Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is speaking out about the renewed threat to women under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, a danger he knows all too well after helping to rescue two Afghan women several years ago.
“The horrible fate awaiting Afghan women under the Taliban should sicken every American of conscience. I’m stunned by the silence of the world’s human rights organizations and the UN who bore witness to the brutality of the Taliban and know them to be monsters whose first targets are women,” Boteach said in an e-mailed statement to Breitbart News.
“The botched American pullout, leaving America looking weak and desperate, has only emboldened the Taliban to tighten their reign of terror, knowing the Biden Administration has decided to cut and run. America and the world must make it clear to the Taliban that attacks on women will be met with attacks on the Taliban leadership.”
As Boteach recounted in a Jerusalem Post article in 2016, he and philanthropist Miriam Adelson, the wife of the late Sheldon Adelson, helped rescue Zakia Ali and Fatima Kazimi. Ali’s story became known through the work of New York Times journalist Rod Nordland, who wrote a book about how she and her husband, Mohammed Ali, fled Afghanistan to the United States in 2016.
As Nordland recounted in The Lovers: Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet, the True Story of How They Defied Their Families and Escaped an Honor Killing, Rabbi Boteach became “consumed” by their case, “lobbying at the highest levels of the United States government to intervene on her behalf.” He and Adelson also worked to rescue Kazimi, “who was the head of the Bamian Women’s Ministry” and “who came under threat after helping Zakia.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.