To read the tribute to SFC Marcus Muralles, please click here
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Telling It Like It Is
Last week, the Taliban murdered two Canadian aid workers and sent a letter threatening Canada if they didn't pull their soldiers out of Afghanistan. A Canadian officer, Col George Petrolekas, responds beautifully.
An open letter to the Taliban:Read the whole thing. It's great.
You purport to speak for Afghans and Afghanistan yet your only questionable legitimacy comes from the barrel of a gun, the slaughter and intimidation of innocents supported by the profits of the opium crop that you protect. You do not answer for the night letters you send, the people you behead, or the villages you hold hostage whose only crime is that they do not agree with your views.
And yet you dare say that we come to kill your innocent, equally forgetting the deaths of thousands of innocents committed by your fellow travellers in crime; so conveniently forgetting the slaughters of Bali, Madrid, London and New York City. Your words may sound high and mighty, but your actions and deeds betray the truth of what you are: a movement committed to the enslavement and servitude of those whose voices cannot be heard. You revile America forgetting that it gave you more food, flour and wheat than any other nation while you were in power; what did you do for the Afghan people?
.... You kill doctors, teachers and aid workers, making a mockery of the words "God the merciful and compassionate." Your deeds make you the ultimate apostates, your actions are the ultimate heresy.
...And in the face of your threats, you will also find that we are made of sterner stuff as are the Afghan people who only wish to live lives in some semblance of security. Liberty does not come freely and ours has been a steep price to pay, and that gives us no joy, but we pay that price in the fervent belief that to not do so is to consign a nation and a people to a darker fate at your hands. And thus we will continue until you are no more.
If those Afghan voices tell us that we should leave, then we will. But we will never leave them alone to face the threats and killings that so brutally demonstrate what you are, because you do not and never have spoken for the Afghan people. And with God's help, you never will.
