Friday, July 07, 2006

Religion of Peace™ Updates

I am gonna include a couple of small things here first, just to indicate how petty, deep and widespread anti-Semitism is within Islam. In other words, no mention (at least at first) of the big stuff. Everyone knows about suicide bombings, flying planes into buildings, blowing up the tube, on-camera beheadings and all the rest of it. And they all bear some plausible relationship to the geopolitics of which there could ostensibly be two sides. But some things are just small and ugly.

First, Indonesia (the world's most-populous Muslim nation) refused to play Israel in the Federation Cup women's national tennis tournament. So the Jewish pigs and dogs/sows and bitches advanced on a walkover. Let's be perfectly clear about this. Indonesia is neither an Arab nation nor anywhere in Israel's neighborhood. It has no rational (or irrational) beef with Israel. Except Islam itself. I've never really bought the "sport builds bridges" boilerplate the head of the Israeli Tennis Federation spouts (particularly when teams represent nations). But there's no excuse for refusal to get on the court/field/stadium/etc. None. Congrats to the Fed Cup for giving Israel a walkover victory. but other sports bodies accommodate Muslim anti-Semitism and shaft the Jewish state accordingly. In soccer, Israel is a member of UEFA and so has to qualify for the World Cup through the much tougher European zone, although their team would be a strong contender if it played in Asia the actual continent of which Israel, as their most recent round of qualifying shows -- they hung with France, Switzerland and Ireland without losing a game. I wonder why the Israelis don't qualify through Asia, as if I didn't know.

Speaking of soccer, Islamist militias have become the de facto government of Somalia (the country, BTW, where the last Democrat president cut-and-ran after a mere 20 US soldiers were killed in a single battle; causing Osama bin Laden to [understandably] conclude that the US is a paper tiger). And they take their iconoclasm seriously. One group of the not-very-centralized militia decided to ban television and fatally shot two people for watching the Germany-Italy World Cup semi-final. According to another report, the Islamists didn't like the mixed-sex public gathering; and according to another account, the alcohol ads on the satellite TV broadcasts arewhat raise the Islamists' ire. As the last linked (BBC) report indicates, the gunman apparently have been arrested and clan elders say they will be executed. Good. But the fact the slayings occurred in the first place is still telling. Whatever leftist twits might burble about the imminent "Christianist" theocracy and their evil censorship plans -- nobody in the West fears Christianist militia opening fire on people watching the Spice Channel (much less the World Cup; much less alcohol ads; much less mixed-sex gatherings) Any comparison between the role of Christianity and Islam in the contemporary world is hateful and obscene, a complete failure to grasp reality (and it usually comes from people proud of their being in the "reality-based community."

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