Evil is as evil does...

One of the big stories over the weekend, apparently (as I was off the grid and not paying attention) was the murder of 10 UN workers in Afghanistan, ostensibly in response to the burning of a Koran by a preacher in Florida. I've thought about weighing in, and really hadn't had the time, but now I've seen another story which relates to it, and I want to comment.

The first point is that the "minister" in question is not someone I'd follow. His stunt - and that's all it was - serves no useful purpose. It's just small-minded and intentionally antagonistic. You'd go all the way through the Gospels searching in vain for justification for his act.

The second point is that this guy is an absolute nobody, and this is a story for one reason and one reason only - the media in this country thinks that all Christians are racist, homophobic, intolerant, hayseed fundamentalist bumpkins, and this event fits the media's preconceptions perfectly. It's not about story - it's all about storyline.

The first two points lead me to point three - Terry Jones and the media bear no - zip, zero, nada, none - no responsibility for the murder of those workers. The culpability for those worker's deaths lies 100% with the Muslim pigs that murdered them. There is no sharing of the blame pie. Even if this nobody in Florida burning a book, and the mainstream amplifying that event to create the illusion that this is a big deal in America, warranted a response, the response it warrants is clearly not multiple murders. What those animals did was validate Terry Jones' opinion of them and their prophet and their scripture. I've said before that Muslims themselves are the source of any anti-Muslim sentiment, and that won't change until Muslims change it.

Having said that, here's another story that confirms everything that I just wrote.
Suicide bombers kill 30 at Pakistani shrine

MULTAN, Pakistan (AP) - A pair of suicide bombers struck a shrine in Pakistan Sunday, killing 30 people gathered there and pressing a campaign of attacks against places of worship that extremists consider un-Islamic, officials said.

The practice of praying, singing and meditating at the shrines of holy men is widespread and much loved across Pakistan, but extremists consider it a dangerous deviation from the austere Islam they espouse.

Several thousand people were attending celebrations to mark the anniversary of the Sakhi Sarwar shrine in Dera Ghazi Khan district of Punjab province when the bombers struck crowds outside the complex, said government administrator Iftikhar Saho.

A stampede followed the bombings, but it was unclear whether that caused any casualties.

Emergency coordinator Natiq Hayat said 30 people were killed and 100 wounded, 20 of them critically.

There's a line in the film "When Harry Met Sally" that "women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place." The people we're at war with, the enemies of civilization, don't need a reason to kill the infidel, they just need a place and a weapon and an infidel. If tossed a morsel like Mr. Jones' Koran burning, they'll pretend to use it, but they don't need it. If it wasn't that, it would have been something else...

George W. Bush is not the enemy...

...and all cultures are not equally worthy of respect. And, while I feel obligated to acknowledge that not all Muslims, or even most, believe in this, it is the Muslim community that needs to fix it, and until it does, until the clerics who recommend this kind of behavior are ostracized instead of revered, the deference it warrants, and should expect, is limited.

Only 14, Bangladeshi girl charged with adultery was lashed to death

Many months later on a winter night, as Hena's sister Alya told it, Hena was walking from her room to an outdoor toilet when Mahbub Khan gagged her with cloth, forced her behind nearby shrubbery and beat and raped her.

Hena struggled to escape, Alya told CNN. Mahbub Khan's wife heard Hena's muffled screams and when she found Hena with her husband, she dragged the teenage girl back to her hut, beat her and trampled her on the floor.

The next day, the village elders met to discuss the case at Mahbub Khan's house, Alya said. The imam pronounced his fatwa. Khan and Hena were found guilty of an illicit relationship. Her punishment under sharia or Islamic law was 101 lashes; his 201.

Mahbub Khan managed to escape after the first few lashes.

Darbesh Khan and Aklima Begum had no choice but to mind the imam's order. They watched as the whip broke the skin of their youngest child and she fell unconscious to the ground.

"What happened to Hena is unfortunate and we all have to be ashamed that we couldn't save her life," said Sultana Kamal, who heads the rights organization Ain o Shalish Kendro.

Bangladesh is considered a democratic and moderate Muslim country, and national law forbids the practice of sharia. But activist and journalist Shoaib Choudhury, who documents such cases, said sharia is still very much in use in villages and towns aided by the lack of education and strong judicial systems.

...

Guilty, they said, of having an affair with a married man. The imam from the local mosque ordered the fatwa, or religious ruling, and the punishment: 101 lashes delivered swiftly, deliberately in public.

Hena dropped after 70.

Bloodied and bruised, she was taken to hospital, where she died a week later.

Historical blindness

(...or why children should be seen and not heard...)

Several years ago, after watching a movie about the Israeli raid on the Entebbe airport, I wrote about the way that we tend to develop blind spots in relatively recent history, that make it difficult for us to discuss current events intelligently.

There are blind spots in the educational process, no matter what type of schooling you take, whether you're in the public schools, or private schools, or, like my kids, schooled at home. There's a transition period that you live through in your youth, that you live through but never learn. It's a period that is current events when you're too young to care, and not history yet when you begin to study history.

My youngest brother, who's now in his early 30s, has been working his way through college over the past decade-plus. He's also hung a lot of sheet rock and siding, covered a lot of roofs, and pulled a lot of lobster traps. Last fall, he was talking about one of his classes where a professor had been talking about the Berlin Wall, and one of the girls in the class, probably 19 or 20, had interrupted with "you keep talking about a Berlin Wall. Is this a figurative expression, or is there a real wall?" And, of course, to anyone who was of age after before 1990, it sounds like an absurd question. But if you were five years old in 1990, you weren't paying much attention to current events when the Berlin Wall fell. The Berlin Wall wasn't news when you were studying Current Events. And it was too recent to have been integrated into your history curriculum. So you've got a massive blind-spot, a perspective on the world that is un-impacted by what was a seminal event to someone just 10 years older.

I was struck by this same phenomenon again when a much younger cousin posted - un-ironically - a link on facebook to an article that is breath-takingly preposterous to anyone who grew to adulthood in the late 70s or early 80s. She's not entirely to blame - you don't know what you aren't taught - but when you don't know what you're talking about, you can end up saying some pretty stupid things. As can be seen in the story she linked. This article attributes the current "wave" of anti-Muslim bigotry to the "overwrought Reagan/Bush-era pop culture that first equated 'terrorist' with 'Muslim.'"

Why do so many like King see extremist acts by non-Muslims as mere isolated incidents that "make no sense to talk about," yet see extremist acts by Muslims as a systemic problem worthy of military invasions and now congressional witch hunts?

The short answer is 9/11 -- but that's oversimplified. Anti-Muslim sentiment was embedded in American society well before that horrific attack stoked a bigoted backlash. The real answer is connected to overwrought Reagan/Bush-era pop culture that first equated "terrorist" with "Muslim.”

[LB - Yes, that good old Republican control of Hollywood has been a problem for a long time, hasn't it? If there's one thing Reagan and Bush were known for, it was their iron-fisted control over the entertainment industry...]

As film scholar Jack Shaheen discovered in his book "Reel Bad Arabs," roughly a third of the most blatantly anti-Muslim films of the last century were made in the 1980s alone. These movies used sporadic atrocities committed by individual Islamic extremists (the Lebanon bombing, the Berlin bombing, etc.) to demonize all Muslims. Consequently, Hollywood's go-to villain in the 1980s became the Muslim terrorist -- whether it was "Iron Eagle's" unnamed Middle Eastern country or "Back to the Future's" bazooka-wielding Libyans.

There's so much wrong there that it's difficult to know where to start. It really isn't worth the effort to try to correct it - better to just dismiss it out of hand. The author may be a bright young man, he may have a future as a writer, but he don't know what he don't know.

But I do want to make a couple of observations.

The first is relatively trivial. I haven't read Jack Shaheen's book "Reel Bad Arabs" so I can't comment on whether there's some truth and accuracy to it or not. But having looked at Amazon's site for it, and having wracked my own brain for portrayals of Muslims in 1980s movies (and I saw a lot of them), I strongly suspect that, rather than an actual analysis of portrayals that revealed a bias, his "scholarship" represents a thesis in search of supporting evidence, to be noted whenever and wherever possible, no matter how tenuous¹. I strongly doubt that he "discovered" anything other than support for his own pre-existing bias.

"The Protestants hate the Catholics,
and the Catholics hate the Protestants,
and the Hindus hate the Muslims,
and everybody hates the Jews..."

- Tom Lehrer, National Brotherhood Week (1965)

Secondly, while I would never deny the presence of anti-Muslim² bigotry in this country, I am skeptical that it is a major problem. (In fact, William Bennett wrote about this just yesterday.) I see no evidence of persecution, there are no "pogroms" or mosque-burnings. I believe that you have to stretch the terms to declare that there's a wave of "anti-Muslim bigotry" in America right now.

Thirdly, even if there were, the idea that the generic throw-away terrorists in Back To The Future³ are somehow responsible is beyond laughable. (You don't suppose that the producers made them Libyan instead of, oh, Swiss, is that Libya was in the terrorism business in the early 80s, do you?) To buy that line of "thinking," you've got to say that current American attitudes toward Muslims are more heavily influenced by a few old movies than by

• 2001 - 9/11, NYC and the Pentagon hit by Islamic terrorists
• 2000 - US Cole heavily damaged by Islamic terrorists in Yemen
• 1998 - US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania destroyed by Islamic terrorists
• 1996 - Islamic terrorist explode a truck bomb at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia where US military personnel were stationed
• 1995 - Car bomb in Riyadh set off at US military headquarters by Islamic terrorists
• 1993 - First attack on the World Trade Center in NY by Islamic terrorists
• 1988 - Islamic terrorists blow up a plane traveling from Frankfort to NY over Lockerbie, Scotland
• 1986 - Libyans bomb a German disco frequented by US military personnel
• 1985 - Islamic terrorists linked to Libya take the cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean, kill one American. Hezbollah hijacks a flight from Athens to Rome and kills a Navy Seal
• 1984 - Islamic terrorists explode a truck bomb outside the US Embassy annex in Beirut, Lebanon. Later that year, more Islamic terrorists explode a car bomb at the US barracks in Beirut killing 241 American military personnel. Later that year, Islamic terrorists explode a car bomb at the US Embassy in Kuwait
• 1979 - Islamic revolutionaries take the US Embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for 444 days.

One could keep going, of course. Munich. Entebbe. Countless incidents in Israel. This is all relevant, because, while many of the "incidents" could be classified as "isolated incidents," they are all related to an ideology, to a religion which divides the world into the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-harb - the House of Islam and the House of War. There is a common driving force behind all of those events. And when you don't recognize that, you end up saying stupid things.

Things like Americans are anti-Muslim because of Back to the Future.




¹ - It seems to me that Hollywood's "go-to villains" are, and have been for a long time, white business executives, politicians and out-of-control military officers.

² - Or anti-Black. Or anti-Jewish. Or anti-female. Or anti-male. Or anti-White...

³ - The "terrorists" in that movie were a plot device. They were on screen, or mentioned, for less than two minutes total. The "villain" was a white male.

"It's never wise to satirize the Episcopal church..."

Mark Steyn points out that the parody-to-reality cycle is now down to 4 years, boding ill for the Onion, Scrappleface, and anyone else in the satire business. How do you mock an institution in which this happens?

Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill.

On Sunday mornings, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest.

She does both, she says, because she's Christian and Muslim.

Well, no, she isn't. If she's a muslim, she doesn't believe that Jesus was the Christ, the savior, anointed of God, the lamb of God sent to bear the sins of the world. If she's a Christian, she, at least theoretically, does. (She may, I suppose, be Episcopalian and muslim, but that's not the same...) There may be common beliefs, similar ideas about certain things, but at their hearts, the two faiths are fundamentally incompatible. Minors and senior citizens pay the same discount rates at the movie theater, but they aren't the same age, no matter how "young at heart" the octogenarian, or "mature for his age" the adolescent.

And the stunning logic with which she defends her position! "I am both Muslim and Christian, just like I'm both an American of African descent and a woman. I'm 100 percent both." This woman obviously never got the concepts of set-theory and mutual exclusivity...


(And it is my goal in life to, just once, write a line as good as Steyn's - "With the benefit of hindsight, it should have been obvious that the first female imam would be an Episcopalian...")