To be shocked this isn't getting more coverage?

Agree Saudi Arabia should have had more heat on it, but them being our allies has forced them to be more open and relax their rules a bit more. It was this that has caused Iran to dial up their funding of Hamas and Hezbollah, because they didn't want SA to be closer to the West. They are funding this shit and are funding Idlamist extremism in Mosques in the UK. They are there becsuse of the West interfering in Iran yes, but that's done now. We can't go back in time and undo the interfering the US and USSR did in the ME.

Some of us ARE talking about Saudi women and women from many other countries.

Making a thread on one topic doesn't mean we don't care about others.

Some of us are screaming about this from the rooftops, but very few people listen or care.

And it IS our business.
What is happening to women across the world is the business of every other woman. No man is coming to save any of us. They never have when we are the only ones suffering from something.

taliban are terrorists and you can not negotiate with terrorists. They are extremists and have zero value of human lives, human rights, the west, Christianity, jews, law and order. Condemning them publicly has zero effect, almost impossible to defeat in a war as they are fighting for their sovereignty and what they see as what they want. They take no notice of anybody or anything. Someone said here change has to come from within - 100%. This isn't the fault of Trump/Biden/Boris/Rishi or anyone else. No amount of protests will make any difference even.

This is just another form of slavery. The close link between Islam and misogyny is really worrying

When did the UK - or whatever country you're from - invade and occupy Saudi Arabia?

We can use our voices for the women who cant. Their rights to a voice have been taken away.

To bring awareness. We can shout about the plight of women.

I am looking at the countries I have lived and grew up in and they are changing before my eyes.

The rights of women is a global issue and topics like what is happening in Afganistan should be spoken about. It should be acknowledged and it isn't (or at least not to the scale it should be).

This news should horrify every woman outside of Afganistan.

We should be holding space for them instead of pretending they don't exist.

If we all bury our heads in the sand we will end up like them, or our daughters, or our granddaughters.

People think the white men sitting in government care what happens to us and that "this will never happen here", and they're deluded.

And if people aren't concerned about the conservative Muslim politicians in the UK and their values about women then they will be in for a shock.

This could be us.

I can't help thinking - activists/newspapers/politicians are loud when campaigning about the gender pay gap or the state of child care or a woman's rights to her own body but somehow on this topic no one wants to criticise too often or too loudly.

ARE activists, newspapers, and politicians "loud" about these issues? I would say nowhere near loud enough, and certainly not loud enough to make any kind of sustained improvement to any of these issues. In fact, globally, we are going back on all of these.

Unfortunately, PPs are correct - when something only or mainly negatively impacts women, society just does not care. "The West", led by the USA, got "our people" out and left everyone else to their fates.

If the taliban cannot feed their people there will be a refugee crisis similar to the Syrian one with millions in the move. When Kabul fell, there was very little refuge for fleeing Afghans. Some people had connections to the countries which had had a presence there and were able to leverage that to get out, and some could leverage other personal connections, but very far from all. Iran eventually did relax its requirements in response to the crisis, but I think it was the only neighbouring country to do so. There was a very strong sense of Afghanistan closing, of a very short window to find a way to go and then - trapped. How can there be a refugee crisis if no one can leave?

Not our business. Actually, why are you not vocal on the part of Saudi women? Is it because the Saudis are our allies? Or is there anything in particular about the plight of the women in Afghanistan? Or is it because Saudi women are better off financially and are allowed an occasional trip to Selfridges in the UK?

This.

It's strange how some countries in the world are regressing. Lebanon in the 70's was very westernised with developing women's rights, just look at it now. The same was true of Iran and many other places that are now hardcore Islamic horror shows where women's rights are non-existent.
Wherever hardcore Islam gets a grip the rights of everyone bar men dive to next to nothing.
Even in Bradford recently 3 women were assaulted by a man for not wearing traditional dress (i.e. Pakistani dress)... these attacks on women's rights happen very close to home on our own doorsteps (Andrew Tate via the Internet, extreme Muslim men on the streets).
Much of this regression is caused by Iran who are stoking trouble wherever they can to divide and make the West unstable... and they are succeeding.
The 7th October Hamas raping/murdering incursion into Israel was funded etc by Iran deliberately to destabilise the region and stop the numerous peace treaties that were being put into place over there including Trump's Abraham Peace Accords.
The only MENA country with meaningful womens/gay/human rights is Israel, whereas Iran undermines these rights wherever it can and will cause conflict instead of peace. Yet no one protests against Iran at all but happily protest in the UK regularly "river to the sea" advocating the eradication of Israel exactly as Iran wants.
IMO the sooner Afghanis and Iranians ris up against their givernments the better. I'm involved with a UK based Iranian women's group who want that exact end.

I agree.

The world is missing out on the great impact, the great minds, the great importance of these women … a mighty contribution to humanity is utterly lost inside oppressive medieval, misogynistic, violent, totalitarian regimes. The loss of these women’s voices and their incredible influence is our collective loss.

Anything to do with women never gets much press. If you notice outrage over race and religion trumps women every time.

I didn’t realise this. Thank you.

If the UK government were in partnership with the Taliban providing with arms, you'd have a point. But they're not.

The very sad fact is we have no leverage. There is nothing the UK can do to help Afgan women.

Who has predicted that?

In Australia they have already removed women's rights to single sex anything so this WILL be coming - make no bones about it.

Zarah Sultana just this week was saying how much she loves it when men tell women what to wear. Yes, she is an MP in Coventry.

Just look at what happened in Iran. The moment the Left were no longer useful they were all slaughtered. They are fucking idiots if they cannot see what is coming but it is now illegal in the UK to critisise Islam.

This is what the Left want.

My friend taught girls in Afghanistan about 15 years ago and spoke about how eager they were to learn, how brilliant some of them were, how eager they were to be taught and improve their English. It's a tragedy of wasted human potential as well as everything else, to think of them being silenced by stone age savages in this way. I do think there is an element of fear & cowardice in the way it is being reported, we mustn't appear Islamophobic, even when it's the most deranged and brutal variant of Islam. Look at Angela Rayner ingratiating herself with that large group of Muslim men weeks before the election, for instance.

My father in law was a Russian Bulgarian student (Sanskrit linguist) who travelled from London to Kabul in a VW Kombi. He and his Cambridge buddies took this massive road trip in 1961. I’ve attached what was written about their observations of women/girls in Kabul at the time: Snapshots of time-worn female oppression and the resistance to it those women maintained, against the odds.

Afghan and Iranian women are my heroes because so many of them will, with everything they’ve got, and while facing insurmountable risks, carve their rights in their own blood if necessary. They will die on that noble hill. And for those who go about their daily lives dutifully, they do so to survive. Their silent resistance lives within them and it must be what gives them the courage to survive under such fearsome brutal regimes. Those women show the world that you can hold courage and fear in one hand. They must live a life of knowing when to rise and when to fall back; this constant dance with duality that is, to most of us, an inconceivable existence.

I remember the Soviet-Afghan war raging on in the background of my American childhood. When my son was born, just after 9/11, I remember thinking ‘and so it continues in his childhood’. His father did 2 tours in Afghanistan (British military). My first husband sat, in wartime, with the ghosts of Kabul his father knew in the flesh 40+ years before, when the geopolitical rumblings were gathering strength.

If we can all be up in arms over the Palestine genocide then we can all care about the vile and terrifying treatment of women in Afganistan.

But oh wait, it's not a popular or trendy topic to virtue signal with... so crickets.

If we turn a blind eye to this it will keep on creeping through other places and we will be in a very scary place soon.

The rights of women are being eroded across the Western world.
Violence against women is at crisis levels.

This is a warning for all of us and I think we will deeply regret ignoring this problem and pretending it doesn't exist.

Re Afghanistan, unfortunately there is nothing to be done there at the moment.

And by the way Taliban was originally sponsored by the USA to counter Soviet Union influence, so it is there thanks to the Western meddling to begin with. Google Operation Cyclone. They were called “insurgency” then. If the Western governments minded their own business, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Libya wouldn’t have been in such a terrible state now. Syria too.

The US care about their position in the world and their relationship with other countries. The US voters were also the ones that forced state governments from towing back on rights. The Taliban don't care about any of those things. The West has tried interfering in the Middle East. It's a shit show partly as a result. Same with Syria.