With friends like these…

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#699)

With friends like these…

by David Benjamin

“… the Islamic State, or ISIS, is homegrown; its aim is not to strike far away, but to spread and impose its vision of Islamic society right here and right now…”
— Thomas L. Friedman in Dubai

MADISON, Wis. — OK, this girl in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai, got shot in the face by a squad of emotionally twisted, mentally retarded religious zealots.

Shot. With an assault rifle. In the face!

Why? Because she went to school — in a society where girls are required by God to remain submissive and illiterate, and kept under house arrest in, preferably, a state of perpetual pregnancy.

And it’s not over. Right now, there’s a global guerrilla army of like-minded retards festering to finish Malala off, with seven or eight more bullets. In the face!

Best of all, according to last week’s news, the whole nation of Pakistan — which is one of America’s allies — is pulling for the retards. A group of 150,000 private schools in Pakistan, representing what pretty much seems like the national consensus, has resolved to teach all its pupils — let’s say there’s about 20 million of them — that Malala is an evil bitch who deserved to get shot in the face, because she offends Islam and the “ideology of Pakistan.”

I gotta ask: What is wrong with these people? And why are they our friends?

OK, a while ago, these two Pakistani brothers got arrested for digging up dead people and eating them. They got off because, in Pakistan, cannibalism is not illegal. So, after they got sprung, guess what? The Zombie Brothers, Jake and Elwood, headed back to the cemetery, dug up a fresh infant corpse and ate its liver — with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Again: Why are these people our friends?

OK, in Afghanistan, there was this long-running story about a girl who — according to national custom — was sold in marriage (on layaway, for about the price of a two-slot toaster) when she was about six years old, to a hairy old guy in the next village. She was supposed to marry this horny pedophile when she was 12 or so, but she resisted, fell in love with a younger guy whom she actually knew, and eloped with him. Of course, her mother and father, and brothers, and her entire village, and the hairy pedophile, eventually caught up with the girl. They murdered her, and her husband. Everybody in Afghanistan — which is another U.S. ally, where thousands of Americans have died defending the “ideology of Afghanistan” — thought the girl was asking for it. Family honor required her violent death — ideally by stoning her — while she was still a teenager.

Again, I gotta ask: Why are these people our friends?

OK, another one of our biggest allies is India, right? For years now, it’s been really popular to send pregnant girls to “doctors” whose practice consists mainly of doing ultra-sound scans to determine the sex of fetuses. Typically, if the fetus has the bad judgment to be a girl, good old Doc Sonogram intervenes, vacuuming the inappropriate succubus from the little mommy’s womb so that she can more quickly atone for her fallopian blunder by breeding a male. The result of this practice has been a gross male/female imbalance. All those frustrated surplus boys have turned India into the world capital of gang rapes. Even when the victim isn’t torn apart and literally raped to death, traditionalists tend to regard the assault as her fault. Like women in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and other cherished American allies, she’s less likely to be comforted than shunned, if not prosecuted as a shameless slut — or summarily murdered by Mom and Dad.

In India — same place — half the population drops its feces outdoors, in streets, yards and fields where children play. Six hundred twenty million Indian kids grow up ankle-deep in human shit, without ever finding a pony. At the moment, India has no serious plans to introduce basic sanitation into the lives of its lower-caste riffraff. Indian kids will be walking around in a brown soup of disease and death for generations to come. But hey, India has the Bomb.

One more time: Why are these people our friends?

Presumably, we tolerate these murderers, misogynists, rapists and religious nuts because we share with them enemies who are even more awful. Maybe so. But, if we just gave up on these throwbacks, what’s the worst that could happen?

OK, Americans tend to deplore religious beheadings, forced marriages, judicial amputations, cannibals, pedophiles, gender-choice feticide, gang rape, sexual subjugation, illiteracy, child soldiers, slavery, shooting little girls in the face, letting cows roam the streets and playgrounds that ooze with raw sewage.

But all these attitudes leave America hopelessly out of step with dozens of nations and billions of people who think they’re gonna go to hell if they don’t decapitate the occasional infidel or strangle the odd daughter.

This is a trend too big for a mere superpower like the U.S.A. to defy. And why should we try? Legions of true believers are slaughtering their own people and destroying civil institutions faster than we could accomplish with a million drone attacks every day. Guided by the Islamic State, billions are streaking fervently back to the Dark Ages in a Klingon Bird-of-Prey at warp speed. So, let ‘em go. Let human regression (and poop) spread from Syria to Bangladesh.

I know this sounds crazy, but I think it’ll turn out fine. Eventually — if we leave them be, with their swords, their scripture and their worst selves — even the religious sadists of ISIS will grow weary of beheading their brothers, enslaving their mothers and shooting little girls on their way to school.

Or, more likely, those brothers, mothers and little girls will grow weary of the religious sadists, and start shooting them.

Preferably, in the face.