As we reported they would, a group of Muslim women have laid wreaths at the National Memorial Arboretum in honor of British troops.
Kalsoom Bashir, who attended the ceremony said: “We are here for two reasons, to say that as mothers we share the grief of those that have lost their loved ones and we salute the loyalty of those men and women that have laid down their lives for our country.
“Secondly we are here to say loud and clear to those extremists that would exploit that grief, you’re not one of us, you don’t represent us.”
But according to the very Goyish Richard Seymour:
This is a ‘positive’ news story about Muslims in the way that a certain kind of supremacist ideology sometimes condescends to its victims. It is also, indirectly, yet another story that venerates ‘the troops’, corroborating the ersatz charisma of people who are basically bureaucrats with weapons.
We have a tendency to speak of the troops either as brave volunteers or as tragic conscripts. In fact, they are more like mercenary traffic wardens with a license to kill, in that their job is to resolve administrative and territorial problems with the skilled application of violence – in this case, the problem is how to control insubordinate population groups and bring Afghanistan fully under the sovereign authority of NATO and its patrimonial client-state. The sick martial fetishism and the rituals that eulogise such evil banality, lathering on about ‘sacrifice’ and ‘courage’ and other soap-on-a-rope virtues, is intended to obscure this mundane reality.
Yes, he really wrote that. Isn’t it usual practice among the hard Left to denounce the military as an institution while expressing a degree of sympathy for ordinary soldiers? None of that for Seymour– to hell with all of them, regardless of who they are, what they believe or what they are doing.
Thousands of men and women from all walks of life volunteering to serve their imperfect but democratic country and putting their lives on the line to help prevent the return to power of a brutal, reactionary, deeply misogynist movement in Afghanistan? Of course Seymour despises them.
