UPDATE: Fitna has been taken down by Liveleak following threats against its staff. This is a sad day for freedom of speech (even if it’s poorly produced speech) and plays into all the fears that Geert Wilders presumably wanted to raise by making it in the first place. Oh well. You can still watch it on YouTube if you really want to.
Fitna appears to be the modern equivalent of the Theatre of Cruelty, minus the creativity. It’s a fairly rudimentary cut-and-paste job – if I can speak bluntly for a moment, if a video doesn’t feature a fighter jet made of biceps, then it’s going wrong somewhere. However clearly my taste is not shared by the rest of the internet; apparently since it was released the video has been viewed 3291470 times (as I write these very words).
More worryingly, Fitna demonstrates almost no insight into the substantial problems of dealing with immigration in post-war Europe. Yes, I know it’s a polemic; however while it’s fairly clear that Wilders is against terrorist bombing and beheading – radical positions, certainly – beyond that it all gets a little fuzzy. Wilders claims that this is “a call to shake off the creeping tyranny of Islamization” but I have difficulty seeing exactly what the average person is expected to do in this heroic struggle.
If you prefer knowledge to fear, you could spend your time more wisely watching the astonishing video interviews with frontline Taliban fighters carried out by Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. This series of interviews covers a range of topics; it’s pretty much essential for anybody who wants some insight into the mindset of the Taliban, and absolutely fascinating even if you only have a passing interest.
The Taliban are not a good guide to the mindset of Muslims in general; but while we’ve been told that they’re Our New Favourite Enemy, most people have no idea who they really are and what they really believe. As the interviews show, these are uneducated men who come from unrelenting poverty, and their understanding of the world is understandably stunted.
It’s by no means good news, but if we want to understand Our New Favourite Enemy – and to improve people’s lives rather than dismiss their culture – then this is the place to start. Needless to say, the web is having a grand mal episode over Fitna, but almost nothing about the Globe and Mail’s report, the “war on terror” having been reduced to schoolboy videos and endless punditry.
Andy and Meg have recorded a new song, but I can’t mention the name of aforementioned song because my parents read this blog. What would they think if they knew that I hung out with people who sample David Lee Roth and sing
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in close harmony?
Whoops.
In other music news, masochist sits through all 763 MP3s submitted to SXSW this year – and reviews every single one of them in 6 words. Now that’s an impressive level of commitment, or possibly just a truckload of drugs. The top pick – what a pick! – were Creature, Canadian pop rock with more vim than my mum’s cleaning cabinet. For your listening pleasure:
Easter Sunday passed without incident here, mainly since it was only Easter for the Catholics, and everybody ignores them. Oh, except I worked out how the Shroud of Turin was formed – Jesus must have been under for 3 weeks rather than 3 days, because my filthy bedlinen has definitely taken on the print of my body.
Too much detail.
Anyway, religion was on my mind last week as I joined the discussion on euthanasia at Cranmer and OurKingdom – and thanks to everybody who contributed to those discussions, particularly David at Britology Watch. As I said in my original post, this is one of the few areas where the religious insist that their views on life be taken as the standard for everybody else, but to their credit most of the commenters on those other threads presented credible non-religious cases against legalising euthanasia.
Paying a visit to Britology Watch, I revisited the “controversial” statements by Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali following Archbishop Rowan Williams’ prolonged bout of stupidity “controversial” statements. Have you noticed that comments by the clergy only get labelled as controversial when they try to say something about politics? That’s probably because of the separation of church and state that we have – no, wait, that’s the US I’m thinking of.
In an interview with Bishop Nazir-Ali, I was greatly amused by these lines:
The real danger to Britain today is the spiritual and moral vacuum that has occurred for the last 40 or 50 years. When you have such a vacuum something will fill it.
That “moral vacuum” metaphor should be put out of its misery as soon as possible, since it manages to be simultaneously banal and meaningless. Continue reading →
The saucy minxes at British Airways sent me an unsolicited email a few weeks ago. Luckily my spam filter junked it immediately; the only reason they email me is to explain that I have millions of air miles but no way of using them in my lifetime.
This time, they were burbling on about the opening of Terminal 5 – which apparently I will find extremely arousing – and my eye was caught by this line:
… with the luxury of time to relax, you can enjoy everything the shops, restaurants, bars and cafés have to offer. These include a chocolate fountain…
A chocolate fountain? What do they think I am, a whore? No thanks, Executive Club Manager Sarah Keyes!
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President George W. Bush got an earful on Thursday about problems and progress in Afghanistan where a war has dragged on for more than six years but been largely eclipsed by Iraq…”I must say, I’m a little envious,” Bush said. “If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.”
“It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks,” Bush said.
In other news:
Forget all that, though – it’s exciting and romantic for American policy wonks, a backdrop for the Beltway equivalent of a Mills & Boon novel. Thanks for making history, y’all!
Cranmer is more than a little irritated by … bland and oblique moralising
Oh crikey. When Cranmer gets a little irritated, property gets damaged, so imagine that carnage that will ensue now that he’s more than a little irritated. Your Grace, what’s got you so riled up?
While Cranmer agrees that the decriminalisation of suicide in 1961 made a modicum of sense insofar as one could never achieve a successful prosecution of the successful and ought to express compassion toward the unsuccessful, the liberalisation of the law on euthanasia would be a dangerously amoral development, as the Lords Spiritual asserted when the issue was last presented to Parliament.
Aha, euthanasia – always a good way of telling the religious person from the secular. Along with abortion, it’s the last area where the faithful believe that they have the right to impose their views on everybody else in our society. Unfortunately Cranmer is not content to assert that his particular faith group is against suicide / euthanasia – he wishes to demonstrate that
Opposition to ‘do anything which is destructive of life’ is one of the few general rules which unites all of the world’s religions
as well as apparently being against the principles of Enlightenment secularism. Unfortunately the quotations he provides demonstrate exactly why the world’s religions are in no position to dictate what the individual does with their body. Continue reading →
