The universe is unfolding as it should.

Maruf Hotak, commenting about the recent protests in Afghanistan in reaction to its largest U.S. base burning Qur’ans and referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.

From Glenn Greenwald: The causes of the protests in Afghanistan:

The U.S. has violently occupied their country for more than a decade. It has, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal himself explained, killed what he called an “amazing number” of innocent Afghans in checkpoint shootings. It has repeatedly — as in, over and over — killed young Afghan children in air strikes. It continues to imprison their citizens for years at Bagram and other American bases without charges of any kind and with credible reports of torture and other serious abuses. Soldiers deliberately shot Afghan civilians for fun and urinated on their corpses and displayed them as trophies.

Meanwhile, the protesters themselves continue to be shot, although most American media accounts favor sentences like these which whitewash who is doing the killing: “running clashes with the police that claimed the lives of another five Afghan protesters” and “in Nangarhar Province, two Afghans protesting the Koran burning were shot to death outside an American base in Khogyani District” and “protesters angry over the burning of Korans at the largest American base in Afghanistan this week took to the streets in demonstrations in a half-dozen provinces on Wednesday that left at least seven dead and many more injured.” Left at least seven dead: as As’ad AbuKhalil observed, “notice that there is no killer in the phrasing.”

It’s comforting to believe that these violent protests and the obviously intense anti-American rage driving them is primarily about anger over the inadvertent burning of some religious books: that way, we can dismiss the rage as primitive and irrational and see the American targets as victims. But the Afghans themselves are making clear that this latest episode is but the trigger for — the latest symbol of — a pile of long-standing, underlying grievances about a decade-old, extremely violent foreign military presence in their country. It’s much more difficult to dismiss those grievances as the by-product of primitive religious fanaticism, so — as usual — they just get ignored.

(via mohandasgandhi)

no shit America

you occupy a country for over 10 years

you indiscriminately kill civilians, children, and others just disappear. 

you desecrate corpses and thump your chests in hyperaggresive displays of military masculinity

you form entire teams and groups to collect body parts to take home with you

the media lies and lies and distorts and distorts

the US calls for another war

articles about the anger of the Afghan people arise in which people genuinely ask where does all this anger come from?

my loved ones, my friends, are not human to you.

in your books and articles, they are backwards, tribal, without law, obsessed with pornography, uncivilized, unchanging, forever quarreling, divisive, combative, timeless, wild, untameable, obsessed with honor. 

and to think

all this started with, ‘we must win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people’