When people worldwide say "Maybe we should let them have Sharia law in their neighborhoods..."

[alfreda89]

...please remember this can happen, and is about to happen, as the president of Afghanistan does not intend to intervene. Are you listening, Tony Blair?

Afghan on trial for Christianity

"An Afghan man is being tried in a court in the capital, Kabul, for converting from Islam to Christianity.

Abdul Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and could face the death sentence under Sharia law unless he recants."

Comments

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

>We get almost no news of Afghanistan anymore, and it's infuriating, because I had no problem with stepping on the Taliban HARD, but we should have stayed there, ignored SH and Iraq, and helped the Afghanis at least return to the 18th century . . ..

To be brutally honest, I think we should have let the Soviet Union get on with it rather than arming the Mujihadeen. And that's an awful thing to say because the Russians did some appalling things in the region. But the rest of C Asia is so much more advanced, even despite some despotic governments.

The last person I spoke with about it was the former British ambassador to Afghanistan and he said it's a complete mess. One assumes that he knows what he's talking about.

>It's very upsetting to realize that I'm never going to get to travel in the world, because the only-president-because-if-we-impeach-him-Cheney's-president fellow has screwed us to the wall.

I take the NZ experience on board, but I wouldn't worry too much. I was in Islamic C Asia when the UK/US went into Iraq and nobody even mentioned it, except for one young man who asked me what I thought of my PM. When I said (sincerely) that I thought he was a lunatic, the young man replied gloomily 'They're all lunatics. Our government is no better.'

Unless they're very extreme, I think most people separate individuals from their governments. (I also met an elderly Japanese man in China who said how nice the Chinese were, and when I mentioned this to a Chinese person, she said 'We have historical issues with them. But these people are just tourists. It's not fair to take things out on them.')

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

There is a comfort knowing that a large percentage of the people of the world know that governments come and go, but the people remain. Still, we are a representative government, and right now I have exactly one person -- my local state senator -- who comes close to representing me. And I write reps constantly. Bah.