Speak of the "Prophet"!
Monday, March 13, 2006
Well, I have basically no time to post, but I can't let a couple of today's sitemeter hits go without comment.
First of all, I hope my visitor from Iran enjoyed reading the partial transcript of Wafa Sultan's remarks posted at the page he visited. And knowing that they probably are afraid to let a woman within a mile of a computer connected to the Internet over there, I am sure it was a "he". That being the case, I'm glad I chose to end with, "And so we have yet another example of a woman who has rejected fundamentalist Islam showing more cajones than any number of men who have embraced it...."
And second, I hope my visitor from Sauda Arabia, our most loudly self-proclaimed "ally", enjoyed reading my line-by-line critique of a recent puff-piece in the Houston Chronicle about a Moslem protest over the Danish cartoons whose "impetus" was -- and I am not making this up -- the recent bombing of a mosque in Iraq by Moslems. As an added bonus, he was using Firefox, meaning that the favicon of his "prophet" (just desserts be upon his followers) -- and my blog's official mascot -- was visible in the address bar. (I will eventually make the favicon visible on all browsers.)
The question is: Who enjoyed his visit more?
I typically will get a hit from at least one of these countries any time I devote a post to Islam.
-- CAV
2 comments:
Gus, I'm a bit bothered by this post, because it appears to show the broad-brush approach you take toward Muslims -- er, Arabs? -- er, UK diplomats? -- er, ME secularists? -- or whoever actually visited from those locations.
;)
Just check out the little ClustrMap I have at the bottom of my page. Saudia Arabia is represented with a biggish red dot, meaning 10-99 visits; and get this: most of those visits are to one of my original posts about persecution of gays in the Middle East which also includes links to the few ME gays sites that exist. Knowing as I do that the Internet is one of the only ways for gays there to communicate relatively "openly," I've never thought that some mad mullah was visiting my site. (If one had, that page probably would have been blocked for those living in Saudi Arabia by now.)
And, look at the two smaller dots (maybe three) for Iran. Some, though not all, of those were to posts about two gay teenagers publicly executed in Iran.
Who knows, but the "butterfly effect" of your posts could lead to a ME revolution! Well. Maybe not after this post, which shows the extreme fundamentalism of Americans...
Curtis,
You make some good points at the end, but if you think that some off-the-cuff comment by a blowhard like me is enough
to derail a revolution, it wasn't much of a revolution to begin with.
To the contrary, I think that the butt of my jokes, Moslem fundamentalists, is pretty obvious.
Who read the post? I really don't know, and the thought crossed my mind that someone decent could indeed have read one
or both.
Now consider who would be offended by what I said. Let's even pretend that the same people who visited me yesterday came back and read this post.
(1) I praise Wafa Sultan as having more cajones than some Moslem fundamentalist. If my reader was a
fundamentalist, he'll be offended, but no more so than he already was by the fact that I don't bow and scrape to Islam. If not, he (and I use the pronoun generically this time) will know I'm not talking about him and will not be offended. In fact, he might even laugh with me.
(2) I pick apart a blatantly absurd news story. What reasonable person is going to be offended by that? And I depict
my mascot, Mo. If this is making him upset, I don't think anything else I say will fail to do so.
There are rational people in the Middle East. It should be obvious to any of them that I am not making fun of them.
Gus
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