Bomb-throwers and pyros for America

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Everybody knows the game our self-proclaimed "patriots" are playing with "Obama's a Muslim" and the self-righteous faux outrage over "the Ground Zero terror mosque."

Everybody except, of course, the willing dupes who comprise the intended target of the GOP brass, Glenn Beck, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and all those who define themselves through their rage.

It's all about hate; it's all about fear; it's all about paranoia. It also is all about politics and the upcoming midterm elections.

What it's also about is playing with fire. It's about ginning up a mob to demand that the federal government . . . New York city government . . . hell, anybody tear down the whole edifice of our constitutional rule in the name of saving the republic from The Other.

The cynical right wants us all to become a lynch mob to save ourselves from terrorism, which is related -- somehow -- to America's first black, socialist, Nazi Muslim president. Or something like that.

It's not exactly a credit to our cultural and democratic bona fides that the vast majority of Americans fail to see the deep and toxic irony of this.

INSTEAD, every time I log on to Facebook, I am confronted with the sidebar list of how many family members, friends and old classmates "like" Glenn Beck.

Like Glenn Beck, like his message. Unfortunately, Beck's message is both bats*** crazy and racially incendiary.

As you know, I grew up in the Deep South -- south Louisiana to be exact. I know what that was all about 40 and 50 years ago, and what it is still too much about now.

I can't judge anybody's heart today -- especially folks I haven't seen in years, decades even -- but I know how a lot of them were raised. I know how I was raised.

I know what was in the cultural air we breathed. How we never gave our assumptions, or those of the society around us, a second thought as we took spiritual Corexit into our hearts and minds. I know that such enculturation can be nearly inexorable, because when you're raised that way from birth, the poison gets into that space between visceral reaction and engagement of the conscience and the mind.

SCRATCH THE SURFACE of my home state, Louisiana, and you'll quickly get to a very bad place. Do the same in any part of America, and you're likely to find varying states of the same collective id.

They say the devil's greatest trick is to convince us he doesn't exist. He just hides in our crooked hearts as our overconfidence congratulates itself on what good, moral, patriotic and God-fearing works of art we have become.

Yet the lynch mob sings "Onward Christian Soldiers" as "the better angels of our nature" twist in the wind, strange fruit of a demagogue's tree.

'Patriots' and their sympathy for the devil

Here's all you need to know about America and her "patriots" today, in three simple video clips.

Above, we see that "patriots" today are so offended by Muslims building a mosque blocks from Ground Zero in New York that they're willing to give offense to the most precious principles of American constitutional law, as enshrined in the First Amendment.


AND THEN we see that Republican "patriots" in Congress and elsewhere are so upset about illegal immigration, they are chomping at the bit to undo the 14th Amendment, undoing some foundational principles of their own party in the process and once again leaving the question "Who is an American?" up to the political whims and prejudices of the moment.


LET'S ASK St. Thomas More, as depicted by Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons, how that's going to work out for them.

Has anyone considered that it's better to give the devil his due than to give him the whole bloody country, something our American "patriots" seem hell-bent on doing?

Children of La Mancha

The problem with the American Dream, now more than ever, is that it's an impossible one.

We spend all our time keeping up appearances, chasing status and material goods instead of meaning, knowledge and relationships -- both human and divine -- such that we have become a society more devoted to "tilting at windmills" than more pedestrian fare as living productively, morally and sustainably.

Society tells us we need to have it all -- today. The economic reports tell us there are five unemployed Americans competing for every job opening.

WE ARE what we own. Our self-worth is what others say it is. We are chasing our tails, our quixotic expectations are giving our kids ulcers, and you just know something's gotta give, something's gotta give, something's gotta give.

Such has it been for a long time in these United States, and the new season of early '60s-set Mad Men was the catalyst for some riffing on the subject from a walking wounded of that era on Rod Dreher's new Big Questions Online blog:

She said that in her recollection of the time, it was hugely important to maintain an impossible standard of middle-class perfection, to the point where it drove people, well, mad. She recalls the pressure to maintain appearances at all costs, and to strive to meet unrealistic ideals. "There was the [N.] family down the street who didn't live like the rest of us in this way," she said. "They didn't go to church, or seem as concerned about the things that preoccupied our families. We all thought they weren't going to make it. Well, guess what? They did fine. The rest of us? Not so much. It was impossible to be satisfied with what we had. You couldn't just stay where you were; you were always looking to move to something better."

Like me, my friend is not a fan of the Sixties and Seventies, but in talking with her, I kept thinking about a judgment I made about "Mad Men" when it first came on: That it gives you an idea of why the Sixties happened the way they did. Some conservatives read the series as a retrospective justification for Sixties excess. I disagree. I don't think series creator Matthew Weiner is necessarily stacking the deck against the Fifties as much as he's diagnosing what it was about bourgeois/haute bourgeois white society at the time that led to the revolution. Because I grew up after the revolution was well underway, I can look at the autopsy with detachment; my friend, who was Sally Draper's age when it was going on, and who was in the "Mad Men" social and cultural class, cannot.

"I keep thinking that today, right now, we're reliving the Fifties," said my friend, who has a child in college. "I see the same obsession with perfection, with getting your kids into the right school so they can go to the right college and get the right job and move into the right group so they can be successful and happy. And these kids, they're terrified of failure. It's crazy, and you can't imagine how stressful this is for parents and kids alike. It's going to blow up, too. You watch. The problem is, there aren't as many intact families to blow up. But these children, they're going to implode. I worry about the net effect on these kids moving forward. They're never going to feel as good or as smart as they're supposed to feel, given how much we've spent on them. I know how my daughter feels: inadequate, always."

SOMETHING'S gotta give, something's gotta give, something's gotta give.

It did starting in about 1966 . . . until it didn't anymore and the revolutionaries became the Establishment, obsessing about establishmentarian pursuits. Like status and stuff -- in other words, the same ol' s***.

And their kids, raised in a world where our means never exceed our appetites and every child is exceptional (or so they're told), know that failure is not an option. Ordinary is not an option -- we will "fight, fight, fight, fight, fight it with all of our might."

Until it is. Something's gotta give.

AND YOU GOTTA WONDER whether that's a big part of this fresh hell looming on our horizon, as spotlighted by ABC News:

"This is what we have feared for a very long time—that finally the ideology of radical Islam is effectively reaching into the United States to disaffected people here over the Internet," said Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism adviser.

Some suspects allegedly used the Internet to also contact radicals like cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. In 2009, Chesser reportedly told the FBI that he sent several e-mails to the New Mexico native, who in turn replied to a couple of them. Al-Awlaki, 39, has most recently been tied to Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the prime suspect in the Fort Hood massacre, as well as the failed Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Some of those charged with terror are now well-known in this country, like Faisal Shahzad, the convicted would-be Time Square bomber. Just last week, a supposed martyrdom video surfaced in which an English-speaking Shahzad vocalized his appreciation for jihad, or holy war.

Also, David Headley from Chicago was convicted of helping to plan the November 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed more than 170 people. Then, associates of Najibullah Zazi, who is a permanent resident, were convicted of plotting to detonate bombs in New York City subways. And Michigan's own Colleen LaRose, more commonly known as Jihad Jane, was implicated in a plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist for drawing the head of the Prophet Muhammad on the body of a dog in 2007.

(snip)

But there have been some suspected terrorists that have flown under the radar, like Bryant Vinas, who was accused of attacking a U.S. military base in Afghanistan and providing al-Qaeda with details about New York's railway system. Also, Michael Finton was arrested in a sting where he was attempting to detonate a truck bomb at a federal courthouse in Springfield, Illinois.

With so many potential threats, authorities say they are in a race against time to find these radicals before they launch a successful attack on the land they grew up on.

"In the last six to nine months," Clark said, "the FBI has seen more domestic Islamist extremist activity than at any time since immediately right after 9/11."

IT'S THE '60s all over again. Right down to rebelling against all the right things in exactly the wrong way, with exactly the wrong ideology.

We never learn.

Issa X

It occurs to me that if Christian churches -- and I point big-time at my own -- believed as much in Jesus as even the Muslims believe in Jesus and were as open about that fact, we just might get somewhere in this country.

I mean, what if the Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha put as much energy into flooding the 'hood with some of that ol' time religion as it does into promoting the annual appeal? Is what I'm saying.

(Yes, of course the Catholics have lots of ministries and Catholic Charities, etc., and so on, but it's hardly "flooding the zone." What about the big high-profile push . . . like the annual appeal?)

So here we have a little story from my hometown about yet another "Stop the Violence" rally trying to convince people with nothing to live for to stop dying for nothing, too.

AND IN The Advocate's dispatch from Baton Rouge, there's this toward the end:

Children from Muhammad University of Islam on Plank Road visited the rally to share messages of faith and peace.

“Our religion teaches us that we should always be for each other because we are family,” said Tynetta Muhammad, 13.

Leslie X, of the Nation of Islam, said the solution to violence is simple: “Jesus told his apostles to love ye one another as I have loved you. If we do that, we will see our condition around us turn around.”

BUT CHRISTIANS by and large don't put stock in Jesus beyond Him being a celestial sugar daddy, and the Muslims are outnumbered, so we have the need for all these "Stop the Violence" rallies. Because in America today, you either have status and stuff or you have squat.

Not even a God who understands.

This should go over big in Brussels

Hey! If you can exterminate 1.5 million Armenians, what's the big deal with a little blackface, eh?

I'm sure the European Union will welcome with open arms a lot as civilized and sensitive as the Turks, who saw fit to welcome President Obama in such a manner.

What? The TV anchor couldn't come up with some chitlins, fried chicken and watermelon to supplement his shtick?

OK, forget the chitlins. Allah would be pissed.

Their god is a frightened god

In London, The Telegraph tells the story of an Iranian family suffering for its Christian faith because the god of Islam -- as understood by that country's civil and religious leaders -- is a frightened god to whom free will is a mortal threat.

Or should I say an immortal threat?

A month ago, the Iranian parliament voted in favour of a draft bill, entitled "Islamic Penal Code", which would codify the death penalty for any male Iranian who leaves his Islamic faith. Women would get life imprisonment. The majority in favour of the new law was overwhelming: 196 votes for, with just seven against.

Imposing the death penalty for changing religion blatantly violates one of the most fundamental of all human rights. The right to freedom of religion is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and in the European Convention of Human Rights. It is even enshrined as Article 23 of Iran's own constitution, which states that no one may be molested simply for his beliefs.

And yet few politicians or clerics in Iran see any contradiction between a law mandating the death penalty for changing religion and Iran's constitution. There has been no public protest in Iran against it.

David Miliband, Britain's Foreign Secretary, stands out as one of the few politicians from any Western country who has put on record his opposition to making apostasy a crime punishable by death. The protest from the EU has been distinctly muted; meanwhile, Germany, Iran's largest foreign trading partner, has just increased its business deals with Iran by more than half. Characteristically, the United Nations has said nothing.

It is a sign of how little interest there is in Iran's intention to launch a campaign of religious persecution that its parliamentary vote has still not been reported in the mainstream media.

For one woman living in London, however, the Iranian parliamentary vote cannot be brushed aside. Rashin Soodmand is a 29-year-old Iranian Christian. Her father, Hossein Soodmand, was the last man to be executed in Iran for apostasy, the "crime" of abandoning one's religion. He had converted from Islam to Christianity in 1960, when he was 13 years old. Thirty years later, he was hanged by the Iranian authorities for that decision.

Today, Rashin's brother, Ramtin, is also held in a prison cell in Mashad, Iran's holiest city. He was arrested on August 21. He has not been charged but he is a Christian. And Rashin fears that, just as her father was the last man to be executed for apostasy in Iran, her brother may become one of the first to be killed under Iran's new law.

Not surprisingly, Rashin is desperately worried. "I am terribly anxious about him," she explains. "Even though my brother is not an apostate, because he has never been a Muslim – my father raised us all as Christians – I don't think he is safe. They assume that if you are Iranian, you must be Muslim."

OBVIOUSLY, Iranian Muslims and their leaders have their deity all figured out. And we know what Flannery O'Connor said about such -- "remember that these things are mysteries and that if they were such that we could understand them, they wouldn’t be worth understanding. A God you understood would be less than yourself."

And this is apparently what's understood about Allah in Iran -- that the Muslim deity is a puppetmaster and mankind is a puppet. That Allah fears that man would not, could not love him freely, so man must be forced to do so. That Islam is not so much about knowing, loving and serving Allah as it is being a "soldier" in a Mafia of a billion-plus souls.

Once in, there's only one way to get out -- be rubbed out.

IF JESUS is the good shepherd, the ayatollahs' Allah must be Michael Corleone. And Muhammad is what? Al Neri?

That makes Ramtin Soodmand the Iranian version of Fredo, I'm afraid.

Nice conception of deity you have there, guys.

Palins put bee in Buzz's bonnet

Far be it from me to promote substance abuse -- particularly that of an illegal nature -- but this column on Bayou Buzz.com really is best read stoned.

For the first time ever, the 2008 Republican Convention celebrated unwed teenage motherhood by seating Sarah Palin's reportedly 5-months' pregnant daughter with her teenage lover, proudly in the VIP row. As the swollen, 17-year-old Bristol Palin complacently gripped her swarthy impregnator's hand, Alaska's governor and the prospective mother's mother sternly lectured on family values and accused "the media" of persecuting her family.

Has the Republican Party gone mad?

No. But perhaps it's watched "The Da Vinci Code" too many times.

Are the Republicans returning to the cult of the goddess?

Maybe. Anything to win the election, right?

The Republican wanna-be First and Second Families made a fascinating tableau, with fertility being unabashedly the message. Sarah wore a tight choker of fat pearls, the luminous gift of oysters, enhancers of libido and mimics of male anatomy. Her plain, silvery tunic fit like Joan of Arc's breastplate and set her apart as the GOP's new high priestess. Cindy McCain, swathed in pearls, wore a bright green outfit—highlighting the Republicans' odd claim to now be champions of global warming. And green is also the color of fertility, of shimmering, budding springtime woods, of leafy glens and grassy fields where fertility rites took place until authoritarian Christianity wiped it out. With her tightly-pinched face and platinum hair hanging loose, her older children gathered around her, Cindy stood for fertility well-preserved.

But the frisky Palins are fertility real and present. Bristol showed us her tummy, her breasts, her pregnant fulsomeness. Sarah's husband, whom she calls "The First Dude," a crow's caw of sexual prowess and desirability, exhibited his softer side by cuddling the infant rumored to actually be his grandchild (by the voluptuous Bristol and her lover), although Sarah claims to be the mother.

If there weren't tricolor flags and people wearing elephant hats, one might think we were at Stonehenge.

How will bright green outfits, bouncy boobies, big bellies, sleeping babies, beehive hairdos, and fecund boyfriends help McCain win the presidency?

Because sex sells; sex wins votes; sex seals the deal.

I'M REALLY AT A LOSS what to say about this -- at least at a loss for things to say that don't begin with "Holy" and end a couple of expletives later.

C'mon, is this s*** for real?

"(T)he swollen, 17-year-old Bristol Palin complacently gripped her swarthy impregnator's hand"?

What, couldn't Sarah Whalen, The Bayou Buzz's hot-and-bothered columnist, work in the phrase "turgid member" while she was at it?

I don't know exactly what has so stung the Bayou Buzz "editors" -- and I think I'll keep "editors" in quotes from now on in relation to this amateurish and weird website -- that they would post Whalen's ode to whack, but you have to wonder whether it has been covered editorially by Al Goldstein at some point.

One thing I do know for sure after reading this: Sigmund Freud died 69 years too soon.

Over at Catholic and Enjoying It, Mark Shea thinks the Buzz piece is another example of the "nutroot" liberal freak-out over the existential threat Sarah Palin's example poses to Abortion, Inc. The piece is a freak-out, that's for damn certain, but it's not of the "nutroot," Daily Kos variety.

NO, THIS IS a down-home, whacked-out, "there's no eccentric like a Louisiana eccentric" freak-out. This is the crazy aunt you might find in Anne Rice's attic.

This is Uncle Fester at Pat O'Brien's after his third hurricane.

From what can be gathered online, Sarah Whalen "is an expert in Islamic Law and a photojournalist specializing in U.S. foreign policy issues." At some point, she apparently taught at Loyola University in New Orleans. And she has been a contributor to the Arab News and The Palestine Chronicle.

One who appears to have "gone native."

The bee in the bonnet of The Bayou Buzz isn't political commentary as spewed by Nutroot Nation. No, this is political commentary you rightly could expect from Hamas. Or the official Saudi press, as it were.

BEFORE THE INTERNET democratized the publishing universe, this Bayou Buzz screed is what you would find lying on a table at the student union. In all its mistyped, poorly photocopied glory.

It's also -- way down the bayou or way up in the piney woods -- the kind of "philosophical treatise" over which you might find some not-half-as-clever-as-he-thinks sort waxing rhapsodic. At least once he'd borrowed a dictionary to look up words such as "swarthy" and "fecund."

In other words, "Move along. There's nothing to see here."

Unless, of course, you happen to be a trained mental-health professional. Or maybe Jack Bauer.

Overgrown children at play in hell

A biology professor at a Minnesota university has followed through on his threat to desecrate an allegedly consecrated communion host and a copy of the Koran.

THE ABOVE PHOTO, from P.Z. Myers' blog, shows what the University of Minnesota-Morris faculty member did to what is most sacred to Catholics and Muslims -- to what Catholics believe is the Body of Christ and to what Islam holds as the literal word of Allah:

OK, time for the anticlimax. I know some of you have proposed intricate plans for how to do horrible things to these crackers, but I repeat…it's just a cracker. I wasn't going to make any major investment of time, money, or effort in treating these dabs of unpleasantness as they deserve, because all they deserve is casual disposal. However, inspired by an old woodcut of Jews stabbing the host, I thought of a simple, quick thing to do: I pierced it with a rusty nail (I hope Jesus's tetanus shots are up to date). And then I simply threw it in the trash, followed by the classic, decorative items of trash cans everywhere, old coffeegrounds and a banana peel. My apologies to those who hoped for more, but the worst I can do is show my unconcerned contempt.

By the way, I didn't want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur'an and The God Delusion. They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

MYERS' ACTIONS belie his words. If the Eucharist really is just a "fraggin' cracker" and the Koran is just bound pieces of paper -- if there is no power in those things, or in peoples' belief in them -- why bother desecrating them?

In a land of intellectual freedom, have not people the right to their "delusions," so long as they remain peacefully deceived? According to the First Amendment and to international human-rights conventions, don't religious believers have the right to practice their faiths in peace?

If so, what is the point of Myers' actions, other than sheer hatefulness and incitement?

If, as the pathetic professor professes, he sees no metaphysical value to a consecrated host or a Muslim holy book, isn't his only point to broadcast his violent hatred of the faithful? In other words, what this 51-year-old (going on 14) college professor is all about is disturbing the peace.

I wonder whether one of Myers' students -- as he stumbled out of a college watering hole -- could get away with pissing on the sidewalk and harassing gay couples if only he possessed the rhetorical sophistication to couch his bad behavior as "freedom of expression."

After all, if the university administration can defend an employee's "hate speech" (and "hate actions") against religious groups and their sacred objects -- remember, Myers holds "nothing must be held sacred" and is willing to go to some length to act on that belief -- what's so "sacred" about un-pissed-upon walkways . . . or gay couples?

Or any couple? Or any law? Or any concept around which society organizes itself?

What, then, is so damned sacred about P.Z. Myers?

IF MINNESOTA-MORRIS can't bring itself to discipline an employee who shows aggressive contempt toward society, its members and public order, what won't it tolerate, then? If desecrating the Eucharist and mutilating a Koran, then publicizing the abuse don't represent "fighting words," then what does?

Indeed, if "nothing must be held sacred," what is so sacred about this overgrown 14-year-old brat's job?

Dogs don't blow stuff up . . .

But some folks who hate them because they're "ritually impure" will blow you, your kids and Fido, too, to Kingdom Come to feed the bloodlust of "Allah the merciful."

And they'll blow themselves up to take out Western whoremongers, which will make them martyrs of Islam, which will earn them serious freak time in Paradise with 72 virgins.

And they'll blow other Muslims up because they're the wrong sort of Muslims.

And, I suspect, a lot of Muslims will blow themselves (and whatever else) up just because they're bored and aggrieved over some slight suffered yesterday or 700 years ago.

Maybe they'll blow somebody in Scotland up because Scottish cops -- and the Scottish people -- like filth. Which, in the warped world of Islam, equals a cute little puppy:

A postcard featuring a cute puppy sitting in a policeman's hat advertising a Scottish police force's new telephone number has sparked outrage from Muslims.

Tayside Police's new non-emergency phone number has prompted complaints from members of the Islamic community.

The choice of image on the Tayside Police cards - a black dog sitting in a police officer's hat - has now been raised with Chief Constable John Vine.

The advert has upset Muslims because dogs are considered ritually unclean and has sparked such anger that some shopkeepers in Dundee have refused to display the advert.

Dundee councillor Mohammed Asif said: 'My concern was that it's not welcomed by all communities, with the dog on the cards.

'It was probably a waste of resources going to these communities.

'They (the police) should have understood. Since then, the police have explained that it was an oversight on their part, and that if they'd seen it was going to cause upset they wouldn't have done it.'

Councillor Asif, who is a member of the Tayside Joint Police Board, said that the force had a diversity adviser and was generally very aware of such issues.

He raised the matter with Mr Vine at a meeting of the board.

The chief constable said he was unaware of the concerns and that the force had not sought to cause any upset but added he would look into the matter.

Councillor Asif said: 'People who have shops just won't put up the postcard. But the police have said to me that it was simply an oversight and they did not seek to offend or upset.'

COME TO THINK OF IT, I wonder whether the outraged Musselmans are angry because God hates dogs -- a cracked idea that's reason enough to raise grave doubts about Islam -- or because the cute pup featured in the Scottish police ad, Rebel, is training to be a police dog.

I mean, who knows? Rebel could end up being a bomb-sniffing dog.

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you," Mark Twain once said. "This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. . . ."

That sounds like the exact difference between Rebel and Scotland's caterwauling Mohammedans. Just replace "man" with "Muslim."

And the difference between a man and Scottish authorities is a man would have told Councillor Asif to piss off.

No roomah in the ummah . . . alhamdulillah

The trouble with Islam is that an infidel just can't catch a break.

If you trash the Prophet and his followers, you're going to catch hell. If you compliment a Muslim when she makes a valid point, then point out the commonalities with the Catholic Church's theology of the body, you are called weird.

And when you leave a comment on Tokyo Cairo Rose's blog to ask what's so weird about standard Catholic theology and cultural criticism . . .

The Mighty Favog Says:
May 6th, 2008 at 1:45 am
lol you’ve been edited. no anti-Islamic sediment on my blog. I had enough of that on the daily reveille. I can actually CONTROL comments here. you said somethign about wahhabis, etc. yeah not here go find someone else to spam

- Shirien

p.s. i also edited your URL, no music here either K? Thaaanks

NOW, I FULLY EXPECT that my response to being mendaciously tarred as "anti-Islamic" for politely asking some questions (and restating the Catholic position which seemingly agrees with the Muslim take on modesty) will be short-lived in Shirien Elamawy's (her real name) dawahland.

So, I'm posting it here . . . for posterity:

The Mighty Favog Says:
May 6th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Excuse me, but what was anti-Islamic about asking questions? Or are you incapable of defending your assertions . . . and your faith?

An honest question deserves an honest answer. Responding to an honest question — and an attempt at some form of dialogue — with disingenuous statements and rank hostility is both dishonorable and doesn’t exactly cover Islam in glory.

In other words, child, it would appear that you can dish it out, but you can’t take it. It likewise would appear that would be the modus operandi of your faith as well — if you are a truly representative witness to it.

Furthermore, if you are not Wahhabi (the no-music thing, I seem to remember, is a Wahhabi thing), what are you? I know not all stripes of Islam are anti-music, what others besides the Wahhabi movement among Sunnis are?

Or is asking that inherently anti-Muslim?

In the peace of Issa the Christ.

OH . . . AND WHILE I'm thinking of it, would you like to hear the story of how Ms. Elamawy came to be a columnist for The Daily Reveille and the explicit purpose of her column?

I knew that you would.

Again, straight from the ummah's mouth:

Anyway, fast-forwarding to the end of my freshman year at LSU. Everyone read and still reads The Daily Reveille on campus everyday. One day, I picked up the paper and saw a cartoon drawn on the op-ed page that not only caught my attention, it infuriated me. This wasn’t the first time The Daily Reveille printed something bigoted and completely offensive to Muslims. I decided to head over to the newsroom to have a little talk with the cartoonist but to my dismay he wasn’t there. Surely, I wasn’t going to leave without complaining. After all, I had to defend Islam. And I’m a girl, complaining is in our nature.

So, I requested to speak to the editor-in-chief at the time. It turned out I wasn’t the only one offended by a cartoon which depicted the Iranian President sitting at a laundry mat waiting for his brain to be finished being “washed” with “Quran Detergent;” other people had apparently been complaining all day.

After complaining about how unacceptable it was for him to print the cartoon, he sincerely apologized and told me he “wants to make sure that it doesn’t happen again in the future,” even though he was graduating only week later. He told me that at that very moment they were holding a forum for people who wanted to apply for being on the opinon staff for the next semester. He highly recommended I apply for a position after knowing I was a mass communication major. Subhanallah, it really was the Qadr of Allah that I went to complain at that very moment, because next thing I knew he led me into the room in which I was to apply. And I did. And so did about 100 other people who wanted one of 12 spots.

Anyway, I applied, got called for an interview and then alhamdulillah I got the job. And that started my work in mass dawah. Which wallahi has been such a blessing from the very beginning. However, you have to have a strong heart when speaking the truth about Islam. Don’t sugar coat things, don’t fall under the pressure of those around you.

Wallahi I can’t tell you all how many times I got people saying “Write about something else!” and subhanallah for a brief moment you think about it… then you realize that you are doing this purely for the sake of Allah and I figured if they fire me for not wanting to write about anything other than Islam, then so be it. But they actually loved the readers I would bring and the hits I would bring to the website too, alhamdulillah.

I HAVE just a single question.

If I were to return to LSU as a grad student, could I get a regular column in the Reveille for the explicit purpose of Catholic evangelization? No, I don't want to be just the token non-traditional student who's a "religious nut" but writes about all kinds of stuff.

What I want is the deal Ms. Elamawy got. I want a column "speaking the truth about Catholicism and the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Don’t sugar coat things, don’t fall under the pressure of those around you."

That's the deal I want. Fair is fair. Because I would be doing it purely for the sake of Issa the Christ, alhamdulillah.

Beauty is not skank deep

For traditional Christians and modern Westerners, it's not a difficult task to find areas of profound disagreement with Islam and then beat those divides into gaping chasms of civilizational conflict.

This particularly would be true in the years since violent jihadists flew jetliners full of innocents into skyscrapers full of innocents in a bid to poke a finger into the eye of the Great Satan.

That, however, does nothing to help us -- as Christians and modern Westerners -- come to the difficult realization that, in so many ways, we are the Great Satan.

Or, at a minimum, willing and enthusiastic dupes of Satan.

IN THAT LIGHT, perhaps it would be useful to explore one area where Christians and thoughtful Westerners can have common cause with thoughtful Muslims -- or at least ought to have common cause with those who profess Islam.

I would submit that the devil's greatest success among Western modernists has been in equating "freedom" with the grossest debasements of human dignity, which by extension are the most profound slurs against a Creator who made mankind in His image. The means of debasement are legion, but they all are rooted in denying the fundamental nature and dignity of -- and, yes, divine image within -- human beings by recognizing them solely as objects.

Not as people, but as things.

Satan's second greatest success among modern Westerners has been in convincing them to run right past the concept of "tolerance" into the abyss where what we profess has nothing to do with how we live.

As one who has toiled for a decade and a half as a volunteer in Catholic youth ministry, let me illustrate this concept from that vantage point.

It's not only possible but, indeed, probable to have large numbers of self-professed Catholic teen-agers -- teen-agers who have gone through Confirmation and made solemn promises therein -- to think nothing of dressing like hookers, defining a "good date" as one that ends inside the pants of a young woman, getting wasted every weekend or otherwise behaving in a manner indistinguishable from the most hardcore of nihilists.

THE STARK REALITY of what used to be known as Christendom is a spent culture in which belief is alienated from practice, humanity is alienated from its fundamental nature and, finally, humans are profoundly alienated from their Creator and one another. Its logical -- and inevitable -- end is Death.

I think that's a cultural critique that orthodox Christians and mainstream Muslims not only could both embrace, but also could see as grounds for cooperation.

Which brings me to "the Hijab Challenge."

The Hijab Challenge was the brainchild of a Muslim columnist for The Daily Reveille, my old college newspaper at Louisiana State University. Briefly, what Shirien Elmasraya did was, I think, brilliant -- an in-your-face throwing down the gauntlet to American society's notion of feminine "beauty."

DOES OUR NOTION of womanly "beauty" mainly involve who a woman is, or merely what standard equipment she comes with? Do we value what is divine, or do we prefer to turn a multidimensional imago dei into nothing more than a one-dimensional object -- a thing to be used for our own ignoble purposes:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column challenging University women to wear the hijab - or headscarf - for a day.

A handful of girls took on my challenge this past Friday. They came to campus adorned by the beauty of the hijab.

They went to class, hung out with their friends and lived their daily routine wearing something they normally wouldn't wear.

But anyone who didn't know them personally would most likely assume these women were Muslim, and they were most likely oppressed.

In the past year and a half I've written, I've probably gotten more hate mail and hate comments below my articles online than just about anyone else on The Daily Reveille's staff.

Some of those who would comment would regurgitate over and over again that women in Islam are oppressed, we are backwards and we need to be liberated from our hijab.

I, in turn, wanted to liberate the people who hold these views from the oppression of media brainwashing and prejudice by challenging them to wear hijab for a day and see what it is really like - the result?

None of those who accused me of being oppressed took on my challenge. They are so afraid of reality and so embarrassed to be proven wrong that they did not even bother defending their claim by agreeing to participate.

So let it be known that your words never did and never will hold any weight with me.

Half of my life, I didn't wear hijab. I was oppressed by society and beauty magazines who told me and my peers that less clothes means more beauty.

To me, the hijab is liberating.

One of the women who decided to take on my challenge was Melissa Breen, mass communication sophomore.

"In order for people to truly be open-minded, they must be willing to step outside of their comfort zones," Breen said.

Breen's friend Sarah Berard, English junior, also decided to participate.

"In order to truly love and respect other people, you have to try to understand them. So as a Roman Catholic, for me, the hijab challenge was an opportunity to come to a better understanding of Muslim women," Berard said.

Michelle Richardson, anthropology junior, said it was a special cultural experience.

"It helped demonstrate to the world and to myself that you are not any less of a free, powerful woman for making the personal choice of wearing the hijab," she said.

WE LIVE IN A CULTURE that makes a fetish of "edginess" and rebellion. What that culture fails to appreciate is that the only revolt here is against truth. Make that Truth, with a capital "T."

Otherwise, what we preceive as "edgy" is merely pedestrian slavishness to a warped and dehumanizing status quo, and what we perceive as "beauty" is predicated on appealing to some of our uglier impulses. Thus blinded, it's difficult for the modern American to appreciate Ms. Elmasraya for the revolutionary she is.

And entirely too easy to laugh and say "Look at the backward Muslim" instead of acknowledge the rot in our own self-mutilated culture.