The Tail of Two Taliban

Banning Flying Kites

The Tail of Two Taliban

Kites flown by Palestinian children in Gaza are now threatening Israel’s national security and becoming a pretext for Israelis to further air strikes on Gaza that haven’t stopped for three years. The ceasefire has been a one-sided one. Palestinian children flying paper kites now are used as justification for further strikes, destruction, and displacement. The Jewish state displaced almost 600 villages and displaced an estimated 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.  Now, the modern Jewish Taliban, Netanyahu and his goons, and the Defense Minister Israel Katz held a special meeting on Sunday with the Israeli military chief of staff, the head of the National Security Council, and other officials, regarding the kites. Katz said he had directed Israeli forces to respond “forcefully” to the launches and to take steps to stop them, classifying them as an “act of war” and treating them the same as drones. Over the years of Israel’s siege on Gaza, which started in 2007, the kite has become a symbol of freedom for Palestinians, especially children, in the Strip. In 2010, thousands of Palestinian children flew kites on Gaza’s beach as part of UNRWA’s Summer Games, setting a new world record for the most kites flown simultaneously. Reported by the Middle East Eye. According to the Jewish Taliban, which has killed thousands of Palestinian children in its genocide, now kite flying would include targeting those “responsible for the launches” and displacing residents from neighborhoods where the kites were launched.

The Jewish Taliban declared jihad against kite flying; this is not getting coverage from Western media, and if it did, it usually comes with the rational justification of an Israeli security threat, and Israel had the right to defend itself caveat. The world was made aware of the Taliban against kite flying in Afghanistan when a few years ago, the Guardian came up with a headline that alarmed us of the Taliban oppressive version of Islamic rule, they mistreat women, and they banned children from flying kites in Kabul. The Guardian coverage of solidarity with Afghan children with London kite celebrations was a front-page story.  

“The Colorful kites fill London sky in solidarity with people of Afghanistan.” … “The kite-flying celebration was organized by the Good Chance theatre, which describes itself as “the theatre of hope” and put on a similar event last August across 15 cities in the UK as an “act of defiance” “Hordes of colorful kites soared into the sky over London in solidarity with the people of Afghanistan on the second anniversary of the fall of their homeland to the Taliban. “Talibanned’: From kite-running to breakdancing, Afghan pastimes again under threat,”  France24 reported.  The art of making and flying kites using colored tissue paper and bamboo sticks is a traditional part of Afghan culture but was denounced by the Taliban as un-Islamic and banned during their rule,” explained The Guardian. “One of the more important parts of our Afghan culture is these amazing multi-coloured kites and we fly them, make them, design them since we were children,” 24-year-old Afghan refugee Amir Hussain Ibrahimi told the PA news agency. The Taliban did not just ban women from schools, impose the burqa and outlaw smartphones. The Taliban built a system that enslaves nearly half the country’s population, reported the Guardian. When the Taliban regime fell in 2001, the sudden return of colorful kites to the skies over Kabul and other cities became an iconic global image of regained freedom and resilience. It took five presidents, George W. Bush (who launched the invasion in 2001), Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and 20 years of wars, $2 trillion, and millions killed, to bring back the Taliban to Afghanistan. The liberal feminists jumped up and down and stamped their chests, pulled their hair, condemning the patriarchal Islamic regime that is abusing women and restricting their inspirations. The Malala cult filled the airwaves and social media with interviews, books, and movies propagating an Islamic anti-women narrative. When British–Indian writer Salman Rushdie received a death fatwa after publishing the most boring novel, the Satanic Verses, Western liberals and intellectuals, and human rights groups got to work, protested, and formed live book clubs around the world to read his overrated novel. When an Egyptian-Turkish poet and activist, Abdulrahman Youssef al-Qaradawi, was arrested and subjected to enforced disappearance after his extradition from Lebanon to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on January 8, 2025. The son of Youssef al-Qaradawi, an exceptionally prominent and highly influential Egyptian-born Islamic scholar and theologian, vanished in UAE prisons, where reports of his torture and deteriorating health. No reading of his poems, no book-signing groups, no movies, and no mentions of his savage mistreatment by UAE security. The West seems to focus more on the Afghan Taliban anti-children, anti-fun ideology,  and looks the other way when it comes to the Jewish Taliban atrocities, which are anti-life for the Palestinians; the Jewish Taliban have been committing genocide in Gaza, destroying 90% of the besieged city. And according to data from the Gaza Health Ministry and comprehensive international tracking, directly, 74,500 Palestinians have been killed, alongside over 169,000 injured. The atrocities of the Jewish Taliban are ignored and looked at as aberrations; a Netanyahu thing, but the Afghan Taliban atrocities are amplified, as cultural and Islamic!