In the last few weeks, the following have all been declared haram, the prohibitions being in most cases promptly backed up by actual executions:
Selling falafels
Growing goatees
Wearing shorts
Selling ice
Smoking cigarettes
Wearing t-shirts with English writing on them
…and my personal favourite:
Eating mayonnaise
And why are falafels unIslamic? One of the threatened vendors explains:
"I said I was just feeding the people, but they said there were no falafels in Mohammed the prophet's time, so we shouldn't have them either.
"I felt like telling them there were no Kalashnikovs in Mohammed's time either, but I wanted to keep my life."
So falafels, goatees, ice-sellers and sunburnt knees vanish away one after the other, and the beardies go on to their next target. And Iraq’s civil society, twenty six million Pastor Niemollers, fear them more than they fear us.
There’s a reason that Iraq had Saddam Hussein. Barring the special case of outside intervention, people get the kind of governments they deserve. Sometimes that outside intervention is indispensible, as in the case of Nazi Germany, where we bombed their cities flat and no-one whined about civilian casualties. It may soon be necessary in the case of Iran, but it’s getting impossible to argue that it was ever so for Iraq. Giving the ballot to a population who allow a few hundred fanatics to hold them at gunpoint over facial hair is beyond futile.
It’s time to bring the boys home, and spend that Iraq reconstruction budget on ethanol fuel conversion and nuclear power plants. Let them try to finance their damned Jihad when no-one wants their lousy oil any more.
A falafel, yesterday. Not kosher, if you’ll pardon the expression…
6 comments:
Happy Monday Ivan.
I thought falafel was a stringy thing or is that alfalfa. Dyslexia - all I need!
I've come to the same conclusion. It's one thing to evangelize the world to the message of equality of all; rights protected by a government formed with the consent of the governed, etc. But when the congregation doesn't want to be "saved," it's time to fold the revival tents and move on.
Cheers.
Those people just haven't tasted a falafel at 3 in the morning, when you're staggering drunk to your dorm on campus. Few things come close to that experience, lemme tell you that.
According to this guy, the population of Baghdad has already started taking care of their own security--by dividing the city into no-go tribal enclaves. Can you spell Lebanon? I guess this gives Tom Friedman a chance to give up his flattening nonsense and go back to what he used to do best: reporting.
But this whole Middle Eastern mess leaves me deeply depressed. Why don't we just bash some crazy liberals instead?
Perhaps this will demonstrate once and for all that trying to impose democracy at gunpoint, in a country that has never had it, is complete folly.
Then again, this would require people to be able to learn from history - clearly unrealistic, esp. for the US.
Pi, if you can spell dyslexia you don't have it.
Randall, to cap the metaphor, "amen to that, brother!"
Des, a few drinks would do them all a lot of good. Maybe getting laid too, if there were any girls desperate or public-spirited enough. I mean, who spends all day soap-dodging, reading some medieval pederast's bullshit texts and polishing a kalashnikov. These guys are poster-boys for "When Nerds Go Bad"...
And JB, that's true only up to a point. After all, Germany never looked back. But that's because we made sure they knew they were beaten. If on the other hand you pussy-foot around being "sensitive" to the enemy's "culture", all they see is weakness. The real lesson of history is, either have the balls to make their acceptance of Islamism intolerable to them, or go home and save your money.
They had plague in the time of Muhammed. Maybe they'd like to see a nice holy dose of plague sweep through their streets. Oh, I've got it wrong, they want it to sweep through our streets. Nice bunch. Milk of human kindness.
According to Sunday's LA Times, in the south the Shi'ites are running things much as they do in Iran. the local Shia population have a degree of freedom they don't have in Baghdad but democracy is dead. Sunnis, democratic agitators and even democratically appointed officials are sitting ducks and killing is common.
This was predictable. If a bunch of galoots sitting in pubs in The Western Isles of Scotland and in Ojai, CA could predict this when we dissolved the Iraqi army, the president should have been able to do so too. Indonesia and Turkey, the most secularly run of the Muslim lands have dodgy interpretations of democracy and their own wee games of robbing Peter to pay Muhammed. And they've been at it for decades. Democracy has growing pains, we all know that, but now, I too, an erstwhile "we break it, we stay and fix it" squawker, thinks that it is evermore pointless to send our own soldiers off to die in such an intractable situation.
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