Boreal
FAREWELL POSTINGS
(Refresh for the latest)
Introduction
Dear...,
It is always nice to hear from you. Thanks for the pictures. Everyone looks great.
I may live another ten years, and then again I may not. Isn’t that the situation for most people my age?
In informing me of the result of my latest thoracic echocardiogram my doctor said that I had been dodging a bullet for years, and I may continue doing so, but the odds were no longer in my favour.
She said she was sorry but it could happen at any time and there was nothing anyone could do.
I told her that, after what Lucette went through, I considered it a godsend, even if I don’t believe in the guy.
A silver lining; with my last book, Fade to Black, I thought I had nothing left to write about, and lo and behold I get to write about Lucette and me again and revisit stuff I wrote about Islam.
I am writing my Farewell Postings without the benefit of a proof-reader, or a Lucette to tell me “you can’t say that”, so expect more than some grammatical surprises that I hope will make you smile and not make you sad.
If I beat the odds, won’t I have egg on my face.
Love You
Bernard
Is He Dead or Has He Nothing More to Say (Yeah)?
One way to find out is to check the Ottawa Citizen's obituary page for the following (or something similar):
My name is Bernard Payeur. Shortly after 9/11, I decided to get to know the Koran and write about it.
It turned out to be a ten year odyssey culminating, with my beloved Lucette's indispensable support and assistance, in Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice – The Koran arranged by topic and explained in a way we can all understand. Those who have read it say it was time well spent; those who have not, have been less kind.
Since then, I have continued writing about Islamic scriptures, the Prophet Muhammad and Islam in general. Eighteen books later, it's over.
If there is a supreme being who wrote a book to mess with our lives, and if Paradise is my final destination and not that other place, I will attempt to come back with the proof. Not the actual Koran, but a reasonable facsimile. I have to assume that the Almighty will not want to part with the original Arabic edition that He keeps close at hand.
43:3-4 We have made it an Arabic Qur’an that perchance you may understand. And, indeed, it is in the Mother of the Book, with Us, lofty and wise.
Cheers!
Lucette Would Understand
October 16, 2024
Lately, as I fear my days are numbered, I have been sharing too much with people I barely know, including snippets of my favourite video, that of my late wife’s fiftieth birthday. While pointing her out to my friendly waitress, I mentioned that one of the last things she said to me was that I was the smartest man she had ever met. What a pretentious jerk I imagined her thinking as I left Abby’s Wine Bar. There was no time to provide context, so I will try to do so here.
Three failed career choices is not a sign of a smart person, but a delusional one. The reason I survived my failures was that they did not stop her from believing in me. She knew that after she was gone, there would be no one to encourage me to persevere, and she wanted me to persevere.
My first failure was the result of ignoring the advice of Sophocles who, in Antigone, warned us: “None love the messenger who brings bad news” and informed my superiors, at the then of Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs (Global Affairs), about my discovery of a multi-million dollar fraud on the Canadian taxpayers and being put in an impossible situation.
After my firing, I built a computer application using leading edge Canadian software that I used as my calling card to get customers. My last client was Bell Canada Enterprises for whom, with the help of the smartest manager I have ever worked with beat Google to Google, only to have new management abandon the project and the Canadian government declare the software that allowed us to do the impossible to be non-compliant with archaic American standards it had adopted—a death knell for my application and my business.
It was after 9/11 when I picked up a copy of the Koran in the hope of understanding what happened that fateful day and decided to write about it. It is a failure in progress.
Lucette would understand.
Investigating a Tardy Demise
November 6, 2024
In 2017, I was diagnosed with a rising aortic aneurism. Every eight months or so I went in for an echocardiogram to check if it had expanded to a size where surgery to cut off the damaged portion to be replaced by some type of polyethylene tubing was called for, in an estimated three years I was told. After Lucette passed away on July 5, 2019 I cancelled any further measurements and decided to let nature take its course.
Nature is taking its bloody sweet time. Whether it’s my heart or some angry believer upset about something I wrote who sends me to meet our alleged fickle friend in the sky, or that other place, it will put an end to a life that has grown tiresome without her and erstwhile friends and acquaintance who no longer care for my company with only me and my obsession.
It's been almost six years since the last measurement. To better understand why I am still here and to get a current estimate as to when I can expect my aneurism to go ballistic I will be getting a measurement on November 16. Will let you know the result so that those interested in selling my books, which will become public domain upon my passing, can get ready, assuming my time is short.
Leaving Montréal
November 12, 2024
With no more books to write about a subject that has held my attention for more than twenty years, and rather than wait for a balloon to burst or on a fanatic to do what Muhammad did to critics (he had them killed), maybe it’s time to do a Leaving Las Vegas type of exit. For those unfamiliar with the movie, it stars Nicholas Cage who plays a despondent character who “decides to move to Las Vegas and drink himself to death… Once there, he develops a romantic relationship with a prostitute played by Elisabeth Shue.”
Having been unable to connect—and I blame myself for putting finishing a book first—with a partner who would join me for some excessive drinking and a bout of intimacy, and be well rewarded if I don't survive, maybe it’s time to return to Montréal and hook up with a woman like Mary, or travel way back in time with a girl like Jasmine.
Lucette, when I got depressed in the more than two years I was stuck at home preparing one appeal of my firing after another, would tell me to go to Montréal, have a good time and see you tomorrow. But of course this is not quite the same thing, which, at this stage, she would probably say: “Are you out of your mind?”
I don’t think so, but I am also no longer a young man.
An Echocardiogram Expertly Performed by a Poached Technician
November 16, 2024
Today, I had a thoracic echocardiogram. The first since Lucette passed away. The technician who performed the procedure was an Egyptian-Canadian. It again reminded me of how the Canadian health care system depends on pilfered expertise from the third world to survive. I level this criticism in spite of the fact that it was a Nigerian doctor who corrected a diagnose and thereby extended my wife’s life by at least five years.
It’s not that the system could not survive otherwise but, as I explained in my first book, a five act speculative play about the future of our country nominated for The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, Canada is a freeloader.
The echocardiogram was my doctor’s idea. She still hopes to convince me to have a graph to replace the damage portion of my aorta before it is too late. Not going to happen. I usually do everything she tells me. She has taken good care of me for more than 30 years and I hate not taking her advice. She will get the results by Monday—if not earlier—if time is of the essence; if not, it may take a while longer.
Regrets
November 19, 2024
One evening, a short time before her passing, Lucette and I talked about regrets. She said she had none. I did, one of them being that losing my job and having to start over after a forlorn appeal to the Supreme of Canada meant she missed out on a lot, including what she loved to do: travelling and meeting people.
At the worst of times, and even as her world was closing in on her, she never complained about our life together, and that night was no different. She reached out and placed one hand on top of mine, looked at me with those soft blue eyes, and said, "Don't be sad; that doesn't matter. What matters is that during my life with you, I have always felt loved. What more could a woman ask for?"
In spite of everything, she had "always felt loved." I never realized how much I loved her until I contemplated divorcing her.
A regret I did not admit to, was about a girl I broke up with after attending her graduation. Shortly after Lucette’s cancer diagnoses, I was diagnosed with a neoplastic cyst on the pancreas. Every year I get an MRI to check on its growth, and 12 years on there is still nothing to worry about. Worried that pancreatic cancer might overtake her lung cancer I destroyed cherished photographs afraid that, after my passing, she would find them and think that she was not the love of my life, in spite of the indiscretions.
I parted with a couple of pictures of Joyce, one of Margaret and one of me and Glenna taken by her mother before we left for her graduation ceremony and the party afterwards. After the dinner and dance, rather than drive to our special place where we would kiss and make-out, I drove her home and told her it was over.
Was I afraid about what could happen next, and convinced that our relationship had no future deciding that someone else should be the first? I don’t know! The way I behaved, and not talking things over, remains a lasting regret.
Then, there is the death of a young woman, when I was a young man living across the hall from her, whose suicide I should have anticipated.
To cap it all, a few months ago, a beautiful 30-something woman I had just met wanted us to spend time together. I was putting the finishing touches to my last book and worried that if one thing led to another I might not get it done, I declined. Maybe it’s because I didn’t want her to give me a reason to live, who knows? One last regret—a minor one you might say, considering… but you would be wrong. A regret made even worse by my doctor's observation that the type of activity I feared would interfered with completing my legacy— now a done thing with the publishing of Fade to Black— would not have a caused my aneurism to burst before its time.
The Oddsmakers Have Spoken
November 22, 2024
It’s official, a thoracic echocardiogram has revealed that the odds of my aortic aneurism rupturing have significantly increased. Best news I have had in a long time. As I wrote in the Preface to Fade to Black:
Whether it’s my heart or some angry believer upset about something I wrote who sends me to meet our alleged fickle friend in the sky, or that other place, it will put an end to a life that has grown tiresome without her and erstwhile friends and acquaintance who no longer care for my company with only me and my obsession.
The Day I Should Have Died
November 24, 2024
I should have died almost 60 years ago as I laid on my back in a drainage ditch adjacent a country road looking up at the sky with a gentle rain caressing my face telling me not to worry. I often remember that day, and just as often wish for a different outcome and avoiding the life of someone who seldom fitted in and caused unnecessary hardship to a woman who deserved better.
The priest who was the difference between life and death said it was God saving me for the priesthood. If there is a god, I must be quite the disappointment.
A Poem That Says It All
November 25, 2024
As I contemplate an abrupt and momentarily painful end to my existence, I am reminded of a poem written by someone facing death by firing squad during one of Khomeini's purges of mostly young dissidents.
Momentarily with pain
for my wounded heart
in this desert of pain
there is
not
a
road
whereof
there is
no end.
From my eyes the water
of
grief’s rain.
A red moment,
as you know,
is on the way.
Sooner or later,
a rage from Hell
will yell
“Fire!”
For Whom the Man Cries? He Cries for Me
November 26, 2024
Upon hearing of my situation, Abbas burst into tears. How we met.
Funeral Arrangements
November 27, 2024
To
the left is a picture of me sitting in the shade a few days after Lucette's
burial having planted the first of many flowers and shrubs (even a tree)
before and after the installation of our tombstone.
To get Lucette a grave near a large shady tree I had to buy three graves, instead of two—one for her and one for me. This was a short time before she died.
At first she said I was wasting my money. She changed her mind when I said it meant I would visit with her on even the hottest of days and sit under the shade of her tree while we talked.
I visited with her every week except for when that idiotic Covid restriction went into effect that forced Beechwood to close the cemetery to visitors.
Having already paid for my grave, I was a bit surprised at the cost when I went to make my funeral arrangements: more than nine thousand dollars for a simple graveside ceremony, no embalming and an actual pine box. It’s not that I could not afford it, but I did balk, to no avail, at paying $500 for them hosing my body. I may have put on some weight but I doubt if it will take more than a few minutes. I also did not think it was necessary with a closed casket.
I should have negotiated my own funeral arrangements when I agreed to hers. That would have avoided what may have been non-negotiable extras added knowing that I would pay anything to be buried next to her.
Beechwood is a national treasure operated by a non-profit foundation. If the money will go to its upkeep, who I am to complain.
Eyes Wide Open
November 28, 2024
In September, after having a late supper in front of the television, I got up and felt a stabbing pain in my chest with every beat of my heart. This is it thought, and let myself fall back on the couch, stretched out my legs, crossed my arms over my chest and tried to maintain what I hoped would be a lasting serene facial expression, not unlike Lucette’s death mask, and said to myself “let it rip!”
No such luck. Once back on the couch, the pain went away to be replaced by a dull sensation. After about half an hour with nothing new to report, I got up, put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, brushed my teeth and went to bed.
I don’t understand the attraction of dying a natural death surrounded by family. Unlike a medically assisted death, like that of my Lucette where they first put you into a deep sleep before the lethal injections are administered about five minutes later, it’s usually not a pretty sight.
That expression of being in a deep, pleasant and undisturbed sleep never left Lucette’s face except for her eyes flashing open just before her passing was confirmed by the attending physician. He said that this happens sometimes, after making a futile attempt to close her eyes. He then made a call and handed me the phone. It was the coroner offering her condolences and asking if I was satisfied with how my wife’s assisted death had been carried out.
After I handed it back, he left with his nurse leaving me alone with my partner of 38 years on the bed, propped up by pillows, staring into the distance as if mesmerized by some spectacle. It felt so real that the first words out of my mouth were “are you okay?”
We had said our last goodbye minutes earlier; therefore, there was nothing left to say, or to do but call to have her body removed. Just before they arrived, I tried one last time to close her eyes. She had a favourite scarf with which I covered them when a knock on the door announced the arrival of the people from Beechwood cemetery.
I hope to die nursing a tall glass of well-aged single malt scotch, and not while watching a porno, but in the company of a real woman—hope springs eternal—with whom I will have had dinner before inviting her to my place to test if sex and alcohol will do for me what assisted death did for my Lucette, die happy.
Finding Solace in the Absurd
November 29, 2024
I envy those who believe they have a nice place to go to when they die. What a comfort it must be when facing your imminent demise. A theory I read about as a teenager devouring books on science fiction and science facts, is that this evidence-free notion was imagined when primitive man first became aware of his mortality and, unable to deal with the implication, invented an afterlife.
In Islam, this idea of a life after death has degenerated into men spending eternity on a bland oasis in the sky fornicating ad nauseam with female facsimiles.
And then there is Hell, a place where most women will be spending their forever time exacerbating a need for replicas to keep the men in Paradise busy.
Allah’s Love of the Male Gender and My Estate
November 30, 2024
Islam makes no allowance for reasonableness and that is particular evident in the disposition of an inheritance. Abu Hanifah (b. 700 - d. 767), founder of the Hanafi Madhhab, the most progressive of the four mainstream Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence, denied that reason played any part in his rulings using Revelation 4:11, “Allah commands you, with respect to your children, that the male shall inherit the equivalent of the share of two females.”
Hanifah: Who is weaker, man or woman?
Baqir: Woman.
Hanifah: Which of them is entitled to larger share in inheritance?
Baqir: The man.
Hanifah: If I had been making deductions by analogy, I should have said that the woman should get the larger share, since on the face of it the weaker one is entitled to more consideration. But I have not said so.
Allah's love of the male gender and the disdain that He shares with Muhammad for females—which many women find endearing—played no part in my giving a male, in my last will and testament, a slightly larger portion over time of my modest estate. If I don’t continue to support him after I am dead, he risks becoming one of Trudeau’s homeless, and I wouldn’t want that no matter the gender.
My and Muhammad's Death
December 1, 2024
Unless I get hit by a bus, or suffer some other misfortune before the blessed event, my official cause of death will be a ruptured aorta, not unlike what Muhammad expected. The Prophet thought he was dying from poison he ingested a few years earlier from eating a leg of lamb, prepared by a Jewish cook, that was causing his aorta to rupture.
Narrated Aisha:
The Prophet in his ailment in which he died, used to say, "O Aisha! I still feel the pain caused by the food I ate at Khaibar, and at this time, I feel as if my aorta is being cut from that poison."
Bukhari 59.713
Muhammad's Official Cause of Death
Of Scribes and Lawyers
December 2, 2024
With my mortality coming into focus I decided to simplify my will.
Mon 2024-11-25 8:30 AM
To: Lawyer
The following changes will greatly simplify my will:
...
Thu 2024-11-28 1:31 PM
To: Lawyer
When can I expect a revised will to review?
Mon 2024-12-02 8:28 AM
To: Me
Given current work load, will do what I can to get this done before the holidays.
Not unlike Muhammad during the negotiations that would lead to the Treaty of Hudaibiyah, I decided to take matters into my own hands.
Mon 2024-12-02 9:50 AM
To: Lawyer
I understand. I am somewhat concerned about my durability; therefore, if you could send me the Word copy of my will, I will make the changes myself then have them notarized.
Muhammad rewrote a section of the treaty, to which the Meccans objected, after his scribe refused to make the modification. This raises the question as to whether the successful merchant was actually an illiterate as implied from Allah's use of the words "the unlettered Prophet" in Revelations 7:157-158 and as reiterated in a questionable biography.
Not Bleeding Into My Risotto and What Does the Prophet Have to Do With It
December 3, 2024
For reasons mentioned in my posting of November 22, 2024, The Oddsmakers Have Spoken, I usually dine alone. Should I have an aortic graph to extend my life for maybe five years I will, for the rest of my life, be on blood thinners; this, after a five hour operation under general amnestic and being put on and off a heart-lung machine which will probably leave me somewhat stupider than when I agreed to the procedure. My sister tells me I have brain cells to spare so I should not worry about that. She is being kind.
What I worry about is a quality of life that now hinges on going out for dinner without having to worry about my nose bleeding into my food because of blood with a viscosity approaching that of water. Of course, if I followed Muhammad’s medical advice for whatever ails you the idea of surgery would never come up.
At one point in time, there was talk of setting up a school of Prophetic Medicine. The idea was dropped when it became clear that much of it was nonsense. Example:
Narrated Abu Sa'id al-Khudri:
I heard that the people asked the Prophet of Allah (peace be upon him): Water is brought for you from the well of Buda'ah. It is a well in which dead dogs, menstrual clothes and excrement of people are thrown.
The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) replied: Verily water is pure and is not defiled by anything.
Abu Dawud 1.0067
Muhammad’s understanding of human anatomy, and the cause of diseases, was on par with the god for whom he spoke who could not even accurately describe the gestation process for which He took credit.
Islam is not so much a religion as a way of life, with thousands of indelible rules to instruct every waking moment of a believer’s existence. First, there is the Koran’s more than six thousand revealed truths, i.e., immutable facts communicated to a mortal by a god. Then, the more than 14,000 hadiths (the sayings and example of the Prophet Muhammad) of the Sunni Canon.
In Islam: A Short History (2002), Karen Armstrong, former nun and unabashed fan of Muhammad, explains why hadiths were made necessary and how they transformed Islam:
The Quran contains very little legislation, and what laws there were had been designed for a much simpler society. So some of the jurists began to collect reports about the Prophet and his companions to find out how they had behaved in a given situation… Thus they believed they would gain true ilm, knowledge of what was right and how to behave... (p.49)
The Prophet, the Perfect Man, became the person to imitate. (p. 60)
Today, you imitate the "Perfect Man" if it does not cause you pain, as his medical advice is bound to, but not if it causes pain to another; that other most often being females with whom, like Muhammad, you can have sex with when they are still children, and stone them when they have reached puberty and beyond.
Today, you also imitate the "Perfect Man" if it does not cause you financial pain, which following Muhammad decrees on the exchange of goods would invariably do, while crippling the modern economy faster than Trump’s tariffs.
The Man Who Will Find Me Dead and the Hijab's Connection to Public Latrines
December 4, 2024
Abbas calls every day, often more than once. It’s an arrangement we have. Should I fail to answer on any given day, he is to check in on me to make sure I have not passed. He has a key to my condo.
We talked about his home country a lot. Today, it was about Iran’s Parliament enacting a harsh new modesty law that will not only increase penalties for not wearing the hijab, a piece of cloth that was never about piety, but also for not wearing it correctly, i.e., not a strand of hair must be visible.
Abbas still hopes that the oppression of women by the ruling theocracy will lead to a revolution but, as Uzza pointed out, they can’t do it without the men, and most of the men don’t seem interested.
What’s In a Name?
December 6, 2024
Muhammad was the top choice for parents naming their baby boys in England and Wales in 2023. BBC Dec. 5, 2024
The less deserving a religious icon’s reputation for propriety, the louder will be the call to silence his critics. And, so it would seem, why parents name their sons after him; proving once again, that you can take the person out of the Land of Peace—the land where wars are never-ending—but you can’t take the Land of Peace out of the person.
My name, whose one meaning is “brave as a bear” will always be associated, not with a bear but a big, friendly dog. I am okay with that, although it would be nice to also be remembered as the author who revealed the real Muhammad in postings such as Most Common Lies Told About Muhammad, in a book about a war he started that continues to this day, in a unique biography, in a collection of his sayings and deeds, etc.
As to being brave… the risk I took in writing about a violent, militant religion from the comfort of my home after a life lived is nothing compared to the risk we expose young people with their life ahead of them, when we send them to fight the likes of the Taliban and ISIS. Rest in peace.
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* For example, in the Land of Peace, naming your children after Greek or Roman gods and goddesses is considered an insult against Allah, the one and only god. Such insults are punishable by death.
Pray for Me if You Want. Just Don’t Make a Big Production Out Of It
December 7, 2024
While I don’t believe there is a Paradise and a god who decides who gets in and who doesn’t, I have no objections to someone praying that I be let in. It shows they care and for that I am grateful.
You could say that prayers have been around since Adam and Eve walked and talked with God, meaning they have been around for millennia.
Until Muhammad, prayers were very much a subdued conversation with yourself, and, for people of faith an uncoerced one-on-one conversations with their god–not unlike Adam and Eve’s—even when praying in groups in places designated as houses of worship.
Muhammad would make prayers mandatory, at the risk of losing one’s head for non-compliance, saying that this is what Allah wanted after a private meeting in Paradise with the god for whom claimed to speak. It was during this momentous face-to-face (God’s face may have been obscured by what the Koran refers to as “a veil of majesty”) that the number of daily prayers were established after some back and forth caused by the intervention of Moses, who should have been relaxing in his spacious grave waiting for Judgement Day.
Muhammad also made prayers a highly choreographed affair, ostensibly after being shown the steps by the angel Gabriel. It is this prayer play that used to be largely confined to mosques and their surrounding, the Musalla, that is increasingly staged in the public space that is the focus of Québec’s premier Legault when he says, as reported by the CBC, “he wants to stop people from praying in public.”
Québec is going one way and English Canada another.
Stop Talking
December 9, 2024
Sunday evening is roast beef night at The Lieutenant’s Pump. It‘s the closest thing to a home cooked meal, something I haven’t had in years. I was already seated at my small table next to the bar when she walked in and took the seat closest to me. So close that I felt a need to reach out and introduce myself to a woman who reminded me of the character Constance "Connie" Tucker, played by Anne Potts in Young Sheldon.
She asked if I was here for the roast beef dinner. So was she, and could she join me.
I thought everything was going well until, as if out of the blue, she said: “stop talking.”
I apologized and said that is why I often preferred dining alone so as not to risk boring my dinner companion.
She then placed her hands palms down on the table getting ready to stand up. “Maybe I should go back to my seat at the bar,” she said.
I place one hand on top of her hers. It was so nice and warm. Maybe that is how it is supposed to feel. Having not touched a woman for so long, I don’t remember.
“Please stay,” I pleaded.
She did and our conversation return to a more normal back and forth exchange of pleasantries.
I was usually such a good listener. I realized then and there that I was behaving like a dying man who has a lot to say and only a short time say it, and I should stop that.
When her phone told her that her Uber had arrived, and it was time to go, it was her who took my hand and said she hoped to see me again next week. Hope so.
I took her admonition in stride; this is not something that Muhammad did. Before he was powerful enough to exact his own vengeance on those who interrupted him or criticised what he had to say, it was the god for whom he spoke who took it upon himself to do the retribution. The cruel and sadistic story of what He will do to Abu Lahab and His wife for her husband interrupting Muhammad can be found in children’s books published in Canada.
Lucette and Khadija
December 9, 2024
Monday evening is when I usually dine at Harmon’s Steak House. I have my favourite table next to a large window that allows me to gaze upon the apartment building where Lucette and her parents lived during the seven years Lucette and I dated. Then it was The Bonaventure Apartments, today it's The Business Inn. It was in her apartment that we first made love.
Muhammad and I both married women that were older than us: His first and my first and last.
What Facial Hair Can Tell You About a Man's State of Mind
December 10, 2024
I used to shave every day. Now I may not shave for two, three or even four days. I’m either making a fashion statement or it is because I am not as concerned about my appearance since being told about the state of my aneurism. It’s the latter.
Facial hair on a committed believer is definitely not a fashion statement but an indication of his radicalism in observing the example of Muhammad down to what he decreed about beards and mustaches.
Narrated Nafi:
Ibn Umar said, The Prophet said, "Do the opposite of what the pagans do. Keep the beards (as it is) and cut the moustaches short."
Bukhari 72.780
Muhammad was brutal in the pursuit of the mission he was ostensibly giving by the god for whom he claimed to speak.
Allah's Apostle said, "I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.'"
Bukhari 52.196
The New York Times asked: "Al-Assad’s Syria Was Brutal. Will What Comes Next Be Better?"
Don’t count on it. The rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani’s beard is not as long, disheveled or partially dyed—Muhammad streaked his beard using a bright orange natural dye called henna—as was that of the leader of the Islamic State, al-Baghdadi, therefore he may not be as brutal. But, don’t underestimate his commitment to the mission of the man he emulates as was evident in his speech, given in a mosque, following the fall of Assad.
A woman's radicalism is there for all to appreciate in what she voluntarily wears in public in the West such as the niqab (face covering veil) or the burqa. She will cut the throat of unbelievers, when the time comes, with as much gusto as her bearded co-religionists.
Giving to an Islamic Charity and Why
December 11, 2024
Based on Israel’s bombing of Syrian military assets since the fall of Assad it obviously agrees with my assessment of the situation (What Facial Hair Can Tell You About a Man's State of Mind, December 10, 2024). It is unfortunate that Israel did not employ the same strategy in GAZA: bombing hardware instead of people.
I condemn, not only in words, but with dollars Netanyahu’s ruthless and self-defeating strategy in Gaza of targeting easily replaced holy warriors*, at considerable cost in children’s lives, instead of not easily replaced military assets, by bequeathing to Islamic Relief Canada a part of my modest estate in the hope that it will be used to alleviate the suffering of children mutilated by Israeli bombs.
Having tried to differentiate between non-militant Muslims and Islamists in my writings—a distinction without a difference if you read Sam Harris—I find it a bit strange to be sending money—to an organization with the word “Islamic” figuring prominently in its name.
Before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, Saudi Arabia was open to forging stronger ties with the Israelis. Now, a year into the war in Gaza, it is warming up to its traditional enemy, Iran. New York Times, Oct. 20, 2024
Israel’s unconscionable, indiscriminate, retaliatory slaughter of thousands of women and children and its steadfast refusal to grant Palestinians a state while continuing to settle their land may succeed in ending a 1,400-year-old feud. That does not bode well for its survival, or ours; and now a potential Islamic Syria in the mold of the Islamic State.
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* A fighter in Allah’s Cause, a world governed by the Sharia, which is the ultimate goal of most who kill and die for the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, Al-Qaeda etc.
Death as an Opportunity Not to Be Missed
December 12, 2024
Hi Bernard,
I have read all of your "Farewell Postings". I couldn't help but notice a very common thread in almost all of your postings, of you bringing up your health situation. Obviously, a very big concern for you, and justifiably so.
My death is not that big of a deal. The serenity I felt when I thought I would die lying on my back in a drainage ditch (see The Day I Should Have Died, November 24, 2024) is pretty much how I feel today.
Whether it happens tomorrow or I continue dodging the bullet, for who knows how long, what my diagnoses offers is a chance, maybe one last time, to connect with people about Islam. This is why, in almost every posting there is one or more link to what I wrote about the Koran, Muhammad and Islam in general.
For instance, since we are on the subject of death and Islam, Cancer Girl is a posting from Love, Sex & Islam where an argument is made that the religion has perverted a celebration of life into a way of luring people to their death with a god’s farcical assurance that the dead have better sex than the living.
And so it goes...
Golda Meir Blamed the Palestinians for the Death of Their Children. I Blame Two Books.
December 14, 2024
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal
Golda Meir said she hated the Palestinians, not because they were Palestinians, but because they forced her to kill their children. No one forced her, and no one is forcing the current Israeli leadership to do such a horrible thing, but still they do it.
Golda Meir’s justification for killing children was not unlike an argument made by a visitor who objected to my donating part of my estate to Islamic Relief Canada (Giving to an Islamic Charity and Why December 11, 2024).
I used the analogy of a firing squad about to execute a man who has committed horrible crimes. But before they can do so, he tells them they will have to kill his wife, his mother, his father, his grandfather, his grandmother, his brothers and sisters, his children and grand-children, neighbours and their wives, mothers and fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers, their brothers and sisters, their children and grand-children…
Rather than seeking another way of making the guilty man pay for his crime, the leader of the firing squad yells: “kill them all!” This is basically what Netanyahu is doing, and just like the people who committed the October massacre, it is a strategy sanctioned by their variation of the same god.
The Koran is a book of concentrated violence on par with the Torah’s invitation to genocide.
The Koran is a shorter book than the Bible (by a factor of ten); pound for pound, it no doubt features more exhortations to violence.
So if you ask which book is “worse” in terms of belligerence, you might say that qualitatively the Hebrew Bible (and hence the Christian Bible) takes the trophy—thanks to that unrivalled embrace of genocide in Deuteronomy—but that quantitatively the winner is the Koran, at least in terms of the frequency of belligerent passages, if not in absolute numbers.
And if, on top of the verses espousing violence in the terrestrial world, you add verses gleefully envisioning the suffering of infidels in the afterlife, the Koran wins the quantitative competition more decisively.
Richard Wright, The Evolution of God
Hamas killed or kidnapped whoever they encountered on October 7. Has horrible as that was, it is no justification for Israel’s deliberate, mass, on-going, indiscriminate retaliatory slaughter in spite it also being given the green light by its holy book to commit mass murder. A pox on them, an archaic expression that is both a description and a condemnation of the Koran and the Torah!
You could say that the children that I am trying to help are victims of both books, and right now Islamic Relief Canada seems to be in the best position to do so, the reason for my donation.
Khaybar (also spelled Khaibar) v. Gaza
December 16, 2024
To: Andre
I now have a new will; please destroy the one in your possession. My imminent demise has again confounded expectations. Sorry for being in such a hurry to get my new Last Will and Testament done.
Have a merry Christmas.
Bernard
I took matters into my own hands (Of Scribes and Lawyers December 2, 2024) because I didn’t want to die before I had chance, in a new will, to leave some money that I hope will be used to ease the suffering of the children of Gaza (Giving to an Islamic Charity and Why, December 11, 2024).
Muhammad took matters into his own hands at the signing of the Treaty of Hudaibiyah. The treaty allowed the Prophet* to attack the Jewish settlement of Khaybar (the attack in the hadiths) without having to worry that the Meccans would march on Medina; this time while his forces were busy elsewhere.
Both Hamas and the Israelis could take a lesson from what Muhammad did at Khaibar, he killed the men and boys who showed growth of pubic hair, but spared the women and children.
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* Muhammad was not so much a forecaster of the future as of the past. The events recounted in the Koran, except for Judgement Day, are all about what came before, with the exemption of the ubiquitous safe-bet prediction that is the bread and butter of doomsday prophets to this day: “the end is near, repent!”
Dying At Home Denied
December 17, 2024
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigns from cabinet National Post, December 6, 2024
What Worries Me About the Afterlife
December 18, 2024
Islam, like most religion, depend on a fear to keep the believers believing, but more so. It is mostly a fear of the punishment that a god will mete out on a day of judgement to those who violated laws communicated to favoured mortals.
In Islam, Judgement Day itself is to be feared for the cruelty and mayhem before and during the the sentencing. There will be omens of the impending and ominous day when mercy will be in short supply.
I don’t fear what a make-believe god, whose self-serving laws I may have violated, will do with my reanimated corpse. What I fear is the law of conservation of energy, the law that states, “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only converted from one form of energy to another.”
What happens to the energy that both sustains and is part of our conscious and subconscious? Where will it go? If we are nothing more than flesh and blood computers, as argued by Stephen Hawking, our death will be like turning it off.
While I dismiss the Hereafter imagined by primitive men unable to confront their mortality, I do believe that there is more to death than a computer being unplugged. That seems to be borne out by quantum mechanics where the energy that powered our existence, when returned to the Universe, will change how the Universe unfolds. Hopefully, if you were a good person, for the better.
Why I Don't Dare Drink Scotch at Home
December 19, 2024
He has been sober for more than 18 years, after becoming an alcoholic in Kuwait of all places. Right now I could empty a good bottle of single malt scotch, but I don’t dare even try. It’s not because it might, in a good way, accelerate my demise, but I am afraid of him finding me dead with a half empty bottle next to me and who knows what that could trigger.
When we first met he wished he could have learned to be a social drinker in control of what he drank, not vice versa, like a normal person, he said. At one point in time he wanted to start a Muslim version of Alcoholics Anonymous because he felt there was a need. If there is a need, blame Umar not Muhammad. He should know.
Let Me Rephrase That
December 20, 2024
If Ion or Robin reads some of what I have written here, and I am still alive on January 7 when we are scheduled to have dinner again, I may have to do an Allah and rephrase some of my remarks.
Ion and Robin are the only two people from the good old days when Lucette was alive that have continued dining with me at a restaurant on a semi-regular basis. This may have something to do with their steadfast commitment to never reading anything I wrote, and my not insisting they do.
I tested that commitment when I gave them a copy of Love, Sex and Islam and told Ion that he was mentioned in the first chapter. If he read it, he never let on. Ion came by his disregard for what I write honestly. Before venturing into Islam I wrote a book about my experience at Foreign Affairs (today Global Affairs).
Lucette was very proud of what I accomplished (I published an extended edition following her death). She offered it to our two diplomat neighbours, John and Norm, who told her in no uncertain what I could do with it.
Many a Christmas Lucette would invite Ion and Robin for dinner before they left to spend Christmas in the Laurentians. She couldn’t help herself, even after I warned her that Ion, the son of a diplomat, would have the same reaction as John and Norm, and he did, adding that he would never read a book that accused his father of being a crook. Unless his father, when rotated back to Ottawa, occupied the position of Area Comptroller, which is unlikely, he would not have been complicit in the theft of millions.
Lucette was somewhat taken aback by the reaction of the usually self-possessed Ion.
Ion was sitting across from her when he unleashed his diatribe. I was sitting next to her and surreptitiously put a calming hand on her thigh and she changed the subject, something a thoughtful hostess will do when something they said or did distressed a guest.
Last Thursday Ion gave me an opening and I jumped in with both feet thinking this could be our last time together, so who cares. I don’t remember what he said that got me to expound at length about the difference between Meccan surahs, i.e., chapters of the Koran and Medinan surahs.
The Koran is a mess, but scholars have managed to gleam from the mess what are referred to as chapters of revelations sent down when Muhammad lived in Mecca, his hometown, and later when he sought refuge in Medina after being run out of town for insisting that his brethren would burn in hell like their ancestors unless they embraced Islam.
I explained to Ion, that if an imam is preaching to an audience he wants to lull into believing that Islam is about peace, he will usually quote verses from Meccan chapters where peace and understanding is preferred to war and mayhem. If he wants to whip up the believers into a murderous frenzy he will usually quote from Medinan chapters such as the ninth surah Repentance.
Muhammad, now secure in Medina, launched pitiless attacks on unbelievers. The sword became the order of the day, and those who refuse to convert are to be put to death on the spot. This change in strategy required Allah to repudiate much of what he said earlier about living together in peace. In the following example, remember that a verse number bears little, or no relationship, as to when it was received*.
Meccan:
109:6 “You have your religion and I have mine.”
Medinan:
3:85 Whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted from him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers.
Scholars have identified more than 200 ephemeral eternal truths in keeping with a new belligerent Islam. Being able to identify revelations that have been modified or replaced is essential to understanding the Koran and being able to tell when you are being lied to.
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* Because little attention appears to have been given to arranging the chapters and verses in chronological order, readers often receive answers to questions that have yet to be asked. For example, in Chapter 9, Verse 114 we are told that Allah refused Abraham’s plea to forgive his father for not believing.
9:114 Abraham asked forgiveness for his father, only because of a promise he had made to him; but when it became clear to him that he was an enemy of Allah, he disowned him. Indeed Abraham was compassionate, forbearing.
The actual request made by Abraham, and the promise made, is revealed ten chapters later:
19:47 [Abraham] said: “Peace be upon you. I will seek forgiveness for you from my Lord. He has, indeed, been gracious to me.”
Mary and Me at Christmas Time
December 22, 2024.
Mary was apprehensive about returning home with a baby and no husband after giving birth under a palm tree.
In Muhammad's adaption of the god of the Jews—unlike the remodeling done in the New Testament—Allah appears to have gotten stuck somewhere on the lower echelons of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the place where you find the preoccupations of adolescence, such as playing games.
This is evident in how He instructs whoever He has granted a special favour, such as Mary’s virgin birth of a prophet, to express themselves using only signs. This is why, when confronted by her relatives about the child, Mary could only point to the infant Jesus who then spoke out in his mother’s defence.
According to Muhammad, Jesus was one of only three babies to speak shortly after their birth.
Lucette did for me—when I started writing about the Koran, Muhammad and Islam in general—what Jesus did for Mary and her family, she made it possible for friends and relatives to feel comfortable in my company with her reassuring presence to soothe any awkward feelings about me and what would become my obsession. Yes, I do make people uncomfortable.
This Christmas, like every Christmas since she died, I will spend it surrounded by her things, except for perhaps this Christmas eve and night which I may spend in the apartment building where she lived with her parents during the seven years we dated—now converted into an apartment hotel—nursing a 12 year old Glenfiddich in the company of a hooker, who can indulge in whatever she wants, or in the company of an accommodating passing acquaintance who has nothing better to do on Christmas eve than entertain an old fool's fantasy.
I may still survive the night, for, as my doctor observed, sex will not cause my aneurism to burst until it’s bloody well ready to do so… but then, there’s the scotch.
Why the Cardiologist Sent Me a Tree for Christmas
December 25, 2024
Dear...,
And a Merry Christmas to you and the family.
As I do every year at this time, on Monday I visited my doctor’s office to deliver a box of her favourite chocolates. She asked if I had heard anything from the Ottawa Heart Institute to whom she had referred my file more than a month ago. Not yet. This could mean that, unlike my doctor, they don’t consider my condition an emergency or is simply another symptom of a collapsing health care system.
I would like to think that they owe me one for ignoring my advice 25 years ago, the year that a cardiologist from the Institute sent me a tree for Christmas. Either way, the situation leaves me somewhat ambivalent.
But of course, this is the season of hope, whatever that hopes is, and my hope for you, your husband and the kids is nothing but the best.
Expect a belated Xmas present in the mail.
Love You
Bernard
Her Renaissance Man
December 26, 2024
One of
the nicest things Lucette said to me, when she did not need to say anything, was after I published the first edition
of what would grow into a layman’s guide to the Koran that would encompass the entire book (a picture of the first
edition on the left) when she told me I was her Renaissance Man.
I asked her what she meant by that. She said that when I lost my job with the government I learned how to prepare and submit legal arguments and appealed my dismissal to the Federal Court and then the Supreme Court of Canada.
After that setback, I learned a new computer language and built the Boreal Shell, and now I was taking on the Koran. She said that, like men of the Renaissance, I did not limit my interest to just one thing and she admired that in me.
Her unheralded Renaissance Man, I might add, for which my loving champion blamed the media.
What a wonderful wife and partner she was for more that 38 years. How I wanted to spend Christmas Eve was not to dishonour her memory but to remember an important part of our time together, the times we were intimate, which were just as important in keeping me believing in myself—and what for me is mental stability—than what you may consider undeserved praise.
You're an Islamophobe and a Racist, Admit It!
December 27, 2024
Should I achieve the notoriety that I expected while I was alive, and that is a big if, my detractors are bound to accuse me—especially those who have not read my books—of being an Islamophobe and a racist, as if Islam was a race and not a religion made up of as many ethnic groups as there are ethnicities.
If you accept my definition of Islamophobia as a rational fear of the irrational then the accusation will have some merit. As to the accompanying, now ubiquitous accusation of racism as an oppressive religion seeks to take on the mantle of defender of the oppressed, it’s a sentiment we all harbour, to one extent or another that is both good and bad. It’s the bad we must guard against, and those who make that accusation in conjunction with a fear of Islam tend to betray a racism of the worst kind.
New Year vs. New Year
December 28, 2024
At midnight January 1, I will be toasting a new year in my own company due to my obsession (see The Oddsmakers Have Spoken, November 22, 2024) and for a lack of a bartender like I knew in Montréal in the old days.
Observant Muslims will celebrate, in keeping with Allah’s primitive moon calendar, their roaming New Year in 2025 when the crescent moon is first sighted in the western sky after sunset on Wednesday, June 25. In 2026 it will be the evening of June 17; in 2027 it will be June 6, and so on.
For observant Muslims, there will no toasting the New Year—theirs and ours— with alcoholic beverages, and for that you can blame Umar.
Umar ibn al-Khattab was what we would call a reformed alcoholic. He used his influence with his good friend Muhammad, to whom he gave his teenaged daughter Hafsa to cement their friendship, to get Allah to ban alcoholic beverages altogether. It took two tries, but he eventually got his way with God who, initially, only wanted His worshippers not to show up for prayers drunk.
The most bizarre revelations in the Koran are those concerning wine: the different verses progressively leading to its interdiction are in response to Umar asking God to clarify what He means.
Exegetes tell us that Umar ardently wished that wine be explicitly prohibited by a revealed truth: “Dear God,” he said, “show us what we must do concerning wine. It makes us lose both our mind and our money.” It was then that God revealed: “O believers, do not approach prayer while you are drunk, until you know what you say!”(4:43)
Umar is completely unhappy with God’s response when Muhammad reads him the verse; the prohibition against wine is not explicit enough as far as he is concerned.
As if to satisfy Umar, the exegetes tell us, in all seriousness, God sends down another revelation: “They ask you about wine and gambling, say: “In both there is great sin and some benefit for people. But the sin is greater than the benefit.” (2:219)
It’s still not enough for Umar; he wants wine explicitly prohibited. It is then that a third revelation is received: “The Devil only wishes to stir up enmity and hatred among you, through wine and gambling, and keep you away from remembering Allah and from prayer. Will you not desist, then?” (5:91)
This time Umar appears satisfied: “Very good! I now consider the matter settled.”
Hela Ouardi, Meutre à la mosquée, Albin Michel, 2021, p. 55-56 (my translation).
Meutre à la mosquée (Murder in the Mosque, my translation) is an account of the life and murder of Umar, the second successor to Muhammad as leader of the believers, i.e. caliph. Three of the four first successors—they are remembered as The Rightly Guided Caliphs—were murdered by disgruntled followers.
Cologne - A New Year's Story
December 30, 2024
'No! You cannot touch me!': Newly-released footage from the New Year's Eve sex attacks in Cologne show how powerless the vastly-outnumbered police were in handling the out-of-control crowd. New footage from Cologne sex attacks reveals how women screamed at their attackers as police realised they are powerless to stop them. More than 500 women were assaulted or robbed by mobs of migrant men.
Daily Mail, Dec 15, 2016
German leaders condemned a “new dimension” of crime after scores of women reported being sexually assaulted as they passed through a group of about 1,000 men during New Year’s Eve celebrations in downtown Cologne.
Associated Press - Jan 5, 2016
Women in the West are increasingly at risk because of what Algerian novelist and journalist Kamel Daoud describes as “the soul that needs to be persuaded to change,” not accommodated. He made this observation in his thinking-man's assessment of what happened in Cologne and why, in Cologne - City of Illusion which appeared in Le Monde. The reaction was what you might have expected. And that is unfortunate.
The largest mass groping of women and girls undoubtedly occurs at the Hajj. It is next to impossible to segregate the sexes during the pilgrimage, therefore women and girls must silently submit—lest they be accused of arousing the male behind them—to the probing hands of men and boys whose religion does not allow them to get this close to the opposite sex then during the performance of so-called sacred rituals until they are married. Like at Cologne, they seek to visualize with their hands what Islam has denied their eyes until their wedding night.
Take Care of Each Other
December 30, 2024
My wish for the New Year, and for years to come, is that we take seriously Kamel Daoud’s observation that "It is not just the physical body that needs asylum. It is also the soul that needs to be persuaded to change. This Other (the immigrant) comes from a vast, appalling, painful universe - an Arab-Muslim world full of sexual misery, with its sick relationship towards woman, the human body, desire. Merely taking him in is not a cure."
It will take time and the courage of your convictions to do what Daoud feels is needed, but in the end we will all be better off, and maybe even avoid The Morning After.
This will probably be my last posting as I don’t believe there is anything left to say, except, take care of each other including the soul that needs to change.
Regrets for The Interviews
December 31, 2024
WE’VE LOST OUR NATIONAL IDENTITY – AND WITH IT, OUR PRIDE IN OUR COUNTRY.
ln his 1997 book National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian History... historian Daniel Francis wrote that civic ideology in a country like Canada must be a deliberate product: something that needs to be “continually recreated and reinforced.“ Canadians rely on this social construct more than other people, Mr. Francis argued, "because we lack a common religion, language, or ethnicity, because we are spread out so sparsely across such a huge piece of real estate.”
Globe and Mail, December 27, 2024
On November 19, 2024 I wrote about personnel regrets. As I come to the end of my Farewell Postings, I would like to express a professional regret that a book I wrote about what was happening to my country, and what is to come, published at about the same time as Mr. Francis’ book, did not find an audience. If it had, maybe the headline in the Globe and Mail, before what promises to be a difficult new year for Canada, would have been different.
When writing Canada – The Fractured Nation Interviews I did not intend for a religious thread to weave its way through three of the interviews, not counting the interview with the Ayatollah (opening segment). It was only as the interviews took shape that I realised that it could not have happened any other way.
An Explanation and A Plea | The Setting
Selected segments of The Interviews that are still relevant, if not more so:
DIANE FRANCES SMITH
The Freeloader Economic Theory
TAMIL BOOM-BOOM SINGH
Johnny Decides To Talk About It | Johnny Talks About Canada’s Early History
Culture and Religion as Contributing Factors | Whose History Is It Anyway?
MAUDE ELIZABETH BARNSTONE
What's In A Name and the Apologetic Canadian | Praise the Lord and Slap the Wife
Sex and the Prophet | Immigration, Assimilation and an Oxymoron
JEAN JOSEPH SOUVIENS
Eulogy for a Prodigal Son | What We Have Talked About So Far
What Is a Country by Jean Joseph Souviens | Language - The Great Unifier
Multiculturalism | Shared Value