AS I WRITE THIS, the swell of a Western grassroots outcry against the Nigerian outfit, Boko Haram, appears to be forming across social media.
Tag Archives: Afghanistan
The Roundtable Podcast 65
• Week of 06.04.2014
The Campaigns for Kabul | Afghanistan: Seen Through the Lens of Anja Niedringhaus | Rwanda | Kurt Cobain: What Ever Happened to Nirvana | New Music: Timber Timbre, “Hot Dreams” | Chewbacca: The Cure For Bad Tattoos? | Food obsessives: the people searching for the perfect cheese, bread and coffee | Germans seize cocaine on its way to Vatican | Best Places To Live In Canada, And The Worst, According To MoneySense
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The Roundtable Podcast 56
• Week of 01.12.2013 | Black Friday
Black Friday shopping in US marred by violence | ‘This isn’t Toronto,’ sheriff says after U.S. mayor’s drug arrest | Afghanistan to reintroduce public stoning as punishment for adultery | Game: Finish the Headline | Featured Article: Rumsfeld’s War and Its Consequences Now | Syria war ‘damaging a generation of children’, UN warns | Music: Queens of the Stone Age | Feds spend $40 million to pitch natural resources | Feds to monitor social media round-the-clock | New Snowden docs show U.S. spied during G20 in Toronto | Highlights from Boring Tweeter @b0ringtweets | Teacher’s attempt to educate students on Internet safety turns into weird viral science lesson | Meindfeld | Why I Keep a Spreadsheet of Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With
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The Taliban Vs. Civilization
THE NEWS from Afghanistan has been nothing but bad, and every indication is of worse to come. By the end of 2014, the Afghan people will be on their own, as they were in 2001 before the arrival — at local invitation — of British and American forces. Recall that twelve years ago the Islamist dirtbags who constituted the Taliban held Kabul, where they supervised a fanatical program of demodernization and terror punctuated by regularly scheduled mass executions. Imagine trying to re-engineer a nation of the twenty-first century along bronze age specifications, and you’ve got the idea — or, rather, don’t imagine it: the experiment was there before the eyes of anyone who cared to look. Now that the war-weary West has thrown its arms around the convenient fiction that the Taliban are ready for a negotiated re-entry (or is it entry?) to the twenty-first century, let’s review a sample of the bad tidings.
The Courage of Malala Yousafzai and the Lessons of Mingora
THERE ARE no words of sufficient force to summarize this week’s attempted murder of fourteen year-old Malala Yousafzai, in the northwest Pakistan city of Mingora. Yet as shocking as this savagery is, there is nothing new about it either: depravity is the business of the Taliban franchise. There are however some lessons to be drawn from the years during which the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (abbreviated as TTP and known also as the Pakistani Taliban) terrorized the Swat valley and Mingora specifically.
The flame of intolerance rises from Koran burnings
NEWS OF THE Bagram Air Base Quran burnings, and the riots which have followed, reproduced the usual concern that perhaps no amount of evident contrition would prevent a violent response. Here is an illustration of the root of this anxiety, from a Reuters article of February 22: “Critics say Western troops often fail to grasp the country’s religious and cultural sensitivities. Muslims consider the Koran the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence.”
The Conservative Party’s courting of China is shameful
I KNOW FROM experience the most efficient way to start a fist-fight in some circles is to use, without irony, the word evil. As in the phrase Axis of Evil. On this principle, George W. Bush was mocked for years by lefties who noted condescendingly (though correctly) that the President’s eyes were just a bit too close together for the nation’s good. One afternoon in the mid 90s, the man who would memorably link Iran, Iraq and North Korea — Bush Jr’s speechwriter, David Frum — passed in front of my car while I was at a red light. I confess repressing an urge to step on the gas. Some years on, however, I’ve a greater respect for Mr. Frum, and in part it’s due to the fact that I think there really is such a thing as evil, perhaps even in axis form.
Living in the Age of The Endless War
ON A WALL at the National Capital’s War Monument are inscribed these words, past which I walk each day and derived from the ninth book of Virgil’s Aeneid: “nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo.” Here I shall provide some context, deferring to Robert Fitzgerald’s 1983 translation for Random House:
Fortunate, both! If in the least my songs
Avail, no future day will ever take you
Out of the record of remembering Time,
While children of Aeneas make their home
Around the Capitol’s unshaken rock,
And still the Roman Father governs all.
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