The Baron and I were discussing her decision to do this. He thinks that she is in danger in Europe, too, and that seeking asylum is problematic.
While I agree with him theoretically, I think her chances on a day-to-day basis are better in Europe than they are in Afghanistan, where she will be so much in the public eye that the fundamentalists are bound to come after her for being so immodest, unchaste, etc.
As you can see in the body of the report from Der Spiegel, below, they want her out of the limelight and back in the house.
Her parents will pay for this — her father has already spent time in jail — but if they are like parents everywhere, it is a price they will pay willingly for their daughter’s freedom:
Afghan Athlete Seeks Asylum in Europe- - - - - - - - -
Mehboba Ahdyar was to be the poster-child for the Olympics but the 19-year-old Afghan runner ran away from an Italian training camp last week. She has since told her parents she is too scared of reprisals and plans to seek asylum in Europe.Mehboba Ahdyar was shouldering the heavy burden of overwhelming expectations. And in the end, it proved more than she could bear. The 19-year-old from Kabul was to be the only female athlete representing Afghanistan in this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing. Now the young woman has run away, leaving a training camp in Italy and telling her family she is applying for political asylum in Europe.
The young runner, who competes in the 800 meters and 1,500 meters, had become the poster girl for the Olympic movement, with her face adorning the International Olympic Committee’s Web site.
But being in the international spotlight had attracted the wrong kind of attention. Although Ahdyar always ran in a headscarf and wore long tracksuit bottoms she still received death threats from extremists who objected to a Muslim woman taking part in sports at all.
When she received visits from Western media earlier this year, her neighbors called the police telling them she was obviously a prostitute working for foreign clients. Her father, a carpenter, even spent time in jail until the issue was cleared up.
[…]
The German coach of the Afghan women’s soccer team, Klaus Stärk, told SPIEGEL ONLINE earlier this year that he had to train his players on a small pitch at a US army base in Kabul because it would be too dangerous for them to play anywhere else. He even brought the female players to his native Stuttgart to give them the chance to play on regulation-sized fields.
While those women were happy to return to their lives in Afghanistan, Ahdyar took the decision to flee her country and gave up her chance to compete at the Olympics.
She had been training with the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) at a facility at Formia in Italy and was due to travel back to a high-performance center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on July 7. Instead she went missing, taking her luggage and passport with her. There were initially fears that she could have been abducted…
However, Ahdyar contacted her family late last week. She told them that she was in Europe and would not be coming back. She said she was scared of reprisals because of her sports career. Her parents are now reportedly under pressure from members of the Afghan Olympic Committee, who say that if she does not come back they will be held responsible and could be thrown in jail.
Thrown in jail again is what they meant.
Hat tip: insubria
9 comments:
She should renounce Islam before she is granted asylum.
Otherwise, what's the point?
She sounds like a very cool person who made a good decision. It's unfortunate that so many people in the West, including me, are burned out by foreigners who use our laws to exploit us. This girl, OTOH, is the real deal, and I'd have no problem with welcoming her and her immediate family to my neighborhood.
I disagree that she should have to renounce Islam.
This insistence implies to me that we should also want all currently residing Muslims in Europe to renounce Islam. This may be what some of us whould like (I wouldnt mind it eaither), but are we going to actually insist on this?
But she should be allowed to settle in our liberated culture. After all, this is the underlying and original rationale for granting rights of asylum at all. To protect foreigners from clear and present dangers to their individual liberties from interfering and dictating regimes.
Obviously we would be within out rights to be proud of how we are able to protect such people.
All of this implies to me a clear and unmistakeable critique of the oppressiveness of much in Islam that would shine brighter than any interference with her rights of conscience that demaning she become an apostate first would imply.
Hundreds of thousands of muslims got into Europe by means of political asylum, and millions as war refugees, and now they are taking our countries away from us. The last decades should have taught us that indiscriminate mass immigration is suicidal, no matter how humanitarian our intentions were about allowing it. The only immigrants we should allow into our countries are those, who we carefully select according to our criteria.
Yes, she should definitely be required to renounce Islam first.
The main problem with requiring her to renounce Islam is that it would make her even more of a target. If I were in charge of this project, I'd keep it low key. Why put even more of a burden on this stressed-out person who was incredibly brave to do what she had to do, and would probably rather not give others even more of an excuse (according to them) to stone her to death on a European street.
If we ended mass Muslim immigration and only accepted certain deserving individuals, we'd be able to support them as individuals, instead of setting the bar so high that people like her couldn't be helped. In effect, the open house policy we have now may prevent us from getting the good ones.
I'd just accept her at face value, no more tests necessary, and that goes for her immediate family as well. If her family were the wrong kind of people, do you think she'd have become a competitive athlete?
@latte island:
"If her family were the wrong kind of people, do you think she'd have become a competitive athlete?"
How can we know? Maybe they support her athletic career, but wouldn't tolerate her or one of her sisters to have extra-marital sexual relations or marry a non-muslim? And even if they did, as long as they stick to Islam and continue to raise their children in that spirit, they or their children may very well at one day turn out to become "the wrong kind of people", like it is the case with moderate muslims in general. It wouldn't be the first time, we have observed it many times already.
"If we ended mass Muslim immigration and only accepted certain deserving individuals, we'd be able to support them as individuals, instead of setting the bar so high that people like her couldn't be helped. In effect, the open house policy we have now may prevent us from getting the good ones."
How do you tell the good ones from the bad ones, other than by demanding of them to renounce Islam? And this is a slippery slope, as there are not just a few, but countless innocent and suffering people in the world, who deserve to be helped, but nevertheless all carry their cultural baggage around with them, which in many cases created the situations from which they fled in the first place. In my country (Germany) there are almost 100,000 Afghans now. They have set up their own subculture, including honor killings. We are losing our country to foreigners.
But I was inconsistent in my former post: Actually, even if she did renounce Islam, I still don't want to let her in. Here is an older article by the Baron about the Swedish town of Södertälje, which reportedly took in more refugees from Iraq than the United States and Canada combined, and mostly Christians at that. Didn't they deserve help? Yes, they did, but it doesn't change the fact that these people replace native Europeans in their land, that native Europeans cede their countries to them. The European nations are being destroyed, while Western troops indirectly support both Iraq and Afghanistan to cleanse their countries from non-muslims. Non-muslims are ceding territory to Islam. One day we must take a stance and consistently oppose any immigration unless it is strictly in our interest.
There might still be ways to help the hundreds of millions of innocent suffering people of people other than letting them immigrate here. But our own survival must be our first priority.
Pasta, I agree with you in general, I'm usually pretty hardline...but the person in this article is clearly an outlier. The only Olympic athlete in Afghanistan isn't representative of anyone, she's just an outstanding individual.
It's like the pet overpopulation problem. Just because there are too many unwanted pets, does that mean that no one should ever adopt a pet? No, it means we should pay attention and get control. Spay and neuter the pets, and deport as many foreign freaks as we can, end immigration, and then we can have the luxury of welcoming the occasional Olympic athlete, great scientist, etc.
@latté island:
"It's like the pet overpopulation problem. Just because there are too many unwanted pets, does that mean that no one should ever adopt a pet? No, it means we should pay attention and get control. Spay and neuter the pets, and deport as many foreign freaks as we can, end immigration, and then we can have the luxury of welcoming the occasional Olympic athlete, great scientist, etc."
I agree that sterilizing refugees makes letting in a limited number of them appear much more acceptable, as they would be prevented from taking over the country in the long run. However, because of the strong taboo on forced sterilization in our times, I would expect the international community to lash out very hard against any state implementing such a policy. In contrast, I don't expect a policy of fending off any requests for accepting refugees to be met with similar reprisals.
We all know what terrible scenarios evolve from multiculturalism, like civil war, ethnic cleansing or the complete obliteration of an ethnic group. Is there any merit in multiculturalism at all? And if there isn't, shouldn't we try to keep our societies as monocultural (homogenous) as possible, by means of prohibiting any immigration whatsoever or procreation of other ethnic groups already residing within the state, unless there is a clear benefit to the state and it can be ensured with absolute certainty that the immigration results in complete assimilation within a reasonable timespan? The United States is the prime example of a society having benefited from immigration in the past, but even the successive waves of European immigrants, who were all closely related to each other, caused substantial conflicts in their times. Isn't it wiser for a nation to give birth to, raise and educate all needed people on its own?
pasta: How do you tell the good ones from the bad ones, other than by demanding of them to renounce Islam?
Answer: You can't. Not even if they do renounce Islam. Got that, Profitsbeard? There's this niggling little thing called taqiyya that makes all such gestures meaningless.
Islam has permanently damned itself with taqiyya. Unless you subject each individual to immediate and routine follow-up fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans, there is NO WAY ON EARTH to accurately or reliably determine whether a Muslim is telling the truth.
This is why Islam must go. It is corrupt to the very core and totally without redeeming features. Keeping it around is like leaving matches in a powder magazine.
pasta: There might still be ways to help the hundreds of millions of innocent suffering people of people other than letting them immigrate here. But our own survival must be our first priority.
Bottom line. End of story.
latté island: Pasta, I agree with you in general, I'm usually pretty hardline...but the person in this article is clearly an outlier. The only Olympic athlete in Afghanistan isn't representative of anyone, she's just an outstanding individual.
It's time for all these "outliers" and other erstwhile opponents of Islam to be kept in-country so that they can begin to topple Muslim culture. Accepting them here is much like how America has allowed so many Mexicans to enter it borders.
The actual end result is to have relieved any pressure that discontented young males may have been able to place on the corrupt Mexican government. So it is with Islam. All of their beleaguered masses must be huddled back in their respective countries of origin until they purchase a collective clue and start killing anyone who wants shari'a law. Until then, Muslims remain a complete and total danger to Western civilization.
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