The Left and Islam are allies now against our civilization.

But they are incompatible and cannot long co-exist in power.

Sooner or later they will turn to confront each other. The way both deal with opposition is to destroy it. They will war against each other. Which will be the victor?

If Islam wins – and it almost certainly will – there’ll be an end to feminism, to homosexual marriage, to “transgendering”. There will be no bothering about the future temperature of the planet. Obsessive striving for “diversity, inclusion, and equity” will stop. Blacks of African descent will be regarded and treated as subservient even if they are Muslim, and there will be true “systemic racism”.  Sects of Islam will clash with one another. Torture and killing will be routine events. There will be no laughter, wine, or music (unless in secret). Life for most people will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

If by remote chance the Left wins, there will be an equal lack of tolerance. Organized religions will be disallowed (don’t cheer, the sentence is not concluded) except for Leftism itself. It will punish heresy as rigorously as Islam would. Life for most people will be communal, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

With either of those two faiths dominant, poverty, misery, and unremitting fear will be the lot of all but the rulers.

With either in power, there will be no more innovation. New ideas come from the heads of individuals, never from governing cliques or compulsory assemblies.

How long,  you may wonder, will the man-made wonders of science and technology that we have now remain available to us? Neither Islam nor the Left believe in teaching math, science, or engineering.  Who will have the ability to maintain products of advanced technology? Where will the genuinely skilled be found?

The answer to that can only be – China. China will be the tower of know-how; the laboratory and engine room of the world; the exploiter of individual genius; the producer and withholder of all things needed for sustaining human life. 

(The life, that is to say, of those permitted to live.)

So no matter which side wins the coming battle between Islam and the Left, it will not enjoy its triumph for long.

The real winner, now that the free West has given up, will not be its ideological destroyer Leftism, nor its terrorist destroyer Islam, but its science-and-technology successor China.

The video in the post below this one ends with a quoted message from President George W. Bush.

But Bush has much to do with the final victory this year, 2021, of the jihadis whose fellow Muslim terrorists perpetrated the 9/11 atrocity.

Bruce Bawer explains why at Front Page:

On 9/11, the world was shown, in one horrific, indelible image, precisely what Islam is all about. Today, to write the previous sentence is to be guilty of Islamophobia. How did that come to be?

It began in the days after 9/11 itself, when George W. Bush – by repeatedly insisting that the cause of the jihadists had nothing to do with Islam – effectively ruled out of bounds any criticism of that religion, or any honest education and open discussion about it. Instead, Bush – who had gotten it into his head that all religions are basically good, and who was manipulated by advisors who wanted to project American power in a part of the world about which they knew very little – used 9/11 as an excuse to rein in Americans’ civil liberties and go nation-building abroad.

It was a massive folly, doomed to failure. Why doomed? Because Islam is utterly irreconcilable with American-style freedom and incapable of reform, at least not without a far more aggressive effort than America was willing to commit to. Unlike America, moreover, Islam has a long memory. Muslims recall their forebears’ foiled attempts to conquer the Christian West at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683; the attacks of 9/11 were part of a history of such actions that goes back to Islam’s earliest days. Yet few Westerners know about this history or are aware that 9/11 was part of it.

Indeed, how many Westerners know, even now, that the word Islam means submission? For a long time, America was the ultimate symbol of the refusal to submit: in World War II, we took on powerful enemies on two fronts and won; during the Cold War, we protected the Free World from Communist takeover. But the Muslim wars we entered into after 9/11 were different. We were hobbled by leaders who refused to name the enemy – and by a corrosive victim culture, born in the academy but rapidly spreading into the mainstream, that divided Americans into oppressed and oppressor classes. It was Muslims who had attacked us on 9/11, and had done so in accordance with their prophet’s directives; but even as our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan labored to overcome social ills in those countries that were the direct result of Islam’s baleful centuries-long influence, our elites began painting Islam as beautiful and peaceful while casting Muslims in the role of America’s ultimate victims.

So little did Americans understand about Islam as of 2008 that they elected as their president a man who was the son and stepson of Muslims and who’d spent much of his childhood in the Muslim nation of Indonesia, where he’d been registered at schools as a Muslim, taken Koran classes, worn Muslim garb, and attended mosque. … Delivering an address at Al-Azhar University in Cairo shortly after his inauguration, the new president hailed Islam’s purported contributions to human civilization, inventing an entire alternate history that replaced primitive violence with advanced learning and scientific discovery. If Bush had whitewashed Islam, Obama exalted it, shifting the Overton window even further away from candor about Islamic fundamentals in the direction of sheer fantasy – and deference. …

The only “misinformation” about Islam that persists in America is the kind served up regularly in places like the New York Times by way of prettifying what is, in reality, an exceedingly poisonous ideology.

By the Times’s highly dishonest standards … it’s an act of vicious bigotry to take Islamic theology seriously, to deal with Islamic terrorism responsibly, or to acknowledge the link between Muslim belief and violent jihad. As for that so-called surge in anti-Muslim violence, it’s as much of a canard as the bogus statistics on campus rape, spread by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its comrades on the left, none of whom ever dare to speak honestly about the violence (largely anti-Jewish) committed by Muslims in the West – or about the bloodthirsty decimation by Middle Eastern Muslims, during the last two decades, of Christian and Jewish communities in that region. No, Muslims must always be portrayed as victims – and that includes portraying them, unforgivably, as the leading victims of 9/11.

The election to Congress of someone like Ilhan Omar – a vile anti-Semite and America-hater with terrorist ties – is not something to celebrate. …

 In Western Europe … Muslims are approaching 10% of the population [bringing] the rapid spread of no-go zones, the huge rise in violent crime, the destructive force of mass welfare dependency [and] the official persecution (and prosecution) of critics of Islam. [The Times does not] cite any of the many deadly jihadist attacks that have taken place since 9/11 on both sides of the Atlantic. …

In a saner world, needless to say, it would be considered risible for the Times to run an article bemoaning the “fear-based narrative around Islam” at precisely the moment when the Taliban, having retaken Afghanistan, is back in business destroying artworks and musical instruments, beating up journalists, forcing women back into burkas and girls into sex slavery, and beheading apostates (among others) and desecrating their remains in the gruesomest of ways. But the West today is not that saner world in which it would be admirable to speak frankly about such matters; on the contrary, it’s a world that’s been shaped since 9/11 by people like those who call the shots at the Times – a world in which it’s unacceptable to admit that the Taliban’s current actions are thoroughly consistent with the teaching of orthodox Islam, but where it’s obligatory to condemn as racist even a tame effort by Donald Trump to prevent entry into the U.S. by devout Muslims who support the Taliban’s actions.

This is where we stand, 20 years after 9/11: the West is awash in lies and cowardice; while the shady likes of Omar and Rashida Tlaib flex their muscles in Congress, while hustlers … brainwash students at our most prestigious universities, while degraded legacy media like the Times continue to sugarcoat Islam, and while a perfidious pol like British MP Stella Creasy feels obliged to say in the House of Commons that the Taliban’s iniquities are “not Islam”, brave truth-tellers on the topic, like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Lars Hedegaard in Denmark, are put on trial, even as another, Robert Spencer, is banned from the U.K., and still another, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, must live with bodyguards around the clock. …

Well, we rained down hell on Afghanistan and Iraq. By force of arms, we repelled the Taliban and ISIS and al-Qaeda, but we then failed in the absurd drive to turn those countries into simulacra of the free society that America had once been but was quickly evolving away from. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush said that the terrorists had lost, because the attacks had brought Americans together. Would Bush say now that the terrorists lost? Twenty years on, under the disgraceful Biden, America feels like a damaged and diminished nation – its power weakened, its alliances shaken, its once-unshakable core beliefs largely shattered, not least by the suicidal compulsion to speak well of Islam (as well as of our enemies in China and of the savage gang members who flood across our Southern border, and whom Nancy Pelosi defended with as much passion – “we’re all God’s children,” she gushed about MS-14 – as Hillary Clinton brought to bear in insulting the “deplorables” of middle America).

To many Americans, especially the young, patriotism now sounds quaint, if not outright offensive; in the view of those who hold the future of America in their hands, saluting the flag and singing the national anthem are for “white supremacists”.

The America that al-Qaeda struck at on 9/11 is no more; and 9/11 itself, and our tragically misguided response to it, are a very big part of the reason why. Islam plays a long game.

President Biden’s indifference to the parents of the thirteen American armed-forces members killed in Afghanistan spoke volumes. All too many of our elites now view GIs who’ve been wounded or killed fighting Muslims as an embarrassment – as relics of a benighted era when we resisted Islam instead of bowing to it.

All those firefighters racing up the stairs of the Twin Towers on 9/11? Todd Beamer shouting “Let’s roll!” as he and some of his fellow passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 rushed the cockpit to foil the Al-Qaeda thugs? In the eyes of many of our most bien pensant types today, these are wince-inducing images – now worn into corny, cloying clichés – that no civilized individual would dredge up any longer except out of sheer Islamophobia.

The other day, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CENTCOM commander Kenneth McKinsey actually praised the Taliban for its cooperativeness, it seemed clear that the mantra of “America bad, Islam good” had triumphed utterly over the values that the overwhelming majority of Americans of both parties once shared.

So it is that, after the fall of Kabul, many of us who, not so long ago, considered America almost immune to the ideological plagues of Europe and elsewhere find ourselves nothing less than shell-shocked, haunted by Ronald Reagan’s cautionary words about freedom never being more than a generation away from extinction.

The last generation that valued America and freedom is passing away. The generation of their destruction – led by some still extant but aged pioneers of hatred for both – has now arisen.

Could there be a picture that better conveys the primitive savagery of the Taliban than this?

Or that better symbolizes the decline and fall of our civilization?

From Jihad Watch.

(This is in part a repeat of  a post we first published on September 3, 2011, under the title The need to knock Islam.) 

The greatness of the West began with doubting. The idea that every belief, every assumption, should be critically examined started the might of Europe. When those old Greek thinkers who founded our civilization learnt and taught that no one has a monopoly of truth or ever will have, they launched the intellectual adventure that has carried the human race – not without a long interval in the doldrums – literally to the skies.

Socrates taught the utility of suspicion. He is reputed to have said, “The highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others.” He was not, however, the first to use doubt for discovery. Thales of Miletos, who was born 155 years before Socrates, dared to doubt that religion’s explanatory tales about how the world came to be as it is were to be trusted, and he began exploring natural phenomena in a way that we recognize as scientific. He is often called the Father of Science. With him and his contemporary, Anaximander, who argued with him by advancing alternative ideas, came the notion – for the first time as far as we know – that reason could fathom and describe how the universe worked.

Science is one of the main achievements of the West, but it is not the only product of constructive doubt that made for its greatness. Doubt as a habit of mind or tradition of thinking meant that new, foreign, even counter-intuitive ideas were not dismissed. Europe, before and after it stagnated in the doldrums of the long Catholic Christian night (and even to some extent during those dark centuries), was hospitable to ideas wherever they came from.

Totally opposed to this intellectual openness were the churches with their dogma. Those who claim that the achievements of our civilization are to be credited to Christianity (or in the currently fashionable and nonsensical phrase to “the Judeo-Christian tradition”) have a hard case to make. It was the rediscovery of the Greek legacy in the Renaissance in the teeth of Christian dogmatism, and the new freedom from religious persecution exploited by the philosophers of the Enlightenment that re-launched the West on its intellectual progress, to become the world’s nursery of innovation and its chief factory of ideas.

Our civilization cannot survive without this openness. Critical examination is the breath that keeps it alive. But it is in danger of suffocation. It is more threatened now than it has been for the last four hundred years by dogmatisms: the old religions still – especially Islam which absolutely forbids criticism – and ever more by Marxism, feminism, environmentalism (especially the myth of manmade global warming), critical race theory (CRT), and the orthodoxy of “diversity, inclusion, and equity”.  

The Founding Fathers of the United States perfectly understood the necessity for an open market of ideas. Every citizen of the republic, they laid down, must be free to declare his beliefs, to argue his case, to speak his mind, to examine ideas as publicly as he chose without fear of being silenced.

There are now two chief sources of doom to free speech:

One is Islam. Its ideas are the very opposite of those on which the USA was founded. It is an ideology of intolerance and cruelty. It forbids the free expression of thought. By its very nature, even if it were not now on a mission of world conquest (which it is), it is the enemy of the West. The best way to defeat it is by criticizing it, constantly and persistently, in speech and writing, on the big screen and the small screen, in schools and academies, in all the media of information and comment.

The second is the orthodoxy of the Left: all its beliefs, and very urgently, “diversity, inclusion, and equity”.  By “diversity” the dogmatists mean non-white supremacy. By “inclusion” they mean the exclusion of whites. By ‘equity” they mean forced uniformity: all equally indoctrinated, all equally compliant, all equally poor.  

The outcome will be an age of lethal conflict, because if defensive words are forbidden, the only other weapons are instruments of death.

America has just been defeated in Afghanistan by a  band of Islamic barbarians.

How was it possible?

A new booklet by Daniel Greenfield, published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center,* explains how.

It recounts how America’s top military brass …

… have betrayed their oaths and imposed on the service men and women under their command an alien ideology that attacks our Constitution, preaches hatred for our country and sows racial division in the military ranks.

In his Introduction, David Horowitz asks:

If the troops tasked with fighting our Marxist and Islamist enemies in a dangerous world are indoctrinated with hatred for their country, their Constitution, and its values, who will defend us?

Having read the booklet, we are convinced that the outcome of the war in Afghanistan could not have been other than defeat.

No one could read it and believe that the fighting forces of the United States, under the “Biden” administration, are able or willing to defend us.

Unless there is a change of government soon, the Age of America is over.

*Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country by Daniel Greenfield, David Horowitz Freedom Center, PO Box 55089, Sherman Oaks, CA 91499. $4.50

The American defeat in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s control of the country revitalizes the hopes of Islamists and jihadists around the world.

“President” Biden has gifted certain Islamic nations and all jihad organizations with a humiliating defeat of America in Afghanistan. 

One of them is Pakistan, which facilitated the Taliban rebellion while pretending to be an ally of the West – taking billions from America for …. what? Keeping a smiling face turned towards it?

Imran Khan, president of Pakistan, declared that now “the shackles of slavery” are broken in Afghanistan.

And the terrorist organization Hamas, offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood, that rules ruthlessly over the Gaza strip, is crowing with delight.

The Investigative Project  on Terrorism (IPT) reports: 

The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas was among the first to congratulate “the Muslim Afghani people for the demise of the American occupation from its soil”.

We congratulate Taliban and its courageous leadership for this victory which culminates to its long Jihad for 20 years … We stress that the freedom from the occupation of America and its allies proves that the resistance of people and on top of the Jihad of our Palestinian people ends with victory and liberation.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh telephoned Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar … to personally congratulate him.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad group also issued a congratulatory statement praising, “the dear Afghan people for liberating Afghan lands from the American and Western occupation. The Afghani Muslim people presented and staged the greatest jihadist glory against all invaders throughout their honorable history.”

IPT reports further on how the defeat of America is a model for all the jihadist movements:

Egyptian born Islamic Group (Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya) leader Assem Abdul Majeed hailed “The Conquest of Kabul: Praise be to God who honored the Mujahedeen (jihadists), [who] defeated the infidels and Today every believer rejoices And every hypocrite and atheist get angry.”

Separately, he wrote, “Have you seen how was power transferred to the Taliban quietly and without resistance?” He compared the Taliban’s determination to Egypt’s 2013 ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, saying it wouldn’t have happened “if the Brotherhood of Egypt had the courage and strength of the Taliban.”

Radical Muslim Brotherhood cleric Wagdy Ghoneim, who now lives in Turkey, posted a video in which he said, “God made Taliban victorious over America and the infidel western countries that united against it.”

From Yemen, where Islamists have been waging a bloody civil war since 2014, the spokesman for Houthi rebels boasted that “Every occupation has an end, long time or short, and now America is reaping failure after 20 years of occupying Afghanistan, so do the countries of aggression consider this?!”

But it is not just terrorist groups and jihadists celebrating the Taliban victory. Islamist affiliated governments and institutions joined the party.

Iran’s new ultraconservative president, Ebrahim Raisi, described the U.S. “military failure” as a chance for a lasting peace in Afghanistan. “America’s military defeat and its withdrawal must become an opportunity to restore life, security and durable peace in Afghanistan,” Raisi said on Iranian state television.

Tehran hosted Taliban officials last month to prepare for the vacuum expected after the U.S. withdrawal. “We are proud to have stood alongside our noble Afghan brothers and sisters during the jihad against the foreign occupiers,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said at the time.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s Islamist government is offering the security and technical assistance. Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he is mulling meeting with Taliban leader. “The latest developments and the situation of the Afghan public are really, really troubling,” Erdogan told CNN Turk on Wednesday.

Pro-government Turkish media highlighted the Taliban’s willingness to forge strong relations with Turkey. “Turkey is our brother, we have many points in common based on faith,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said last month. “We want Turkey to leave the past and return to the present and the future. After that, we can ask for dialogue.”

Erdogan had strong ties with the Afghan mujahideen before becoming Turkey’s prime minister. He was seen in an old video sitting at the feet of Afghani warlord Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, known as the “Butcher of Kabul” in Afghanistan.

Turkey, it must be remembered is – incomprehensibly – a member of NATO!

The head of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), Ahmed Raissouni, congratulated the Taliban for “the expulsion of the American and European invading forces. And this is a purely Afghan achievement that came thanks to continuous jihad, patience and sacrifices … We are ready to receive the scholars of Afghanistan and visit them and negotiate with them on issues of Islam and the application of Islamic Sharia as best as possible.”

Ahmed Bin Hama al-Khalili, the Mufti of Oman, congratulated “the brotherly Muslim people of Afghanistan for the clear victory and the valued victory over the aggressor invaders, and we follow this by congratulating ourselves and the entire Islamic nation for the fulfillment of God’s sincere promise.” Khalili’s statement is surprising since he is an official in a country considered a U.S. ally.

The Taliban previously allowed Afghanistan to be a safe haven for terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. Muslim Brotherhood members already are mulling using Afghanistan as a new refuge, Al Arabiya reported. Their current home, Turkey, started clamping down on Brotherhood activities in an effort to mend strained relations with Egypt.

Brotherhood relations with the Afghan mujahedeen date back at least to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The ISIS affiliated terrorist group Boko Haram which has operates extensively in Nigeria, West Africa and African Sahel countries is believed to benefit emotionally from the recent withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. Boko Haram would like to replicate the Taliban’s success and now has a model to believe in.

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Taliban’s takeover, turns Africa into the new frontline of terror, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari wrote in this Sunday’s Financial Times.

The Taliban victory reverses a decade of setbacks for jihadists and Islamists in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The American defeat in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s control of the country revitalizes the hopes of Islamists and jihadists around the world.

And, most dangerous of all, China fully understands the lesson of America’s defeat.

The Global Times reports:

Afghanistan situation a lesson for Taiwan authorities

The US troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan has led to the rapid demise of the Kabul government. The world has witnessed how the US evacuated its diplomats by helicopter while Taliban soldiers crowded into the presidential palace in Kabul. This has dealt a heavy blow to the credibility and reliability of the US.

How Washington abandoned the Kabul regime particularly shocked some in Asia, including the island of Taiwan. Taiwan is the region that relies on the protection of the US the most in Asia.

The situation in Afghanistan suddenly saw a radical change after the country was abandoned by the US.

From what happened in Afghanistan, [Taiwan] should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island’s defense will collapse in hours and the US military won’t come to help.

China is much more likely to invade Taiwan now, with the intention of annexing it, after America’s capitulation in Afghanistan.

But Taiwan will not necessarily “collapse in hours”, even without direct American help. It will fight. It has an army, and materiel. And it has cause: freedom.

We agree with the Global Times that Biden-ruled America is very unlikely to engage in war with China.

Biden’s America is a cripple.

The twenty year war waged in Afghanistan by the combined armies of some of the militarily strongest countries in the world, led by America the strongest of all, against fanatical Muslim savages banded together as “the Taliban”, is over. 

The savages have won.  

From the Daily Mail today (August 14, 2021):

The Taliban seized its 17th major city on Friday as they raced to take full control of Afghanistan and inched closer to Kabul, with the main settlement in Logar province – just 40 miles from the capital – falling to the militants.

The blitz through Afghanistan’s southern heartland means the insurgents now hold half of the country’s 34 provincial capitals and control more than two-thirds of the nation – weeks before the U.S. plans to fully withdraw.

As Kabul looks to be on the brink of being taken by the Taliban, fears have also been raised of a refugee crisis and a rollback of gains in human rights. Some 400,000 civilians have been forced from their homes since the beginning of the year, 250,000 of them since May.

The loss of Helmand’s provincial capital of Kandahar in the past 24 hours comes after years of toil and blood spill by American, British and allied NATO forces.

Both Britain and the United States will deploy thousands of troops to evacuate their citizens from the capital city Kabul, which could fall within days as the Taliban continue their march to seize it from the [useless] government.

The defeat of America and its NATO allies by Afghan savages is perilous for the world.

From Debkafile:

The Taliban’s regaining of power in Afghanistan bodes a shift in the balance of power on the Indian subcontinent and the revival the terrorist threat to the Mid-East.

The return of Taliban to Kabul will mean the reinstatement of al Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists in their old lairs.

Yet the “Biden” administration is still denying that it has capitulated to the Taliban in Afghanistan!

From the Daily Mail:

DoD spokesman Baghdad Bob John Kirby said on Friday that the Pentagon does not believe Kabul is under imminent threat from the rapid Taliban advance.

Could America have won the war?

Who is most to blame for the defeat?

Could a withdrawal have been better managed?

What lessons for the future might be taken from this enormous fiasco, so costly in lives and money?

Islam is an appalling religion. By far the worst of the big ones.

It is savagely cruel in both theory and practice.

Now that the fanatical Taliban sect is taking complete power over Afghanistan, advancing daily as the US military withdraws from the country, Afghan women will be slaves, downtrodden, exploited, abused, killed at the whim of men or by Islamic law, which prescribes agonizing methods of execution. They can be easily divorced and abandoned. Their children can be taken from them. They will be denied education and medical treatment. (They may not be treated by male doctors, and will not be allowed to train as doctors.) They may not go to work outside their homes, so if they are divorced or widowed and have no male relations to earn money to keep them, they are sentenced to death by starvation.

Afghan women who have been working with the American army will be put to death.

Consider this story of one brave strong American woman trying to save one Afghan woman.

Phyllis Chesler tells her story at the excellent site of Steven Emerson, The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

I have been on email with this one women in Kabul both day and night.

“After international forces leave Afghanistan,” she wrote, “my life will be in danger so I once more kindly request you to save my life. Their withdrawing will be life threatening for all those women and girls who worked with international organizations and were social activists. I am one of those girls.”

Few single Afghan women will leave with smugglers on their own. And for good reason. Smugglers will probably rape, rob, and abandon a woman. Life in refugee camps is similarly dangerous. The only safe way an Afghan woman can leave at this point—and with her family’s blessing—would be on a military transport with someone waiting to receive her, and a process in place so that she can live and work while she applies for political asylum. This is the only route which does not require the almost impossible-to-obtain special or America-related visa. If one has not worked for an American NGO or the American military directly, one cannot apply for a visa. I’m told that if an Afghan woman wants to apply for a “special” visa, she must travel to a third country and remain there for a year.

There are thousands of Afghan women who have hosted Afghan radio and television programs (as my woman in Kabul has), and who have written for Afghan newspapers. There are physicians, nurses, teachers, police officers, politicians, scientists, athletes, etc. What will become of them under Taliban rule?

Perhaps America and the West stayed “in country” too long. In 20 years, we neither found bin Laden hiding in an Afghan cave nor were we able to extinguish or moderate Taliban warlord values. They are quintessential Islamists who live to fight, kill, and die “for Allah”. 

But, at the same time, the presence of Western military boots on the ground allowed countless Afghan civilians, especially women, to succeed educationally and professionally. They enjoyed a taste of what Western post-Enlightenment civilization has to offer. We are now abandoning them to the Middle Ages. 

What else can we do? We cannot afford to airlift half the Afghan population and settle them in the West.

The moment the last Western military boot leaves Afghanistan, the remaining shelters for battered women and schools for girls will be torched, one by one, as will the women who dared to run these enterprises.

And yes, the Taliban will shelter and train anti-Western terrorists from all over the world.

Does all this mean that the US should keep a military presence in the country forever?

If not that, is there anything Americans should do, at least for the women?

Is there anything Americans could do for them?

DebkaFile reports:

Anti-government protests spread to Tehran today [Monday, July 27, 2021], after a week of raging demonstrations in Khuzestan over water and power shortages.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters across the capital began shouting such slogans as “Death to the dictator!” (supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ) and “Clerics get lost!”

Some took up on the watchword of the 2006 opposition riots that were brutally quelled:

“No for Gaza, No for Lebanon, My life for Iran.”

– allusions to Iranian support for two terrorist organizations: Hamas, ruling Gaza, and Hezbollah, disastrously holding Lebanon hostage.

Placards carried the words

“Today is the day of mourning, workers’ lives hang in the balance”

– as 31,814 new covid cases were recorded, the highest single-day figure ever, and 322 fatalities took the death toll to 89,122. Altogether 3,500 people were hospitalized in the last 24 hours, according to Iran’s health ministry, with a warning that the fifth wave has yet to peak out.

Deputy governor of Tehran Hamidreza Goodarzi admitted that there was “street unrest” which he attributed to long power outages, some spanning several days. He offered no information on how security forces were dispersing the furious protesters.

In the southern oil-rich Khuzestan, eight demonstrators were killed when the Revolutionary Guards were enlisted to break up protests against water shortages and electricity blackouts.

The lives of Iranians are unlikely to improve when Ibrahim Raisi is sworn in as president in August.

Who is Ibrahim Raisi? A monster who has earned the trust of the ayatollahs.

In 2019 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Kamenei appointed him chairman of the judiciary.

He has the approval of the very powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

He is particularly remembered for his part in a great  binge of zealous cruelty in 1988, ordered by the founder of the republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Raisi was a member of an infamous “death committee” which condemned thousands of Iranians to be hanged from cranes for religious heresy and/or political dissent. 

According to DebkaFile –

Some activists voiced disappointment over the absence of words of support from the Biden administration or condemnation of the clerical regime’s harsh crackdown of dissent.

But they have no reason to expect anything helpful from the “Biden” administration. The Democrat-loyal state department is pursuing Obama’s policy, desperately trying to revive the rotten “deal” Obama made with the Iranian regime to help it become a nuclear power while seeming to restrain it.