Just as a general sentiment I was willing to paint cyclists with the brush of acting like the laws didn’t apply to them. I’ve certainly felt that same hostility now as a cyclists, despite doing my best to try to ride within the rules of the road, in a safe and respectful manner. And I know other people do too, but there is certainly that low-level antagonism here, and there has been for quite some time. It’s one thing that keeps people from getting into cycling, is they just don’t feel safe. The cycling resources are getting better, but it feels still like “Bikes vs. Cars,” instead of everyone sharing the road. So Critical Manners is certainly a step to try to alleviate that, to put out some respect from cyclists for all road-users, in the hopes that will generate a bit more good feeling from everyone.

Some of the sentiments we’ve heard around here in the last few days are that people don’t want “good feelings”—what they want are hard-enforced laws, better bicycle infrastructure that will make bicycling safety the default rather than the exception on city streets. Critical Mass had always been what people felt was a necessary piece of civil disobedience in order to call attention to these issues. Do you think there’s legitimacy to that?

Absolutely. When the mass rides started, I certainly think they went a long way in drawing attention to cyclists, and saying “We’re out here, and when we get together as a group, we’re not small.” Vancouver, I feel, has gone quite a long way over the past few years, of trying to implement cycling infrastructure. The biggest problem with Critical Mass as it stands right now is that it has gone beyond bike activism and it’s attracted anarchists, basically. I’ve heard the sentiment often that “I love Critical Mass and I love to disturb the peace,” in words that aren’t quite that diplomatic. So there are also a number of cycling organizations that are doing what I think is a correct next step, and Critical Manners certainly follows with them, in saying, “Let’s use the bike resources, or ride as safely within the law as we can,” and when that’s not working, let’s demonstrate that to the city. Our city council right now is quite committed to bike resources, so let’s go out and show them we need new cross-town routes. We have a lot of North-South routes but only one East-West route that’s designated with a bike lane. We need more dedicated bike roads, not just bike lanes. Things like that. The Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition organizes rides to evaluate the current state of bike routes, so they go out and ride and say OK, this route has had a lot of increased traffic over the last little while, it’s less safe for bikes, or if new lights have been put in or not. There’s a lot of work going on in terms of continuously evaluating and improving the cycling infrastructure, and a lot of people don’t see that, because all they see is a mass of beer-drinking, pot-smoking, crazy people on bikes screaming at them.

Thursday March 15
SFU School of Communication CounterCulture Series presents,
Nandita Sharma
On
How to Stop Thinking Like a State:
No Border Movements and the Struggle Against National Forms of Discrimination
SFU Vancouver Campus
(515 West Hastings St. Vancouver)
7 pm
Room 1700 (7th Floor)
Nandita Sharma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawai’i. Her recent book, Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006), examines the importance of nationalist renditions of home, community and society to the indenturing of hundreds of thousands of people classified as non-immigrant workers. She is currently examining temporary “guest workers” in the U.S. Nandita has long been active in feminist, anti-racist and migrants’ rights movements. She helped to co-found a transnational campaign, Open the Borders!, in 1999.

Which brings me back to my original point. If you read Rutz’s rant, what he really seems to be scared of is men becoming more like women. I find that this is the real source of homophobia — hatred and fear of women …
That’s why Jack Malebranche is only fueling hatred against women by suggesting that gay men should redefine themselves in an effort to “remain men.” (You’ll note the portrait of him holding a baseball bat in a menacing manner — lovely).
That’s why I’ve always believed that the past battles between feminists and gay men (over censorship/pornography) and between lesbians and trans people (over access to women-only spaces) seemed so futile.
Because according to our opponents, the only thing worse than being gay is being a woman.

And in other news … the teen moralists over at Rebulution have just released the results of their modesty survey! Fun! The survey was restricted to men, and asked them about what articles of women’s clothing represent “stumbling blocks” in their ongoing battle to maintain their chastity.
In other words, what clothing should teenage girls avoid so as to guarantee that they won’t be sexually assaulted (or worse, shudder to think, they might actually feel good in their bodies and be encouraged to set their own sexual boundaries … noooo).
Some words of wisdom from the survey: “A tankini with shorts is immodest … Seeing a girl stretching (e.g. arching the back, reaching the arms back, and sticking out the chest) is a stumbling block … Lifting a long skirt any higher than the knee in order to step over something is a stumbling block.”
I couldn’t make this up if I tried.