Malalai Joya, Afghan Women's Mission: Visa Denied, plus NARAL News & First Nations vs."Tar-arism"

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Produced by: 
KBOO
Program:: 
Air date: 
Mon, 03/21/2011 - 12:00am
Interviews with Sonali Kolhatkar w. the Afghan women's mission & NARAL's Michelle Stranger-Hunter

MALALAI JOYA:  AFGHAN WOMEN'S RIGHTS ACTIVIST, FORMER MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT, ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S '100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE' DENIED A VISA BY THE AMERICAN EMBASSY

The U.S. government has denied a travel visa to Malalai Joya, an acclaimed women’s rights activist and former member of Afghanistan’s parliament, said organizers of her U.S. tour. Joya, who was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2010, was set to begin a three-week U.S. tour to promote an updated edition of her memoir, "A Woman Among Warlords.”   Tour organizers report that when Joya presented herself as scheduled at the U.S. embassy, she was told she was being denied because she was "unemployed" and "lives underground." Then 27, Joya was the youngest woman elected to Afghanistan’s parliament in 2005. "Because of her harsh criticism of warlords and fundamentalists in Afghanistan, she has been the target of at least five assassination attempts. The reason Joya lives underground is because she faces the constant threat of death for having had the courage to speak up for women’s rights    Joya has also become an internationally known critic of the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan. Organizers argue that the denial of Joya’s visa appears to be a case of what the American Civil Liberties Union describes as “Ideological Exclusion,”

www.afghanwomensmission.org/

Closer to home, the Executive Director of NARAL Oregon, Michelle Stranger-Hunter talked choice and reminded listeners of the organization's up-coming fund-raiser.

www.prochoiceoregon.org/

 

And not to forget the Kelly Pt. Indigenous Peoples protest against tar sands on native lands.

Members of the Grande Ronde and Warm Springs tribes gathered at Kelly Point in Portland yesterday to protest oil sands shipments across lands that either currently belong to them by agreedment with the Ghaddaffiesque US government or by rights ought to belong to them.  In any case, no one wants tar sands trucked through wildlands or anywhere else..The group of about 20 Native Americans and environmental activists were protesting the shipment of equipment upriver to support an oil project in Alberta, Canada. oil-factory modules moving up the Columbia River, across the states of Idaho and Montana, and into Canada's oil sands, where Imperial Oil, a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil, will assemble the 207 massive components into in an $8 billion oil operation. Imperial plans to strip mine tarlike bitumen from the ground and convert it into petroleum through a complicated, energy-consumptive process. allagainstthehaul.org/

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