Afghan poppy crop

Tackling the growing of poppies in Afghanistan is a difficult problem. The current plan which is to spray herbicides is unlikely to have any lasting impact. It will have little impact anyway, since the spraying will of necessity be at low level, using relatively light aircraft. These will be extremely vulnerable to being shot down. You are likely to run out of aircraft and willing pilots before even a fraction of the many square miles of poppy crop has been sprayed. The exercise must be repeated year after year to have any significant impact.

Given the vast acreages, it is necessary to use a fleet of heavy-lift aircraft such as the Hercules. The size of the problem is simply too great to be tackled by light aircraft. To reduce the risk of being shot down, the Hercules would need to fly at a reasonable altitude, say 10000 feet or above. Unfortunately, any herbicide sprayed from that altitude is liable to have evaporated and dispersed long before it reaches the ground. (Possibly you could spray herbicide from some altitude, if you do so whilst it is raining. The rain would carry it to the ground level. It would however be necessary to fly at or below cloudbase, which is likely to be a vulnerable height. Additionally, the herbicide may be rendered ineffective, if the rain is too heavy, since it would simply be washed off the leaves. It may be worth considering, but as a stop-gap approach, to destroy a crop that is already established.)

Here is a workable solution:

Simply stated: From a safe height, dispense a combination of salt and rape seed from the back of a fleet of Hercules aircraft. As both of these are solids, they will reach the ground, in most weather conditions. Since rape plants are members of the brassica family, they are easily able to grow in salty soil. Poppies are not in the brassica family, and are weakened and stunted by salt, if they grow at all. Unlike herbicides, the salt in the soil will remain active for some time, until it is eventually washed away.

The rape seeds are small. However, each rape plant grows into quite a good sized bush, some 5 feet high. It should easily out-compete the poppy plants near it, particularly if they are weakened by the salt. Each rape plant produces a large number of seeds, which would produce a much denser ground cover in the following year. Taking the land out of use for poppy growing in this way has some chance of success. Spraying herbicide is too high-tech, and requires too much infrastructure and support for it to work effectively over the vast areas involved.

The rape plants can be harvested and used for cooking oil production. Salting the land does not make it completely useless for growing other crops. Any plants in the brassica family should be OK. This includes food crops such as cabbage or sprouts etc, so this approach will not result in starvation of the population.

Incentives could be given to the farmers to grow and harvest the rape seeds, which would then be used to curtail poppy growing in other districts.

This is a possible solution to one particular problem. However western civilisation is under much greater threat than that due to a small percentage of the population who are involved in drugs. Tackling the drugs problem is worthwhile for the sake of those who get sucked into it, but also as it fuels the crime wave.

No, the greatest threat is from Islam itself. In a survey last year, 53 percent of the respondents consider that Islam itself is a threat to democracy and our way of life. Unfortunately our political leaders are somewhat behind the public understanding on this issue.

Tony Blair appears to have little depth of understanding. Following the London bombings, he stated:

"We will start to beat this when we stand up and confront the ideology of this evil. Not just the methods but the ideas."

That is a valid point. However, more recently Blair has stated:

"The most remarkable thing about reading the Koran – in so far as it can be truly translated from the original Arabic - is to understand how progressive it is.

What utter tripe!

It is high time that our politicians fully grasped the truth about Islam, as the general public are ahead of them on this issue. Do they understand the concept of "abrogation"? Blair clearly does not.

If you will but read the Quran, with an understanding of abrogation, you will clearly see that the Quran is at the root of encouraging, condoning and glorifying Islamic terrorism. It also clearly states that Muslims cannot integrate with the rest of society. Why are our politicians so blind not to see this?

Here are a couple of quotes, by way of example. There are many others that are equally disturbing:

"When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them." Quran 8.12

"O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil)." Quran 9.123

"O Prophet! urge the believers to war; if there are twenty patient ones of you they shall overcome two hundred, and if there are a hundred of you they shall overcome a thousand of those who disbelieve, because they are a people who do not understand." Quran 8.65

It is high time that our politicians demonstrated that they have a true understanding of Islam, and the bloodthirsty nature of the Quran. You will have no chance of beating the "ideology of this evil", until you understand the true nature of the ideology itself.

Following 9/11, Salman Rushdie wrote an article with the title "Yes, This Is About Islam". This article should be required reading. It can be found here:

www.faithfreedom.org


Humanity needs peace not Islam.