Will this bode well for other female candidates in the ME? Will much change? How will religious conservatives react?
Six months in office before ISIS eliminates her. Tunisia is the biggest recruiting hub for ISIS. I heard a while back that an alligator was stoned to death under Sharia Law in Tunisia.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ries-attack-outside-hotel-packed-Britons.html My sister should have been there but her husband slipped and broke his ankle at work and they had to cancel their holiday. We call it their "lucky break" I doubt a female mayor will make any difference at all unless she gets murdered.
Quite possible, although you will of course know that the Muslim nation of Bangladesh has had several female prime ministers. It probably depends on what she does. The Islamists hate modernity, just as Southern rednecks did. It took a hundred years before they stopped lynching Blacks ... hopefully the Muslims won't take as long.
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/articl...rtion-claims-many-black-babies-less-four-days 3446 lets call it 4000 over 100 years obviously an uncomfortable number still but in a population of 300,000,000 this is not a particularly high number which is born out that even in the south the majority of people were not KKK! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-terrorists-worldwide-soars-80-just-year.html 32,000 in one year or almost 1000 times more per year than the KKK they really aren't comparable.
Well, the American population back then was more like 15It0,000 000 not 300 000 000, but let's not quibble over numbers. The key thing is that Blacks were lynched with impunity. The whole town turned out to take part ... and even posed for photographs. They knew they weren't going to be prosecuted. It was just in the culture. They cut off body parts for souvenirs and then went to church and prayed to Jesus. However, this is the human norm. There's absolutely no reason for Americans, Southerners in particular, to feel any special guilt. Jews were treated the same way in Czarist Russia, if you're a member of the wrong tribe you can be hacked to death in Kenya by the losers in an election, 2000 Sikhs were murdered by mobs in India after Mrs Gandhi was assassinated by one of her Sikh bodyguards, Tamils were thrown into their burning homes in Sri Lanka, Muslims face deadly violence in Gujarat, Chinese are murdered in Malaysia for being too successful ... The most recent lynching in America was of Yankel Rosenbaum, stabbed to death by a group of Blacks in 1991. Human progress is slow. Engels said that history pulls her chariot forward over mountains of human corpses, and he was right.
There's no justification for their abuse but it's still is very different from what's happening with Muslim terrorists right now both in terms of numbers and motives. Also KKK membership has severely declined over the last 6 decades whilst the population has grown 33% the opposite trend has happened with extremism in Islam. I have no doubt the way Bush handled 9/11 has an awful lot to do with this.
Funny that you skip over Christian persecution for some reason. I guess in your mind we are only the people committing crimes huh?
Christians are the only people committing crimes? Okay, I suppose you think that the people committing all the crimes I've listed above are Christians, or that I implied this. They're not. They're Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus. I just assumed anyone reading this would be intelligent enough to know that. But for those who aren't: the populations of India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, are not mainly Christians. Maybe some of the Africans killing each other are Christians though. Usually, Christians kill each other: in Northern Ireland (Catholics and Protestants) and Yugoslavia (Serbs and Croats). As for Christian victims .. .you bet. In Iraq (after our invasion) and especially in Pakistan, but also in India and Egypt, although most of the victims here were victims of terrorism, not lynching. The subject was lynching, not terrorism, which is something else, although often terrorist attacks (like blowing up a church) have a lot of popular support in Muslim countries. When four Black schoolgirls were killed by Southern white racists -- no doubt pious Christians -- who bombed their church in 1963, that was terrorism, not lynching. I would hope that, by then, most Southern whites would not have condoned it, although all-white juries in the South at the time usually acquitted white murderers of Black people. Anyway, the human race is gradually dragging itself out of the slime.
Yes, Islamism is something new, and not really directly related to the sort of horrible tribal conflicts that have existed and still exist around the globe. It's congruent to the usual hyper-nationalist stuff in backward countries like Pakistan, but sui generis. We were midwives to it in Afghanistan ... looked like a good idea at the time, I suppose -- but it probably would have come about without our help.
Afghanistan was up and coming in the 70's until fundamentalism took hold. The issue isn't Islam it's the growth of extremism in Islam which are 2 different things. the 2nd one is our own actions coming back to bite us in the ass.
Afghanistan was a backwater. Then the Communists took over. Then one faction invited in the Russians in to deal with another and you have yourself a civil war. Then Pakistan and the US funded a bunch of jihadis (and some not quite so jihadi) to fight the Russians. Afghanistan was a mess before the fundamentalists got hold of it. They just made sure that anything not trashed by 13 years of continuous war was trashed. Not an endorsement of the fundamentalists, but there were plenty of hands involved in wrecking Afghanistan, most of them decidedly secular.
My best guess is that you get problems when you get the trappings of modernity in a country outrunning the economic prosperity that modernity will eventually bring. You can have a Lesbian Outreach Center in Kandahar, if everyone is too busy making money and buying things to care. (And if you go slow -- first teaching girls to read, then having a female mayor, etc... spreading it out over two or three generations.) Of course religion is just an arbitrary superstructure of superstitions, fairy tales, and pious platitudes, on top of people's real desires. No one really pays any attention to what some so-called Holy Book, or their priests, tell them to do or not to do, if it gets it the way of what they really want to do.
There have been female leaders in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Indonesia, & others (that is 4 of the 5 biggest Muslim nations I think). All positive steps, but none will necessarily change the ME. Conservatives will be upset, as per usual.
I think most of those were members of a family dynasty, and so were accepted just as English queens were. The markers of progress are how many females can read, have a basic education, have a university education, have jobs away from home. These indicators basically track economic growth. It's the seductive power of money: you're a pious Muslim father who of course believes women should be hidden away in the home ... but you also might like the money your daughter can earn if she has a decent job. Money wins out in the long run.
