This video got a big grin from me.  I suspect it’ll do the same for everyone who’s often asked “where are you from?” because it’s a perfect debunking of the assumptions and condescension lurking behind that question:

I just now saw the cellphone video of one of the killers in Woolwich. It is pure barbarism. And all the more weirdly so for taking place on a busy London street, in front of passers-by, just a few yards from a school.

Blood all over his hands, and all over the cleaver and the knife he’s so casually brandishing. None of the distance of guns here, let alone drones. No attempt to hide, or to flee. Instead, a rant into the camera “justifying” what he and his friend have just done: run down a man and then hacked him to death. In the name, good god, of God.

I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, what strikes me is the way this man exults over what he’s done. He’s pacing back and forth like an animal after a kill, like a predator — a lion, say, or even a “domestic” cat when it catches a bat — proud of what he’s done, showing off, all but beating his chest.

And guarding his kill, keeping everyone away from “it.”  “No man comes near this body,” witnesses report his friend saying, but you can see a woman calling them on that, then bending down to try to help the victim, then standing up to challenge them over what they’ve done.  That’s courage.

As for the so-called quote from the Quran, he’s in fact in direct opposition to it.  Sura 5, verse 45, specifically states that an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth no longer applies. It says that “previously” — in the Torah — “we ordained an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (see Exodus 21:24) but now, it continues, “if anyone freely forgoes this right, it shall count as an act of expiation for him.”

No expiation for these two men. They are vicious murderers, pure and simple. Nothing more, and nothing less.

And that terrifying ignorance, that self-justifying righteousness, that pure bloody-minded and bloody-handed inhumanity, is the enemy of us all.

You might think it absurd that a woman driving a car is news.  But then this is the absurdity known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, now frantically trying to censor video clips of Manal al-Sharif driving.  An apparently government-supported online drive is under way to beat women caught driving, and al-Sharif  (this is her, to the right) is being held in detention for “inciting public opinion” and “disturbing public order.”

That is, for driving while female.  DWF.  A crime.

Watch the Al Jazeera report here.  Check out the newly replicated Facebook page here.  Read al-Sharif’s instructions for the June 17 ‘drive-in’ protest here on Saudiwoman’s Weblog.

And then consider the far greater absurdity of the continued existence of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which refuses to extend the most basic civil rights (even the vote) to half its population, and whose wealth and power is entirely fueled by the Western thirst for oil.  An intensely repressive Middle East regime, that is, funded directly by Western money.

But that’s only the surface.  This Western oil money is still funding the worldwide Saudi export of the most conservative and repressive form of Islam.  If there is one single country that has enabled violent Islamism, it’s not the perceived enemies of the United States like Libya, Afghanistan, or Iran, but our “good friends” the Saudis — our oil dealers.

The Saudis thought they had escaped “the Arab spring.”  They sent their military into Bahrain to help squelch protests there.  They encouraged the violent suppression of protests in Yemen.  They thought they had things under control.

But another kind of Arab spring may now be in the making.  An Arab summer, perhaps.  Six months ago, a single Tunisian street vendor couldn’t take it any more and sparked a revolution by setting himself on fire.  Now a tech-savvy Saudi woman refuses to take it any more and threatens to spark another revolution by simply taking the wheel.

This is how it starts — with individual acts of defiance, with a refusal to knuckle under, with an insistence on basic dignity.  And with the support of a vast and unsquelchable online community.

The links are above.  Go to it, everyone.

Yes, I’m posting one of those damn feel-good videos, and no, it’s not even full moon.  Am I going soft?

[big hug to my friend Lynn for sending it to me]

Last night, I gave a talk at the invitation of the Seattle World Affairs Council on ‘What the Quran Really Says.’   Many thanks to a wonderful audience.

In the discussion afterward, we talked about how the many Muslim leaders who speak out against terrorism in the name of Islam are consistently ignored.  The most striking example was the 600-page fatwa against terrorism and suicide bombing issued by the highly respected Pakistani cleric Sheikh Tahir ul-Qudri on March 1 this year, which was barely mentioned in the American media despite — or in fact because of — its close and detailed argument, which does not lend itself to the easy sloganeering of what passes for political discussion these days, let alone religious discussion (for a mere 80-page English-language summary, click here).

Autumn Lerner, vice-president of Seattle WAC,  mentioned a short video released this past summer in which leading American Muslim scholars speak out against terrorism, but neither of us could remember its title.    So for those who were there, and those who were not, I just did a quick online search and found it: