Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, as Chair of the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, and as an original cosponsor of the House companion, I rise in support of the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act of 2001. In 1996, a heavy shroud was placed on the people of Afghanistan when the Taliban captured Kabul. From that moment onward, the Taliban took the peaceful and sacred scriptures of the Holy Koran and distorted them into a rulebook of terror. Through their creation of the Department for Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the Taliban enforced a perverse rendition of Islam which gruesomely joined prayer with the barbaric practices of beatings, torture, rape, and executions. But the Taliban's brutality and blatant disregard for the lives and well-being of the Afghan people was perhaps most clearly evident among half of its population, the women of Afghanistan, who bear the deepest scars. Made widows and orphans by the will of the Taliban, the same women who once made up 50 percent of Afghanistan's doctors, nurses, teachers, college students, and diplomats, have been made destitute, sick, and marginalized. The Taliban further banned them from receiving any education past the age of 8, for which the curriculum was limited to the Taliban's corrupted version of the Koran.”