PBS FRONTLINE apparently had Afghani tortured to "protect children"

FOREWORD:
I'm no apologist for the mujahedeen - I vigourously defended the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan back in 1979 - I was then a member of the Trotskyist "Spartacist Youth League" - and at the time we said "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!", recognizing that in the struggle between the pro-USSR Stalinist Afghan government and the CIA backed mujaheddin, the working people had to take a side - against the woman-hating mullahs and their CIA controllers. Women's rights, principally, were at stake and the woman question was starkly posed back then - as it is now - in Afghanistan. The CIA-backed, ignorant Islamic fundamentalist forces won - because the modernizing Afghan government was betrayed by the Moscow Stalinists, who were themselves seeking a way out from under their increasingly oppressive "burden" of defending the world's first workers state from the anti-Communist attacks of the Reagan Administration and their NATO allies. We all know what the defeat of the USSR-backed Afghan government meant: the immediate enslavement of every Afghani woman, and the destruction of the society, throwing Afghanistan back to the conditions of the 7th century.

In the Soviet Union, too, the surrender of the decrepit Stalinist ruling clique presaged the descent of the USSR's working class into horrible poverty and unemployment - a collapse that saw the life expectancy of workers in the former USSR fall by more than a decade!

I do not pretend that there are no cases of child abuse in Afghanistan - in fact I would believe that it is practically impossible for anything that Westerners would consider to be a "normal childhood" is possible for Afghan youth under the onslaught of the imperialist war being waged there. The "bacha bazi" system is certainly capable of producing horrendous cases of child exploitation and abuse - as is the traditional "nuclear family" system in the West. In the US, it has long been reported that 75% of all cases of child abuse occur in the home - the abusers most commonly being fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, etc.

What I object to is the concept, prevalent in all anti-sex circles, and most predominantly in the rabid "anti-pedophilia" ranks of the Western countries, that asserts that EVERY sexual relationship between consenting individuals of divergent ages MUST BE BY THEIR VERY NATURE abusive and exploitative. THAT is purest bullshit, and these intergenerational sex-hating morons are ruining the lives of millions of basically decent working people all over the globe in their overzealous crusade to stamp out sexual practices that are as natural as a sunrise - and without which, the human race itself would never have survived.

- Varlet


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I just finished watching "FRONTLINE"'s virlulently homophobic "documentary" "The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan". This is not only a vicious attack on sexual practices that have been around for at least since the founding of Western Civilization (in fact, adults having sex with "children" is the sole reason why human beings were able to become the dominant species on this planet!); not only a thinly-veiled attack on same-sex and intergenerational relationships in the Third World (i.e., more that HALF the world's population); it is the very first time that I know of where a "news organization" had someone TORTURED in order to obtain "proof" of child abuse! Yes, believe it or not, "FRONTLINE had a musician tortured by Afghan "authorities" in order to "protect" a young man from an education in music and dance (and possibly some sex with adults)!

Not only that: this entire story seems quite probably to be completely concocted by one Najibullah Quraishi, a so-called "journalist" working in Afghanistan. Najibullah and FRONTLINE claim to be investigating allegations that so-called "Bacha Bazi" or "Boy play" dancers are systematiccaly being raped by men in Afghanistan. Never mind that tens if not hundreds of thousands of children have been murdered by the US bombings of Afghanistan since 1979 - never mind that predator drones are slaughtering hundreds of Afghan and Pakistani children as I write this - never mind that hundreds of children have been murdered and maimed by US-laid land mines and cluster bombs which have been laid and dropped by the hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan - we are supposed to believe that the worst thing that is happening to children in Afghanistan today is that they are being trained as musicians and dancers to perform for mostly male audiences - and to have sex, occasionally, with adult men!

Never mind that the FRONTLINE producers were not able to produce a single first-hand account of any young man being actually raped by anyone. They rely entirely on secondhand and thirdhand evidence for their wild assertions. Never mind that families of these children are driven by poverty so horrible that they are forced to sell their own children into servitude (wasn't this the practice in Europe and the US in the 18th and 19th centuries as well? Remember child labor in American textile factories and coal mines?) in order to keep their families alive; FRONTLINE would have you believe that this ancient Afghani practice is some recent invention of the US-backed warlords and the current Afghan government of Hamid Karzai and his opium- dealing brother!

First of all, let's get something straight, FRONTLINE: sexual use of children wasn't invented in Afghanistan in 2004. This has been going on in Western civilizations since day 1. The Greeks practiced man-boy love as did the Romans; as has the Roman Catholic priesthood since Catholicism was adopted by the Roman Emperor. The United States fought a war against the Russian-backed Afghan Government in the 80's - a government that was dedicated to bringing Afghanistan into the 20th century, by defending women's rights and fighting to eradicate backward practices like "buying" boys from their impoverished parents. In that war, the US intervened ON BEHALF of the mujaheddin warlords who are solely responsible for the resurgence of Bacha Bazi. So let's please not wax indignant about backward practices that would have been wiped out 25 years ago if not for the intervention on the side of the practitioners of "bacha bazi" of the Reagan Administration's "Holy Warriors" against Communism!

Secondly: It should be noted that "children" were legally allowed to have sex with adults in the US until *very* recently. It is only since the Reagan anti-sex witchhunt that the US has been on a worldwide crusade against what it terms "pedophilia". Historically, though, "pedophilia" was legal in every state in the US from the 1600s until the early 1960s. Ask your grandparents how old they or THEIR parents were when they married! In some states, the "age of consent" was as low as EIGHT until the second half of the twentieth century! Is it legitimate for the US, which has only recently "discovered" that ANY sexual relationship between an adult and a "child" MUST BE BY ITS VERY NATURE ABUSIVE to ban this very same practice all over the world? Is it legitimate that the US should unilaterally indict as "repulsive, abhorrent and unnatural" the relationships between tens or hundreds of millions of consenting individuals around the globe?

I also accuse FRONTLINE of having instigated the torture - or at least the "agressive interrogation" (same thing) - of an Afghan musician by the Afghani authorities so as to "protect the interests" of a child who was sold by his own family into indentured servitude in order to earn money for his poverty-stricken family. There is no evidence produced in the FRONTLINE documentary to show that this young boy was ever sexually abused; yet the FRONTLINE producers, in their zeal to "protect" this poverty-stricken child from being taught how to play stringed instruments and how to dance in front of all-male audiences, had his music teacher TORTURED in order to find out where the child had run away to, so that FRONTLINE could relocate the child and his entire family to a frigid mountain region in another province, where the child was receiving NO education of any kind, and was in the care of a man who may or not have been his father. FRONTLINE's producers PAID CASH to the family for interviews and PAID CASH to the family to enroll the boy in a school - in a country where "school" means a madrassa, or Islamic school, where the boy will study the Koran - and NOTHING ELSE!

FRONTLINE turns a blind eye to the US/NATO murders of tens of thousands of children over the past decades; it turns a blind eye to the abject poverty that forces parents to sell their children into indentured servitude; it turns a blind eye to the BRUTAL OPPRESSION OF WOMEN IN AFGHANISTAN! No! To the producers of FRONTLINE, those are not the worst aspects of life in Afghanistan today
- it is the fact that perhaps a few hundred teenagers (and some younger boys) might be living as paid concubines with men in Afghanistan! Oh, HORROR! And we have the testimony of a music teacher we had tortured at OUR INSTIGATION, says FRONTLINE, to PROVE IT!

Here are some excerpts from the FRONTLINE "documentary", with timestamps taken from the online version of the show, available at  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/dancingboys/view/? utm_campaign=homepage&utm_medium=proglist&utm_source=proglist I have added my comments, in brackets.

Radhika Coomaraswamy - UN Special Rep. for Children and Armed Conflict:

24:51 "It's a disgusting practice. You saw that boy's face - that was one taken in that car - it was complete, trusting innocence; I mean, it's just absolutely horrific. It's a form of slavery [no it isn't - they get PAID! And by this definition of slavery, all exploitation of workers could be called slavery.] ... um, you know... taking a child, keeping him... it's, it's a form of sexual slavery. We have to ensure that we take them out of that reality because it's terribly exploitative of them."

Here are some excerpts of the interviews broadcast on "FRONTLINE"'s documentary "The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan"

25:50 Narrator: "That's where Najibullah [the FRONTLINE reporter] met Abdullah, just 13."

Najibullah: "How did you start?"

Abdullah: "I had a passion for it. I learned to dance myself."

Narrator: "Abdullah's owner and Raffi, sat nearby, listening to the interview."

Najibullah: "What does your family say about these dancing parties?" [That's a nice hurtful question to ask this kid]

Abdullah: "My family doesn't know."

Najibullah: "They don't know?"

Abdullah: "No."

Najibullah: "Your friends and peers?"

Abdullah: "They don't know anything either, they don't need to know." [Well they know NOW, because you've just been OUTED by FRONTLINE!"]

32:36
The only story we are told about a specific incident where a boy is murdered is one in which the family of the murdered boy claims that a police officer was involved in the boy's assassination. I's a story about a 15-year old "boy", Hafiz. Calling him a "boy" in a country where the life expectancy is 35 for men, is something of an exaggeration. In the US, he's the equivalent of a 30-year old.
35:05 -
Hafiz' brother, Jawad: "One of the men (who raped and killed Hafiz), named Ahmadullah, was a policeman. He supplied the gun to kill my brother."

Reporter (Najibullah): "He [Ahmadullah] brought the gun"?

Jawad: "He brought the gun from the police station. It was Ahmadullah."

Narrator: "Jawad and his mother say that Ahmadullah, the policeman, was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison. But just a few months later, he was released. They said local people belive that Hafiz' former owner paid off the authorities."

Hafiz' mother: "If only these people were punished, this kind of thing wouldn't happen. Whoever commits these crimes doesn't get punished. Power is Power."
[So it was not, in this case, the "predators" who killed this young boy, but the Afghan police! So, how does this awkward turn of events affect your thesis, FRONTLINE? Oh, I see: just use some fancy footwork and move on to another line of questioning!]


37:34
[Interview with Shafiq's father]

Barat: "My name is Barat. I'm from Sharekhana province."

Reporter (Najibullah): "Is this your son?"

Barat: "Yes, and he's been away for about a year."

Najibullah: "What's the benefit of giving them your son?"

Barat: "Well, they send some income for the boy."

Najibullah: "They give you money?"

Barat: "Yes, they give us money."

Najibullah: "When he is far away, do you miss him?"

Barat: "Of course we miss him, but times are bad. We have no choice. We see him once a month."

Najibullah: "Do you know what happens to him?"

Barat: "We know, but, well, he's a boy. Whatever happens will pass."

Najibullah: "What does his mother say about it?"

Barat: [I guessed what his response to this idiotic question would be...] "His mother has no choice. If I say so, she has to accept."

Najibullah: "Are you not afraid Dastager sleeps with your son?"

Barat: "No, I trust Dastager."

[And there you have it. The extreme poverty in Afghanistan impels parents to sell their children off in servitude to rich people who promise to take good care of their children and perhaps teach them a trade. If they have sex with their children, so be it: "[They are children.] Whatever happens will pass." This is not an attitude that compares to the very recent attitude of Western society.]

40:10
[We see Najibullah, the reporter, hastily packing his bags, knowing that since he has betrayed the trust of Dastager, his life and the lives of his camera crew, the boy and the boy's entire family are in extreme danger - nice work, FRONTLINE!]

Najibullah (hurriedly packing his clothes into a knapsack): "Suddenly, the boy - the young boy - disappeared, and we asked Dastager to take us back to [Takhar?], and Dastager refused... and he said he doesn't want to filming anymore. So this is the time for us to leave the country.


[OH MY FUCKING GOD!! READ THIS NEXT SECTION!! FRONTLINE HAD THE MUSICIAN, RAFI TORTURED BY AFGHAN POLICE IN ORDER TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BOY SHAFIQ!!

44:30:

Narrator: "Then Mastari used his contacts with Afghan authorities to push for Rafi to be interrogated. [!!!] Under pressure [!!!], Rafi finally [!!!] admitted that he and Dastager had made up the whole story about the accident, to avoid giving up the boy. Shafiq was alive, somewhere near Takhar." [So Rafi, Shafiq's music teacher, was "interrogated" "under pressure" by "Afghan authorities" for a long time until "finally" he "admitted" that Dastager had "refused to give up the boy" - which, it turns out, isn't even true! Rafi, under torture, "admitted" a lie! In fact, Shafiq had run away, and neither Rafi nor Dastager knew where he was!]

Yastari: "We had contacts and friends put pressure on Rafi. He finally [!!!] gave us an adress in a district called Farkhar. It's a place in Takhar region. That's where he said Shafiq was. Finally, we found the boy there, and gave him back to his parents in the presence of witnesses."

So, "the authorities", in order to protect the boy Shafiq from earning money to support his family, ship the WHOLE FAMILY off to another province of Afghanistan!

Narrator: "In February, Najibullah came back to Afghanistan. He'd been assured that the boy was safe. The authorities had intervened, and helped relocate his family [read: forced his family to relocate!] to another region [!!!] of Afghanistan

Yastari: "We arranged to get some money for them. It was around $1,800.00. I collected some of it from friends, and some of it came from me. This way, he can restart his life and live comfortably. We want him to live in a province where no one can find him."

Narrator: "In a long, secretive journey, Mastari took Najibullah to a mountain village far from Takhar; a location we've also had to disguise. There had always been a worry about returning the boy to his father; but, getting to the village, Najibullah was surprised to discover that he [Shafiq's "father"] was a different man than the one he had interviewed months earlier. [!!!]

Najibullah: "Are you Shafiq's father?"

"Father": "Yes".

Najibullah: "When we came before, Rafi and Dastager introduced someone else as his father."

"Father": "I wasn't there at the time. He was the boy's uncle."

Najibullah: "Can you give us proof that Shafiq is your son?"

"Father" (reaches into his pocket automatically - this scene appears to have been rehearsed): "Yes, this proves that Shafiq is our son."

Najibullah: "What is it?"

"Father": It's an ID card."

Narrator: "Convinced he was indeed Shafiq's father, Najibullah told the family he had brought additional funds: personal contributions from the producers and "Frontline" staff to help the family resettle, and see that Shafiq gets an education." [!!! FRONTLINE PAID CASH FOR THESE INTERVIEWS!!! GOODBYE "OBJECTIVITY!"]

Najibullah: "Does Shafiq go to school?"

"Father": "He hasn't attended school yet. But now, as our living conditions are much better, he will go to school." [Really? Where? He had been learning music and dance. Now he'll be enrolled in a Madrassah, and taught nothing but radical Islam? Great job, Frontline! He has a wonderful future ahead of him as a woman-hating mujaheddin!]

[The next scene is of Najibullah and Shafiq sitting together in the same room, wearing the same clothing, apparently just moments after Shafiq's "father" just stated that Shafiq had not attended school yet.]

Najibullah: "How do you feel about being back with your parents?"

Shafiq: "I feel good."

Najibullah: "Have you started school or any courses yet?"

Shafiq: "Yes." [!!!] "I'm doing an English course." [This, of course, totally contradicts the testimony of the "father", taken just a few minutes before or after this interview took place. Was FRONTLINE scammed by Najibullah Quraishi? Who did the translations?]

Najibullah: "An English course?"

Shafiq: "Yes." [How nice and convenient! Good luck finding an English teacher in that mountainous village in Afghanistan!]

Najibullah: "What do you want to become in the future?"

Shafiq: "My wish is to study in school. I want to become a doctor in the future. I want to be able to help other boys, to improve their futures."

[FRONTLINE: Setting a new standard for journalism: we'll go to ANY LENGTH to pursue a story; even if we have to have someone tortured to get it!
There needs to be a serious investigation into this sordid tale to see what was really going on. A boy with two fathers, both accepted by a "reporter" who crosses an Afghan "warlord" in a rural area - how did Najibullah and the camera crew escape? Via Blackhawk helicopter? And yet they survive and even return to Afghanistan! AMAZING! Amazingly full of shit!]

Workers of the World, Unite!

Varlet

USA