Touchstone

I recently ran across a five year old article called The Torture Place, about Abhaseen Barikzy, an Afghan communist who was tortured at the hands of the Taliban. I recommend reading it as a reminder of what we're up against in this war. Here's a snippet of his experiences in captivity:

Then Fazal-ur Rehman said to the commander, 'I want to kill a very bad pagan among the prisoners to receive more blessing from Allah,'

Barikzy waited. His friend avoided bringing him out for any more torture, but Barikzy says he saw the Taliban's worst punishments of other prisoners: "For Uzbek people, they wanted them digging in the mountain without having any purpose. Forty people digging a big hole in the side of the mountain. Then they asked them to go inside the hole, and they exploded it, and all of them died in there.

"The Massoud followers, they told them, 'Because you live in a mountainous area, you are used to cold weather,' and then tied them upside down on trees and put lots of water on them. By the next morning they were all dead, their bodies iced.

"Then there were 50 or 60 Hazara (an ethnic minority from central Afghanistan). They tied their hands and feet and put them in line, and a man had a hammer and nails, and he was beating the nails into the heads of the people. As soon as the nails got in, the blood rushed from their mouth and nose and they died."

Last he describes a military pilot suspected of being a spy. "They put a butcher's hook in his throat and hung him, pretending that he was a sheep and calling out, 'Who wants to buy sheep meat?' and the others were mocking him, saying, 'I want 2 kilo of the leg,' and they would cut the leg and pretend to sell the meat."

I really don't have much to add to Barikzy's story. It speaks for itself. I was struck by the commander who said, 'I want to kill a very bad pagan among the prisoners to receive more blessing from Allah." I think his reasoning is emblematic of what we're up against with respect to Islamic fascism. We in the West desperately want to believe that we can find common, rational ground and negotiate with Islamic fascists. The Commander exemplifies why negotiation, in the end, is folly. For them, they merely buy time with negotiation. Their life on Earth is not important; it's what comes after that matters. We should be mindful of this while we lodge complaints to Iranian mullahs who race towards making isotopes.

While Iranian Muslims and the Taliban are opposed to each other, they share a central core belief: Allah's up there. Period. Get there, and don't worry about here. Just get through your two seconds on Earth and score points with Allah by killing his enemies. If such thinking isn't a part of historical Islam, is something new and in the minority, then so be it. Whatever it is, and wherever it came from, it's here on Earth now -- magnified by cell phones, web sites, plane tickets and easily-obtained passports to Western cities.

Through all the hurricane news, it's been frustrating to see the US, EU and UN falter at containing Iran's nuclear program. It's like reading a script right out of the League of Nations. Islamic tyrants manipulate the West into disharmonious dithering while they build Allah's Blessed Bomb.

After he got out of captivity, Barikzy was at a UN shelter:

Finally, two men came to the [UN] shelter and asked his plans for the future. "I told them to send me overseas," he says. "They asked where I wanted to go, and I said, 'To the United States, because there is good security there and I feel safe.'

Barikzy was a secularist. Given his treatment at the hands of real fascists for being one, he might just as well have been called 'The West.' His experience with fascists is a touchstone for us to compare our freedoms to. I'm sure he thinks they're worth preserving now that he is here, even if some among us carry too much angst to understand we're in the fight for our lives.