Comments on Let Freedom Reign

Fucking ragheads.

Let's pack up and let them kill each other. Let Allah sort it all out.

Another victory for a loving god and a religion of peace.

(I think you meant "democratic", which should not be capitalized unless it's the name of a party.)

More War Less Jobs. McCain '08!

I love that to suggest the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam might be blasphemous... is blasphemy. That's just so neat, ya know? It's a Swiss fuckin' watch.

That's sadly not the whole story. It's much worse than that. The condemned's brother is a journalist who wrote a report about many warlords' embarrassing habit of habitually kidnapping and fucking little boys. In order to avoid a freedom of the press shitstorm, they're not attacking him directly, and are going at him through his brother.

Freedom! Yay!

Like in China, where the Stranger's new favorite business partner Yahoo, owner of Flickr, gave account data to China that sent two journalists off on ten-year prison terms. Yahoo settled a lawsuit the families brought, agreeing to help pay living expenses for the wives and kids while their dads rot in prison.

Freedom. Yay.

Ah, Islam . . . the religion of peace.

Not to start a firestorm of comments, but wasn't the point [of waging war with Afghanistan] NOT about fundamentalist Islam (i.e. the imposition of Sharia law) but rather terrorism? Or put another way, the imposition of Wahabbism on government on account of the threat of terrorism? In other words, if we attempt to subject their country to the same standards of our own we are committing moralistic cultural imperialism.

At what point did it become anathema to allow a group of people to determine what they consider obscene, what they consider blasphemous, what they consider the line between free speech and religious sedition et cetera. If they are a muslim nation and they choose to be governed by a certain set of Islamic law, those outside of those laws are criminals even if their crime would have been legal in the west.

It seems fairly straight-forward to me. That's why in our union, the federal government leaves the regulation of morality to the states, thus preserving each one the opportunity to commit to its own code of ethics.

Now, I'm not saying that this necessarily applies in this situation, seeing as "domestic protests" seems to imply that this may in fact not be the moral/ethical/legal system which Afghanis are committed to. On the other hand, that really depends on proportion of people opposed to that system. If 10% of Americans are opposed to copyright law enforcement for those caught downloading music on P2P networks, they should by no means have that freedom. If 90% of Americans were opposed to copyright law enforcement, it would be unreasonable to impose that law (as much as we would all suffer the consequences).

@9,

There's a little problem with your argument in that Afghanistan's laws violate basic human rights. If you consider basic rights to be inalienable, then, no, Afghans don't get to give them up.

Additionally, states can only set their own laws within the limits of the Constitution and our system of government is intended to protect the rights of minorities, no matter what the majority thinks.

@10 agreed. "terrorism" violates unalienable rights as much as these examples. you are still allowing for freedom and self-government even when enforcing a few basic rules.

Wha-? You mean the "Freedom-Loving" (tm) peoples of Afghanistan haven't enthusiastically embraced Western-style representational democracy? Just like they didn't enthusiastically embrace Soviet-era Communism back in the 1980's? Or, British Imperialism in the 1800's?

Who would'a thunk it.

Seriously, a cursory knowledge of Afghan history would inform even the thickest lunkhead that the Pashtun tribal hegemony that has run the country for most of its modern history wouldn't simply roll over and accept foreign intervention without a fight - and the Afghans are some of the baddest of the bad when it comes to internecine warfare. The closely-knit tribal and family structures that dominate Pashtun social organization make it literally impossible for anyone outside the heirarchy to gain a successful political footing in a country where most social interaction is predicated on the concept that "my brother is my enemy, but my brother and I are enemies against our cousin. My brother and cousin are enemies again our tribe; other tribes are enemies against my tribe", etc., etc.

This is why the real solution is to nuke Saudi Arabia with neutron bombs.

Yeah, I'm serious.

No, I know it's cruel, but you have to understand who is actually providing the Wahhabi religious texts (100 percent) and the funding (90 percent) and the volunteers (90 percent) for al-Qaeda.

War ain't fun.

@10:
The context of the current argument is women's rights. Now, seeing as that subject is very broad, let me distinguish between two elements of that group.

One would be fundamental rights and actual human rights: does a woman have a right to speak in court? Can she seek redress for abuse by her husband? Is she valued or marginalized by the legal system? Aspects of this would fall in this category.

On the other hand we have the western view of gender equality.

Essentially, this forms a Venn diagram with human rights containing the overlap of men's and women's rights. In the west, we seek to have no rights of men excluded from women and vice-versa, but this is not the same as human rights.

I am not a Muslim. I'm not advocating for Sharia law.

Yet when it is inherently offensive and immodest to many muslims to see women in western dress, when it is inherently offensive to most of the muslim world to print caricatures of the prophet Mohamed we can't simply call certain rights "human rights" when really we mean our own values.

Putting everything in the basket of "human rights" is tantamount to saying a priori "you're system has no concrete philosophical undergirding while my moral/philosophical/justice system is self-evident."

@14,

No. The context of the current argument is freedom of speech, which is a human right and certainly not something for which someone should be executed. Here's a link to the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Some highlights:

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

This isn't just an argument over cultural relativism. Hard-line Wahhabists deny most or all of these rights to everyone, men and women.

What do you say to Afghans who do want these rights?

@15
Though the issue is clouded by NATO's current occupation, I think the issue here is sovereignty. And an Afghan that believes that he should have certain rights needs to not support a government that doesn't provide them to him. Other countries (or their citizens) do not have the right to interfere in internal governmental decisions. I don't believe in the death penalty, and as such I support legislation and representatives that advocate my viewpoint. Yet, if I were to kill someone tomorrow and be convicted, I would probably be executed (I live in Virginia!). And though most of Europe would argue that it is against a person's right to live to have their government kill them, any other country certainly doesn't have the right to interfere or attempt to subvert our national laws.

@16: Yet that would not make the execution any less wrong, that other countries couldn't intervene to stop it.

@16,

I'm not saying that the U.S. should invade countries to liberate people from oppressive regimes or ensure human rights. What I am opposing is cultural relativism, something Mr. Joshua embodies.

But, above all, I'm annoyed by Mr. Joshua's conflation of copyright law with basic human rights.

Mr. Joshua, I don't give a fuck if anyone considers it cultural or moral imperialism to demand that women have everything laid out in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Some things are universal, and anyone who's more concerned about the delicate sensibilities of oppressive and abusive regimes than the suffering of those being crushed by those regimes if guilty of moral cowardice.

This is what you might call beating a dead horse.

@15: There wasn't anything about freedom of speech there. Thought, opinion and expression, but that doesn't include the right to read ANYTHING, because some content is inherently offensive. In some communities in America, it is illegal to view pornography. Perhaps "women's rights" is pornographic in that interpretation of Islam.

What I am saying is this. When we say that something is universal, when we claim to be qualified to judge a practice within another culture, we are not only judging that practice but the philosophical undergirding of that practice.

It offends our conscience (mine included) to read that someone has been sentenced to death for gathering what we consider innocuous information. Yet we must be willing to both consider it within cultural context and recognize when we feel the urge to reform another worldview that to do so often requires suppressing that worldview.

The subject in question not only read information about women's rights, but went on to pass that around his campus.

If you did that with Nazi propaganda in Germany today, you would get arrested.

I don't believe in cultural relativism. What I do believe is that people who believe in Wahabbi Islam will not change their views on women unless the Qu'ran changes or they come to a more liberal Islamic position or have a major change in world-view (i.e. leave their faith). The core of Islam is the Qu'ran, and those who seek to be faithful to it find it very difficult to reconcile with western ideals.