Lileks comments on a videotaped viewing of a Moslem sermon in Iraq:
I just saw a video of one of the sermons, carried on prime-time TV in Iraq. Same old same old, with a twist: Usually the text says that the very trees will cry out there is a Jew behind me, kill him. This video had a new version: even the stone will say “a Jew is hiding behind me. Come and cut off his head.”
And then the mullah pulled out a sword. That’s the detail you don’t get in the transcripts: these men of God are packing heat – granted, it’s medieval-style slicy heat, but heat nonetheless.
“And we shall cut off his head!” he shouted, waving the sword. “By Allah, we shall cut it off! Oh Jews! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Jihad for the sake of Allah! Jihad for the sake of Allah!”
Playwright Harold Pinter, speaking at last weekend’s rally, said “The US is a nation out of control,” and “unless we stop it, it will bring barbarism to the entire world.” He said America was “a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug.”
When Blair shows up in the pulpit cleaving the air with a scimitar, let me know. When US television broadcasts a speech with Billy Graham hosting an Excalibur replica from the Franklin Mint Collection, demanding the decapitation of Muslims, let me know. When George Bush grips the podium and beseeches American rock formations to give up the location of non-Christians so we can slit their throats, and it’s carried live on national TV by presidential order, drop me a line.
I haven’t been, and remain not, someone who considers the Islamic world, per se, the Enemy. I know perfectly peaceful Moslems, and I’ve read plenty of translated passages from the Koran that make it clear that it’s no more intrinsically violent a religion than, say, Christianity.
But there are strains of Islam that clearly are dangerous to non-believers. And the comparison here is worth noting, and it puts folks like Pinter and his ilk in a particularly bad (and deservedly so) light.
Is it that Pinter doesn’t believe that these folks are dangerous? How patronizing. Is it that he doesn’t believe in the power of language? How ironic. Or is it that he believes in what they say? How … well, I’ll let you come up with an adjective.
If you are interested in where this strain of “my death, your death, doesn’t matter as long as someone dies” Islam came from, I am willing to loan Stephen Swartz’s “Two Faces of Islam” which is very interesting. It explains, among other things, why the US is particularly at risk from infiltration of these hate-mongers because of our history of religious tolerance. Hoist on our own petard, we are!