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Not Just The Women
All Afghans are threatened by the Taliban, whatever an “Afghan” is. Women are treated as property and so are boys, and so are subordinate males if caught out of their zone. Depends how subordinate.
There is not a single benefit brought by the Taliban which makes the overall result worthwhile, except for a crust of apologists similar to and sometimes overlapping with our own pinko apologists for the mass-murdering despot states of the 20th century. And believe me, you are about to start hearing (once again) of the benefits brought by the Taliban. Nazis made the trains run on time, etc.
I read a book while in Afghanistan which featured a memorable observation that the whole country had been at war for forty years and was more based on PTSD than any religion or system of government.
There is a line of cleavage within the fanatics which IIRC helps delineate Taliban from Al-Q/ISIS, which is that the “Arab brothers” are foreign and do not share the cultural impact of growing up in Afghanistan (whatever Afghanistan is). Even accepting that every human is wounded in some way; their wounds are different.
As with much of the left’s pathology, the “cycle of violence” and “conflict resolution” ideas are misapplications of small-scale human truths at the ridiculously inappropriate level of nation-states. A mob behaves differently from its constituent individuals, and cannot be treated as a rational being — it is exactly not that. A nation-state is not even fairly treated as a mob, much less a person writ large, but as a mob of mobs, no matter how dressed in government and flags. The cycle of violence is entirely valid at the level of the individual, wherein a huge majority of abusers were themselves abused.
Islam is absolutely run through with predatory homosexuality, perhaps nowhere more so than the most chronically PTSD-afflicted population to walk the planet in living memory. The monstrous men who make awful headlines were boys treated poorly by the previous generation or three of monstrous men. Of course, they treat women poorly. Women and girls are not the future of Afghanistan — the boys are. And things have just gotten a lot bleaker for the boys.
Published in Islamist Terrorism
You are correct. There is a very good book called The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini which depicts this darker reality of homosexual rape rampant in the culture.
Yup. I have read that and A Thousand Splendid Suns. And we got word of the rapes going on across camp from us.
The book I was thinking of is The Punishment of Virtue by Sarah Chayes. Great book.
I said that “Islam is absolutely run through with predatory homosexuality…”, but I know little of Islam outside of the middle east. Perhaps in Indonesia (the “wet Muslims”) this is not so. I have no idea. And of course, this sort of thing is hardly limited to Islam. But with those caveats, I’ll stick by what I said.
Dear God, mankind is wicked. File this under somethings I wish I didn’t know. . .
As far as I know, this is not common practice across the Islamic world, it’s mostly prominent in Afghanistan. Some practices we tend to think of as Islamic, like female genital mutilation, but they are actually tribal practices that predate Mohammad.