A couple of years ago, my best friend Sean Langan was kidnapped by the Taliban while making a documentary for Channel 4 in Pakistan. During his three-month ordeal he was interrogated by his captors many times and he was often surprised by what they wanted him to confess to. One subject they kept returning to were the moon landings. They refused to believe that America had put men on the moon and, again and again, they tried to browbeat him into admitting that NASA's programme of manned space flight had been an elaborate hoax.
Why did this matter to them? Sean's theory is that the moon landings are clear evidence of the superiority of everything the Taliban are opposed to -- of reason over revelation, of democracy over theocracy, of science over superstition. In it's original conception, NASA's Apollo Programme was supposed to be an advertisement for the superiority of America to the Soviet Union -- a Cold War propaganda exercise -- but in the eyes of these Islamist terrorists it also served to discredit America's current enemies. Their response was to insist the moon landings hadn't happened. (To read more, click here.)
