PERHAPS THE MOST remarkable thing about Adnan Rasheed’s defence of the Malala Yousafzai shooting (putting aside the fact it’s a defence) is how predictable and clichéd a performance it is, beginning with its disingenuous preamble “I’m sorry this happened, but ….”
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.
• Podcast 35 | Week of 24.03.2013
Article of the Week: Why Canada Needs the Sasquatch, Vice Magazine.
Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3).
FOR A SHORT time, the writer George Orwell worked in a book store. There he observed the depressing chasm (as he saw it) between what was praised in public versus what was actually sought and read in private.
THERE’S NO USE in a writer denying the pleasures derived of notoriety, but it happened this week that I was “Freshly Pressed” and that I had feelings about it which weren’t entirely comforting. In case you don’t know, to be Freshly Pressed (or FPd, as I have discovered the WordPress folks put it) is to have a post chosen by the editors of WordPress for the landing page at wordpress.com. This arbitrary distinction — as I feel it to be — brings with it a huge momentary increase in traffic, comments, email and polite approbation. In short, here comes and goes your fifteen minutes of fame.
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.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 