Taliban upset that their botched attempt to kill an unarmed 14-year old girl has received 'biased' coverage

A Pakistani schoolgirl holds a 'get well' poster for Malala Yousufzai
saying that she prays for the girl's recovery. Me, too.
(Reuters photo by Moshin Raza, obtained from Yahoo! News)

I saw this story, by John Hudson, on Yahoo! News last evening and did a double-take. Was I reading a parody from The Onion? Hey, I know The Onion has fooled the Iranian government -- how much easier must it be to fool me?

But it appears that this linked story is serious: Hudson writes that the Taliban is miffed because their botched attempt to kill Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year old girl, has received bad press.

Really?

Hudson's article quotes a spokesman for a Taliban faction called Tahreek-i-Taliban Pakistanan (the leader of which has apparently called for attacks against the press because in the wake of the overwhelming negative reaction to Yousufzai's shooting) as saying his group would respect reporters and press organizations except for "highly biased" organizations.

"Bias" as determined solely by the Taliban.

Hudson also quotes a "spokesman for another Taliban insurgent group, Sirajuddin Ahmad of Maulana Fazlullah" as saying, "Right from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to Hillary Clinton and President Obama, all of them used whatever bad language and words they could use on the media but when we tried to reply to them, no media organisation was willing to give us importance."

What's to reply? I wondered at first. These idiots tried to kill an unarmed 14-year old girl simply because she had the temerity to want an education -- and to say so, publicly.

But as I thought about it more, yes, the media coverage of the shooting has been biased: It's been far too secular. We in the West use the language of crime or terrorism and the Taliban insists that they are talking about "religion."

So let's look at it from a religious perspective, shall we?

The Taliban are superstitious pagans -- yes, pagans -- hiding behind selected tenets of a great Abrahamic religion. They are tribal thugs who worship only their weapons. And they know -- at least their leaders know -- they are perverting the religion they pretend to profess. How can I say this? Because, in order to mouth the few cherry-picked verses of the Koran they use to justify their crimes, they must have learned -- and chosen to ignore -- the rest of their tradition, which condemns them.

The Hell that the Taliban are creating on Earth, however, for those unhappy enough to live in their evil shadow, is nothing compared to the Hell the Taliban are creating for themselves in the World to Come. Maybe they should worry about that.