Jordanian poet arrested for insulting Islam: There ain’t no such thing as a gay Jordanian penguin
America bashing has always been and will, most probably, always be one of the world’s most favourite sports – and, up to a point, that’s quite understandable and by no means automatically a bad thing. The USA is still the world’s biggest power and international player, so it’s not unreasonable to look at America with a critical eye.
Of course, at times that critical eye is swapped for a paranoiac’s stare (and the mad mumblings of a million ‘truther’ bloggers) but that’s just how the world wags its collective tail. Any person or state that enjoys a measure of wealth and/or power will automatically attract all manners of enemies, whether they are deserving of this or not.
Anyway, enough of these meanderings.
So, you may remember that bit of fairly inconsequential news that, as a new mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin asked how one would go about banning certain books from libraries – and most of us will certainly remember the brouhaha that followed the publication and subsequent banning from libraries of a book about two male penguins raising a chick.
Both stories were seen and much used as examples of how the evil right wing, fundamentalist Christians were trying to turn the USA into an Iranian-style theocracy.
Now, I’m not exactly a big fan of any form of organized religion and I do consider ALL fundamentalist faith-based ‘initiatives’ as inimical to the best interests of humanity, be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Hebrew.
However, while it is always fun to go another round with American evangelicals, it should be remembered that they are not exactly the world’s leaders when it comes to religious oppression. The true heirs of the Soviets’ system of corrupt and evil ideological trials are not the fundamentalist Christian leaders of an, as of yet mythical American theocracy but a score of very real and highly oppressive Muslim states – as the following article shows:
Jordanian police arrested a local writer on Tuesday for incorporating verses of the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book, into his love poetry. The poet, Islam Samhan, published his collection of poems, Grace like a Shadow, which allegedly insults the holy book. Samhan was charged with harming the Islamic faith and violating the press and publication law for combining the sacred words of the Qur’an with sexual themes. If convicted the poet could face up to three years in jail.
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