Why Doesn’t the Media Mention These Guys’ Religion?

Is there something about Christianity that leads fathers to rape their daughters?
Josef Fritzl
An unnamed Italian father and son, both of whom abused their daughters and the son abused his sister.
ColombianArcedio Alvarez
An unnamed United States citizen. They don’t give his name, and inexplicably, they don’t give his religion. It’s a safe bet, in that case, that he isn’t Muslim.

Arcedio Alvarez is said to have abused his daughter, now in her 30s, since she was nine years old.

ROME, Italy (CNN) — Police in Italy say they have arrested a grandfather and his son for allegedly sexually abusing the elder man’s daughter for more than a 25 years, in a case likened to Austria’s Josef Fritzl.

The 41-year-old son, identified by police only by the pseudonym Giovanni, was arrested February 16; his 64-year-old father was arrested March 16, Turin Police Inspector Iolanda Seri told CNN Saturday.

Both men were imprisoned, and were charged with sexual abuse of their daughter and sister, who is now 34 and has been identified by the pseudonym Laura. Both men have denied wrongdoing.

Giovanni is also charged with sexually abusing the eldest of his own four daughters, who are aged 21, 20, 11 and 6, Seri said.

The Fritzl case emerged in April 2008 when a 42-year-old woman, Elisabeth Fritzl (born 6 April 1966), stated to police in the town of Amstetten in Austria that she had been held captive for 24 years in a concealed part of the basement of the family home by her father, Josef Fritzl (born 9 April 1935), and that he had physically assaulted, sexually abused, and raped her numerous times during her imprisonment. The incestuous relationship forced upon her by her father had resulted in the birth of seven children and one miscarriage.

Three of the children had been imprisoned along with their mother for the whole of their lives: daughter Kerstin, aged 19, and sons Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5. One child, named Michael, had died of respiratory problems three days after birth, deprived of all medical help; his body was incinerated by Josef Fritzl on his property.

A Missouri man has been arraigned on second-degree murder and other charges involving three children he allegedly fathered with his teenage daughter.

The bodies of two babies were found in coolers on the rural property where the family had lived. Authorities said the body of a third infant was found in Oklahoma.

Of course I’m not serious. The Christian culture these men grew up in and lived in is very unlikely to be the cause of their imprisoning their daughters, raping them repeatedly, and killing the offspring.

I just wish the western media would use the same common sense when reporting on crimes committed by Muslims.

Now that I think about it, there is that well-known biblical story of Lot. Let’s see, he retired to a secluded cave with his two virgin daughters, had sex with them, and they bore children for him. Maybe there is some truth to these cases of incest being inspired by Christianity.

My Reading List Grows

As if I didn’t have enough books piling up, now I read about one that sounds particularly awesome:
The House of Wisdom; How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization by Jonathan Lyons.
Here’s the LA Times review, the Guardian UK review, and a review on Juan Cole’s site, Informed Comment, that I somehow managed to miss.

From the Guardian’s review:

The theory of permanent Muslim-Christian enmity, though it flourishes in the caves of Tora Bora and parts of the American academy, was long ago exploded by the historians. In this clear and well-written book, Jonathan Lyons delves into all sorts of musty corners to show how Arabic science percolated into the Latin world in the middle ages and helped civilise a rude society.

With the fall of the Roman empire in the west, Europe lost touch with much of its classical inheritance and was isolated by the Arab invasions from the Byzantine empire where some ancient learning survived. Lyons recounts how early medieval Christendom was unable accurately to measure the time of day for monastic offices, or fix the date of Easter, while dogmatic schemes of scripture and hierarchy left little scope for natural science. Aristotle’s influence was confined to the logic and rhetoric of the schools. Bishop Isidore of Seville promulgated the idea that the Earth was flat.

In contrast, when the Arabs conquered Iraq in the first half of the seventh century AD, they came upon living schools of Hellenistic learning in natural science and medicine, along with Indian mathematics and astronomy that had come by way of Iran. Systematic reasoning, driven out of Muslim jurisprudence in favour of precedents from the Prophet’s life and conduct, found a new field of inquiry in ancient geography and cosmology. After the founding of Baghdad in AD762, the Abbasid caliphs established a library and a team of translators at the Beit al-Hikma, the “House of Wisdom” of Lyons’s title.

He begins with a vivid contrast. In 1109, 10 years after the Crusaders sacked Jerusalem and put Muslims, Jews and eastern Christians to the sword, Adelard of Bath, a well-born scholar, set off for Antioch not to kill Muslims but, as he put it, “to investigate the studies of the Arabs” (studia arabum). As so often in medieval biography, a few “facts” are made to work hard, and some scholars (though not Lyons) doubt Adelard ever mastered Arabic. Nonetheless, he is thought to have taken part in translations from Arabic of Euclid’s geometric system, the elements, and the astronomical tables of al-Khwarizmi, and composed such original works as On the Use of the Astrolabe. For Lyons, Adelard is the “first man of science”. Such was the prestige of Arabic learning in England, according to a startling passage here, that partisans of King Henry II, during the quarrel with Rome over Thomas Becket, threatened the king would convert to Islam.

Actually, just a few years ago nutcases in the US and the UK put forward their case that Prince Charles must have converted to Islam. I will not link to their blogs because I find them objectionable, but a Google search is just like turning over rocks in your backyard after a rain.

Blog Recommend

Lawrence of Cyberia. I have visited this blog before, but not regularly. Today I followed a series of links and ended up on some very interesting blog posts.
There’s this one: Lost in Translation, about how the media chose the most inflammatory (and inaccurate) translation possible for a Palestinian politician’s speech (this was back in 2004):

OK, so now we know that Arafat isn’t randomly exhorting the Palestinians to go out and blow up Israelis, he’s actually finishing his speech with a quote from the Qur’an. (Though that verb “terrorize” is a very 21st century/War on Terror kind of vocabulary to find in the Qur’an, isn’t it?). Now, here’s the strange thing: I tried to look up that quote in the Qur’an, to see the whole verse in context so that I might get a better idea of what Arafat was saying by citing it. I was pretty sure I would find it quickly by searching for that damning verb “terrorize”, but when I looked it up in four of the most popular English translations (Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, Khan and Shakir), I couldn’t find a single instance of the word “terrorize” appearing anywhere in the Qur’an. So finding the verse in context wasn’t as easy as I thought.

and this one: They Hate, We Don’t, full of counterexamples to the usual old arguments that Arabs hate Jews:

In other words, I don’t look for the worst examples of extremism I can find and pretend they are representative of the whole culture, just so I can smear an entire religion as “a religion of hate” or a whole race as “not quite people like us”.

It is indefensible to incite hatred of Jews. It is yet more reprehensible when children are your target audience. But it is also reprehensible to want to cherry pick the worst examples of extremist behaviour, and to pretend it is representative of an entire people, just because it fulfils your own prejudices about what kind of people “they” are.

Everything You Know About Iran is a Myth

2. He wants to wipe Israel off the map! That’s what we were told in our news media’s hysterical reporting of Ahmadinejad’s speech to the “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran on 26 October 2005. Except it turns out that, when correctly translated, he didn’t really say that Israel must be wiped off the map, but that “the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time”, which is not a threat of war or annihilation, but an expression of hope for regime change. Ahmadinejad isn’t a Zionist. He doesn’t believe that the Muslim-majority land of Palestine should be forcibly transformed into a Jewish state, and his speech is an expression of confidence that Zionist rule over Jerusalem will come to an end just as surely as other once-powerful regimes (he cites the examples of the Shah in Iran, the Communists in the Soviet Union, and Saddam’s rule over Iraq) all came to an end. If you look at the Middle East through a Zionist perspective, you might not like to hear that, but it doesn’t give anyone the right to pretend that he’s threatening to launch nukes at Tel Aviv or drive the Jews into the sea, as the “wiped off the map” language would suggest.

Adding to blogroll.

Mosque Cake

I was browsing the web, visiting some blogs I like, and someone had posted a photo of an elaborate birthday cake. So I went to the bakery’s web site and looked at their gallery and had the thought, “I wonder if anyone has ever made a cake that looks like a mosque?” Well, lots of people have. A Google image search turns up several. Here’s one now:

Map

Found on various sites around the web. Just Google it. I hope whoever drew it in the first place gets credit.

Take a Gander at these Tee Shirts

Richard Silverstein’s Tikun Olam blog has a post about t-shirts being sported by IDF soldiers to commemorate their experiences in Gaza.

G. [soldier in an elite unit]: “These are shirts for around the house, for jogging, in the army. Not for going out. Sometimes people will ask you what it’s about.”

Of the shirt depicting a bull’s-eye on a pregnant woman, he said: “…It doesn’t really mean anything. I mean it’s not like someone is gonna go and shoot a pregnant woman.”

What is the idea behind the shirt from July 2007, which has an image of a child with the slogan “Smaller – harder!”?

“It’s a kid, so you’ve got a little more of a problem, morally, and also the target is smaller.”

The article includes pictures of several such shirts. It’s eye-opening.
By the way, the caption on the tee shirt of the pregnant Arab woman in the crosshairs is, “1 Shot 2 Kills.”

Killing and Mayhem in Holy Books

I was reading the comments to a blog post on Pharyngula and a couple of commenters included some really interesting links.
Here’s one that lists a whole lot of exhortations to violence from the Bible, and here’s a Boston Globe newspaper article comparing and contrasting violent passages in the Bible and Qur’an.

From the latter:

The Bible also alleges divine approval of racism and segregation. If you had to choose the single biblical story that most conspicuously outrages modern sentiment, it might well be the tale of Phinehas, a story that remains unknown to most Christian readers today (Numbers 25: 1-15). The story begins when the children of Israel are threatened by a plague. Phinehas, however, shrewdly identifies the cause of God’s anger: God is outraged at the fact that a Hebrew man has found a wife among the people of Midian, and through her has imported an alien religion. Phinehas slaughters the offending couple – and, mollified, God ends the plague and blesses Phinehas and his descendants. Modern American racists love this passage. In 1990, Richard Kelly Hoskins used the story as the basis for his manifesto “Vigilantes of Christendom.” Hoskins advocated the creation of a new order of militant white supremacists, the Phineas Priesthood, and since then a number of groups have assumed this title, claiming Phinehas as the justification for terrorist attacks on mixed-race couples and abortion clinics.

Modern Christians who believe the Bible offers only a message of love and forgiveness are usually thinking only of the New Testament. Certainly, the New Testament contains far fewer injunctions to kill or segregate. Yet it has its own troublesome passages, especially when the Gospel of John expresses such hostility to the Ioudaioi, a Greek word that usually translates as “Jews.” Ioudaioi plan to stone Jesus, they plot to kill him; in turn, Jesus calls them liars, children of the Devil.

Various authorities approach the word differently: I might prefer, for instance, to interpret it as “followers of the oppressive Judean religious elite,” Or perhaps “Judeans.” But in practice, any reputable translation has to use the simple and familiar word, “Jew,” so that we read about the disciples hiding out after the Crucifixion, huddled in a room that is locked “for fear of the Jews.” So harsh do these words sound to post-Holocaust ears that some churches exclude them from public reading.

Commands to kill, to commit ethnic cleansing, to institutionalize segregation, to hate and fear other races and religions . . . all are in the Bible, and occur with a far greater frequency than in the Koran.

see http://www.thebricktestament.com

Water Flowing Underground

Is Michael Sells messing with my mind? I’m reading his book, Approaching the Qur’an, and in his discussion of Sura 85, he uses the phrase “water flowing underground,” a phrase I can’t possibly read or hear without immediately hearing the Talking Heads’ song Once in a Lifetime.
So here it is, for your listening/viewing pleasure.

Pointless anecdote: About ten years ago one of the young people at work said something about “that one-hit wonder, the Talking Heads,” and I set him straight. I had three of their albums, and they were awesome!

Man, I wish I could find my master list of all the best songs of the 80′s.
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Update: I just realized I still had “Kermit the Frog” listed as a tag. That’s because I originally had a shorter YouTube clip of the same song performed by Kermit and friends. I don’t want to put them both here, but you should have no trouble finding it on YouTube if you’re interested.

Watch The Colbert Report Wednesday

Stephen Colbert’s guest on Wednesday night’s show will be Juan Cole, presumably talking about his new book, Engaging the Muslim World.
I’ll be watching it Thursday, because 11:30 is way too late at night for me.

This is Terrible

During a soccer match between the teams Buhairat and Sinjar in a small town near Baghdad, a fan shot a forward in the head, killing him, just he (the forward) was shooting on goal.
The police arrested the shooter immediately. The news article didn’t give the name of the player.
Dang.
Arabic story here.
English story here.
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Update: An alert reader sent me this link from the New York Times, which gives a completely different story. In the NYT story, a goalie was shot to death, by accident, after a policeman fired celebratory bullets, after the game was over.
Really makes you wonder what really happened.
The NYT couldn’t resist adding this, to make it all sound more exotic and primitive:

The family of the goalie was demanding so-called blood money from the officer, the police said.

How completely unlike us those barbarians are! Here in the US, we don’t ask for anything as sanguinary as “so-called blood money.” Here we hire lawyers to sue the policeman, the police force, the stadium, and the city for as many millions as we can possibly get. That’s what makes us civilized. *rolleyes*

I actually learned two English words from the Hans Wehr dictionary: bloodwite and wergild. Those are the English words for “blood money,” a fixed amount of money paid as compensation for a person’s death.