Our Mistaken Ideas About Human Rights Failed Us in Afghanistan
Human rights are not a government, they’re a culture.
America was founded on that simple premise. The Declaration of Independence’s conviction in the equality of men, individual rights, and governments gaining their authority from the consent of the governed was based on “self-evident” truths.
These truths are “self-evident” to Americans in the way that they’re not self-evident to the average Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, Russian, South African or Chinese citizen. They have their own truths that are equally “self-evident” to them based on their own worldview and culture.
The Taliban, like the vast majority of Muslims, assert that believers in Allah are superior to infidels, that men must have supreme authority over women, and leaders over people.
This hierarchical model governs a lot more of the world than anything we’ve come up with.
...The problem with exporting our “self-evident” ideas is that they’re based on the belief in a loving and merciful God, on the value of individual life, and the genius of individual innovation. Most of the world’s cultures are not only not individualistic, many, like the People’s Republic of China or the Muslim world, are actively anti-individualistic and believe morality comes from hierarchy.
...America can and should export human rights. But the best way to do it is by example.
Whether it’s parents influencing children, teachers acting as role models, or any other mentor relationship, the most vital lessons are not didactic, but personal. From our earliest years, we learn by imitation and we become like the people we want to be. Indeed, in both Judaism and Christianity, goodness comes from striving to learn from and imitate the ways of God.
Tellingly, the concept plays out very differently in Islam where Muslims imitate Mohammed.
...Above all else, we should show that our values lead to a good life. The example that we set for the rest of the world will do more to spread human rights than any military interventions.
That’s how it always was.
...If we want to defeat Islamism and protect human rights and freedom, we should start at home.
It’s not just Afghanistan where young girls are being enslaved or sexually abused by Islamists.
In 2019, I reported that there had been over 2,000 visas approved for underage ‘brides’ from Muslim countries. Two years before that I reported on a female genital mutilation network in Michigan. There have been multiple cases of slavery involving Muslim families in America.
The massive influx of Afghans into America will make those numbers worse, not better.
The fundamental lesson of our founding is that we can’t defend our rights without also defending our culture. The self-evident truths on which our freedoms were founded are no longer all that self-evident on a college campus, let alone in Islamist enclaves like Dearborn or Little Mogadishu. If we want to save our rights, we’ll have to defeat the Taliban at home.
I wouldn’t want anything we are peddling. I wouldn’t want my children exposed to the dangerous shaitanic ideology of feminism homosexualism and transvestitism. We’re the bad guys. Plenty of kiddie diddlin’ going on when the west was running things.