Afghanistan is not likely to compete in a World Cup any time soon but its women's side trains fiercely in the heat, wearing headscarfs, track suits and long sleeves that cover everything except hands and faces.
Wearing shorts in Afghanistan is taboo. A few of the more daring players have swapped Muslim veils for baseball caps as they train next to the NATO headquarters in Kabul, nerve centre of a nine-year fight against the Taliban....
Teammate Khalida Popal calls football "a passion" but a struggle for women, who were forbidden from sport and all public activities, including going to school, under the 1996-2001 Taliban regime."It's hard to play football here," she explains. Aged 20, she is one of the oldest players in a young Afghan team. She watches recruits shooting at the goal, clad in T-shirts bearing the image of President Hamid Karzai.
"Some families refuse, they say this is not for girls," she says. "Others don't like it that we go abroad without our families."
In 2007, the women's team started to travel, playing in Germany, Jordan and Pakistan.
"Sometimes, it just makes me cry. You have to fight to continue to play. It's just like the Americans who fight against the Taliban," she says.
Under the post-Taliban Afghan constitution, women are equal to men and a handful have competed in overseas competitions, mostly in martial arts events.
But women's groups say they remain the most marginalised and underprivileged group in the country, subject to violence and discrimination in the name of Afghan tradition. The war is another hindrance.
In the middle of training, the team suddenly races for the stands as -- without warning -- two US helicopters prepare to land on the pitch.
"Normally they warn us, but this time they've forgotten," says Wali, bending over to protect herself from the powerful downdraft as a Black Hawk has just set down on the grass.
Due to safety concerns in Kabul, where Taliban suicide attacks are on the rise and where facilities are few, women play on ground attached to the general headquarters of the 142,000-strong foreign military in Afghanistan.
When the aircraft take off, training can resume.....
Something to think about when one hears blather about no funding for women's sports or why Afghanistan is a lost cause.
Ezra Levant (sans cape) turns the blinkers on what many would or should believe is unthinkable. Would anyone excuse Karla Homolka or Paul Bernardo for murdering Tammy Homolka? How about excusing the murder of Aqsa Parvez by her own father and brother?:
How do you feel? How do you feel about a repulsive excuse for humanity like Jim Coyle telling you that the murderers are full of love? And that their deliberate, calculated murder of Aqsa was a "crime of passion", the only time the word crime is used. And that this was not a morally reprehensible act, but a "tragedy". That's just a step over from the word "accident", isn't it. A bridge collapsing is a tragedy. Not a cold-blooded murder.
Would Coyle dare write this way about Tammy Homolka? Of course not. Even the craven Star would not publish such a desecration. And if, by some fluke, it had gone to print, he'd be fired the next day.
But not so for defaming the memory of Aqsa Parvez. Why? Is the murder of a brown Muslim girl less odious than the murder of a white Christian girl? That's pretty much Coyle's argument, actually. He's racist. Here's the rest of his column, this time with no words changed:
They need to understand how generation gaps exist at the best of times, in the best of families – and how wide one might be between a 57-year-old father and 16-year-old daughter.
They need to understand how profoundly disorienting is the experience of immigration – the risk taken, the price paid by someone moving to the other side of the world, almost always in the interests of the next generation.
The stakes are huge, just like the aspirations, just like the certainty of divided loyalties and conflict to come.
It's for their perennial resonance that stories of the intergenerational culture clash are so frequently retold – in recent times in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, in Bend it Like Beckham, in a library's worth of stories of shtetl Jews arriving in America.
Most of the time, compromises made, the story works out. Occasionally, it even inspires art, brings out the best in us.
And sometimes, the worst.
Can you believe this disgusting man, comparing Aqsa Parvez's murder -- an "honour killing" because she refused to dress like a chattel owned by the males in her family -- to the heartwarming, light-hearted culture clashes in Bend it Like Beckham or Yiddish stories?
Honour killings? It's a problem every immigrant has! It's part of the great American dream, really!
Other than the 3% of Canadians who are Aboriginal, the rest of us are immigrants or children of immigrants. Have you ever heard of this sort of honour killing before, in our nation's 400-year history?
Or Coyle's claim that the 41-year age gap between father and daughter was the cause?
Is he serious?
Jim Coyle and the Toronto Star are racist. Abiding honour killings is racist. It's sexist. It's anti-feminist. It's precisely the thing the Star claims to be against. But they're not. They'd rather be politically correct than stand up for the rights of women and children.
They'd rather be politically correct than stand up for secular values like gender equality.
They'd rather be politically correct -- and for Aqsa Parvez to be dead -- than to offend Parvez's murderous brother and father.
Damn right.
Rather than demand or even expect for anyone to find the murder of one's offspring to be abhorrent, the Toronto Star's Jim Coyle excuses the crime of killing Aqsa Pervez as just a cultural hiccup, something terrible native-born Canadians just can't understand:
They need to understand that family violence is unique to no time, no place, no culture, no religion.
They need to understand that crimes of passion are called that for a reason. They happen in intimate relationships, between the closest of people, in the places where love is fiercest and fears most great.
What a total fool. There was nothing passionate or caring about the deliberate murder of a teen-aged girl and he should damn well know it.
What is it that Mr. Coyle thinks Canadians should understand? What should we as Canadian citizens get that the "poor" Parvezes already do? Does he truly think that no other immigrant has ever experienced some difficulty relocating yet- surprise, surprise- has not killed his children? Either Mr. Coyle thinks nothing of killing in general or thinks that killing is just dandy in certain immigrant circles because "those people just don't know any better".
As Mr. Levant pointed out, Jim Coyle and the rag he works for would gladly moil in the racism of lowered expectations rather than grow a spine and call out the sickening tribalism for what it is. It is hardly ethno-centric to expect that people, particularly immigrants, think that killing innocent teenagers is repulsive- unless, of course, the political spectrum to which Mr. Coyle belongs think that immigrants just aren't up to the task of being good people. It must totally shock cultural apologists to learn that many immigrants have gotten by quite well without infanticide. Maybe Mr. Coyle could explain that in his next article.
Interesting:
The mummified remains of a noblewoman from the 16th century were discovered at a construction site in Osan, Gyeonggi Province. The Seogyeong Cultural Properties Research Institute said Thursday the mummified body of a woman from the Chosun Dynasty and 10 artifacts including a white porcelain pot, wooden comb and a chignon ornament have been found. "The structure and style of the grave and clothes suggest the body was buried in the mid-1500s," said Kim Woo-lim, a museum official in Ulsan.
Dressed in burial clothes, the mummy measures 154 cm in height, the average height during the Chosun Dynasty. The upper part of the body is so well preserved that the skin texture and teeth can be seen. The lower half of the body has decomposed slightly.
A banner covering the coffin shows that the woman was the wife of a military officer. Kim said the discovery will offer invaluable insight into the lifestyle of the period. It dates back to a similar time as the mummified remains of a mother and daughter discovered in Paju, Gyeonggi Province eight years ago.
When one thinks of mummies, one doesn't always think of South Korea. Or... at all. I find this stuff quite interesting.
Also fascinating:
Vatican officials unveiled the paintings Tuesday, discovered along with the earliest known images of the apostles John and Andrew in an underground burial chamber beneath an office building on a busy street in a working-class Rome neighbourhood.
The images, which date from the second half of the 4th century, were uncovered using a new laser technique that allows restorers to burn off centuries of thick white calcium carbonate deposits without damaging the brilliant dark colours of the paintings underneath.
The technique could revolutionize the way restoration work is carried out in the miles (kilometres) of catacombs that burrow under the Eternal City where early Christians buried their dead.
The icons were discovered on the ceiling of a tomb of an aristocratic Roman woman at the Santa Tecla catacomb, near where the remains of the apostle Paul are said to be buried.
Rome has dozens of such burial chambers and they are a major tourist attraction, giving visitors a peek into the traditions of the early church when Christians were often persecuted for their beliefs. Early Christians dug the catacombs outside Rome's walls as underground cemeteries, since burial was forbidden inside the city walls and pagan Romans were usually cremated.
The art that decorated Rome's catacombs was often simplistic and symbolic in nature. The Santa Tecla catacombs, however, represent some of the earliest evidence of devotion to the apostles in early Christianity, Vatican officials said.
"The Christian catacombs, while giving us value with a religious and cultural patrimony, represent an eloquent and significant testimony of Christianity at its origin," said Monsignor Giovanni Carru, the No. 2 in the Vatican's Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology, which maintains the catacombs.
I remember seeing the catacombs when I was in Rome. An entire culture thrived literally underground. It is hard for us to imagine but is still quite thrilling to discover.
In sad news, Edith Shain, the nurse in the iconic VJ Day photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt, passed away at age ninety-one.
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