The things we have seen over the past ten or fifteen years are extraordinary. This strange “war on terror” and this call to Jihad. It wasn’t a surprise when I saw those images from Abu Ghraib, the evidence that people torture and mistreat people in prison. You can go to the nearest police station in Pakistan and see worse things happening to people being held there. As terrible as those images from Abu Ghraib were, those were—I don’t mean to diminish the suffering—quite tame compared with things that happen in Pakistani prisons. How a thief is made to confess. So if there was a surprise it wasn’t about the fact that people torture, it was that the West does—with its claims of freedom and democracy and human rights. Immediately after 9/11, a great cry went up across half the world, that the Muslim world needs to go through something called “enlightenment.” And then all the principles of enlightenment that the West was so proud of, they were abandoned. Look what happened in Abu Ghraib, look what’s happening with the hunger strikers in Guantánamo Bay, and the NSA.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 20:13:50 +0000
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