Greetings All!
I am sure that each and every none of you in my vast assemblage of fans have both asphyxiated and decomposed as you waited patiently for my latest blog post. My sympathies to the families and to those bullied into cleaning up the remains. The stains can be removed. The odor, not so much. But such are the risks one assumes when one hitches ones wagon to a blog star, and you can't say I didn't warn you. I TOLD you that I was irresponsible, as well as incoherent, so you should never have come here actually expecting anything. I'm sure I don't, and if I am not getting anything out of the deal, well, there you are.
But I digress. I was planning on actually writing something as close to intelligent and timely as my feeble talents would allow, and I started off by talking about stinking, filthy, rotting corpses. Which, come to think of it, is not all that far from my real topic - Islamic terrorism. I chose this delightful area of inquiry for two reasons. First of all, it's all over the news and I have been thinking about it for a long, long time now. And two, someone asked me tonight over the phone about my opinion of the Paris attacks. My first (and only) reaction was that they sucked, but this my adopted mom we are talking about here, and Brenda ain't into cussing, so I just waved her off with a noncommittal statement about "we can probably expect to see more of those kinds of things in the future" and changed the subject. But that bothers me. I do have an opinion, I suppose. I absolutely SHOULD have an opinion, and everybody else should have one too, because this stuff is not going away. I don't know where the ax will fall, but fall it will, someplace in America, and a lot of innocent people will die. People will cry, politicians will maneuver to not waste the crisis, and, more than likely, nothing intelligent, proportionate, warranted, and effective will result. This is because we really don't know, or don't want to know, who and what we are dealing with when it comes to Islamic warfare. I'm not going to use the word terror anymore because it really doesn't fit, and it never has. Bush called it a war on terror only because he didn't want to hurt people's feelings, or lose political clout, or worse, piss off the Saudis (although they are perhaps the venomous roots of the entire problem). So I won't call it terror. I will call it war. Just like the good old boys over in the caliphate do. Just like the worldwide Ummah does. Just like the Koran does. Just like the Prophet did, bless his little heart. (Note, observant reader, that I have just arguably blasphemed the Prophet, which in the "moderate" Muslim nations would get me killed via judicial action, while in the caliphate it would just be a matter of a jumpsuit, a camera, a psychopath or twenty, and a (hopefully) sharp knife).
But again, I, well, you know. So, as I was saying about the Islamic war we now find ourselves in, the score seems, surprisingly, to be currently favoring the bad guys. For those wondering, I see the Islamists as bad, evil actually, on a par with Treblinka guards and Coach K. But how could WE, the US of A, be losing against the "jv" team? Are they not contained? Are not the vast, vast majority of Muslims as appalled as we are by this hijacking of the religion of peace? In a word, la. That means no in Arabic. Islam is, as countless observers throughout history (up to and including Adolf Hitler, and he should know) have noted, a warrior religion. Just read the book. Find a Koran and spend 15 minutes. Go anywhere. Pick a page at random. See how long it takes you to find something about "unbelievers" and Allah's displeasure with them. If you find an enlightened surah, likely written (actually, supposedly, dictated by Muhammad since he was illiterate) early in the Prophet's career, it might even sound civil (for the seventh century anyway), but it will clearly distinguish between them and us. That seems to be the fundamental issue in the Koran; what to do about US. We, the unbelievers, the apostates, the object of Allah's wrath - what should the good Muslim DO about us?
Surprisingly, this is not a hard question to answer. It's right there in the book. And it's not any of that namby pamby love your neighbor drivel, like Jesus used to preach. Allah has a simple plan for us infidels and you don't have to go any further that surah 9 (Al Tawbah "The Repentance"), and verse 5. This is commonly referred to as "The Verse of the Sword" and seems to fit into today's news EVENTS better than the often repeated (but never fully studied) "there is no compulsion in religion" verse that is always a part of our news PROGRAMS.
So, what is the Verse of the Sword? Well, it goes (partly) something like this:
But when the forbidden months are past,
Then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them.
And seize them. and beleaguer them,
And lie in wait for them,
In every stratagem of war.
You might wonder what the forbidden months are. Supposedly, the Prophet always warned his various desert enemies that it was either his way or the highway, and he gave them four months to think it over. A four month jihad waiting period as it were. So everybody gets a temporary pass; trouble is, ours is apparently expired. So it's "game on" and go directly to the good stuff - the fighting, slaying, seizing, and beleaguering, stuff. I don't have the wherewithal (or the education) to actually give a full account of the proper hermeneutics of the last revelation, but I did learn a couple of things. First off, the Koran is not chronological. The chapters are organized by length, not subject or date. Surahs 8 and 9 are some of the oldest. and that makes a difference because verses in the Koran can be abrogated, that is, annulled or overruled, by later verses. So if two verses contradict, you go with the one given last in order to decide the issue. Surah 8 is a lot of fun, with the entire chapter devoted on the proper way to distribute "booty" captured during wartime (no really) and with particular emphasis on who got what after the Battle of Badr, when the Prophet and his trusty friends kicked the living poop out of a larger army of infidels and had a lot of booty (literally and figuratively) to pass around. Some believe that 8 and 9 are one long surah, so it gives the context of the Verse of the Sword pretty clearly. Allah is talking real swords, and real dead people, and real slaves taken from the survivors. This is not contextually limited to the seventh century, no hint that this is some limited instruction for a particular time and place (like even the most militant verses in the Old Testament); this is an everlasting rule, happily and intentionally followed by our Islamist friends today. The Verse of the Sword still applies.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I must add that the Verse of the Sword offers an exception to the killing and seizing injunction, but only one, and that is conversion to Islam. So if you do not want to grow a beard or go styling in a burka, the exception is not very helpful. But it does exist, so there.
To conclude, if by some strange coincidence someone has actually read this far, the situation that we find ourselves in is that we are at war. Not a geographical war, and not a war against a overstimulated central nervous system, but a real war with people who are our sworn enemies. It might improve our chances of winning the game if we admit that we are indeed playing.
But that's just me.
