Former US Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger passed away at age 100 on Wednesday.
The renowned diplomat and influential foreign policy thinker died at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, said in a statement. After quitting the US military, Kissinger earned a PhD at Harvard University and taught international relations before becoming President Richard Nixon’s top national security adviser in 1969. He eventually served as secretary of state under Nixon and his successor, President Gerald Ford. A skilled negotiator committed to realism, Kissinger was instrumental in improving US relations with the Soviet Union in the 1970s and paved a way for the normalization of Washington's ties with China. With Kissinger's stewardship, the Nixon administration's easing of travel and trade restrictions against Beijing was instrumental in kick-starting China's rise to prominence as an industrial economy. In 1973, Kissinger shared the Nobel Peace Prize with diplomat Le Duc Tho for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, which facilitated the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam. In 1974, he helped to negotiate Israel’s disengagement agreements with Syria and Egypt, which officially ended the Yom Kippur War. However, a book by US-British journalist Christopher Hitchens ‘The Trial of Henry Kissinger’ accused the diplomat of ordering the first round of Cambodia bombings in the 1960s without congressional approval. In addition to this, an Intercept report released in May to mark the Kissinger’s 100th birthday claimed that he was behind more than 3 million civilian deaths, and that he helped to prolong the Vietnam War while fostering strife and civil wars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Kissinger remained active after leaving office, giving lectures and interviews, in which he commented on world affairs. One of his last trips was a visit to Beijing in July 2023, during which he met with President Xi Jinping. He also repeatedly warned the US and China that if they continued on their current foreign policy course, they risked sliding into open military confrontation. On the Ukraine conflict, Kissinger described the West’s decision to offer Kiev a pathway to NATO as “a grave mistake” which led to the hostilities in the first place. While the veteran diplomat opposed Ukraine’s membership in the US-led military bloc before the conflict, he later changed his stance, arguing that the country’s neutrality is “no longer meaningful” amid the ongoing fighting. Last year, he also suggested that Ukraine could relinquish its territorial claims to Crimea and grant autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics – all Russian territories now – to achieve peace, an idea repeatedly rejected by Kiev.
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Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar described Europe as “paradise” and his country as “one of the best parts of paradise,” urging citizens not not to link immigration with crime during a speech in parliament on Tuesday.
The PM’s comment came as Ireland continues to reel from the anti-immigrant riots that swept Dublin on Thursday night, after a man of Algerian descent allegedly stabbed three young children and their caregiver before he was subdued by bystanders. Because “Europe is paradise and Ireland is one of the best parts of paradise, thousands will come here and we just need to manage that as best we can,” Varadkar said, insisting that migrants were no more likely to commit crimes than anyone else and it was “totally wrong” to think otherwise. “In a country of 5.3 million people, if there are hundreds of thousands of migrants, there are going to be a few of them who commit terrible crimes, just as there are people born and bred in Ireland who commit terrible crimes every day, including murder,” the PM said. Acknowledging that the suspect in the stabbing case is a “migrant, though a citizen and someone who has been here for over 20 years,” Varadkar stressed that the parents of the five-year-old child that the attacker had put in the hospital were also migrants, as was the Brazilian delivery worker who hit the attacker with his helmet in order to protect the children and three others who intervened to stop the attack. “It is totally wrong to try to make out that there is a connection between crime and migration based on what happened on Parnell Street,” the Irish leader said, referring to the location of the school where the stabbing occurred. The attacker’s motive remains unknown. Several officers were injured in Thursday’s riot, while at least two buses, a tram and multiple police vehicles were torched. Dozens of rioters have been arrested. Irish authorities reacted to the worst unrest in Dublin in decades by vowing to strengthen hate speech laws and beef up surveillance. Justice Minister Helen McEntee rated the police response as “excellent,” while police commissioner Drew Harris denounced the rioters as “a complete lunatic hooligan faction driven by far right ideology.” While he acknowledged there was a “real concern” about the nation’s porous borders, Varadkar told legislators on Tuesday that the number of migrants seeking asylum in Ireland had declined from last year’s record high thanks to his efforts. The country has struggled to accommodate unprecedented immigration, with 141,000 arriving between April 2022 and April 2023 alone, according to the Central Statistics Office.
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At the beginning of this week, foreign ministers from a group of Muslim-majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the Palestinian National Authority, and Indonesia travelled to China in order to seek support for a ceasefire in the ongoing Gaza war.
The unconditional backing of Israel by the United States and its allies has tanked their credibility across the Islamic world, and Beijing has positioned itself as an advocate of peace when others are not willing to take up that role. It is curious that within the following few days, a report was released by Human Rights Watch, accusing China of expanding its alleged campaign of closing down and repurposing mosques into regions other than Xinjiang – which had so far been the focus of accusations that Beijing is cracking down on the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority. Even those allegations had been somewhat on the backburner in the establishment media lately, but the HRW report was quickly picked up and amplified. Although relations between the US and China have somewhat calmed down, it is obvious that Washington does not want to see Beijing increase its influence in the Muslim world, as that would inevitably come at the expense of American clout. The attempt to draw attention back to China’s alleged repression of its Muslim population, while underreporting Israel’s devastating attack on the (also Muslim) population of Gaza, is an exercise in deflection and part of the ongoing narrative war between China and the US. Be it about Muslims or not, the Xinjiang issue has long been a key component of that struggle for influence. The Uighur minority has, since 2018, been a tool of “atrocity propaganda” used to wage public relations offensives against China. It is a means to an end, which often disappears and resurfaces in the media, coinciding with the ebb and flow of anti-Beijing rhetoric coming from the US administration or the State Department. This includes using it to turn public opinion against Beijing in selected countries, including allies, or to manufacture consent for policies aimed at supply chain shifts or “decoupling,” through the accusation of forced labor, especially in the fields of key agricultural goods, polysilicon and solar panels, or to attempt to embarrass China diplomatically at the UN, or to push for boycotting events such as the Winter Olympics. This is an incredibly opportunistic attitude to something Beijing’s detractors claim is a “genocide.” Since late 2021, the Biden administration has largely ignored the issue and it has fallen off the international agenda, precisely because Washington had gotten the sanctions they wanted from it at the time. However, the Israel-Gaza conflict introduces a new dynamic whereby the US and its allies are dramatically losing face and credibility among Muslim nations because they are backing Israel unconditionally in the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. From a geopolitical point of view, such a policy pathway is actually strategically disastrous because it alienates the entire Global South, serves as a beacon in projecting US hypocrisy and worse still, directly empowers China as a competitor. So when you are faced with a situation whereby Beijing is gaining diplomatic capital over your own failures, what do you do? You desperately aim to deflect by trying to draw attention to another issue in the attempt to smear Beijing: Xinjiang and the Uighurs. Now as it happens, Muslim countries mostly ignore US-led propaganda over the Xinjiang issue, because they see it for what it is and also share a common norm of respect for national sovereignty with Beijing, which is politically beneficial for them. The only Muslim nation who has ever made public comment about it is Türkiye, because Uighurs are a Turkic ethnic group and the issues is viewed through the lens of Ankara’s Pan-Turk ideology. However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is still likely to ignore the issue, or only involve himself in it based on what he can gain. On the other hand, the Gulf States, the key US allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, support China’s position, and the Gaza issue is putting them under pressure regarding their relations with the US and the decision to normalize relations with Israel. So suddenly we are seeing a resurgence of Xinjiang material because the US, even if it cannot sway their governments, wants to kindle the anger of Muslim populations about another issue instead and diminish China’s credibility. Although this is less likely in Arab States, it could cause public opinion ruptures in key Asian Islamic countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, where significant resources were placed by organizations such as the BBC in relaying Xinjiang-related content in their respective languages. But the question is, will this campaign succeed? It might be worth remembering that Xinjiang is an artificially imposed issue pushed “top-down” by governments and the media, whereas Palestine is a grassroots issue pushing from the bottom up, aspects of which media and politicians endeavor to selectively ignore. China’s heavy-handed management of Uighurs in Xinjiang is not really a genocide, and it will never rank on the same level of severity as the outright bombardment and mass killing of Palestinians, no matter how hard you try.
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The start of the peak consumption season in the EU amid rising demand from Asia could drive up prices for natural gas on the continent despite ample supply of liquified natural gas (LNG) globally, Oilprice reported this week.
According to the outlet, the situation has been worsened by a range of factors, such as geopolitical tensions, including the recent Houthi ship seizure. Supply-chain challenges, like the restrictions in the Panama Canal and risks in the Suez Canal, have also been causing concerns for global LNG shipping and pricing, the report added. “Vulnerability to any occurrence that can influence prices was made crystal clear earlier this week when European benchmark prices jumped after the news broke of Houthis seizing a cargo ship in the Red Sea,” Oilprice wrote, noting that the ship was linked to an Israeli company and therefore was widely seen as a sign of a possible escalation of the conflict in the Middle East. According to the report, citing S&P Global, some experts in the gas trading industry believe LNG prices won’t climb much higher, even in light of rising geopolitical risks in the Middle East. Other experts reportedly suggest that shipping news has become quite important for all sorts of commodities lately due to restricted movement via the Panama Canal and riskier passage via the Suez Canal as a result of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Asian buyers of US LNG have also been seeking alternative routes in the wake of the limited movement in the key choke-point between North and South America, which is expected to add to freight rates, the report noted. “Speaking of supply, it may be plentiful, but as last year’s Freeport outage demonstrated, this abundance is one outage away from a disruption and a price spike,” Oilprice wrote. The blast at a massive US gas export plant last June shut the facility down for the rest of the year. Freeport, which had accounted for a tenth of European LNG imports before the blast, only reopened in February this year. The force majeure has led to a spike in gas prices on the continent. With temperatures dropping for winter, gas prices could climb higher in the EU, while global prices may be more resilient, Oilprice concluded. A warm winter last year and efforts by the EU to build up stocks helped to avoid a recurrence of the 2021 energy crisis, when gas prices in the region spiked over €300 ($320) per megawatt hour following the bloc’s decision to shift away from Russian supplies. European gas prices were volatile this week as traders weighed higher heating demand in colder weather with still nearly full EU inventories. The front-month Dutch TTF Natural Gas Futures, the benchmark for Europe’s gas trading, were trading 1.3% lower on Wednesday at $44.66 per megawatt-hour as of 11:04am GMT.
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Limits on electricity and gas prices will not be extended until March 2024 as previously planned, but will expire at the end of this year, Deutschlandfunk radio station has cited Finance Minister Christian Lindner as saying in an interview to be aired on Sunday.
“As of December 31 of this year the Economic and Stabilization Fund will be closed,” Lindner said. “There will be no more payouts from this. The electricity and gas price brakes will also be terminated.” Lindner did not clarify whether energy support would be provided via the regular budget in 2024. The financial support scheme was introduced to protect households and businesses from soaring prices of gas and electricity after Germany, along with many other EU member states, opted to slash energy imports from Russia after the outbreak of the military conflict in Ukraine. Earlier this month, the European Commission called on Berlin to phase out its price caps as soon as possible. The decision comes days after the German Constitutional Court blocked the federal government's move to transfer €60 billion ($66 billion) from funds initially earmarked to tackle the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, to other projects. The fund – known by its German abbreviation WSF – is one of the country’s 29 such non-budget institutions, worth around €870 billion. The ruling has jeopardised funding for plans to modernise the German economy and fight climate change. The decision by the country’s top court could also set a precedent for fiscal responses to future crises.
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Gold prices could soon reach a record $2,500 per ounce, driven by safe-haven investor demand in the wake of global uncertainty and geopolitical tensions, some analysts are now projecting.
Futures have risen 3% in the past couple of weeks, briefly breaching the key psychological threshold of $2,000 per ounce on Tuesday. The rise marked the highest daily close so far this month, and any move above $2,006.37 per ounce this week would make it the highest weekly close since the spring, researcher Fundstrat’s technical analyst Mark Newton wrote in a note on Wednesday seen by Business Insider. “This is quite positive technically, and I expect that gold has begun its push back to new all-time highs,” wrote Newton. He believes a rise past $2,009.41 per ounce should lead to gold entering the $2,060-2,080 range. Newton told Business Insider that a breach of resistance at $2,080 would signal a “definite technical breakout,” which he expects to quickly drive gold even higher. “My technical target for gold is $2,500/oz, and it looks appealing to be long precious metals given falling real rates, rising cycles and ongoing geopolitical conflict,” he said. The analyst later clarified that his timeline for $2,500 isn't necessarily for the end of the year but is an “intermediate target.” Bullion has been rallying since the attack by Palestinian armed group Hamas on Israel on October 7. Experts and traders expect the escalation and uncertainty in the Middle East to continue driving gold prices higher. Investors traditionally turn to gold in times of market uncertainty to hedge risks and as a store of value. Bullion has been seen as a safe haven during periods of economic instability, stock market crises, military conflicts, and pandemics. Geert Wilders is a stalwart of the Dutch opposition, whose controversial views on immigration and Islam have seen him live under police protection for nearly two decades. Now, after a decisive election victory, he could be the next prime minister of the Netherlands. Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) won 37 seats in Wednesday’s general election, more than doubling its presence in parliament and making it the country’s largest party. After decades in opposition, Wilders declared in his victory speech that he intends to form a government, and is “confident that [he] can reach an agreement” with the mainstream right, which has for years balked at working with the PVV. Anti-Islam crusaderWilders’ began his political career as a member of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). Following the assassination of Pim Fortuyn – a popular politician and critic of Islam – in 2002, Wilders made a series of speeches condemning multiculturalism and Islamic immigration. When the VVD endorsed Türkiye’s bid for EU membership in 2004, Wilders split from the party and formed the PVV. In a manifesto published two years later, Wilders called for a moratorium on all non-Western immigration to the Netherlands, a ban on the founding of new mosques, and a tax on the wearing of the Hijab by Muslim women. Wilders went on to call the Islamic Prophet Mohammed “the devil,” the Quran “a fascist book” that should be outlawed, and Moroccan immigrants “street terrorists.” Targeted by extremists Wilders’ hardline positions and proclivity for political stunts – including his hosting of a ‘Prophet Mohammed cartoon competition’ in 2019 – have led to death threats from extremist preachers and terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda. Wilders was placed under police protection in 2004, after plans for his assassination were discovered, and to this day he is watched 24/7 by armed officers. Wilders has been tried twice for hate speech in the Netherlands. In 2016, a court found him guilty of inciting "discrimination and hatred" over a speech he gave two years earlier, in which he asked his supporters whether they wanted “fewer Moroccans” in the country. The verdict was overturned in 2020. A right-wing liberal While Wilders is often described in the media as “far-right,” he rejects the label, and has distanced himself from other European right-wing movements. “I'm very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups,” he told The Guardian in 2008, explaining in subsequent interviews that he views Islam as a threat to women’s and LGBT rights, free speech, and social tolerance. A more moderate message Wilders toned down his anti-Islam rhetoric during this year’s campaign, although immigration remained front and center. His manifesto promised a freeze on the admission of asylum seekers, the deportation of criminal immigrants, and the prioritization of native Dutch people for social housing. "The Netherlands will be returned to the Dutch,” he said in his victory speech, declaring that “the asylum tsunami will be curbed.” In a nod to potential coalition partners – likely the VVD or the newly formed and centrist New Social Contract party – he added that all of his proposals will be “within the law and the constitution.” In this year’s manifesto, Wilders also proposed to either hold a referendum on leaving the EU or dramatically lower the Netherlands’ contributions to the union, scrap climate legislation, and halt arms transfers to Ukraine. While Wilders has condemned Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, he argues that the Netherlands should bolster its own military rather than that of Kiev. Wilders has also vowed to block Ukraine’s accession to the EU and NATO, and has called sanctions on Russia “ineffective and also bad for the Netherlands.” The next prime minister? "We want to govern and...we will govern,” Wilders said in Wednesday night’s speech. To do so, Wilders will need the backing of 38 other lawmakers to make up a majority, a situation that could lead to protracted talks and compromise from the PVV leader. New Social Contract leader Pieter Omtzigt said that his party is “available to govern,” potentially adding another 20 seats, while Thierry Baudet, whose right-wing Forum for Democracy (FVD) managed to secure only three seats, said that he would “contribute… in any way.”
With 24 seats, the center-right VVD is a potential coalition partner, having secured the PVV’s support to form a government in 2010. However, the deal fell apart within two years, and the VVD’s current leader, Dilan Yesilgoz, has previously ruled out entering a coalition with Wilders. The PVV has convincingly won the 2023 parliamentary election, standing at 37 seats with 94 percent of the votes counted. About 2.3 million people voted for the far-right party on Wednesday. Geert Wilders’ party is doing better than the VVD did in 2021 and 2017 when 2.2 million people voted for the party. In 2012, Rutte’s party received slightly more votes at 2.5 million.
GroenLinks-PvdA became the second-largest party on Wednesday with 1.57 million votes, followed closely by the VVD with almost 1.53 million votes. NSC also attracted over a million voters. Pieter Omtzigt’s party got almost 1.3 million votes. D66 got more than 1.5 million votes two years ago, but only around 630,000 remained this year. The smallest party is the Politieke Partij voor Basisinkomen. It got just over a thousand votes. Two years ago, De Groenen was the smallest party with over a hundred votes. Nine municipalities still have to report their results to the ANP Election Service. The votes from the special municipalities of Bonaire, St. Eustatius, and Saba, and the postal votes from Dutch abroad have also not been received yet. ANP’s latest prognosis puts the PVV at 37 seats in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament, up one from the previous forecast. D66 dropped from 10 to 9. The projection is based on nearly 94 percent of the votes counted nationwide. BBB will also increase slightly from 5 to 7 seats compared to the first forecast. The CDA has 5 seats and not the previously reported 6. The animal rights party PvdD and far-right FvD each got one seat less than in the first forecast, ending up with 3 instead of 4. For the other parties, the number of seats corresponds to the exit polls by Ipsos on behalf of NOS and RTL. GroenLinks-PvdA remains at 25 parliamentary seats, closely followed by the VVD with 24. NSC gets 20. The SP ends up with 5 seats. ChristenUnie gets 3 as do SGP and DENK. Volt got 2, and JA21 got 1. The party for the elderly 50Plus got 0 seats, while the exit poll seemed to put it at 1. BIJ1 also lost its only seat in the Tweede Kamer. The ousted leader of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is returning to the company that fired him late last week, culminating a days-long power struggle that shocked the tech industry and brought attention to the conflicts around how to safely build artificial intelligence.
San Francisco-based OpenAI said in a statement late Tuesday, “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board." The board, which replaces the one that fired Altman on Friday, will be led by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, who also chaired Twitter's board before its takeover by Elon Musk last year. The other members will be former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. OpenAI’s previous board of directors, which included D'Angelo, had refused to give specific reasons for why it fired Altman, leading to a weekend of internal conflict at the company and growing outside pressure from the startup's investors. The chaos also accentuated the differences between Altman — who's become the face of generative AI's rapid commercialization since ChatGPT's arrival a year ago — and members of the company's board who have expressed deep reservations about the safety risks posed by AI as it becomes more advanced. Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and has rights to its current technology, quickly moved to hire Altman on Monday, as well as another co-founder and former president, Greg Brockman, who had quit in protest after Altman's removal. That emboldened a threatened exodus of nearly all of the startup's 770 employees who signed a letter calling for the board's resignation and Altman's return. One of the four board members who participated in Altman's ouster, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, later expressed regret and joined the call for the board's resignation. Microsoft in recent days had pledged to welcome all employees who wanted to follow Altman and Brockman to a new AI research unit at the software giant. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also made clear in a series of interviews Monday that he was still open to the possibility of Altman returning to OpenAI, so long as the startup's governance problems are solved. “We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board,” Nadella posted on X late Tuesday. “We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.” In his own post, Altman said that “with the new board and (with) Satya's support, I'm looking forward to returning to OpenAI, and building on our strong partnership with (Microsoft)." Co-founded by Altman as a nonprofit with a mission to safely build so-called artificial general intelligence that outperforms humans and benefits humanity, OpenAI later became a for-profit business but one still run by its nonprofit board of directors. It's not clear yet if the board's structure will change with its newly appointed members. “We are collaborating to figure out the details,” OpenAI posted on X. “Thank you so much for your patience through this.” Nadella said Brockman, who was OpenAI's board chairman until Altman's firing, will also have a key role to play in ensuring the group “continues to thrive and build on its mission.” Hours earlier, Brockman returned to social media as if it were business as usual, touting a feature called ChatGPT Voice that was rolling out to users. “Give it a try — totally changes the ChatGPT experience,” Brockman wrote, flagging a post from OpenAI's main X account that featured a demonstration of the technology and playfully winking at recent turmoil. “It’s been a long night for the team and we’re hungry. How many 16-inch pizzas should I order for 778 people?” the person asks, using the number of people who work at OpenAI. ChatGPT's synthetic voice responded by recommending around 195 pizzas, ensuring everyone gets three slices. As for OpenAI's short-lived interim CEO Emmett Shear, the second interim CEO in the days since Altman's ouster, he posted on X that he was “deeply pleased by this result, after ~72 very intense hours of work.” “Coming into OpenAI, I wasn't sure what the right path would be,” wrote Shear, the former head of Twitch. “This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved. I'm glad to have been a part of the solution.” The PVV, PvdA-GroenLinks, and the VVD are tied in the final poll by I&O Research. 63 percent of voters had not yet finalized their vote choice for the parliamentary elections that will take place on Wednesday.The survey was conducted from Monday at 09:00 p.m., following the EenVandaag debate, until Tuesday at 09:00 a.m. The previous poll by I&O Research was conducted from Friday afternoon to Monday morning and published on Monday evening.
PVV rose from 26 to 28 seats in just one day, slightly ahead of the VVD and the left-wing alliance PvdA-GL, with both at 27 seats. The difference between these three parties is so minor that it cannot be stated that the PVV is leading. "The parties are statistically indistinguishable," according to the researchers. The New Social Contract of Pieter Omtzigt follows with 21 seats. The four parties have a margin of error of three seats, meaning that the actual support for these parties could be three seats higher or lower than indicated. There are no significant changes compared to Monday, according to I&O Research. Apart from the PVV, which gained two seats, D66 rose from 8 to 9 seats, while the BBB lost another seat, now at virtually five seats. CU and JA21 also lost one seat since the previous day and now have virtually three and one seat respectively. The researchers warned that the poll should not be interpreted as a prediction of the election outcome. Approximately two-thirds of voters (63%) have not yet definitively decided which party they will vote for Online abuse and hate speech targeting politically active women in Afghanistan has significantly increased since the Taliban took over the country in Aug. 2021, according to a report released Monday by a U.K.-based rights group.
Afghan Witness, an open-source project run by the non-profit Center for Information Resilience, says it found that abusive posts tripled, a 217% increase, between June-December 2021 and the same period of 2022. Building on expertise gained from similar research in Myanmar, the Afghan Witness team analyzed publicly available information from X, formerly known as Twitter, and conducted in-depth interviews with six Afghan women to investigate the nature of the online abuse since the Taliban takeover. The report said the team of investigators "collected and analyzed over 78,000 posts" written in Dari and Pashto — two local Afghan languages — directed at "almost 100 accounts of politically active Afghan women." The interviews indicated that the spread of abusive posts online helped make the women targets, the report's authors said. The interviewees reported receiving messages with pornographic material as well as threats of sexual violence and death. "I think the hatred they show on social media does not differ from what they feel in real life," one woman told Afghan Witness. Taliban government spokesmen were not immediately available to comment about the report. The report identified four general themes in the abusive posts: accusations of promiscuity; the belief that politically active women violated cultural and religious norms; allegations the women were agents of the West; and accusations of making false claims in order to seek asylum abroad. At the same time, Afghan Witness said it found the online abuse was "overwhelmingly sexualized," with over 60% of the posts in 2022 containing terms such as "whore" or "prostitute." "Since the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan, social media has turned from being a place for social and political expression to a forum for abuse and suppression, especially of women," the project's lead investigator, Francesca Gentile, said. The Taliban have barred women from most areas of public life and work and stopped girls from going to school beyond the sixth grade as part of harsh measures they imposed after taking power in 2021, as U.S. and NATO forces were pulling out of Afghanistan following two decades of war. "The Taliban's hostility towards women and their rights sends a message to online abusers that any woman who stands up for herself is fair game," added Gentile. One female journalist, speaking with Afghan Witness on condition of anonymity, said she deactivated some of her social media accounts and no longer reads comments, which affects her work when trying to reach out to online sources. The report said it found the majority of those behind the online abuse were men, "from a range of political affiliations, ethnic groups, and backgrounds." |
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