Glob-a-log

Pakistani clerics have responded to Salmon Rushdie’s knighthood by handing out a religious bauble to Osama bin Laden.

Pakistan’s Ulema Council gave the al-Qaida leader the title “Saifullah”, or sword of Allah. The Ulema Council is part of a demented, Islamist coalition, that actively opposed the Pakistani government when it wanted to make changes in the Hudood laws.

The Hudood laws made it possible for raped women to be stoned to death – because in these laws there is no difference between adultery and rape.

Whilst nominating our good friend Osama for this religious honour, the council chairman, Tahir Ashrafi, said,

If a blasphemer can be given the title ‘Sir’ by the west despite the fact he’s hurt the feelings of Muslims, then a mujahid who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam, Saifullah,”.

Yes, of course – such eminent reasoning.

Hurting someone’s feelings is bad, bad, bad. Flying planes into buildings…; ah well, boys will be boys – and hey, man, Osama’s feelings were hurt so báááád, by the West, by people like Rushdie, no doubt.

So, give the poor guy his Saifullah plaster already and kiss it all better.

Oh, right: I almost forgot. Before I declare end of rant, I’d like to turn the spotlight on one Oliver Miles. I’d never heard of him before but he wrote an opinion piece in today’s online Guardian. Miles mentions that, as a sensitive Christian,

I am pained when somebody throws a bucket of filth over the cherished symbols of my religious culture.

Right, another one of those hurt feelings twits.

There are many appeasers in the West. Like Chamberlain and his stupid umbrella they are always committed to the peace at any cost concept– and always more than willing to suck up to one little Hitler or the other. In a way these people are even more contemptible than all those raving mullahs and suicide bombers.

Again, insanity is a time-honoured defence in law; complicity is not.

So, apropos Rushdie’s knighthood: our good Christian is against it. Surprise, surprise. One of his points,

Or rather it is only our concern if there is a feeling around that he deserves an honour because he has suffered for his art. I would argue that the suffering was self-invited.

Ah, Listen to the children of the night: what sweet music they make. Self-invited death sentences. Like those raped Australian women, no doubt. You remember: those self-inviting pieces of uncovered meat that drew those poor cats to them.

Bad, bad Rushdie. Bad bad women.

Anyway, Oliver Miles ends his good little German speech with a passionate,

Unfortunately I see no realistic way in which the harm that has been done can now be undone. It is tempting to suggest that someone - but who? - might acknowledge that a mistake has been made, and indeed the more of us who do so the better. But one of the drawbacks of the pomp and ceremony associated with state activities like the grant of honours is that they are inflexible, unable without very great difficulty to react to the unexpected.

Indeed, it is very unfortunate that a knighthood is for life – and not just for Christmas. Like the late Ayatollah’s death sentence. Oh no, sorry, I forgot. That was self-invited, of course.

Anyway, back to our Muslim hot air Miles,

Which leaves me with the question: was it really unexpected? Did no one really understand that far from being in the category of those who have made a positive contribution, Rushdie has deepened the divisions in our society, and this accolade was likely to deepen them still further?

And has it occurred to our appeasing friend that Rushdie might have served England quite well, for showing how many demented, little monsters had been nurturing their evil thoughts and hate-filled souls, living in but actually loathing the place that had welcomed them and their families, when they had no other place to go to?

End of rant.

For now…

 Good old Winnie: a man with a quote for all seasons but even more famous than he is she, prisoner No. 9818783:

I’ve had a lot of time to search the web since I’ve been here. I was just so impressed that the man was almost as popular as me, and I was like ‘who is this guy?’.

And then, like her bestest friend, she went all Oops, I did it again, again:

He won all of the debates. He’s just so popular! I’m a Ron Paul junkie now.

You know, some time ago I suggested that Bill Gates wasn’t real happy when George Bush came out of the left drawer of some really warped closet, to loudly support the Microsoft company.

Like Caesar who, with breaking eyes, sees Brutus approaching, saying, Stand back; I know CPR!

Anyway, so today the Spoof’s very own Fernickus Bronst busted Brutus and back-broke Bush, breaking the news that Paris Hilton has endorsed Ron Paul.

Poor guy.

Poor Republicans.

Poor Paris.

(She sure knows how to pick them, doesn’t she?)

Incoming: Someone else who’s always been good at the Oops I did it again game, also did it again today.

A recent study showed that chimps aren’t the brightest kids on the block anymore.

Problem is: it was a study done by humans, so trustworthiness is an issue. Douglas Adams (in his famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series) once stated, quite convincingly, that homo sapiens was the most intelligent life form on spaceship earth – after the dolphin and the white mouse, that is.

However, if you don’t want to take his word for it, we might try to settle things through an old-fashioned ordeal by fire:

Judge us by our gadgets:  A Northern California man was badly burned when his cell phone spontaneously combusted. He was sleeping with the phone in his front pants pocket when it exploded and caused his clothes to ignite, according to reports, and he awoke in flames.

Judge us by the way we treat our loved ones: A Fulton County woman doused her boyfriend with gasoline then set him on fire while he was in bed early Saturday, police said. The woman, 39-year-old Cynthia Covington, was also burned.

Judge us by the other kind of company we keep: A catfish called Kipper is being blamed for starting a fire that destroyed his owner’s home.  Miss Killahenna said that Kipper was a notoriously belligerent fish and often fought with other occupants of her 5ft aquarium. She suspects that the fish’s antics caused water to splash on to a power socket, starting the chain of events that led to the fire.

You know, whatever that dubious study said about chimps, I’m pretty sure you won’t find chimps having those kinds of problems.

Anyway, enough about the so-called superiority of humans. Or, as Marvin (the paranoid android) would have it, Life? Don’t talk to me about life…

Or, in the more constructive voice of Leonard Cohen - from his Book of Longing,

taxes
children
lost pussy
war
constipation

The Age of Aquarius has given way to the Age of the Nut.

Fervour ain’t the half of it. When all those self-righteous, evil clowns aren’t smiting their opponents, they wage war on their brothers and stone & burn their sisters.

By the way, don’t think for one moment that it’s only Muslims who behave like rabid dogs. Whenever they get the chance Hindus are killing Muslims (and vice versa, of course)  in India - and those dear old Christians are quite busy killing (or condoning & conspiring in the killing of) abortion doctors and blowing up surgical clinics.

And all the major religions enjoy a good gay bashing, of course.

So, why try to pretend that our species can ever amount to anything useful - let alone good? Why not join in the fray?

Me, I’d like to reintroduce the burning of witches - and I recommend a Ms McKeever as our first Roman candle.

It would interrupt what she calls ‘a great work of charity‘ - and what the rest of an ever shrinking rational world would call evil-minded bigotry - but what the fuck.

Or, as emperor Nero would have it, I like the smell of Christians in the morning.

In more Rushdie related madness, the Organisation to Commemorate Martyrs of the Muslim World, a fringe hardline group, offered a reward of $150,000 (£75,000) to any successful assassin.

Forouz Rajaefar, the group’s secretary general, said,

The British and the supporters of the anti-Islam Salman Rushdie could rest assured that the writer’s nightmare will not end until the moment of his death and we will bestow kisses on the hands of whomsoever is able to execute this apostate.

Even more ludicrously, hardliners in Iran revived calls for his murder yesterday. Mehdi Kuchakzadeh, a Tehran MP, declared,

Rushdie died the moment the late Imam [Ayatollah Khomeini] issued the fatwa.

Well, actually, mister Kuchakzadeh, he didn’t. Your bearded connoisseur of hatred discomfited the writer somewhat but did not actually manage to touch a single hair on his balding plate.

Come to think of it, the mere fact that your precious holy warmonger, worshiped, aided and abetted by millions of hysterical, Dalek-minded nitwits, didn’t even come close to shutting up one geeky looking writer, could tell you something about the level of support the ayatollah got from on high.

As of yet, the Heavenly score board reads:

Dead ayatollah   : 1
Dead S. Rushdie : 0

Only yesterday Mohammad Ali Hosseini, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, announced to the world at large that,

the decision to honour the novelist was an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies.

Today the Morons for God Monitor (MGM) proudly announces that Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain (the MCB) has joined the fomenting fray, saying that,

Salman Rushdie earned notoriety amongst Muslims for the highly insulting and blasphemous manner in which he portrayed early Islamic figures. The granting of a knighthood to him can only do harm to the image of our country in the eyes of hundreds of millions of Muslims across the world. Many will interpret the knighthood as a final contemptuous parting gift from Tony Blair to the Muslim world.

It is nice to know that the MCB found time to attack Rushdie again. Especially, since this venerable body could not make room in their Islam for Peace and Tolerance agenda to respond to (let alone condemn) what’s only the most recent case in quite a high number of honour killings in Britain.

The MGM also noted with extreme pleasure that,

earlier today Pakistani MPs demanded that Britain withdraw Rushdie’s knighthood.

A government-backed resolution condemning the author’s knighthood was passed unanimously by the lower house of the Pakistani parliament amid angry protests across the country.

MPs said the honour was an insult to the religious sentiments of Muslims. In the eastern city of Multan, hardline Muslim students burned effigies of the Queen and Rushdie, chanting “Kill Him! Kill Him!”

Pakistan’s minister for parliamentary affairs, Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, who proposed the resolution condemning the honour, branded Rushdie a “blasphemer”.

Speaking out for Islam and all peaceful Muslims worldwide, Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, the Pakistani religious affairs minister, said that,

The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the ’sir’ title.

Hear, hear!

Again, it is highly satisfactory that the Pakistani parliament was able to pass their Rushdie resolution so fast - especially since they can’t be bothered to do anything at all about the three-hundred or so Pakistani women, who are burned to death each year by their husband’s families.

It is great to see that Muslim communities all over the world have their priorities in such splendid order.

Due to logistical problems it may take some time but the MGM will make sure that the honourable Iranian spokesman, the esteemed members of the MCB and all those who voted in favour of the anti-Rushdie resolution in the proud Pakistani parliament will each receive their own I am a moron for God T-shirt, as fast as their God of choice allow.

This week, again, we saw a few examples of one of those Jane Austen-like universal truths - namely that fundamentalist Christians have much in common with fundamentalist Muslims.

Both Islamic writers and certain Christian teachers deny evolution.

Both islamic imams and Christian pastors blame women for most of society’s evils.

It’s not surprising that this is so, of course. Both holy books were written by old men, whose half-senile brains and envious hearts were baked by an unforgiving desert sun.

Theirs is a religion of excess - of excessive angers, intolerance, meanness and loathing. Its joys are of a psychotic nature: war, ritual killings and genital mutilation. Its arts are the arts of torture and the burning of heretics, the burning of witches, the burning of books.

There have been many mad, bad and dangerous religions throughout history. There have not been many emancipatory, secular movements which have actively tried to counter them.

The founding fathers of the USA tried. Jefferson wrote the following:

Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.

That was then. This is now. There’s a born-again president in the White House and his potential successors are running around the country, cap in hand, trying to woe the evangelical equivalent of mad mullahs.

No wonder the Jefferson memorial is sinking.

To state the bleeding obvious, the Muslim world doesn’t trust the USA all that much. They have their reasons, no doubt but at times their hostility and paranoia becomes almost hilarious.

So, now both Sunnis and Shia in Iraq think that the US was behind the second attack and now almost total destruction of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, as part of a plot to incite sectarian violence between these two groups.

Apart from the fact that neither Sunnis nor Shia look like they need any help from the US in this regard, it also shows that, unlike the rest of the world, the Muslim community still has an almost endearing trust in the cleverness and competence of the USA.

Remember, when they tried to bomb one of Saddam’s hideouts in the first Iraq war, they hit a civilian bomb shelter - and during the Kosovo war they managed to hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

There are enough reasons for the rest of the world to fear and distrust the US of A - but map reading & pinpoint precision are not exactly their strongest suit.

Still, this mutual distrust between Muslims and Americans is rather silly - sad even. They have so very much in common. Especially in terms of spirituality, paranoia and sheer mind-boggling lunacy.

Take evolution. Muslim writers foment against it, as do many teachers in the US. Granted, their agreement is not total.

Certain US teachers think that teaching evolution more or less directly led to the Holocaust. Iran’s president would certainly not agree with that. He’d probably stand firmly behind the evolution theory in this aspect, since he denies the Holocaust happened. (Darwin must be real happy with the kind of support his theory is getting these days…)

Talking of Iran, they have let it be known that they are shocked that Salmon Rushdie has received a knighthood. Their Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said that to honour the writer of the Satanic Verses in this way was an insult to the Muslim world. In his own words:

Awarding a person who is among the most detested characters in the Islamic society is obvious proof of anti-Islamism by ranking British officials.

Among the most detested people in the Muslim world: right.

To get back to where we started, one would think that, on some shared Muslim detestation scale, there would be a somewhat higher position reserved for people and countries who foment civil war in Muslim societies.

One can argue that certain books are naughty or even sacrilegious and that the writers of these books have somewhat dubious values. The written word certainly has the power to offend and to hurt.

In terms of pure evil though, writing one supposedly offensive book is not exactly in the same league as arming and then encouraging one group of oppressed Muslims with the exact purpose of attacking and then slaughtering their equally oppressed brothers.

So, a bit less about Rushdie, please, mister Iranian spokesman. If there is one entity that should be reviled by the so-called Islamic society, it would have to be the depraved and utterly cynical leaders of Iran.

Iran’s decision to arm and then encite the mad dogs of Hamas, has led to the ever escalating civil war between the already much put-upon Palestinians. Sure, the Palestians have, yet again, proved themselves to be a bunch of abject losers and complete idiots, by fighting amongst themselves in this way - but aiding & abetting and arming morons is still morally repugnant.

It is also quite ridiculous, the way Iran has sponsored a civil war between Fatah and Hamas, which - to all the world - now looks very much like a silly, if deadly cat fight between one homosexual gang and another, in an enclave surrounded by the KKK army.

Sad, yes - but also hilarious; Rod Liddle in today’s Sunday Times, talking about the most recent developments in the land that God must really hate:

If a third party came along that was simultaneously corrupt, incompetent, homicidal and fundamentalist it would probably clean up in Palestine. The old neocon fallacy, upon which we went to war in Iraq, was that the people of the Middle East desire nothing more than to be led by decent, secular, democratically minded politicians who wished ill upon nobody - Menzies Campbell in a headscarf.

Read the whole column here. It’s good. It’s all true, painful & funny:

“We want peace, my frent,” ordinary Arabs plead with the western news crews in front of smashed homes and bombed buildings after each successive spurt of nihilistic carnage, from Basra to Beirut. And so they do, probably, just as soon as they’ve exterminated one or another local enemy - Fatah, Hamas, Sunni, Shi’ite, Kurd, bedouin, Druze and, of course, the Jews.

There’s an old song by Kirsty Maccoll which has the immortal lines:

There’s a guy works down the chip shop swears he’s Elvis
Just like you swore to me that you’d be true
There’s a guy works down the chip shop swears he’s Elvis
But he’s a liar and Im not sure about you.

Which leads us directly (well, almost directly) to the folowing:

An Australian court has found a restaurant critic guilty of damaging the trade of some restaurant. The man had written a negative review.

One of the offensive bits in the review claimed, that a sherry scented apricot white sauce that had accompanied a steak was a “wretched garnish” that the critic had had to scrape off.

Which leads us, niftily yet seamlessly, to the following:

It’s not often that you can find Dolly Parton and Salmon Rushdie in one article - let alone one sentence. To most, these two would not exactly seem a match made in Heaven.

Still, Dolly Parton has been named a lifetime member of the Girls Scouts of Tanasi Council during a presentation before 1,000 Girl Scouts at her Dollywood theme park Friday evening.

An emotional Dolly stated:

“While I was never a Girl Scout myself when I was a kid, I always wanted to be. This great honor lets me live out a dream and to be part of an organization that stands for many of the same values I do and Dollywood does.”

Quite.

So, Dolly did not see this badge of honour as a wretched garnish she had to scrape off as soon as it was pinned to her lapel.

Ah well, each according to his and her taste, of course.

Anyway, while Dolly Parton was singing the praises of Girls Scouts and shamelessly promoting that other wretched garnish, called Dollywood, in the same breath, Salmon Rushdie was being knighted by the queen of England.

That Australian food critic mentioned above also said, apropos of yet another unfortunate dish, that the flavour of oysters soaked in limoncello “jangled like a car crash.”

He had a point, I’m sure; oysters with lemon liquor sounds pretty disgusting but then again, not quite as disgusting as yet another bit of wretched garnish that’s still clinging to some vague memory of status, England’s very own prime minister, Tony Blair.

These days, Blair talks a good line about fighting for democracy and the values and spirit of the free Western world. However, when Salmon Rushdie was sentenced to death by the now not much lamented, late ayatollah Khomeini, Tony and his cronies motly kept an impressive quiet.

Once in office, Blair never showed he gave much of a damn about Rushdie or any other victim of intolerant (but nicely rich) Muslim regimes.

In his defense though: he was always rather busy doing business deals with these wretched & corrupt Muslim regimes and bribing their representatives.

Or, as John Sutherland, much more diplomatically, said:

The award might represent a tacit olive branch from those who perhaps had failed to support Sir Salman as he might have hoped.

Public figures have been very, very reluctant to support Rushdie, particularly when he was under direct threat of assassination. It’s a brave and entirely commendable decision by the people who advise the Queen - I would be curious to know if the recommendation came directly from Downing Street, though.

Yeah, right.

Not much chance of that, I’d say - which is a pity, really. If it had been Blair (or Bliar, to his many admirers) who’d been responsible for Rushdie getting his K, it would have been so nice, if Salmon, in his acceptance speech, would have addressed the prime minister directly, with these words from one of Dolly Parton’s songs, Little bit slow to catch on:

Well, I couldn’t see the light for the brightness
Of the sweet little smile you gave us
I couldn’t see how you were cheatin’ on us
But finally I’m a catchin’ on, on
Finally, I’m a’ catchin’ on

I’m a little bit slow to catch on
But when I do, I’m caught on
A little bit slow to move on
But your baby is a’ movin’ on, on
Your baby is a’ movin’ on