Nancy Pelosi will tell ‘em. “The Taliban must know that the world is watching its actions,” she said in a recent statement, insisting that any “political settlement that the Afghans pursue to avert bloodshed must include having women at the table.” Yes, well, maybe House Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) can threaten them with cancellation.
Oh, yeah, the “world is watching,” she said — not censoring.
(Actually, the world is watching and laughing at the Biden administration.)
Calling Pelosi’s statement “delusional,” commentator Andrea Widburg reports on the story, writing:
Showing a bizarre disassociation from facts, senility, or a feminist obsession that overrides all other things, Nancy Pelosi issued an utterly ludicrous statement on Afghanistan. Its entire focus is on women and girls. There’s no mention of the thousands or tens of thousands of men who have been and will be slaughtered in cold blood. There’s also no recognition that the Taliban is a medieval Islamic sect that believes that women and girls (including little girls) belong in the home cooking for and satisfying the sexual needs of their Taliban husbands — and that’s it.
As Pelosi put it in her statement, dated August 14:
The Taliban must know that the world is watching its actions. We are deeply concerned about reports regarding the Taliban’s brutal treatment of all Afghans, especially women and girls. The U.S., the international community and the Afghan government must do everything we can to protect women and girls from inhumane treatment by the Taliban.
Any political settlement that the Afghans pursue to avert bloodshed must include having women at the table. The fate of women and girls in Afghanistan is critical to the future of Afghanistan. As we strive to assist women, we must recognize that their voices are important, and all must listen to them for solutions, respectful of their culture. There is bipartisan support to assist the women and girls of Afghanistan. One of the successes of U.S.-NATO cooperation in Afghanistan was the progress made by women and girls. We must all continue to work together to ensure that is not eroded.
First, as Widburg points out, the Taliban aren’t like the Democrats: They don’t prioritize the “world” over their own fellows. In fact, they look beyond this world: “The Taliban answer only to Allah, and they do so via the words of a fanatical warlord turned prophet,” as Widburg puts it.
Moreover, why would the Taliban care about a “political settlement” and averting “bloodshed”? They’ve been spilling blood and shedding their own during our 20-year occupation and still soldiered on; besides, they’ve won the war.
But Pelosi’s feminist obsession is the establishment norm. In fact, listening to the pseudo-elites, some could be forgiven for thinking the Taliban might be a-okay if they’d just embrace some “gender” theory.
That is, the Afghan war was continually marketed, surprise, surprise, in a politically correct fashion: with a save-the-women appeal, as if we should shed blood on a feminist crusade. Now, admittedly, the Taliban do visit onerous restrictions on women. But unjust restrictions are foisted on everyone else to some degree, too. Yet the message that came across in our equality-on-the-brain time was, “Persecute people if you must, but persecute them equally.”
What’s more, the feminist obsession went beyond marketing. As Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported this week:
Over the past 20 years … Congress has allocated close to a billion dollars to export academic feminism to Afghanistan. Where did that money go? Well, it went to programs like a two years Master’s Degree in Gender and Women’s Studies offered at Kabul University, something Afghans apparently never knew they needed.
Another U.S. government effort meanwhile funded quote, “activities that educate and engage Afghan men and boys to challenge gender stereotypes.” Right? They weren’t doing that enough.
And of course, always and everywhere, our leaders enforced the most American of all cultural exports, affirmative action. American-funded gender advisers demanded that women compromise at least 10 percent of the Afghan National Army and a still larger proportion of that country’s political leadership. Thanks to American imposed gender quotas, dozens of women ultimately were installed as representatives in Afghan’s Parliament. How did that work? Well, the whole thing was a sham, as always. In fact, many of these new female legislators had never been to the provinces they claimed to represent.
Was this social engineering wise? You be the judge. “Almost nobody in Afghanistan liked any of this, by the way, and why would they?” Carlson continued. “As one USAID official conceded in a classified report, quote, ‘Focusing on gender made things more unstable because it caused revolts.’”
But our pseudo-elites wouldn’t stop — “because they were in charge of these Stone Age people they were going to educate,” as Carlson put it.
The irony of this is that for decades leftists would preach against the evils of “ethnocentrism” and admonish us to “respect other cultures.” (I guess that’s only when those other cultures are in the U.S.) Whatever happened to their cultural relativism?
Now, wise people might have accepted that, Taliban aside, the Afghans (including most of the women) believe the sexes have different roles, making them like 99-plus percent of humans who’ve ever lived. Understanding that politics “is the art of the possible,” as German leader Otto Von Bismarck put it, they might have accepted that a non-Taliban government reflecting Afghan cultural norms wouldn’t have been perfect but perhaps feasible — and better for all the people, including the women. (This said, the Mideast nation-building dream was always fantastical.)
But this was beyond the narrow-minded pseudo-elites who are not only radical, but radically wrong. So instead, they just cemented in Afghans’ minds the idea that we’re bizarre, sex-switching aliens.
As for the pseudo-elites’ situational cultural tolerance, philosopher C.S. Lewis explained the phenomenon well. “Their scepticism about values is on the surface,” he wrote in 1943. It “is for use on other people’s values; about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough.”
Or, as I’ve often put it, the ultimate result of relativism is to make everything relative to oneself.
