Blood Brothers

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Once again, the extremists have fed each other.  Once again, with other people’s blood.

The blood is that of one of the best friends the new Libya could have had:  US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, killed yesterday, the evening of 9/11, along with three of his staff as they tried to evacuate employees of the American consulate in Benghazi.  The evacuation was necessary because protestors had been whipped into violence by a 14-minute farce of a video attacking the prophet Muhammad.  Or, as now seems possible, the protest was used as an excuse for a planned attack, since RPGs and automatic weapons were involved.

Al-Qaeda-type extremists are apparently the ones who pulled the trigger, using the insult to Islam as an excuse. But they could not have done so without the help of their partners — their Jewish and Christian brothers-in-arms right here in the United States. That’s who provided the ammunition, in the form of a shoddily crude and absurdly amateurish “movie trailer” portraying Muhammad as a fraud and his early supporters as a bunch of goons.

I’m deliberately not linking to the video here since I refuse to link to such tripe. This isn’t an insult to Islam;  it’s an insult to human intelligence. If you feel sufficiently masochistic, you can find it on YouTube by typing in the title, ‘Muslim Innocence’ (the director’s idea of irony).

You’ll see that it’s made by ignorant fanatics for ignorant fanatics. Nobody else would pay it the blindest bit of attention. In fact nobody else did (even the director, an Israeli-American who goes by the name of Sam Bacile, which may or may not be a pseudonym, admits that the whole movie has been shown only once, to a nearly empty movie theater in California). Nobody else, that is, until Florida’s tinpot Quran-burning pastor Terry Jones — the one who once hanged President Obama in effigy and will apparently do anything to get himself back in the news — decided to showcase the trailer as part of his annual 9/11 Islamophobic rant.

I’ll write more about this very soon (I’m just back from a trip, and jet-lagged). But for now, two things:

1. Rest in peace, Christopher Stevens.

2. As for Terry Jones and the man calling himself Sam Bacile: if such a thing as hell exists, may you both rot in it, alongside your blood brothers in Al Qaeda.

Filed under: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism, ugliness | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments »

Neanderthals in D.C.

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Don’t you just love it when politicians say: “I mis-spoke”?

Republican congressman Todd Akin’s breathtakingly Neanderthal assertion that women’s bodies automatically prevent pregnancy if they’re victims of what he calls “legitimate rape” — his argument against allowing abortion even in cases of rape — has brought suitably righteous wrath down upon him.  Today he says he “mis-spoke.”  Though he doesn’t say exactly how.

So here’s what I’m guessing is Akin’s’ un-mis-spoken version:

Look, we all know that women lie.  Jesus Christ, they lie all the time.  What’s a guy to do?  So she’s a little drunk, okay, and she’s saying ‘No,’ okay, but you know she doesn’t mean it, because women never do, so you give her what she wants and then the next morning what does she do but cry rape?  That, my friends, is what I mean by illegitimate rape.

To be legitimate, it’d damn well better be violent.  At knifepoint or gunpoint.  And those Wahhabi or Taliban types or whatever they call themselves out there in Afghanistan and whatnot have a good point:  either you’ve got four witnesses that she was violently raped or forget it, she’s just covering her ass by lying.  And she’s a little whore to boot.  Serves her right, is what I say.

Fact is, if she gets pregnant, you can be just about one hundred percent sure she wasn’t really raped, because I know some wonderful doctors who assure me that women’s bodies are like that:  you know, they’re such conniving bitches, they can control whether they get pregnant or not.  If they don’t want, they just shut down.  Something in their bodies just switches off.  Factory’s closed, know what I mean?

No I haven’t checked their medical credentials, and I can’t tell you their names off the cuff, but I can tell you they’re God-fearing Christian doctors, all highly recommended by one of the one hundred pastors who’ve endorsed my campaign for senator for this great state of Missouri — pastors like that good man in Florida, Terry Jones, total victim of the Muslim-loving bend-over-backwards politically-correct liberal east-coast media elite.

These doctors, they’ve got Christian ethics, so they’re not about to let some hysterical woman who went and got herself pregnant worm her way out of it with an abortion.  They know that if a woman doesn’t want to get pregnant, she doesn’t.  If she does want to — well, there’s lots of guys out there who can testify to having been tricked into marriage by some bitch who went and got herself pregnant.  Am I right or am I right, guys?  Hey?  Y’know what I mean?

What’s that?  The Centers for Disease Control say that over 32,000 women a year get pregnant as a result of rape?  Well there’s big government for you.  The CDC will be one of the first government-funded institutions to be abolished when my pals Romney and Ryan get into the White House.  We’ll close that bunch of liberal pseudo-scientists down.

So yeah, those woman who really are raped — legitimately raped — I guess one or two might have their bodies let them down and somehow get pregnant.  But hey, nobody asked them to go and get raped.  And we can’t go allowing them to have abortions like a get-out-of-jail-free card.  That’d be wrong, my friends.  Wrong in the eyes of the Lord.

Goddammit they’re gonna have those kids and raise ‘em, whether they want to or not.  And don’t let them think we’re gonna help them.  We’re going to shut down all those programs that allow single mothers to freeload off decent hard-working Christian citizens of this country who have the good sense not to and get themselves raped.  We’re going to bring decency back to America, my friends.  We’re going to bring ethics back to America.  God bless America.

Filed under: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, ugliness, US politics, women | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Soul Brothers: The Crackpot Pastor and the Taliban

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

I’ve been asked what I’d do about the crackpot pastor Terry Jones, the Quran-burning Florida redneck who keeps a poster of Mel Gibson’s ‘Braveheart’ in his office for “spiritual sustenance.” It would be wonderful to just laugh, but last week Jones’ idiocy set off the reciprocal idiocy of riots in Afghanistan that have so far resulted in at least 24 deaths (in addition to the 5 he caused last September when he first threatened to burn the Quran).  It’s a horrendous example of how prejudice feeds prejudice and ignorance feeds ignorance — with the food being other people’s blood.

If ever you wanted proof that extremists of all faiths are the real co-religionists, this was it.   Terry Jones meet your soul brothers:  the Taliban.

What actually happened?  The publicity-hungry Jones, whose entire church consists of some twenty family members, was encouraged to hold a mock trial of the Quran by Ahmed Abaza, a former Muslim who runs a deliriously amateurish satellite channel called TheTruthTV — that tell-tale capitalized Truth yet again.   (Abaza’s testimony to his conversion to “the light of Christ,” apparently intended as heart-rending, is here, if you can stand it).  Abaza obligingly live-streamed the trial proceedings,  and then (the verdict being a foregone conclusion) Jones carried out his heart’s desire, got out a can of firelighter fluid, and burned a copy.

The American media acted with uncharacteristic wisdom and ignored the event.  All might yet have been calm if word of the burning had not reached Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardawi and Afghanistan president Hamid Kharzai, who then tried to outdo each other in condemning it — an excellent way to distract attention from the real problems in their respective countries, especially at a time when both are highly aware that the call for regime change throughout the Middle East might spread to threaten their hold on power too.  Three fire-and-brimstone mullahs took up the call the next day at Friday prayer, inciting an anti-American mob out for blood, and UN workers paid the price.

So what would I do?   Well, as you can imagine, my fantasies at first tended to my own version of violent retribution, but then my better side took over.  So here’s my proposal, courtesy of existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose play Huis Clos (No Exit) is starkly simple in conception:  three people locked together in a bare room, slowly realizing that where they are is hell.  As they tear each other apart with words, they conclude, in the play’s most famous line, that “hell is other people.”

Jones, Karzai, and Zardawi locked together for eternity, condemned to listen to each other’s vanity and bombast?  That might not be the perfect punishment, but it’s a damned good one.

—————

[The only question:  should Jones be allowed to take his 'Braveheart' poster into the room with him?  For the sake of ensuring Karzai and Zardawi's ongoing torment, I'd have to vote yes.]

Filed under: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 16 Comments »

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