Welcome to Swat
So here’s how it went down in Swat.
The burka-clad [girl] is heard crying throughout the two-minute flogging and at one point swears on her father that she will not do it again. Relatives of the man involved in the incident told the BBC he had gone to the house of the girl in the village of Kala Kalay to do repairs as an electrician, but militants accused him of having a relationship with her. They dragged him from the house and flogged him before punishing the girl, his relatives said. The Taleban made the girl’s brother hold her down during the flogging, they said. After the incident, the Taleban forced the couple to marry and instructed the man not to divorce his wife.
The Taleban forced ‘the couple’ to marry – except that there was no couple, there was an electrician doing some work in a house and a girl who happened to live there. Now there are three people stuck in a revolting nightmare, with (no doubt) the Taleban balefully peering at them all the time so that they can’t escape. Allah is wise, merciful.
Maybe it would be good thing for the world as a whole if the Taleban were in control of a sizable piece of territory for a decent period of time. It would make it impossible for anybody to have any doubts about just how disgusting they are. It would also force other types of islamist to try to explain how they are really quite different. And if they didn’t do this it would be reasonable to conclude that they are not very different after all.
Well, really, Bob-R, the Taliban had control of a sizeable chunk of territory for several years – Afghanistan. And they made it very clear how disgusting they are. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury think they’re really peaceful at heart. We just have to make a few concessions, is all. It’s like people talking about the problem of pain. It doesn’t matter how much suffering there is, people still seem to go on believing in the author of it all just the same. There is something fundamentally irrational about religious belief. People tend to go on believing it whatever happens. Human rights abuses – what’s that got to do with it? These are the commands of a god, after all!
As for other Islamists being quite different. Obviously they’re not. Which is why it’s time we woke up to reality at last, and saw the threat for what it really is. Sure, not all Muslims are Islamists, but all Islamists are basically Taliban. Time to wake up and smell the shit!
At least in Britain I think things like this are likely to have rather more impact than the doings of the Taleban in Afghanistan prior to 2001 did. It was possible then to think things had always been pretty bad in Afghanistan and that, and Afghanistan was always a pretty remote place for most of the British population. It is not possible to say that things were always pretty bad in Pakistan, and it is not a remote place given the large numbers of people of Pakistani descent in Britain. A few more videos like this from Pakistan could have a real impact in Britain in a way that events in Afghanistan did not.
I agree that other types of islamists are not so very different from the Taleban but they have been able to appear rather different. A few more videos like this could force them to either condemn the Taleban unambiguously or be exposed as very similar.
Yeah, that’s a point – stuff happening in Pakistan hits home a lot more than stuff happening in Afghanistan. Just for one thing, English is not a lingua franca in Afghanistan but it is in Pakistan – so Anglophones in general have much more chance to communicate with people in P than in A.
Bye bye now.