Taliban frightened of pink balloons.

[frigidmagi]

artdaily

The official Taliban website has published an article criticising an art project in which 10,000 pink balloons were given away for free in Kabul, saying the event encouraged un-Islamic behaviour.

Under the headline "Was it a balloon show or a mini-skirt show?", the piece said that the conceptual artwork was a trick to promote Western values among the young Afghan volunteers who helped hand out the balloons.

"The West is using different techniques to promote their culture in Afghanistan, sometimes they do it in an undercover way," the author, Qari Habib, wrote in Pashto in the critique published on Sunday.

"Some girls were without headscarves, with tight jeans and tops on, and even with mini-skirts on the streets. The boys were also dressed in Western-style outfits.

"After distributing some balloons, they wandered around Kabul aiming to break the culture of hijab." Hijab is the culture of modesty in Islam and covers conduct and dress codes for males and females. On Saturday morning -- the start of the Afghan working week -- 100 volunteers distributed the neon-pink "peace" balloons to surprised workers, families and shoppers. The event's organiser, Yazmany Arboleda, a 31-year-old artist from New York, said the project was designed to highlight young Afghans' creativity and sense of fun in a city wrecked by decades of war.

Called "We Believe In Balloons", it was paid for by individuals and groups around the world sponsoring each balloon for $1.

"The West wanted to smuggle in its culture through this programme," Habib wrote on the Voice of Jihad website. "It was obvious that the main goal was to break the culture of covering in women.

"The war on our religious values, modesty and hijab is on-going under different names such as women skiing, wrestling, fashion shows and balloons."

The continuing insurgent threat in Kabul was underlined as the balloons were being distributed when a suicide bomber killed himself elsewhere in the city while he was preparing his explosives

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[General Havoc]

The "culture of the Hijab" is once more revealed for what it is. Medieval psychopathy.

[Lys]

The "culture of the Hijab" is once more revealed for what it is. Medieval psychopathy.

What we are witnessing here is a distinctively modern psychopathy with most of its roots in the 18th century. The progress of society is not and never has been a smooth upward curve, so often times you see regressive insanity that has no actual basis on past practices. Islamic radical reactionary philosophies are the results of a mixture of generalized anxiety about being left behind by the modern world with other factors, somewhat exacerbated by European imperialism (counting the Turks are European). It is notable that these philosophies did not rise in earnest until the collapse of Arab Nationalism as an alternative, and while the Iranians, Afghanis, and Pakistanis are not Arab, cultural influence can and does extend beyond national borders, and in the end all Muslims pray to Mecca. Though granted, some of the seeds that bore these thorny, choking vines were sown around the 13th century due to things like the Mongol invasion and the need to ideologically justify waging war against fellow Muslims.

The principal point is that Wahhabism and the beliefs of the Taliban are not truly a callback to the Middle Ages so much as a cancerous growth that has appeared due to a refusal to embrace the modern world. In that it shares some parallels with the witch hunts that wracked Europe during the Renaissance, an entirely new phenomenon that seems backwards and conservative but in actuality had no real basis in the past.

[General Havoc]

When I describe such things as medieval psychopathy, understand I'm not trying to temporally locate it, so much as describe it in an adjectival sense. The mindset is derived from mostly modern or early modern sources, but the effect is a mindset that is distinctly medieval in all the wrong ways. A parochial, narrow-minded, ludditic, ignorant, suspicious, violent, contemptible mindset. Whether derived from centuries-old bad habits or some newly minted barbarism, the effect is a value system that taints the very ground upon which its thinkers walk, a form of anti-thought I cannot curse violently enough.

The Taliban are medieval psychopaths, whether their "intellectual" underpinnings derive from the 1290s or 1990s. May they be molested by ten thousand camels, to use the Arabic curse.