Kemstone's Journal

I can’t take it anymore. Every time I hear one of these stories it lodges itself in my brain and refuses to let go. Whenever my mind isn’t otherwise occupied it goes straight to the image of the horrific scene as though searching in vain for some kind of new perspective that will alleviate the sick feeling it gives me for reasons I don’t quite understand. What’s it to me anyway? Why does the story of a horrible thing happening to a girl on the other side of the world—a girl I’ve never met and know nothing about—affect me so much? Is there something wrong me? Am I insane, or is the culture that allows such things to happen insane?

It must be insane. How else to describe a culture that puts rape victims to torture? This is something I just don’t understand. I can’t wrap my head around it. I just can’t comprehend how any culture, any human being can tolerate this, let alone think it’s right.

Before going any further I just want to note that this is not a typical blog entry for me. I’m writing this purely out of psychological necessity, to get the thoughts and feelings I’ve been wrestling with for the past two days out of my head and into words, just as I did when writing about Aisha late last year. My only purpose in writing this is to put these feelings into words and post them online so they’re not spinning around in my mind alone. Just knowing that a handful of others might read this will serve greatly to lighten the load.

This past Sunday I stopped by the office of the language school I work for to use the internet there because it’s currently down where I live. I was scanning the headlines at the Huffington Post and one near the bottom caught my eye. It said “Bangladeshi Girl Lashed To Death After Being Raped By Cousin”.

I immediately closed the web browser and left the office, not wanting to hear any of the details, hoping that I could just shut it out of my mind and go about the rest of my day without thinking about it, but the damage was done. For reasons I’ll get to in a moment, this kind of thing disturbs me more deeply than any other thing that happens in the world. From that point on, whenever my mind was not occupied with something else it would immediately go back to that headline, wondering about that girl and the circumstances surrounding her death. What was her name? Who gave her that terrible sentence? Is there any chance whatsoever that he and the man who raped her will ever be put to justice?

Yesterday I gave up trying not to think about it and searched for the story when I was back at the office. It was a link to an article from a newspaper called The Daily Star, and unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for me) it gave very few details about the incident itself.

The girl’s name was Hena, and she was 14 years old.  After being raped by a 40-year-old relative of hers named Mahbub there was a “fatwa” issued against her at a village arbitration. The local authorities sentenced her to 100 lashes, and she fell unconscious after 80. She was rushed to the hospital but succumbed to her injuries and she died.

Sickening.

The article focused mostly on an order issued by the High Court to the local authorities to explain why they didn’t protect her. Apparently such kinds of “extrajudicial punishment” are illegal in Bangladesh. Confused, I looked up Bangladesh on Wikipedia and was surprised to find that it’s actually a fairly secular, modernized society. This isn’t Somalia or Afghanistan—this kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen there. Yet somehow, some villages still insist on imposing the most brutal interpretation of Shariah law on women.

Hopefully these local officials and the rapist himself will be put to some kind of justice, but no matter what punishment they receive it won’t be nearly harsh enough in my mind. They should all be raped and lashed to death themselves—and even then they would still not have experienced the kind of unimaginable pain and horror that only a young girl would.

This profoundly disturbs me on two levels, and the first is just the idea of the incident itself. Imagining what must have been going through Hena’s mind as she underwent eighty consecutive lashes. Eighty. It’s a wonder and a tragedy that she remained conscious for that long. As I wrote in my Aisha post, whenever I hear about things like this I always try to find an “at least” in the situation. When terrible tragedies befall adults I can think “at least they were old enough to endure it” but there’s usually no “at least” when it comes to children. The only “at least” in this situation is the fact that Hena was not actually sentenced to death (this was supposedly an unintended consequence of the sentence) so she presumably did not have to endure the unspeakable terror of the certainty of impending death. But what else was in her mind at the time? Did she feel that what was happening to her was wrong, or was she also so imbued in the culture of fundamentalist Islam that she actually felt shame—that she deserved this?

That’s the other, deeper level this disturbs me on, and it’s one of the main reasons that stories of so-called “honor killings” upset me more than anything else in the world. I get deeply upset whenever I hear about bad things happening to young girls, probably because growing up I was the kind of boy who was far more comfortable in the company of girls. With only one exception, every best friend I ever had before college was a girl and I remain deeply fond of young girls to this day. I want them all to be safe and happy and loved, and I can’t understand anyone who doesn’t share those feelings. I can understand why others might not feel the same level of compassion towards them as I do, but it just makes no sense at all to me how some people in some cultures can feel no compassion at all.

Isn’t compassion a basic element of human nature? Unless someone suffers from the kind of mental illness that prevents them from experiencing empathy, doesn’t everyone feel a sense of pain when confronted with the pain of others? When we see a suffering child, doesn’t every mentally healthy human being suffer a little at the sight?

So unless these local officials are all sociopaths, I just don’t understand how after hearing about this poor girl getting raped by her 40-year-old cousin they would decide that the girl must be punished. Why don’t their hearts go out to her the same way that mine and those of most other people on the planet do? How twisted does one’s sense of morality have to be to punish the victim, and to order a punishment as unbelievably brutal as 100 lashes?

Seriously—if anyone can offer any insight into the mind-set of these people I’d really like to hear it. Perhaps if I understood it better I’d have an easier time coping with it.

Do they really think it’s the girl’s fault? Do they think that she deliberately tempted her cousin out of some evil desire to be raped by him? Was the 40-year-old cousin just so overwhelmed by the desire she instilled in him that he couldn’t possibly have resisted his urge? If that’s really the case, then these kinds of Muslims must think that all men are incredibly weak and helpless. What about the rest of us who somehow, some way, actually do manage to resist our desires when they are directed towards someone they shouldn’t be? Are we all super-human?

What kind of monster looks at a rape victim and decides that justice can only be served by putting that victim to torture? What kind of twisted creature looks at the rapist and says, “I’m so sorry you had to endure that. She should never have tempted you into taking an action that could taint your soul that way. Don’t worry, we’ll make her suffer until your honor is restored.”

The answer may be clear—the only kind of monster who could do such a thing is one convinced of the infallibility of his religion—but that almost feels too simple. Most religious people, including Muslims, do not think that justice is served by punishing the victim and most feel the same kind of moral outrage I do. But there’s very little doubt that no atheist would draw such a backwards ethical conclusion. Divorced from religious doctrine, an action is usually considered moral insofar as it increases happiness and decreases suffering, and an action is immoral insofar as it causes suffering. The rapist is clearly, obviously the morally condemnable party. It’s so obvious that I can hardly believe I’m spelling it out like this, but apparently there are people in the world (far too many people) who don’t think that way. They abandon all semblance of basic rationality in favor of whatever twisted moral code they were indoctrinated with by their parents or religious leaders.

And in the end, I suppose that’s what troubles me most of all. The fact that natural human compassion can be so easily overridden by religious conviction, and the fact that it is just so horribly common. Did those officials—or any other judges who pass such sentences throughout the Muslim word—feel any sympathy for the girl whatsoever, or were their minds so twisted by religious fervor that they really only looked at her as a wicked sinner deserving of punishment? Did the man who cracked the whip against her back eighty consecutive times even wince as she cried out in pain? Did the people watching feel any compassion at all, or were they so convinced of the rightness of their beliefs that it all seemed entirely appropriate to them?

This kind of thing has got to stop, but I don’t know how to stop it. It’s been going on for centuries and it’s spread throughout the world. There is no clear solution. And in the past I might have even believed that it’s not our place to fix it. After all, it’s not our culture so what right do we have to interfere?

But moral relativism is bullshit in these cases. Certain aspects of certain cultures are just plain wrong, and while we may not share a common nationality or ethnicity, we are all human beings and we have a right to try and change the way our brothers and sisters look at things when it’s clear that they’re looking at them in a severely distorted way that causes unspeakable suffering.

For the longest time I believed that it really wasn’t my place to try and do anything about this. I’m not Muslim. I’m not even female. But if I’m this strongly affected by this issue then perhaps it is my place to try and get involved.

I like to think of humanity as one great collective consciousness, a macrocosm of an individual human mind. Some individuals represent humanity’s conscience with regard to certain issues. Just as one individual might struggle with the morality of eating meat, vegetarians and vegans represent the guilt of humanity as a whole with regard to our treatment of animals. And if my mind harbors some of humanity’s conscience with regard to the problem of honor killings, whatever the psychological reason may be, then perhaps it’s appropriate for me to act on that feeling.

On the other hand, I may actually be too sensitive to this stuff. After searching online for some organizations that fight to stop honor killings I quickly realized that I could never actually join one of them. I’d constantly receive newsletters with the same kind of horrifying headline that provoked this severely negative emotional response in me this week. I can’t just file these stories away in the corner of my mind and not let them affect me. I can’t be happy when I’m constantly thinking about murdered girls. To join one of these groups would be to doom myself to a state of near-permanent depression and despair.

At the very least, I can make donations from time to time. I just gave some money to the International Campaign Against Honor Killings. If anyone who reads this feels even half as strongly about this as I do, hopefully they’ll do the same, and this blog entry will have served a much greater purpose than just making me feel better.

If I could have, I would have gladly traded places with Hena or Aisha or any of the thousands of other girls who are put to death each year for things that are no fault of their own. But from where I am now, this is the best I can do. If writing about this issue inspires anyone to donate to ICAHK or any other anti-honor killing organization and if just one girl’s life is saved as a result, I’ll be able to rest a little easier.

I wish I’d never heard her name. From the moment I read about her story two years ago, all I’ve wanted to do is forget it. I initially hated the blogger from whom I first heard about it, wishing he’d made the point he wanted to make without using such a mind-numbingly horrific story to do so. But as the months went by I kept hearing about her, each time confronted with new and increasingly sickening details about the event. I was bound to hear about her at some point, and as long as her story is out there I’ll never be able to forget it. It’s already so firmly entrenched within the neural fibers of my brain that it can never come out—images of the scene as I picture it all-too-frequently flash before my mind with only the slightest hint of an association, dragging me down to depths that can take minutes, hours or even days to recover from.

I last heard the story on a recent podcast of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense, and while that was two nights ago I still find myself looking at the world through darkened lenses because of it. The only thing I can do is to write about it and hope to find some clarity through that.

If anyone reading this doesn’t know the story of Aisha, you might want to consider not reading this and sparing yourself the psychological/emotional torture that I’ve been enduring since the story was sprung upon me without warning. I’m writing this mostly for myself, and for anyone else who might be struggling with the same feelings and for whom a written account of another person’s thoughts might be helpful.

Almost everyone is aware of the practice of “honor killings” in which Muslim women are murdered for adultery. Nearly every week there’s another story in the news about a woman killed by her own family for being with another man. Sometimes no actual adultery is committed—the woman need only be alone in a room with a man who isn’t her husband to earn a death sentence. Occasionally the punishment will be as sickening as mutilation or as horrifying as being buried alive, as some young teenage girls recently were because they dared to flirt with boys their own age.

And yet nothing is worse than what happened to poor Aisha. Her story remains the single most horrifying thing I’ve ever heard. It’s the kind of thing that makes me look at humanity and almost wish that our species had never evolved to the point where we became capable of such things.

Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was a 13-year-old Somali girl who committed the ‘unforgivable crime’ of being gang-raped by three men and then reporting it to the local authorities in the Kiyasmu region, the al-Shabab militia. Under certain interpretations of Islam, letting oneself be raped is akin to adultery, and the punishment for adultery in Kiyasmu is death by stoning.

On October 27, 2008, Aisha was dragged before a crowd of over 1,000 spectators in a stadium at the southern port of Kiyasmu where she would be buried up to her neck in a hole in the ground while 50 men threw stones at her head until she died. While she was being dragged to her death, she reportedly shouted and pleaded with her executioners “No! I won’t go! Don’t kill me!” No mercy was shown to her.

During the execution, at least a few of the spectators showed some humanity and attempted to save her, but the militia opened fire and killed a boy who was a bystander. The rest of the crowd sat and watched.

At one point they pulled Aisha from the ground and nurses were instructed to determine whether or not she was still alive. They announced that she was, and she was put back in the hole for the stoning to continue. One can only hope that by this point her body was in such a state of shock that she could no longer feel anything. One can only hope.

Every time I hear this story I get the most sickening feeling in my gut, I feel like my insides are burning and that that my brain might tear itself apart in blind rage. I just want to find the al-Shabab militia members who sentenced Aisha to death and the men who stoned her and pummel each of them to death one by one. But that would accomplish nothing. Aisha is dead and no vengeance will bring her back. She had to undergo that experience and it will never be erased.

Part of the reason this disturbs me so much has to do with the way I look at reality. Time is a relative thing, so everything that happens exists permanently. Subjective experience is a part of the universe, so all experiences exist permanently as well. I also think that the nature of consciousness might be universal, in that the same Being—call it God, the Brahmam-Atman, or whatever it may be—is at the centre of the awareness of everyone and everything that is aware. What happens to one of us happens to all of us—we only perceive different events through different minds.

So whenever I hear about a tragedy, I imagine the experience from the point of view of the victims. I can usually find some kind of “at least” in the situation. As in, “at least he was strong enough to face death bravely,” or “at least she was old enough to accept her fate” but with children it’s a different story. The only “at least” I can find when something bad happens to children is “at least they were too young to understand what was happening.”

But Aisha was 13—old enough to understand death but far too young to make peace with it. She was also female—and in a patriarchal culture, no one would have bothered to help her cultivate the qualities of strength and bravery that would have been encouraged in male children.

No, Aisha was as vulnerable a victim as there can be. And to imagine the horror from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl of being buried up to your neck, desperately trying to claw your way out of the ground but unable to move an inch, lying there helpless as heavy stones fly at your face, each new crack in your skull producing an eternity of agony and bringing you one step closer to a death of which you are terrified, the pain and fear too overwhelming to comprehend.

This experience is a part of the universe and it always will be. And that almost makes me wish the universe never existed at all. Better to have eternal nothingness than a single moment such as that…

But what really makes this story so unbearable to me is the setting. This event happened in a stadium of a thousand people, and while at least a few were horrified enough to try and put a stop to it, the majority of spectators must have felt…what?

Were they enjoying it? Did most of them get some sick macabre sort of pleasure out of watching a poor defenseless girl cry out in horror as her life was ripped away from her? Did they actually feel that justice was being served—that this adulteress, despised by Allah, was getting what she deserved?

That’s the thought that keeps me up at night, because that is one of the great unsolvable questions of humanity at this stage in history. Many people would hear this story and blame it on Islam, but the problem goes much deeper than that. The practice of honor killings may have been integrated into some versions of Islam but it almost certainly pre-dates the religion, going all the way back to tribal existence. This is an element of the culture in that part of the world that goes unquestioned by what may be most of the people there, including the women. When asked whether they approve of the practice of honor killings, it might be the case that this cultural tradition is so firmly ingrained in their minds that a majority of them would insist on its moral correctness.

I once considered myself a moral relativist, but not anymore. Just because something is accepted in another culture does not make it right. There is a certain amount of happiness and suffering brought about by every action, and certain actions cause a degree of suffering so great that the scale could never be balanced. Aisha’s death was so horrible that no amount of satisfaction on the part of the executioners or spectators who felt that justice had been served could outweigh it. This is as black-and-white as it comes. No matter what culture or time period you’re talking about, this kind of thing is plain wrong.

And yet, what can any of us do about it? Some suggest that a Western military presence in the region serves this very purpose. If we can bring stable democracies to these areas in which women are given the power to help shape their societies, eventually these practices will end.

But I’m for leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, and whatever I may feel in my heart, I know in my mind that staying would cause more overall harm than good. As much as I would desperately like to change their culture, I consider it the height of arrogance to think ourselves capable of doing so. You can’t change thousands of years of tradition by rolling in with tanks and shooting everything that looks threatening. If centuries of colonialism taught us anything, it’s that more just societies can’t be imposed from above. They can only transform from within.

But how long before the women in these societies awaken enough to question their cultural traditions and feel strong enough to fight against them? How many more innocent girls are to be buried alive or stoned to death before such things are resting firmly in the trash-bin of history where they belong?

The only shred of positive thinking I can muster from Aisha’s story is that it may serve as some kind of wake-up call within the collective human consciousness. I never met this girl. I don’t even have any idea what she looked like. I never knew she existed until she no longer did. But if I can feel such powerful emotions over the manner in which she died, then others can too.

I said that I wished I’d never heard of her, and that may still be true. I didn’t want to have to face the reality that we live in such a world where an event like her death can happen, and that I’m a member of a species that is capable of doing such a thing. But perhaps more people need to be confronted with this reality. More people need to know about Aisha, to lose sleep over her, to picture her crying face sticking up from a hole in the ground whenever a random comment triggers the firing of those neurons.

Only by confronting the horror can we hope to one day be rid of it. It’s either that or wait until the planet rids itself of us. But for Aisha’s sake I have to hope it’s the former. If the human species wipes itself out, at least these kinds of horrors will stop but it will all have been for naught. If we can come together and forge a global society in which the murder of children is not tolerated by anyone, at least such deaths won’t have been in vain. And if there is any truth to the idea of immortal souls, I can only hope that Aisha’s will be able to see what we’ve done and to know that her suffering did not go unnoticed—that the cries she let out as death took her in that stadium did not fall on deaf ears.

One can only hope.

Let me preface this by saying that I like Keith Olbermann, that I think he often does great work, with Monday’s special comment, “There is no ‘Ground Zero Mosque’” standing as a shining example.

But while I was watching the show last night, he said something that made a few synapses in my brain burst. He brought on Eugene Robinson (whom I also like) to discuss the mosque issue and he opened with this question:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

“What have we not been talking about during these 24-hour news cycles that have been commandeered by the so-called mosque controversy?” he asks.

Robinson responds by listing a few of the more important issues that the media should be talking about, including the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the upcoming mid-term elections.

I felt like shouting, “Well, why don’t you talk about these things? You have a television show! You can talk about whatever you want. You decided to devote the first fifteen minutes of your program to talk about something that you don’t think is worth talking about, and then complain about how this is all the media is talking about!”

In all fairness, Keith Olbermann doesn’t determine the news cycle any more than I do. He just reports and comments on whatever happens to be in the news cycle, and he does do a great job of keeping certain stories like the BP oil catastrophe in the headlines long after the rest of the media has lost interest.

But in the words of Eric Cantor, “Come on.” Seriously—you are obviously aware that this whole controversy is just a strategic political move on the part of the right-wing to divide the country, get the left and right to yell at each other, and distract people from the important issues. So why be a part of it? Why not decide that you’re not going to fall into that trap—that you’ve said your piece on the controversy and now you’re going to focus on more important matters like what the government is or is not doing to help the economy and what we are or are not doing to bring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a responsible end.

Oh, and did you know that Pakistan is quickly turning into the lost city of Atlantis? Yes, millions of Muslims are suffering while America is too stuck in this anti-Muslim tizzy to notice or care.

Even I am somewhat guilty of my own charge here, as I could be writing about Pakistan but instead I’m bitching about the media bitching about itself. My only excuse is that I’m a blogger that nobody reads, so it’s not my responsibility to determine the news cycle. Still…just…come on.

I was ripped and torn to pieces on the Daily Kos the other day for daring to suggest that President Obama might not be fighting hard enough for progressive causes (among other reasons). I insisted that he runs scared from any right-wing talking-point that gets hurled his way.

But this morning I woke up to read that Obama actually stood up in the face of all the “secret Muslim” accusations that have been thrown his way and said this at a White House dinner:

As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country…That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.

Hell yeah, Barack! Bring it!

Whether or not this was a political calculation to deflect progressive criticism in the wake of Robert Gibb’s recent comments, I don’t care. He knows damned well that half the country thinks he’s secretly a Muslim radical plotting to facilitate the takeover of America at the hands of Islamic terrorists. He knows that the right-wing media has been beating the “Mosques are terrorist training-facilities” drum for months and he just walked straight into the flames. Good for him.

Of course, I must temper my applause by pointing out that this is only rhetoric, and that I’m not going to start cheering wholeheartedly for Obama again unless I see some action. Appointing Elizabeth Warren would go a long way to restoring my lost Hope.

Nevertheless—credit where credit is due.

The opposition to building a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero was bad enough, but now we’ve got a right-wing fearmonger calling for a ban on the construction of all mosques in the United States:

Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for Ground Zero. This is for one simple reason: each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.

Much has already been said and written about Bryan Fischer’s anti-mosque screed this past week, but I can’t resist bringing my artillery to this fight. While most reasonable-minded conservatives would never go as far as Fischer, I’m afraid that reasonable-minded conservatives are a dying breed these days and that once one wingnut jumps off an ideological cliff the rest of the lemmings quickly follow. It’s important to push back as forcefully as possible against this kind of divisive, hateful, fear-driven nonsense or the next thing you know it’ll be considered “mainstream”.

So Mr. Fischer, what evidence do you have that every single Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government?

Here is the strategy, in their own words, in the words of “An Explanatory Memorandum” circulated by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1991 which outlines “the General Strategic Goal” for the Islamic movement “in North America.”

Read it and shudder:

Muslims “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions…It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny…” (emphasis mine)

Um…seriously? That’s all you’ve got? This is going to be easier than I thought.

First of all, I read through the “Explanatory Memorandum” quoted here and was not surprised at all to find that this is by far the most questionable paragraph. The entire memorandum is basically just a proposed framework for how to go about establishing a thriving Islamic community in America. This is from the introduction:

The papers which are between your hands are not abundant extravagance, imaginations or hallucinations which passed in the mind of one of your brothers, but they are rather hopes, ambitions and challenges that I hope that you share some or most of which with me. I don’t claim their infallibility or absolute correctness, but they are an attempt which requires study, outlook, detailing and rooting from you. (emphasis mine)

Hardly a call-to-arms from a violent fundamentalist.

Here’s what the document had to say about the role of these mosques themselves:

Thus, the Islamic center would turn into a place for study, family, battalion, course, seminar, visit, sport, school, social club, women gathering, kindergarten for male and female youngsters, the office of the domestic political resolution, and the center for distributing our newspapers, magazines, books and our audio and visual tapes.

Sounds threatening, doesn’t it? Kindergartners! Audio and visual tapes! The only remotely questionable term is “battalion” but I’d say it’s a safe bet that if you look at the original Arabic word from which it was translated its meaning will be much more benign than “terrorist training facility”.

Of course the word that sets off most of the alarm-bells in conservative minds is “Jihad” but it too doesn’t mean what they think it means. “Jihad” literally means “struggle” and it can refer to a struggle with oneself or a struggle in war. It was first used by Muhammed while he and his followers were under assault in Medina, and is widely understood as a struggle to defend Islam—not to aggressively impose it on others.

But let’s just say for the sake of argument that Fischer is right and this “Explanatory Memorandum” really was calling for the violent overthrow of America. So what?

Let’s just say hypothetically that a group of right-wing Christians met in a Church every week to plot the overthrow of the U.S. Government. [Note: This may not actually be hypothetical at all] Should we therefore ban churches?

Last November, Fischer wrote this in a short piece called “The Difference Between Christian Churches and Mosques”:

American churches: places where generosity and self-sacrifice are nurtured and encouraged. American mosques: places where America’s enemies plot our destruction.

Uh huh. Yeah, that doesn’t sound like a gross oversimplification at all. Obviously there are absolutely no churches in the entire country where hateful rhetoric is preached. Obviously there are absolutely no mosques in the entire country where generosity and self-sacrifice are encouraged.

Seriously, are there any Muslims here who could invite Mr. Fischer to one of your mosques so he can see for himself? Obviously he thinks that all you do is sit around planning the next 9/11. Let him examine every inch of your mosque and see what he says when he doesn’t find the stock-piled weapons, dirty-bomb construction manuals, and viles full of anthrax.

What is Mr. Fischer so afraid of? Is he really so terrified of some kind of Muslim takeover of America that he wants to shred the First Amendment in order to deprive them of a place from which to plan their attack?

It’s actually a microcosm of the absurd Afghanistan strategy: drive the terrorists out so they have no safe-haven from which to plan an attack…except Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia—oh, and Germany, England, France, etc. If they can’t plan their attacks from the local mosque they can just plan them from the fucking basement!

And if they do rise up and try to take over, it’s not like we’d be helpless to stop them. Don’t we have the strongest military that has ever existed on this planet? I’m pretty sure we could take them out rather quickly.

Bryan Fischer is a prime example of the dangerous way the American right operates today. He looks at the most right-wing position of the day—no mosque as Ground Zero—and pushes it a few steps further: no mosques anywhere in the U.S. He’s shifting the spectrum even further to the right, and we have to pull back hard.

So I’ll take the left-wing position of the day—let mosques be built wherever people want them—and push it a few steps further: build more mosques! And pay for them with government money! How about that? Keep building until there’s one mosque for every church! And force kids who go to one to every once in awhile go to the other as well. You know…in the name of tolerance and cross-cultural understanding.

Are right-wing heads exploding yet? Well, now you know how we feel.

I couldn’t get to sleep the other night because I was so worried that Elena Kagan and an army of liberal activist judges were about to impose the strict fundamentalist form of Islamic law known as Sharia in the United States.

But now that Newt Gingrich has risen up in defense of Western values, I can rest easy. Last week, the former Republican Speaker of the House gave a speech in which he called for a federal law to forbid all U.S. Courts from considering Sharia as a replacement to U.S. law.

Boy do I hope we get that law sooner or later. You know how these damned liberal judges are constantly trying to replace American law with all kinds of religious doctrine…

Oh wait…we already have a law to prevent them from doing that? Something like, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”? Isn’t that one of those amendment thingies? Well, it couldn’t be too important if judges are constantly ignoring it….Oh, it’s the first amendment you say? The very first one? Well…hmmm.

Maybe we don’t need Gingrich’s law after all. In fact, maybe any group of Muslims actively trying to replace their local laws with Sharia would be thrown out of the courtroom, hunted down by mobs of angry Christians, and beaten mercilessly while the police stand nearby and laugh.

But I don’t know. Maybe this really is a threat and the secret cabal of Liberal Elites who run the country are so tolerant of other cultures that they’ll let their own culture be subverted to that of backwards-thinking religious wackos from the Middle East. It could be that come next Tuesday women will no longer be allowed in public without a full burka and stoning-to-death will replace imprisonment as the punishment for everything from theft to adultery. I can totally see Americans just sitting quietly by while liberal activist judges let that happen.

Luckily we have Newt Gingrich to protect us. Then maybe next week he can do something about all that Scientology being taught in schools.

I know this is ancient history already, but I’ve been meaning to comment on it for days and more important stuff got in the way. I promise this isn’t as unimportant as it will seem at first.

So all the way back at the beginning of last week, Sarah Palin sent out a tweet regarding the plans to build an Islamic mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero:

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate

Totally ignoring the substance of what she was saying, the Twitterverse apparently responded with resounding laughter over the completely made-up word “refudiate”. Palin then responded with another tweet trying to mitigate the damage from the first:

Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real

Seeing as how “refute” makes no sense in that context, that didn’t really help. Finally she offered up this gem:

“Refudiate”, “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!

Immediately all of the focus shifted to the absurdity of Palin comparing herself to Shakespeare (not to mention the choice of “wee-wee’d up” as an example of a great new word). That is indeed hilarious, but it’s not the real issue. I’m going to give her a pass on the surface and condemn her on the substance.

For one thing, “Refudiate” is actually a great word. It even applies to what I’m doing in this blog post. It’s a combination of “refute” and “repudiate”—two things that often go together. So I will refute the idea behind Palin’s original tweet and repudiate her for saying it—thus refudiating her.

Here’s the thing: Why would a mosque a couple of blocks from Ground Zero “stab” any reasonable person “in the heart”? The tacit claim made in this statement is that the same people behind the 9/11 attacks are the people who want to build a mosque near Ground Zero—that all Muslims are guilty of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Refutation: Not true at all. Are all Christians guilty of every crime ever committed by Christians throughout history? I didn’t think so. Are all Tea Partiers guilty of racism because some of them hold racist signs? I didn’t think so. So how can you claim that all Muslims are guilty of what a small segment of radicalized, violent Muslims decided to do? If an entire group of people bears full responsibility for what a small segment of that group does, then the whole Tea Party is racist and all Christians have a lot of blood on their hands.

Repudiation: Shame on you, Sarah. You’re contributing to the already massive level of intolerance on the part of Americans towards Muslims. By equating the word “Muslim” with “Terrorist” you’re inviting further violence against Muslims, and possibly even an attack on the mosque they’re building near Ground Zero—which, incidentally, will be home to a perfectly mainstream, peaceful branch of Islam that would no doubt condemn the actions of the 9/11 terrorists, as would the vast majority of all Muslims around the world. What you said is divisive and ignorant and you owe all Muslims an apology.

But thanks for the great new word! Now whenever someone says something both factually and morally wrong, we can refute and repudiate them at the same time! Refudiation! Got to celebrate it!

There were a few details about my conversation with the Iranians on the last night of Rheinfest that I left out of the entry, and because I consider that encounter to be one of the most significant I’ve yet had in my travels, I feel compelled to record them before they are forever lost to my memory’s slow decay.

Both Mozhgan and Kiyoumars were offered beer by the locals, and she drank one out of courtesy while he had two. It’s not something either of them were used to, her especially, as drinking alcohol is illegal in Iran. Some people make their own alcohol and it’s much stronger and more dangerous than it would be if it were regulated (like drugs are in the U.S.), and anyone caught drinking it goes to prison. They have their own drink which they drink socially, but it doesn’t contain any alcohol and is supposedly actually healthy for you. They were surprised to learn from me that alcohol was also prohibited in America back in the 1920s. They hadn’t known about this.

They both had their hair covered, but that was the extent of their religious attire. She was otherwise in plain-clothes, though in Iran she’d have to wear a burqa in public.

While we were discussing politics, they said how they believed the Shah is a good man, a man of God. The German man who had been sitting with us at the time told them how when the Shah had come to Germany in 1979, students had protested and called him a dictator, and they were both very surprised by that. But they seemed to credit America with giving protection to the Shah. As for the Ayatollah, they believe he’s not a man of God at all, and that the government only pretends to follow Islam.

This interested me because I’ve assumed that the Iranian government actually does consist of religious fundamentalists who want to see Islamic law imposed on the rest of the world. It’s the basis on which we believe it would be so dangerous for Iran to get nuclear weapons—if they’re serious enough about their religion and believe it’s their God-given duty to wipe out Israel, they might actually use their nukes and start WWIII. But this couple doesn’t believe they’re sincere at all about Islam, and they don’t understand why their government keeps pursuing nuclear weapons, especially when it brings about sanctions that only hurt the common people.

The people aren’t terrorists, she insisted. The governments are terrorists—all governments are terrorists. They control the people through fear, and they maintain hostile relationships with other governments to serve their own purposes. As I wrote before, it’s to the mutual advantage of America and Iran (and according to them, to Israel as well) to continue to posture as enemies. As long as the people of each nation believe in an existential threat, they’ll go along with the government.

Finally, I’ve given off the impression that this was a very somber, serious discussion, when in reality it was very light-hearted with lots of smiling and laughter. At one point, Kiyoumars stood me up and put his arm around my shoulder, inviting me to join him in some kind of dance which involved lots of bending of the knees and kicking. It was slightly embarrassing and I totally fucked it up, but we all had a good laugh. It was clear that those two beers went straight to his head, which is to be expected from someone who spent most of his life in a country where drinking one beer could land you in prison.

As for the story of the raven which accompanied them on their journey, I’m too much of a skeptic to simply accept them on their word that it was the same bird every time. She said that at first they also chalked it up to coincidence but over time they came to believe it was protecting them and showing them the way. I think it’s far more likely that it was a different bird each time, and looked similar enough to allow them to believe they were being guided by a spirit. Still, it’s so much more preferable to believe that the bird was a spirit than to dismiss it as coincidence coupled with wishful thinking. Hearing their story made me long for the days when I could accept such things on faith, but those days are over. I’ve accepted the more scientific approach of never accepting extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence. Sadly, when you take that approach to its logical conclusions you wind up with a universe completely devoid of any higher value or deeper significance. Life is empty. There’s no real reason to live—the best you can do is live for a small reasons. Love would be enough of a reason for me to live, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. Instead, I’ve settled for experience. If there’s really nothing more to the universe than particles and forces, then even that is inherently devoid of value, but on nights like that one it almost feels like enough.