Andrew Cassel and Dan Rottenberg

Andy,

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Here's the ultimate contrarian challenge for your morning: Who in the Western world will defend those universally hated outcasts, the Taliban? Who will speak up for Afghanistan's version of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives? Who will say a kind word on behalf of a faith that (with the aid of a few sticks of dynamite) moves mountains?

Granted, the Taliban are religious fanatics and bullies. Granted, they are blowing up priceless ancient Buddhist statues because it's the only thing they do really well. (Just as, say, our Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham pursues the death penalty against poor and retarded defendants because it's the only thing her office does really well.) Granted, if the Taliban's abused women were to flee Afghanistan en masse, it would serve their men folk right. Granted, the Taliban have stood the message of Marie Curie ("Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood") on its head. Granted, the Taliban's national anthem ought to be, "We're the Very Best at Bein' Bad." Granted, like Barney Greenwald in The Caine Mutiny, I'd rather prosecute the Taliban than defend them. And yet ...

Suppose you're devoutly religious. Suppose your religion is the only hopeful element in your life. Suppose you feel (as everyone in the world aside from you and me and maybe six other people feel) victimized and persecuted. And suppose you must spend your every waking hour in the shadow of a 150-foot-high monument to somebody else's religion. Wouldn't you be a trifle disturbed?

Let's take this a step further. Suppose the monument in question celebrates a faith that has persecuted your relatives for 900 years--say, a gigantic crucifix. Suppose your co-religionists are trying to create a refuge where they need not be exposed to Wagner or skinheads or anti-Semites. And suppose the land they have settled for this refuge is prominently dotted with huge, artistic, priceless stone carvings of that ancient Indian symbol, the swastika? Do you get my drift?

Those giant Buddhas in Afghanistan don't bother me. But they might if they were in my backyard. Plenty of Philadelphians were bothered big time in 1981 when the Catholic Archdiocese temporarily exhibited a gigantic statue of the Virgin Mary on Logan Circle. The Taliban's intolerance is loathsome. But so is the kind of in-your-face religion that imposes huge images on believers and nonbelievers alike. The irony here is that Islam is one religion that specifically forbids graven religious images. But one effect is that the Taliban must live surrounded by Buddhist images without any countervailing images of their own. Can you blame them for feeling they must destroy the images that upset them?

Dan

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