| Afghanistan Archives The Charge Of The Lightly Armoured Brigade (With apologies to Lord Tennyson) One hundred and forty million to the right of them, Sixty-eight million to the left of them, Thirty million in front of them … Boldly they drove and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell Drove the two-thousand (or so). A compelling reason there must be for young Canadian men and women to die in the near hopeless cause that is Afghanistan. The more than 10,430 (International Crisis Group) religious fanatic factories that are the madrassas (Islamic religious schools) of Pakistan alone are sufficient to ensure that the supply of terrorists may always exceed the capacity of the forces sent to eradicate them. So what are we doing there? Giving comfort to the enemy During the Afghan detainee controversy the Minister of Justice, the Honourable Robert Nicholson, parroted on national television what most Canadians now believe to be a canard, that lives are at stake if the government releases information on the transfer of Afghan detainees. The government, by stonewalling on giving information about what is believed to be an innocent breach of protocol in the transfer of captured insurgents to the Afghan governments has left the impression that it is about much more. That Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan have done terrible things which can never be revealed. Prime Minister Harper, Defense Minister Peter Mackay, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Canon and Justice Minister Robert Nicholson by suggesting that Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan are less than honourable combatants will only have themselves to blame for the damage done to the reputation of our armed forces. This damaged reputation will serve the recruitment efforts of the insurgents and will lead to an unnecessary loss of life not the demand by Parliament for the information it needs to do its job. How Parliament Hill's newspaper The Hill Times phrased it:
Better Red Than Dead? In the 1960s and 70s, when the Cold War was at its height, on many campuses there was a defeatist philosophy embraced by many students and academics who saw nuclear confrontation with the Soviets as suicidal. Some called this defeatist philosophy the better-red-than-dead alternative. These advocates of no ideology is worth dying for wanted Canada to get out of NATO and embrace many of Communism's anti-democratic ideals as a means of saving Canadian lives and setting an example for the world. I see a reflection of that defeatist attitude and lack of resolve in support for Western civilization’s current struggle with the vanguard of an army of religious fanatics who would see democracy replaced by a fascist theocracy. Islam, not unlike twentieth century Soviet-style communism, presents those who value their liberty and right to choose with a stark choice: come over to our side or be killed. Western democracies stared down the Soviet threat, although it was a near thing. We were fortunate that NATO in general, and the Americans in particular, did not buy into the argument of the better-red-than-dead crowd. We face that same harsh choice today. Do we fight and die to prevent a new Dark Age descending on the world from which humanity may never emerge, or do we just let it happen by offering only token resistance if it will save a few lives in the short term, as some politicians would have us do. The Greeks and Romans of antiquity, the Greeks in the vanguard, gave us the concept of democracy, the foundation of modern medicine and modern science, a philosophy or a way of questioning the world around you and the world beyond, the idea that liberty is humanity’s most precious possession, ethics and morality that comes from within. These precious gifts were temporally lost during a period in our history known as the Dark Ages (400-900 AD). Islam (610-632 AD) is a product of that ominous period. Islam wants to turn the clock back to the time of its birth; a time when ignorance was bliss and superstitions ruled the minds of men. If Islam is successful in re-creating the world of the Dark Ages then the March of Civilization will effectively come to an end. The end of civilization is bound to witness the mass slaughter of countless millions who value their liberty and freedom more than their lives by those who will see it as their sacred duty to butcher those who will not submit to the Will of Allah. Some, like the former better-red-than-dead crowd would see us retreat from the fight as if this struggle was only about Afghanistan. What Some Young People Are Dying For The Path to 9/11, a six-hour docudrama, drew criticism from the Center for American Progress for blaming Clinton’s pre-occupation with the Lewinsky affair for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Did three thousand men, women and children die a horrible death because a President indulged in oral sex on the job? Maybe, just maybe, they were blown to bits; burnt alive by exploding jet fuel; jump to their death to escape the fire above; crushed between slabs of concrete, their lives squeezed out of them like so much toothpaste because of a group of merciless young men’s sexual fantasies about what awaited them after their killing work, in the name of their god, was done, and there was nothing Bill or George could do about it. The rewards promised in the note of encouragement left behind by the hijacker's leader Muhammad Atta; “Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty, and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out” may have been irresistible to the young men, all members of a religion which denies sexually mature males intimate knowledge of women until they are admitted into Paradise by a capricious god, or have successfully bartered for spouses in the the here-and-now. In the war, that Wafa Sultan called a clash between civilization and barbarity*, it is young men willing to die for what they believe in that will decide the outcome. The West is asking its young men to fight and die for a, sometimes, obscure notion of liberty, freedom and human rights with no guarantee of an interesting sexual after-life or any after-life at all. Can Western Civilization count on its young men and women to continue to risk being killed and to die to save it on moral and ethical grounds with no promise of an eternity of orgiastic sex or an hedonistic hear-after? If Afghanistan is any indication, there is hope. ----------------------- * “The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilization. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on one hand and the violation of these rights, on the other. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings…” Wafa Sultan, outspoken Arab-American woman, during a debate broadcasted on Al-jazeera Those who would condemn a selfless act for selfish reasons Soldiers' families condemn anti-war video A fictional military mom packs an AK-47 and a stuffed doll into a duffel bag and laments that she might not have had kids had she known they'd grow up to become “cannon fodder” in Afghanistan. Globe and Mail, October 8, 2010 The anti-war video is the work of La Fédération des femmes du Québec (Québec Women’s Federation). “We are thousands of women committed to making equality for all a reality (my translation of “Nous sommes des milliers de femmes engagées pour que l'égalité devienne une réalité”) proudly proclaims its website (except for Afghan women it would seem.) La Fédération des femmes du Québec would leave the women and girls of Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the Taliban even after what they did to them the last time they were in charge: With the Koran as their legal and moral justification, the Taliban executed women and girls in soccer stadiums. Anonymous in oppressive burqas, invisible in life, invisible in death, brought into the stadium in the back of pick-up trucks and forced to kneel on the ground, then shot in the back of the head to the obvious pleasure of the bearded young and old men milling around and shouting Allahu Akbar, God is Great. Scenes from a soccer stadium in Kabul after the Taliban took power. This time it will be even worse, much worse. Expect a mass slaughter of women and girls who took advantage of the protection of men and women with guns to expand their horizons and achieve a level of schooling which the Taliban will find intolerable, and like the example of Khidr in the Koran, will kill them en-masse in cold blood to avoid them confusing the believers as to what Allah and His Prophet expect of them. The men and women who go to Afghanistan are often volunteers. Some have died and others will in this noble cause of protecting the weak and defenceless against the strong and ruthless who would oppress and kill them. La Fédération des femmes du Québec would condemn this selfless act for selfish reasons and doom thousands of women and girls to an early violent death should we fail to keep the Taliban in check. Oct 8, 2010 --------------------------------------------------------------------- In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful is the phrase that you hear Muslims repeating over and over during their daily prayers and almost every time the name of the omnipotent God of the Koran is mentioned. If Allah is a compassionate and merciful god, why all the pre-meditated, cold-blooded killing done in His name by the likes of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda? Is Allah really a compassionate and merciful deity as claimed by the faithful? Yes, He is, but it is a conditional type of compassion and mercy with which the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are well acquainted and of which non-Muslims are mostly ignorant. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Exasperation! What is the difference between the Taliban and the Karzai government? None apparently! On April 1, 2009 media from around the world reported that the Karzai government had passed legislation intended to align Afghan law more closely with the Koran such as legalizing rape if it’s your wife you’re rapping. Wives in the Koran are no more than fields to be ploughed at the discretion of the ploughman. 2:223 Your women are a tillage for you. So get to your tillage whenever you like … And the field, warned the Prophet, dare not resist. “if a husband invites his wife to have intimate relations with him, but the wife rejects him and he becomes angry all night long – for this his wife will be cursed by an angel until morning.” Being cursed by an angel (the equivalent of being cursed by Allah) means a field which refuses to be furrowed risks spending an eternity on fire in Hell. Maybe there is nothing that can be done with men raised on the Koran. Perhaps the West should abandon Afghanistan to its fate while making arrangements for women who want to leave that theocratic, misogynous place, to do so, if their wish. A side benefit of letting the Taliban take over Afghanistan is that these religious fanatics are Sunnis. Sunnis consider Shiites heretics, and vice versa. Both would rather finish the other off before doing away with the unbelievers. Iranians, the greatest peril for the West right now because they will soon have nuclear weapons and have threatened to use them at the first opportunity, are Shiites. Being surrounded by Sunnis with access to Pakistani nuclear weapons may give them pause. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
|
