Monsef, an Afghan Canadian, said: "I want to take this opportunity to speak to our brothers the Taliban; we call on you to ensure the safe and secure passage of any individual in Afghanistan out of the country. We call on you to immediately stop the violence, the genocide, the femicide, the destruction of infrastructure, including heritage buildings."She continued: "We call on your to return immediately to the peacekeeping table, to the peace deal that was negotiated, and to ensure women and minorities voices are a part of that discussion in a meaningful way."
Nothing to worry about, sister Monsef! The Taliban will be on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. What higher claim to authority could they have to decent treatment for women than a seat on the global body overseeing such matters?
Ralph Peters, about 15 years ago: "One of the most consistently disheartening experiences an adult can have today is to listen to the endless attempts by our intellectuals and intelligence professionals to explain religious terrorism in clinical terms, assigning rational motives to men who have moved irrevocably beyond reason. We suffer under layers of intellectual asymmetries that hinder us from an intuititive recognition of our enemies."
ReplyDeleteAnd, further back in the past, Paul Reynaud, who became Prime Minister of France just two months before the German invasion of 1940:
"People think Hitler is like Kaiser Wilhelm. The old gentleman only wanted to take Alsace-Lorraine from us. But Hitler is Genghis Khan.
And, just last month, former Senator Barbara Boxer (who is less intelligent than most boxer dogs), said, after being shoved and robbed: "How could they do this to a grandma?"..." I’m a little person with gray hair. Why would you hurt a person who has the potential to love you?"
As Ed Driscoll at Instapundit put it, THE TROLLING WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Taliban vow to tackle Climate Change: Terror group sets out its eco credentials...
ReplyDeleteAnd that link isn't the Babylon Bee.
If the diagnosis of climate change as being caused by industrial economic activity is correct, I suppose there's reason to believe the Taliban will be pretty good on that one.
ReplyDeletePeters was both right and wrong.
ReplyDeleteMost terrorists have moved beyond "reason." However, to most effectively and efficiently fight and destroy terrorists, we do need to understand their motives, and rest assured, they do behave with reason and logic. Our failure--and Peters'--is to assume that if they're not acting according to our rules of reason or logic, they cannot be acting reasonably or logically at all.
The hard part, but no less necessary for that, is to discern and understand their rules of logic instead of arrogantly projecting our rules onto them. The various terrorist organizations each will have their own rules of logic and reason, too; there's no one-size-fits-all paradigm here, no matter how convenient that might be for our comfort.
Reynaud was closer to the mark, but he was hiding behind the laziness of analogy rather than doing any actual understanding.
Simply writing terrorists off as crazy or Genghis reincarnate is uninformed, lazy, cowardly, and/or dishonest, depending on who's doing the writing off.
Separately, Driscoll was trying for a bit of satire, but.... When I was stationed at Duluth, one of the interceptor squadron commanders at Sawyer really did announce that there would be no further leaves granted in his squadron until morale improved.
Eric Hines
This connected for me with a guest post at Ace's yesterday by commenter Joe Mannix titled Why Don’t We Do Our Own ‘Long March?’
ReplyDeleteHe's discussing the problem of cracking into and recovering 'woke' institutions in the same way the Left executed the Gramscian 'Long March', the essential problem being that the 'everything is a power struggle' philosophy of the Left gives no point of entry by the resolution of a real contradiction between their standards and reality. It seems to me the Taliban have found that entry point through the effective embodiment of the contradiction by mouthing the words with absolutely no intention of carrying out the accompanying deeds.
I'm not sure that such an approach could be used successfully by people who expect congruity between their words and their deeds, however.
E Hines....it's been a while since I've read Peters regularly, but I remember him being a pretty thoughtful commentator. I don't see him as saying that we don't need to parse the specifics of how a particular terrorist group thinks, just that we can't assume that we call settle things with them via money, incremental changes in borders, etc.
ReplyDeleteReynaud was not an analyst, but rather a politician seeking to awake his fellow countrymen to the true nature of the threat that was facing them. **Infinitely worse** than what we were fighting twenty years ago, was his fundamental message.
All three of the examples...the people Peters was talking about, the people Reynaud was talking about, and Boxer herself...all failed to recognize the existence of implacable evil in the world.
Mr Foster,
ReplyDelete...explain religious terrorism in clinical terms, assigning rational motives to men who have moved irrevocably beyond reason doesn't sound like Peters was interested in understanding how terrorists think; although it's been 15, or so, years since I've heard much from him, also. There's also no disconnect between understanding terrorists' thinking or blowing them off as wholly irrational on the one hand and not sending them money or relying or incrementalism with them or... on the other hand.
Reynaud was a politician, but that's no excuse for trying to sway his countrymen to a position with political rhetoric rather than logic and facts. We're seeing today, in our own nation, the disaster that creates.
Boxer's foolishness was her own answer, as has been usually the case for her, no other response needed. Besides, the comparison with boxers insults the dogs with the low expectations bar. [/snark]
Eric Hines