Well, this didn’t take long at all. On Tuesday I noted that Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said: “We are going to allow women to work and study, women are going to be very active in society… we guarantee all their rights within the limits of Islam.” With admirable dispatch, the Taliban on the very same day indelibly illustrated how strictly those “limits of Islam” would be enforced. Fox News reported, also on Tuesday, that “fighters from the group shot and killed a woman in Takhar province after she went out in public without a burqa.”
No one should have been surprised, although some people undoubtedly were. The familiar wishful thinking and willful blindness are already appearing in establishment media circles. Wednesday on CNN, Christiane Amanpour, eager as always to be told soothing falsehoods, interviewed Saad Mohseni, director of the MOBY Group, which describes itself as operating in “South & Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa.”
“Headquartered in Dubai, the group employs over 1,200 individuals across 16 businesses,” and says it “has been widely recognized for its role in bringing news and entertainment to underserved populations.” The MOBY Group website also notes that Mohseni was “named one of 10 men fighting for gender equality by BBC 100 Women 2015.”
Mohseni told Amanpour: “Can the real Taliban stand up please? You have different factions, you have different wings… so we’re not even sure which part of the Taliban will prevail. Will the moderates prevail or will the more conservative ones prevail? It’s too early to tell.” Back in the real world, that is, the part that isn’t reported by CNN, this is arrant nonsense. There has been no evidence whatsoever of “moderate” wings of the Taliban, and any internal differences within the group are not likely to involve issues of women’s rights or relations with non-Muslim entities, as the Taliban’s stance on such matters is entirely dictated by the parameters of Islamic law.
Of course, Amanpour and her colleagues don’t have the faintest idea what Islamic law teaches, and even if they did, would dismiss even explicit teachings from the Qur’an and Sunnah as “extremist” and “fringe” and assume, without the slightest shred of evidence, that the vast majority of devout, knowledgeable and Sharia-adherent Muslims reject those teachings. Amanpour and her ilk cling to their fantasies about moderate Taliban factions and moderates among the Iranian mullahs just as tenaciously as they cling to their wholly baseless imaginings of the true, peaceful teachings of Islam that somehow elude the Taliban, and ISIS, and al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram, and all the rest, despite dedicating their lives to understanding Islam properly and implementing its laws faithfully.
The grim reality that the media establishment, as well as the political establishment, cannot or will not face is that while there are many millions of Muslims who have no interest in waging jihad and never will do so, and so can be classified as “moderate,” the teachings of Islam’s core texts, as explicated by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence and all the various sects of the religion, contain numerous mandates for warfare against unbelievers and the subjugation of women. The persistent refusal to recognize this in the United States, and the West in general, has led to absurdities such as what played out on Tuesday, with UNICEF saying it was “quite optimistic” regarding the education of girls in Afghanistan after some of the Taliban’s statements about respecting women’s rights there.
All this comes from the multicultural Left’s hidden ethnocentrism. Leftists generally cannot see the world except in their own image. They have contempt for religion and do not understand the religious impulse, so they completely underestimate the centrality of the Islamic religion in Muslim societies. They assume that there must be moderate members of the Taliban who really support women’s rights and likely want peace with the West because they believe that, whatever superficial differences there may be between people, everyone is really pretty much the same, that is, holding to the values and perspectives of twenty-first-century First-World Western Leftists. Leftists illustrate this view of the world every day when they preen about their commitment to “diversity,” which for them means a lot of people who look different, dress different, speak different languages, and have different cultures, but all think in exactly the same way.
The alliance between Leftists and Islamic activists in the U.S. also tends to cloud their vision. If Muslims in the West ally with the Left, Muslims in Afghanistan, including at least some members of the Taliban, must respect women’s rights, right? Wrong. The Leftist/Islamic alliance in the U.S. is fueled by numerous factors, but it certainly does not stem from a shared view of gender roles.
The Left’s myopia and ethnocentrism regarding groups such as the Taliban would be just another example of how divorced from the real world the Left really is were it not for the fact that Leftists control all the centers of power in the U.S. today. The willfully blind are responsible for making policy. We saw how well that has worked
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