In The Hearts Of The Left And Some On The Right

Murder, Rape & Blackmail buy respectabilty at Toronto Star
Monday, September 3, 2007

Taliban Jack, they called him, hundreds of news cycles ago. Jack Layton would hold forth on the idea of the Canadian government and others participating in negotiations with the Taliban.

I naively thought that Jack was pandering to his pacifist party base, and that the idea of sitting down at the table with the human rights loathing, women hating, head chopping Taliban was something that would amount to nothing more than the usual flotsam and jestsam of political debate.

But this apparently was not to be. The Toronto Star's Thomas Walkom, whose columns "inform" the values of mainstream Liberals has now decided that the recent set of negotiations between the Taliban and the South Koreans should persuade us that the road to peace in Afghanistan may be paved with some Taliban diplomacy.

Walkom thinks that South Korea's deal to gain the release of 19 South Korean Christian missionaries from the Taliban is one that should persuade us that we have a peace partner in Afghanistan. Walkom wrote, "It puts the lie to those, including the current Canadian government, who say it is impossible or counterproductive to strike a deal with the Islamist insurgents.

Clearly South Korea found the talks quite productive." So let me get this straight Mr. Walkom.

After the Taliban captured 21 missionaries, raped several of them, killed two of them and took a ransom payment of twenty million dollars for the rest of them, you are telling us that we ought to think of the Taliban as legitimate partner in Afghan peacemaking.

Thanks for the heads up Mr. Walkom. Now when Liberal mouth breathers start regurgitating this wickedly foul gumbo, we won't be shocked. The head choppers in Afghanistan are assured of victory if enough of us over here begin losing our heads.

Taliban Jack is no doubt a happy camper. His foolishness has received respectability from the Liberal newspaper of choice.

And to think that all it took to meet the Toronto Star's price for respectability were a few dollops of kidnapping, rape, murder and blackmail.

To be fair, we should remind ourselves that the victims were all Korean. The Toronto Star wouldn't be burnishing the Taliban image if there had been Canadian blood in this Faustian
bargain.

Or would that also get filed as a naive assumption?

- Charles Adler