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Taliban fear educated women (photo: telegraph.co.uk)
Taliban militants blew up a girls' school in Pakistan's Khyber district in the pre-dawn hours Monday morning. Of course, it’s not that heinous a crime because they obliterated the school while empty. The parents of the little Afghan girls should consider themselves lucky – no blood, no foul.
Ignominious and morally repugnant? Yes. Against religious principles? No – at least not according to the Taliban brand of Islam. These holy warriors were simply adhering to Sharia law – the law of their merciful and loving God. Allah surely created woman to be slave to man, with the sole purpose of incubating and spitting out children and dulcifying the male ego at all costs to body, psyche and probity.
I wonder how many people realize that Pakistan is the source of this antediluvian evil that has caused the U.S. much angst, considering most of today’s Afghan Taliban leaders were trained and spawned in Pakistani madrassas while the Mujahedeen fought the Red Army on the other side of the border.
One wonders if both Pakistanis and Afghans can hear these echoes from the past and can comprehend that this could become their future, once again, should the Taliban return to power. One day the U.S. shall vacate, and both countries will be left to their own devices to fend against these Islamofascists.
When the Taliban first came to rule in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, filling the power vacuum after winning the civil wars of the post-Soviet era, one of the first things they did was close all of the girls' schools. And it is well known that woman must be garbed head to toe to in society’s such as this, to avoid showing skin lest they tempt the good Muslim male’s soul and cause him to sin.
One wonders why Afghan men are so fearful of women. Do they see the advances women have made in the West, do they see female CEOs and world leaders and quake at the concept that the dominant rule of the male sex is near its end?
Devil’s advocates would say: “well, the U.S. used to treat women like chattel - in due time - some society’s are more progressive than others. We should not judge.” Or they point to the settling of the American Western frontier - packed with atrocities like the Apache scalp trade, unpunished raping of woman, indiscriminate slaughter – man in a savage Hobbesian state of nature with a kill or be killed mindset. America has a long history of oppressing and slaughtering innocent minorities, the underprivileged, and the defenseless.
Fair point. However, the question still begs: why are countries like Afghanistan light years behind Western society in terms of civil rights and equality of the sexes? Is it not a coincidence that everywhere we see the comingling of church and state we see oppression and tyranny?
I once heard Christopher Hitchens quote Steven Weinberg in a debate:
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
I simply do not believe that my Palestinian friends I’ve known for years think that to blow yourself up inside an orphanage is a moral act or in an old people’s home in Netanya is a moral action, that anything in their nature makes them think this but their mullahs tell them that it is.”
If we do an honest appraisal of governance founded on the steadfast belief in the separation of church and state versus those countries constituted on religion, we would be hard pressed to conclude that the secular democracies have not fared better and have not produced the most free and equitable societies in world history.
Political agitators don’t blow up girls’ schools and orphanages in Western democracies. At least not in the modern history I have studied. Theocracies have yielded nothing but poverty, despotism and repression. To quote Hitchens once more:
No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.”
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