Category Archives: Terrorism Issue

Pork Barrel Islamophobia

Bible and Holy Land, Humor and Satire, Islamophobia, Islamophobia 101, Terrorism Issue

The biblical prophet Isaiah talked about turning swords into plowshares. Leave it to a bunch of Idahoites to turn bullets into bullshit. In the online world of chickenhawkers of nonsense, you are now able to buy pork-laced ammunition. The theory (I hesitate to use this term for such a potato-head notion) is that if a Muslim jihadi is shot with one of these bullets he will, of course, go straight to hell. Here is the rationale on the “about us” of their website:

History of dealings with radical Islam from the days of Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates to actions of Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing in the early 1900’s in the Philippines gave clarity to a modern day market solution-Jihawg Ammo. Our preference is peace first but if a fight is to be had we are determined and resolved to win. Thus came the beginning of the truest form of defensive ammunition ever created in history.

A natural deterrent that prevents violence just by owning it but will strike fear into the hearts of those bent upon hate, violence and murder. Jihawg Ammo is certified “Haraam” or unclean. According to the belief system of the radical Islamist becoming “unclean” during Jihad will prevent their attaining entrance into heaven. Jihawg Ammo is a natural deterrent to radical and suicidal acts of violence.

Our Porcine Coating (Pattern Pending) is infused with the highest quality pork product made right here in America. Jihawg Ammo is produced in the great state of Idaho.

We at Jihawg Ammo hope you will stock up on Jihawg as a natural deterrent to the ever growing threat of radical Islam and Sharia Law. We, however, stress that the nullifying principle of our product is only effective if you are attacked by an Islamist in Jihad. Otherwise, our ammo functions just like any other ammunition so we obviously insist upon defensive use of our ammo only-not offensive.

I suppose it is a comfort that this ammo is only for defense, but then it is sad indeed that those folk who think Obama is a Muslim and the U.S. Supreme Court is about to institute shariah law are also convinced that the Moslems will soon be staging operations in their own backyard (now that the commies decided not to come and rape our women, after all). Perhaps in addition to gun control, we also need dumb-ass control.

Hezbullies

"Arab Spring", Arab-Israeli Conflict, Lebanon, Shi'a, Syria, Terrorism Issue


ebanese Hezbollah supporters hold a picture of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (L), Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (R) and his late father President Hafez al-Assad (C) in Bint Jbeil on September 22, 2012 (AFP)

[This post was first written a month ago and recently published in Middle East Muddle on Anthropology News.]

The bullet and bomb-blast battle of the bullies is raging in Syria. The biggest bully is Bashar al-Asad, son of Hafez al-Asad who in February, 1982, sent his troops into the city of Homs and slaughtered between 10,000-40,000 civilians who dared to oppose his dictatorial rule. Hafez has slain his thousands, Bashar his tens of thousands. One estimate, reported by Reuters, estimates that between 94,000 and 120,000 Syrians have died in the wake of the Arab Spring that toppled other long-standing dictator regimes. Over a million and half Syrians are refugees who have fled the fighting to neighboring countries, where many do not find even the most basic humanitarian aid. Millions within Syria are in desperate shape, victimized by all sides. But the bully of Damascus hangs on, with Russian backing and Iranian duplicity.

There are other bullies in this fight, from a small faction of radical Muslims intent on reinstalling a caliphate where the Umayyads once ruled to seemingly secular-minded opponents of Asad’s brutal policies. And recently a new bully has arrived, the Hezbollah Hezbullies who control southern Lebanon and thrive as a thorn in the side of Israel. Israel, thus far, has mainly watched from the sidelines, no doubt content to see a bloodbath not directed at them. There was a sharp military response a couple of weeks ago to what appeared to be stockpiles of weapons from Iran on the Damascus road to Hezbollah. Continue reading Hezbullies →

Voltaire on Tolerance

Books You Should Read, Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Terrorism Issue


Allegorical bust of Voltaire; from 1901 text

One of the vexing paradoxes of modernity is whether or not intolerance can be tolerated. Should dictators be cuddled if they play up to the foreign policy concerns of a democracy? Should anyone — man, woman or child — be forced to live by religious dogma? How much of the intolerable actions in this world should we tolerate? Some wise words on the problem were offered two and a half centuries ago by the French savant, Voltaire, as brilliantly said in his Philosophical Dictionary. Here is what Voltaire said:

What is tolerance? it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly–that is the first law of nature.

It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. That admits of no difficulty. But the government! but the magistrates! but the princes! how do they treat those who have another worship than theirs? If they are powerful strangers, it is certain that a prince will make an alliance with them. Franois I., very Christian, will unite with Mussulmans against Charles V., very Catholic. Francois I. will give money to the Lutherans of Germany to support them in their revolt against the emperor; but, in accordance with custom, he will start by having Lutherans burned at home. For political reasons he pays them in Saxony; for political reasons he burns them in Paris. But what will happen? Persecutions make proselytes? Soon France will be full of new Protestants. At first they will let themselves be hanged, later they in their turn will hang. There will be civil wars, then will come the St. Bartholomew; and this corner of the world will be worse than all that the ancients and moderns have ever told of hell.

Madmen, who have never been able to give worship to the God who made you! Miscreants, whom the example of the Noachides, the learned Chinese, the Parsees and all the sages, has never been able to lead! Monsters, who need superstitions as crows’ gizzards need carrion! you have been told it already, and there is nothing else to tell you-if you have two religions in your countries, they will cut each other’s throat ; if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace. Look at the great Turk, he governs Guebres, Banians, Creek Christians, Nestorians, Romans. The first who tried to stir up tumult would be impaled; and everyone is tranquil.

The right barnamaj for Egypt

"Arab Spring", Arab-Israeli Conflict, Egypt, Humor and Satire, Terrorism Issue, YouTube Watch

“If your regime is not strong enough to handle a joke, then you don’t have a regime.” Such was the sentiment of satirist Jon Stewart, who made a surprise appearance on the popular Egyptian television comedy show, al-Barnamaj, starring Bassem Youssef. If the Arab Spring protests were not simply an exercise resulting in one kind of intolerance replacing another, then this may be one of the most important lessons to be learned from the prevailing winds of post-people-revolution hopes. Obviously Moubarek did not handle jokes well, nor did Ben Ali, nor Qaddafi, nor Ali Abdullah Salih. Neither does Bashar al-Asad, who is desperately trying not to be the next ex-dictator in the Middle East. But then the ruling parties in the Islamic Republic are not exactly comedy-friendly. Bin Laden was the butt of millions of jokes, but it is hard to imagine him having success as a stand-up comedian.

The irony is that most of the people I have met in Egypt and Yemen are fond of jokes and have a rich tradition making fun of those in power, corrupt regimes and religious hypocrisy. Many have a sharp edge of “othering” one group or another, but some are self-deprecating. Satire has a way of getting to the crux of problems, which is probably why it is so irritating to those in power. Consider the following joke about the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Asad, a joke I heard from a Lebanese friend when Syria was basically in control of much of Lebanon.

The heads of the CIA, the KGB and the Syrian intelligence agency met at a conference and were bragging about their abilities to track down and find terrorists. Continue reading The right barnamaj for Egypt →

Game changer? Game on?

"Arab Spring", Obama Administration, Syria, Terrorism Issue


There is always a problem with drawing a line in the sand, especially the shifting sands of Middle East conflicts. President Obama is surely aware of this now, after unguardedly saying that use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime would be a “game-changer.” The devastation in Syria, where the death toll is now estimated at around 93,000, is no game for the people of Syria or its neighbors, who are absorbing hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians. In hindsight, President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner summarizes with non-irenic irony the ineptness of his administration’s handling of the last (hopefully the last) Iraq War; will “Game Changer” haunt Obama’s record for future historians? To be blunt, is “game-changer” morphing into “game-on”?

In the rhetorical build-up to the last Iraq War, the hawkish mantra was WMD. Forget the fact that the U.S. gave tactical support to Saddam’s regime in his bloody 80’s war with Iran or had the opportunity to take him out in the earlier Iraq war. The intelligence icing on the “yellow cake” was that Saddam had become a threat to the U.S. (surely Israel was not absent in the equation), even though he had zero to do with 9/11 and was intolerant of any Islamic extremism at home. Although Libya did not seem to have WMDs, it did have the crazy loon Qaddafi, an easy target for removal by an air campaign of the U.S. and its NATO allies. Tunisia and Egypt sprung out of their respective dictatorial nightmares on their own, as the U.S. was basically reduced to observer status. The conflict in Yemen drones on, with the Saudis and the GCC doing the dirty work to redesign Yemen. Forget about changing the scene in Bahrein, where the U.S. docks its naval ships.

So the focus now is on Syria. Well, not just Syria. Continue reading Game changer? Game on? →

Islam minus “Theism”

Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Islam: Introduction, Terrorism Issue

[Webshaykh’s note: There are many Christians and Jews who still find spiritual and moral value in their faiths while rejecting literalist interpretations, especially those that preach exclusivity rather than tolerance. This same holds for many Muslims, although their voice are seldom given a chance to be heard or else are gobbled up with relish by Islamophobes. The following commentary by Ali A. Rizvi is well worth reading.]

An Atheist Muslim’s Perspective on the ‘Root Causes’ of Islamist Jihadism and the Politics of Islamophobia

by Ali A. Rizvi, Huntington Post, May 3, 2013

The ambassador answered us that [their right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

The above passage is not a reference to a declaration by al Qaeda or some Iranian fatwa. They are the words of Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassador to France, reporting to Secretary of State John Jay a conversation he’d had with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, Tripoli’s envoy to London, in 1786 — more than two and a quarter centuries ago.

That is before al Qaeda and the Taliban, before the creation of Israel or the Arab-Israeli conflict, before Khomeini, before Saudi Arabia, before drones, before most Americans even knew what jihad or Islam was, and, most importantly, well before the United States had engaged in a single military incursion overseas or even had an established foreign policy.

At the time, thousands of American and European trade ships entering the Mediterranean had been targeted by pirates from the Muslim Barbary states (modern-day North Africa). More than a million Westerners had been kidnapped, imprisoned and enslaved. Tripoli was the nexus for these operations. Jefferson’s attempts to negotiate resulted in deadlock, and he was told simply that the kidnapping and enslavement of the infidels would continue, tersely articulated by Adja in the exchange paraphrased above.

Adja’s position wasn’t a random one-off. This conflict continued for years, seminally resulting in the Treaty of Tripoli, signed into law by President John Adams in 1797. Article 11 of the document, a direct product of the United States’ first-ever overseas conflict, contained these famous words, cementing America’s fundamental commitment to secularism:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext, arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Yes, the establishment of secularism in America back in the 18th century was largely related to a conflict with Islamist jihadism.

So where did Abdul Rahman Adja’s bin Laden-esque words come from?

They couldn’t have been a response to American imperialism (the start of the conflict precedes the presidency of George Washington), U.S. foreign policy, globalization, AIPAC or Islamophobia. Yet his words are virtually identical to those spouted ad nauseum by jihadists today who justify their bellicosity as a reaction to these U.S.-centric factors, which were nonexistent in Adja’s time.

How do we make sense of this? Well, the common denominator here just happens to be the elephant in the room. Continue reading Islam minus “Theism” →

Timbuktu and the Missing Manuscripts

Archaeology and Antiquities, Islamic Texts, Mali, Terrorism Issue


Destroyed manuscripts in Timbuktu; photograph by Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Mali version of Nigeria’s Boko Haram, calling itself Ansar al-Din, not only went after Western knowledge but earlier Muslim sources as well. When the extremists ran amok in northern Mali last year, they destroyed Sufi shrines, beat women whose veils were not long enough, flogged men for daring to smoke or drink and did just about everything they could to drag Islam into the mud. But they did not get to burn the vast number, estimated at some 300,000, of Islamic manuscripts stored in collections across Timbuktu. The story of how donkeys and ingenious local men, with a million dollars in funding from abroad, were able to smuggle the precious written documents to safety is told with flair by Sudarsan Raghavan in yesterday’s Washington Post.

Below is the end of the article, styling the rescue operation as an Indiana Jones Moment…

It was the first stage of that mission that brought Traore and his donkey caravan to the old-city streets of Timbuktu on that August night. His grandfather had helped him load the donkeys, but he stayed behind as Traore and three other men set out with the manuscripts.

The rain, in the end, helped them. The jihadists were not at their checkpoints, preferring to stay indoors. Continue reading Timbuktu and the Missing Manuscripts →

Do We Care?

"Arab Spring", Ethics, Syria, Terrorism Issue


Scene after a massacre in a coastal Syrian village on May 4

Do we care? When the news media report yet another attack on civilians in Syria (or Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere outside of Boston and New York), do we really care? It is hard to be sympathetic to the picture above without feeling the pain caused by imagining your own child’s body bloodied and lifeless. It is not easy for those of us in the fabled “land of the free” to admit that in war and civil strife everyone is presumed guilty by being in the way of a bomb and only proven innocent as a victim. These are bodies that have stopped growing, faces forever locked into expressions of horror. There can be no rest for these children in the grave for there can be no end to the grief of those who knew them.

But what do we care? It did not happen here. We make sure of that by sending arms to our erstwhile allies and droning anyone abroad who looks like a terrorist. As long as we proclaim our rhetorical support for human dignity, who can blame us? This was the act of a vicious dictator struggling to hold on to absolute power. Asad is Russia’s bastard, not ours. The weapons used to rip apart these childrens’ lives were Cold-War-forged Soviet, not Free World. Thank God, our God of course, there is no “Made in the USA” trademark on any of the bombs used here. But our’s will soon be in play here, as they are in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen, and even more children will never be able to play again.

Should we care? We did not know them. There are seven billion of us living and dying on this planet. What does it matter if a few children do not have a chance to live? Perhaps they would die of cancer before their teens or be run over by a car? What if one of these children had grown up to be a violent terrorist and take some of our lives? There are many ways not to look at these dead bodies, not to count them as our own. You can ignore what you see here, quickly click your mouse to escape caring. But tomorrow there will be another picture just like this, perhaps with women or men. Perhaps with soldiers who have little choice but to follow orders or risk their own lives. You need not worry, though, because you will not know any of them, not their names, not the sound of their laughter, not their dreams, not the goodness that shines through in every corner of our globally disconnected world.

So go ahead. Ignore what you see. Thank your God it’s not about you. Life goes on here no matter how many lives end over there. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I have said what I want to say in less than 500. The rest is up to you.