Boreal
FAREWELL POSTINGS
Part 2
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 Allah.
Narrated Abu Huraira:
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 dogmatic or as brutal; but, don’t underestimate his commitment to the mission of the man he emulates.
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 Hamas fighters, 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.
The world, from the point of view of Islam, is divided into the "House of Islam" and the "House of War", and this latter designation should indicate how many Muslims believe their differences with those who do not share their faith will be ultimately resolved.
While there are undoubtedly some "moderate" Muslims who have decided to overlook the irrescindable militancy of their religion, Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The only future devout Muslims can envisage—as Muslims—is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, subjugated, or killed. The tenets of Islam simply do not admit of anything but a temporary sharing of power with the "enemies of God."
Sam Harris, End of Faith, W. W. Norton, 2004, p. 110
I must admit, I find it a bit strange to be sending money to an organization with the word “Islamic” figuring prominently in its name.
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 between Sunnis and Shias.
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
That does not bode well for its survival, or ours; and now a potential Islamic Syria in the mold of the Islamic State.
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...
DEAD PALESTINIAN CHILDREN! WHO’S TO BLAME?
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 and so on.
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, depends 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 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 in His Hell-hole. 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 for the better, if you were a good person.
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. 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 who told her in no uncertain that they did not care to read 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, 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 as 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 than 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 31, 2024
For more than twenty years Lucette and I celebrated the arrival of the new year, along with three, sometime four couples, at a neighbour's house. At midnight tonight, I will be toasting a New Year in my own company due to having been unable to establish a meaningful connection that might have gotten me an invitation.
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.
TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER
January 1, 2025
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."
The Lessons of Cologne and Paris
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.
No Therapy for Her, No Coffee for Me
January 6, 2025
“Group readies Centretown mosque in former church and heritage centre” CBC January 4, 2025
The church in question:
The headline triggered a mosque related memory, actually two. The Ontario Lung Association rented space in a business mall in the east end of Ottawa where people with breathing difficulties could go to perform exercises geared to their handicap under the direction of a licence therapist. When asked why there was no exercise session scheduled for Friday she gestured towards the large mosque across the street from the mall’s parking lot. “There used be,” she said, “but they were cancelled because on Fridays there was no place to park. She shrugged her shoulders, “there was nothing we could do."
By “nothing we could do” I have to assume she meant that parking enforcement ignored the cars with no handicap stickers occupying clearly marked handicap spaces next to the entrance to the Lung Association’s facility for people who could only walk short distances without experiencing breathing difficulties.
Attached to the mosque was what I believed was a coffee shop next to a travel agency advertisings pilgrimage packages.
One day while Lucette was doing her exercises I walked in and asked the hijab lady behind the counter for a coffee. She said they did not serve coffee. I pointed to two of the four or five tables where people were sitting having what looked like coffee. She repeated in a slightly louder voice, ”we don’t serve coffee here.”
A burley fellow came out of the small kitchen and asked her if there was a problem. She pointed to me and said “he wants a coffee.” The man looked me the eye and said “we don’t serve coffee here, please leave.” He might as well have said “we don’t serve your kind here” in keeping with Allah’s many edicts about making nice with unbelievers.
The following is another posting that made its way into more than a few of my books. I probably won’t get a chance to let you know why some Muslims will reject your offer of friendship, not just refuse you a cup of coffee.
A doctor who had supervised an intern from Saudi Arabia thought he had made a friend. When the Saudi citizen had completed his residency and was getting ready to return home the good doctor told him how much he had enjoyed their friendship and how he hoped to visit him in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi man, point blank, told him he was not his friend and not to come and visit him. The doctor later realised, after reading the chapter that I have included in my Farewell Postings, that it was not personal.
REMEMBERING THE CHARLIE HEBDO MASSACRE
January 7, 2025
Being still here on the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, a reminder of what it was all about and what has become of that brave little publication.
That Charlie Hebdo is no longer putting its cartoonists at risks does not mean it has stopped from coming to the assistance of brave souls who have attracted the attention of rabid supporters of a deeply flawed human being responsible for so much misery over the centuries. These defenders of a self-proclaimed spokesman for the Almighty also see it as their duty to silence critics of the god for whom he claimed to speak, as was the case with a French teenager by the name of Mila.
MY LAST PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
January 11, 2025
UK should consider letting IS members return, terror watchdog says... Since the fall of IS in 2019, thousands of people linked to the group - mostly women and children - have been detained in camps in northern Syria. BBC January 11, 2025
Western governments have a duty to take the survivors and their children back for not countering, with the truth, the propaganda to which they were exposed!
As we near the end of my Farewell Postings I would have been remised if I had not mentioned the women and girls that our governments continue to ignore when in it is largely their fault that the survivors find themselves in the predicament that they are in.
Western media and Western governments have been largely reluctant, even when countless lives could be saved, to publicise uncomfortable truths about Islam, such as what awaits men and women in Allah’s Hereafter, i.e., repetitive semenless sex with female facsimiles for men in a bland Paradise and Hell for the vast majority of women.
For that reason, I again recycled The Promise of Absurd Sex and Hell is for Mothers in my Farewell Postings and why I again give you What Every Jihadi Bride Should Know. Consider them the public service announcements that your governments should have made a long time again and repeated over and over again as needed.
Canada Complicit in Trafficking Teenaged Girls to ISIS
DYING WITHOUT HAVING UNDERSTOOD WOMEN
Jan. 12, 2024
Taliban 'do not see women as human', says Malala Yousafzai. BBC Jan. 12, 2024
In January 2007, the municipality of Hérouxville of the province of Québec (pop. 1,338 at the time) introduced a code of conduct (Normes de vie) to inform immigrants of the townspeople's values and traditions and why newcomers should respect them. The first article of the Code declared: "We consider men and women equal." Fourteen traditionally draped Muslim women were dispatched by the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) to Hérouxville to set the locals straight on what Islam is all about.
I will die not having understood why so many women do what they do in spite, in my first semester at Simon Fraser, taking a course on The Psychology of Women hoping to improve on a dismal record of forming relationships with girls while in high school. Marina of Pestalozzi College, Margaret… and later Lucette were not unlike the archetype of the women of The Psychology of Women, confident and respected—without undue deference—members of the human race.
My getting close and personal with Islam and reading—and yes— watching video testimonials of women and girls who, apparently having lost their self-respect that becoming convert of a religion that considers them less than human requires, as effectively destroyed that illusion that they were the rule rather than the exception.
I can understand the self-loathing that the Koran imbues in women born into the religion, starting in childhood, which makes it difficult for them to question their indoctrination later in life; but what about the women and girls who, as non-Muslim children have not had the Koran drummed into them, whole-heartedly embrace the Book and the man.
Why would the Taliban see women as humans when so many, converts in particular, don’t consider themselves deserving of the appellation. Is Islam serving a need for women to be dominated and disciplined by the equivalent of Gwen Stephani’s “bad boys” or are they to be compared to Pink’s “stupid girls?”
Gwen Stephani's Bathwater
So why do we choose the boys that are nasty...
Why do the good girls always want the bad boys...
I still love to wash in your old bath water
Makes me feel like I couldn't love another
I can't help it, you're my kind of man
Whoo-oo, doo-oo
Whoo-doo, doo-oo
No I can't help myself,
I can't help myself
Pink's Stupid Girls
What happened to the dreams of a girl president
She's dancing in the video next to 50 Cent
They travel in packs of two or three
With their itsy bitsy doggies and their teeny-weeny tees
Where, oh where, have the smart people gone?
Oh where, oh where could they be?
If women like Malala, Lucette and Marina are the exception, than the Renaissance, which marked the end of the Catholic Church’s dominance in Europe allowing for a flowering of the arts and sciences, and the Enlightenment which ushered in the Age of Reason—what Mark Lilla described as The Fragile Exception—is doomed.
After centuries of strife, the West has learned to separate religion and politics – to establish the legitimacy of its leaders without referring to divine command. There is little reason to expect the rest of the world – the Islamic world in particular – will follow.
We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that can leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that political theology died in 16th-century Europe. We were wrong. It's we who are the fragile exception.
Mark Lilla, professor of the humanities at Columbia University, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (2007)
The women of Sumer gave birth to Western civilization. The women of Islam, a child’s first acquaintance with the Koran and the narrow limits it places on the imagination, may bring it to an end. The Koran, taken literally, kills the imagination allowing insanity to settle in. Will these mainly “illiterate and downtrodden mothers” entrusted with the crucial early years of a child’s upbringing—invisible to the outside world courtesy of a prudish, insecure, misogynistic God—even be aware of what they have done?
WOMEN OF SUMER
The Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Hebrew Bible by at least 2000 years, the Koran by an additional 1500 years, more or less. It was carved into clay tablets at the dawn of Western written history in ancient Sumeria (Sumer). In it you will find a story about the great flood and the Garden of Eden. How would Islam, which contains variations of the same stories as can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh and later in the Bible, reconcile the two?
The Koran contains references to twenty-five prophets who came before the Prophet Muhammad and it is clear that there are many more. In one tradition of the Prophet, more than 124,000 prophets were sent by God before He got fed up with His Message being badly transmitted or misunderstood and decided to send His last and greatest Messenger, the Prophet Muhammad.
Believers would maintain that the author of Gilgamesh was probably a prophet who was misquoted or who misunderstood Allah’s Message. For instance, how could someone possibly write that it was a woman who gave birth to humanity, not a man; or that it is a woman, as described in the following excerpt (translation by Stephanie Dalley) from that heroic poem, to whom we are indebted for the wisdom with which she endowed man and which allowed civilization to blossom?
Shambat loosened her undergarments, opened her legs and
he took in her attractions.
She did not pull away. She took wind of him.
Spread open her garments and he lay upon her.
She did for him, the primitive man, as women do.
His love-making he lavished upon her.
For six days and seven nights Enkidu was aroused and
poured himself into Shambat.
When he was sated with her charms,
He set his face towards the open country of his cattle.
The gazelles saw Enkidu and scattered.
The cattle of open country kept away from his body.
For Enkidu had become smooth; his body was too clean.
His legs, which used to keep pace with his cattle, were at a
standstill.
Enkidu had been diminished, he could not run as before.
Yet he had acquired judgement, had become wiser.
For the Sumerians it was the goddess Aruru, the mother goddess, who created Enkidu from clay—the Bible and the Koran would give that role to a man. For the Sumerians, women were a civilizing influence; for the illiterate desert tribesmen who would usurp her role in the creation accounts, she became the seductress, the harlot who caused mankind to be expelled from Paradise.
For the men and women of Sumer, their cities were Paradise. For the people of Sumer it was also women as life givers, homemakers and lovers who made this sedentary, civilized lifestyle possible, desirable and enjoyable. For the tribesmen of the desert, trapped and fighting for survival beneath a monotonous, unchanging blue sky and a blaring scorching sun on a sea of dust and sand, the cities of Sumer would also have been seen as Paradise. Allah’s description of Paradise, as an oasis with buildings and women as pleasure providers, almost fits the description of Sumerian cities and their female inhabitants, with the exception that in Sumer, women were not second-class citizens.
Why would desert tribesmen, who would adapt, if not pervert, many of the events described in the Epic of Gilgamesh—including the story of the meeting between Shambat and Enkidu—blame women for mankind’s exile from Paradise? The seduction of Enkidu by Shambat was seen as a good thing by the people of Sumer; a wild, roving man is civilized by being intimate with a woman.
For the people of Sumer, being “civilized” meant acquiring wisdom; becoming capable of exercising judgement, of assessing situations or circumstances shrewdly and logically and drawing your own reasonable conclusions. For the illiterate, fatalistic tribesmen of the deserts of the Middle East whose very existence was constantly being tested by elements over which they had no control, which they believed was God’s way of trying their faith, this had to seem like blasphemy. Paradise was to be denied mankind because a woman was foolish enough to endow a man with god-like qualities. For their jealous, vengeful god this had to be unacceptable.
The Koran, with its meticulous instructions as to what a believer may or may not do, what a believer may think or say, was perhaps the primitive tribesman’s way of using the invention of writing to establish eternal, unchanging limits on mankind’s imagination and free will in the hope of convincing God to let man back into Sumer, back into Paradise.
Writing as Allah revealed in verses from Surah 96, The Clot made man arrogant, thinking himself self-sufficient. This was not why He taught man how to write. He taught man how to write not to make him more self-sufficient, but less, by having man write down His unchanging instructions as to how He expected man to behave and how He was to be worshipped. Instructions which He then expected to be followed to the literal letter or man would have to answer to Him Whom all of mankind must eventually return.
96:3 Read by your Most Generous Lord,
96:4 Who taught by the pen.
96:5 He thought man what he did not know.
96:6 Yet, man will, indeed wax arrogant;
96:7 For he thinks himself self-sufficient.
96:8 Surely, unto your Lord is the ultimate return.
It was the Sumerians who, more than five millennia ago, first carved the written word on clay tablets. According to Thomas Cahill, the period before the invention of writing saw an “explosion of technological creativity on a scale that would not be matched until the nineteenth and twentieth century of our era.” Writing may have been a result of mankind’s need to record this leap of knowledge, upon which memory could no longer be counted to chronicle or manage. Civilization could not progress any further without the means of recording civilization’s accomplishments for future generations to build upon.
The society that invented writing worshipped many goddesses. The greatest goddess of all, Ishtar, goddess of love and war, was worshipped by the people of the city of Uruk, perhaps the earliest settlement to deserve the name of city. It was in this ancient Mesopotamian city, on the shore of the Euphrates River, that the first words written five thousand years ago on clay tablets were found. If it was not a woman who imagined those first words then it was her civilizing influence which allowed the written word to be imagined in the first place.
RISKING THE WRATH OF THE ENEMY WITHIN
January 14, 2025
Hizb ut-Tahrir Cancels Pro-Caliphate Event in Canada Middle East Forum Jan. 14, 2025
Islamism is commonly expressed as the desire to enforce a version of Shari’ah as law… An Islamist attempts to impose his version of Islam on society, and a jihadist is an Islamist who attempts to do so by force… Political Islamists seek to impose their views through the ballot box, biding their time until they can infiltrate the institutions of society from within.
Maajid Nawaz, author of Radical, My Journey out of Islamist Extremism Labels
We know how jihadists intend to bring about the Caliphate the hard way. Political Islamists wanted to hold a conference during which they would inform their fans how they indent to do it. Instead of threats to get them to cancel, the government should have insisted that the Canadian media be allowed to report on the proceeding, then we would all be the wiser.
“Know your enemy” to quote Sun Tzu, and later Clausewitz, is the key to victory, starting with the enemy within. Should the enemy within want to take exception to whatever I wrote and put me out of my misery, here is a recent picture that will appear on the cover of Farewell Postings.
THE ENEMY WITHIN
(Abbreviated excerpt from Remembering Uzza, Boreal Books)
Uzza: Could I have an adult drink now, please. They are not coming back tonight. If anything, they are waiting somewhere to teach me a lesson. Archie, do you mind? (extends her empty glass of apple juice.)
Archie: When you came in you said you wanted a beer. How about a nice glass of white wine? On the house.
Uzza: Just like in heaven.
Archie: What do you mean?
Uzza: In Paradise there are rivers of wine in which the believers can dip their cups and toast Allah − and, for the privileged class, special wines aged in some kind of container sealed with musk.
Archie: Why would Allah outlaw wines here but allow them in heaven?
Uzza: There was a time when Allah bragged about wine being one of the signs of His Beneficence. Then wine became a sin in which there was some benefit. Then no benefits at all; wine became an abomination, something the devil concocted.
Archie: You haven’t answered my question.
Uzza: A drunk and disorderly believer could have embarrassed Muhammad without intending to and could not be trusted to carry out his orders without fail. Reason enough, I think, for Allah to make sure that didn’t happen.
Archie: Then, why all the pussyfooting?
Uzza: Allah does not pussyfoot, if that is even a word. He may have wanted to wait until Muhammad was strong enough to enforce His decree before making wine an abomination. I do not know. And, can I give you back this damn veil? It only empowers women to do what men want them to do. Where is the fun in that?
Archie: No, but you can take it off and keep it close by. And you must promise to put it back on if you see someone come up the stairs.
Uzza: I promise.
Gerry: And don't worry, I will walk you home or to your car, if you want.
Uzza: Thank you, but my being seen with a man other than a husband or close relative will only make it worse.
Gerry, Johnny, Bob: [raising their glasses] Cheers!
Uzza: [does not raise her glass, nor does she take a sip, but stares straight ahead.]
Johnny: Anything wrong?
Uzza: You let in them in.
Bob: I thought Archie let them in.
Archie: You're not talking about those people, are you?
Uzza: Not just them, all of them. People like that should never have been allowed in our country.
Archie: But, they are your people?
Uzza: No, they are not. They are from another century.
Archie: And what century would that be?
Uzza: The 7th century. They consider Western civilization a mistake that must be rectified by a return to what they consider the good old days when Muhammad and what he said was the Will of God was the law, the only law, the Sharia. You let in those for whom the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, reason itself is a blasphemy.
Archie: That explains a lot; the craziness, I mean.
Uzza: You let in those who did not come seeking our way of life but to change it thinking you would change them, and Muslims who came here to escape the shackles of the Sharia are paying the price of your arrogance, a price you will all have to pay sooner rather than later.
Archie: I’m paying right now.
Uzza: You welcomed this Islamic population into my grandfather's adopted country, you fed them, you housed them, you gave them benefits that others had worked for, you bent over backwards to appease them, you forced everyone to tolerate them, and you encouraged their religion to thrive.
Archie: We did that, alright. Maybe we’re the crazy ones.
Uzza: You gave them economics opportunities not available to more upstanding citizens which allowed them to fund what my father warned was a hidden agenda. They lied to you, they told you they were peaceful and wanted nothing else but to be fine, upstanding citizens and abide by your laws. They accepted your food, your housing, your benefits, your kindness but they never accepted your culture which they viewed as weak and immoral, nor your beliefs which they equated as being anti-Islam. They now secretly hide and protect the bombers and beheaders within their communities, the so-called Islamic Municipalities into which the authorities dare not venture. They grew strong on your misplaced generosity and tolerance. One day in the not-too-distant future they will receive the call, in Arabic, from the Muslim hate preachers of the mosques you have so generously allowed them to build so they can preach their Islamic bile and rise up and finish what you started when you let them in[28].
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[28] Dialogue beginning with "You welcome this Islamic population" adapted from a response by an individual who goes by the pseudonym Haïm Ittah to an Ottawa Citizen story about the Nice truck attack which killed 84 people including 10 children.