David Vance SubstackRead More
“In the city I live in, hunger is a nightly guest in hundreds of thousands of homes. Children roam the streets in freezing cold, barefoot, barely clothed, picking through plastic bottles and trash just to buy a single loaf of bread.
Sometimes, they fight over a bottle, because survival doesn’t wait for kindness. Look into their eyes—grief and anger are locked together, burning quietly. Their homes are cold and dark. Illness sweeps through the family, but there is no money for medicine, not even for a single paracetamol. Sisters, mothers, grandmothers—they have never known warmth, comfort, or dignity. And when they see someone walking by in shoes and clean clothes, longing devours them piece by piece. Yet they thank God anyway. They endure. They are told: the first to enter heaven will be the ones like you.
Meanwhile, on the same streets, the Taliban and clerics parade in polished cars, pressed clothes, shining beards. They load their vehicles with the finest fruits, flaunt wealth, and even charge money for mosque toilets. Drugs, weapons, mines, transport—all theirs. Sometimes, they don’t even know what to do with the mountains of cash they’ve stolen from life itself. Their villas tower over the city. Luxury and lust have swallowed them whole. Yet they claim to care for our souls.
Meanwhile, small businesses that kept the poor alive—rickshaws, carts, market stalls—are crushed one by one. Thousands more fall into poverty, trapped, voiceless. They write laws that divide society: the poor, the untouchables; themselves, the elite and clerics. Justice is double-faced. Their crimes earn polite advice. Ours earn prison, torture, stoning, flogging, execution. I cannot understand the God they claim to serve. Who could?
The mass deportation of millions of Afghan migrants from Pakistan and Iran, coupled with closed borders, has stripped millions of Afghans of any chance at a dignified life. The system that engineered this horror calls itself the “Islamic Emirate.” Their Islam is a machine of suffering. It spreads humiliation, fear, and numbness like a drug across the land, taking the hearts and minds of millions hostage. Do not let this ideology spread. Stop it by every means you have. Help the people of Afghanistan resist. Fight it. Crush it in its birthplace. No to Islamism. No to Jihadism.
