Pickings from the Webvine
The greatest mistake in the Bergdahl trade was elevating the Taliban. We start with some items to remind us of the true nature of these antediluvian misogynists. The Spectator, UK witnesses a stoning.
… ‘I couldn’t spot where the first rock came from — maybe from the mutaween, the religious police, “upholders of virtue and stoppers of sin’’, identifiable by their beards. The uniformed police, lined up, were busy throwing rocks. A tipper truck had brought up a load of Type Two aggregate of red sandstone from the road-building being undertaken by my companion’s construction company, and dumped in two heaps for those without sin to fling at the women under their shrouds. The targets could not of course duck down into their holes: they were too narrow.’
Well, that was and is the law out there, and the practice. Stoning for adultery was Moses’ law too, but the Jews haven’t practised it for a couple of millennia or so, as far as I know, just as we have given up burning our apostates. The merit of stoning, like the firing squad, is that one can’t ascribe the killing to a given individual.
Over in Pakistan last week, the stoning to death of Farzana Parveen, married and pregnant, wasn’t the result of a formal legal indictment even though it was taking place in the open space in front of the High Court in Lahore, that most sophisticated of Pakistan’s cities. It was done, it seems, mostly by her own family at the behest of her father, who regarded as adultery his daughter’s marriage to a man other than the one he had chosen. Here the police didn’t participate in the stone-throwing, but just stood and watched, together with a chance assembly of lawyers and passers-by.
The act of stoning, while not actually lawful in Pakistan, was done in what is called a ‘climate of impunity’ in the rigorous Islamic tradition of daughters marrying who they’re told to, and in the light of the awareness of several hundred other such killings in Pakistan every year going unpunished. …
We go back a few years to a NY Times article on the 2012 reemergence of stoning in Afghanistan as the Taliban regained power. We can say this president made the world safe for women to be stoned again.
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban on Sunday ordered their first public executions by stoning since their fall from power nine years ago, killing a young couple who had eloped, according to Afghan officials and a witness.
The punishment was carried out by hundreds of the victims’ neighbors in a village in northern KunduzProvince, according to Nadir Khan, 40, a local farmer and Taliban sympathizer, who was interviewed by telephone. Even family members were involved, both in the stoning and in tricking the couple into returning after they had fled.
Mr. Khan said that as a Taliban mullah prepared to read the judgment of a religious court, the lovers, a 25-year-old man named Khayyam and a 19-year-old woman named Siddiqa, defiantly confessed in public to their relationship. “They said, ‘We love each other no matter what happens,’ ” Mr. Khan said.
The executions were the latest in a series of cases where the Taliban have imposed their harsh version of Shariah law for social crimes, reminiscent of their behavior during their decade of ruling the country. In recent years, Taliban officials have sought to play down their bloody punishments of the past, as they concentrated on building up popular support. …
FrontPage posts on the poisoning of schoolgirls by the Taliban. This is another item from two years ago, but it is illustrative of fact we have known for a long time about the nature of these people. The president won’t negotiate with Republicans. Perhaps he can only relate to men like his father.
In a recent effort to prevent their attendance at school, the Taliban poisoned nearly 150 Afghan schoolgirls, marking just the latest atrocity in a litany of barbaric acts the Islamist terror group continues to inflict upon the women and girls of Afghanistan.
The afflicted girls — all of whom suffered severe nausea, headaches, and dizziness — had become poisoned after drinking contaminated water from jugs in their classrooms at their high school in Afghanistan’s northern province of Takhar. Many of the students were taken to a local hospital where some were listed in critical condition.
Fearing retribution, some school officials were initially reluctant to assign blame to any particular group for the chemical attack, with one simply saying, “This is either the work of those who are against girls’ education or irresponsible armed individuals.” …
… Time magazine focused widespread indignation on Afghanistan recently by putting on its cover a picture of an 18-year-old woman from OruzganProvince whose nose and ears were cut off by her Taliban husband after she had fled her child marriage to him.
Amnesty International condemned the latest stonings, calling them the first such executions since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. “The Taliban and other insurgent groups are growing increasingly brutal in their abuses against Afghans,” said Sam Zarifi, an Amnesty International official.
Time for a look at last week’s job report. James Pethokoukis is first.
… Thanks to 217,000 net new jobs created in May, US employment is now at an all-time peak. All the 9 million jobs lost during the Great Recession have been recovered. …
… But while the milestone is certainly worth noting, its importance pales next to the current state of the “jobs gap.” The US economy now has 113,000 more jobs than in December 2007, but the working-age population today is 16 million larger. When you factor in population growth, as the Economic Policy Institute has, you find the recession has left a remaining shortfall of nearly 7 million jobs or “missing workers.” (See chart at top).
More context: the share of adult Americans with any sort of job — what I like to call the employment rate — was 58.9% last month vs. a prerecession peak of 63.4%. And as the Wall Street Journal notes, “Since the economy emerged from recession five years ago, wage gains have barely managed to keep ahead of inflation.” …
The economics editor from Nate Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight, has ten charts.
Six-and-a-half years after the Great Recession began — and five years after it officially ended — the U.S. has finally surpassed its precrisis employment peak. But the job market is far from fully healed.
U.S. employers added 217,000 jobs in May, bringing total non-farm employment to 138.5 million – 113,000 more than the 138.4 million jobs that existed in December 2007, the first month of the recession. It took 76 months to regain the nearly 9 million jobs lost in the recession, making this by far the slowest jobs recovery since World War II. (If any of this sounds familiar, you’re right: Private-sector employment returned to its prerecession peak in March.)
Getting back to square one isn’t much to celebrate, however. There are more than 6 million more working-age Americans today than when the recession began. Adjusting for population growth, we’re still millions of jobs short of where we were 6½ years ago — and have seen hardly any jobs recovery. …