I certainly dismiss labels like intolerant or racist because people raise concerns about border security, but we’ve also got to be very alive to the complexity of this and that there’s no quick fix
– Julia Gillard
Oh
My
God.
In Afghanistan, a terrible, brutal war is going on. We know it’s going on, because we constantly hear about its progress (if we follow the news at all). We know how much violence there is an Afghanistan, and we know about the level of oppression there is there. We know that the Taliban attacks girls for trying to go to school, and indeed tons of people who’ve done nothing wrong whatsoever. We know that Afghanistan’s occupying armies kill people, torture people, abduct people, hand people over to the Afghan police to be tortured… and many of these on highly spurious evidence at that. We know that Afghanistan’s new rulers are corrupt, oppressive, and — in many cases — no better than the Taliban they replaced. We also know about drone attacks over the border with Pakistan, in which over a hundred people can be killed because someone, somewhere, decided that a wedding party was a suspicious event.
And yet, this is apparently not a situation people would be in their right mind to want to flee? How dare you not want to be killed? How dare you not want to be tortured? How dare you want your daughters to receive educations? How dare you want to live under a less oppressive government than Hamid Karzai’s amazingly liberal regime? View full article »