Who are the real animals?

You know how as we get closer to September 11, every year, there is some sort of a book or a movie or something else released to remind us of the atrocities that were committed? So last night, I was switching between watching Kim Clijsters advance to the semis and a movie called My trip to Al-Qaeda on HBO. I first saw it for only a few moments and found it really dull so I flipped back to the US Open. But then curiosity got the better of me and I gave it another shot.

My trip to Al-Qaeda is a movie about a journalist who is investigating the Taliban and its allies while maintaining a neutral tone about them – I guess a very hard thing to do. This journalist, Lawrence Wright, is actually a pretty bright fellow; who wrote a very interesting book called The Looming Tower. 

A banner predicting
Afghanistan's fate so far
 hangs at its museum

Anyway, so in the last 30 minutes that the movie had remaining he was talking about the Taliban and how relentlessly tormenting those guys are. He also tackled some issues from the Bush administration about torture and wire tapping. But what really saddened me was when he talked about the museum and the zoo. As all ancient cities, Kabul too had a museum which had some pretty cool relics. So the Taliban decide they don’t want any more of that art—it’s anti-Muslim—entered the museum with a sledge hammer and destroyed it all! Art that was preserved from the time of Alexander the great and Genghis Khan! You know how old that is!?!? Then art that couldn’t be sledge hammered, they blew it up. Remember the Bamiyan Buddhas? Those were only from the 6th century, grrrrr!

Marjan, the blind lion

Then they move on to the zoo and decide to kill the animals. One of them enters the enclosure of a lone, old lion, Marjan and starts dancing in front of him singing “who’s the lion now”. The lion bite off the bastard’s arm; another Taliban guy saw this and threw a grenade in the enclosure blinding the lion. Another one went and cut off a bear’s nose. Why? Because his beard isn’t long enough, he said. The only 3 animals who survived the brutality were Marjan, the blind lion, the now nose less bear and a wild boar. Everyone else was massacred by these unholy, sacrilegious, vile, wicked bastards!

It boils my blood to see them destroy relics, murder animals, treat women like property and be overall inhumanely sadistic. But, however heretical they maybe, burning their Koran as a way to stand up to their crimes is not the way to go. I can totally understand the hatred and animosity people feel against them (the Taliban are rampant in India) but a great soul once said “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” They may treat everything around them without any reverence but if we decide to do the same, what is really the difference between us and them? Burning a Koran is perhaps the first step towards adopting an attitude that ultimately leads to disrespecting the other greater things we venerate. Lawrence Wright mentioned in his film last night that more Muslims are being killed by Al-Qaeda and its atrocities than any other means. A Muslim FBI agent, Soufan, stood up to the torture being committed by Bush and his administration and used calm, peaceful, culture centric methods to extract information from the terrorists captured. Information that was actually real and helped the forces track down other terrorists and prevent many attacks. As much as we think building schools, educating women and spreading a general awareness of other countries and cultures is the slow way; that might be our only choice if we want any chance at a harmonious coexistence. We’ll never know until we try. Isn't peace worth that much?