What Have We Learned?

 

We have learned:

- not to name the enemy:

After 9/11, however, the West told itself that jihadi fundamentalism was a “perversion” of Islam. This is dishonest. While many Western Muslims endorse human rights and deplore the atrocities perpetrated in the name of their religion, jihadi excesses are nevertheless rooted solidly in Islamic religious texts. Sept. 11 was an act of Islamic holy war.

Those who cannot even bring themselves to name the enemy that is waging war upon them will be defeated by it. That’s why the claim of “Islamophobia” is so troubling.

 

- not to acknowledge evil: 

The meaning of 9/11? That great evil lurks in the heart of man, and that occasionally it is let loose upon the earth, above the earth and under the earth.

 

- not devise a strategy to win:

The first step to recovery, they say, is to admit you have a problem. Since we’re all supposed to be drawing lessons on this anniversary about the lessons of 9/11, and about what Americans so absurdly characterize as “America’s longest war” now that they’re determined to pretend the war is over, the first step should be an admission. We’d all do well to admit it: Terrorism works.

- not to build nations:

“There is no motivation for the army to fight for the corrupt government and corrupt politicians here,” Massoud lamented. “They are not fighting for Ghani. They haven’t even been fed properly. Why should they fight? For what?”

Massoud concluded the soldiers believed they were “better off with the Taliban, which is why they are switching sides like that.”

The allegation that the Afghan government, which is largely funded by the United States, is not spending money to feed its own army raises questions regarding where U.S. taxpayers’ dollars meant for the defense of the nation are going. The office of the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a Washington watchdog tasked with monitoring that money, has repeatedly accused the regime of corruption and waste, from money simply vanishing from public coffers to being spent on useless infrastructure including incorrectly dimensioned soccer stadiums and staircases in one-story buildings.

The U.S. SIGAR himself, John Sopko, accused the Pentagon of “hubris” and distorting on-the-ground data to make the Afghan security forces appear more prepared and competent than they actually were in a blistering assessment in July.

Some in the Afghan government have admitted to corruption being the answer to that question. Ghani’s finance minister, Mohammad Khalid Painda, said in May that he believed the Afghan government was embezzling $8 million a day. He included local officials embezzling in that tally, not just Kabul’s top leaders, and claimed a significant portion of government money was going “to the mafia and the Taliban.”

 

- not to have one shred of decency:

Thobani says anti-Muslim sentiment was also fuelled partly by the very justifications used by the U.S. and Canadian governments to invade Afghanistan: to free Afghan women and girls from the oppressive rule of the Taliban.

“What we saw at that moment is that Islamophobia became a gendered discourse,” she said. “It fuelled perceptions about (male) Muslims, but it also othered Muslim women and girls too. And that othering, it never stopped. That gap has been growing even larger since 9/11.”

Explain this girl's face, then, Thobani, you b!#ch.

 

The militaristic Japanese of Thirties and Forties were the ISIS of their day. They were brutal and unfeeling and ruthless in their march for power.

They did not hide themselves when they attacked Pearl Harbour. Everyone knew who was responsible for that act.

The Americans did not cower or reach out to the militaristic Japanese. Instead, they spent the next four years subduing them and re-fashioning a post-war Japan into a democracy and thriving economy.

Twenty years after Islamist terrorists killed nearly three thousand citizens from all over the world, people still worry about the feelings of a culture that time and time proves itself to be bloodthirsty and people are willing to walk away in disgrace.

What a waste.

More:

I would like to address the ripple effects of church burnings in Canada and slaughtered non-Muslims all over the world:

The federal government has funded long-term projects to address anti-Muslim hate but has not addressed the “immediate ripple effects that we’re seeing here,” he said.

From Ibn Warraq:

An obsession with conspiracies leads to fatalism, a refusal to take charge of one's own destiny or to take responsibility for the manifest backwardness of one's own culture.