Same Old, Same Old

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Andrew Stuttaford

The Guardian‘s Nick Cohen has written a powerful piece on the “Weimar of the Aegean” which is well worth reading in full, but this detail caught my attention:

One can say with certainty that old alliances between extreme political and extreme religious movements are reviving. Hence, last month Christian fanatics and neo-Nazi…protested against a “blasphemous” play with a homosexual theme in Athens. The theatre’s management duly pulled it. Greek television cut a scene from Downton Abbey that featured a gay kiss. No one can explain why but a country that censors Downton Abbey on any grounds other than literary taste is in grave trouble.

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Icon of the Religious Left

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Andrew Stuttaford

Some hagiography here:
watch?v=6fSlpUsSeiM

Unclear how that whole “revenge” thing fits in with this, however.

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Vandals

Posted on November 3, 2012 by Andrew Stuttaford

The totalitarian Saudi regime has been busy again.

The Daily Telegraph’s Damian Thompson reports:

…The long-cherished ambition of Saudi Arabia’s ruling Wahhabi sect to smash up the ancient buildings of Mecca and Medina is nearing fruition.

In Mecca, the house of one of Mohammed’s wives has been demolished to make space for public lavatories. His birthplace may disappear, too, as part of King Abdullah’s scheme to complement the skyscrapers and shopping malls with a Grand Mosque fashioned from the same materials as a multi-storey car park in Wolverhampton.

As for Islam’s second holiest place, the city of Medina, a recent article by Jerome Taylor in the Independent revealed a megalomaniac plan to pull down three 7th-century mosques. Taylor added: “Ten years ago, a mosque which belonged to the Prophet’s grandson was dynamited. Pictures of the demolition that were secretly taken and smuggled out of the kingdom showed the religious police celebrating.”

Only a small minority of the world’s billion Muslims are Wahhabis, despite the tens of billions of petrodollars spent by the Saudis propagating their creed. (Bosnia, for example, is now littered with Saudi-style mosques, replacing the graceful Ottoman architecture that Wahhabis detest.) Many pilgrims to Mecca are revolted by the marriage of Puritanism and greed they find there. Yet protests are scattered and muted. Why?

One answer is that the House of Saud, though widely hated, is also feared: its wealth and terrorist connections make it unlikely that, say, a Pakistani politician would speak openly about the desecration of the Hajj.

The West can hardly complain about such gutlessness: this year’s Hajj exhibition at the British Museum was creepily sanitised – no mention of bulldozers or the 2,000ft clock tower built right next to the Kaaba, the black cube-shaped building that is the centrepiece of Islamic devotions.

But what sticks in the craw is the hypocrisy of Muslims who throw a fit if Israeli archaeologists carry out non-intrusive work underneath the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, “Islam’s third holiest place”, as we’re constantly reminded. Such anger would be more convincing if the first and second holy sites weren’t being ploughed up by a police state. Likewise, are cartoons of Mohammed really more offensive than reducing the remains of his life to rubble?

As one Middle East expert put it to me: “Jews disturbing the Dome of the Rock fits into an anti-Western narrative, so Muslims can cope with that. The Saudi destruction of Mecca doesn’t fit into that narrative, and so there’s virtual silence.” Something worth bearing in mind, perhaps, when you wonder why the murder of Muslims by Muslims in Darfur or Syria provokes only limited outrage in the Islamic world….

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Leviathan vs. Behemoth

Posted on November 3, 2012 by Andrew Stuttaford

EUObserver reports:

BRUSSELS – The European Commission has said that Poland’s prosecution of a rock group for “blasphemy” is against European values.

It said on Wednesday (31 October) in a written statement for EUobserver that “national blasphemy laws are a matter for the domestic legal order of the member states.

But it added that EU countries must respect international pacts.

It cited the European Convention of Human Rights, a Poland-signatory treaty attached to the Strasbourg-based rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, on freedom of expression.

“This right protects not only information or ideas that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also those that offend, shock or disturb,” the commission said.

The statement comes amid a row in Poland over a heavy metal band called Behemoth.

Its lead singer, Adam Darski, while on stage in 2007, ripped up a Bible and called the Roman Catholic church a “murderous cult.”

In a case with echoes of Pussy Riot in Russia or Mohammed cartoons in Denmark, the Polish supreme court on Monday said prosecutors can go after Darski on the basis of article 196 of Poland’s penal code on “the crime of offending religious sensibilities.”
In theory, he faces two years in prison. But nobody expects a jail sentence if he loses.

A few points:

1. The EU Commission is, as usual, being disingenuous. All EU countries are required to subscribe to the (non-EU) European Convention of Human Rights.

2. No self-respecting country should pay much attention to what the supranationalist “jurists” of the European Court of Human Rights has to say about its internal affairs.

3. No decent country should have blasphemy laws, particularly blasphemy laws so intrusive that singer cannot rip up his own copy of a book and say a few (admittedly) harsh words about a religious faith.

Poland should scrap this shameful law.

The Guardian has more here:

“We’d been doing that for two years on tour before it happened in Poland,” Behemoth bassist Tomasz Wróblewski told Decibel magazine (via Blabbermouth). “We [were] not offending any particular person. We [were] just offending the religion that we’ve been raised in.”

Despite this intention, Darski was pursued by Polish courts for having offended Catholic fans. After being cleared by judges in 2010 and 2011, the singer/guitarist is again on trial. Officials in Gdansk asked the supreme court how Darski could be “offending religious feelings” if most of Behemoth’s fans expected theatrical sacrilege?

“The crime of offending religious sensibilities is committed not only by he who intends to carry it out, but also by he who is aware that his actions may lead to offence being taken,” the court said.

Ah yes, “offense”. That again.

Pathetic.

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Boston’s Question 2

Posted on November 3, 2012 by Andrew Stuttaford

Over at the Corner, Wesley Smith posted a comment on Boston’s Question 2 (assisted suicide). You can find it here.

Here was my response:

Wesley, you write:

“Pro-assisted-suicide activists often claim falsely that opponents want to force (Catholic) religion on rational people.”

Clearly there are people of many different faiths and of none who are opposed to assisted suicide. They are so for a wide variety of reasons, sometimes rooted in religion, and sometimes not. As the Boston Globe puts it in the extract from the editorial you cite, “reasonable people” can disagree over this issue.

Equally (as I am sure you would accept) the Roman Catholic Church is a part of the coalition opposing Question 2 and that (unsurprisingly) it is so for primarily religious reasons. That’s not in the slightest bit shocking, but nor is it something to be denied.

Then we come to these words in the Boston Globe editorial cited by you:

“[A] yes vote would not serve the larger interests of the state.”

As you note, it is a liberal newspaper.

The newspaper’s conclusion is that various constituencies ( ”the medical community, insurers, religious groups, and state policy makers”) should keep talking, and talking mainly about what should be done for people rather than by people. And as they keep talking, somewhere someone (trapped suddenly, say, in locked-in syndrome) will find himself deprived of his individual autonomy in the most profound manner imaginable. He may, quite rationally, decide to make the best of it, or at least to cope, and that, of course, is his inalienable right. But what of the patient who decides, no less rationally, that he would rather not face the years of imprisonment (as he sees it) in his own body that may lie ahead? You can explain to him about the dangers of legalized assisted suicide, and of the perils of the slippery slope, but something tells me that he will conclude that he has slid down a slippery slope all of his own. And has been left to rot there.

Wesley replied here.

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Don’t go to college, please!

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Heather Mac Donald

Hurricane Sandy has provided yet another reminder of our practical and psychological dependence on a steady supply of electricity.  Granted, the current devastation to the energy grid is a distribution, rather than a supply, crisis.  Nevertheless, utopian greens should take note.  Undoubtedly many of the Brooklynites and Lower East Siders desperately searching for ways to recharge their cell phones and iPads share their cohort’s usual scorn for coal, fracking, and nuclear.  But nearly every one of them would jump at the opportunity to crank up a greenhouse-gas-spewing generator, if that would get their wired (and lighted and refrigerated) lifestyle going again—and understandably so.  Even a desert-sized bank of Solyndra-built solar panels is unlikely to do the trick at the moment.

But Sandy is also a reminder of the ongoing necessity of blue collar workers—all those hard hats trying to repair power lines and pump the water out of miles of homes, tunnels, and subway tracks.  A universal population of college graduates, the desideratum of nearly all Democrats and far too many Republicans, composed as it inevitably would be of marketing and ethnic studies majors, would be of little use in rescuing the tri-state area from its catastrophic blow.  Yes, more engineers are also needed–in the long run, to try to design more resistant infrastructure, and in the short run, to diagnose the current ruptures and plan a strategy of attack.  But manual labor is a crucial component of the current recovery.  To be sure, many of these hard hats belong to recalcitrant and budget-breaking public employee unions.  But their power is slight compared to the teachers unions.   And unlike teachers, who enjoy regular paeans of praise from politicians and advocates, utility workers rarely are the object of aspiration and admiration.

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October Surprise

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Heather Mac Donald

The election’s over.  My bets were on President Obama in any case, but the rightful suspension of campaigning in the aftermath of the hurricane catastrophe seals Romney’s fate.  Obama gets to look presidential, while Romney disappears.  Even if that suspension lasts just a few days, it breaks any momentum Romney may have been building up.  Perhaps he could recover it, but the chances are against him, I would think.  Things may look differently outside the Eastern seaboard, where normal life still continues.  But in the case of a disaster of this magnitude, people’s instincts are to preserve what they can of the status quo, my guess is.

In the meantime, many local officials in the tri-state area have been showing impressive leadership, above all the head of New York City’s crushed transit system, Joe Lhotta, a protege of former mayor Rudolph Guiliani.  With any luck, Lhotta will ride his display of organizational skills and crisis management into City Hall as a dark horse candidate in the 2013 mayoral election.  That field currently features one more disastrous tool of the welfare-industrial complex after another.   And N.J. governor Chris Christie has again demonstrated his take-no-prisoners executive style.  Our greatest thanks, however, go out to the anonymous members of the uniformed services who have been working without sleep to help the stricken and to restore the fruits of civilization to the storm path.

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Connecticut Governor: Go pray!

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Heather Mac Donald

Connecticut Governor Dannel Molloy this morning advised his state’s residents to prepare for Hurricane Sandy and then go “pray.”  What exactly would those prayers look like? 

“Dear God: Even though you’ve sent this hurricane (because nothing happens on earth that is contrary to the Will of the Omnipotent One), do you think you could maybe mitigate its effects just a little bit?  (Such a last minute modification in the predestined unfurling of your simultaneous, omnipresent Will would be theologically problematic, but at this point, who’s counting?)  Just to remind you, human beings don’t like getting mowed down with natural disasters.  Of course, you were content to allow thousands to be wiped out in the big publicity items—the Japanese and Indonesian tsunamis, say—as well as in the unnoticed fires, tree branch fallings, electrocutions, slip and falls, and incurable diseases that take human beings down every day.  But those victims maybe weren’t as deserving as us, who knows, it’s a real puzzle, or maybe they didn’t get a chance to pray before they were killed.  We, however, are still very much alive, and here we are with a VERY big prayer and a VERY big claim on your attention, cuz’ we know WE’RE deserving as all get out. 

We also can’t help observing that it would have been a whole lot easier had you simply averted Hurricane Sandy in the first place, rather than allowing it to proceed, and THEN fiddling with its course—would’ve saved us a whole lot of trouble preparing and would not have disrupted commerce and millions of lives.  But maybe you were distracted with other things, and forgot how inconvenient a hurricane can be.  So we won’t hold it against you, but now that we’ve brought this problem to your attention, do you think that you could maybe call back the winds? 

Rest assured, however, that if you decide not to call the whole thing off and lives are lost, we will still troop to church and thank you for your Divine Mercy  and will pray for you to take care of the still living victims, even though dozens or hundreds of other human beings didn’t get your Mercy BEFORE they lost their lives.  (Though we’re sure that now that they’re dead, you are laying a whole lot of Mercy on them, and we thank you for that.)

In the meantime, however, thousands of selfless emergency workers are preparing to help their fellow humans survive this hurricane, putting their own well-being at risk.  And we are grateful for the millions of engineering geniuses whose labors on behalf of humanity mean that we will weather your storm a million times better than those less fortunate people who lived hundreds of years earlier.  But of course, in working to better their fellow humans, these emergency workers, scientists, entrepreneurs, tinkerers, and builders are merely reflecting YOUR Divine Love, and it is to you, ultimately, that we owe our greatest thanks.

P.S. Could you please make sure that [Obama] [Romney] wins the election?”

 

 

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Ridiculous

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Andrew Stuttaford

Locked-inAnti-euthanasia zealot Rebecca Hamilton writes in Patheos:

Doctors are rapidly becoming the new executioner class of our society.

Oh, good grief.

Executioner Class? Rapidly? Really?

And then there’s this:

Every single human being has an intrinsic value and right to life and we may not tamper with it. That is the order of things. The first premise. We must, as Christians, reason our actions from there.

Well, Rebecca, that’s a familiar argument, but it does not address the issue of the individual who wishes to end his or her life, but, through incapacity, is unable to do so. Your insistence that doctors may not grant that person his or her wish is about as bad an example of “tampering” with a life as I can imagine.

And, oh yes, it’s cruel too…

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Silencing Timbuktu

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Andrew Stuttaford

Cross-posted on the Corner.

I cannot say that I know that much about Mali, but my ipod knows its music.

Enter the Islamists.

The Guardian reports:

The pickup halted in Kidal, the far-flung Malian desert town that is home to members of the Grammy award-winning band Tinariwen. Seven AK47-toting militiamen got out and marched to the family home of a local musician. He wasn’t home, but the message delivered to his sister was chilling: “If you speak to him, tell him that if he ever shows his face in this town again, we’ll cut off all the fingers he uses to play his guitar with.”

The gang then removed guitars, amplifiers, speakers, microphones and a drum kit from the house, doused them with petrol, and set them ablaze. In northern Mali, religious war has been declared on music.

The savagery is shocking, as is the peculiarly grotesque vandalism of an ancient cultural heritage. But there is also crushing inhumanity of it, the merciless expression of an arid religious monomania with no room, it seems, for so many of the pleasures of this world. It’s not so much an assertion of the idea that there is no God but Allah, but the insistence that there is nothing but Allah…

Naturally, xenophobia is thrown into the mix:

An official decree banning all western music was issued on 22 August by a heavily bearded Islamist spokesman in the city of Gao. “We don’t want the music of Satan. Qur’anic verses must take its place. Sharia demands it,” the decree says.

No sympathy for the devil then.

The Guardian continues:

The ban comes in the context of a horrifically literal and gratuitous application of Sharia law in all aspects of daily life. Militiamen are cutting off the hands and feet of thieves or stoning adulterers. Smokers, alcohol drinkers and women who are not properly attired are being publicly whipped. As one well-known Touareg musician from Kidal says: “There’s a lack of joy. No one is dancing. There are no parties. Everybody’s under this kind of spell. It’s strange.”

Ansar adds: “People think that the problem is new. But the menace of al-Qaida started to have an effect on us in 2007. That’s when al-Qaida people started to appear in the desert. They came to the nomad camps near Essakane [the beautiful dunes to the west of Timbuktu where the Festival in the Desert used to be held] and at first they were pleasant and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re Muslims like you.’ Then they began to say, ‘We have a common enemy, which is the west.’ That’s when I understood that things were going to get difficult.”

Read the whole—terrible—thing.

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