Well, this didn’t take long at all. On Tuesday I noted that Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said: “We are going to allow women to work and study, women are going to be very active in society… we guarantee all their rights within the limits of Islam.” With admirable dispatch, the Taliban on the very same day indelibly illustrated how strictly those “limits of Islam” would be enforced. Fox News reported, also on Tuesday, that “fighters from the group shot and killed a woman in Takhar province after she went out in public without a burqa.”

No one should have been surprised, although some people undoubtedly were. The familiar wishful thinking and willful blindness are already appearing in establishment media circles. Wednesday on CNN, Christiane Amanpour, eager as always to be told soothing falsehoods, interviewed Saad Mohseni, director of the MOBY Group, which describes itself as operating in “South & Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa.”

“Headquartered in Dubai, the group employs over 1,200 individuals across 16 businesses,” and says it “has been widely recognized for its role in bringing news and entertainment to underserved populations.” The MOBY Group website also notes that Mohseni was “named one of 10 men fighting for gender equality by BBC 100 Women 2015.”

Mohseni told Amanpour: “Can the real Taliban stand up please? You have different factions, you have different wings… so we’re not even sure which part of the Taliban will prevail. Will the moderates prevail or will the more conservative ones prevail? It’s too early to tell.” Back in the real world, that is, the part that isn’t reported by CNN, this is arrant nonsense.

There has been no evidence whatsoever of “moderate” wings of the Taliban, and any internal differences within the group are not likely to involve issues of women’s rights or relations with non-Muslim entities, as the Taliban’s stance on such matters is entirely dictated by the parameters of Islamic law.

Of course, Amanpour and her colleagues don’t have the faintest idea what Islamic law teaches, and even if they did, would dismiss even explicit teachings from the Qur’an and Sunnah as “extremist” and “fringe” and assume, without the slightest shred of evidence, that the vast majority of devout, knowledgeable and Sharia-adherent Muslims reject those teachings.

Amanpour and her ilk cling to their fantasies about moderate Taliban factions and moderates among the Iranian mullahs just as tenaciously as they cling to their wholly baseless imaginings of the true, peaceful teachings of Islam that somehow elude the Taliban, and ISIS, and al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram, and all the rest, despite dedicating their lives to understanding Islam properly and implementing its laws faithfully.

There is more.