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| Afghan women seeking equal rights |
The plan is to ship to various points in the world for prescreening victims of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. This assumes the remaining victims will be rescued -- by whom it is not clear -- from the prehensile claws of the victors in America’s “never ending war."
Kosovo, we learn from recent news reports, is one of these
countries. Here in Connecticut, U.S.
Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy have opened compassionate arms.
Christopher Hitchens, everyone’s favorite atheist, should be alive
at this moment. One can only imagine his response to the too frequent policy
absurdities of the current President of the United States, who is reputed to be
a liberal. Hitchens was a liberal, one of his saving graces. On the
authoritarian dimensions of Islam, he pulled no punches.
America has always lifted its freedom torch to refugees
fleeing illiberal regimes, many of which in the modern and postmodern period
were, Hitchens sadly admitted, totalitarian-socialist in nature. Hitchens was a
Trotskyite socialist in his younger years. Eventually, he grew up and put away childish things.
Taliban victims are called evacuees, not refugees, because many
of them are either American citizens caught behind enemy lines or Afghanis unfortunate enough to have helped American soldiers maintain an
uneasy peace in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, the “unending war” of
Biden’s recent declamations. The fate of such Afghanis, if they remain in
Afghanistan following America’s retreat, is perilous.
The somber recollection of the ISIS attack on America 20
years ago is fast approaching. The burning Twin Towers in New York still
smolder in the American imagination.
Had his surrender to the Afghan Taliban gone smoothly,
Biden might have been able to visit ISIS targets in the United States on the
anniversary of September 11, puff out his chest and boast that he had ended the
“never ending” Afghan war. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan separately
to visit the three 9-11 sites.
Biden’s botched evacuation almost certainly will cast a dark
cloud over the proceedings.
A recent Associated Press report, Taliban
stop planes of evacuees from leaving, but unclear why, is not
uplifting. “At least four planes chartered to evacuate several hundred people
seeking to escape the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, the AP reported, “have
been unable to leave the country for days, officials said Sunday, with conflicting
accounts emerging about why the flights weren’t able to take off as pressure
ramps up on the United States to help those left behind to flee.”
A day earlier, not long after the last American soldier had
left Afghanistan, Afghan women, rallying together for equal rights, were
answered by bullets, the AP reported: “Taliban special forces in camouflage fired
their weapons into the air Saturday, bringing an abrupt and frightening end to
the latest protest march in the capital by Afghan women demanding equal rights
from the new rulers.”
Hitchens –
and, more dramatically, Oriana Fallaci – would not have permitted a
cowardly silence to smother this moment. Both Fallaci and Hitchens were
atheists, but Fallaci, an Italian journalist known for her combative interviews,
greatly admired two Popes, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict, who was his predecessor's theologian.
Fallaci had a very sharp
mind and an equally sharp tongue. During her long and eventful career, she had
interviewed Deng Xiaoping, Andreas Papandreou, Haile
Selassie, Lech Wałęsa, Muammar Gaddafi, Mário
Soares, Alfred Hitchcock, and Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, the founder
of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Henry Kissinger said his interview with Fallaci, published
in Playboy Magazine, was “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever
had with any member of the press." Khomeini, who allowed only one Western
reporter, Fallaci, to interview him, fared no better.
Fallaci is mentioned in Connecticut Commentary twice: here, “Courageous Women in America,” and here, Carter Does Quinnipiac, in which Fallaci’s fiery confrontation with Khomeini is briefly recounted.
In the course of her interview, Fallaci saw the truth of the
moment and knew the future. Pointing to her chādor, Fallaci had asked
Khomeini, “How do women swim in a chādor?”
Displeased, Khomeini
replied angrily that Western women were unable to appreciate the
modestly of Islamic women: “Our customs
do not concern you. If you do not like Islamic dress, you are not obliged to wear
it, because Islamic dress is for young beautiful women and decent men.”
Fallaci pulled off her chādor, defiantly threw it to
the ground, and replied, “That's very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so,
I'm going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now. There. Done,” at
which the interview was terminated.
Fallaci died of cancer, but not before she had been
tormented by suits filed in Switzerland by the Islamic Center and the Somal
Association of Geneva. Here in the United States, the government does not
yet sue its fiercest critics. But then, a media that will not print contrary
opinion perhaps has, for the time being, rendered suits unnecessary. Still, one
wonders whether either Hitchens’ or Fallaci’s fierce contrary opinions would be
printed in today’s media. Of course, in the new Emirate of Afghanistan, where
opposition is met by bullets fired over the heads of uppity women, opposition
is muted, much to the satisfaction of the ruling Taliban.
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