This series of “school poisonings” would appear to be a cogent and ironic argument in favor of the Taliban’s position:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) working with the Afghan government has investigated attacks for more than three years but found “no conclusive evidence of deliberate poisoning”.
Thousands of girls have been taken ill at schools in that time, in incidents of mass fainting and vomiting. Pressure has mounted on Hamid Karzai’s government to stop the apparent attacks as their frequency has increased in recent months. Pictures of girls being carried to ambulances, or hooked up to drips in provincial hospitals, have become an increasingly common sight. The symptoms are always short-lived.
The incidents have been widely interpreted as a campaign by the Taliban or other insurgent hardliners to crackdown on girls’ education.
In other words, the Taliban had nothing to do with what is simply an example of mass female hysteria. I’m sure this incident has gone a long way towards hardening the position of the hardliners. They’re already highly skeptical of democracy and female education, can you imagine what this does to their opinion of female suffrage?
“Let’s see, they’re blaming us for stuff we said we didn’t do even though we quite happily take credit for beheading people and blowing them up, and these girls are all quite literally crazy, so yeah, let’s definitely give them a voice in government!”
The amazing thing about feminism is that it regularly makes 7th century cretins look sane by comparison.