Scapegoating

These days it seems Syria is your usual scapegoat. Well, Syria and El Niño, since it's still quite impossible to blame Syria for crop freeze in California, although it's not to be entirely ruled out. Therefore, stick it into Syria's fold. As a whole, the idea is comic, well, in a tragic sense, and old, since the Bushmerica did accustom us with it's incapability of assuming responsibilities and it's constant obsession to blame others for it's total incompetence (remember the episode when Iraq was blamed for 9/11 when total failure in Afghanistan became imminent). Nothing new, that is. Although I have a strange feeling that this new series of usual accusations is related somehow with Brammertz's praise for Syria's total collaboration with the investigators and it's absence from the Black List of uncooperative countries, which, as rumors go, seems to be containing the whole Axis of Good.
What I'm still waiting to see is the end of this auction for Syria. Who will pay more: Europe via Iran, or Saudi Wahhabi Arabia, through Bushmerican invasion?

Fowles' Maggot

It is hard writing about a book. It is hard writing about a life or a literary style. It is hard writing about anything other than politics in this war infested present tense. Let alone writing about something so sublime I can't find a proper word to describe. A maggot, that's what it is, just like writer John Fowles defined it himself, a fancy.

My City

A few years ago I bought my first digital cam, or actually my first cam period. I had a vision. A dream, or maybe just a strange feeling of melancholy. I want to document or chronicle everything I know. So I know. Just for myself. Nothing noble. I want to remember, and I want to remember the way I remember. Everything. This is my city.

O, Fortuna!

"Regno, Regnavi, Sum sine regno, Regnabo"

I reign, I reigned, I am without reign, I shall reign

Did I Hear Rumsfeld?

Someone commented that it should be interesting seeing a pic with Hangman and Rumsfeld. As'ad already did that, and I take the liberty to borrow the masterpiece. A bit blurry, but please pardon me.

To Arima

Arima,

I have for some time now censoring problems, and unfortunately I cannot comment on the other blogs, especially on the new version ones. C'est la vie.

I read your posts about the picture and I admit that I was intrigued when first seeing it and knowing your thinking, which is the reasonable, inquiring, well informed critique, and has nothing to do with this ostentatious bravado of some half-wits, like Hrisi, or Waffa Sultan, or...

Arima, the problem nowadays is that in this crazy war against "fundamentalism", impersonated by Islam this time around (it was Communism back in the '50), the self-proclaimed liberals have become more radicalists than Zarqawi. Attacks over attacks, heck, a blogger I know and respect was subjected to death threats for his reasonable opinions about Islam. It seems they weren't "liberal" enough to please. In this liberal-as-in-curse-Islam world, the shortest way to fame is by throwing biased outrageous undocumented libels at Islam. And fueling the Wahhabi in the process. This is what daughter of Somalian Warlord Hrisi Ali does. When I saw "Submission", I thought it to be made by some amateur Westerner who never got out of his native town, let alone country, and has the same amount of knowledge about Islam as Bush' knowledge about diplomacy. To know it was made by a Muslim, it only makes the film more of a joke.

And now that you wrote about the book, it seems it's the oppressed sexual complexes of someone eager to have sex before getting married, thus making this the Great issue of Islam. If she was for real, she would have attacked the real concerns, as in the mad fatwas against the Shiites, declaring their apostasy, the arrogance of the clerics who interpret laws and label as "bida'a" anything they feel like, with no basis, translate and transfigure Quran as it suit their pockets, instigate for violence against Danish cartoons instead of uniting everyone in defending the Iraqi or Palestinians. Transform Saddam into a Symbol.

There are many critics of nowadays Islam. Yes, too many. But those that do it using their brains become immune, if not respected. Like Adel Imam.

No Comment

The one on the left is Hangman. The other one is the "moderate" Saudi King.
(courtesy of the Angry Arab)