He had weapons of math instruction!

A teacher was disemboweled and ripped apart by motorbikes in Afghanistan for teaching girls against the Taleban orders. Very Mad Max-style. Mohammed Halim was 46, and he was the fourth teacher killed in Afghanistan's Ghazni province lately.

In the same article Fatima Mustaq, the director of education at Ghazni, describes the death threats that she gets regularly and that also extend to her husband and eight children, and how she and her sister got beaten up by authorities for teaching algebra to girls.

The Taleban are much into burning girls' schools anyway. They also threaten to cut noses and ears off teachers and students. In the first 6 months of this year they managed to disrupt or shut down about 300 schools.

A few girls's schools also gets burned down in Pakistan every one in a while. Muslim brotherhood used to burn girls' schools in Egypt and the revolutionaries used to burn them during the Islamic revolution in Iran.

In totally unrelated news, a new group in Gaza, "Just Swords of Islam", has warned Gaza women to wear hijabs or be attacked by acid, and said that they have already thrown acid on one immodestly dressed woman. These are the same guys that attacked a number of music shops and Internet cafes in Gaza last Wednesday with bombs and rocket-propelled grenades.

"We will have no mercy on any woman who violates the traditions of Islam and who also hangs out in Internet cafes," they said.

Hamas officials denied any connection to the group, noting that their movement does not resort to methods of "intimidation and terror" against the people. Hey, people, stop giggling.

All the Islam-advertising webpages (the same ones that never tell you about the death penalty for apostasy) usually say that Islam is totally for the equality of the sexes and if some Islamic countries (ok, let's face it, all Islamic countries) treat the women otherwise that must be due to some bad pre-Islamic habits that still remain. Sure thing. This leaves us two questions:

1. How come on average the more secular a Muslim country is the better women are doing? Compare, for example, Turkey and Saudi Arabia?

2. If the bad local habits and traditions in those countries are so strong that 1400 years of totally gender-equal Islam have brought so little in the way of actual equality, what are the implication of this for Western countries' immigration and integration policies?