Killing Women and Children.
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What Awaits Female Suicide Bombers in Paradise? CNN Headline News today reports that a female suicide bomber detonated a bomb that killed her and 16 other people in Iraq. What do extremists use to lure young women to kill themselves? 72 (female) virgins in Paradise wouldn't seem very appealing to any woman, not even a 'lesbian', and I rather doubt militant Islam is encouraging lesbianism, unless of course it wants lesbians to kill themselves. 72 male virgins would hold no appeal for the bulk of women either, especially religiously devout women, since no major religion encourages nymphomania. So how do the loons of Islamism lure stupid young women into committing mass murder and suicide? Darned if I know.
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One of the stated goals of some Islamists, recreating the Caliphate, might actually be a good thing, if the Caliphate were a spiritual rather than temporal domain, and IF the Caliph, as supreme head of the faith, were to denounce suicide and murder as utterly inconsistent with the religious precepts of Islam, and thus steer Islam away from the current madness of some splinter groups back to the advanced, civilizing mission of its origins. Islam, in short, needs a Pope, who, like Benedict XVI in his Easter message two days ago, denounced the war in Iraq. Catholicism has the Pope; Anglicanism, the Archbishop of Canterbury; Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama;* Protestantism, the World Council of Churches. All those voices tend to align on the most generous and humane principles. Who speaks for Islam?
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Would a religious but not temporal Caliph align with those other voices of moderation and grace, who see the mission of religion as being to provide moral guidance and the reinforcement in each person of our best impulses, by ascribing noble impulses to the divine spirit, breathing goodness into us and animating our lives to do God's will? It is very hard for me to conceive of a Caliph seized with the madness of an Usama bin Laden. Besides, Islam has a long history of killing Caliphs, so deposing a Caliph gone bad wouldn't be too hard. (The question then is how a spiritual but nongovernmental Caliph would be selected. Would it be akin to an Islamic College of Cardinals electing a new Caliph in private conclave?)
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While a given Caliph lives, the rest of the world can know with certitude what Islam really does stand for, as to know whether there can be peace between the rest of the world and Islam or if there really does have to be total war to eradicate Islam from human history. I suspect the wisest of Moslems can count people and nukes, so will not embark on jihad against the entire planet, but will measure their words and adjust their theology to planetary realities. After all, why do you think other religions preach tolerance and peace? Because they know the "human" capacity for violence and aggression, and understand that inciting violence causes violence to echo back from the walls that surround us and keep us confined to this one big ball of dirt. We can fite to the death in an unending cage match or help each other, mutually and generously, to live well on this finite planet. The wise, of all faiths and secular moralities, have made a conscious and rational decision that peace is the better way.
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European High Murder. I was appalled to read today of a court decision that shows the utter lack of morality in Europe:

A British woman left infertile after being treated for ovarian cancer has no right to frozen embryos against the wishes of her former fiance, who provided the sperm, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Tuesday.

The court's Grand Chamber, a panel of 17 European judges, confirmed a lower court ruling upholding a British law that stipulates consent from both parents is needed at every stage of the in vitro fertilization process.

Tuesday's verdict cannot be appealed, and the frozen embryos will be destroyed.

I have a better idea: let's destroy the judges, every last one. Chop up those who can be used for spare parts; burn the rest. While alive. Oh, and kill the father too, for good measure. Chop him up for parts for decent people.
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The idea that a would-be father has the right to order the death of his children is straight out of the middle ages. Europeans have never known right from wrong, have they? The history of Europe is a history of fratricidal violence and mass death, from the earliest annals we have to the carnage in the Balkans in the last decade and on into today's decision to kill babies according to the law!
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The obvious moral solution to the issue posed would have been to give the woman who wants these children the right to them, in order to save their lives, or at least such of them that survive to term, and forbid legal claims of any kind against the father, ever. Instead, Europeans chose to kill babies. Maybe it's a good thing after all that Europe is being invaded by millions of Moslems. Maybe we should look forward to vast civil war and carnage in Europe to kill off a European "civilization" that has strayed so very, very far from the first principles of Western civilization.
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This is not a new moral quandary, just a very old one with a new, technological twist. Remember the Old Testament story of King Solomon (fl. c. 950 B.C.) and the baby claimed by two women? (1 Kings 3) He offered to cut the child in half and give one (dead) half to each, whereupon one woman said no, he must not kill the child! Give the boy to the other woman if he must, but don't kill him. The other woman was perfectly content to have the child chopped in half rather than see the baby live with another woman. Solomon decided that the child truly belonged to (or at least with) the woman who wanted its life spared. The European Court of Human Rights has instead sided with the woman who wants the child dead. Have we learned nothing in 3,000 years?
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All the world should prevent incidents like this from recurring, by forbidding all in vitro creation of embryos that are not ALL immediately placed into a willing recipient's uterus. Indeed, given the grotesque overcrowding on this planet, no fertility treatments of any kind should be given to anyone but geniuses, superlative athletes or performers, or other people of extraordinary genetic gifts that should be preserved. We should regard sterility as a blessing upon the planet, to be valued, not voided.
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But murder should always be punished, and I don't care how many people co-conspire in murder. They all deserve to die. Every single one of those 17 judges should be killed, by the most painful method of execution known to man. Slaughtering babies is inexcusable barbarism, and deserves barbarous retaliation. If judges don't know right from wrong, we need new judges.
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* The Caliphate and then the Ottoman Sultanate united 'church' and state, but we need to remember that the Pope was head of both church and state in the Papal States, the King of England was the Head of the Church of England (and "Defender of the Faith", then Catholicism) for many years, and the Dalai Lama was the head of the Tibetan state for centuries. All of these joint religious and temporal leaders' positions were subdivided over time. Secular leaders took over governments, leaving the Pope and Dalai Lama only religious leaders; and the King of England was supplanted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the religious area, altho two Kings (Henry II and Henry VIII) had one Archbishop (St. Thomas à Becket) and one Lord Chancellor (Thomas More) killed for refusing the King's authority over the church). We must ever be mindful that for long periods, religious and governmental powers have been united in a single office in cultures all over the world, not just the Caliphate. But we evolved to separate offices for religious and government heads, even in the Moslem world. Reuniting spiritual Islam does not require reuniting 'church' and state in one supreme leader.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,292 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM