The Taliban and the Talking Points
I think I have divined the contents of one of the recent blast-faxes from Authoritarian Right-Winger Central. Whenever anyone brings up the physical (never mind the rhetorical) excesses of the Christian authoritarian right here in North America, a right-wing troll automatically brings up the story of the Taliban executing an Afghani teacher for educating girls. In typical fashion, they misinterpret the story such that the teacher in question is drawn and quartered using motorcycles, a really macabre variation on what seems to be the actual events, where the regulators arrived on motorcycles and shot the teacher.
The thrust of the argument, such as it is, seems to be that the Taliban are this terrible evil scourge, far worse than the extreme rightward Christianist fringe could ever dream of being, and it isn't fair to compare the two. (Also, by extension, that we all should be in Afghanistan, kicking Taliban ass and taking names, as if the other side -- which is mostly Talibani in their Friday clothes -- is any better.)
They say this, because, well, you know, no extremist Christian would ever do anything that evil.
I must've missed on the news when the Taliban blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, and bombed the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park, committed bombings, arsons, and harassments beyond counting at women's health clinics and abortion providers, shot Dr. Barnett Slepian and shot at others, beat, tortured, and killed Matthew Sheppard for the heinous crime of being gay, mailed fake anthrax letters to Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann, sent poisoned cookies to members of the US Supreme Court, were plotting to blow up Congress with a suitcase bomb, grotesquely murdered Charles and Annie Goldmark and their two sons because they mistakenly believed them to be Jewish, dropped a teenaged girl into a bonfire because they mistakenly believed her to be Jewish, left a horse's head in the swimming pool of a liberal city councillor in New York State, sent death threats and lists of poisonous herbs to a feminist blogger because she took emergency contraception (and expressed the desire to get an abortion if it didn't work), and had a long standoff with US authorities in Montana in 1996 where they were refusing to recognise US governmental authority over their land.
...oh, wait. You mean right-wing Christians did all of those things? You'd never know it, from the way the Bush Administration and most of the US media goes out of its way to avoid mentioning the most persistent kind of terrorism facing the US, the kind committed by homegrown, goodoleboy types gone bad.
Once you get down into the depths of depraved religiously-motivated violence, the exact flavour stops mattering so much.
The thrust of the argument, such as it is, seems to be that the Taliban are this terrible evil scourge, far worse than the extreme rightward Christianist fringe could ever dream of being, and it isn't fair to compare the two. (Also, by extension, that we all should be in Afghanistan, kicking Taliban ass and taking names, as if the other side -- which is mostly Talibani in their Friday clothes -- is any better.)
They say this, because, well, you know, no extremist Christian would ever do anything that evil.
I must've missed on the news when the Taliban blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, and bombed the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park, committed bombings, arsons, and harassments beyond counting at women's health clinics and abortion providers, shot Dr. Barnett Slepian and shot at others, beat, tortured, and killed Matthew Sheppard for the heinous crime of being gay, mailed fake anthrax letters to Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann, sent poisoned cookies to members of the US Supreme Court, were plotting to blow up Congress with a suitcase bomb, grotesquely murdered Charles and Annie Goldmark and their two sons because they mistakenly believed them to be Jewish, dropped a teenaged girl into a bonfire because they mistakenly believed her to be Jewish, left a horse's head in the swimming pool of a liberal city councillor in New York State, sent death threats and lists of poisonous herbs to a feminist blogger because she took emergency contraception (and expressed the desire to get an abortion if it didn't work), and had a long standoff with US authorities in Montana in 1996 where they were refusing to recognise US governmental authority over their land.
...oh, wait. You mean right-wing Christians did all of those things? You'd never know it, from the way the Bush Administration and most of the US media goes out of its way to avoid mentioning the most persistent kind of terrorism facing the US, the kind committed by homegrown, goodoleboy types gone bad.
Once you get down into the depths of depraved religiously-motivated violence, the exact flavour stops mattering so much.
posted by Interrobang at 3:08 PM
3 Comments:
Maybe we need a Global War On Religious Extremism (GWORE!).
Aren't they a weird costume-metal band?
Oh, wait, that's GWAR!! Maybe we need some GWAR too...
GWORE it is!
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