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Title: Taliban shave men for listening to music: victim
Source:
yahoo - afp
URL Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2009042 ... istanunrestnorthwestmusicwomen
Published: Apr 26, 2009
Author: afp
Post Date: 2009-04-26 09:52:23 by Rotara
Keywords: None
Views: 121
Comments: 5
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) – Taliban militants in northwest Buner district shaved the heads and moustaches of four Pakistani men as punishment for listening to music, one of the men said Sunday. Buner has been subject to huge US concern after hundreds of Taliban fighters advanced into the area from the neighbouring Swat, where the hardliners fought a brutal, nearly two-year insurgency to enforce Islamic law. Although Taliban and local officials said the fighters retreated from Buner by Saturday, local members of the movement remain. Residents said many fighters were still present in the hilly outskirts of the district. In one incident late Saturday, Taliban hardliners shaved the heads and moustaches of four men for listening to music, a young man from Buner told AFP by telephone, requesting not to be identified. "I was with three other friends in my car, listening to music when armed Taliban stopped us and, after smashing cassettes and the cassette player, they shaved half our heads and moustaches," he said. "The Taliban also beat us and asked us not to listen to music ever again," said the terrified man. Local police said they had no information about the incident. The victim said neither he nor his friends lodged a complaint with police, as this would have been "useless." "It might have annoyed the Taliban further and I fear for my life," the man said. Residents in Mingora, the main town in Swat, said Taliban posters had been put up in streets and markets ordering women not to go shopping. The posters had appeared after the Taliban's controversial agreement with the government to enforce Islamic law in the region. "We will take action against women who go out shopping in the markets and any shopkeeper seen dealing with women shoppers will be dealt with severely," read the poster from the Swat branch of Tehreek-e-Taliban. "The peace agreement does not mean that obscenity should be re-born," it added. Hardline Islamists in the extremist Taliban consider it "obscene" for women to leave their homes, and ban females from venturing out in public without an immediate male relative -- namely a father, brother, son or husband. For years, Swat was a popular ski resort frequented by Westerners but the Pakistani government effectively lost control of the mountainous district after the violent Taliban campaign to enforce sharia law.
Poster Comment: 
The Taliban have also warned people against shaving their beards. Here a barber stands by a
‘do not shave’ warning written by militants in the front window of his shop in Buner—AFP
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#1. To: Rotara (#0)
And this is important for what reason?
#2. To: Deasy (#1)
That is a very good question. I sincerely wish that these matters did not concern us at all. However they do because we have our schnozzles so deeply inserted into this muck that it may be generations before we disentangle ourselves from it, if indeed the republic endures that long. Through our friends, the Saudis, we have managed to infect much of the Sunni world (wherever the local police state is unable to strangle it in the cradle) with Wahabism, or more correctly according to its adherents, Salafism. This form of puritan Islam is full of conceits that demand conformance to ritual observances and strictures regarding day to day behavior: a man may not shave a hair from his beard, the shaving off of other body hair, the annual ritual slap of a wife by the husband required by certain interpreations of traditions, as well as the reinforcement of more traditional practices such as the covering and seclusion of women and segregation of the sexes. All of this is supported by a system of exegesis that would make a Talmudist blush. It is a kind of splendidly successful sectarian bolshevism. It is a knife aimed toward the north and the east. This virus is spread by our proteges, like the amorphous "Al Qaeda" created by London and Washington and now funded by our proxies for purposes that are quite obvious. I don't have to spell them out for folks that post here. Less virulent forms of this sort of puritanism are at work in places like Turkey, where on the one hand Islamism is at odds with ninety years of secularism, while on the other the Islamists in power receive American money and political support and quietly build US naval facilities on the Black Sea and on the Mediterranean. This stuff is important because we are paying for it. It's our baby.
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