By Olivia Pierson
http://www.oliviapierson.org/b...
One could be forgiven for nearly falling off the chair with laughter after reading NZ media outlet 'Stuff's' sappy little identity-politics piece by Ms. Mahvash Ali, titled, "I grew up under a pregnant prime minister; she was a role model and an inspiration."
Ms Ali is defending Jacinda Ardern by referencing Benazir Bhutto - Pakistan's ill-fated first female prime minister, who also happened to be at one point a pregnant prime minister.
Aside from the bar of "inspiration" being set so very low, I mean all mammals breed - from Kitti's hog-nosed bats to blue whales - are people really this desperate to glorify Jacinda Ardern’s planned pregnancy in the opening days of her prime ministership that the woman who did more than any other leader to bring forth the murderous Taliban movement in Pakistan and Afghanistan is considered a positive comparison?
This is where identity-politics really is a brain-free zone, something it has in common with pregnancy it seems.
One can only remind Ms. Ali that New Zealand forces have spent a decade in Afghanistan fighting the very brutal and entrenched foe that Benazir Bhutto admittedly helped to create. Such decisions would hardly have been helped by "baby brain" - which apparently is a real thing, i.e. impaired cognitive function during pregnancy.
Instead of backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, who, with the help of America had fought and won against Soviet cruelty in 1989, Benazir Bhutto threw her significant support behind the Taliban & Al Qaeda, with the help of, and pressure from, Pakistan’s Inter-service Intelligence agency (ISI) - and hatched a horrific, subhuman monster that Western forces are still fighting today as I write.
In an effort to mould neighbouring Afghanistan into a submissive and manageable client state, Benazir Bhutto unleashed upon it the barbaric forces of the Taliban - newly gifted with government sourced weapons and money, which decimated the India-friendly resistance movement led by Afghan Ahmad Shah Massoud. The rest is dark history.
Was Benazir Bhutto a courageous woman? Indeed. Undoubtably she was as courageous as she was beautiful - and intelligent to boot, but her decision making was fanatical, true to the fanatical traditions of the Islamic country she twice governed.
On the occasion of her assassination (arguably at the hands of the same foe she helped to create), the late journalist/polemicist extraordinaire, Christopher Hitchens, who had met and interviewed Benazir Bhutto back in 1998, wrote of her notorious courage:
“This courage could sometimes have been worthy of a finer cause, and many of the problems she claimed to solve were partly of her own making. Nonetheless, she perhaps did have a hint of destiny about her.”
Now that Jacinda Ardern has been referenced in a comparison with this Daughter of Destiny, one can only hope that her courage too may be worthy of a finer cause; finer than just waving the tatty little feminist flags of women’s rights and multiculturalism, finer than "trailblazing" dippy endorsements of the biologically doomed role of the stay-at-home-dad.
If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book Western Values Defended: A Primer