The Not-So Suprising Face of Islam

Today, Shi'ite Muslims all over the world "celebrate" Ashura, a religious observance in which they flagellate themselves to simulate the pain, suffering and death of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, who, according to Islamic tradition, was killed in AD 680 at Karbala, a city in modern day Iraq, in a battle for the leadership of the faith.

If, after observing:

1) this Islamic "festival",

2) the Islamic world's stunningly hypocritical reaction to that Danish newspaper's Mohammad cartoon ridiculousness (you should see the cartoons in Gulf newspapers depicting Christians and Jews in such a wonderful light on a daily basis), and

3) the Iranian government's quest for "peaceful nuclear power" despite their vast oil reserves (somewhere on the order of 90 billion barrels worth) put within the context of their President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's now infamous and all too truthful rant to "Wipe Israel off the map!",

you do not yet understand the immense danger fundamentalist Islam poses to the civilized world, then you are either:

1) a "happily uniformed, not burdened by the facts, head in the geopolitical sand" jackass, or

2) a fundamentalist Muslim yourself.

Just for correlation, compare this "celebration" to the Christian (read "prodominatly western and democratic" here) celebration of Easter, a philosophically similar religious observance mourning the passing and then celebrating the resurrection of a prophet, conducted in, shall we say, quite a different manner.

Sure, the egg thing is a bit silly, but then again so is slicing your skull open with arrestingly large Mameluke sword to show your depth and breadth of religious devotion. People get committed to a rubber room for less...

I would invite all of you who subscribe to the "Islam is a peaceful religion" nonsense to Riyadh's Deera Square, affectionately known by westerners living in the Kingdom as "Chop Chop Square", this Friday at noon to witness Sharia law in action.

You are bound to see something exciting like a beheading, a stoning, or some other delightfully quaint and unmistakably tribal form of punishment that Qur'anic-based law exacts of the recently convicted.

Or if you are really lucky, the prisoner has committed something particularly egregious (like, for example, printing cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad in a rather unflattering light?) and has been sentenced to something rather innocuously called Al-Had, in which the prisoner is affixed to a wooden X mounted in the ground and partially beheaded while the crowd cheers Allah Akbar, "God is great", then mobs the executioner in order to shake his hand and congratulate him for enacting "God's will".

And, before you ask...no, I am not making this up.

Certainly sounds like a religion of peace to me. Let's help spread the word on the utopian tendencies of this much maligned and misunderstood religion populated by bushy bearded pacifists who want nothing but world peace.

Who's with me?