A Stitch in Haste

Even during the worst periods of failure in Iraq, at least the neoconservatives, along with the rest of us, could point to Afghanistan — the "legitimate" post 9/11 war — as a success story. The Taliban was deposed, a democratic government with a secular, Western-friendly leader was elected...

...and (almost) no government-imposed Sharia-inspired slaughter of journalists:

An Afghan court in northern Afghanistan sentenced a journalism student to death for blasphemy for distributing an article from the Internet that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, the judge in charge of the court said Wednesday.

The student, Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, who also works for a local newspaper, was charged with insulting Muhammad by calling the prophet "a killer and adulterer," the judge, Shamsurahman Muhmand, said in a telephone interview.

The sentence was denounced as unfair by Mr. Kambakhsh's family and journalists' organizations. Mr. Kambakhsh's brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, denied that his sibling had committed blasphemy, and said that his brother was not given enough time to prepare his defense and was denied a lawyer.
...
The case is the third time that clerics have called for death for a blasphemer in the six years since the removal of the Taliban leadership and reflects the deep conservatism that prevails even under the more liberal government of President Hamid Karzai.

"Deep conservatism"? Is that what naked bloodlust by barbarian goatherders is called these days?

And remember: This is not just more "insult the prophet" nonsense. Plenty of regimes, including some Western democracies, have no problem censoring expression and criminalizing thought. Nothing new in that.

But here the goatherder-judges are (allegedly) also committing other Islam-as-usual crimes against humanity: trampling property rights, conducting authoritarian searches, denial the inherent right to present a defense and retain advocates. Even Canada doesn't go that far.

If we had kept our focus on Afghanistan as we should have, then perhaps these remote circles of hell could have been brought out of the Dark Ages. In the meantime, just list young Mr. Kambakhsh as "collateral damage" in the War on Terror.

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Speaking of "some Western democracies" —

A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned down by a government agency's awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims.

Of course, the fact that giving book awards is not a legitimate function of government is a topic for a different blogpost. For our purposes, the lesson is simply that children, in modern Western democracies, are being taught that the state should decide whose primitive beliefs and irrational feelings matter more than theirs as a matter of public policy. Class dismissed.