Did anyone see that horrible photo on the cover of Time magazine this week? The one of the young Afghan girl with her nose cut off by the Taliban? I saw it yesterday while standing in the check-out line at the Berkeley Bowl, and it gave me horrible nightmares last night. How could anyone do such a horrible thing to a young girl? What kind of monster could do such a thing?

Well, the message on the cover of Time magazine was perfectly clear -- Islamic monsters could do that. And, therefore, "we" are justified in killing Muslims by the millions, right?

Wrong.

That kind of insane brutality in Afghanistan was not produced by Islam. It was produced by the mental instability and psychosis that has resulted from hundreds of years of colonial warfare against Afghans -- just as the torture and bombing and killing of untold numbers of Afghan women by Americans is a result of America's insane "war" priorities, not Christianity.

But I digress.

If Americans were truly worried about the status of women in Afghanistan, "we" wouldn't have made that country our plaything and pawn in the CIA's recent stupid and wasteful Great Game with the USSR. "We" wouldn't have armed and created the Taliban. "We" would have supported RAWA, an Afghan women's organization that promotes reading and self-respect, instead of wasting billions on arming and empowering brutal and corrupt Afghan drug lords and warlords. "We" would have provided schools and hospitals instead of bombs and more bombs after "our" brutal and unnecessary 2001 occupation of that country. And we would never have let our war-lobby-toady lawmakers pour billions of tax dollars into the coffers of weapons manufacturers, those slimy merchants of death, so that they could make insane profit margins on manufacturing the deaths of innocent Afghan women and children who had NOTHING to do with 9-11.

But. If weapons manufacturers are truly dead-set on making their greedy and outlandish profits on the spilled blood of innocents, then how about having THEM go to Afghanistan and personally cut off the noses of Afghan women instead of just doing it from a distance with their drones? Come on guys, quit just sitting around your posh mansions in Loudoun County and actually earn your money. Get some actual blood on your hands.

Or how about this idea? Let's make the weapons manufacturers happy yet once again by developing a whole new weapons market for them. How about giving every woman in Afghanistan over the age of eight years old an M-16 of her very own? And the training and the bullets to use it too?

I'd like to see who would be willing to cut off any women's noses when said women were holding one of those babies in their hands.

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Here's the URL for the nightmarish Time cover photo:
http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/photos/2010/07/a_time_cover_0809.jpg

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