Under pressure from everyone, the State Department reversed an earlier decision to deny prominent Afghan activist Malalai Joya a visa for a three-week speaking tour for her new book, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice.” Joya told reporters last week that she was denied because — get this — she is “unemployed” and “lives underground.” Seeing that she is an accomplished author who has dodged fists and assassins, called a prostitute and communist and needs to live underground else she might die, this seemed weirdly obtuse if not petty.
That is if you weren’t familiar with Joya in the first place. She is one bad-ass woman, to put it plainly. And everyone has loved her for her brave and brutal verbal attacks on the corruption in the Afghan government and on the continued neglect of women’s rights. But “the bravest woman in Afghanistan” has also been a relentless critic of the continuing U.S military occupation in Afghanistan, and for that she had seemingly fallen from grace and into the status of a “problem,” one that cannot be allowed to infect our domestic audience with her authentic reaction to American policy in Afghanistan.
Joya’s supporters — of which there are many, obviously — rallied her cause in part by bombarding Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office with phone calls and emails. The decision to grant her a visa was made today, just before her scheduled speech at Harvard tomorrow. So the message managers engaging in their usual game of “preferred speakers” were not able to get away with it this time. It seems to me all too conspicuous that they would try to shut her out, after giving her visas for numerous previous trips to the U.S, just about the same time Gen. David Petraeus and Company were running around Washington trying to drum up positive reasons why we need to stay in Afghanistan.
Now let’s see if the corporate mainstream media gives her any coverage.
