The Taliban fighters are holding loaded guns, patrolling the streets of cities they have just taken over, and declared as territories they will now command. They have strict rules that their subjects must obey, especially women. Any defiance is likely to come at a cost. However, none of this seems to have scared off a small group of brave women, who were seen holding up placards in protest in Kabul. 

This is the first reported women’s protest in Kabul after the Taliban’s takeover. The women held handwritten paper signs that reportedly read: “We want our rights, here are women, we want social security, no ban on work, the right to education and the right to political participation. No force can ignore and stifle women. All our achievements over the years should not be compromised and our basic rights!”

First reported women’s protest in Kabul following the takeover by the Taliban:

Four women holding handwritten paper signs stand surrounded by armed Taliban fighters

Indescribable courage:pic.twitter.com/1HtpQ4X2ip

— Leah McElrath ?️‍? (@leahmcelrath) August 17, 2021

A protest, let alone one led by women, who the Taliban have historically considered lesser humans, has come across as a strong message from Afghanistan, from where so far have emerged images of chaos, followed by eerie calm on the streets, and palpable fear as the heavily armed Taliban fighters continue patrolling.

First protest of women in Kabul.#Afghanistan
Video of @HameedMohdShah pic.twitter.com/p2guH2kSj6

— Pajhwok Afghan News (@pajhwok) August 17, 2021

Thousands of Afghans have been attempting to flee the country in fear of what may be unleashed under Taliban rule, this group of women demanding their rights seen at the first public protest in Afghanistan. The Taliban leaders have been busy making assurances that girls and women will be able to study, and work, as long as they follow the ‘rules’. Images of a beauty shop for women removing posters and painting its front, went viral the day the Taliban reached Kabul. Many women are reportedly now fearful of their future under the Taliban regime. 

On Tuesday, the Taliban held it’s first press conference and its spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid claimed women in Afghanistan will be “allowed” to work, study and “be very active in society but within the framework of Islam.” However, according to Reuters, “Some women have already been ordered from their jobs during the chaos of Taliban advances across the country in recent days. Others are fearful that whatever the militants say, the reality may be different.”

Women journalists have been the most vulnerable. Female news anchors have reportedly been replaced by men, though TOLONews removed and then once again placed women anchors back on screen.

Khadija Amin the new anchor on state TV last week.
Taliban taking over her seat as of Monday.
Ms. Amin told us her boss informed her Taliban have banned women from returning to work at state television.#Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/S4BfISKkaG

— Farnaz Fassihi (@farnazfassihi) August 17, 2021

There are some who say that times have changed, and the current generation of Afghan women are educated and aware. Communication, especially social media, has also meant that any actions will be known to the world within minutes.   

“Right now, we fight back” said Barak Zalmai Khan Durrani, an educationist and women’s rights activist who returned to live in Afghanistan. Durrani, once a refugee in Pakistan, said she had a right to be in Afghanistan. In response to a question where she’d considered fleeing after the Taliban takeover, Durrani told journalist Hala Gorani that as an educated woman she owes it to future generations to ensure Afghan girls receive education. “It is less heroic and more heroic… if we don’t speak right now the next generation will not be educated. In the 90s there were more heroic women who were running underground schools.” In 2020, she was selected as the first woman from Kandahar and youngest in Afghanistan to receive the Malala Fund Education Champion award.

The kind of heroism that simply takes your breath away. I asked teacher and women’s rights activist @BarakPashtana if she’d considered fleeing after the Taliban takeover. Listen to her answer. pic.twitter.com/b5cTXdJ6e7

— Hala Gorani (@HalaGorani) August 17, 2021

Female from wazir akbar khan, Kabul are out & protesting for share in political & economic business of the Govt:#Kabul pic.twitter.com/NkD4w5g4lP

— Hamza Dawar (@HamzaDawar0) August 17, 2021

Women who managed to flee Afghanistan said they feared for those left behind. An Afghan woman who arrived in Delhi from Kabul on Sunday, told the media that she feared her friends back home “are going to get killed. They [Taliban] are going to kill us. Our women are not going to have any more rights,” reported India Today.

Media reports and social media posts also indicated that many young Afghan women feared they will be forcefully “married” to Taliban fighters. Other images showed women donning the chadari, the full Afghan burqa that the Taliban have always enforced. Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad said “compulsory hijab is Taliban’s culture.”

Since the day I started my campaign against compulsory hijab, many Western journalists refused to help me by saying that this is part of Iranian’s culture. Wrong! As this picture speaks for itself. Compulsory hijab is Taliban’s culture. pic.twitter.com/5efpNn8K0p

— Masih Alinejad ?️ (@AlinejadMasih) August 16, 2021

“Do not believe the lies of Taliban. I’m 23. Taliban forcibly marry women like me to their fighters. The spokesman of Taliban have account on Twitter. For what? For spreading their lies in the world,” said an Afghan woman whose video went viral recently. “No one cares about us. We’ll die slowly in history,” she had said in her chat with Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad on Tuesday. She added, “If the Taliban saw women like me, they’d forcibly marry me to one of their fighters, a marriage of Islamic rape in other words…They consider us, women, bounties of war.”

“Do not believe the lies of Taliban. I’m 23. Taliban forcibly marry women like me to their fighters. The spokesman of Taliban have account on Twitter. For what? For spreading their lies in the world.”
Listen to her pic.twitter.com/oUiOe7ApG7

— Masih Alinejad ?️ (@AlinejadMasih) August 17, 2021

Women journalists are most vulnerable

In a blog in The Guardian, an unnamed woman journalist wrote that she was now on the run. She wrote, “Last week I was a news journalist. Today I can’t write under my own name or say where I am from or where I am. My whole life has been obliterated in just a few days. I am so scared and I don’t know what will happen to me.” She asked, “Will I ever go home? Will I see my parents again? Where will I go? The highway is blocked in both directions. How will I survive?” She said she was not safe as a 22-year-old woman as “Taliban are forcing families to give their daughters as wives for their fighters. I’m also not safe because I’m a news journalist and I know the Taliban will come looking for me and all of my colleagues.”

The Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) issued a statement of “solidarity with journalists and all other beleaguered civilians in Afghanistan, especially women, as the situation rapidly deteriorates amidst the Taliban take-over of the country.” The NWMI also urged the Indian government to “extend all possible support to vulnerable civilians and journalists, particularly women journalists, in Afghanistan.”

Women journalists who the NWMI was in contact with said, “We are living in a very risky situation and day by day we lose hope. We are concerned about our safety but also the loss of our achievements. I am not afraid of killing and death but afraid of their (the Taliban) cruel behaviour. I am really afraid for the young women journalists who live in the provinces. They are under pressure from this trauma and cannot escape.”

Women who are seen as threats are being targeted, especially if they are in cities other than the capital  Kabul. According to a report in India Today, Salima Mazari, who took up arms to fight the Taliban has reportedly been captured. According to reports Salima Mazari, a well known woman leader was captured by the Taliban .

History needs to be recalled again and again by all those following the developments in Afghanistan. In 1998 SabrangIndia co-founder and human rights defender Teesta Setalvad had written a piece titled Hell on Earth, that analysed how Afghan women in particular, were subjected to “an unending nightmare of terror and trauma” that were not restricted to severe restriction of movement, and choices, but included rape and murder if they or any family member dared to speak up. 

However, there is a small ray of hope this time, as another group of citizens also  took to the streets to protest any change in the nation’s flag, shared journalist Bashir Ahmad Gwakh, in a social media post.

Yesterday, Khost and today Jalalabad: People protest asking Taliban to not change the #AfghanFlag ??.

A participant tells me the Taliban shot at them but no exact info on casualties. Taliban have not said anything as well.
—
Taliban have returned to a changed #Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/iZQ7B7KKJc

— Bashir Ahmad Gwakh (@bashirgwakh) August 18, 2021

Related:

Hell on Earth
Will Taliban takeover of Afghanistan be used to attack Indian Muslims?
Gov’t will help Afghanistan’s Sikhs and Hindus to come to India: MEA
Afghan crisis: Women, activists demand immediate ceasefire, protection for civilians
Afghanistan Crisis: What is India’s plan of action?
Afghan President flees as Taliban enters Kabul

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The Taliban has re-emerged in Afghanistan after 20 years and on Sunday, it took over the capital city of Kabul. They captured the Presidential Palace just hours after President Ashraf Ghani fled, reportedly to Tajikistan.

Ghani explained his reason for departure in a post on his official Facebook page saying, “The Taliban have made it to remove me, they are here to attack all Kabul and the people of Kabul. In order to avoid the bleeding flood, I thought it was best to get out.”

Meanwhile, chaos reigned in the capital with ATMs running dry and people making a beeline for the airport causing traffic jams. There were also reports of gunfire at the airport.

The situation had been escalating in Afghanistan with Taliban conquering different province. Some of the areas now under Taliban control include Mahmud Raqi (capital of Kapisa province), Bamyan, Bagram Airfield, Khost, Jalalbad, Maidan Shahr, Torkham town (near the Pakistan border), and many others. The militia reportedly left rivers of blood in their wake. Perhaps the most shocking display of Taliban brutality came last week when they executed comedian Nazar Mohammed, who was better known by his TikTok handle name Khasha Zwan. He was executed by two Taliban members. A video of the execution went viral on social media.

Afghan actor Sahra Karimi wrote an emotional letter to the international film community a few days ago showcasing the extent of Taliban brutality. “They have massacred our people, they have kidnapped many children, they sold girls as child brides to their men, they murdered a woman for her attire, they gauges the eyes of a woman, they tortured and murdered one of our beloved comedians, they murdered one of our historian poets, they murdered the head of culture and media for the government, they have been assassinating people affiliated with the government, they hung some of our men publicly, they have displaced hundreds of thousands of families,” wrote Karimi urging the international community to stop being silent.

Earlier this year, the impact of the Taliban’s actions was felt in India as well when Pulitzer prize winning Reuters photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was killed while covering clashes between Afghan forces and Taliban in Kandahar in July.

The Taliban emerged as a militia comprising students of hardline Islamic preacher Mullah Omar who shot into prominence after Russia withdrew from Afghanistan in 1990-91. The US at that time is said to have armed the Taliban, using them as a defence against the Russians in a proxy war. However, the equation changed with 9/11.

Omar was believed to be a close associate of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden. When it emerged that Omar was providing safe haven to Bin Laden and his men, the US invaded Afghanistan in what was dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom. Large swathes of the country were carpet bombed to “smoke them (terrorists) out” as then President George Bush Jr. described. The Taliban itself had been made largely irrelevant by December 2001 itself, after which a new government was formed in Afghanistan. While many top Taliban commanders were killed in attacks by the US, Omar and Osama remained elusive.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s infrastructure was in shambles and democracy was in peril from a resurgence of Taliban should US troops withdraw. US troops would often exchange fire with residual Taliban forces in sporadic skirmishes. Upholding and defending human rights erased by the Taliban became a priority. Images of women forced to don full length burkhas and beaten with sticks even if their ankles showed are still fresh in the minds of people. Hardliners are also opposed to education of girls.

US troops have been in the country for 20 years. They had to stay after the new government was established, as it would have been irresponsible to imperil a nation and then leave when one’s purpose was served. But the American people were growing restless with the constant state of war, the illogical invasion of Iraq adding to their frustration. Many successive presidents promised to withdraw troops from the oil-rich Middle East and then reneged on their word, purportedly to serve their own political agendas. Bin Laden was eventually killed in Pakistan in May 2011, while Mullah Omar died in April 2013.

But given previous political turmoil in the region, specifically its virtual abuse by two super powers, the Afghan government could not be expected to hold its own. The US needed to stay put, mainly to clean up its mess. Progress was slow, and often rather unsteady. Afghanistan took its tentative steps towards operating as a democracy and strengthening human rights. This included doing away with harsh rules against the education and employment of women. Steps were also taken by the Afghan government to restore the rights of those tribes and ethnic minorities that do not practice Islam. Keeping hardliners in check was a task in itself. But all the progress made in strengthening democracy, now appears to have come to a grinding halt with fears of regression, especially when it comes to rights of women and minorities.

After the Taliban takeover of Kabul, US President Joe Biden authorised additional troops to help with evacuation of embassy and allied personnel. Nearly 5,000 US troops are part of the mammoth evacuation process which includes maintaining peace at the Kabul international airport, so that flights can take off. The move to evacuate the embassy though has drawn sharp criticism from various quarters, many asking how he could leave the Afghan people at the mercy of the Taliban. But Biden remains firm on his stand that he would not pass this war to the next President of the United States. Here’s an excerpt from his official statement:

While Joe Biden’s rationale vis a vis the American public may be justified, history will judge America by its aggressive, militarised and ill-thought out decision to invade Afghanistan in 2001 in the first place, going after an entire country rather than the criminal masterminds responsible for 9/11.

Related:

Danish Siddiqui’s photojournalism captured the soul of the news
20 years after they were destroyed, Bamiyan Buddha resurrected virtually

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After seizing control of Afghanistan in 1996, the Taliban rapidly became the
world’s   most despised regime. In August of 1999, a United Nations investigation revealed that the Taliban’s war against women was “widespread, systematic and officially sanctioned”. Three months later, Afghanistan’s gross human rights violations, thriving opium industry, and a welcome mat for terrorists, led the United Nations to impose trade sanctions.

Despite this history, Asian, European and Australian media have recently conjured a new picture of Afghanistan’s Islamic fundamentalists. Most reports stem from the hijacking of the Delhi–bound Indian Airlines flight IC 814 on December 24, 1999. But others, notably those in the London Guardian (November 26 and December 21, 1999) and the Sydney Morning Herald (December 24, 1999), are illogical attempts to deny the obscenities inflicted on Afghan women as a result of the Taliban’s perverted interpretation of the Quran.

World media, while sceptical of Pakistan’s role in the December 24 hijacking, reiterated the Indian government’s praise for the Taliban’s “constructive Cupertino” while 154 passengers were held hostage in the Afghanistan city of Kandahar, and coincidentally, the headquarters of the Taliban militia. In the end, following a week of bargaining orchestrated by the Taliban, three militants held in Indian prisons were released in exchange for the freedom of flight IC 814’s passengers. Most analysts viewed the swap as a victory for terrorism, but many also saw the perceived diplomacy in Kandahar as a step towards improved relations between the Taliban and the outside world. 

Presently, the Taliban’s authority in Afghanistan is recognised by only three countries — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; the rest of the world regards the Rabbani government, which controls only 10 per cent of Afghanistan, as the territory’s lawful authority. According to a spokesperson for the Taliban, India should consider renewing diplomatic ties with Kabul after the courtesies extended by the militia to resolve the hijacking crisis, but the international community is likely to be unforgiving of the Taliban’s complicity with the five hijackers of Flight 814, and the three militants released from Indian prisons in exchange for the hostages.

Within days, the Taliban’s role in granting all eight the luxury of ten hours in which to make their escape to Quetta in neighbouring, terrorist-friendly Pakistan sparked an outrage amongst British victims of one of the released militants. Also, a report from Afghanistan indicates that another of the released militants, Maulana Masood Azhar, after being welcomed home to Pakistan as a hero, has retreated back to Afghanistan to avoid US bounty hunters. 

Just as claims that the Taliban has been unjustly cast as villains, suggestions that Afghan women have been miscast as helpless heroines holds no sway against the vast body of evidence confirming the Taliban’s obscene treatment of women. After interviewing Afghan women, tens of thousands of whom live in appalling conditions as refugees in Pakistan, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, concluded that discrimination against women was an official Taliban policy.

According to Coomara-swamy, armed militia patrol the streets of Kabul looking for women violating the Taliban edicts, which forbid women to venture outside their homes, even for employment, unless accompanied by a male relative. In the same vein, the Taliban bars girls from attending school after the age of twelve. Women violators are publicly beaten, sometimes with radio antennae torn from nearby vehicles, but usually with an instrument resembling a leather cricket bat.

According to the London Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald, women living in Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul have learnt to navigate the sporadically enforced, rigid moral codes laid down by the Taliban’s ministry of vice and virtue. Supposedly, Taliban concessions permit women to collect salaries and qualify for promotion, but only if they were not previously employed as judges or other occupations which the Taliban’s version of Islam deems unsuitable for women. Critics of the Taliban see no virtue in these minimal concessions, and maintain condemnation on the Taliban’s dictates which deny thousands upon thousands of Afghan women access to dignified employment from which to feed and clothe their families. 

In a climate where Afghan women have an unimaginable level of widowhood — 35,000 in Kabul alone, as a result of their country’s two decades of civil war — the Taliban’s taboos on their extra–residential employment has left many almost without options. As never before, women dominate the ranks of Kabul’s beggars. Driven to prostitution, some retain the guise of beggars, covering themselves from head to toe with tattered clothes to conceal clothing designed to attract the men frequenting Kabul’s thriving brothel industry. Unlike the beggar prostitutes at risk of the Taliban’s virtuous wrath, brothels are often protected by the Taliban, effectively endorsing the further abuse of Afghanistan’s poverty–stricken women by the regime’s self–righteous militiamen.

Prisons are home to thousands of Afghans, many women, and the vast majority innocent of any crime other than being ethnic Tajiks who are automatically deemed to have violated the Taliban’s religious code. Pol-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul boasts twenty blocks, two assigned to female prisoners, each block divided into 116 rooms, and each room crammed with 40 to 50 prisoners who are regularly raped, beaten, flogged, tortured, and humiliated by the Taliban’s armed guards seeking entertainment. 

Each prisoner receives a subsistence daily ration of 180 grams of dried out bread, supplemented with 80 grams of boiled rice from Red Cross aid. Three prisoners die each week from malnutrition. Others often held for between one and three years without legal representation, and facing conviction for some “invented” political crime which brings an undefined prison term, suffer physical and mental illness, and strive to retain their sanity. The solitary Red Cross aid which reaches prisoners is the 80 gram daily ration of boiled rice. Other aid items such as medicines, beans, oil, sugar, tea, meat, vegetables, fruits, soap, carpet, jackets, glasses, and gasoline are divided amongst corrupt Red Cross employees and the prison administration, who falsify prisoner’s names to rationalise their books.

Living in exile, and contending with poverty in nearby Pakistan, the Revolutionary Association of Women from Afghanistan (RAWA), has refused to be intimidated by the Taliban’s vicious inhumanity towards women chiefly but also against women’s children, their partners and their parents. Regularly protesting against the regime’s ignorant misinterpretation of the Quran, RAWA’s courage has brought international attention to the Taliban’s war against women which does not stop at denying them dignified employment.
Featuring amongst the Taliban’s litany of obscenities imposed on women is the burqa, a garment which, except for a filigree strip across the eyes permitting vision, is all–concealing and symbolic of women’s enslavement under the Taliban. Countless Afghan women have been beaten and stoned in public for not wearing the “proper attire”; even in some instances where the offence amounted to nothing more than the revealing of eyes from behind the burqa’s mesh.

The London Guardian also proclaimed the Taliban’s mellowing with respect to girl’s education when the first government girls’ schools were opened in Kabul in November of 1999. But as RAWA was quick to point out, this amounts to nothing more than religious and domestic classes for the daughters of Taliban followers accepting of the vile code of virtuosity which has been imposed in Afghanistan. In other words, these are schools by the Taliban for the Taliban’s barbaric ends, but with the assistance of complicit journalists, a message evolves to create the impression that science subjects and even English are now available to Afghanistan’s girls. The truth, from the mouths of young girls attending such schools verifies that these are indoctrination houses to brainwash the next generation of fundamentalists, hanging like hungry crows on the naked trees of Afghanistan’s vast graveyard created by the murderous, and largely illiterate, Taliban.

The Taliban’s recent hostage negotiations in Kandahar sent a clear message to would–be hijackers that Afghanistan is a sanctuary for unlawful negotiations endorsing terrorism. Equally, daily atrocities send a clear message to the international community that Afghanistan is home to gross human rights violations, particularly those of women, while the Taliban remains in power. 

There is absolutely no indication that the Taliban is about to change its tune. On the contrary, the January 8, 2000 issue of the Lancet medical journal warned of Taliban plans to purge Afghanistan’s health professions of staff educated in socialist countries between 1978 and 1992 when Afghanistan was under communist rule. The Taliban has made no secret of its intention to replace the purgees with “like-minded” sharing its version of Islam. 
At the end of the day, no amount of sanitising the Taliban’s barbarisms can whitewash the fact that, at the opening of the year 2000, the Taliban is nothing less than an extremist fundamentalist regime; one which undermines global security with its training and sheltering of terrorists, all while implementing its own reign of terror against the women residing within Afghanistan’s borders. Or, to paraphrase William Shakespeare, the Taliban 2000, no matter how intense the sanitising, still reeks with the vile stench of fundamentalist indecency! 

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2000. Year 7  No, 56,  Region
 

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The ruling elite and the military establishment of Pakistan is paranoid about an independent Kashmir — and I really don’t understand why. Pakistan talks about "self–determination" as long as it means Pakistan will be able to gain. Pakistan is completely allergic to the "I" word. They have an agenda to suppress, undermine, and prevent any organized movement that begins to harness the natural aspirations of the people of Jammu & Kashmir for independent Kashmir.

Pakistan has backed groups that have a destructive approach to the freedom struggle and have a distorted agenda which exploits the name of Islam. In 1990, Pakistan realised that JKLF would not serve its selfish interests so they went to the old habits they learnt from the CIA in the Afghanistan war theatre — they backed multiple groups, most notoriously Jamaat-e-Islami and Hizbul Mujahideen and encouraged them to wipe out the pro–independence struggle while they fought India. The battle or "jihad" waged by these groups was designed to create chaos and create desperation but it never was disciplined, organized, strategic, or aimed to empower the common people of Kashmir to stand up for themselves.

Pakistan supported extremists with a Pakistani nationalistic agenda in Kashmir. It must be understood that their agenda is separate from main stream Islam and they only exploit the name of Islam for their political agenda. As such they tried to create a desperation in the Kashmiri society and force a communal revolt. There are reasons for this. An activist of Jamaat Islami once explained that they must wipe out tourism and education in order to make the common people desperate and ready for "revolution".

I never understood why in Kashmir schools were burnt or why blasts were placed in civilian, non–military zones. Why bridges were destroyed. Why Kashmiri people were kidnapped. I know of people who would have sacrificed everything for freedom who were kidnapped and told to pay so many lakhs of rupees or give their son for their organisation or be killed. Why did this happen? And why did this continue with full knowledge of the leadership of these organisations? Its absolutely inexcusable.

A Jamaat supporter once explained to me that sometimes you have to force a people to wake up and realise what is best for them. He said without jobs and education "jihad" will be the only avenue. These politicians call this creation of chaos, this self–destruction "jihad"? I call it a "facade". Do these organizations think you can call something "Islamic" and that is enough?

(T)hey manipulated and extorted. Their methods broke down political and social institutions when what was needed was a strengthening of these institutions so they might be utilised for the cause of freedom. What’s more, these organizations directly targeted JKLF boys and then they fought even among themselves. How could these organisations be expected to succeed with this type of treachery and lack of morals?

We have seen what was done to Kabul in the name of Islam — the blood of Muslims was made to run through its streets at the hands of other Muslims. Hekmatyar had a dispute with Prof. Rabbani and it resulted in the death of thousands of Afghans. Mosques were destroyed. An entire city which survived the evil Soviet onslaught was razed to the ground. This was a dispute between two Jamaat Islami supporters. And both sides called it "jihad". What’s more, the Taliban have taken their place, also in the name of Islam and also with the backing of Pakistan.

Tolerance is the epitome of Jammu and Kashmir and all the people of the state of different faiths have, do, and will live in peace with each other. And the communal flames of the last nine years have been ignited by foreign hands and have nothing to do with Kashmiri actions. And if Islam is to spread further in Jammu and Kashmir it will spread by example and by practice and according to the will of Allah— just like it did when Islam first came to Kashmir.

The truth is the people of Kashmir are sincere Muslims – meaning that they are also tolerant, positive, and caring human beings. There is a profound love for Islam and the people of Kashmir embrace tolerance and compassion towards all as part of their belief. Likewise, the people of Jammu and Kashmir are not just Muslim. In fact a significant portion of the population is Buddhist, Sikh, and Hindu. And Kashmiris have co–existed in a peaceful way for centuries.

Much to the dislike of Pakistan and pro–Pak groups, the majority of Kashmiris want re–unification and independence. And they are going to have to come to terms with this reality sooner or later. And no matter how much they cloak their rhetoric in terms of "Islam" this fact is not going to disappear.

Archived from Communalism Combat, July 1999, Year 6  No. 51, Cover Story 3

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