Make your next holiday destination… sunny Afghanistan!

Shavua tov, a good week, gentle reader! And from the annals of latter day lunacy, your reporter is pleased to present the BBC’s feature story tonight, “Afghanistan- wish you were here? The Taliban do.” You’d think Afghanistan under the Taliban wouldn’t be a popular tourist destination. You’d think. “But a quick scroll through social media suggests that not only has tourism survived, it has – in its own, extraordinarily niche way – boomed. ‘Five reasons why Afghanistan should be your next trip,’ gush the delighted influencers, their cameras sweeping across glistening lakes, through mountainous passes and into colourful, busy markets. ‘Afghanistan hasn’t been this safe in 20 years,’ others declare, posing next to the vast chasms left behind by the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas more than 20 years ago.”

Surly Taliban guards won’t talk to the woke female ecotourists flocking to hip new Islamist Kabul, except perhaps to remind them if their hijab is slipping. But the Queers for Sharia Law crowd don’t mind. It’s cultural relativism! And how many aerobic diversions present-day Afghanistan offers for the sporting traveler: train with a real machete and cut off the hands of a turnstile-jumper caught in the act in the Mazar-e Sharif metro. Push a teenage boy convicted of homosexuality off a tall building. Heave ho! Administer eighty lashes to a woman who absentmindedly went out shopping for groceries without her husband’s permission. And for lunch, how about scrambled eggs shahid-style? Suicide bomber blows self up next to a truckload of eggs. Pick out the metal bits and enjoy with toasted naan. Bon appetit!

That’s right, folks. In these enlightened times, when the strains of “Cosi fan tutti” in the Sydney Opera House blend harmoniously with a cappella calls to “Gas the Jews!” (yeah, yeah, the New South Wales police heard it as “Be nice to the Jews!” and would you please pass that joint along and not hog it, officer?) and the windows of the Minsk Synagogue in Toronto are blown out, doubtless in an effort to encourage green air-conditioning in this epoch of climate change, it’s time for Jihadi Jaunts to exotic places. Visit Yemen and pilot an explosive drone into a cargo ship conveying fair trade coffee to your local Starbucks (oops!). Play targeting missiles with Hezbollah and win extra bonus points if your Persian-made rocket hits an Israeli kindergarten.

Or just take a selfie in front of the holes where the Bamiyan Buddhas were before your bearded guide’s dad blew them up in 2001. “Can I hold your AK-47 while we pose for the picture?” “No, infidel dog.” “How intersectional!”

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Mahayana Buddhism spread eastwards along the Silk Road from India to China. In those days most of the countries the Silk Road passed through spoke Eastern Iranian languages: Sogdian, Bactrian, Khotanese. Ancient Sogd, Sogdiana if you like but in Russian it’s just plain Sogd (it means “burnt” as in refined, thus, the Pure Land), included the cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Hindus, and Buddhists lived side by side in Sogd and decorated their living rooms in fabled Panjikant with registers of frescoes depicting scenes in heaven, heroic epics, and animal fables. Sogdian Zoroastrians carved elaborate nephrite funeral couches in central China portraying caravan journeys, scenes of souls crossing the bridge from this world into the next, and Magi praying before fire chalices. Alexander the Great besieged Bactra (Balkh, now Mazar-e Sharif). Merchants bartered silk for jade in Khotan. Manichaean monks copied illuminated manuscript codices in Dandan Oiliq and Ming Öi. Traders converging on Dunhuang marveled at the painted cave temples, and one of them lost a folded piece of paper with prayers for travel in Hebrew written on it. I spent many happy years teaching that stuff. But in this dark age, extremist Islam tyrannizes the lands where cosmopolitan culture and thought once ruled.

And there’s no response to tyranny quite like the mealy-mouthed cowardice of Western leftist appeasers. When the Taliban dynamited the two giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan, Afghanistan in early April 2001, National Public Radio predictably hauled in a crypto-Buddhist spokesperson to assure us that nothing is permanent so blowing up art treasures is okay so long as it’s Islamist terrorists, I mean, militants, who are doing it.

But I wrote a letter that evening to the Harvard Crimson, a daily campus paper. I said that al-Qaeda and its affiliates (the Taliban in this instance) had a penchant for attacking twin targets— two US Embassies in East Africa, etc.— so we should expect another attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in NYC. The Crimson refused to print this evaluation of current events, stuffily dismissing it as “prophecy”.

But I figured the jihadis would fly planes into the Towers, since the bomb they had planted in the basement in 1993 hadn’t done enough damage. So on the morning of September 11, 2001, when a bemused BBC correspondent reported that a small plane had collided by accident with one of the Towers, I realized this was the real deal and at once called my folks in NYC to tell them to stay home. “Don’t be para-” said Dad, as the second plane hit on TV before he could get out “-noid!”

Then we had the bottom feeders telling us 9/11 was an inside job. Sure it was. So was Pearl Harbor: Banzai, GI Joe! This are Tokyo Rose. Pearl Harbor was inside job! So please to put down your rifle and come over here.

Then we had Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Kabul, which made the chaos of the choppers in Saigon in 1975 look like choreographed figure skating. The parents of Marines who had the temerity to die as heroes at the airport while helping terrified Afghans, were hushed up.

Then there was the worldwide celebration of October 7th. Shoving Jewish babies into ovens and raping and decapitating Jewish girls is fashionable again— it’s time to shelve the temporary reticence of the decades after the revelation of the gas chambers and crematoria. Pogrom party!

The Crimson was right. Why print Cassandra’s ravings? Definitely a downer. Did Agamemnon listen to her? No. I think Aeschylus put her in just to provide a voice over of the regicide going on in the wings. Suppose the paper had published my dire warnings about al-Qaeda’s designs on lower Manhattan. Nobody would have done anything anyway. But here’s the thing, folks: no sardonic Apollonian gift of prophecy, no embittered sense of satiric irony, nothing could have prepared me for today’s tourist trend: paying the Taliban to visit the holes where the Bamiyan Buddhas they destroyed had stood. It gives Holocaust tourism a participatory twist.

Is God seeing any of this? If He is, I’ve some advice for you: build an ark on the double. You can consult the Book of Genesis for specifications. Feel a drop? Well as they say, It never rains but it pours.