Radical Christian extremist ISIS

Phil Robertson is the moral equivalent of ISIS tyrant Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Robertson quotes Proverbs, "All who hate me love death."



His choice for Muslims is the same choice that ISIS has posed to Yazidis (and doesn't even offer to Shias): Convert  (to my extremist religion) or die.

In fact, Robertson thinks it's too late even for conversion. "That time has come and gone," he says.

For Robertson, there's no place in the world for moral reasoning, only for winning the war over which god is the bigger murderous asshole. And he thinks Satan is the problem!

Of course, Sean Hannity, handmaiden to genocide, is just fine with all this.

Need a couple more letters

We used to call bumpkin idiots gomers. They used to be decent enough people. Now they have a new name, gohmerts, and three decades of hate radio has made many of them unrepentant assholes.

Louie Gohmert makes you look good even if you were the kid in high school algebra who said, "Whattaya mean, x is a number!" Come to think of it, al-gebra sounds like creeping sharia!

Where will the Gohmerts go when even Texas is no longer xenophobic enough for them?

Like Bolsheviks, Nazis, Viet Cong, and Khmer Rouge

The Taliban know that every girl who learns to think and every father who teaches his daughter to think, subverts  the backwardness and evil of fundamentalist Islam. Thinking is a threat to their fervently chosen ignorance. The Taliban are more than willing to kill in defense of their radical refusal to grow into liberal society.

Sirajuddin Ahmad, the spokesman for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, said that Ms. Yousafzai became a target because she had been “brainwashed” into making anti-Taliban statements by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai.

“We warned him several times to stop his daughter from using dirty language against us, but he didn’t listen and forced us to take this extreme step,” he said.

Both father and daughter remain on the Taliban’s list of intended victims, he said.

This reminds me Kurtz's apologia in "Apocalypse Now":

I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do!

Kurtz's eventual response was a descent into the heart of darkness, into monstrous depravity, into insane homicide.

What should our response be? Could we retain our moral character, retain our judgement, which Kurtz called our defeat, and nonetheless issue a secular fatwa that anyone who harms Malala Yousafzai or her father Ziauddin will be subject to a U.S. lethal finding?

Moderation needs space and time and tolerance to grow. Extremists of all stripes know this and murder moderates. Would it benefit moderates to exact a deadly cost from the extremists, or would it simply drive others into their arms?

America is already using drones for targeted assassination as a tool of war, if not statecraft, despite a long-standing inclination not to - in reaction to out-of-control spy agencies during the Cold War. Israel has used assassination. Killing the guilty, the enemy, the vicious murderer of your children has visceral appeal, and there's often no civil authority in these cases. Has that been for the good or the bad? It's hard to tell.

It's hard to imagine our government could responsibly manage vengeance orders, when it can't manage a just civilian death penalty. It can't even manage political asylum very well.

But I know that I wish Sirajuddin Ahmad dead. The shooters who have gravely wounded Malala, I wish dead. Their commanders, dead.

Traditional war-making has proven a very poor tool to accomplish those just deaths without a mortgage of further deaths uncounted. This reasoning is how liberals like me get to law as the best tool to accomplish punishment of the guilty. It lacks the immediacy of gunning down your enemies, but it lasts better.

Public domain photo from the Library of Congress, found here.

Failure of understanding - mine

Other cultures have different norms:

The problem for Gulnaz and the other women in the film is the deeply held belief that women uphold their family’s honor. Thus any attempt to expose abuse is so humiliating to the family that a woman who speaks out often becomes a pariah among her relatives, ending up isolated as well as abused.

Gulnaz’s case shows the power of cultural norms. On the one hand, the public campaign for the woman prompted the pardon, which ensures that she will be able to bring up her daughter outside prison. On the other hand, the fact that the only imaginable solution to the situation of a woman with an illegitimate child is to have her marry the father — even if he is a rapist — is testament to the rigid belief here that a woman is respectable only if she is embedded within a family.

Ms. Malpas said that Gulnaz talked to her about why she felt that she had to give in to requests that she marry the man who raped her, even though she did not want to, explaining that not only would she be an outcast if she did not, but so would her daughter, and she would bring shame on her family.

I can't even begin to understand this one. A man rapes one of another man's female relatives, maybe even a daughter, and he blames her for shaming him!?

What the fuck is wrong with these people and their misogynistic religion and society?

Dangling modifier

Hope and change come in fitful bursts, followed by reaction and retrenchment. As it is with Occupy Wall Street, so it is in Bahrain:

Of all the uprisings in the Arab world, Bahrain managed to end the unrest, largely by using coercive force. Tensions between Sunnis and Shiites flared, and a country that was once one of the region’s most cosmopolitan is now one of its most divided.

and in Egypt:

[T]he military council began spelling out plans to carve out permanent political powers and protection from civilian oversight under the next constitution. Those efforts exploded after the government used force to clear a small protest camp from Tahrir Square last Saturday, amid mounting unrest across the country.

A few observations, not too taxing for those of you just in or headed for another tryptophan coma:

• Our reporters know to cheer for the Arab spring protesters and against the Occupiers. Why is that?
• Go back three centuries and substitute Protestant and Catholic for Sunni and Shiite, and you get Christian Europe with all it sectarian conflict - and the motivation for our separation of church and state.
• A despotism's power grows out of the barrel of a gun - or the nozzle of a can of pepper spray.
• Monarchy is never legitimate.
• I'm a liberal, so it's not nearly as easy to scare me as your average Fox-watching conservamaton, but Islamist co-option of the legitimate democratic aspirations of the Arab spring scares me.

Less popular than atheists

Less popular than Muslims!

 [T]he Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

Of course, those of us who were not performing daily self-service colonoscopies also knew this:

Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born.

Sectarian laws

Granted that the well-fanned flames of anti-shariah panic spring from bigotry in almost every instance.

The more tangible effect of the movement, opponents say, is the spread of an alarmist message about Islam.... The anti-Shariah campaign, they say, appears to be an end in itself, aimed at keeping Muslims on the margins of American life.

The loons who oppose any mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, don't do it because they are in fact in any danger at all. They do it because they hate Muslims, don't want them living next door, and don't want them worshipping any god but theirs.

They've reached the point where most of them will grudgingly give Catholics a pass, at least until they get the Southern Baptist theocracy they want established. And this will differ from shariah how exactly? I am the lord thy god, and thou shall have no other gods before me. It's such a huuuge difference to smite a heretic in the name of god, instead of the name of god in Arabic.

But I digress.

The truth is that, despite anti-shariah's genealogy of bigotry, I don't want any ecclesiastical law - not canon law, not rabbinic law, and especially not shariah - to determine the outcome of cases in American courts. I want secular law to dominate. I'm happy to have diverse ethnic and religious people in America, but America is a shared political idea of common liberty under law. It shouldn't be a place where one neighborhood has rights for women and one neighborhood can treat them as chattel.

Sure, we have only attained this enlightenment ourselves recently. That only means we shouldn't draw self-flattering conclusions about how wonderful we are, not that we should surrender the real progress we've made as if it weren't really progress after all.

One actual case I've heard of in which shariah was considered (in Florida, of all places, if I remember correctly) was a family law case submitted to an Islamic arbitrator by mutual consent of the parties. Since both the man and the woman were represented by American lawyers, that sounds pretty reasonable. Still, think of the social pressure on the woman to accept her lesser legal standing and thus to achieve a lesser outcome. A Muslim woman who immigrates to America should (and does) gain all the rights of the American woman she has become.

Here's another case in which justice was delayed, though not denied:

Critics most typically cite a New Jersey case last year in which a Moroccan woman sought a restraining order against her husband after he repeatedly assaulted and raped her. The judge denied the request, finding that the defendant lacked criminal intent because he believed that his wife must comply, under Islamic law, with his demand for sex.

The decision was reversed on appeal.

America is in no danger whatsoever of the establishment of widespread shariah. None. The anti-shariah movement is built to frighten and manipulate credulous wingnut fools. Keeping them in a constant state of uproar and fear - so typical of conservatives - is an electoral strategy designed as red meat for the bigoted, nativist base of the Republican Party.

The correct political reply from the left is not to defend shariah. We don't want to own this sort of statement:

“There’s a conflation between the idea of Islam being a universalist, proselytizing religion and reducing it to a totalitarian movement,” said Mohammad Fadel, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at the University of Toronto. “All good propaganda is based on half-truths.”

Islam is not a universalist religion. It's not inclusive. It's absolutist. Its social and political incarnations in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa practice by and large only the barest religious tolerance - if any. Speaking of propaganda based on half-truths...

Perhaps our political response should start by mocking the silly fears of ignernt teabaggers. But mainly it's to say quite calmly and directly that we all live under the Constitution and English Common Law, and that we don't need any precedents, statutes, or case law from any religious legalisms. For example, we don't need Michele Bachmann submitting to her husband like a good little religious wife - fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, take your pick, we don't want either.

Update: Outrage piled upon outrage, so thick and high I could quote almost any single paragraph. Here are two short ones:

Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.

“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed.

Do we actually imagine in a century we could fix this lawless backward society? It would take a mythic race of avenging Amazons killing every uncle who murdered his niece and every father who acquiesced. As brutally and publicly as possible.

The next wingnut contrive-versy

Sharia burial!  Give it a few days...  The birthers need a new so-called issue.

Never mind that the consensus seems to be that burial at sea accords with some Muslim customs and not with others.  The wingnuts don't care about facts.  They have an entire disinformation apparatus to make up any bullshit they need.

And they need to go through the day in a constant state of outrage and alienation from everyone who's not in their tribe.

Yesterday morning, they resented Osama bin Laden continuing to breathe.  Today, they resent that President Obama directed the effort to find and capture or kill him.  And they're thanking Duhbya, whose every major move and attitude gave punishment of al Qaeda the short shrift in his failed geopolitical game of Risk.

Rehab

Click image for full Jimmy Margulies/Record cartoon.

Bigger, better bullshit, Egypt edition

Conservatives may not be able to agree whether the unrest in Egypt is a good thing, but you can be sure they'll all eventually jump on the Duhbya/neocon vindication bandwagon:

"We might be in a better position if we had more closely followed President Bush's prescription for support of greater democracy in all parts of the world," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona, said as he stepped off the Senate floor Monday. "If we had maintained that position and had that reputation in the world….then our calls today for restraint would have more credibility because the people of Egypt would know our heart was with their desire for greater representation."

Kyl (R-sow's ear) is saying that Egyptians would luuuv us if we had just remained fully committed to killing hundreds of thousands more of their fellow Arab Muslims, if we hadn't stopped there but had proceeded to attack Saudi Arab and Persian Muslims.  Then we would have credibility when calling for restraint, whatever the hell he means by that.  He's blithely relying on the complete captious ignoramus stupidity of his base and the vast wasteland of American media (o.k., no longer so vast).

Of course, Duhbya did convince a majority of Americans to go to war in the first place because his advisers from the PNAC thought we could swoop into the crossroads of the Middle East and impose Western democracy without the least goddamn bit of nation-building.  Hell, god was just going to show up, kick allah's ass, and everyone would kiss his ring.  Does Disney have the rights to that bullshit?  Better aim that animated nonsense at preschoolers - everyone old enough to disbelieve in Santa Claus would know better.

So maybe Kyl's not an idiot for supposing he can get away with this malodorous bullshit.

Republicans are confused by the obvious doom that faces the Mubarak/mukhabarat regime.  The protesters are showing him their shoes, but at least they aren't winging them at him.  When Mubarak concedes to his own term limits, he thinks he's compromising.  Moron.  Rulers don't win by saying they'll go away at some future time.  He's toast.

Still, Republicans want to know how can they bend the facts to their advantage.  (Hint: Don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin!)  Mohamed ElBaradei, whom they despised when he was pursuing inspections and non-proliferation with Iran, looks o.k. - not too-too Islam-y - but what if the Muslim Brotherhood is the real power?  What if self-government in Egypt is anti-American?

(Republican note to self:  Be of good cheer.  Remember that Americans don't remember shit.  If it stops being on TV, well, outta sight outta mind.)

The aspiration to self-government is a good thing (except in poor people who might like ACORN).  While the panicky and mercurial two-year-olds who compose so much of American society these days still like Egyptian rebellion, here's the bigger, better bullshit that kneecaps Jon Kyl's thin luuuv for Duhbya:

• Duhbya and the Republicans made war in the Middle East, which inspired zero popular movements to depose autocrats.
• President Obama has taken only a few steps toward peace, and, voilà, the yearning for self-government has broken out all over the place!
• QED, bitches!  (Just please skip that French word in the previous bullet.)

But, of course, buy on rumor, sell on news.  The dream of Egyptian (and Tunisian) self-government is everything in the world you could possibly imagine.  The reality will be difficult even if it overcomes its poor odds and winds up a net positive.  The Arab street hates Israel - and America.

We are in bed with local authoritarians precisely because they can be bribed to suppress the street.  Whole peoples are hard to bribe - for a reasonable price, anyway.  Mubarak could cream off his cut of our foreign aid every year and build a fine set of overseas investment accounts.  (Dictator 101 - it's right there in the handbook: In case of revolution, you'd better have some swag somewhere else.)

Half a billion dollars a year (wild, unsubstantiated guess) can pay for one very decadent family - just ask Paris Hilton - but it doesn't go that far when split 80 million ways.  We can't pay them all off!  (That would be socialism anyway!)

I'd reckon Mubarak's presidency less than a week to survive.  Then there will be a caretaker, then who knows?

The Republicans will attack Obama at every turn.  When Mubarak flees, Obama will not have stood by a stalwart ally.  When the caretaker comes in, Obama will not have steered another sovereign nation well enough to get our boy into office. (The Republicans use the word sovereign situationally.  For us, it means absolute unfettered authority.  For other countries, it means absolute unfettered authority - for us!  We win!)

When the caretaker is ousted (anyone remember Shahpour Bakhtiar?), Obama will not have stabilized his government enough.  When there's any hint of Islam, even an innocent hint and the hints are not likely to be limited to innocent hints, it will be Obama's fault that he didn't cast a nationwide spell over every Egyptian first-born in order to get America's interests looked after first and foremost (sovereignty).  If we object to that expectation, the GOPers'll say that we thought all along that Obama is the messiah.  Never mind that they projected that on us, the media will run with it.

Because it's just stupid enough to have universal appeal.

The long dirt nap

What to hope for in Egypt?

The American media appeases its audience with just-so stories that make it appear everything could turn out, like, totally cool and schweet.

Friday’s protests were the largest and most diverse yet, including young and old, women with Louis Vuitton bags and men in galabeyas, factory workers and film stars.

Freedom-loving patriots of all stripes and walks of life!  They undoubtedly hope for freedom, free markets, and a life of peace seeking rapprochement with all other nations and religions.  It's the dawning of a new day.

This is the New York Times, so they follow up with a little un-Disneyfied reporting:

Street battles unfolded throughout the day Friday, as hundreds of thousands of people streamed out of mosques after noon prayers on Friday in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and other cities around the country.

Something tells me that they're not going to have to suffer the outrageous wall of separation between church mosque and state.  Oh, snap!  If only Southern Baptists would riot just a little...

A dictator like Hosni Mubarak is like a loan from the mob.  The vig is tough to pay in the best of times.  Sometimes it might even be worth it.  But when the loan is past due, someone's going to start losing fingers.

It's hard not to sympathize with the heady feeling of Egyptians, who are no longer too afraid to shout what they want, who have reached the point where they can boil over and they know that Mubarak can't liquidate them all.  Realists on this side of the world should remember how an organic revolution worked out in Iran under similar circumstances.

All the Muslim Brotherhood has to do to topple the government might be to assassinate Mohamed ElBaradei and make it look like the secret service's work.  He's the great Western hope, a man who has worked for peace.  But radicals know - witness the Bolsheviks - that killing or marginalizing the moderates to polarize the country is a path to decisive victory over a weakened foe.  Or maybe they'll capture our embassy.  That works too.

It's no coincidence that Teapublicans in the U.S. now think Orrin Hatch is not conservative enough.  The GOP has been marginalizing anyone who ever had a moderate thought - or even listened to a moderate expression.

A spectre haunting Europe

Soon the senescent secular Europe will be overrun by Muslim immigrants and the unassimilated progeny of their oppressed, veiled women. They'll move in, have as many babies as a renegade Mormon living on welfare in Moab, take the public dole, and spend every night plotting the violent downfall of the foolish system that makes their conspiratorial leisure possible.

Right?

Uh, no.

Slightly more than 4 per cent of Europe's population is “Muslim,” as defined by demographers (though about 80 per cent of these people are not religiously observant, so they are better defined as secular citizens who have escaped religious nations).

In our putrid excuse for a national conversation, every time some fearful trope turns out to be a bullshit lie, it came from the right-wing propaganda machine.

(h/t DougJ at Balloon Juice)

If you think ignorance is expensive

... try some more of it.

Click image for full Tim Jackson/Chicago Defender cartoon.

Wingnuts correct the Bill of Rights, freedom of religion

The Founders cared so much about the free exercise of religion that they put it first in the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

The wingnut's imagined text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of any particular Christian denomination, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Oh sure, they'll let the Jews practice their religion freely too. They haven't killed Christ in like 2000 years, and besides, the fundies need them to help the End Times arrive.

But Muslims? No way. Cal Thomas tells his wingnut audience at Townhall:

We won't win this war if we permit the uncontrolled construction of mosques.

Then he says that we need to be more like Syria, that well-known beacon of religious liberty. I kid you not!

[T]he Syrian government has asked imams for recordings of their Friday sermons and has begun closely monitoring what is taught in religious schools. ...

What does Syria know that we refuse to acknowledge out of fear of offending "sensibilities"?

We must purge the evil from among us, or else.

Could we please start that purge with Cal? (Kidding of course.)

(h/t Mediamatters)

Book of Jon

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A shared reproach

Click image for full Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.

I do not think that word means what you think it means

The Iranian state press has fired back at Carla Bruni for daring to say that adulterers should not be stoned to death. The nerve! The mullahs' pet editorialists have pointed to Bruni's non-medieval sexual history and called her a hypocrite and a prostitute.

Bruni even deserves to die for having had sex (presumably) with more than one man. You can't say they're not consistent.

Uh, guys - and you know they're all guys, and they probably all have some secret shame, maybe even scantily clad pictures of Bruni herself - she'd be a hypocrite if she were a prostitute who favored stoning the adulterers.

There must be a deep human need to tamp down sexuality. Or maybe it's just a deep masculine need to control female sexuality. All the world's major religions stock some of their strongest taboos for sex, especially those dominated by men.

Our own founding Puritans put scarlet A's on women's clothing and locked randy people in stocks. Current fundamentalists think the word moral is solely about sex; Bill Clinton was immoral for his sexual transgressions, but Duhbya is moral despite raining death from the skies on the thinnest of pretexts and despite torturing hundreds.

Orthodox Jews are forbidden to touch their wives in their time of "uncleanness."

Conservative Muslims hide their women in shapeless bags that are even worse than the traditional habits of Catholic nuns. But note how similar the hijab and the wimple are!

Even randy adolescents have their secular ways of enforcing sexual mores on girls: Is there anything worse you can call a girl than slut?

I'm just not sure I understand what this deep-seated need is...

Why liberals think conservatives harbor bigots

Because they do:

"No mosque in Murfreesboro. I don't want it. I don't want them here," Evy Summers said to WTVF. "Go start their own country overseas somewhere. This is a Christian country. It was based on Christianity."

The theater of the absurd is opening everywhere:

"[Muslims] are not a religion. They are a political ... group," Bob Shelton, a 76-year-old retiree who lives in the area, told The Associated Press.

Shelton was among several hundred demonstrators who recently wore "Vote for Jesus" T-shirts...

(h/t Glenn Greenwald at Salon)

More on Murfreesboro:

"It's a pro-Christian bill," [State Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro,] said. "It was established to protect the First Amendment to keep the federal government from coming in and making a decision on whether or not the church qualified or not to be a church."

But of course Ketron is qualified to decide that a mosque is not a mosque or Islam is not a religion or the First Amendment doesn't mean what it says.

Evil or stupid?

Yes.

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Road outrage

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.