A Stitch in Haste

Because there's no one there worth staying for:

Insurgents detonated a bomb in a car with two children in it after using the children as decoys to get through a military checkpoint in Baghdad, an American general said Tuesday.

Speaking at a news briefing at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Michael Barbaro, deputy director for regional operations at the Joint Staff, said American soldiers had stopped the car at the checkpoint but had allowed it to pass after seeing the two children in the back seat.

People who blow up their own children simply cannot be redeemed. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that we can do for a land populated by such people. And such people are not worth one drop of our soldiers' blood or one dollar of our tax bill.

All we can do is leave, and enable the non-monster elements of Iraqi society to leave with us ("Yankee go home — and take me with you!"). Much of the non-barbarian Iraqi middle class has already left anyway.

Would Iran invade? Perhaps. Or maybe Syria. Or Saudi Arabia. Or Turkey. Or all of the above.

So what? Let the Iraqi ogres blow them up instead of us — or their own children.

There is simply no way anymore to blame the United States for people blowing up their own children. And there is no way to blame us for now walking away from this Islamic cesspool that, at this point at least, is simply no longer our fault.

Sickening:

The suicide bomber behind last week's attack at an Algerian naval barracks which killed 30 was a 15-year-old student, according to a statement from Al-Qaeda's self-styled offshoot quoted Monday.

Nabil Belkacemi, who carried out Saturday's blast at the port town of Dellys, 70 kilometres (45 miles) east of Algiers, had assumed the nom-de-guerre Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after a Jordanian Al-Qaeda leader killed by US forces in Iraq, the Al-Watan daily said, quoting the statement.
...
"He spent the night in the mosque and then he disappeared," [his mother] told Al-Watan. "He called me on a cellphone and asked me not to worry and said he would be back soon. It was ten days before a critical school exam," she said.

But in another telephone call, he said: "Mother, I am scared, I don't know where I am. I would like to escape but I am scared they (the Islamists) will kill you. They told me that if I ever escaped, they would take it out on you.

So we have authoritarian Christians raping children and authoritarian Muslims blowing them up (and not for the first time). And about the only moral premise they seem to share is an insistence that homosexuality is a sin — oh, and a threat to children.

Madness. Sheer madness.

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.

First it was strapping bombs to the bodies of children. Now it's strapping bombs to adults with the minds of children:

U.S. and Iraqi officials said Saturday that pictures showed the bombers had Down syndrome and likely did not know they were being used in Friday's attacks.
...
"It appears the suicide bombers were not willing martyrs, they were used by al-Qaida for these horrific attacks," he said. "These two women were likely used because they didn't understand what was happening and they were less likely to be searched."

Behold the Religion of Peace. I wonder, in situtations like this, who gets the 72 virgins?

Meanwhile:

Police in Senegal have arrested several men following the publication of pictures claiming to depict a wedding ceremony between two men.
...
Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country and gay men and women remain socially marginalised.

And Senegal is generally considered to be one of the "better" (i.e., less barbarian) Muslim countries in Africa. Go figure.