By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
If it was possible to add another injustice levied against Farkhunda, a woman who suffered a brutal murder at the hands of a mob in Afghanistan that insisted she burned a Koran, authorities publicly announced she was in fact innocent of these claims.
In response to this outrage, a day of national morning occurred during her funeral and burial. Various leaders including Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani strongly condemned her murder as a heinous attack. Reports of police standing nearby and indifferent to the incident lead the president to call for fundamental reforms in the nation’s police forces.
We previously wrote of this horror in an article HERE.
The murder was merciless. A mob of approximately twenty seven beat Farkhunda to death then tossed her body from a rooftop, drove over her with a car, then immolated her before casting the remains into a river. This occurred just outside the Shah-Do Shamshira mosque.
The incident was recorded by cellphone video and broadcast from the Internet, horrifying many Afghans who then called for renewed actions for reforms and justice.
In attendance of Farkhunda’s funeral service, scores of politicians, activists and human rights advocates offered solidarity with Farkhunda and the cause to avenge justice on her behalf. The funeral was carried live on Afghan television. Breaking with tradition, an all female pallbearer regiment carried her casket to its resting place.
Video of the funeral may be watched HERE
Senior detectives assigned to the case declared that Farkhunda had not burned a Koran.
The attack reportedly occurred when Farkhunda entered into a dispute with amulet sellers at the Mosque. She believed the sellers to be “parasites” and recommended to women, friends, and family members not to waste their money on the sellers’ wares. According to her father, Mohammed Nadir, the men responded by accusing her of burning a Koran.
News Limited reports the Interior Ministry was providing extra protection for her family and stated:
The head of the ministry’s criminal investigation directorate, Gen. Mohammad Zahir, said 13 people had been arrested in connection with the killing, including two men who sold amulets. The Interior Ministry said 13 policemen had been suspended pending investigation.
Zahir said authorities were “unable to find any single iota of evidence to support claims that she had burned a Koran.”
“She is completely innocent,” he said.
Hopefully, in time some good and fundamental change will come from her tragic death.
By Darren Smith
Source:
The views expressed in this posting are the author’s alone and not those of the blog, the host, or other weekend bloggers. As an open forum, weekend bloggers post independently without pre-approval or review. Content and any displays or art are solely their decision and responsibility.
@ Nick Spinelli
“Kenny Rogers, You are pretty cocky for a person who doesn’t even know how to spell Colombia.”
Nicky Spinelli, you must be feeling pretty hostilely desperate to tax me with a typo. The “u” and the “o” are but two keys away from each other.
Speaking of typos, you have one in your sentence above. Can you spot it?
Are you sure you want to dance with me verbally, Nicky?
@ happypappies
“Ken Rogers
“Perhaps some of us here actually think that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. I know this is an ideology foreign to your spew but that would be why we would consider the war worth it and look now.”
That “ideology foreign to your spew,” bless your heart, is almost worthy of framing.
As you apparently didn’t accept my suggestion that you and I communicate only with other posters, I’ll respond to what you wrote regarding the Iraq government’s responsibility for 9/11 in this way:
Anyone who believes that Iraq had anything to do with the attacks of 9/11 is wallowing– not dipping a toe in– but *wallowing* in willful ignorance and/or a stupefied state of Cheney-esque disinformation bewilderment.
Although, several of my son’s teachers misspelled his home country incorrectly. Good enough for govt. work. I think you might be one of them govt. workers.
@ Nicky Spinelli
“Although, several of my son’s teachers misspelled his home country incorrectly. Good enough for govt. work. I think you might be one of them govt. workers.”
In Standard English, Nicky, there’s no comma called for after “although,” you have a dangling modifier and double negative in “incorrectly,” you have a sentence fragment in “Good enough for gov’t. work,” you’ve used the pronoun “them,” when you should have used the adjective “those,” and you’ve used the auxiliary verb “might” when you should have used the auxiliary verb “may.””
Here, in Standard English, is probably what you were trying to say:
“Although several of my son’s teachers misspelled the name of his home country, I suppose that their spellings were good enough as far as government workers are concerned. I think you may be one of those government workers.”
Aren’t you familiar with the old adage, “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,” or do you think that it doesn’t apply to you?
Even W can spell it correctly.
Kenny Rogers, You are pretty cocky for a person who doesn’t even know how to spell Colombia.
Nick Spinelli
Kenny is best buds with Alex Jones. His Infowars agenda is starting to show
happy pappies
So, in your worldview, Iran doesn’t have the right to defend itself if attacked by a country that has nuclear weapons? Why not? And,FYI, much of the world considers Israel and even Uncle Sam to be the world’s leading state sponsors of terrorism.
Bill McWilliams
Get another argument please. No one is going to attack Iran. They are the ones that said they were going to wipe Israel off the face of the earth in 2005 and have been patently denying it ever since.
Just because you don’t know your enemy doesn’t mean that I have to be a fool.
In case you are unaware of the fact the Iranians were terrified of Nuclear Weapons until the 1980s – after they made the arms deal with Reagan and gave us back the Hostages they kept for a year – we tried to deal with them and they showed bad faith. .
@ Nick “Fool Me On’y One’st” Spinelli
“Yes, Ken Rogers gets paid by the word.”
Thanks for calling that to my attention, Nick. Is my check in the mail? Now that I know what the deal is, I’ll stop rationing my foodstuffs.
What’s *your* reimbursement schedule, by the way? Do you get paid by the hostile thought-gurgle?
If not, you should speak with your agent, as that would probably be the most lucrative way for you to go. 🙂
You can rest on your lawn ordure laurels, Nick, or you can open your mind to other possibilities.
It’s your call.
KEN
I’m very familiar w/PDS’s work,though I’ve not read the book you cited. I knew about “carpet of gold or carpet of bombs’ offer (sic). I was merely referring to single aspect of the invasion having to do with the opium trade, not the role of the military/security complex in protecting and advancing the interests of clients in the energy industry.
@ Bill McWilliams
“KEN
“I’m very familiar w/PDS’s work,though I’ve not read the book you cited. I knew about “carpet of gold or carpet of bombs’ offer (sic).”
For the benefit of those who aren’t familiar with the US “two-carpets” offer to the Taliban, here’s the background:
“PARIS – Under the influence of United States oil companies, the government of President George W Bush initially blocked intelligence agencies’ investigations on terrorism while it bargained with the Taliban on the delivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition and economic aid, two French intelligence analysts claim.
“In the book Bin Laden, la verite interdite (Bin Laden, the forbidden truth), that was released recently, the authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) deputy director John O’Neill resigned in July in protest over the obstruction.
“The authors claim that O’Neill told them that ‘the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it’. The two claim that the US government’s main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate the position of the Taliban regime to obtain access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia.
“They affirm that until August, the US government saw the Taliban regime ‘as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia’ from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. Until now, says the book, ‘the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that.’
“But, confronted with Taliban’s refusal to accept US conditions, ‘this rationale of energy security changed into a military one’, the authors claim.
“At one moment during the negotiations, the US representatives told the Taliban, ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,’ Brisard said in an interview in Paris.”
http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/CaspianOilPipeline.shtml
@ Wadewilliams
“Hep! Help!
“There is a howling mob of African Americans outside my door right now!
“Perhaps Squeeky will pull out her handy AK15 and come to my rescue.”
This is only a guess, but based on other posts by our intrepid reporter and historian, rather than coming over with her AK15 and pink bandoliers, she’d probably advise you to just throw into that mob however much fried chicken and watermelon you have on hand, and slip out the back door.
KEN ROGERS
Great post. I would just add that the main mission of our brave military is to protect the poppy fields in Afghanistan. Can’t have any interruption in the Company’s most profitable product, doncha.
@ Bill McWilliams
“KEN ROGERS
Great post. I would just add that the main mission of our brave military is to protect the poppy fields in Afghanistan. Can’t have any interruption in the Company’s most profitable product, doncha.”
Thanks for the kudos.
Well, there’s also the Caspian pipeline*, of course, but you sound as though you may be familiar with Peter Dale Scott’s *Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Columbia, and Indochina*. If not, I highly recommend it.
*”The Deadly Pipeline War
US Afghan Policy Driven By Oil Interests
December 8, 2001
A few days before September 11, the U.S. Energy Information Administration documented Afghanistan’s strategic ‘geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural and gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea,’ including the construction of pipelines through Afghanistan.
“Prior to September 11, United States policy toward the Taliban was largely influenced by oil. In a new book published in Paris, “Bin Laden, la verite interdite” (*Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth*), former French intelligence officer Jean-Charles Brisard and journalist Guillaume Dasquie document a cozy relationship between George W. Bush and the Taliban. The book quotes John O’Neill, former director of anti-terrorism for the FBI, who thought the U.S. State Department, acting on behalf of United States and Saudi oil interests, interfered with FBI efforts to track down Osama bin Laden.
“Before he was tapped as Bush’s running mate, Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, the biggest oil services company in the world. In a 1998 speech to the ‘Collateral Damage Conference’ of the Cato Institute, Cheney said, ‘the good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is.’
If that last wasn’t spoken like a true, international, Military-Industrial Complex bidnessman, I frankly don’t know what could be. Good thing he was so marginalized in the Bushevik Administration, no?
http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/CaspianOilPipeline.shtml
Yes, Ken Rogers gets paid by the word.
Hep! Help!
There is a howling mob of African Americans outside my door right now!
Perhaps Squeeky will pull out her handy AK15 and come to my rescue.
Ken, who knew all those victims of lynchings we previously thought were black were actually white? o_O
“We,” Kemo Sabe?
I thought all white-thinking, i.e., right-thinking people knew that from the git.
Sqeaky Fromm Pom the Cheerleader for White Supremacy obviously knew it, as witness her spot-on description of the “irrational, howling, bloodthirsty [Afro-American] lynch mobs” in America.
As I implied in my post on the sad, painful history of the lynching of whites, I’m concerned that we could witness a recurrence of the phenomenon (or worse–think “decapitation,” here) at the hands of the Muslim hordes at the gates.
I think that this very possibility makes the population control recommendations of BitchinDog and Lord P HaW particularly apt and timely, especially employed with respect to the aforementioned non-white, non-Christian defectives in the Middle East.
There’s no reason on earth why, in the American spirit of “can-do,” that even very large numbers of these non-white undesirables cannot be either prevented in the first place with contraceptive measures, or eliminated after the fact, as they were in Iraq, for example, both before and after the invasion in 2003.
The sanctions imposed by the Clinton Administration, for example, took the lives of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children, and the US invasion and occupation were good for hundreds of thousands more. In a masterfully diplomatic understatement, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright assured her interviewer that the price of the sanctions, 500,000 children’s deaths, had been “worth it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnskeu-puE
“Worth it”? *Worth* it!? How about cause for high-fives all around, you modest little minx? I mean we were *at war* with those little suckers and their costumed dictator, our former ally, or at least soon would be. Officially, I mean. Not with UN approval, but officially as far as the US Military-Industrial Complex was concerned. As Prince Bush once aptly put it, “International law?! Ha! I guess I better call my lawyer!” Oh, boy, such a sense of humor he had on him while he was “The Decider”!
“The first serious statistical investigation of the war’s impact was a survey by Johns Hopkins University published in the British medical magazine, *The Lancet*. According to the study, from the March 2003 invasion through September 2006, the number of deaths due to the war was 654,965. Over half of those were women and children. The Johns Hopkins study also used the ‘excess mortality’ methodology, which measures not only deaths from war, but violent crime and disease. It found that 91.8% of the excess mortality was due to violence, 31% of that inflicted by coalition forces.
“President Bush immediately dismissed the study’s methodology as ‘pretty well discredited,’ and the media either ignored it or accepted the White House’s characterization.”
[To be fair, the Philosopher Prince would have had no reason to downplay the extent of the carnage inflicted on the Iraqi people by his war of choice which enabled his openly confessed desire to be a “war president.”]
“In fact, there is virtual unanimity among bio-statisticians and mortality experts that the methodology used in the Johns Hopkins study is accurate. Following up on an earlier version of the study, Liala Guterman, a senior reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, says she contacted 10 experts in the field about *The Lancet* article, and ‘not one of them took issue with the study’s methods or conclusions.’ Indeed, she said, the experts found the conclusions ‘cautious.’
“According to John Zogby of Zogby International, one of the world’s most respected polling services, ‘The sampling [in *The Lancet* survey] is solid, the methodology is as good as it gets.’ Ronald Waldman, a Columbia University epidemiologist, said the method was ‘tried and true,’ and British Defense Ministry science advisor, Sir Roy Anderson, said the survey was ‘close to the best practice.’
“Indeed, the Bush administration used exactly the same methodology to determine the number of deaths in Darfur, figures that were used to convince the U.S. Congress to label the current crisis in the Sudan ‘genocide.’ ”
http://antiwar.com/orig/hallinan.php?articleid=11776
So, there you have it, and I rest my case. Everybody should know by now, and if they don’t, perhaps they soon will, that American military science and technology are unrivaled in the world.
All that may be lacking is the political will to put them to their best use in as many arenas as possible.
That’s why the cheer leading of deep thinkers such as BitchinDog, Sqeaky Fromm Pom, and Lord P HaW, among others, has such an important role to play, as they toy with ideas that enhance the possibility of war between the US and Russian governments which would open wide the door on the path to nuclear Armageddon, which would rid us once and for all, praise Yaweh, of *all* those unwhite, spawn of Satan miscreants.
Imagine what would have happened if they weren’t the religion of peace.
When the head of a religion is the Devil Himself and that is who Allah is, all that can come out of their mouths is and actions are evil, pure evil, and that is what Islam is, pure evil!
I hate all of this. We will never evolve as a species until we all get past this
Sadly, we have our own irrational, howling, bloodthirsty lynch mobs right here in America. Luckily, George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson dodged a similar fate.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
@ Sqeaky Fromm, Girl Historian
Yes, but although Messrs. Zimmerman and Wilson were lucky enough to escape with their lives, thousands of other whites in our history were not so lucky. On the contrary, they were *lynched* by howling, irrational, bloodthirsty Afro-American mobs.
Almost 4,000 white people were lynched in America between 1877 and 1950 alone, some of them after being castrated, tortured, and/or burned to death.
“On Tuesday, the organization he [Bryan Stevenson] founded and runs, the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., released a report on the history of lynchings in the United States, the result of five years of research and 160 visits to sites around the South. The authors of the report compiled an inventory of 3,959 victims of ‘racial terror lynchings’ in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950.”
Here are some examples of what his research turned up regarding the victims of howling, bloodthirsty Afro-American mobs:
“DALLAS — A block from the tourist-swarmed headquarters of the former Texas School Book Depository sits the old county courthouse, now a museum. In 1910, a group of men rushed into the courthouse, threw a rope around the neck of a white man accused of sexually assaulting a 3-year-old black girl, and threw the other end of the rope out a window. A mob outside yanked the man, Allen Brooks, to the ground and strung him up at a ceremonial arch a few blocks down Main Street.
“South of the city, past the Trinity River bottoms, a white man named W. R. Taylor was hanged by a mob in 1889. Farther south still is the community of Streetman, where 25-year-old George Gay was hanged from a tree and shot hundreds of times in 1922.
“And just beyond that is Kirvin, where three white men, two of them almost certainly innocent, were accused of killing a black woman and, under the gaze of hundreds of soda-drinking spectators, were castrated, stabbed, beaten, tied to a plow and set afire in the spring of 1922.” *
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/us/history-of-lynchings-in-the-south-documents-nearly-4000-names.html?_r=1
* For some inexplicable reason, unless they were simply typos, the skin colors of the mobs and the victims were reversed in Stevenson’s report, so I have corrected that error in these excerpts.
When considering that at least 54 whites were lynched each year in America between 1877 and 1950 (and there is good reason, of course, to think that not all lynchings were recorded), one could justifiably argue that blacks should never have been allowed to immigrate from Africa to America in the first place.
Not only did immigrating blacks take thousands of jobs that deserving white people needed in order, as President Bush said in another context, “to put food on their families,” they were an incredibly bloodthirsty lot, whose savagery simply boggles the mind.
It is to be fervently hoped that such a colossal policy error will never be repeated, as no good has ever issued from any such mixing of the races, particularly when one of them has given itself over to such wanton barbarity as has the African immigrant.
Ken Rogers
Perhaps some of us here actually think that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. I know this is an ideology foreign to your spew but that would be why we would consider the war worth it and look now. It is still going on. I see you are ignoring that though. I am wondering if you live up in that white state that Inga and Mespo live in?
Oh and a little off the subject – as a good Secretary of State, who voted for Obama – once said.
Colin Powell as secretary of state once advised British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that “if you want to bring the Iranians around, you have to hold an ax over their heads.” Instead, Mr. Obama is holding a selfie stick over his own. The U.S. has done too little on Iran, and now we are nearly too late to stop the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism from acquiring nuclear weapons. – See more at: http://israel-commentary.org/?p=10858#sthash.mW8n4pf7.dpuf
Scripture-sanctioned behavior on display. When will we collectively move past religious nonsense. And breaking news: the Poop turned old blood back into liquid! How amazing! What a miracle. And billions of people subscribe to some form of this.
We’re a species doomed to self-destruction. Tragedy unfolding.
@ DS
This reaction by Afghan authorities that you describe is seriously undermining the Islamophobic narrative that all Afghan Muslims are atavistic monsters.
I’ve been unable to find any reports of arrests in the case of the Israeli settler firebombing of a Palestinian family in their taxi cab, but I did find this:
“Yet even military officials have said Israelis too rarely face punishment for crimes against Palestinians and their property. Direct comparisons of conviction rates are impossible, because Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank are prosecuted under different justice systems. But according to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization, less than 9 percent of 781 such ‘ideological’ crimes investigated by Israeli police from 2005 to March 2012 led to indictments.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/settler-violence-against-palestinians-raises-alarm-in-israel/2012/08/24/14511b7e-ec77-11e1-a80b-9f898562d010_story.html
It appears that in these two cases, the Afghan authorities in Kabul were more motivated to apprehend the perpetrators than were their Israeli counterparts.
I don’t know, but perhaps it has something to do with their different religions.
Fanatics of all kinds are bad news. Both at home and abroad.