I just caught a snippet of some news story. The jist is that members of the Taliban may have been trying to claim asylum in the UK. The Home Office have apparently made some statement which basically says that their policy is based on the 1951 Refugee Convention and terrorists need not apply since refusal often offends.
Now this is where things get tricky. It's true that we've been at war with the Taliban regime but we've not actually called them terrorists yet. We talk about their links with terrorist groups it's true, but given that they were a government until very recently if we start calling anything they did then terrorism a lot of governments will find themselves tarred with the same brush.
Moving on let's look at the way we in the West like regimes to change. Aside from the smart bombs and such we usually like an inside group of dissenters to help out. A group of people with guns and bombs trying to overthrow the government, or at the very least change some policy. Now if anyone tries to label the activities of such groups they are often Freedom Fighters or something equally decent and righteous. Well, we say that about people doing such things in countries where we don't really like the government anyway. When things get a little closer to home our Freedom Fighters become scum-sucking terrorists.
It's nice to see that even after everything we haven't let our double-standards slip.
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