The Many Evils Of Islam

Cross posted @ Atheist Oasis

There is no doubt that Man’s inhumanity to Man is dwarfed by Man’s inhumanity to Woman, as evidenced in the photo above. Of the Big Abrahamic Three, Islam has proven itself time and again to be the most barbaric. This woman’s tragic story is listed in TIME:

The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband's house. They dragged her to a mountain clearing near her village in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan, ignoring her protests that her in-laws had been abusive, that she had no choice but to escape. Shivering in the cold air and blinded by the flashlights trained on her by her husband's family, she faced her spouse and accuser. Her in-laws treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her. If she hadn't run away, she would have died. Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Later, he would tell Aisha's uncle that she had to be made an example of lest other girls in the village try to do the same thing. The commander gave his verdict, and men moved in to deliver the punishment. Aisha's brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose. Aisha passed out from the pain but awoke soon after, choking on her own blood. The men had left her on the mountainside to die.

A scene from the distant past? Frighteningly, no:

This didn't happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year. Now hidden in a secret women's shelter in the relative safety of Kabul, where she was taken after receiving care from U.S. forces, Aisha recounts her tale in a monotone, her eyes flat and distant. She listens obsessively to the news on a small radio that she keeps by her side. Talk that the Afghan government is considering some kind of political accommodation with the Taliban is the only thing that elicits an emotional response. "They are the people that did this to me," she says, touching the jagged bridge of scarred flesh and bone that frames the gaping hole in an otherwise beautiful face. "How can we reconcile with them?"

How indeed? These are the Taliban – and lest we forget these raging desert rats…

The Taliban—from the Arabic word for student, “taleb”—are fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, mostly from Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes. The Taliban dominates large swaths of Afghanistan and a large part of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

The Taliban seek to establish a puritanical caliphate that neither recognizes nor tolerates forms of Islam divergent from their own. They scorn democracy or any secular or pluralistic political process as an offense against Islam. The Taliban’s Islam, however, a close kin of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism, is far more perversion than interpretation. The Taliban’s version of Islamic law, or Sharia, is historically inaccurate, contradictory, self-serving and fundamentally deviant from prevailing interpretations of Islamic law and practice.

The major part that I agree with in that paragraph is, “historically inaccurate, contradictory, self-serving and fundamentally deviant” – but then, I thought the majority of religion and religious text is exactly that.

But…who put these madmen in charge of anything? Why, Pakistan, a government founded on Sharia law:

Religious indoctrination in Pakistan’s madrassas and Omar’s campaigns against rapists alone were not the light that lit the Taliban fuse. The Pakistani intelligence services known as the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, the Pakistani military and Benazir Bhutto, who was prime minister of Pakistan during the Taliban’s most politically and militarily formative years (1993-96), all saw in the Taliban a proxy army they could manipulate to Pakistan’s ends.

In 1994, Bhutto’s government appointed the Taliban as protector of Pakistani convoys through Afghanistan. Controlling trade routs and the lucrative windfalls those routes provide in Afghanistan is a major source of lucre and power. The Taliban proved uniquely effective, swiftly defeating other warlords and conquering major Afghan cities.

Of course, the USA was fairly stupid about this as well:

Following Pakistan’s lead, the Clinton administration initially supported the Taliban’s rise. Clinton’s judgment was clouded by the question that has often led American policy astray in the region: Who can best check Iran’s influence? In the 1980s, the Reagan administration armed and financed Saddam Hussein under the assumption that a totalitarian Iraq was more acceptable than an unbridled, Islamic Iran. The policy backfired in the form of two wars, one of which has yet to end.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration also funded the mujahideen in Afghanistan as well as their Islamist supporters in Pakistan. That blowback took the form of al-Qaeda. As the Soviets withdrew and the cold war ended, American support for Afghan mujahideen stopped abruptly, but military and diplomatic support for Afghanistan did not. Under the influence of Benazir Bhutto, the Clinton administration voiced itself willing to open a dialogue with the Taliban in the mid-1990s, especially as the Taliban was the only force in Afghanistan capable of guaranteeing another American interest in the region — potential oil pipelines.

And we’re back to the issue of women’s rights:

The Taliban's long lists of edicts and decrees took an especially misogynistic view of women. Schools for girls were closed. Women were forbidden to work or leave their homes without verifiable permission. Wearing non-Islamic dress was forbidden. Wearing make-up, sporting western products like purses or shoes, was forbidden. Music, dancing, cinemas, any form of non-religious broadcasting and entertainment were banned. Lawbreakers were beaten, flogged, shot or beheaded.

And the press releases are becoming increasingly less…kind. Stories of atrocities abound, enough to sicken anyone with a human heart.

This then, is the ill fruit borne of ‘respecting’ all religious delusions. It is the price paid for allowing insane people to propagate their mental viruses, an ill price for indulgent forbearance. We need to understand that some folks are just beyond being educated, and it must be dealt with accordingly and soon, because no pacifist screed will succeed against these animals with rough hands and rough hearts who will slice away the parts of the world that offends them most.

Till the next post then.