Friday 10 September 2010

They were only obeying orders!

From The Metro:

A man protesting against plans by a US pastor to burn copies of the Koran has been shot dead outside a NATO base in Afghanistan. A large crowd were hurling stones at the base run by German soldiers in the district of Badakhshan when troops inside opened fire,according to a local official. Several others were said to have been wounded by gunshots...

Moving swifly on:

Earlier Pastor Terry Jones had agreed to cancel the book-burning after he claimed he was promised that a proposed mosque in New York would be moved away from Ground Zero - the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

But later outside his church in Gainesville, Florida, Mr Jones insisted he was "lied to" after Imam Muhammad Musri, the president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, and the leader of the New York mosque said there was no deal of this nature. The iman said there was only an agreement for him and Mr Jones to travel to New York tomorrow to meet him.


The words "trust" and "throw" spring to mind. Part of me thinks that the best way to combat Islam might be simply to ridicule it, constantly and mercilessly (but in a strictly non-violent fashion, of course).

Let's open up gay bars and pork butchers opposite every mosque. Let's have more bingo halls called Mecca. Let's end NHS treatment of birth defects caused by inbreeding. Let's put pictures of pigs or pet dogs on our coins and notes. Let's ban the burka - except on topless beaches. Let's regularly publish insulting cartoons of "The Prophet". Let's introduce a Beard Tax and start refering to polygamists as 'adulterers'.

And last but not least, let's have our Foreign Secretary invite the amabassadors from India, Israel, Russia, Sudan, East Timor*, Thailand (and any other countries from The Bloody Borders Of Islam) to a ceremonial lighting of a chain of beacons fuelled by korans.

The possibilities are endless.

*That's probably not a country, but hey.

18 comments:

Jon said...

Christian nutcase plans a Hitler-style book burning in spite of warnings that troops may be put at risk. Unless you believe said nutcase achieved something that the entire right wing political machine wasn't able to, he then embarks on a campaign of media bullshit, reneging on a promise.

And yet when the Christian nutcase succeeds in putting troops at risk, your reaction is to ridicule Islam? When the person or persons doing the killing are most likely Christian, and the person being killed Muslim, you stand firm with the gunman and make fun of the dead?

What's wrong with you?

Mark Wadsworth said...

Jon, if you start pelting armed soldiers* with stones and heck knows what else in a conflict zone, what do you expect to happen?

* Admittedly, the soldiers shouldn't have been there in the first place, different topic.

JuliaM said...

"...you stand firm with the gunman and make fun of the dead?"

The stupid dead? Yup, I'm laughing!

As MW points out, hurling stones at armed soldiers over a book that hasn't even been burnt (yet) is not exactly a sign of someone whom the world is going to miss...

Umbongo said...

MW

Jon got there before me. However, as is the way with apologists for any idiocy perpetrated by followers of Mohammed (even if, as in this case, said followers got the sticky end of a German lollipop), he finds that, somehow, you bear some of the responsibility for the stupidity of those Muslims provoked into violence by a Christian nutter. Frankly, as with the Mohammed Cartoons incident (whereby no Danes but a number of similarly provoked Muslims died), my sympathies do not lie with those who are so thick and so reckless as to endanger lives (their own and others) on the basis that some idiot somewhere thousands of miles away does something they find offensive.

DBC Reed said...

Stone throwing Islamic mobs generally include a lot of laughing youths (as did the Notting Hill Riots),who may well be enjoying the break from terminal unemployment/under employment.As the Islamic revival followed hard on the heels of the decline of Socialism in places like Persia/Iran,Afghanistan, it may be time to re-consider the Western policy of getting rid of Mossadeq and Najibullah, as the anti-socialist Islamic replacements have been a whole lot worse.Undermining Communism in China and Russia has also been a terrific succes has n't it-with them competing with cheap labour in Western markets?

Chuckles said...

Niven's Laws -

a) Never throw shit at an armed man.

b) Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man.

Bayard said...

DBCR - If it's Commie, it's evil - this is such a fundamental truth to a frightening number of people, I wouldn't be surprised if they thought it was written in the Bible.

Henry North London 2.0 said...

we have senator mc carthy to thank for that.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JM, thanks for back up.

U, re Danish cartoons, that was sort of my point. If we do enough silly things over here, all the extremists will end up killing each other over there.

DBC, I always quite liked the Shah of Iran, but wasn't he a CIA stool pigeon? He never struck me as a 'socialist' but rather as the best of a bad bunch.

Ch, good summary.

B, in practice, Communism is awful, but at least it tends to die out of its own accord. The problem is that what follows it is sometimes just as bad (Russia, China).

FOE, you've lost me.

Marchamont Needham said...

A beard tax - Gordon wouldn't like that.

Mark Wadsworth said...

MN, which Gordon? Ramsay? Brown?

Budvar said...

Pork butchers or gay bars in the vicinity of mosques?? Don't make me laugh.

A little tale of a pub in my village called "The flying pig". Pub was owned by a small brewery called "Trough brewery" in Bradford and their pubs were all pig related names.

A mosque was built over the road from said pub, and guess what, pub had to change its name if it wanted to continue to have a licence.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, that is exactly the tide of nonsense that we have to reverse, isn't it?

Pogo said...

Budvar - we in the UK seem to specialise in raving official lunacy like that - people buy houses next to motor-racing tracks and then successfully complain about "the noise", etc..

Mark Wadsworth said...

P, that is taking NIMBYism to a whole new level!

Bayard said...

I've heard stories like that before, but they mostly seem to concern new housing. I get the impression that the crafty developers show prospective buyers round on a quiet day and the buyers don't find out until too late. It's particularly prevalent where the developer is given planning permission on condition he builds a road (usually a bit of a bypass). Naturally he tries to sell all the houses near the road before anyone can use the road as a bypass, then when the new road is open, all hell breaks loose.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, the purchasers ought to have had a local search done. Major new roads are often pencilled in on maps ten or fifteen years before they actually open.

As to the motor racing track, I did this on my law degree, it's a topic known as 'nuisance'. There's a good summary here.

"The consent of the person affected is not to be implied by his "coming to the nuisance" but in the case of an "amenity" nuisance, such as noise, the character of the neighbourhood will be relevant to what is reasonable; "what would be a nuisance in Belgrave Square would not necessarily be so in Bermondsey." This does not hold true, however, where physical damage is caused, for example, by vibration."

Bayard said...

M, the road is there, plain to see, it just doesn't go anywhere until the next development is built and the bit of road provided by that development isn't on the map because it's being funded "privately".