A tail dragging romp through the swamps of the world
THINGS ARE STARTING to get crazy in Tehran. According to the Guardian, one of I Need a Dinner Jacket's chief fart-catchers got busted for sorcery. Yup, sorcery. Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits).
Djinns? Well, let the bells ring out and the banners fly, like the genie in the Looney Tunes cartoons, used to say.
REASON.COM has a great book review by Brian Doherty, "The First War on Terror", which is a review of "The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents", by Alex Butterworth, Pantheon Books.It's worthy of your attention, as the efforts of the Anarchists of the 19th century are compared and contrasted with those of today's radical Muslims.
To the powers of the time, the anarchist threat was not to be downplayed or doubted. After the anarchist-linked Leon Czolgosz assassinated U.S. President William McKinley, McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, issued a pronouncement that presaged George W. Bush’s rhetoric about the post-9/11 threat of radical Islam: “When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance.” Collaborations of national secret police agencies created an ad hoc global force to fight the nonexistent global anarchist conspiracy, and the very advocacy of anarchist ideas was outlawed in most of the West.
As history has shown, Roosevelt was wrong about the significance of the anarchist threat. So was George W. Bush when he used the jihadist threat as an excuse for policies that may have done far more to damage America and elsewhere than they did to prevent attacks.
ACCORDING TO THE TELEGRAPH, in an article by Andrew Hough, some Iranian shell-back is claiming that "Women who dress “inappropriately” incite extramarital sex that in turn cause more earthquakes".Attractive women who snub traditional Islamic clothing to instead wear fashionable clothes and apply heavy make-up, caused youths in the country to “go astray” and have affairs, Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi said.
"Many women who dress inappropriately ... cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes," he told worshippers at a Tehran prayer service late last week.
"Calamities are the result of people's deeds.
“We have no way but conform to Islam to ward off dangers."
Which raises the question: which Islam is to be conformed to? Somehow, you just know that old goatface has never read “The Taqwacores” or listened to the Kominas pound away at "Suicide bomb the GAP".
