The Taliban Are Evil! Period!

AP News recently published an article on the Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan.  In it, they posed the hotly terrifying question “What does the Taliban takeover mean for women?”— but followed it with a passive lukewarm answer by saying: “…Many are worried they will once again be confined to their homes.  The Taliban have said women’s rights will be respected under Islamic law, without providing much detail.”

It is interesting to see that a news organization that has no qualms with editorializing President Biden’s speaking style as “speaking volumes by whispering” seems scared to condemn what is sure to be a holocaust against women’s rights.

If you want proof of the threat the Taliban poses, take their unashamed public demand that parents gift children as young as 15 to be “wives” for the Taliban or the fact that women have been legally forced to veil their faces, and impoverished mothers who refused to feed Taliban fighters have been beaten to death.

The unwillingness of AP News to unequivocally condemn the Taliban’s vicious intentions toward women is pathetic.  It violates the very notion of divine justice that permeates creation.  As Psalm 82:3 said: “Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.”

The Taliban’s actions are evil. End of story.

The lip service paid by Taliban spokesmen to women’s rights is qualified by one key phrase “we are guaranteeing all their rights within the limits of Islam.”  In case no one has noticed, the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam decrees that women are inherently less valuable than men and can be treated like property.

In the words of human rights activist Malala Yousafzai:

“I cannot help but think of my own childhood.  When the Taliban took over my hometown in Pakistan’s Swat Valley in 2007 and shortly thereafter banned girls from getting an education, I hid my books under my long, hefty shawl and walked to school in fear.  Five years later, when I was 15, the Taliban tried to kill me for speaking out about my right to go to school.”

This kind of evil must be attacked openly and outright.

The wisdom literature of Psalm 94:16 provides testimony that victims of oppression should take comfort in the fact that “[God] will rise up for me against the wicked…[God] will take a stand for me against evildoers…”  However, human beings that know something of God should not offer such weak responses in the face of violent extremists. 

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel