It’s not the same Taliban as 20 years ago, we’re told. They’re smarter, more mature, reformed.
They’re looking to gain “legitimacy” in the eyes of the world, President Joe Biden claimed Friday. Their leaders are promising to respect women’s rights. They’ll provide safe passage to the airport to any American who wants to leave. They won’t punish those who fought against them, and they won’t harbor terrorists, as they did al Qaeda in 2001.
It’s all a lie.
Just look at the images of women and children covered in blood this week and militants patrolling the streets armed with “peaceful” rocket launchers. Or the God-knows-how-many people racing toward the airports, risking death to flee the country. What do you think they know about the Taliban that Biden & Co. don’t?
In fact, people have been beaten with sticks, rubber hoses, knotted ropes and rifle butts. Men with tarred faces and nooses wrapped around their necks are paraded through streets, tied to the backs of trucks. Reports say Taliban fighters are trolling villages looking for young girls to marry and knocking on doors to root out Afghans who helped America.
That’s a far cry from what Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid promised, that this regime would be “positively different” from the pre-9/11 one, that they won’t exact revenge.
The group then blew up the statue of a Shiite militia leader who fought against them during the civil war in the 1990s, recalling a similar pre-9/11 Taliban statue-destruction policy. On Wednesday, at least three people were killed trying to replace the Islamist regime’s flag with the national flag of Afghanistan.
Taliban leaders claim women will be allowed to “work and study” and be “very active in society,” perhaps even play a role in government — yet they then turn around and say women’s rights will be decided by a council of Islamic scholars following Sharia law. It’s clear what that means.
One Afghan mother, who was shot and had her eyes gouged out for getting a job in law enforcement, certainly knows: “In the eyes of the Taliban, women are not living, breathing human beings, but merely some meat and flesh to be battered,” the 33-year-old woman, who now lives in India, told India’s News 18.
The new Taliban are the same as the old Taliban.