An Afghan Kristallnacht.
In Afghanistan, you can always tell the Khomeinists' hand in "spontaneous" demonstrations by the tell-tale slogan Marg Bar Yahood (Death to the Jews). You can hear it for yourself in this raw video footage, about 55 seconds in.
That was what they were shouting in the first mini-riot in Kabul last week, which, so far as I can determine, the foreign press reported without exception as merely a spontaneous demonstration of Afghan anger in response to the Quran-burning escapade undertaken by that hillbilly crackpot imam Terry Jones. You'd think that Asif Mohseni, Iran's chosen ayatollah in Afghanistan, has had nothing to do with it. You'd never know that immediately prior to that first protest, Hamid Karzai allowed himself to be engaged by Iran's propagandists in Afghanistan to utter the ridiculous demand for Jones' arrest - causing the uproar that was the first that Afghans had even heard about the Quran-burning.
Think whatever you like. For all of you who would prefer to think of the horror in Mazar and now Kandahar as just another instance of Them Devilish Muzzies Gone Mad, you are welcome to your stupid and self-congratulating bigotry. You should be pleased with yourselves that you share precisely the same idiocy that animates illiterate Kandahari hillbillies who fault kaffirs and Yanks at large for the vulgar provocation that was an act of criminal negligence committed solely by Jones and his pathetic little flock of cretins in Florida.
It has been an excruciating and utterly heartbreaking 48 hours for us at the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. But from the reports we are getting from our friends back in Afghanistan, especially from Mazar, what is emerging is a fairly clear picture of a well-organized campaign of incitement to violence and murder carried out by a determined Khomeinist-Deobandist criminal conspiracy. There will be much more about that later.
For now, from Kabul, here's Thomas Ruttig:
"Who would have thought that something like this could be possible following the Nazis’ autodafé in the Berlin of 1933 were they set the works of Jewish, Marxist and pacifist – in short ‘un-German’ – writers like Heinrich Mann, Remarque, Tucholsky, Kaestner, Freud and Marx alight. (I always admired the Bavarian writer, Oskar Maria Graf, who wrote a letter of protest to the ‘Fuehrer’ when he discovered that his books had been spared). What makes people in Afghanistan so angry that they attack random foreigners, UN personnel who have nothing at all to do with that fringe pastor’s act?"
What, indeed.
That was what they were shouting in the first mini-riot in Kabul last week, which, so far as I can determine, the foreign press reported without exception as merely a spontaneous demonstration of Afghan anger in response to the Quran-burning escapade undertaken by that hillbilly crackpot imam Terry Jones. You'd think that Asif Mohseni, Iran's chosen ayatollah in Afghanistan, has had nothing to do with it. You'd never know that immediately prior to that first protest, Hamid Karzai allowed himself to be engaged by Iran's propagandists in Afghanistan to utter the ridiculous demand for Jones' arrest - causing the uproar that was the first that Afghans had even heard about the Quran-burning.
Think whatever you like. For all of you who would prefer to think of the horror in Mazar and now Kandahar as just another instance of Them Devilish Muzzies Gone Mad, you are welcome to your stupid and self-congratulating bigotry. You should be pleased with yourselves that you share precisely the same idiocy that animates illiterate Kandahari hillbillies who fault kaffirs and Yanks at large for the vulgar provocation that was an act of criminal negligence committed solely by Jones and his pathetic little flock of cretins in Florida.
It has been an excruciating and utterly heartbreaking 48 hours for us at the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. But from the reports we are getting from our friends back in Afghanistan, especially from Mazar, what is emerging is a fairly clear picture of a well-organized campaign of incitement to violence and murder carried out by a determined Khomeinist-Deobandist criminal conspiracy. There will be much more about that later.
For now, from Kabul, here's Thomas Ruttig:
"Who would have thought that something like this could be possible following the Nazis’ autodafé in the Berlin of 1933 were they set the works of Jewish, Marxist and pacifist – in short ‘un-German’ – writers like Heinrich Mann, Remarque, Tucholsky, Kaestner, Freud and Marx alight. (I always admired the Bavarian writer, Oskar Maria Graf, who wrote a letter of protest to the ‘Fuehrer’ when he discovered that his books had been spared). What makes people in Afghanistan so angry that they attack random foreigners, UN personnel who have nothing at all to do with that fringe pastor’s act?"
What, indeed.
posted by Terry Glavin at 9:54 AM
5 Comments:
RE: what is emerging is a fairly clear picture of a well-organized campaign of incitement to violence and murder carried out by a determined Khomeinist-Deobandist criminal conspiracy.
First correct usage of the word "incitement" that I've read. So far it's only been applied -- entirely incorrectly -- to that nutter Terry Jones, who is guilty of provocation, but, in my opinion, not even that vis a vis the Afghans. After all, why should an incident half a world away be of any concern whatsoever? It's the Danish cartoons all over again, albeit by a much more unsavoury character.
It's like the Motoons affairs only to the extent that the cartoons, too, were a mere pretext for savagery, and the allegedly spontaneous response was anything but spontaneous. People have forgotten that the Mo-toons appeared in the Egyptian press, producing revulsion and nothing else, two weeks before the riots erupted.
The difference is that the hillbilly Jones knew exactly what was going to happen, he knew the result of his sick little experiment in advance, and indeed the premise of his "trial" was that violence and mayhem would prove his point, which even a hillbilly like him knows damn well doesn't need proving in the first place.
The massacres "prove" Jones' sick little religious-fanatic point, which was not a point about free speech. One does not need to prove that the Talibs and their accomplices are the enemies of humanity. You don't jump up and down shouting "I dare you" if the hostage-takers have told us and proved to us over and over again that they will kill hostages if we dare them.
Still not sure what your point is terry. Yes, Jones is a repulsive bigoted nutter. We can all agree on that. What else is there to say about Jones?
So,what are you suggesting should be done to Mr.Jones?
DMorris
If I were to answer the 'What is to be done with Mr. Jones?' question at the moment, in all honesty, I am almost ashamed to say what I think.
What I can say is that I am sick to the teeth with the puerile "Yes but he didn't actually kill anyone" and "Yes but these Muzzies are the killers" forms of yesbuttery. Yes, compared to the killers, you can almost make Jones look innocent. Fat lot of good that does in recommending him. Who doesn't look good next to a throatslitter? You could also say that compared to Jones, the lunatic chanting Marg Bar Yahood looks good. Does that somehow redeem the chanter? At some point, parsing equivalences in the effort to appear alert to false moral equivalence is just boring and stupid.
Keep an eye out for Ehsanullah Ehsan's essay in the Toronto Star tomorrow if you want to get a sense of how I'm feeling about all this right now. Una Moore has a good piece today that notices blood on Karzai's hands - google is your fiend - as I do too. Wrote my piece yesterday. When it finds its home I'll post it here.
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