When I fled Afghanistan at the end of 1961, I thought I was the only American who had ever been there or heard about the country—other than Herman Melville who opens Moby Dick with a reference to “Bloody Riots in Afghanistan.”
Now, nearly 50 years later, (well, 48 years to be precise), Afghanistan seems to be following me. I cannot pick up a newspaper without reading at least one, often two articles about it. This is true day after day, year after year.
Just today, I read about the memorial services for the six American, one British, one German foreign aid workers and the two Afghans who worked with them. Three were women. They were all buried at the British Cemetary in Kabul. With the exception of the Afghans, the medical team were all Christians but they had not come to proselytize. They came to do for the impoverished Afghan people what their own leaders could not or would not do: Provide free and expert dental, medical, surgical, and eye care.
Of course, the Taliban proudly claimed responsibility for and justified the cold-blooded murders of unarmed civilians because they were Christians who had come to convert Muslims. On the other hand, the single survivor, their Afghan Muslim driver, says that it could have been a simple robbery—the murderers first removed their victim’s money, jewelry and valuables and then shot each person, one by one. The driver also says that he was only allowed to live because he said he was a Muslim and was able to recite some verses from the Qu’ran.
Thus, these noble souls were either murdered because they were Christians or because they were do-gooders who provided free medical care in Kabul, Herat, Mazar, and Kandahar.
Sedika Mojdadi, is the Afghan-American daughter of two Afghan physicians who emigrated to America in 1972.
In 2007, she released a powerful documentary, Motherland Afghanistan which followed her parents’ working visits back to Afghanistan over a six year period.
Mojdadi’s father is an obstetrician-gynecologist. He went to Afghanistan to train Afghan physicians who “had no clue as to how to do things properly because no one has told them.”
Afghanistan has the second highest infant mortality rate in the world. There are at least 100,000 women in Afghanistan with unhealed fistulas. Women with fistulas (torn during childbirth) are rarely treated. A women suffering from Eclampysia-induced seizures was taken to a mullah/faith healer who tried to “exorcise” the evil spirits. He beat the pregnant woman with a whip until she was near death. The baby died. The mother survived, but barely.
In the recent past, rioting mobs have laid siege to hospitals.
According to the Mojdadis, (her mother is a primary care physician), despite the presumably massive American government support, hospitals rarely had any supplies. Patients have to buy their own IV equipment, sutures for surgery, etc. Anesthesia is limited. Bathrooms are constantly overflowing and unusable.
Dr. Mojdadi finally left the American hospital but returned to an NGO-funded hospital in a Hazara region. The cabinets were fully stocked with hospital supplies. It was clean, beautiful, and was serving 57,000 patients a year. However, the doctors still did not have adequate skills. Although he was born and grew up in Afghanistan, Dr. Mojdadi admits that he could not live here any more, things are “too rough.”
Enter the American Christian do-gooders. Their needless, sobering murders are a triumph of pure Evil over pure Good. It is also an example of what death-eating Muslim Taliban or Arabized Afghans really think of infidels. More: It shows that anyone who tries to alleviate physical suffering is perceived as an enemy of a Sunni Islamic Afghanistan and therefore is also treated as vulnerable prey, to be taken hostage for ransom money, or robbed and murdered.
Jews are hated because they have brought moral and scientific knowledge into the world and, as Israelis, “made the desert bloom” (in every sense of the word); Arabs did not even try to do so.
These Christians are hated because they represent the virtues of altruism and compassion and represent a tradition which values life over death, healing over suffering.
This is why they were murdered.
America’s and the West’s greatest decision is whether we are obligated to try and help those people whose leaders refuse to do so—and who will kill us for trying.
I have yet to hear President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, or President Hamid Karzai clearly denounce these murders and explain exactly what they mean.
“These Christians are hated because they represent the virtues of altruism and compassion and represent a tradition which values life over death, healing over suffering.
This is why they were murdered.”
Y’know what? You don’t lance a boil on your knee by putting a needle in your elbow.
When are we ready to seize Saudi Arabia, declare the universal human right of religious freedom will be respected therein, and shoot whomever disagrees?
That’s what it will take to knock down Muhammad’s house of cards.
Questions of the homicidal, life-hating Taliban aside, I want to ask (not rhetorically) if you think the poor Afghan people would be better served if the Christians tucked their religious affiliation into their Bibles before leaving for their work in that g-dforsaken country.
I’m a Christian so my question isn’t backed by any animus. I’m just wondering if those who go there to help wouldn’t be of more help to those they want to serve if they kept the lowest profile possible?
And I wonder if women associated with NGOs wouldn’t be better off with some kind of bodyguard protection provided by the corrupt govt. Women serving in any country where Islam is the majority are at risk anyway. But if they didn’t go there, no man would be permitted to help women. What a double bind!
I realize there are no good answers when people want to kill you just because you exist and you’re in their space offending them by breathing in and out.
However, I’m sure others would be interested in your thoughts re the wisdom of permitting one’s religion to be part of one’s profile in such a place.
I know Jews who haved ‘passed’ when they felt it served the larger goal.
Which reminds me: when those Pakistani-born American citizens (captured in Chicago, iirc) were hatching their plans to blow up the newspaper in Denmark which printed the Mo Cartoons, they also planned to murder the most public of the cartoonists, Lars Hedegaard (he started the International Free Press Society). Along with him, they were going to take out Flemming Rose, the editor, partly because his name “sounded Jewish”. They even staked out a local syangogue to see if they could spot him.
this indicates, at least to me, that Islam is not a religion but a religious facade for a political movement. Afghanistan and the rest of the sewer known as The Arab Street with their almost puppet like homage to Mohammed as G-d, just proves to me that G-d in fact has forsaken this blighted land. or maybe it’s the other way around… that people have forsaken G_d when they chose Islam.
These innocent people were doing something far worse than preaching Christianity. They were PRACTICING Christianty.
Perfect example of greed, hatred and ignorance in action. All three celebrated by the Koran and Jihad. These good people lived the opposite way. Afghans involved can’t help but know who lived well and who didn’t. The Taliban won’t last. Good people will keep coming to Afghanistan.
The most violent and extreme forms of hatred are those that have no motivation. Hitler had no reason to hate Jews. He loved music and needed atomic scientists. Jews were both musicians and physicists. But Hitler’s hatred was totally pure and irrational, not based on anything. That’s why he was such a horrible and effective murderer.
The world of Islam is consumed by hatred. The hatred is unmotivated. It is directed not only against Jews and Christians, but against other Muslims. Shiites and Sunnis kill each other and blow up each other’s mosques. Muslim women are hated. Muslim children are taught to be martyrs, which shows they are expected to express and act out the hatreds of their parents. It also shows they are not loved–until they are dead.
It is extremely hard to fight a force that is irrational.
In his own mind, Hitler was entirely rational with respect to the Jews. One has to enter the mentality of a thoroughgoing racist and anti-Semite to see their logic. I tried to lay this out here:
http://clarespark.com/2009/08/27/hitler-and-the-jewish-mind-part-three/
http://clarespark.com/2009/08/27/hitler-and-the-jewish-mind-part-two/
http://clarespark.com/2009/08/26/hitler-and-the-jewish-mind-part-one/.
I could say the same for radical jihadists. They see that the West and radical Islam cannot co-exist, so they are determined to destroy the West. It was the same for Hitler.
Yes, but they kill other Muslims and blow up their mosques, as well.
It’s a myth, propagated by Jews, that Hitler and the Germans had “no reason” to hate the Jews. There is a very good reason why Hitler and Gentile monarchs over the centuries have expelled Jews from their countries. It’s because the Jewish religion teaches Jewish Supremacism — that Jews are the only true humanity. There is one law for how Jews must treat Jews, and another law regarding how they are to treat non-Jews. Jewish law allows Jews to exploit non-Jews to the extent that they can get away with it and not be found out or reflect poorly on their fellow Jews. If America really knew how Jews were destroying their country, from the inside out, they would be furious, too. Perhaps we, too, would demand that these traitors be expelled, too. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen. White Gentile America will be extinct long before that ever happens — and the world will have Jews to thank for that.
Miss Polly Not Korect,
When You can point me to an account of Jews stoning women to death for committing adultery, or torturing people much more inhumanely than we did KSM with the waterboard (ie. the pregnant woman they shot three times in the head after they administered 200 lashes comes to mind), or forced marriages, or sanctioned rapes, or requiring half their population to cover themselves…. then I will be willing to take your comments about the “Evil Jew” a little more seriously.
Polly, you obviously know nothing about Jewishness, Torah nor Jewish Theology. May I suggest you at least take a few classes about the Jewish faith before commenting. Your ignorance is so overwhelming, I am finding it difficult to bring myself to even think of having a discussion on your statements because you are so obviously misinformed and educationally challenged regarding Jews that we may soon find you commiting irrational hate crimes.
I see, Moslems murdering Christians and Jews out of hand for no particular reason, except for their religion.
How is this news?
I auppose Interim President Obama will want the Muslims to erect a 30 storey commemorative mosque on the site of these disgusting murders. May the beautiful souls of those wonderful men and women rest in peace. May they for ever be at the right side of God. May He hold them in the hollow of His hand. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam. Éamonn, Dublin, Ireland.
May their generous and loving souls rest in peace. They are true martyrs, unlike the Islamic ones, who call themselves martyrs, but are in reality murderers.
‘I have yet to hear President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, or President Hamid Karzai clearly denounce these murders..’
And you won’t.
Avoidance of upsetting the sensitivities of locals when they’re Afghans is far easier than similar when it comes to New Yorkers.
This week that taqiyya drenched Iftar speech followed by his comment on supposed freedom of religion being sacrosanct in the US has to be the icing on the cake of his treachery. And deception.
Christians were arrested in Dearborn a couple of weeks ago for the ‘crime’ of so called proseletisation. Where was their freedom?
I love your reference to Herman Melville. Very nice indeed. From the very beginning you tell us that Afghanistant and the USA have a long history.
Thought provoking. Most people as in the 1930′s refuse to see the Beast for what it is until it is almost too late…..
Its cruel and the war is not getting any where only good people are being hurt
James A. Michener wrote a book about Afghanistan, CARAVANS, published in 1962.
Rudyard Kipling’s KIM is about Afghanistan.
Dearest Dr. Chesler,
I am not sure whether Talibans murdered such People because they were Christians, because they were practicing Christianity or because they were Americans.
A Difference (well, not that it matters too much) must be noted:
1) if it was because of their religious Belief, then it was a Matter of Islam-ism;
2) if it was because of their Job, then it problably depended on the Fact that they were healing People, which Talibans did not like;
3) if it was because of their Americanity, then it probably had to do with mere political Reasons.
—
Talibans are a Cancer of Humanity, this has no Doubts, let’s see what does RAWA reports about their (Mis)facts (against Women).
—
The Tie that connects you (your Feelings, Part of your Heart) to Afghanistan is almost incomprehensible to most of us.
I therefore especially appreciate your Efforts devoted to inform us about there.
Thank you and lovliest Regards.
Not all Muslims are terrorists, true. But who are commiting the thousands of so-called “honor killings”? Who are throwing acid at the faces of girls and women? Who picked up rocks and hurled them at human beings who simply fell in love? I’m sure there are decent, intelligent Muslims out there, but surely they must be the minority or these horrors would not be so common.