"You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog. I am proud to be called a radical Buddhist."

Said Ashin Wirathu, the leader of Burma�s 969 movement, quoted in a WaPo article titled "The serene-looking Buddhist monk accused of inciting Burma�s sectarian violence."

A catchy pop tune titled �Song to Whip Up Religious Blood� is often played at 969 rallies. The movement is named for three digits that monks say symbolize the virtues of the Buddha, Buddhist practices and the Buddhist community, but its theme song is far from devotional. The lyrics reference people who �live in our land, drink our water, and are ungrateful to us,� according to the Times. And the chorus, �We will build a fence with our bones if necessary,� is repeated over and over again.

Wirathu claims that his movement is not responsible for the violence against the Rohingya [Burma�s Muslims]. But he does repeatedly insist that Muslims � whom he often calls �kalars,� a derogatory term roughly equivalent to the N-word � need to be kept in their place. He calls for boycotts of Muslim-owned businesses, warns Buddhists to protect their women from Muslim rapists and was a vocal backer of a law restricting marriages between Buddhists and Muslims...

"Non-Muslims who work in the Middle East, are forced to wear 'respectable' clothing by their employers, or face disciplinary measures."

"The Arab Muslims say that this demand is quite acceptable; and that this is to ensure that people adhere to local traditions and customs of the host country. So, with this same philosophy, why can't Europeans set a similar standard for migrants?"

That is, by far, the most up-voted comment (out of 708 comments) at the NYT article titled "Muslim Frenchwomen Struggle With Discrimination as Bans on Veils Expand."

I want to say that the answer to that question is obvious: Because we have a strong belief in religious freedom and personal expression. But I can't say "we," because I'm not French. From the article:

Mainstream politicians... say they [support the ban] for the benefit of public order or in the name of la�cit�, the French term for the separation of church and state.... The concept of la�cit� was developed during the French Revolution, and was intended to limit the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in the government.

A little more detail on that:

The strict separation of church and state... has evolved into what some religious leaders see as a "form of political correctness that made bringing religion into public affairs a major taboo." Former President Sarkozy initially criticised this approach as a "negative la�cit�" and wanted to develop a "positive la�cit�" that recognizes the contribution of faith to French culture, history and society, allows for faith in the public discourse and for government subsidies for faith-based groups. Sarkozy saw France's main religions as positive contributions to French society...  Sarkozy later changed footing on the place of religion in French society, by publicly declaring the burqa "not welcome" in France in 2009 and favoring legislation to outlaw it....

"These are the last days of Mecca. The pilgrimage is supposed to be a spartan, simple rite of passage..."

"... but it has turned into an experience closer to Las Vegas, which most pilgrims simply can�t afford," says Irfan Al-Alawi, director of the UK-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation. "The city is turning into Mecca-hattan... Everything has been swept away to make way for the incessant march of luxury hotels, which are destroying the sanctity of the place and pricing normal pilgrims out."

The Grand Mosque is now loomed over by the second tallest building in the world.... The hotel rises 600m (2,000ft) into the air, projecting a dazzling green laser-show by night, on a site where an Ottoman fortress once stood � razed for development, along with the hill on which it sat.

The list of heritage crimes goes on, driven by state-endorsed Wahhabism, the hardline interpretation of Islam that perceives historical sites as encouraging sinful idolatry � which spawned the ideology that is now driving Isis�s reign of destruction in Syria and Iraq. In Mecca and Medina, meanwhile, anything that relates to the prophet could be in the bulldozer�s sights. The house of Khadijah, his first wife, was crushed to make way for public lavatories; the house of his companion Abu Bakr is now the site of a Hilton hotel; his grandson�s house was flattened by the king�s palace. Moments from these sites now stands a Paris Hilton store and a gender-segregated Starbucks.

ADDED: Do you think much about the problem of idolatry? It's strange where such thinking leads people, but one reason it is strange is that we've lost touch with idolatry as a significant sin. We use the word "idol" with complete casualness.

"Afghan rapper escaped teen marriage by singing about it."

From Public Radio International. There's a skimpiness to the story and doesn't quite support the drama of the headline:

�One day my mom told me, �You have to return to Afghanistan with me. There�s a man there who wants to marry you. Your brother�s engaged and we need your dowry money to pay for his wedding.��

Sonita [Alizadeh] was devastated. So she wrote the song "Brides for Sale." The song starts �Let me whisper, so no one hears that I speak of selling girls. My voice shouldn�t be heard since it�s against Sharia. Women must remain silent� this is our tradition.�...

Sonita was worried what her parents would think about the video � but they actually loved it � and they also told her that she didn�t have to get married....

The attention around Sonita�s music landed her a full scholarship to an arts academy in Utah, and that led to the concert here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

PRI is giving her publicity and extracting a fair amount of criticism of America. The photo captions are: "Afghan rapper Sonita Alizadeh narrowly escaped a forced marriage at 14 by writing the song 'Brides for Sale.' She recently visited West Oakland, California, and was surprised that the US, like Iran and Afghanistan, has poor neighborhoods and homeless people." And: "Sonita was shocked by this neighborhood in West Oakland. 'Are you telling me in America there are places where you can�t walk alone at night?' she asked."

Another Bangladesh blogger is hacked to death.

"Ananta Bijoy Das was attacked by a masked gang wielding machetes in the city of Sylhet," BBC reports.

Mr Das wrote blogs for Mukto-Mona, a website once moderated by Avijit Roy, himself hacked to death in February...

Sara Hossain, a lawyer and human rights activist in Dhaka, has told the BBC Mr Das and Mr Roy were on a list of targets. "They've always believed and written very vocally in support of free expression and they've very explicitly written about not following any religion themselves," she told the BBC World Service's Newsday programme. "These last two have been part of a blog called Mukto-Mona (Free Mind), which is about free thinking and is about explicitly taking on religious fundamentalism and particularly Islamic religious fundamentalism. Their names have been on lists of identified targets."

"One of the two gunmen in a Garland, Texas, attack on a cartoon contest featuring images of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed has been identified as Elton Simpson..."

"... a federal law enforcement source told CNN. The source said Simpson is thought to have sent a tweet before the attack with the hashtag #texasattack. 'May Allah accept us as mujahideen,' the tweet read in part."

Elton Simpson � sounds like the name of a character in a cartoon. I picture him looking like this:


But he looked like this.

1. "Clinton: 'Deep-seated' beliefs block abortion access," 2. "Hillary On Abortion: 'Deep-Seated Cultural Codes, Religious Beliefs And Structural Biases Have To Be Changed.'"

2 headlines for the same news event in 2 different places. #1 is The Hill. #2 is The Daily Caller.

Here's the raw material. Judge for yourself:



Hillary did say "Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed. As I have said and as I believe, the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century and not just for women but for everyone � and not just in far away countries but right here in the United States."

Now, it does sound off to say "religious beliefs... have to be changed." You'd think the speech-writers would have tweaked that into something less easily extracted and denounced. And yet... perhaps it's a trap. Come on, you Hillary haters. Flay her for saying "religious beliefs... have to be changed." Commit. Then she can come back and destroy you. She can tell you about the war against Islamic extremists who have religious beliefs that have to be changed. They're cutting people's heads off for not converting. They are raping and enslaving women. They are throwing gay people off tall buildings. Gotcha!

Of course, there are religious beliefs that need to be changed! That's not even controversial. The question is how to change them � when to use military force, when to use the force of legal sanctions, and when to use speech to persuade people to believe ideas because they are better.

The equality of women � feminism is the radical notion that women are people � is a strong, persuasive idea that is at odds with what many believe as a matter of religion. Hillary Clinton is on solid ground when she says religious beliefs have to be changed, and I assume she means that they can be changed through persuasive speech and appeals to reason and moral sensibility.

If you think she's vulnerable to attack, go ahead and attack. I'll spectate from this overlook.

Bus ads in NYC: "'Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah.' That�s His Jihad. What�s yours?"

"On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John Koeltl ruled that New York�s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) cannot stop the controversial ad from running on scores of subway cars and buses."

The MTA has argued that the ad could incite violence against Jews, but Koeltl rejected that idea.

MTA officials �underestimate the tolerant quality of New Yorkers and overestimate the potential impact of these fleeting advertisements,� he ruled. �Moreover, there is no evidence that seeing one of these advertisements on the back of a bus would be sufficient to trigger a violent reaction. Therefore, these ads � offensive as they may be � are still entitled to First Amendment protection.�

The MTA's argument was premised on the idea that people would misunderstand the ad, which is intended to be pro-Israel. The ad comes from Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative.

�What matters is not AFDI�s intent, but how the ad would be interpreted,� [said MTA Security Director Raymond Diaz]. The line �What is yours?� could be considered a �call to violence,� particularly because the CAIR posters it was mocking never appeared in New York....

"The Yazidi woman watched as her name was drawn out of a hat."

"Then a man she had never met told her to go into the bathroom and clean herself. But she knew better. As a Yazidi woman captured by the Islamic State, she knew that a bath was often prelude to rape. So she swallowed some poison and hoped to die."

From "Islamic State�s �war crimes� against Yazidi women documented," in the Washington Post.

Also:

Islamic State makes no secret about its enslavement of Yazidi women. In October, the group boasted about the practice in its English-language magazine, Dabiq.

�After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations,� the magazine said, arguing that unlike Christians and Jews, Yazidis, as polytheists, could be treated as property. �The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers.�

Video appears to show ISIS militants destroying what is left of Nimrud, a kingdom from 900-612 B.C.

"In the video, militants use drills, sledgehammers and a bulldozer to destroy ancient stone reliefs and walls, before huge explosions can be seen...."

In the video, militants say "God has honored us in the Islamic State to remove all of these idols and statutes worshiped instead of Allah in the past days" and "Whenever we seize a piece of land, we will remove signs of idolatry and spread monotheism."

ADDED: More pictures (and video) here. 

"If We Don�t Stand Up As One, More Farkhundas Will Incinerate in the Inferno of Fundamentalism!"

"The hacking to death of Farkhunda was not an accident, but rather a product of a culture of traitor-nurturing and lionising of thugs who since decades � particularly during the last fourteen years � have ruled the country."

("[T]he victim�s father, Mohammed Nadir, said that the attack stemmed from a dispute between Farkhunda, an observant Muslim scholar, and a cleric who sold amulets at the Shah-Do Shamshera shrine in central Kabul. After the young woman criticized the selling of charms, the cleric responded by making the false accusation that she had burned the Quran, and she was brutally assaulted by men enraged by her supposed blasphemy.")

"When I was 9 or 10, in Kenya, the Nancy Drew books showed me a type of empowered girl that I was not used to at all."

"I used to read those in secret with my sister. When I was older, Charles Dickens inspired my sense of justice and fairness. George Orwell criticized liberals for apologizing for Communism; he continues to inspire me to persist in my position that Islam unreformed, when put into practice, leads to a dystopia. Orwell today would tell us that the Islamic State is Islamic and shame those who refuse to acknowledge a truth so plain."

Said Ayaan Hirsi Ali, answering the question "If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?" (and rejecting the premise because "It can never be one book; it has to be several books, because as a human being you evolve").

She also recommends 2 books that I just added to my Kindle: "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," by Charles MacKay, and "The Quran Speaks," by Bahis Sedq (who she says is "the most sophisticated of all the dissidents in the Muslim world... the Muslim Luther, if there were only a way to keep him safe"). The MacKay book was first published in 1841. Here's an illustration from it:

"Many were shocked that the apparent executioner in videos made by the Islamic State, or ISIS, was an educated, middle-class metropolitan."

"In fact, academic institutions in Britain have been infiltrated for years by dangerous theocratic fantasists. I should know: I was one of them," writes Maajid Nawaz, in a NYT op-ed.

Islamist �entryism� � the term originally described tactics adopted by Leon Trotsky to take over a rival Communist organization in France in the early 1930s � continues to be a problem within British universities and schools. Twenty years ago, I played my part as an Islamist entryist at college....

I had a mind inquiring enough to question world events, as well as the passion fostered by my background to care, but I lacked the emotional maturity to process these things. That made me ripe for Islamist recruitment. Into this ferment came my recruiter, himself straight out of a London medical college.

Here's Nawaz's book: "Radical: My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism."

"Today is September 30th, also known as Blasphemy Rights day."

"This day is dedicated to those who are systematically being persecuted, harassed, or killed for their simple expression of Freethought (more precisely, for their �blasphemous� views towards religion)."

Today, we state clearly that considering apostasy to be a criminal offense in state level in fact is an inexcusable offense. If being religious is someone�s right, then being critical to religion is also one�s right. There is nothing wrong to be critical to any idea or ideology, as CFI aptly put on its Blasphemy day banner � �Ideas do not need rights, People do�!

So wrote Avijit Roy on his blog Mukto Mona, on September 30, 2013.

Avijit Roy left his home in Atlanta for a speaking engagement in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Last Thursday:

As he walked back from the book fair, assailants plunged machetes and knives into Roy and his wife, killing him and leaving her bloodied and missing a finger.

Afterward, an Islamist group "Ansar Bangla-7" reportedly tweeted, "Target Down here in Bangladesh."

ISIS endeavors to destroy the art of ancient Nineveh (AKA Mosul).

The efforts at destruction that you see at the beginning of this video are not as horrible as they look, for reasons that are explained half way through.

Watch out for the British expert who appears at 1:47. She thinks it's "pretty rotten for the people who actually live" in northern Iraq that so many of the original works of art have been transferred to Western museums � even as it's apparent that if those sculptures had been left in northern Iraq, they would now be sledgehammered to bits. Or does she � do we � think that if the artworks had been left in place, the history of Iraq would have played out on a different path, and the people who live there would have treasured and protected the world's artistic heritage? From the article at the link (to the British Channel 4 site):

The demolition squad of the Islamic State are following in the tradition of the Taliban who blew up the Buddhas at Bamyan, in Afghanistan, and the Malian jihadi group Ansar al Dine which destroyed mud tombs and ancient Islamic manuscripts in Timbuktu. They quote suras from the Koran that they say demand the destruction of idols and icons.

But iconoclasm isn't just a Salafi Islamic idea. In the 17th Century, puritans, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, destroyed Catholic holy objects and art in Britain.

"We pulled down two mighty great angells, with wings, and divers other angells . . . and about a hundred chirubims and angells," wrote William Dowsing, Cromwell's chief wrecker, after leading his henchmen into Peterhouse college chapel in Cambridge in December 1643.

Iconoclasm. If you're inclined to reach back into history, you will, perhaps, find it everywhere. From the Wikipedia article "Iconoclasm," here are "The Sons of Liberty pulling down the statue of George III of the United Kingdom on Bowling Green (New York City), 1776":



And I can't look at that and not think about the statue of Saddam Hussein that our military tore down in Bagdhad in April 2003. And what of all those monumental statues of Vladimir Lenin that came in for destruction when the Soviet Union dissolved. Would you like to see them all removed?

I know there's at least one still standing, because the NYT, just a couple days ago, ran a story cooing over an aging American couple who are using Airbnb to live in various European cities and the slideshow features the man, dressed in shorts, like a child, and standing, like a child, knee-high to "this statue of Lenin in Lithuania." The hand of the smiling child-man reaches out to encircle the index finger of Soviet dictator. In another photo, the woman, in a short skirt, poses at the feet of a giant Stalin. This one too is "in Lithuania." We're told there's "a sculpture garden." Isn't that nice?

I need to do my own research to find out about "Grutas Park (unofficially known as Stalin's World...)... a sculpture garden of Soviet-era statues and an exposition of other Soviet ideological relics from the times of the Lithuanian SSR."

Founded in 2001 by entrepreneur Viliumas Malinauskas, the park is located near Druskininkai, about 130 kilometres (81 mi) southwest of Vilnius, Lithuania.... Its establishment faced some fierce opposition, and its existence is still controversial.... The park also contains playgrounds, a mini-zoo and cafes, all containing relics of the Soviet era. On special occasions actors stage re-enactments of various Soviet-sponsored festivals.

So there's an alternative to iconoclasm.