evolution

I’ve been following this story about Rachael Ray and the evil scarf of death for a few days, and I have to say, I think it’s pretty stupid.

In fact, it reminded me of the Burger King “Allah” swirly-cone (posts here and here), in which a Muslim fellow succeeded in pressuring Burger King to stop selling an ice-cream cone because the package design “looked like” the Arabic inscription for “Allah”.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet the people that are flogging the Rachael Ray story were flogging the ice-cream-cone story from the opposite angle, i.e. that Burger King shouldn’t have folded. In the Burger King case, outrage at Burger King and derision for the complainant was at least appropriately placed. In this case, it was exactly reversed. In both cases, the response from each of Burger King and Dunkin Donuts should have been “Look. It’s a(n) scarf(ice cream cone). Oh, and screw you.”

I’ll bet that none of those people considered that the scarf “meant” exactly what Ray and the commercial’s producers intended, which I’d be willing to bet further was “a piece of colored cloth that matches my outfit and makes me look good for this commercial”. Each stupid overreaction like this causes people to take their eyes off the prize in the now-decades-long fight against radical Islamist terrorism.

That’s what they’re saying — 5.2 on the Richter — and apparently it was felt as far west as Kansas City.

Consider it the antithesis to Bush’s own version of the dance.

A prominent Saudi cleric has publicly criticised religious hardliners after it was suggested he behaved improperly when he danced at a wedding.

Sheikh Abdul Mohsen al-Obaikan had been filmed performing the Bedouin sword dance at the wedding.

But he told Saudi newspaper Asharq al Awsat there was nothing wrong with showing joy.

The sheikh is a prominent member of the Saudi Kingdom’s Council of senior Islamic scholars.

He is also a legal consultant to the country’s ministry of justice.

Voice of tolerance

There is suspicion Sheik al-Obaikan has been targeted because he has expressed relatively moderate views in the past.

He has given limited support to the right of women to drive and criticised suicide attacks, saying they are not religiously sanctioned as acts of martyrdom.

In Saudi Arabia’s strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, where the sexes are segregated and clerics determine social restrictions, Sheikh Al Obaikan is considered a voice of tolerance.

But his enemies attack him by describing him as the cleric to the United States marines and the Saudi establishment.

Now the Sheikh has had to defend his rather sedate Bedouin sword dance at his nephew’s wedding - a video clip of which has been posted on the internet.

Couldn’t find the video.

Possibly.

Samantha Power, you’ll recall, was one of Barack Obama’s senior foriegn policy advisers. I say “was” because she was fired after referring to Hillary Clinton as “a monster” to The Scotsman (fired after what, an hour?) and an el foldo by the Obama people.

Turns out, as this Obsidian Wings post shows, she may have formed that opinion long before she ever met Barack Obama, based on her evaluation of how the Clintons, the worthless State Department¹, and the U.S. government dealt with the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s.

The content of the post is shocking (but hardly surprising) if it is an accurate portrayal of events — and I must say that I believe it is. Be sure to read it all.

1. Just because State was staffed by Democrats then isn’t what makes it worthless. It’s headed by Republicans now, and it’s still just as worthless. [↩]

Sorry to beat this scimitar video thing to death, but I redubbed it with an appropriate soundtrack.

I saw this on public television last night [IRONY BREAK: I got tired of a special on racial diversity so I switched to the other public television station and watched a documentary on the life and times at... Windsor Castle], and they billed it as something like an opportunity for openness and cultural exchange. The media has taken that ball and run with it — CNN calls it “historic”; the Beeb calls it “a remarkable display of cultural diplomacy”;

Really? I’d call it “neat, but barely noteworthy”. The people of North Korea — who, I might add, will be force-fed this performance on state radio and TV, which will take a break from its all-Kim Jong Il, all-the-time programming to carry it — will be disappointed to learn that you can’t eat a New York Philharmonic performance.

Certainly the Philharmonic players will remember it. I don’t mean to denigrate them — no doubt they are highly talented and among the best in the world. There’s no reason to think that they won’t put on a good show, and I’d imagine the people Kim handpicks to attend the event will have a good time, what with the Hennessy VSOP, the Pleasure Brigade, and one of the world’s finest orchestras.

The talk about “cultural openness” and such is just that — talk. A showy gesture, which the people who talk about such things are famous for. It will change nothing.

UPDATE [21:42]: Reuters: “a unique moment of unity.” Do journalists have some standardized “lofty cliche” handbook they consult at times like these?

UPDATE [21:49]: All of the news stories said that the orchestra wanted to open with “The Star-Spangled Banner”, but they opened the dress rehearsal with the North Korean anthem, followed up by the national anthem. Make of that what you will.

[With apologies to Don Henley. Sadly, I didn't have to change too many of the words.]

They’re picking up the prisoner; they’re putting on the hood
All he wants to do is dance, dance
Islamists been Islamists since I dont know when
And all he wants to do is dance
Molotov cocktail-the local drink
And all he wants to do is dance, dance
They mix ‘em up right in the kitchen sink
And all he wants to do is dance

Crazy people walkin round with blood in their eyes
And all he wants to do is dance, dance
Wild-eyed pistol wavers who ain’t afraid to die
And all he wants to do is-
And all he wants to do is dance
And make romance

He can’t feel the heat comin off the street
He wants to party
He wants to get down
And all he wants to do is-
And all he wants to do is dance

Well, the government bugged the men’s room in the local disco lounge
And all he wants to do is dance, dance
To keep the boys from sellin’ all the weapons they could scrounge
And all he wants to do is dance

But that don’t keep the boys from makin’ a buck or two
And all he wants to do is dance, dance
They still can sell the people all the drugs that they can do
And all he wants to do is-
And all he wants to do is dance
And make romance

[inherited from: LGF.]

Would you support the widespread distribution of pr0n in the Middle East — specifically in, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia?

Judging from my statistics logs, there is definitely a market for it. Quite a number of the most disturbing searches for pornographic material that led people here come from that part of the world.

We here in the West are more or less jaded to porn. References to porn and the production thereof have become more-or-less mainstream, and advertising now speaks openly of sex, erections, and “warming sensations”. Despite the fevered imaginations in certain groups of nutbags, the Fascist Theocrat Culture War of AmeriKKKa™ has been a colossal failure.

But — in actual theocratic autocracies — what will the effects of widespread distribution be?

In the conservative Muslim world, sex is enjoyed as everywhere else on Earth, only it is a private, totally hush-hush thing. To show a female breast in public is a major offence, and can be punished with extreme severity. Sex outside marriage is a crime. Many sexual techniques, which are common among teenagers in the west*, are officially illegal in those countries.

The effect of those extremely graphic porn sites, written in Arabic, on a growing Middle East audience, is potentially more devastating in the medium term than a full scale conventional war.

If you get exposed, and then used, to western porn, well, not only your private morality but even your public morality will became weaker over time. You’ll begin questioning the social order, family values and traditions, religion, women role in society, the government, everything: it’s much more effective than a high altitude bombing, indeed.

After all, Weapons of Mass Distraction were massively used against western populations since 40 years now, and they proved to be extremely effective: so it is inevitable that they will be as much if not more lethal when fired against the Middle East culture, traditions and institutions.

What you have to ask yourself is whether or not you want the U.S. government in the business of financing, distributing, or producing** porn.

That won’t happen, of course. But it’s certainly safer than, say, airstrikes and invasion. Tactics similar to these have been used against us in the past. Should we use them in the national interest in the future?

*: Where the hell was I?

**: Imagine a world with government-produced porn. Because I’d prefer not to.

Ron Rosenbaum:

To me the visit was about the necessity to bear some kind of moral witness against the evil represented by Ahmadinejad, whatever pseudo-sophisticated arguments are used deny responsibility to him for his regimes crimes or to treat him as open to Reason.

The new meme tries to frame it as being about “fear” of Ahmadinejad. No it’s not about fear, it’s about moral disgust, revulsion. The fear can be seen, rather, in the posturing of those super brave boyz who accuse those who have the clarity to express moral disgust and rejection as “fearful”. When in fact it’s their fear—that their super-sophisitcated white boy, think tank subsidized, wonk mentality with all its nuances is laughably impotent in the face of fundamentalist, theocratic fascist evil. And what’s equally laughable is their belief that their arguments, their rhetoric their desire above all for dialogue will make a differ[e]nce in a kumbaya way, to the victims of a theocratic Stasi-like state.

RTWT.

So you’ve seen it, you’ve Technoratied it, you’ve refreshed Memeorandum every 15 minutes, and you’ve worn your index finger out from refreshing your RSS reader.

I speak, of course, of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearances before the National Press Club and at Columbia University. I won’t link all those things here — you’re all familiar enough with this medium that you can find whatever views smooth your plumage.

I will say that every living soul that was a part of this — from Ahmadinejad himself, to the U.S. government which granted him a visa, to the tough-talking questioner from Columbia, to the people that invited him, to the chin-stroking “progressive” multiculturalists** and their starry-eyed charges, to the media which covered the show, played their assigned role to the hilt. Not one deviated from the script prepared for them by fate and their respective masters.

My own views — outside of quite a deepening of the general malaise which has settled over me — can be described as some amalgam of the following. First, Wretchard:

Does Bollinger actually believe that the more Ahmedinajad speaks the more he “undermines” his own position in Iran? That the “many good-hearted, intelligent citizens” listening to Bollinger’s exchange with Ahmedinajad will have their eyes opened? About the only thing Bollinger got right was the assessment of the importance of his own remarks at the closing of his speech. The Columbia President continues:

A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country, as at one of the meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations, so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party’s defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more.

I am only a professor, who is also a university president.

This is beyond sad. It’s the closing of a man out of his own depth. It’s an faculty lunch speech dispatched against a man accustomed to command the secret police, rockets, EFPs, sophisticated propaganda and disinformation cells. Bollinger was game, but not only is he not in the same ring, he doesn’t even know where the fight is scheduled to take place. If this is what our intellectual leaders think is effective resistance against the Islamic Revolution then we are in serious trouble.

Jeff:

And when all is said and done, that’s what this is all about: not only does inviting [Ahmadinejad] serve as a PR coup and a thumb to the eye of warmongering Buscho and its simplistic “axis of Evil”-type thinking — but it shows how “civilized” can be the “free exchange of ideas” once international diplomacy is handed over to those intellectual elites who understand nuance and have been properly schooled in multiculturalist dogma.

Fellow ex-member of the now defunct Raging RINOs Nick Schweitzer:

For my part, I don’t think he should be silenced. While I certainly question the motives of those at Columbia University who invited him to speak… my questions center on them, not him. Why would they want him to speak? What value does his insight into world politics bring? His hatred of Jews? His hatred of freedom? His encouragement of terrorism? Does Columbia find these things valuable because they agree with them, or because they want to provide him a forum to pronounce his views and hope that students will backlash against him? …

But for those who truly do want to silence him… I would ask you why. What are you afraid of? In my experience, people don’t bother attempting to stop things that they don’t fear. Do you truly believe that the people of America will be swayed by what this monster says? Isn’t it just as likely that those who hear him will be disgusted by him, and will only convince them how evil he is? Is there that little faith in the heart of the basic American? If that is so… then our problem isn’t with Ahmadinejad, but rather with ourselves. Silencing him won’t restore our faith.

That faith, at least in me, is decreasing by the second.

*: The result of Alan Turing’s work combined with Godel’s incompleteness theorem shows that either a logical system is inconsistent or incomplete (cannot be computed by a Turing machine, cannot be fully enumerated or catalogued — there exist statements in the system that are true but unprovable within the system). Guess which ones we are.

**: Osama has made the same sort of overtures, mentioning various leftist causes in his “most recent” (read: cobbled together posthumously) messgaes. But, these were ham-fisted and even they saw through it. Ahmadinejad is slick — essentially, this “president” is a press secretary for the Ayatollah. He plays them like a harp***, and they love it, because it’s a thumb in the eye to the Bushitler and the Real Enemies™ (other Americans). Bush’s own incompetence and failure of leadership in this matter, as in many others, cannot be either understated or forgotten.

***: It’s really not that hard. Mouth a few of the shibboleths and off you go. (Bill is going to sue me for abusing his footnote device, but here I go again.)