Religious Freedom in ‘Liberated’ Afghanistan

Democracy, Middle East, Politics, Religion, The State

Lawrence Auster is BAB’s Guest Blogger today. First up, he comments on the case of the Muslim convert to Christianity, now awaiting death in “liberated” Afghanistan.–ILANA

“How Democratization has put us in Bed with the Muslims” By Lawrence Auster at View from the Right:

Here’s something to make your teeth hurt. The U.S. State Department refuses to call on the Afghanis to stop seeking the death penalty for a former Muslim who became a Christian. Instead, the State Department spokesmen are saying things like, “We believe it is important that the Afghan authorities handle the case in a transparent manner,” as though all they care about were proper legal procedure. But wait—that is all our government cares about, isn’t? For example, if a mass-murdering terrorist organization comes to power in the Palestinian Authority by legal popular vote, that’s fine with us, right?
Meanwhile Italy told the Afghanis it would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan if the Christian man is not spared.

Costs of War Predicted By Prescient Libertarians

Iraq, libertarianism, War

On April 30, 2003 I wrote the following:

According to figures provided by Yale professor William Nordhaus and the Council of Foreign Relations, the eventual costs of the war on Iraq will be roughly $1.2 trillion.

Very many libertarians debated—and were familiar with—this estimate.

On March 17, 2006, MSNBC’s Martin Wolk finally awoke and wrote:

One estimate puts the total economic impact [of the war] at up to $2 trillion.

On May 28, 2004, I noted in amazement that the neoconservative talking twits [have] been wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq. Their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities had them insisting our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia. They’ve consistently dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage.

They were wrong all along, yet they’ve retained their status as philosopher-kings.

On the other hand—and unfortunately for America—there hasn’t been a horror in Iraq that certain libertarian prescients did not foretell well in advance.

And I asked: “So why are insightful commentators, whose observations have predictive power, generally barred from the national discourse, while false neoconservative prophets are called back for encores?”

The answer I gave in 2004 applies today:

Elites—media included—can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please—not inform—the populace. Having their worldview affirmed—even affirmed in a parallel universe—is worth a lot to news consumers, who are keener to avoid the pains of cognitive dissonance than to get the real deal.

Oh What A Wonderful War!

War

Ibn Saud, Sultan of Najd (1876-1953), said this about the Iraqis:

It may be accepted as an incontrovertible fact that it will be impossible to manage the people of Iraq except by strong means and military force.

Like Saddam Hussein did?

No one is praising Saddam, yada, yada, yada. And perhaps I don’t have the stomach for Bush-style freedom, but then my stomach isn’t directly at stake, is it? I know that if I were made to walk in the shoes of these poor Iraqis, pooling their meager means to stockpile for civil war—or is “sectarian strife” more palatable?—I’d be wishing for the return of the Saddam era.

The San Francisco Chronicle employs journalists who actually go out into the field, rather than scoop stories fresh off… the AP wire:

Om Hussein, wrapped in her black abaya, lists the contents of the family’s walk-in storage closet: three 175-pound cases of rice, two 33-pound cases of cooking fat, six cases of canned tomatoes, three crates of assorted legumes, a one-month supply of drinking water, frozen chicken livers in the freezer. And in the garage, jerry cans filled with fuel are piled floor to ceiling.
Om Hussein, who was reluctant to give her full name, and her Shiite family are preparing for war. They’ve stocked up on food. They bought a Kalashnikov rifle and a second car — so that there is space for all 13 members of their extended family should they need to flee in a hurry.
“We are afraid of what will happen in the coming days,” she says. “Maybe there will be a month-long curfew, or maybe fighting in the streets will force my family to stay in the house for days at a time.”

So far, “hundreds of ordinary Iraqis [are] dead and dozens of mosques [have been] ransacked. Daily execution-style killings and car bombings continue. On Sunday, multiple car bombs killed scores. The bodies of scores more, many bound and garroted, have been discovered around Baghdad since Monday. The capital’s hospitals overflow with the wounded.”

Children, who once played safely in the street, can’t leave home, although Ali-Baba opportunists regularly invite themselves into homes and kidnap family members for ransom. “Shiites and Sunnis have become refugees in their own country, as they flee neighborhoods and outlying villages where they have found themselves members of a suddenly unwelcome minority.”

Imagine having to leave your abode and camp out like a nomad for fear of sectarian reprisals and still not be safe.

Let’s get straight the order of events: first came the invasion and its concomitant wanton devastation of life and property—Iraqi and American. With its preemptive, aggressive, and unwarranted strike, the U.S. conceived (unintentionally—I know, I know) the chaos and anarchy that have created a comparative advantage for Iraqi gangsters.

To say, as Christopher Hitchens has, that this is better than Saddam’s law-and-order dictatorship is preposterous. The only way ex-Trotskyites like Hitchens—for whom permanent revolution is evidently still an article of faith—can backup this apparently sincere conviction, is by taking up residence in what has become the most dangerous zone in the world: Iraq.

Feminism and Islam (And a Thought about Jewish Women)

Feminism, Islam

Some feminists have dedicated their lives and work to women and to mending the fractious relationships between the sexes, yet have remained mum on the topic of women under Islam. The analogy of the libertarian writer, who holds free speech and private property rights sacred, yet has refused to weigh in on the Danish cartoon controversy obtains here.

To say something about the plight of women under Islam would require an objective examination of Islam’s teachings about women—they are deemed unclean; contaminants, a source of sin, and worse—without resorting to postmodern, culture-specific constructs. Is this what is being avoided? What a disgrace.

Here’s a hilarious thought about Jewish women: I recall reading one of Kevin MacDonald’s loopy expositions about Jews, in which he asserts seriously that Jewish women are oppressed. It had something to do with the faith’s teachings. He clearly hasn’t met very many Jews. If anything, Jewish women could do with some oppression.

I wonder if he was referring to the after-meal grace Jews say, where a song of adulation is sung especially for the Woman of the House. In it, the family praises her uniqueness and wisdom. Beauty is said to be all nonsense—a woman’s substance is all that matters and for her substance her husband must worship her (if he knows what’s good for him).