MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2011
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Make glove, not war
Afghanistan's female boxers defy the odds in Olympic quest
BY JORDAN HELLER
At the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, women’s boxing will be an Olympic sport for the first time, and though Afghanistan is still torn by war, the country is looking to send a team of female fighters — lack of resources be damned.
“We have just a few weights, no modern equipment, no physicians, no sports nutrition,” coach Mohammed Sabir Sharifi said recently from a dusty training room in Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium, the official training ground for the Afghanistan Women’s Boxing Team.
“Security is still not good in Kabul,” he added. “If the Taliban got hold of these girls, they would shoot them on the spot.”
In fact, less than 10 years ago, the Taliban held public executions on the very same soccer pitch just outside the training room.
In 1996, the Taliban banned all women’s sports as a violation of Islamic law. Four years later, the Afghan Olympic team, a fixture in every Olympic Games since 1936, was excluded from the Sydney Games because of the Taliban’s prohibitions on sports and discrimination against women.
Though the Taliban now have no influence in Kabul, they control many parts of the country — and you only have to travel a short distance into the countryside, where every woman over the age of 12 wears a burqa in public, to find it.
Sadaf Rahimi, 17, one of the 23 women on the team, said she and her teammates have been told many times that Afghan women should not be fighting.
“Sometimes we’ve even had threats,” she said. “But we ignore them.”
Sadaf’s sister Shabnam, 18, who is also on the team, said she sees boxing as a means to moving Afghanistan forward in the eyes of the world.
“We want to develop the sport, to show the world that Afghanistan can move on from the past, that there’s more to this country than war,” she said.
Sharifi started the boxing program in 2007. The team won a bronze medal at the 2009 Asian Games in Vietnam, but as for London, he said, qualifying would be achievement enough.
“Right now, I just hope we get there,” said Sharifi, who has faith in his team.
“Fighting is in an Afghan’s blood,” he said. “We are a competitive and physically strong people, and our women are the same.”
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THRILL SEEKERS
Michael Jackson is king of the auction block at memorabilia sale
BY ELIZABETH SEMRAI
The iconic red and black leather jacket Michael Jackson wore in his 1983 “Thriller” music video went on the auction block yesterday, selling for $1.8 million, more than quadrupling the expected price.
The jacket was among dozens of the King of Pop’s belongings on sale at Julien’s Auctions Gallery in Beverly Hills, Calif. A portion of the jacket’s proceeds will benefit actress Tippi Hedren’s Shambala Preserve in California, the current home of Jackson’s two tigers.
Milton Verret of Austin, Texas, was the winning bidder. A commodities trader and philanthropist, he said he planned to send the jacket on tour to be used as a fundraising tool for children's charities.
- Elizabeth.Semrai@thedaily.com
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CUTTING CHECKS
Deep pockets of 'intact-ivist' fueling anti-circumcision movement
BY KAREN KELLER
After long being the target of ridicule — giggles, eye rolls and snippy jokes — the anti-circumcision movement is starting to make political inroads, thanks to one man, virtually unknown until now, who has transformed the movement with an influx of cash.
Dean Pisani, 44, America’s biggest donor to pro-foreskin forces, has given at least $1.3 million to the so-called “intact-ivist” cause, mostly through the group he helped found, Intact America. Before Pisani, the largest anti-circumcision groups raked in less than $20,000 a year.
Texas-based Pisani — who owns an environmental services firm called Entact — may be the most important anti-circumcision supporter that nobody’s ever heard of.
“I didn’t even know the name. I just know he’s the one who really got it going,” said Lloyd Schofield, the San Francisco activist who collected more than 12,000 signatures to put the proposed circumcision ban on the city ballot.
“Everybody in the ‘intact-ivist’ movement is exceptionally grateful for his generous donation, and we’re looking for a lot more people like him,” Schofield said.
The uncut cause already has historical momentum on its side: A study released last year showed 33 percent of newborn boys in the United States were snipped in 2009, compared with 56 percent in 2006, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. That’s down from a 64 percent circumcision rate in 1979.
In November, San Francisco will be the first city to ask voters whether they want to ban circumcising boys under 18. A similar initiative was proposed in Santa Monica, Calif., for 2012. And activists in 45 other states are pushing for circumcision bans. Just last week, in order to save money, Colorado became the 17th cash- strapped state in just over a decade to stop Medicare funding for medically unnecessary circumcisions.
And the anti-circumcision marketing video that recently went viral, “Intact & Famous: Celebrities with Foreskins,” asks if there was anything wrong with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Colin Farrell and other uncircumcised celebrities.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily, Pisani described himself as “private” and a “a normal dude” who was happy to remain behind-the-scenes.
“You can Google my name, but you won’t find much about me,” Pisani said. “I just write the checks.”
And no, Pisani is not “intact” — he was circumcised as a baby.
“I was born in the ’60s — it was just done like brushing your teeth or something,” said Pisani, who got involved in the effort in 1999 after his wife became pregnant. At first he had no opinion on whether to circumcise his son. Then, after researching, he decided the procedure was unnecessary.
When a nurse ridiculed Pisani for not circumcising his boy, “she lit my fire,” he said.
He called a longtime anti-circumcision activist in San Francisco, Marilyn Milos, to ask what he could do to help. First, he gave her group, National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers, or NOCIRC, donations of between $5,000 to $20,000 a year.
Then in 2006, Pisani met a like-minded attorney, Georganne Chapin, who runs Hudson Health Plan, a nonprofit group in New York. Together in 2008, Pisani and Chapin, 59, founded Intact America.
Both believe that Americans are behind the rest of the world, which largely doesn’t circumcise. Pisani, Chapin and others also say it’s wrong that U.S. laws protect female genitalia from cutting, but not boys.
Over the past decade, Facebook has helped organize anti-circumcision activists, and YouTube has inspired new ones by making grotesquely detailed circumcision videos widely available, said Matthew Hess, an activist who wrote the San Francisco initiative.
Then came Pisani’s cash infusions, Hess said.
“For years, ‘intact-ivism’ moved at a glacial pace,” Hess said. “Only in the past two to three years, it’s really picked up steam."
Before Pisani came along, activists had been relying on PayPal donations of anywhere from a couple of dollars to a few thousand.
Milos, the mother hen of the national anti-circumcision movement, said she was stunned when she heard about Pisani’s $1 million donation in 2008.
“I cried for 15 minutes,” the former midwife told The Daily as she snipped roses in her garden. She’s spent three decades helping the movement grow from her northern California home.
Pisani’s donations have allowed Intact America to spend money on pressuring influential organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics through petitions and ad campaigns.
Maybe the lobbying has helped.
In 2009, the CDC said it was working on a recommendation regarding circumcision but currently has “no position” on the procedure.
Meanwhile, anti-circumcision lobbying efforts are convincing some Americans, but the pro-foreskin crowd is irritating others.
Last week, a group of Jewish, Muslim and other groups filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco initiative, claiming that only the state can legislate that type of law. Besides, they said, circumcision is a religious ritual protected under the Constitution, and cutting away the foreskin has proven health benefits.
“This would make doctors criminal for doing something that has a health benefit,” said Abby Porth, associate director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco. “It’s ludicrous.”
According to the World Health Organization, circumcision helps reduce HIV by 60 percent in parts of Africa, but it hasn’t kept statistics for Western countries. It also says the procedure helps ward off penile cancer, male urinary tract infections and other conditions.
But the organization and many American medical groups stop short of telling parents whether cut or uncut is healthier.
Dr. Edgar Schoen, clinical professor of pediatrics at University of California, San Francisco, and former chief of the circumcision commission at the American Academy of Pediatrics, is a pro-circumcision physician who said the procedure helps protect against urinary tract infections and kidney disease, as well as sexually transmitted diseases.
“The scientific evidence is overwhelming, and getting more and more so. You come up with about a 10-to-1 benefit to risk ratio,” he told The Daily.
“All kinds of germs, viruses and bacteria have a favorable environment under the foreskin, it’s warm and it’s moist,” said Schoen, who noted that circumcision is as American as “apple pie and the stars and stripes.”
Porth blasted the San Francisco initiative as “hate-motivated,” after it came out that Hess, a leader in the San Francisco initiative — which would slap a $1,000 fine and a year of jail time on anyone who circumcises a male under 18 — published a comic on his website that many consider anti-Semitic.
The comic, “Foreskin Man,” depicts an evil rabbi wielding a knife over a baby lying on a pool table. In his defense, Hess said the Jewish parents are depicted as innocent and that he dislikes anyone who snips a baby’s foreskin.
Such tactics seem at odds with Pisani, a churchgoing Republican who said he does not proselytize about the issue to friends, family or employees.
As for Pisani’s commitment to the cause, he said his wife, a nurse, is on board. The couple also donates large sums to charities that fight child abuse, he said.
Only half-joking, he said he’ll continue writing checks unless anything changes in the science surrounding circumcision.
“If someone came to me and said it saves lives, my money would start going the other direction,” Pisani said.
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The new anarchists
Hackers’ efforts to fight the power may lead to a backlash
BY TREVOR BUTTERWORTH
Peter Steiner’s now famous cartoon for the New Yorker, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” first appeared in 1993 but didn’t, according to the artist, receive much attention until the Internet became more familiar to people. It was a rare instance of a cartoon doing what it’s not supposed to do, gaining relevance over time as people understand just how pithily it captured an essential truth. This, surely, elevates it to one of the most important cartoons in history (Steiner told the New York Times in 2000 that he felt a little like the person who invented the smiley face).
History has shown Steiner’s vision to be much too benign, and the cyber events of the past year — hacking and theft on the scale of 18th-century piracy — demand an update, perhaps along the lines of, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re China.” But even that may have been spoiled after the events of this week, which saw the appearance of an alliance between two groups of clandestine hackers, Anonymous and LulzSec, both of which have been implicated in numerous high profile security breaches.
In a statement announcing “Operation Anti-Security,” LulzSec declared that “the government and white hat security terrorists across the world continue to dominate and control our Internet ocean … we encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path.”
This was accompanied by “an open letter to citizens of the United States of America” on Anonymous’ news site, which sounded uncannily tea party-ish in its call on Americans to “wake up” and take back their liberties from a corrupt government.
To judge from the reaction of some information security experts, the alliance was on the scale of Germany teaming up with Japan during World War II. Except by the end of the week, LulzSec was apparently calling it quits, alarmed, perhaps, by the arrest of an alleged member in Britain and the attempts by other hackers to expose their identities.
With subterfuge as the name of the info-war game, the virtual equivalent of smoke and mirrors makes it difficult to say what’s true and what might be misdirection, especially with organizations that are leaderless and decentralized. But here’s the upshot of this recent cycle of cyber shenanigans: On the Internet, one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist.
Technological prowess has given hackers an extraordinary sense of political entitlement. It’s easy to theorize about how the world should work if your only engagement with it is through a computer and you’re in your teens or 20s. But weaponize your theories through hacking and you’re all but certain to lose the public, who will demand ever more stringent crackdowns and restrictive laws that, in turn, will push some hackers to even more extreme responses.
At the same time, the hacker collectives do possess a technological prowess that is beyond the imagining of most people, and with a deep understanding of how technology works, there is the privilege of insight. The explosive development of the Web raises serious, complex questions about ownership, privacy and freedom. And if these are ignored by politicians, or dominated by commercial interests, or dismissed by a mainstream media averse to complexity, then hacker frustrations will turn to direct action as a way of getting attention.
This is, after all, what non-governmental organizations and other advocacy groups do on a much more limited scale to promote their interests. (Still, it’s one thing to disrupt traffic with a protest march; it’s another to disrupt Internet traffic with a denial-of-service attack.)
The question is what kind of politics is this technology empowering? If you don’t acknowledge genuine concerns or even good faith in the info security community, if government is irredeemably corrupt, then you haven’t just abandoned politics, you’re anti-political; all that’s left is a war of attrition.
Oddly, the most useful insights on hacker culture may come from a re-engagement with the politics of anarchism, as noted in a review of new books on the subject in the summer issue of BookForum by Columbia historian Mark Mazower. While Mazower makes a mistake, in my view, in seeing revolutionary politics as still being mediated through academic leftism rather than through technology, his point — that the anarchist theories of the 19th century are more relevant than Marx to explain the present political conditions — is timely.
“Anarchism’s combination of individual commitment, ethical universalism and deep suspicion of the state as a political actor mark it out as the ideology of our times,” writes Mazower, before ending his piece with the claim that “we are all anarchists now.”
But we’re not. We are disenfranchised because today’s anarchism belongs to the hackers — and they have the means to make much better bombs. Whether the alliance between LulzSec and Anonymous was ever real or not, it defines the new ideological reality of our times: the network as an emerging anarchic state actor. Whether we like it or not, this politics of technology forces us toward libertarianism, to maximal freedom, because the alternatives — anarchy and control — are dancing toward disaster.
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Beyoncé brings some sorely needed city sparkle to the country at Glastonbury Festival in England.
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The V-22 Osprey Takes Flight
It's taken billions of dollars and two decades to develop, but now the V-22 Osprey is a mainstay of the U.S. military. The Daily goes along for a ride. —Video by Elizabeth Saab, Vivek Kemp, Paula Cohen and Shelby Pollack
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Marathon Mutt
A dog named Dozer was the surprising star of the Maryland Half Marathon, running for miles and raising thousands of dollars for cancer research.
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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