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  • 2016-03-10 (xsd:date)
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  • Is This Ronald Reagan Meeting with Taliban Leaders at the White House? (en)
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  • A photograph purportedly showing Ronald Reagan meeting with the leaders of the Taliban (Sunni Islamic fundamentalist movement) at the White House has been shared online for many years, along with a purported laudatory quote from the 40th U.S. president, These Gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's Founding Fathers: This enduring meme is wrong on more than one account. The group pictured here are not Taliban leaders, the photograph was not taken in 1985, and Reagan did not compare the pictured group to America's Founding Fathers. (In this particular meme, even the name Reagan is misspelled.) According to the Ronald Reagan Library, the above-displayed photograph was taken in 1983, and it captures then-president Reagan meeting with Afghan rebel leaders to discuss the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. While the Reagan administration did help fund and equip the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (and rebel groups elsewhere) so that they could fight against the Soviet occupation, it is inaccurate to say that the former president met with the Taliban, as at that point that group did not exist: The quote frequently attached to this photograph is a paraphrased version of something said by President Reagan, but he was not speaking about either the Taliban or Afghan opposition groups at the time. He made the comment about contra rebels in Nicaragua during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1985: (en)
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