Thursday, April 13, 2006

Buddy, Can You Spare A Fatwa?


(The hypocrites at Borders and Waldenbooks should go visit their soulmates at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Maybe City Lights would post their Banned Book Convention poster.)

Fatwas are multiplying like rabbits eating Viagra-spiked pellets, and I still haven’t got mine. Youssef Ibrahim, in a Special to the Sun, New York, is quoted by Pamela at Atlas Shrugs: “Among the wave of fatwas already out there, some authorize suicide bombings, forbid participation in voting or elections by Muslims living in the West, void marriage between spouses who practice intercourse in the nude (this one from Egypt), and ban the exchange of seasons’ greetings between Muslims and nonbelievers, to cite a few.”

I feel like Rodney “I can’t get no respect” Dangerfield. They are down to giving fatwas for things that Ms. Manners would cover, like wiping your mouth with your left sleeve at dinner, and my truly offensive drawing of Gay Muhammad has gone un-fatwaed. It’s enough to make you want to flush a Koran.

In the meantime, a few of the latest fatwas have not been frivolous. For example, there is now a fatwa by a heavy-hitter in Egypt, “Egypt’s highest Islamic jurist, Sheik Ali Gomaa, decreeing that the exhibition of any statues is sinful, as is sculpture and those who practice it — going all the way back to Pharaonic temples, Greek and Roman sculptures, and Christian images spanning several centuries, ever since the dawn of history.” Holy Taliban, Fatwa-man!

Of course, there is still the unending fatwa against Salman Rushdie – unending, because the only one who could lift it, the Ayatollah Khomeni, is now frustrating 72 virgins in what Islamists call Paradise, but I call a brothel. In addition, there is a fatwa on Wafa Sultan -- American Muslim psychologist who dared to speak out against the Muslim treatment of women.

Who needs a fatwa? Just the thought that an unreasoning Islamist might take deadly offense is enough to make some so-called supporters of freedom of speech cave in without a fight. Borders, which just sponsored a Banned Book Convention (and Waldenbooks), will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it exhibits the Muhammad cartoons. (hat tip to Say Anything blog)

I thought that only conservative authors were banned in book stores, like the famously liberal City Lights in San Francisco, which won’t carry Oriana Fallaci's new book, "The Force of Reason,” because City Lights decreed her a “fascist.” Liberals use that term for anyone who disagrees with them. Funny, City Lights has no problem carrying the discredited work of nutcases like Ward “9/11 victims were little Eichmanns” Churchill.

Am I digressing? Somehow, to me, it all seems to flow. The hypocritical Left thump their “diversity and multicultural” Bible while making sure they never notice that the America they beat on all the time is the freest nation the World has ever known, and that the Islamists they avoid noticing are among the most repressive. While championing basic civil rights, they turn their heads and participate in the trampling of freedom of expression. The Left screams about wiretapping a call to Al Qaeda, and says “Genocide? Oppression? I don’t see that, nothin’ to see here, just keep on walkin’” in Iraq under Saddam, in Somalia, and in Rwanda while Clinton dithered.

Liberals have their own form of fatwa – they control what and how events are reported. If a bunch of whacked out Islamists want to do something really weird, like destroy all the ancient statues of Egypt, it’s President Bush’s fault because he didn’t get them to sit down with him and “reason together,” like LBJ did in Vietnam. Anyone who disagrees with the liberal-controlled media better get a blog.

(Check out my favorite blogs, listed in the left margin. They are all great, or better. Guaranteed.)

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