The I. C. Fumes Again

The Irate Codger still marvels after all these years at the knavery, deviousness, and, when it suits his purposes, the unctuousness of George W. Bush. E.g., on the blowing up of a golden-domed Shiite shrine in Samara. This despicable act was, he said yesterday, "an affront to people of faith throughout the world." Who does he suppose blew the thing up, atheists? In Bush's fantasy world, the Great Divide of the modern age lies between People of Faith (good) and the Unbelievers (degenerate, cynical amoralists). On one side the God-fearing; on the other those who sneer at the Almighty. On one side, Family Values; on the other, perverts and deviants, and those who embrace their sick "lifestyles."

So it simply can't be that those who blew the shrine's roof off were Sunni fanatics for whom the shrine was a detestable symbol of "idol-worship"--i.e. the Shiite veneration of "imams" descended from the offspring of the marriage of Ali, Mohammad's son-in-law, and the Prophet's daughter Fatima--- veneration for which, Sunnis believe, there is no justification in the Koran. Or so I gather.

Bush can never acknowledge that fanaticism and intolerance are inseperable from religious belief. Thus his pathetic mantra--not heard in some time, actually--that Islam is a "peaceful" religion, when in fact it is the most militant of the three great monotheistic faiths and by far the most insistent proselytizer. Muhammad's stern command: Submit or Die (I've been reading the Koran of late, 150 pages so far in the Penguin edition, so don't try to tell me I've misunderstood.)

It's not just Muslims, of course. I remember the Serb bombardment of Dubrovnik fourteen years ago. That unbelievably beautiful city, the creation of the Venetian Republic during its centuries of glory, was being slowly smashed up by Serb artillery, and the churches, monestaries, and basilicas seemed unusually unfortunate. It was almost as if the Serbs were aiming at them. As indeed they were. Those buildings were Catholic and the Serbs are Orthodox. Nuff said. Of course, in Bosnia-Herzegovina the Serbs were just as systematic in destroying mosques and synagogues.

Then there were the religious Zionist fanatics in Jerusalem who plotted to tunnel under the Temple Mount (or Abode of the Faithful, is it?) to blow up the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque in one glorious detonation, thus bringing to an end an affront to the Jews and their Yahweh of fourteen centuries duration. And who can forget the Taliban zealots who could no longer endure the affront to Allah of those two giant Buhddas carved into a mountainside in northern Afghanistan fifteen centuries ago, and so, in an act of profound piety, blew them up?

No, George, we atheists have no enthusiasm whatever for barbaric acts such as these. In fact, we tend to be cultured folk who venerate such buildings of whatever faith, who come to admire them, to sit silently in them for some minutes meditating, and before stepping out into the daylight again, to drop a few bucks in the collection boxes for the preservation and restoration of them.

What did Bush say at the end of his 2003 State of the Union address, just before invading Iraq? "Freedom is not America's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man, woman, and child on earth." I think that was it. So Bush, the Almighty's modest "messenger," as he styled himself to Bob Woodward, brought the Almighty's gift to Iraq. The trouble was, there was already an Almighty there. In fact, two of them. So you had the Texas Almighty, and then the Sunni, and the Shiite. The Sunnis and Shiites, after fourteen centuries of mainly living and letting live, are now ready to Get It On! Let's r-r-r-Rumble!! The curtain is about to rise on Bush's most extravagent production yet, "War of the Gods: The Final Showdown." Or perhaps, "The Mother of all Civil Wars."

The Shoe Bomb Plot

The horrors mount daily. The mendacity, hubris, folly, and incompetence of this administration are boundless. Maureen Dowd speaks for all of us in her column in this morning's New York Times, "Smoking Dutch Cleanser," while from the Letters columns arise cries of justified anguish: "I have never been more outraged by my government than I am right now;" "The captains, it seems, are asleep at the helm, and it is every man, woman and child for himself and herself;" and "This administration is not to be trusted. Not ever."

But every once in a while there comes something so preposterous, so stupid, so over the top, that it's funny, deeply, blissfully funny. Thus Thursday morning when Dubya, speaking to the National Guard Association (which presented him with a bronze bust of himself for his gallant service in the Texas Air National Guard---did you know that?), Dubya, I say, revealed for a second or third time that four years ago an al Qaeda plot was foiled in the nick of time to fly an airliner into the tallest building in Los Angeles, a plot in which a shoe bomb was to be used to "breach the cockpit door." I was listening to Al Franken's show on Air America Radio later that morning, and Al had Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe on the line. Franken asked, "How would you use a shoe bomb to breach the cockpit door? I mean, at the least it would blow your legs off, wouldn't it?" Oliphant was laughing helplessly. "I can't wait," he said, "for Scott McClellan to try to explain this one tomorrow morning." Remember, people, that Richard Reid, the original shoe bomber, had only to light the fuse to blow himself and the airplane to kingdom come. A shoe bomb explosion to breach a door within the airplane would have to be a /very carefully /controlled one, wouldn't it? They went to a commercial break, and during those three minutes or so, Franken figured it all out.

Here's how Franken explained it. "The bomber buys a first class ticket, and gets a seat about five rows back from the cockpit. He takes his shoes off and beckons to a cabin attendant. He explains that he's been travelling for some time and hasn't had time to change, and that his feet are smelly because he forgot to put odor eaters in his shoes. He doesn't want to offend, so would she please put his shoes somewhere well away from the other passengers? Say at the cockpit door?"

In the forty-eight hours since, I haven't seen anyone comment on the collossal silliness of this claim, not even--or not yet--mediamatters.org, usually so quick to nail the media's blunders and ommisions.

A glum note. Does anyone know Donald E. Powell? I thought not. He's the guy who is the administration's "Gulf Coast recovery czar." Remember when in September Bush pledged to "spend whatever it takes" to bring back New Orleans "bigger and better than ever"? Well, Powell was appointed to do that in early November, so quietly that I missed it for three weeks (no Rose Garden announcement, you may be sure). The minimally acceptable response would have been to create something akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority, or at least to Senator Joseph Lieberman's idiotic brainstorm, the Department of Homeland Security, with a highly qualified hydrologist/ engineer/ environmentalist, given sweeping administrative authority, at its head. Who is Powell? I googled him. Before his appointment as "czar," he was chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, appointed by Bush in 2001. And before that? CEO and chairman of the Boatman's First National Bank of Amarillo, Texas. And head of the Board of Regents of Texas A&M University, where he established the George Bush School of Business Administration. And a member of the board of the Texas Cattle Feeders Association. And, oh yes, a Bush-Cheney 2000 "Pioneer," named so for bundling at least $100,000 in campaign contributions. I have seen no mention of this background anywhere in the media. "Don, you're doin' one heckuva job."

Let's hear it for blasphemy!

The Irate Codger finds himself so mad he could spit. He hasn't been this disgusted since the Senate voted 99-0 to condemn the two judges of the Ninth Circuit Court who held that the words "under God" in the Pledge contravened the establishment clause of the Constitution, inasmuch as compelling children to affirm a belief in a supreme being in a patriotic ritual made true patriotism and monotheism inseparable. If that didn't establish religion, what did? This utterly sane and constitutionally impeccable decision was deemed "deeply offensive," an "unforgivable insult" to the vast majority of Americans for whom this is a Christian--whoops, Judeo-Christian--nation. Impiety makes the great majority bolt and flee like panicked sheep.

So with this stir over the blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet--blessedness be upon Him--published in an obscure Danish newspaper. It's not so much that the whole Islamic world appears to have gone nuts over it (although, intriguingly, Al Jazeera Magazine Online has downplayed the story almost to the point of censorship) as that the Blair government and the Bush administration have opportunistically sided with Muslim outrage, as no other NATO governments have, and that the press in both the UK and the US have gone along with their governments in blacking out the offending cartoons. They've been printed everywhere else in Europe, apparently in the curious belief that the public has a right to know what provoked the furor, and the press has an obligation to inform it. But Jack Straw [Do you know, when I was teaching at East Anglia in 1968-69, Jack Straw was a "student radical," quite a firebrand, one heard---who could forget that name, right out of the 14th century Peasants' Revolt?], speaking for Her Majesty's Government, denounced republication as "insulting...insensitive...disrespectful...and wrong."

The Guardian editorial for today ties itself in knots from the outset. "The Guardian believes uncompromisingly in freedom of expression," it asserts, yet it would be "senselessly provocative" to reproduce these images, "of no intrinsic value, which pander to the worst prejudices about Muslims." After all, we're speaking here of the founder of "one of the world's three great monotheistic religions." Ah, yes, the three great monotheistic religions--how could any sensitive person possibly accuse any of them of having been or being fanatical, murderous, and bigoted? "Even if the intention was satirical and not blasphemous," the Guardian says, publishing these cartoons in the first place was "wrong." So even if the intent was satirical--as it obviously was--the result is clearly blasphemy, and that is absolutely out of bounds.

To which Le Nouvel Observateur editor Jean-Marcel Bougereau replies, "Blasphemy is Authorized." "In France," he writes, "everyone has the right to criticize religions. Blasphemy is even authorized. It is perfectly legal...to dump on religions, to judge them to be lying, soul-destroying, mind-numbing. Unless we want to re-establish the crime of blasphemy?" He notes that many of the most glorious names in the French literary canon blasphemed, beginning with Voltaire [but doesn't mention my favorite, Denis Diderot, who wrote that "mankind will not be truly free until the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest"]. The German home minister refused to apologize for the printing of the offending cartoons in four papers. "Why should the German government apologize?" he asked. "This is an expression of press freedom." Quite.

The US is just as bad as the Brits. A spokesman for the State Department said of the cartoons, "We find them offensive, and we certainly understand why Muslims would find them offensive." Muslims of the world, we feel your pain. If George W. Bush really wanted to apologize to Muslims, it might have been more to the point to fire Gen. Jerry Boykin for standing in evangelical pulpits in uniform and calling Muslims idol-worshippers, or to condemn the Rev. Franklin Graham, "chaplain to the Pentagon," for calling Islam a false religion. Or, even, to express some doubt about his being the Almighty's servant and messenger in bringing freedom to Iraq and utterly crushing the "Islamists," so contradictory to his idiotic mantra that Islam is a "peaceful" religion.

Why would the US and the UK grovel so, when, so far, no other nation except poor Denmark has? Would the following have anything to do with it? "The United States has been trying to improve its image in the Muslim world, badly damaged by the Iraq war and American support for Israel." (this morning's NY Times) And who is our ally in Iraq? Why, it's Tony Blair!

That every US newspaper has censored the cartoons, and all the TV networks, save for one brief exposure of one on ABC, is contemptible. What are they afraid of, that we'll all turn to stone if we glance at one? The Washington Post editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, explained on NPR this afternoon that it was sufficient to describe the cartoons and that actually printing any of them would provide no real furthering of understanding of the issue and would be "gratuitously offensive." So, for our own good, evidently, we must accept that big editor knows that it's best for us that we never see these awful things..

What is laughable about all this, of course, is that anyone with a computer can find these cartoons in a minute. I did, and I wasn't horrified. In fact, the one of Muhammad stopping suicide bombers at the gates of Paradise and saying, "Hold it, we're all out of virgins!" made me laugh briefly. I remembered one young Palestinian "martyr" in the mid-nineties who made a video before blowing up himself and eleven Israelis at a busstop, a video in which he said, "I will enter heaven wearing a necklace of the skulls of the Sons of Zion." Gee, I almost forgot that this is a vicious distortion of Islam, one of those stereotypes perpetrated by anti-Muslim bigots.

One argument in the Arab press is that we in the West would never print such cartoons if they had been aimed at Jews rather than Muslims. They have a point. Were there any cartoons in the West ridiculing religious Zionist fanaticism and condemning its results after Dr. Baruch Goldberg of Brooklyn machine-gunned twenty-eight Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1993? Perhaps there were in Europe, but not here. If there had been, you may be sure that Abraham Foxman would have had a letter published in the NY Times the next morning, if not a column, condemning such gross insensitivity and--of course--blatant anti-Semitism. After the good doctor's martyrdom, there was erected a memorial to him with an eternal flame in the east Jerusalem settlement of Kiryat Arba which stood until Ehud Barak ordered its dismantlement in 2000. The Hassidic rabbis of Hebron and Jerusalem still give as good as they get in trading curses and anathemas with the mullahs of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Gaza.

What we need is more blasphemy, not less. Did any American cartoonist have the cheek upon the death of Pope John Paul II to point out that he cleaned up on priests professing anything like liberation theology; that he kicked Fr. Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of the church for standing up to the heirs of Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti (so good to MotherTheresa had the junior Duvalier been); that he stifled Archbishop Romero of San Salvador, that peasants' priest, before the ARENA gunmen assassinated him; that his "abstinance only" no-condoms HIV/AIDS campaign in sub-Saharan Africa, so faithfully carried out by the Bush administration, has condemned millions to an early death; that he ignored priestly molestation of boys and gave a sinecure in Rome to Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston, the predator's enabler; that he condemned perhaps half his priesthood for manifesting the "grave spiritual disorder" of homosexuality; and that he laid it down as immutable that women must not be admitted to the priesthood because all of Jesus's disciples were men? If anyone was ripe for the scorn of humanity, it was this mean, bitter old man at his death. Yet, everywhere was reverence.

The only essay about this rudeness of Danish cartoonists to the Prophet I've seen with which I'm in full agreement is Christopher Hitchens's in today's Slate. It's good to see him back in vintage Hitchens form. One minor disagreement. Hitchens accepts that any depiction of the Prophet is and always has been absolutely verboten to Muslims. Well, I have seen reproductions of sixteenth century Persian and Mughal illuminated manuscripts depicting all manner of scenes, including Muhammad teaching his disciples, sitting, in a turban and with a neat little van Dyke, on a carpet, right forefinger up and pointing for emphasis.

Finally, all this reminds me of one of the funniest editorial cartoons I've ever seen. It was by Jeff Danziger at the time of the Ayatollah Khomenei's fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. We see Rushdie in the foreground running toward us in terror, pursued by a phalanx of Muslims brandishing scimitars led by the Ayatollah. And running along beside Rushdie is an agent holding his fedora on his head with one hand and clutching a briefcase with the other, turning to the writer smilingly and saying, "Rushdie, I tell you you can't buy publicity like this!"