I Hate the Taliban
UPDATED: RAWA's (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan's) Photo Gallery. WARNING: Graphic photos of life under the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. The nightmare for the people, especially the women and girls, of Afghanistan continues. It's a testament to the women that they aren't extinct by now. It's a wonder anyone manages to live and find some joy in Afghanistan. (We had a chance to change things, and we're blowing it. Americans have forgotten about Afghanistan.)
-----
Well, because I make nice noises about not hating anyone, this one will have to go into the "I'm not proud of it" folder, but may I say that I hate the Taliban!
I opposed the Iraq War from the start. I did not oppose the war in Afghanistan. We would never have closed our embassy in Kabul had I anything to say about it, and I wanted to arm women in that country ever since the civil war that began in the 1990s. If we had stepped in earlier we wouldn't have to be waging a larger war there now (a war that got forgotten in our foolish rush into Iraq).
Even women in the Dark Ages were allowed to walk in the sun. The Taliban are the most unimaginably barbaric collection of rotterers I've ever seen. Now they've killed a second hostage. And you thought I hated Jerry Falwell? They make me sick.
Cowardly, repulsive, sociopathic bunch of pig-ignorant bullies who know nothing and build nothing. Kill a helpless hostage – real manly. No wonder they have to force women to marry them. No wonder that even in ultraconservative Afghanistan they have to break down people’s doors and force fathers to hand over their daughters. They’re burning down schools. They’re beating men for cheering at soccer games and cutting off body parts because men shave their beards or women wear lipstick. I mean, these people are just unreal.
I’m not proud of it, but just before the fall of Kabul I read that these same lunatics who had run to the front lines yawping “Death to America!” had turned tail and were fleeing back to the Pakistani border as fast as their ugly legs could carry them, and I laughed. When I read that Mullah Omar was yelling over an open radio channel for the Taliban to stop running away “like chickens with their heads cut off,” I turned to my co-worker and gleefully reported, “The Taliban are running away like chickens with their heads cut off!” Yeah, Mullah Omar, what a winner – he murdered a man just to have his wife. And Ayman al-Zhawahiri, he’s a real piece of work, now his wife and daughters are dead, because he dragged their asses to Tora Bora (along with his favorite concubine, Osama bin Laden), and what does he have to say about their deaths? “Oh, they’re fine, they’re in heaven.” Lah-te-dah, al Qaeda and the Taliban love death more than we love life, so it’s no big deal to sacrifice your family for the cause, but I don’t see al-Zhawahiri and Mullah Omar and Osama killing themselves. I thought Osama wanted to die for the glory of Islam? It’s been five years and all he’s done is warn Americans not to go trick-or-treating again this year. (Or maybe he’s trying to bore himself to death.)
Stupid idiots. Who but a moron fights a B-52 or a Predator with a rifle? Who but a selfish ideologue extraordinaire brings his children along to the cave where he’s holed up, and teaches his kids to yell “Allahu Ahkbar” when he shoots off his rockets? I always felt sad when I read that, knowing that if these kids lived they would grow up to be like their dads. I saw some of the photos of kids that were left behind on CDs and on laptops in those caves – beautiful little faces, small innocent minds to be corrupted by the filth spewed by these people.
I keep reminding myself that once these awful people were those innocent kids, but it just makes me feel worse.
-----
Well, because I make nice noises about not hating anyone, this one will have to go into the "I'm not proud of it" folder, but may I say that I hate the Taliban!
I opposed the Iraq War from the start. I did not oppose the war in Afghanistan. We would never have closed our embassy in Kabul had I anything to say about it, and I wanted to arm women in that country ever since the civil war that began in the 1990s. If we had stepped in earlier we wouldn't have to be waging a larger war there now (a war that got forgotten in our foolish rush into Iraq).
Even women in the Dark Ages were allowed to walk in the sun. The Taliban are the most unimaginably barbaric collection of rotterers I've ever seen. Now they've killed a second hostage. And you thought I hated Jerry Falwell? They make me sick.
Cowardly, repulsive, sociopathic bunch of pig-ignorant bullies who know nothing and build nothing. Kill a helpless hostage – real manly. No wonder they have to force women to marry them. No wonder that even in ultraconservative Afghanistan they have to break down people’s doors and force fathers to hand over their daughters. They’re burning down schools. They’re beating men for cheering at soccer games and cutting off body parts because men shave their beards or women wear lipstick. I mean, these people are just unreal.
I’m not proud of it, but just before the fall of Kabul I read that these same lunatics who had run to the front lines yawping “Death to America!” had turned tail and were fleeing back to the Pakistani border as fast as their ugly legs could carry them, and I laughed. When I read that Mullah Omar was yelling over an open radio channel for the Taliban to stop running away “like chickens with their heads cut off,” I turned to my co-worker and gleefully reported, “The Taliban are running away like chickens with their heads cut off!” Yeah, Mullah Omar, what a winner – he murdered a man just to have his wife. And Ayman al-Zhawahiri, he’s a real piece of work, now his wife and daughters are dead, because he dragged their asses to Tora Bora (along with his favorite concubine, Osama bin Laden), and what does he have to say about their deaths? “Oh, they’re fine, they’re in heaven.” Lah-te-dah, al Qaeda and the Taliban love death more than we love life, so it’s no big deal to sacrifice your family for the cause, but I don’t see al-Zhawahiri and Mullah Omar and Osama killing themselves. I thought Osama wanted to die for the glory of Islam? It’s been five years and all he’s done is warn Americans not to go trick-or-treating again this year. (Or maybe he’s trying to bore himself to death.)
Stupid idiots. Who but a moron fights a B-52 or a Predator with a rifle? Who but a selfish ideologue extraordinaire brings his children along to the cave where he’s holed up, and teaches his kids to yell “Allahu Ahkbar” when he shoots off his rockets? I always felt sad when I read that, knowing that if these kids lived they would grow up to be like their dads. I saw some of the photos of kids that were left behind on CDs and on laptops in those caves – beautiful little faces, small innocent minds to be corrupted by the filth spewed by these people.
I keep reminding myself that once these awful people were those innocent kids, but it just makes me feel worse.
Labels: army of dorks, civil rights, Islam, women
posted by Kristine | Monday, July 30, 2007
33 Comments:
Excellent post.
*Sigh* Well, thanks.
Other emotions that I'm not proud of:
-Being glad that Jerry Falwell is dead.
-Being glad that Uday and Qusay are dead. (And despite everything, I really am. I was more scared of them than Saddam himself, who had turned into a befuddled old fart, writing his romance novels and collecting his putrid b-grade porn. A lot of people are better off now that BagVlad the Impaler Jr. and his brother are gone.)
-Not really feeling too sorry about how Saddam Hussein died (though it bothers me).
-Becoming indifferent about the people who get killed in stampedes during Pakistani protests against the west and Musharraf's reforms. (The right to keep the tribal "tradition" of raping the sister of someone who offended you - who the hell comes up with this garbage?)
I share your hatred for them but not your reluctance to hate them. Some people deserve to be loathed and they certainly fall into that category.
Here is when I first learned to hate the Taliban:
I learned that women were dying just because they had no access to gynecology. A male doctor who examines a female is subject to death, and so is the female. And women are not allowed to be educated to become doctors. So Afghani women were dying of treatable infections!
Allahu Akbar indeed. I was not against the war in Afghanistan, either.
I share your hatred for them but not your reluctance to hate them.
Well, I try to feel reluctance, not for their sake, but for my own. For the sake of my humanity - for the sake of my ideals - I try very hard not to hate even those who are absolutely despicable.
When I saw this series of photos of the Northern Alliance - who are also bloody and sexist - killing the unarmed Taliban man I was sorry for him. (WARNING: Graphic photos) Of course I was, because I saw him as an individual. But he was also an individual who would not have viewed me as one.
I don't know what to do with my feelings, always. The Afghan people suffer under Northern Alliance warlords and under Taliban morons.
So Afghani women were dying of treatable infections!
Yes, but that's not the worst of it. RAWA reports hideous stories of child rape and abductions, public executions, public beatings. Afghanistan was on its way to becoming modernized once. Kabul was a fucking hippie hangout for pity's sake, like modern day Marrakesh. I'm scared.
I cannot find the article, but there was one online that showed a woman in a burqua crying after a man beat her for standing in line with the men for U.N. supplies (sabotaged by warlords), and the article stated something like, "Men and women in Afghanistan have changed. Men no longer view women as people, they don't want to have sex with women that is not rape, they don't want to look at women except as slaves, they don't want to talk to women except as slaves, they're not lonely for women, the men don't have any normal sexual drives anymore [and remember that homosexuality is punished with death], it's all gone bad, it's all a mess," etc. I'm scared that this disease will infect the world, men and women all over the place, and change them as they have been changed in Afghanistan.
Hatred for the Taliban is fully justified.
I have no desire to veiw the posts. Hell, I was checking the RAWA site almost ten years ago. This was long before Laura Bush took to the air to comment about the invasion of Afganistan was to benefit the Afgani women. (Yeah. Right.)
Just remember, before the terrorist attacks, Unocal was working on building an oil pipeline through Afganistan with Taliban help. It seems that one could do business with them.
Janine
Yes, and Taliban representatives came to Washington, were treated royally, and told off a woman who tried to confront them. People didn't have a problem with how they treated women then. Bush didn't do shit about it, and neither did Clinton. Nobody cared but people like you and me.
I remember the day that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. I knew where the country was, I knew that it was predominantly Muslim, I knew what the aggression meant, and I was scared. I must have been around 15 at the time.
I was a member of the Lesbian Avengers. We paid attention to these things. I remember one group in Chicago that had a display about the abuses done by the Talban. This was even before the blowing up of the buddist statues.
The problen is this. It is the "radical feminists" who harped on these things.
Oh. Wait. Bringing free market capitolism would have liberalized everything there. Look how well it worked in China.
Janine
Second that. And get (I think) pretty well that it's nothing to be proud of, exactly.
It's a tragedy, this, all of it. Ugly and nasty and such a fucking bloody mess. I feel, watching the fulminating rants of these folk, a mix of loathing and pity, and echoes of Dawkins' 'what chance has she?'. I mean, honestly, yeah, what they do is beyond despicable, beyond loathesome. But the unpleasant reality is it's a tide in their culture they swim with, and you've probably got to be at least a bit of a hero to swim against it, a lot of places. More than a hero, maybe... exceptional, even, gutsy or bloody minded in a way a lot of us probably just aren't, given how early conditioning starts. The madrassas seem to understand well the Jesuit's dictum: 'give me a child until he is five...'. I honestly wonder: raised in such a place, raised in such a school, told every day by every authority such brutality is appropriate, would I do the same as them?
Imagine it doesn't often come out so much online, but it's one of the reasons I've always had a bit of a complex about being too proud about my atheism. Being open, forthright, all that's good and necessary, absolutey, in reference to PZ's recent bit on the same--I think it's even quit sane to see doing so as something of a matter of conscience, something due to those living in areas where they need that kind of support, that sense that yes, there are other voices out there, safer paces, so don't let the bastards grind you down--but I can't so much be proud of it. There's somethin' akin to survivor's guilt that gets in the way. I mean, what, I'm supposed to be proud that I didn't entirely drink that particular kool-aid? Most of the time, I just figure I was probably as much bloody lucky as anything.
All of which is saying, mind you: the women of RAWA are sure as hell heroes, if anyone's looking for those.
Now, Janine. Oppression of men is political. Oppression of women is cultural. Right?
Survivor's guilt? Oh, yeah! I also have "Why am I so lucky" guilt. I'm in grad school, and the Taliban don't want girls to read. I know how fortunate I am!
I suppose the blowing up of the statues at Bamyan woke many people up, but they cared more about those fucking statues than the women. Long before then I remember the woman who was riding on a bike with her husband, and when they were confronted by the Taliban, she said, “He told me to ride it,” and they called her “shameless” and shot her to death. Then they issued this proclamation that women had to wear soft-soled shoes so that men couldn’t hear their footsteps and become sexually aroused.
This isn't their "culture," A.J. That's like saying (Godwin Law alert) that Hitler's Aryan breeding program was ancient German tradition. The burqua is old, yes, separation of men in women in public, yes, but much of this stuff is new, invented in the madrassas, which are ancient, but there's nothing in their past that compares to this mass genocide of women and the suicide rate among them! Women had women doctors before the Taliban. Women even had access to male doctors through a male relative (yes, I know, still barbaric) before the Taliban. And depending upon the ethnic group, women did have some rights.
Fundamentalism is always as political movement that harkens back to the idealized past that never existed.
I think we ought to just evacuate all the women and girls from that country and bring them here. Let the fucking Taliban have Afghanistan. See how long they fucking last then.
Re 'this isn't their "culture", I'm very aware how fraudulent are the historical posings of the fundamentalists, Kristine. I'm just speaking of 'the tide in their culture' in the practical, immediate, contemporary sense.
And there's no Godwin issue, here; the parallel is excellent and instructive to that very point: yes Hitler's Aryan mythology was just as much a crock, a recent invention (or reinvention, as so many religions and ideologies are). And it also created just as influential a tide in the contemporary culture. You had to have serious guts and independence a lot of us just don't to say no, I'd rather not join the Youth.
Speaking of which: this calls for an xkcd reference.
Thankfully, no practitioner of an atheistic philosphy ever starts a war, or murders civilians.
Thankfully, no practitioner of an atheistic philosphy ever starts a war, or murders civilians.
Sorry, but -
*Yawn*
Read Charlie Wilson's War - it should be available at the library.
Once you have read that book, you will come to the unfortunate, but true, fact that we (the US) sewed the seeds of 9/11 with arms and training for the Taliban in their fight against the Russians.
Absent our actions, the Taliban would be history.
The Brits are redeploying troops to Afghanistan. We are covering up Pat Tillman's death. Guess what country gives a damn about women?
Oh, I’m aware of our long history with the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. There are and were some progressive mujahadeen (including some women), but we chose to support the most reactionary elements, including Gimabbuden Hektamayer. Imagine that, supporting tyrants – how original for the U.S. And then Hektamayer declared a jihad against the U.S. in Afghanistan in 2002 (nobody cared) and started attacking U.S. troops there. What a guy. What a policy. Lots of people deserve a thump on the head for this one.
Can't fight the urge to bow to the phallus.
Janine, Legion is reportedly (by him) female, so many we should call it Dickie Chick from now on?
Basement activist; because no one else wants to deal with this person.
Gee, comparing people who actually have committed henious crimes with people who set down words.
So, almighty phallus, which is more likely to harm or kill you; your average Taliban or the likes of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens?
Oh, repeating my here, but no one cowers in fear form your words. Most are simply annoyed. Some of us see it as an oppertunity to laugh.
Hugs,
Janine
Hey, Legionnaire’s Disease –
Did you ever notice (no) that the first three letters in the word FUNDY are FUN?
Now, you could be really interesting if you take my advice…mmmm….mhhh…zzzzzzz.
*Snore!*
Oh, The One With Many Names now put Kristine to sleep. Is that Dear Troll's greatest weapon? Putting people to sleep while online? For what use could there be for this? Am I to be scare or amused?
Eyelids closing. (SLAM!)
I hope I do not drool on my keyboard.
ZZZZZZZZ,
Janine
It starts with words.
From what I have seen of this troll's behavior, he has not been able to start anything with words. For all his "much speaking" he engages in mere "vain repetition." Off-topic, irrelevant, and self-absorbed.
A Bridge just felld down in Minneapolis. Kristine are you alright?
The bridge was transporting trolls - it couldn't bear up under the weight of the hypocrisy.
Borat, I am fine. Thank you. Calm down.
Mr. Smartass from Auckland, New Zealand: this bridge collapse is a terrible tragedy to a lot of people. Your statement is incredibly insensitive and inexcusable! I considered removing your comment but decided to leave it there for all to see and inform you that my blogometer traces your IP down to latitude and longitude.
You don't come here and act like this. You owe the people of Minneapolis an apology.
I'm waiting.
It is good to know you are well Kristine. I just found out about the collapsed bridge. I get no news while I am at work.
Sad to know that some people will use a tragedy just to keep acting as a loathsome troll. Do you hate atheists so much, you would use the deaths of others in order to flame one.
It is time you that person to meet Legion. They can have a good time together.
Janine
Damn. That's nasty all around.
Good to hear you're okay, Kristine.
Oh, and I really got no trouble calling what certain religious so-called 'educators' do to children's minds--effectively crippling their very ability to discern what is and is not reason--abusive. Not the least bit surprised that certain whinging apologists for every major sect will happily declare that this makes me some sorta modern Goebbels... and don't much give a mangy rat's ass. Been called worse by better, and it really is appalling. The systematic crippling and enslaving of an independent intelligence, that's just a shitty thing to do. I mean right, let's tell 'em, effectively, that there is an absolute authority they may not question... let's tell 'em if anything contradicts it, that something else is wrong, and it doesn't matter how they have to torture their normal deductive faculties to make it come out that way... Let's all pretend that arbitrary authority isn't manifestly self-contradictory, even though anyone sane and not brought up in the same tradition would say it clearly is. Let's tell 'em if they think it is, the problem is with them--and that more than a mere failure of insight on this part, it's an actual moral failing that they can't simply accept this twisted contradiction as the highest, most transcendant of truths. Let's tell 'em this daily for the most impressionable years of their lives. And now let's wonder that they're easy prey for every manipulative fraud who shows up afterward and knows how to cloak himself in that same contrived 'authority'. Now let's wonder why they're more than a mite confused about how one actually works out truth with their own unencumbered faculties.
Disgusting. Entirely. Whine about 'bigotry' all you like, it doesn't make it one iota less disgusting. Dawkins, for the record, wasn't even talking about that: he was merely talking about the very presumption of labelling a child by its parents' beliefs, so don't go pinning this on him... But I'll happily go that step further, at least.
Thanks, Janine. Okay, settle down, everyone! :-)
The New Zealand troll was a first time (and probably last time) visitor and coward who had googled the "Exxon" graphic and stumbled upon my blog. It wasn't Legion, and it's probably not some religious fanatic - just a random vandal.
AJ, I agree with you fully. And Legion has been fully informed by me, with citations and even video links, that he is distorting what Dawkins says. Legion knows better - s/he just wants more flame wars. At this point, s/he's a joke. It just never ends.
A lonely person wanting some attention.
NO,
The hypocrisy line was mine - not a New Zealander. I assumed that the bridge had collapsed without traffic at the time - I was making a snide joke about the trolls here - not the poor, innocent victims or the evil bastards who defeated that $0.05 tax increase for infrastructure - like the governor. I've used that bridge in the past 18 months when in the twin cities on an appeal.
No insult meant and happy that you are well. Damn sorry for the victims.
GRO
Well, thank you for apologizing, GRO.
But the IP did come up as coming from New Zealand. So, I don't have an explanation for that.
I forgive you. But please - this is why I also got into a spat with someone at Pharyngula about what he said about the bridge collapse - delay is the best antidote to anger. Okay?
Anyway thanks for owning up. I was upset that night and it's all past.
I posted the "Read Charlie Wilson's War" post. Compare IP addresses for that, this. the troll bridge and the apology I'd bet that they were all quite different and I'm posting from one laptop in use at the office, home and during travel (no, not to New Zealand - to CA and back several times last month) - I think that Blogger has some IP identity problems.
I'm sorry that I make dirty swears.
Nobody was attacking K. No apology necessary
I feel the same way! I second that!!!!!!
Post a Comment
<< Home