Janet Daley in the UK Telegraph regarding the celebrations in Kabul:
Why should this surprise us? Did we really think that there was an entire race of human beings who believed that this life was nothing – absolutely nothing – but a preparation for a glorious death? That there was a whole nation of women who were prepared to live and die with fewer freedoms than a serf? Or, for that matter, that there was an entire society of men who had such a pathological loathing of women that they would prefer to see their wives and daughters die rather than allow a male doctor to attend them? Could anyone in his right mind actually have believed this? But if we did not believe it, how could so many serious people have spent so long tiptoeing reverentially around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism?
[…] While some of our opinion formers were wittering about the dangers of allowing American imperialism to triumph over a sincere, if eccentric, religious faith, the people of Kabul were praying for release. The Arab “street”, as we have come to call it, may shriek proudly for the cameras about American aggression while they ceremonially burn the American flag, but in Kabul they were waiting to be liberated. Those bombers flying overhead were their deliverance from a form of life which, in any Western country, would constitute cruel and inhuman treatment under the European Convention on Human Rights.
[…] Maybe we need to become less obsessed with the notion of universal human rights and more concerned about universal human desires. Almost everyone, it seems, wants to live this life with some degree of self-determination and sense of self-worth before contemplating the challenge of the next one. Most people want to do this in relative peace and security. The conditions that are, on the historical evidence, most likely to give rise to this possibility are liberal democratic government and free market economics. Nobody needs to apologise for propagating them.
It’s a tough call. We’ve become much more sensitive in the West, over the last three or four decades, to not imposing values on others. Indeed, it’s been as a reaction against such tyrannical impositions that we have come to hate them. And yet, we find our own hands therefore tied when facing other cultures, or groups, who feel differently. Who are we to not tolerate tolerance? Who are we to prevent those who do not seem to want choice to choose that lifestyle?
Sooner or later, though, it seems we have to. And, at least in this case, it seems like we made the right choice.
(Via InstaPundit)