timeimmortal

Weird, I know, but there it is.

Consider, for a moment, one of the celebrities the Israelis turned over. Sumil Kuntar murdered an Israeli family including a little girl in a terror operation at Nahariya in 1979. The details are horrific, and I won’t revisit them.

On Thursday, this man told Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV network, “To tell you the truth, we envy our enemies — the way they care for a body and will go to the end of the world in order to get it back.” He added that, reading in jail, he had come to feel, by comparison, the “disregard for human beings’ value in Arab countries,” mentioning specifically Egypt’s indifferent attitude towards its own soldiers, missing in action.

I intended the paradoxical conclusion, which I invite my reader to puzzle over. Here is one terrorist who may possibly have benefited from taking stock in jail, and has at least shown a particle of real courage in mentioning something that he learned. All of Lebanon may have gone to hell, yet this one man could be worth saving.

Israel made a bad deal in releasing these five murderers back to Hezbollah, but it is perhaps hopeful to see at least one of them recognizing that his captors not only are reasonable, decent human beings, but that his own Arab and Islamic compatriots do not value human life, nor human dignity, in anywhere near the same fashion that the people of Israel do.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

As I am pretty sure I’ve said before, I really want to think better of Islam, both as a Religion and in a more general, philosophical sense. But every time I work up the nerve to maybe be a little more charitable in my assumptions, something like this crops up:

Stuff I wish I’d made up:

Saudi marriage officiant Dr. Ahmad al-Mu’bi told Lebanese television viewers last week that it’s permissible for girls as young as 1 to marry — as long as sex is postponed.

Al-Mu’bi’s remarkable comments also included an explanation that “there is no minimal age for entering marriage.”

“You can have a marriage contract even with a 1-year-old girl, not to mention a girl of 9, 7 or 8,” he said. “But is the girl ready for sex or not?” What is the appropriate age for sex for the first time? This varies according to environment and tradition,” al-Mu’bi said.

Actually, crazy may not be the best word to describe this nonsense…And these are the same clowns who call the West decadent?

If one follows the hadith (the sayings and actions of Muhammad), one could argue that the minimum age for sex is nine, since that is the age that most scholars agree the (false) prophet’s wife Aisha was when the (false) prophet “consummated” their marriage. Apparently, Aisha was six when she was wedded to the (much older — think, like, fifty) Muhammed.

How can a one year old marry? Even in Islam, the whole concept of marriage hinges, at least in part, on the mutual consent of the parties involved. And while I realize that in Islam the woman has less value and fewer (if any) rights, and so can almost be “sold” into a marriage by the consent of her parents, how could anyone honestly think that an infant is marriageable? How sick in the head does one have to be to even discuss the possibility of such a thing?

No, wait, strike that. How sick in the head does one have to be to discuss the possibility of such a thing, and then move on to a discussion about what age it is appropriate to sexually consummate the marriage…without ever mentioning an age in excess of nine years?

As I say, I really want to find a way to have a higher opinion of Islam. And yet, at every turn, it just seems to be the case that all the (false) prophet managed to establish was a weird cult obsessed with sex and death.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Let’s all watch Canada’s new favourite raving Muslim/power-generation engineer rant and rave about how great Hezbollah is, shall we? It’s another pitch-perfect piece that fuses anti-Zionism paranoia with fears of Christian conspiracy, all the while praising Hezbollah as “Lebanon’s Islamic Resistance militia” and noting their commendable “religious dedication, discipline, military skills, large public support base, high morale, good communication and [supply of the] enemy’s military information.”

Yup, he’s a Canadian. Apparently.

Over at Ace of Spades, LauraW and Ace joined the group of folks who have wondered aloud at the strange connection between engineering as an educational discipline and the tendency to become embroiled in radicalism — Ace, in particular, wonders if it’s a “personality type” issue, assuming I read him correctly. And certainly, there has been something of an established trend that has been observed in the past that suggests that engineers are prime recruiting targets for the global jihad.

It’s not hard to see why terrorist groups would want to recruit engineers — backpack nukes and Qassam rockets work so much better when someone with solid, relevant technical know-how has been involved/instrumental in their creation and setup. What’s perhaps harder to see is why engineers would be as apt as they are to sign on with the radicals.

Ace might just be on to something when he notes:

I’m asking because the engineer’s mindset — and likely then the personality type most strongly attracted to the profession — is much concerned with streamlining, simplifying, cutting through bullshit, cutting down on wasteful steps, etc. And I wonder if then doesn’t result in a tendency towards rejection of Politics entirely as simply irrelevant to one’s day-to-day life or else a strong identification with one political faction due to identifying one of any key factors (freedom, security, what have you) as primary and discarding most others as secondary at best.

Certainly, the above describes most engineers I know, including most of the ones I went to school with. But there’s a bit of a problem can emerge in all the simplifying and cutting out. Oh, one expects (as things like Dilbert have reminded us ad nauseum) a certain degree of social isolation to accompany any foray into engineering as a discipline, and certainly most of the people I went to school with could easily be said to fall under the category of “social misfit” — a category I myself an easily a part of.

There was an incident I can think of related to one engineering student in particular who wound up being banned from the University of Alberta campus, in no small part because his life had basically been trimmed to the point where all he had was his engineering, to the point of having forgotten the rules of basic human interaction. Suffice to say, he was banned for stalking a few women (some of whom I know), and I suppose that his doing so shouldn’t have come as the surprise that it did: having cut out all other aspects of normal human-to-human interactive ability from his life, he really had no idea what the proper way to express interest in a member of the opposite sex was anymore.

I think the sort of excessive social isolation that can accompany an education heavy in numbers and equations (untempered by the occasional bold expedition into writing or art) is not particularly different from the sort of social isolation that the young, exciteable men of…say…Palestine feel. Many of the same tensions are present, in fact…especially sexual tension, which fanciful tales of an endless harem of virgins in Paradise appeals to only too easily, and often with deadly results.

It’s a two-fold problem, then. On one hand, terrorist groups in need of people with solid technical training and education, who have only martyrdom and the lure of virgins in Paradise to offer. On the other hand, socially isolated, shy, technically gifted (and highly trained) professionals who’ve spent too much time in their books and wouldn’t mind a little companionship, but who may have next to no idea how to go about finding a companion.

Hmmn…and people wonder why there’s a natural connection here?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

The irony is too good to miss:

The Canadian Arab Federation has come out strongly against the Canadian government’s decision, supported by the NDP, to not participate in any way with the upcoming UN-sponsored Durban II conference on Racism. The position of the Conservative government, supported by the NDP, is that Durban II is shaping up to be an exercise in the most vile and repellent Anti-Semitism, as was experienced by the Canadian delegation that attended the Durban I conference in 2001.

The CAF has every right to take a different position. But to call Jason Kenney an Islamophobe who is contemptuous of Arabs and of Islam?

But then CAF president Khaled Mouammar, who has all sorts of links with the , declares anyone who sympathizes with Israel to be guilty complicit in war crimes.

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Mouammar was embroiled in the Liberal Party  leadership campaign, when in an attempt to derail Bob Rae’s campaign, Mouammar was linked to the infamous “Jew flyer”:

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In addition to targeting Bob Rae, Khaled Mouammar went after Gerard Kennedy for being too friendly to Jews:

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Kennedy criticizes Hizbollah and Hamas, and so earns the enmity of Khaled Mouammar.

Only leadership candidates Michael Ignatieff (who declared Israeli actions during the 2006 war in Lebanon to be war crimes) and Stephane Dion were spared being called stooges for Israel by Mouammar.

The bottom line is that anyone who expresses support for Israel is a criminal, according to Khaled Mouammar, as he explained in a letter to the Globe and Mail in December 2006.

As noted previously, I couldn’t be happier that Canada is skipping out on the next Durban conference. Although in theory, Durban is supposed to be about combatting racism on a global scale, in practice it became (back in 2001) an exercise in the very thing it supposedly existed to condemn, and there’s little doubt that it will once again turn into just that sort of shameful UN farce.

And if Canada’s refusal to participate in Durban annoys and/or angers the likes of Khaled Mouammar, then that’s just icing on an already delicious cake.

Update: Welcome, BlazingCatFur readers!

I’ve been abstaining, in recent days, from commenting on the whole Muslim cartoon controversy, primarily because I’ve been busy getting the new site operative, and also because in a realistic sense I’ve just not been up to writing about it. But I feel moved to wade in with some commentary, some comparison/contrast if you will, because of the recent (rather predictable) turn of events that has come about.

For those who have only just heard of what’s going on with these cartoons, I can recap just briefly what has happened. It began with a Danish author writing a book about the life and death of the Prophet Muhammad. He had wanted illustrations done for it, but found that nobody wanted to touch the project, nor come within ten feet of it. Not surprising — according to Islam, graphical depictions of the Prophet are haram (forbidden), and in the region around Denmark, artists who have in the past flouted the tenets of Islam, or offered direct criticism of that religion, have met with death threats, and even murder in the case of Theo Van Gogh. Many European nations, faced with stagnant birthrates of their own, have opened their doors to millions of immigrants, and many such nations now have large Muslim communities that are almost nations within themselves. This has led to any number of problems in the past: rapes committed for sectarian reasons, violence against people who criticize Islam (see above), race riots in France and Cronulla, Australia, and so forth.

And it has contributed to a climate of fear in, among other places, Denmark. That is why the Danish author could not find illustrators for his book: the artists feared a backlash from the Danish Muslim community.

As a result of this, one Danish newspaper — Jyllands-Posten — challenged artists to come up with pictures of Muhammed, and received twelve submissions. Some of them were rather lame, and others flirted with offensiveness, and one or two were kind of funny. Some of them — depicting fearful artists and violent Muslim rage at the cartoons — turned out to be rather prophetic in nature. Not that it was a hard call, I suppose. The composite image on the right is an assembled montage of all the cartoons that I cribbed off of Kathy. The pictures, clockwise from the upper right, depict the following:

• A man in a turban holding up a stick-figure sketch. I can’t remember which one is supposed to be Muhammed…but I think it’s the stick-figure. The orange ball in the turban reads “PR Stunt”.
• Muhammed, with the Islamic crescent forming the bottom of his face and the Islamic star as his right eye.
• Muhammed with a bomb for a turban.
• Muhammed with golden horns that look, from a distance, like a halo.
• A series of sketched balloons — actually the Islamic star and crescent. The words read: “Prophet! daft and dumb keeping woman under thumb”.
• A slightly frumpy Muhammed walking in the desert
• A fearful cartoonist looking over his shoulder as he draws a picture of the Prophet.
• A Muslim holding up his hand to stop two of his bretheren who are wielding swords. He is saying something in Dutch that roughly translates as “Relax folks, it is just a sketch made by a Dane from the south-west of Denmark”.
• A student named Mohammed Valloyskole standing at a blackboard. The Arabic text he has written reads “Jyllands-Posten’s journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs”.
• Muhammed, with his eyes covered by a black box, flakned by two women in full burqas.
• Muhammed greeting a line of suicide bombers in Paradise with the words: “Stop! We have run out of virgins!”
• And the middle picture, which is a line-up different people (Muhammed is second from the right, I think) and a man viewing them saying “Hmmm…I don’t recognize him”.

If you’re really curious, you can view all of the cartoons in detail here, in another posting on the site.

Okay, so these cartoons were drawn. Now what, you might ask, was the result?

Well, I said that some of the cartoons, depicting fear and backlash, were rather prophetic, didn’t I? And you may have noticed the protest rally picture that began this posting. That’s right…outrage resulted from the printing and re-printing of these cartoons. Outrage would, I suppose, have been justified, much as Christian outrage over things like Piss Christ was justified…provided that the outrage over these cartoons also took the same form as Christian outrage over Piss Christ.

Which means that boycotting art shows and writing letters of complaint would be justified. Burning embassies, making death threats against the artists and the newspaper, attacking Danish social workers in other nations, and murdering Catholic priests would not be justified. And, as Lost Budgie points out in the article concerning that priest, the cartoons are not really the incident so much as they are the reason-du-jour for violence and rampage.

Christian communities in Lebanon have been torched, allegedly because of these cartoons. What connection a Christian enclave has with Dutch secularist artists is suspect, and indeed probably does not exist. But it is as Budgie says: the cartoons are not the reason, only the thin justification. Muslim mobs can use these cartoons as the “spark” that starts the fire, but once the blaze is lit, anyone who isn’t Muslim is a legitimate target for “revenge”. That is why a Catholic priest was shot dead in Turkey, allegedly in connection with riots over these cartoons. Father Santoro’s murderer didn’t say anything about cartoons: he simply shouted “God is Great” and fired his gun…his desire was not to avenge himself upon a Dane, but instead to please Allah by slaying the infidel.

It was irresponsible of Jyllands-Posten to provoke this response, I think, but it serves to note that they do have a freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, as we ostensibly have over here as well. And the exercise thereof cannot be trodden upon to accomodate the sensibilities of any particular group…and I apply that even to my fellow Catholics. I think Piss Christ was offensive and vulgar, but I accept that the artist, being made in the image and likeness of God and therefore possessed of free will, had a right to make that picture. And even though I find it offensive and vulgar, I don’t respond by uttering death threats, or by holding up signs like these that are pictured, calling for the extermination of the artist in question, and indeed all who oppose Catholicism.

Tarek Fatah, who I mentioned previously in connection with Khalid Usman, had this to say regarding the reaction of his Muslim bretheren world-wide to the cartoons:

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“The protests in the Middle East have proven that the cartoonist was right,” said Tarek Fatah, a director of the Muslim Canadian Congress.

“It’s falling straight into that trap of being depicted as a violent people and proving the point that, yes, we are.”

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And he is right. And indeed, in all of this violence, there is irony. For when cartoons were published that depicted Muslims as exciteable and murderous, how did Muslims the world over respond? With riots and murder.