Unfair Bad Press

We who are of the opinion that the Taliban are not particularly concerned how they are portrayed in the West, are obviously not privy to the tender feelings and sensitivities of the Taliban leadership who take umbrage at the revulsion that Westerners view them with for their brutality.  What the West conceives of as brutal punishment and oppression, the Taliban quite evidently consider to be necessary treatment of people who must align themselves with the teachings of pure Islam.

What to the West appears like human rights abuses is quite simply strictures justly imposed upon a Muslim population which requires reminders from time to time of their obligations to the tenets of strict Islamic rule.  Dress codes are vital, particularly for women, but men as well, since men must not emulate Western notions of clean-shaved faces.  Offences against Islamic tradition are not to be tolerated and Muslims must suffer the consequences - for their own good.

Music is forbidden.  Dance is forbidden.  Revealing clothing forbidden.  Cosmetics use forbidden.  Refusal of a wife to submit to a dominating husband forbidden.  Girls' school attendance is forbidden.  Celebrations are forbidden.  It is forbidden for women and for girls to communicate with a male not of their family.  Women working out of the home is forbidden.  Women must be medically treated by other women.

And so it was with Malala Yousufzal, whose impetuously insulting demeanor was an offence against Islam which holds, according to the Taliban, that girls need not be educated, that they must be groomed to become social appendages of their husbands, unseen in public, clad from toe to top of head discreetly, not to be heard, nor flesh glimpsed lest they corrupt the tender sensibilities of men who fall victim to their allure.

"For days  and days coverage of the Malala case has shown clearly that the Pakistani and international media are biased.  The Taliban cannot tolerate biased media", fulminated a Pakistani Taliban commander in South Waziristan.  "This filthy, godless media has taken huge advantage of this situation, and journalists have started passing judgement on us."

Heaven forfend that journalists pass judgement on the Taliban.  But the Taliban must know of what they speak.  And they speak of 99% of reporters using the fourteen-year-old Pakistani activist girl's shooting as an offence against humanity, quite needlessly, for it was nothing more, nothing less than an admonition, a deserved penalty imposed upon an impious and retrograde Muslim espousing the sins of Western ways.

Just as Malala Yousufzai was penalized, so too now must journalists suffer a like fate.  Twelve suicide bombers have now been tasked with serving notice on journalists that their spreading of false, condemning reports will no longer be tolerated.  They, like Malala before them, are guilty of spreading Western values among Muslim populations.

The foreign media, and journalists from all sources who have portrayed the Taliban as the "worst people on earth" have been placed on notice.  They are to be targets of suicide bombers.  The Taliban have thus decreed.  The result of not scrupulously minding their Ps and Qs.