Nine media loses plot on Taliban

Anything more ludicrous than the Taliban, with its monstrous record of unrelenting barbarity, accusing our Diggers of “the worst … human rights violations” in Afghanistan would be difficult to imagine. Yet that is what the murderous terrorist outfit’s spokesman, Suhail Shaheen, has done in a painfully naive interview with Nine Entertainment outlets that Foreign Minister Marise Payne was right to denounce immediately as “repugnant”. According to the Sydney Morning Herald version of the interview, Mr Shaheen reckons “Australia was part of (the) occupation, but they committed some of the worst and the brutal kind of human rights violations, by hacking fingers off dead bodies and killing farmers in (Oruzgan) and other provinces they were based”. More than that, according to Mr Shaheen, “they should be prosecuted as per the law, humanitarian law”. Yes, that’s the voice of the Islamist Taliban pronouncing, incredibly, on human rights and the alleged iniquities of our Diggers, and Nine Entertainment outlets falling for it hook, line and sinker.

Forget that, by even the most conservative estimates, in just the past 20 years the Taliban has been responsible for the deaths of at least 66,000 soldiers and policemen in Afghanistan, as well as 48,000 civilians, almost 450 aid workers, and scores of journalists and human rights lawyers. Forget that the Taliban, when it ruled Afghanistan previously and since, ruthlessly has applied the most savage punishments to perceived wrongdoers: hapless women and men (sometimes together) stoned to death for alleged adultery; public floggings of men and women; those accused of theft having a hand chopped off for a first offence, a foot for a second offence, and so on for third and fourth offences; young Afghan girls having their ears and noses severed for trying to flee from an arranged marriage with one of the Taliban thugs; other girls having the tips of their fingers amputated for having had the temerity to wear nail polish.

That is the indelible, disgraceful record of the medieval, obscurantist Taliban in whose name Mr Shaheen now demands – via Nine Entertainment – the prosecution of our Diggers “as per the law, humanitarian law”. And it does not end there. Who can forget The Wall Street Journal’s chilling account last May that quoted another Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, as saying “amputations would be reinstated once a sufficiently stable system is in place, including healthcare to attend to cut-off limbs”? That meant “they’ll resume hacking off body parts as soon as they have the wherewithal to bandage the stumps”.

Nothing can excuse the utter barbarity of the savage version of sharia law the Taliban has imposed in the past and is poised to impose again. Yet it is our Diggers, in the demented minds of those such as Taliban spokesman Mr Shaheen, who are the human rights abusers who should be prosecuted “as per the law, humanitarian law”. And it is Nine Entertainment’s outlets, long preoccupied with what our soldiers are alleged to have done or not done in Afghanistan, that have provided him with a gullible forum for his obnoxious views. As Senator Payne said: “I find those sorts of statements, which are dismissive of the contribution that Australia in this case, and the international community, has endeavoured to make in Afghanistan over so many years, deeply disappointing.” Our men and women who served in Afghanistan and sacrificed so much in trying to prevent a return of the Taliban’s evil certainly deserve far better than such disreputable slurs.