I don’t think anybody expected Pashtun tribesmen to eventually became supporters of American troops in their country, but how do the elites who have the most invested in the new Afghanistan feel about their liberators?

It's near-impossible to find anyone in Afghanistan who doesn't believe the US are funding the Taliban: and it's the highly educated Afghan professionals, those employed by ISAF, USAID, international media organisations – and even advising US diplomats – who seem the most convinced.

One Afghan friend, who speaks flawless English and likes to quote Charles Dickens, Bertolt Brecht and Anton Chekhov, says the reason is clear. "The US has an interest in prolonging the conflict so as to stay in Afghanistan for the long term."...

This isn't just some vague prejudice or the wildly conspiratorial theories so prevalent in the Middle East. There is a highly structured if convoluted analysis behind this. If the US really wanted to defeat the Taliban, person after person asks me, why don't they tackle them in Pakistan? The reason is simple, one friend tells me. "As long as you don't get rid of the nest, the problem will continue. If they eliminate the Taliban, the US will have no reason to stay here."

The proof is manifold, they say (although it does tend to include the phrase guaranteed to dismay every journalist: "everybody knows that …").

Among the things everybody knows are that Afghan national army troops report taking over Taliban bases to find identical rations and weapons to their own US-supplied equipment. The US funds the madrasas both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, which produce the young Talibs. US army helicopters regularly deliver supplies behind Taliban lines. The aid organisations are nothing more than intelligence-collecting agencies, going into regions the army cannot easily reach to obtain facts on the ground. Even the humblest midwife-training project is a spying outfit.

Well what are they supposed to believe?  That the US is over there to help them rebuild their country?  Free their women?  Educate their children?  

Many of us who've grown up in the Culture of Western Suicide don't find it too difficult to believe that our leaders would sacrifice lives (of people from a different class whom they don't know, of course) to help foreigners who detest them.  But if you don't understand the modern white man, just about any theory sounds more credible than that!

[The eighth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

What's it like to live in a modern, diverse, tolerant, vibrant, inclusive, multicultural society? Everyday experience in early twenty-first century America is enough to sketch the situation in bold strokes.

Growing up absurd

Such a society lacks sustaining stories, symbols, and models of a good life, and indeed intentionally eradicates them. Such things are racist, since they reflect the specifics of a particular culture, and sexist and heteronormative, since they express fundamental patterns of human life. They're also theocratic, since they connect the order of human life to a particular understanding of the order of the world.

Another crazy story from the Middle East/South Asia.

Kabul, Afghanistan (TML) – The Muslim world is full of violent, graphic and alarming stories of “honor killings,” in which young woman are killed by male family members for dishonoring the family.

"Honor rape,” in which the gang rape of a woman is used as a tool of social punishment, is spoken of less.

Almost unheard of is an “honor killing” or “honor rape” of a man.

But the northern Afghanistan province of Jowzjan is grappling with just that, after the sons of the region’s governor and police chief were found having sex with two women almost a month ago in the Dasht-i Leile desert, north of the provincial capital Shiberghan.

According to local media reports, a man named Yama, the 30-year-old son of the Jowzjan governor, and his friend Hashmatullah, the 28-year-old son of the provincial police chief, were seen by local herdsmen having sex with 24-year old Shokreya and 22-year-old Jamila.

The herdsmen allegedly stole the men’s guns and money and gang raped them in retribution for the “dishonor” they had committed by having sex with the two young women.

“The farmers tore the clothes off the two young men with sickles and raped them,” a local official told Pajhwok Afghan News. The herdsmen later described to local organizations that the attack was an “honor rape.”

As the story goes, the two men were left naked in the desert, only to return home covered by the women’s burqas and unable to sit down due to their injuries. The two women were reportedly unharmed, but told to leave the area within two weeks.

Muhammad Hashim Zare, the provincial governor, has refused to comment on the case, but his spokesperson Mahboobullah Zare has claimed that the governor is being targeted as part of a political smear campaign.

Brig. Gen. Khalilullah Aminzada, the police chief, has claimed that his son was not in the desert at the time of the alleged incident, and blamed the accusations on local farmers.

The response to this is usually to just chalk it up to Islam.  But how powerful of an explanatory force is this?  I’ve only heard of “honor rape” occurring in Afghanistan and Pakistan, though never in Egypt and Somalia.  On the other hand, those two African countries practice female genital mutilation, while Muslims in South Asia don’t.  How can Islam be responsible for both FGM and honor rape at the same time, when some Muslims practice one but not the other and most partake in neither, but nobody does both?

My theory: Islam makes you immune to globalization.  You distrust the infidel West, are confident in your society and refuse to change your culture to conform with modern norms.  Thus, all kinds of arcane practices abhorrent to the Western mind survive even though they have nothing to do with Islam.

China, for example, got rid of foot binding in the early twentieth century, probably after their elites started encountering other peoples who found it repulsive.  Had they been Muslims, the forces of reaction would’ve been stronger and maybe prevented this reform.  Modern professional Muslim haters would see foot binding as yet another piece of evidence in the case against Islam.

This is relevant to the Alternative Right as many of us curse the homogenizing of the world that globalization is bringing about and like the idea of different cultures confidently asserting themselves against international liberal activists.  But undoubtably cultural relativism has a dark side and barbarism is too common to be the fault of any one faith.

I posted on my website the video that was going around the web of Muslims attacking a Swedish artist.  I just found the whole thing.

 

Previously I’d thought that the guy simply drew a picture of Muhammad and was assaulted.  Now I see that the Muslim prophet was put into some kind of gay collage.

Before seeing the video in its entirety I had the standard conservative opinion and saw this as a free speech issue.  But now I have to ask to other men of the Right, is this the kind of liberty you’re defending?  Would you respect Muslims more if they behaved more like Christian believers, who watch images of the most revered figures of their faith soaked in urine and feces while sitting on their hands?

Of course Muslims should’ve never been let into the West but that’s not the issue here.  If we’re not going to take an explicitly anti-religion stance, then I think we’d appreciate it if Christians had the guts to shut down any production that portrayed their savior as a homosexual regardless of legal niceties.  And if we wouldn’t blame Christians for reacting violently to such blatant provocation then we can’t hold this episode against Muslims either.  As a matter of fact, they're the only ones a true traditionalist would sympathize with in this video.  

 

On Monday, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on the Moscow subway, killing 39 people. On Wednesday, more bombings killed another twelve Russians, including nine police officers. These are the latest in a series of attacks on the Russian Federation by Muslims. The Russian victims, who live in a modern city and go about on the subway, are much like us, and there are many who are apt to see this conflict as part of a "Clash of Civilizations" with Islam, a piece with the global war on terror and America's campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Charlie Szrom of National Review Online, for instance, couselled that we remember that "we remain locked in a global struggle with an enemy that seeks to continually harm American interests." But pace the conservatives, to understand the attacks in Moscow, we ought to look not to the Koran but the history of the North Caucuses. Russia's attempts to conquer the region have been bloody and futile and have created as much of a psychological crisis as they do a humanitarian one. 

The fact of the matter is, while Europe and America were foolish enough to bring Muslims into their countries, the Chechen situation is closer to that of the Palestinians, who have been displaced and oppressed by a foreign power. But unlike the Palestinians, nobody taken seriously among the Chechens has ever questioned Russia's right to exist or claimed anything more than the lands his people are currently living on.  

Why is the Muslim world in the condition it is? Why do Muslims do such odd and inhuman things? Why does Spain translate more books in a year than the Arabs in a thousand years, Pakistan edit physics textbooks to get rid of references to causality, and the Arab world remain at the bottom of every measure of development for countries outside sub-Saharan Africa?

Robert R. Reilly, in his forthcoming book of that title, says it's all because of The Closing of the Muslim Mind. According to its subtitle, his book, to be published by ISI, tries to explain "how intellectual suicide created the modern Islamist." As such it's a clear and informative account that emphasizes basic issues and quotes lots of primary sources. (Like all accounts, it's imperfect, but more on that later.)

According to Reilly, the closing is longstanding. It began in earnest with the overthrow of the Mutazilites by the Asharites in the Abbasid caliphate around 848 A.D., and was pretty much completed by the 12th century. The Mutazilites were theologians who read the Greeks and liked what they saw, so they made reason primary in understanding everything, including God. The Asharites, in contrast, believed in God as absolute will, so that His uniqueness and unity meant that His arbitrary decision determines everything. If you said that reason determines God's actions you were denying His supreme freedom and omnipotence, and if you said that something that wasn't God (like human decision or the essential nature of things) had any effect on anything you were a polytheist.  

It is highly likely that the March 29^th terrorist strikes in Moscow were carried out by Chechen female suicide bombers, also known as "black widows." After six years, Chechen jihadist cells have pulled off another successful attack against innocent Russians only minutes from the Kremlin.

The official U.S. response to the bombings has been to condemn the violence and "stand with" Russia, though support in these matters rarely extends beyond statements for the press. Beyond public diplomacy, what policy line does Washington actually pursue in relation to the Caucasus?

L. Paul Bremer, former head of the US Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, popped up for an interview recently. Bremer (His nickname "Jerry" is much too bland. Victorian custom might accord our hero the moniker of "Baghdad.") had nothing to say about the bang-up job he did in managing the occupation of Iraq from 2003-2004. But as a former ambassador to the Netherlands, he did elect to share his wisdom on the subject of Islam in Europe.

Bremer is a Neoconservative, in case his position in Baghdad didn't clue you in. As such, he purports to defend the heritage of the West while maintaining a worldview and positions that only work to undermine it.

Nigel Farage, a British member of the European Parliament, was fined an equivalent of $4,000 on Tuesday for "insulting" the new European Union President Herman van Rompuy (r.) and refusing to apologize. In a memorable performance in Strasbourg ten days eaerlier, the Euroskeptic MEP told the former Beligian prime minister that he had "all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk":

"We were told that when we had a president, we'd see a giant global political figure, a man who would be the political leader for 500 million people, the man that would represent all of us all of us on the world stage, the man whose job was so important that of course you're paid more than President Obama. Well, I'm afraid what we got was you... The question I want to ask is: 'Who are you?' I'd never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you."

In what is being seen as a dry run for the national elections of 9 June, in the 3 March local elections Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) won control of its first municipality and came second in The Hague.

The town of Almere at the southern end of the Ijesselmeer is one of the newest towns in Holland, founded in 1975 on land reclaimed from the Zuider Zee only seven years previously. The town’s youthfulness and its mostly homogenous population may seem to be at odds with Wilders’ anti-Islamic and conservative message, but most of its residents commute to work in Amsterdam. The significance of coming second in The Hague is that it is the seat of the Dutch government and royal family, and the home to many institutions, such as the International Court of Justice. This was the party’s first outing in local elections, and it only contested these constituencies because of a lack of resources.