Siblinghood
Our what?
Who is she? Canada’s Minister for Women and Gender Equality.
So, yeah…our brothers?
I think not.
Updating to add: see Sastra’s comment and Seanna’s for a better understanding.
Tip Jar
Our what?
Who is she? Canada’s Minister for Women and Gender Equality.
So, yeah…our brothers?
I think not.
Updating to add: see Sastra’s comment and Seanna’s for a better understanding.
Under the circumstances, I don’t read too much into this. She’s asking a bunch of hooligans to allow safe passage for people fleeing from then. Be polite, respectful, and try to appeal to the idea that in some sense you’re on the same side. That’s just basic diplomacy.
If you’re going to make a request in order to save many lives, don’t start out with “Look, you murdering shitheads …”
I agree with Sastra.
Hm. I see your point, but I think I still think “our brothers” is a step too far.
Monseff (who is from Afghanistan) clarifies that calling the Taliban “brothers” was according to cultural practice:
She says:
“The Taliban are a terrorist group, and yet they claim to be Muslims. We’re calling on them to immediately allow for the safe passage of any individual who is in Afghanistan out of the country. We are calling on them to immediately cease the violence, the femicide, the genocide, the rapes, the lootings, and to return immediately to the peace and negotiation table in an inclusive and meaningful way. If they will ever be recognized as a legitimate party, this is the starting point,”
“The reference to brothers is a cultural reference, of course. But let me be very clear: we do not support the Taliban, we are horrified that the hard-won gains of the past 20 years are at stake like this, and being eroded like this.”
Oops, here’s the source link I left out: https://www.660citynews.com/2021/08/25/maryam-monsef-taliban-comments/
Ok that makes sense of it.
Are the Taliban truly as evil as the media wants us to believe? Or is this part of the misinformation war to justify an illegal invasion of a foreign nation?
It is impossible for those who followed the Triumvirate of Evil (Bush, Blair, Howard) into Afghanistan to accept that they met strong resistance from Afghans, just as one would assume there would be resistance from any country that was attacked by another. Was the French Underground wrong to resist the NAZIs, even as their actions sometimes led to death or worse for other French people?
I am reminded of the WW1 posters of German soldiers bayoneting babies, of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The “Domino Theory”.
In every war, there is evil, even from those who claim to have “God on their side”. I see no difference between the London Blitz and the firebombing of Dresden or the atomisation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Gulf of Tonkin incident and the WMD were both pretences for war, not a justification for war.
While we hand wring over Afghanistan, let us not forget Bush’s other folly in Iraq that left Iraqi women far worse off than they ever were under Saddam Hussein.
I am not unsympathetic to the plight of Afghans, but we cannot offer refuge to all who seek it. Our best recourse is to resolve to never again go to war and create ever icreasing numbers of victims.
Well, it’s not so much the media, I think, as it is all those sobbing, desperate, suicidal women who say they remember the last time.
Roj Blake: Seriously? You’re likening the Taliban’s known historical practices of child rape, sexual slavery and mass murder of anyone who doesn’t follow their specific brand of Islam to the French Resistance?
Yes, the Taliban are that evil. That doesn’t mean an invasion was the best way to oust them, nor does it mean our every action in that war was justified even if the war itself could be argued as a necessity. But yes, the Earth would be a better place if they ceased to exist as an entity.
Yes, third that. The Taliban really are that evil. Skip the media, ask Afghan women.
Specifically, ask the women who returned to Afghanistan and devoted years of effort to re-build their country and now find everything they had worked for about to be demolished and their own lives in danger.
I think people desperately clinging to the undercarriage of departing planes would refute any suggestion that the Taliban are the resistance movement fighting a foreign invasion.
I second, or third Sastra
It is possible to call other human beings brothers, however cruel and heartless they be.
Dehumanizing others is not necessary to condemn them.
But there’s a lot of space between calling people brothers or sisters and dehumanizing them. Nearly all humans are not any one person’s brothers or sisters. Not calling the Taliban my brothers is not calling them rats or maggots or any other dehumanizing word of that kind. I think Monseff’s clarification is fair enough, but it doesn’t translate to saying we all have to think of them as our brothers.
Agreed – without the context, calling Taliban terrorists “brothers” is disturbingly evocative of the “good people on both sides” comment made by Trump regarding Charlottesville
Good analogy.