Who‘s Dissing the Koran

If ever there was an advertisement for the hypocritical nature of the Muslim extremists, it was the behavior of rioters who went into a religious frenzy over the Koran last month.
Word that the Koran was urinated on, torn up and flushed down toilets by U.S. guards at Guantanamo Bay sent the Muslim world into a tizzy, with violent protests in Pakistan and Afghanistan that killed 15 people.
Did our guys really do it? Who cares? It’s a book -- that’s all -- not someone’s pet dog or kid sister.
We too have fanatics in the United States who go ballistic over the thought of anyone burning the American flag. But even our battiest patriots don’t go rioting in the streets murdering their countrymen every time they see a Muslim crowd torching Old Glory on the Six O’Clock News.
The truth is that many of the “People of the Book” as Muslims call themselves, have been pissing on the Koran themselves ever since the Prophet Mohammad laid down the law in 632 A.D. They’ve desecrated the Koran by not following the spirit of its teachings.
When one billion people make a huge deal out of claiming to live “by the Book,“ then they should be held to account for the reckless, medieval and outright cruel aspects of their religion.
Like the Torah, the Bible, the Baghavadgita and any book representing a great religion, the central message of the Koran preaches kindness, respect and tolerance for one’s brothers and sisters on this earth.
• How does that square with members of the Muslim Janjaweed militias of the Sudan throwing living children onto bonfires in Darfur?
• How does it square with murdering your fellow Muslims with the car bombs of Iraq? Or murdering 300 Iraqi doctors and kidnapping hundreds more?
• What sort of religion advocates stoning women to death for adultery when they are forced into prostitution to survive, as is the case in Afghanistan today?
• How does it square with the
Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah death sentence on author Salmon Rushdie for poking fun at the hypocrisies of Islam? Or Osama bin Ladin calling for all Muslims to kill Americans at every chance?
• How does it square with making ownership of the Bible a crime in Saudi Arabia?
• How does it square with killing a Dutch filmmaker for making a documentary about the routine abuse of Muslim women, as was the case in Holland last year?
• What about the
Shariah religious town council ordering the gang rape of an innocent young woman for the misdeeds of her uncle, as was the case in Pakistan last year?
• How does it square with Muslim extremists murdering 3,000 U.S. civilians in New York?
If these Muslim fanatics aren’t defecating on the Koran and all it stands for, then who is?
True, the Koran has its nutty sections proscribing the stoning, whipping, beheading and general torment of people, just like the book of Leviticus in the Bible. But what makes a religion good is its generosity of spirit, not the meanhearted, creepy stuff that somehow made the cut in the textbook. People who want respect for their religious books need to earn it by practicing what they preach.

Knowing when to stop

A recent interview with the White Stripes in Newsweek offers some advice that any artist might take to heart.
Noting that they recorded their new bestselling CD in just three weeks on old analog tape equipment, guitarist/singer Jack White offers some advice to those seeking to create a masterpiece: go easy on the shine and leave in enough rough spots to keep it real.
“Most musicians, even the fake plastic ones, would tell you that they liked their record better when it was a demo,” White says. “That’s because when they made the final album, nobody in the room knew when to stop. If you’re painting and don’t know when to lay the brush down, you’re going over what you’ve done until the paint is this thick. That’s the most important part of art -- knowing when to stop.”
Amen to that, brutha’. As a would-be artist, I recall wrecking a piece of sculpture years ago by trying to make a good thing a little bit better. Unfortunately, all that fiddling polished the life right out of my alleged “work of art.“
There’s so much digital meddling with music these days that even the top artists
often sound like they’ve been through a
rock polisher.
Even to an untrained ear, sections of last year’s top-selling album by The Strokes sounded like they had been patched together with Scotch tape in the studio.
And I looked forward to hearing Robert Plant getting back to the “real blues” as hyped on his latest album, only to find that the big blues number by the former Led Zeppelin frontman sounded like it had been pieced together in digital snips. Apparently the old days of singing a song straight through in a cavernous echo chamber with a taxi cab micophone to capture a rough & ragged harmonica sound are doomed to remain back in 1968 where they began.
Speaking of which, why is it that old albums from the ‘60s and ‘70s often sound richer and warmer in tone than today‘s CDs, considering that they were produced on primitive reel-to-reel tape recorders? The answer has been rediscovered by the White Stripes, using old-school equipment and recordings that limit the number of takes. Sometimes keeping it simple is best.
Maybe the same is also true of everything from raising kids to fashioning a fine romance.

View On Our Website