Helpless Maidens and Chivalrous Knights: Afghan Women in the Canadian Press PDF

Y A S M I N J I WA N I Helpless Maidens and Chivalrous Knights: Afghan Women in the Canadian Press ABSTRACT On the international stage, Canada is renowned for its multicultural ethos, its peacekeeping reputation, and its moderate politics vis-à-vis the United States. N...

Y A S M I N J I WA N I Helpless Maidens and Chivalrous Knights: Afghan Women in the Canadian Press ABSTRACT On the international stage, Canada is renowned for its multicultural ethos, its peacekeeping reputation, and its moderate politics vis-à-vis the United States. Nonetheless, post-9/11, the Canadian press followed the US media in casting Afghan women as abject victims who could be rescued only by what Iris Marion Young has aptly called the ‘knights of civilization.’ Yet the discursive manner in which support for the US-led war was invoked bore traces of a counter-hegemonic frame. This essay interrogates representations of Afghan women in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s major English-language daily and news- paper of record. Examining the coverage over a seven-year period, the author traces the changes and continuities marking these representations in response to Canada’s initial peacekeeping and subsequent military involvement in Afghanistan. The Orientalist construction of Islam as a homogeneous and mono- lithic faith and its representation as an essentialized patriarchal force are under- scored. The framing of Afghan women living in Canada in contrast to their counterparts in Afghanistan is explored with respect to issues of agency, victim- hood, and Canadian benevolence. The essay concludes with observations on how this coverage reinforces and legitimates an imagined community that is reflective of Canada as a white, settler colony. [I]t is the interrelation between the sovereign right to kill and the humanitarian right to rescue that constitutes modes of modern power, whether by states or by other institutions of power. Inderpal Grewal The knights of civilization aim to bring enlightened understanding to the further regions of the world still living in cruel and irrational traditions that keep them from developing the economic and political structures that will bring them a good life. Iris Marion Young Discourses of security depend on identifying a threat ‘out there’ against which ‘we’ can be defended. Although articulating a dominant ideologi- cal chord, such discourses are often rife with contradictions but university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009 doi: 10.3138/utq.78.2.728  afghan women in the canadian press 729 inescapably anchored in a historical stock of knowledge. In the contem- porary global context, the elimination of threat needs to be rationalized discursively if it is to obtain consent. As David Theo Goldberg argues, the ‘civility’ of ‘civilized’ nations clothes violence in a velvet glove, legit- imizing and rationalizing its deployment. The violence of the state through its brutal invasion and occupation, then, needs to be rationalized in discourses of care, compassion, and rescue. A significant civility of contemporary Western democracies lies in the pastoral authority of the state as manifested in its benevolent appearance and its ‘civilizing’ mission. Drawing from Michel Foucault, Iris Marion Young argues that this pastoral power is most apparent in the paternalism of the state as manifested in its promise to protect and look after its citizens. Here the state’s civility assumes a chivalrous character privileging a particular masculinist logic: In this patriarchal logic, the role of the masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience. To the extent that citizens of a democratic state allow their leaders to adopt a stance of protectors toward them, these citizens come to occupy a subordinate status like that of women in the patriarchal household. (Young 2) Thus, according to Young, the two faces of the security state are consti- tuted by a chivalric masculinity and a dominative masculinity that wages war against others ‘out there.’ It is this notion of chivalric mascu- linity that I wish to emphasize in this essay, for, as Young puts it, the ‘knights of civilization’ redeem their dominative masculinity by being ‘good men’ protecting their women within the homeland and rescuing helpless maidens outside it. In this essay, I draw upon popular discourses that have circulated in the Canadian press, notably the Globe and Mail, to demonstrate construc- tions of Afghan women as quintessential innocent victims requiring rescue, wherein such a rescue mission produces and reproduces the chi- valric code of masculinity that is the inverse of the hard power of the security state. Thus, conquest and containment (through profiling and security certificates) are legitimized through the soft power of interven- tion through rescue and aid leavened by civilizational discourses. I begin with a discussion situating representations of female victims of vio- lence in the press, since a comparative examination of how different women are portrayed demonstrates their discursive construction as worthy or unworthy victims of rescue. Thereafter, I analyze the Globe’s representations of Afghan women derived from a search of the newspa- per’s archives over a seven-year period, paying particular attention to the kinds of frames that are deployed by the media to make ‘sense’ of university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  730 yasmin jiwani Afghan women as victims. I conclude by highlighting how the press works in concert with the state to secure consent for Canadian interven- tion in Afghanistan (‘over there’), all the while occluding the reality of gendered violence (‘over here’) (S. Khan). In securing such consent, I argue, the security of Afghan women was imperilled as they were once again rendered objects of epistemic, material, and political violence (Ayotte and Husain). WOMEN AS VICTIMS IN THE NEWS Van Zoonen and others assert that coverage of women’s issues in the news is linked to their emergence as journalists and reporters and, fur- thermore (with the focus on women as a potentially lucrative audience), to newspapers beginning to include ‘soft’ news in the form of human interest stories considered to be appealing to such a readership (Holland; Ross). For my purposes here, it is the representation of women as victims that is cogent. In this regard, the literature on crime news is the most revealing insofar as it exposes the raced and gendered aspects of news coverage. In her insightful analysis of the press coverage of women victims of violence, Marian Meyers argues that ‘news coverage of violent crimes reveals society’s biases and prejudices. It tells us who is valued and who is not; whose life has meaning and whose is insignificant; who has power and who does not’ (99). She adds that women are most likely to be represented as blameworthy victims of gender violence. In a similar vein, Ken Dowler, Thomas Fleming, and Stephen Muzzatti observe that women victims are often more heavily represented in the news, but that this newsworthiness is contingent on their social status: victims must be judged innocent, virtuous and honorable. Consequently, a paradox exists between victims who are ‘innocent’ and those who are ‘blameworthy,’ a paradox rooted in patriarchal notions of femininity and gender stereotypes. (841) It is this paradox that becomes evident in the reporting of differently racialized groups of women and their experiences of violence. These observations resonate with Helen Benedict’s earlier work on sex crimes in the media. Benedict articulates this paradox in terms of the dichotomy of the vamp and virgin. The vamp, she argues, is the woman who, ‘by her looks, behavior or generally loose morality, drove the man to such extremes of lust that he was compelled to commit the crime.’ The virgin, by contrast, is the victim par excellence: ‘The man, a depraved and perverted monster, sullied the innocent victim, who is now a martyr to the flaws of society’ (23). In her analysis of mainstream television discourses of prostitution, Lisa McLaughlin offers a more university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  afghan women in the canadian press 731 nuanced analysis, suggesting that this paradox is also contingent on which women are considered worthy of saving versus women whose deviance exceeds the limits of the ‘rescue-able.’ In this regard, McLaughlin notes that even ‘bad’ women – the vamps – are distin- guished by those who have some ‘good’ in them: differentiating those who can be salvaged from those who are beyond societal redemption. Distinctions between worthy and unworthy victims are determined by race, class, gender, and sexuality, through which middle-class values and morality are asserted, naturalizing an ‘existing scheme of things’ (Hall 325– 26). In a study of crime coverage concerning women in newspapers in Toronto, Scot Wortley observes that Black women who are victims of male violence are usually given less attention and that their stories are confined to the back pages. This echoes Dowler, Fleming, and Muzzatti’s point that crime coverage depends on the status of the victim, wherein white, middle-class women as victims are more likely to be covered than their Black, working-class counterparts. In a similar vein, Warren Goulding argues that the murders of Aboriginal women in Canada scar- cely generate any significant media coverage. In contrast, in previous research I have found that violence against women in the South Asian Canadian community has elicited far greater coverage in the Canadian press and that such coverage tends to invoke and articulate stereotypes about South Asian cultures and communities as exotic and deviant others (Jiwani). It would seem, then, that how and which stories about vio- lence against women are covered depends not only on the status and race of the women, but also on cumulative knowledge that exists about particular groups of women along with the stereotypes, common sense notions, and historical experiences that inform such a stock of knowledge. News coverage, bounded as it is within the parameters of values of newsworthiness, tends to focus on those stories that ideologically make ‘sense.’ To put it another way, stories are more likely to be told if they are considered to be relevant, timely, or unusual, and if they pertain to a conflict and/or involve elite nations and personalities. Hence, stories about honour killings (which are framed as emblematic of ‘exotic’ cul- tures) are more likely to get press than those dealing with ‘home-grown’ domestic violence (Narayan). ‘ L I B E R AT I N G AFGHAN WOMEN’ The ‘rescue motif’ has been a repeated feature of colonial discourse, invoked especially when it has suited colonial powers to invade, conquer, and subjugate the colonized (Abu-Lughod; Grewal; Macdonald). The burqa in Afghanistan, the chador in Iran, and the abaya in Saudi Arabia, not to mention similar forms of veiling in other Muslim states, have become iconic symbols of women’s oppression university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  732 yasmin jiwani under Islam. The mobilization of the US-led intervention into Afghanistan after 11 September, for example, has utilized this image to secure consent for war. Under the guise of a ‘rescue’ mission, the intervention has been aimed explicitly, and especially rhetorically, at establishing democracy and equality in Afghanistan, and liberating Afghans from the yoke of Taliban tyranny (Hunt; Russo). Eric Louw insightfully analyzes how the Pentagon has strategically uti- lized the trope of the oppressed Afghan women. He notes that the Pentagon’s public relations strategy has involved searching the non- governmental organization sphere for suitable discourses that could be brought in to harness the war effort. The issue of women’s oppression under the Taliban had been circulating in these spheres since 1996. Yet it was not until 2001 that the Pentagon saw it as a cause worthy enough to mobilize its military intervention and revive flagging support for the war. Naturally, there have been other economic and politically motivated reasons for engaging in the war. Nevertheless, the use of women’s bodies has served a useful ploy. Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood argue that Hollywood celeb- rities, in conjunction with the Feminist Majority Foundation in the United States, were the first to publicize the oppression of Afghan women in the West. From there, concern over Afghan women’s oppres- sion escalated after 11 September when US First Lady Laura Bush and Britain’s Cherie Blair’s respective and heavily publicized speeches heigh- tened public attention. Thereafter, even Benetton, the popular clothing company, featured burqa-clad women on its website (an image that has since been removed). What has horrified the West is the Taliban’s com- plete suppression of women’s rights, including the right to wear lipstick and nail polish, reveal one’s face, wear shoes that make any kind of noise, appear in public without the burqa and unaccompanied by a male rela- tive, and participate in educational and social exchanges and work. Russo has aptly termed the Feminist Majority Foundation’s campaign a form of imperial feminism, arguing that it embodies an Orientalist logic [that] constructs an absolute difference between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’/’self’ and ‘other.’ It does so by erasing the history and politics of Afghanistan and by projecting a cultural barbarity in need of a civilizing mission. Western women and feminism become the embodiment of Afghanis’ hope for democracy. (559) What was largely elided in the media coverage that followed in the immediate aftermath of September 11 was that the Taliban’s strictures were imposed largely on urban women (in Kabul, for instance), and that women’s oppression was scarcely less prior to the Taliban takeover (Hirschkind and Mahmood). Sonali Kolhatkar notes that, after ousting university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  afghan women in the canadian press 733 the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan, the US- and Saudi Arabia– financed Mujahadeen ‘instituted laws banning alcohol and requiring that women be veiled. Both of these new crimes were punishable by flog- gings, amputations, and public executions’ (16). Women’s illiteracy rates were high before the Taliban gained control over Afghanistan; maternal death and infant mortality rates were equally high (Barakat and Wardell). The extreme economic deprivation faced by women prior to and after Taliban control has often been negated in press accounts, as is the fact that it was under Soviet occu- pation that women had enjoyed the most freedom and greater access to education and services.1 Neither has much been made of the fact that the particular brand of Deobandi Islam that was exported (from Saudi Arabia) to Afghanistan at that time embodied the same literal interpret- ation of Islam as that imposed by the Taliban (see Entman; Kellner). However, as Robert M. Entman points out, this particular frame of analy- sis underscoring Saudi involvement, though attempted by various jour- nalists in the United States, has not been able to dislodge the White House’s preferred framing of the Taliban as the archetypal force of evil and of Osama bin Laden as the formidable villain (Agathangelou and Ling; Winch). That both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda have been considered synonymous and used rhetorically as instruments of evil and oppression obscures the reality that the Taliban would have continued to exercise its oppressive regime with or without bin Laden or Al-Qaeda (Ayotte and Husain). AFGHAN WOMEN IN THE GLOBE AND MAIL A search of the Factiva database (2000 – 07) yielded 254 stories in the Globe and Mail that make some mention of Afghan women.2 After discarding letters to the editor and articles that refer to Afghan women only in passing, 229 stories remain in the final corpus for my analysis. Not sur- prisingly, the concentration of stories dealing with Afghan women peaks in 2001 –02. Thereafter, the number of stories declines, yet their sig- nificance does not. Throughout this seven-year period, the spectre of the victimized Afghan women surfaces repeatedly, often harnessed to Canadian benevolence and justification for the military intervention in Afghanistan. So much is this trope utilized that even when newspapers report on flagging support for the war, as evident in the results of popular opinion polls, retired Major-General Lewis MacKenzie has 1 Only one story celebrates women’s achievements (as pilots) during the Soviet occupation in the Globe’s coverage during these seven years (see Smith). 2 The Globe and Mail is one of Canada’s national dailies, regarded as a newspaper of record, influencing policy decisions and targeting a middle-class, educated readership. university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  734 yasmin jiwani countered that pollsters have been asking the wrong questions. Instead, he opines, pollsters should ask the public the following: ‘Do you support beheading teachers in front of their class if they permit even one girl to attend?’ ‘Do you support denying all Afghan women the right to visit a doctor, as there are no female doctors permitted by the Taliban and male doctors are not allowed to inspect female patients?’ ‘Do you support the government’s right to execute women by blowing out their brains in front of thousands of cheering onlookers in a football stadium because the victims were seen in the company of men other than their husbands?’ ‘Do you support the actions of a suicide bomber who, just before he blows himself up beside elderly Muslims waiting to obtain papers for a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, picks up a child and presses her against his explosive vest before detonating himself?’ (MacKenzie)3 Rather than interrogating this complicity, Canadian journalists, like their American counterparts, have belaboured the oppression of Afghan women. One popular columnist has gone so far as to describe Afghan women as ‘walking wombs’ under Taliban reign: The women of Afghanistan are the most oppressed group of people in the world. Their country has been destroyed by wave on wave of war, and now they live under the tyranny of brutal misogynists. The Taliban believes that females are scarcely more than walking wombs, and they treat them worse than animals. If – when – the Taliban is overthrown, the women of Afghanistan will probably be better off. (Wente) In their analysis of the Western mainstream media’s coverage of the war on Afghanistan, Carol A. Stabile and Deepa Kumar draw attention to the play of a ‘protection scenario’ based on the logic that ‘women, like the penetrable, feminized territory of the nation-state, must be protected from the predatory advances of some real or imaginary enemy’ (770). In this scenario, the hero protects the helpless victim and fights against the villain. The United States has thus been cast, or has cast itself, in the role of chivalrous warrior out to rescue helpless maidens. Canada has fol- lowed suit (Hirji). There are two issues here worthy of examination; first is the orientalist (Said) framing of Afghanistan and the justification for war; second is the 3 The Canadian government has recognized the strategic value of this discursive move with the revelations from a report it had commissioned that declining support for the war could be shifted if the emphasis were put on ‘rebuilding,’ ‘enhancing the lives of women and children,’ and ‘peacekeeping’ (Freeman). Thus, women and children have continued to play a significant role in harnessing support for Canada’s continued mili- tary involvement in Afghanistan. university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  afghan women in the canadian press 735 notion of the oriental woman as needing to be saved. To be ‘saved,’ women have to be considered worthy of rescue. Afghan women are ren- dered worthy of this rescue (even though their situation has not changed for the better since then) by virtue of the construction of the Taliban as an ultra-patriarchal force representative of Islam. This reinforces stereotypi- cal constructions about the barbaric nature of Islam and its subhuman treatment of women, a theme that resonates with orientalist literature and popular images of oppressed Muslim women (Rosenberg). A ‘Joyless, Monomaniacal Theocracy’ Constructed as a misogynistic force of evil, the Taliban constitutes an aberrance that is institutionally grounded (through a specific interpret- ation of Islam), embodying what Geoffrey York calls a ‘joyless, monoma- niacal theocracy’ (‘Hammer’). Armed with weapons, reliant on the drug trade, and engaged in the sale of women as well as in their complete oppression, the Taliban is portrayed as an undifferentiated mass, a force that can be countered only with the enlightened force of the West. As one editorial opines, ‘The driving force is misogyny masquerading as faith and paternalistic protection’ (‘Women’). Afghan women’s oppression is underscored at every turn. What seals their representation discursively as victims worthy of rescue are particu- lar features interwoven through most of these stories. First and foremost is the consistent repetition, almost mantra-like, of the excesses of the Taliban. Thus, with every reference to the Taliban one finds some mention of the actions it has committed in the name of Islam to suppress women’s rights and liberties. This continual reference effectively conjures associations among the burqa, Islam, the Taliban, and oppression, thereby creating a mediated template of fundamentalist Islam. Jenny Kitzinger observes that templates serve as rhetorical shorthand, helping journalists and audiences to make sense of fresh news stories. They are instrumental in shaping narratives around particular social problems, guiding public discussion not only about the past, but also the present and the future. (61) The potency of the burqa-Taliban-Islam-oppression template is evident in that when the news discourse shifts to events in Canada – as, for example, the debate over sharia law and its applicability in a Canadian context – the chain of signification invoked by the template becomes immediately apparent (Erman). What makes these stories particularly poignant in terms of summoning feelings of identification and empathetic, if not sympathetic, sentiment is that the Afghan women are constructed as victims through no fault of their own except in being women. Thus, in one particularly compelling university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  736 yasmin jiwani article, Lauren Oates states, ‘The treatment of Afghan women under the Taliban was so excessive in its brutality that it has been dubbed “gender- cide” or “gender apartheid.”’ This notion of ‘gendercide’ is a powerful discursive move, as it suggests that, without the Taliban and their particu- lar interpretation of Islam, Afghan women would not have been so oppressed – a point of view that camouflages previous US imperial inter- ests and involvement in the region (Russo). However, in the aftermath of the coalition forces entering Afghanistan, the lack of an immediate military success by NATO and Canadian forces, not to mention the absence of a widespread and joyous ‘liberation’ of Afghan women through a massive public unveiling, has resulted in a reframing of the Taliban oppression template, such that Taliban excesses have become redefined in cultural and essentialist terms. In other words, the women have been positioned as culture-bound, and it has been implied that only through exposure to the West could they be sufficiently enlightened to undertake the task of their own liberation. Thus, these victims who could be saved have been shown to have potential. Miriam Cooke reasons that [i]mperial logic genders and separates subject peoples so that the men are the Other and the women are civilizable. To defend our universal civilization we must rescue the women. To rescue these women we must attack these men. These women will be rescued not because they are more ‘ours’ than ‘theirs’ but rather because they will have become more ‘ours’ through the rescue mission. (468) ‘Rescue-ability,’ then, comes to be defined through terms that reveal how these women have become ‘ours’ or more like us. The discarding of the burqa constitutes one such sign – and much has been made of it in the few instances in which women have publicly de-veiled themselves (Wente, ‘Will We Sell Out’). Yet another sign of this ‘rescue-ability’ can be read in terms of Afghan women’s embracing of Western economic initiatives. For example, after the Taliban conceded defeat, one of the first business initiatives to be deployed in Afghanistan concerned the beautification of Afghan women, with major US cosmetic companies funding various programs (Ghafour, ‘Beauticians’). This suggests how, through such enterprises, women can be cultivated into future consumers. Micro-credit endeavours have also received considerable media coverage because of their success among Afghan women, as evidenced in a telling example: Bibi Qutbi... lives on the side of a hill that surrounds Kabul, in a house carved out from the rock face. Ms Qutbi’s husband is unemployed and her son is university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  afghan women in the canadian press 737 disabled. She is a tailor, who took out a $200 loan to import gold and silver thread from India. She is now a certified provider of hand-embroidered badges for police and military. She has a steady market and is training several other women to join her. Proceeds from her business support her family and go toward medical treatment. (Grant) Thus, through the rescue mission (in the form of military intervention, micro-credit enterprises, and beauty schools), Afghan women are ren- dered more like ‘us.’ They demonstrate initiative and, in their embracing of Western ways, they prove their deservedness as victims worthy of saving and, in line with that, as potential consumers for Western goods. The Heroic Afghan Women The second aspect of the media discourse that underscores the worthiness of Afghan women as victims is evident in a combination of stories that stresses their resilience, agency, and resistance to the Taliban. Numerous stories detail the challenges they have faced, the individual risks they have undertaken, and their fearlessness in the face of death threats, beat- ings, executions, and the like. These first-person accounts of suffering are also marked by tropes of normalcy, situating these women as engaging in day-to-day activities, often emphasized by reference to their vocations. Here is one such example dating back to a news story published in 2000: Kabul – Her name is Fatima, and she was risking a beating. Defiantly, she stood outside, talking to a man. Her face was uncovered. Under Taliban rule, such openness by a woman is forbidden. But Fatima said she did not care. She was growing used to a life with some risk. Three months ago, she and a few other women decided to break the law. They opened a school for girls... A teacher by training, she is in her 30s. She was dressed smartly in a black jacket and long skirt. Standing in an open courtyard, her cheeks had become rosy from the morning cold. She was wearing lipstick. (Bearak) The heroism of Afghan women is a recurrent theme throughout the seven-year period examined here. Thus, through these news stories the audience learns about Afghan women such as Sima Samar, a physician living in exile who organized and managed clinics and schools of girls (York, ‘Holy War’); Masooda Jalal, a presidential candidate who ran against Hamid Karzai in the elections held by the grand council in 2002 (MacKinnon) and in 2004 (Wente, ‘“No one”’); Badrai, an illiterate university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  738 yasmin jiwani Afghan woman who, despite threats against her, registered to vote in the election (Ghafour, ‘Universal Suffrage’); Malalai Joya, a populist hero who also ran for office (Ghafour, ‘Populist’); Malalai Badahari, a counter- narcotics cop (Morarjee); Safia Ama Jan, provincial director for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs who was killed by the Taliban (N. Khan); Rona Tareen (Blatchford), her successor; and countless other women whose heroic deeds are outlined in some detail in the Globe’s articles. What is interesting about these stories is that the women are named, indi- vidualized, and quoted directly. Not only are women in Afghanistan rep- resented in such heroic terms, but so too are the fleeing women refugees whose stories of extreme hardship and distress make for a compelling read (see for example, York, ‘“The people”’). Closer to home, Canadian women of Afghan origin are similarly described in this corpus of articles. For instance, Nelofar Pazira, author of A Bed of Red Flowers and featured in the film Kandahar, is quoted as saying, ‘For me, the issue of death is resolved. I am ready to die any moment if I have to. I’m not afraid of it. I look at the faces of those little Afghan girls I have seen starving, I see myself in them’ (McLaren). Pazira’s statement can be read as a form of ventriloquism, echoing what ‘we’ as the audience would expect of her. In her analysis of Kandahar, Weber remarks that President George W. Bush specifically wanted to view this film and encouraged all Americans to see it. Central to its stra- tegic value is the United States appropriation of the film as a text that has ‘propelled occidental subjects to “lift the veil” on Afghanistan and on Afghan women by viewing Kandahar as if it [has] positioned the feminine as a needy and wiling object of US rescue’ (Weber 360). However, while the film serves as one instance – albeit a powerful one – of Afghanistan as the location of traditional femininity, it is the recurrent play on the sentiments of unswerving loyalty, commitment, and benevolent compassion evident in other stories that underscores the worthiness of Afghan women as victims. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in accounts of diasporic Afghan women who have returned to their homeland to participate in the task of reconstruction. Often these women are depicted as showing Afghan women how to become more assertive. This is illustrated in the account of Safir Saddiqi, described as ‘the outspoken and dynamic Afghan-Canadian now working as a senior advisor to the Ministry of Rural Reconstruction where she shares a cramped office with a half-dozen shy, young Afghan women slowly learning to emulate her brash style’ (Koring), as well as in a story about Fahima Vorgetts, an Afghan-American activist who is quoted as telling Afghan women, ‘We must make sacrifices to bring change.... People will say we are sully- ing our fathers’ names. But let them call us prostitutes, fallen women. If we don’t fight for our rights, who will?’ (Ghafour, ‘Women’s Rights’); and also in that of Katrin Fakiri, who ‘is one of thousands of ex-pats university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  afghan women in the canadian press 739 returning home to help rebuild a shattered economy – one dollar at a time’ (Grant). Canadian Benevolence The heroism and unflinching commitment of Afghan women is matched by Canadian benevolence, which ostensibly seems to bring out the best in people in Afghanistan. The corpus included numerous stories that detailed initiatives by individuals and their families in Canada to help support Afghan women. Sally Armstrong, author of Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan, in decrying Canada’s vacillating commitment to military involvement in ensuring security and, thus, democracy (the two issues are interlinked in this news discourse), wrote, Canadians have done impressive work to deliver the promises made in Bonn. Two Calgary women started an organization called Women for Women in Afghanistan and raised $500,000 that goes directly to nurses’ training, school kits and an orphanage. A Toronto woman started a fundraiser called Breaking Bread for Women that has held more than 400 potluck suppers across Canada and raised half a million dollars to pay teachers in Afghanistan. A Winnipeg man brought together medical students from universities across Canada to restock the library at Kabul University’s medical school; the Canadian military delivered the books, and a philanthropist in Vancouver paid the cost of sending a librarian to Kabul to train the library staff. (Armstrong, ‘We’ve Forgotten’) That aside, news reports also detail the Canadian government’s contri- butions to Afghanistan, including micro-loans to 135,000 Afghan women, special health project grants, and contributions by the Canadian International Development Agency. As well, the military’s presence has been identified as a significant Canadian contribution. In all these stories, Canadians’ benevolence and noblesse oblige are highlighted. As General Rick Hillier, former chief of the Defence Staff, has reportedly stated, ‘We are in Afghanistan to help Afghans.... We’re not there to build an empire, we’re not there to occupy a country. We’re there to help Afghan men, women and children rebuild their families’ (Den Tandt). In keeping with the gendered theme, Governor General Michaëlle Jean, during her visit to Afghanistan on International Women’s Day, has been quoted as saying, The women of Afghanistan may face the most unbearable conditions, but they never stop fighting for survival.... Of course, we, the rest of the women around the world, took too long to hear the cries of our Afghan sisters, but I university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  740 yasmin jiwani am here to tell them that they are no longer alone. And neither are the people of Afghanistan. (Friesen) Canadian ‘rescue’ efforts continue. CONCLUSION In their introduction to Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, Amal Amireh and Lisa Majaj outline the prevailing paradigms that organize relations between Third World and First World women: ‘[T]he “saving brown women from brown men” model, the “victims of culture” model and the “feminist by exposure to the West” model’ (7). The burqa-Islam-Taliban-oppression template articulates these paradigms. First, the barbarism of the Taliban underscores the worthiness of Afghan women as victims by making explicit the imposed nature of the oppression. Second, the failure of the women to engage in massive and public de-veiling after the fall of the Taliban pre- empts any revelation of the hollow discourse of women’s liberation being used by the United States and its allies (Arat-Koc). Culture becomes the focal point of attention, and the need for rescue is thus reframed as one of saving women from what Uma Narayan has described as ‘death by culture.’ Finally, the juxtaposition of Afghan heroines with the agency and commitment of diasporic Afghan women (from Canada, the United States, and elsewhere in the West) reaffirms the notion of Afghan women as inherently ‘like us’ – fighting against oppression and thus worthy of our support. In this respect, although they are directly named and quoted, their voices echo Western assumptions. Culminating in this portrayal is the constant and repeated assertion that this oppression has been imposed first by Islam and then by a barba- ric culture. What renders these portrayals so problematic in the representational economy of violence is that patriarchy is defined explicitly as the sole terrain and identifying feature of Islam. In contrast, patriarchal forces as they affect women in Canada are condensed in the symbol of aberrant and singular white men or isolated incidents that do not reflect the vio- lence of a settler society (see Razack). Yet there is another element to this discursive economy. Exotic crimes are more often attended to than homegrown crimes of the quotidian variety. Moreover, by focusing on issues ‘out there,’ the media can overlook the issues ‘over here’ and thereby obfuscate – if not evacuate – the issue of our complicity in upholding the ‘existing scheme of things.’ As Žižek observes, ‘[O]ur “compassion” for victims of international warfare and oppression “pre- supposes that in it, we perceive ourselves in the form that we find likeable: the victim is presented so that we like to see ourselves in the position university of toronto quarterly, volume 78, number 2, spring 2009  afghan women in the canadian press 741 from which we stare at her” ’(qtd in Franks 146 – 47, italics in the original). The benevolence undergirding this point of view, I would argue, rests simultaneously on our disavowal of violence against women ‘over here.’ As complicit citizen-subjects in a white settler colony, we are com- forted in the illusion that the discursive and physical violence enacted ‘there’ does not exist ‘here.’ Concomitantly, in securing the threat ‘out there,’ we are assured of security ‘over here’ – a market for Western pro- ducts that is created simultaneously along with the export of Western-style ‘democracy’ and its attendant extraction of prized resources. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research was made possible by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am especially indebted to Vivian Tabar, and Alan Wong for their critical insights and editorial assist- ance. I would also like to acknowledge Reisa Klein and Meg Leitold for their research assistance. 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