The fact that fundamentalist Islam isn’t that old should make it a lot easier to knock it out of the culture, but we’re too politically correct to even talk about how to do so. Unfortunately, though, it is older now than Nazism was in 1945.
17 thoughts on “Six Ancient Traditions”
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Cracked‘s mistake is that Islam is stuck in its Dark Ages, not ours.
I know most of the ACTUAL history on these things. But was there a point to be made here?
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I’ve never heard Limbaugh or Beck say ISLAM is the problem. RADICAL Islam is the term used. But I did like the typical raging nut-job pictures of Limbaugh and Beck, mixed with the saitly picture of that murdering a$$hole bin Laden. Classy.
The Saud family has been Wahabist for over 200 years. (there are nineteen ‘correct’ spellings for wahabist, wahhabist, …whatever, that alone should prove it’s about craziness)
That history is not an unknown fact to those who look into it. It was was taught to me [and several others] when I was in the Navy, from some guy from the ‘State Dept’, who was traveling with some nice flat topped, square shaped, Ramboish ‘gentlemen’ who had no names on their Army style fatigues. [I always thought they were ALL spooks, since when does State explain stuff to enlisted sailors!?) They were giving us training, (and some All American rah rah) hoping several of us would agree to sit in IRAQ running generators so those un-named, square ‘gentlemen’ could listen to the IRANIANs. They were pretty sure Ayatollah Khomeini was about to take over and needed intel.
AND they were pretty sure the Saudis were part of the RADICAL movement, which [as I was told that day) traced its roots BACK to the 1700’s. (not the 1950’s] That’s the U.S. GOVERNMENT outlook on Wahabi history, cicra July 1979.
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Thanksgiving was STANDARDIZED and made a National holiday by Lincoln, not created by him or Ms Hale.
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And I’ve read nearly that version of how we got the Pledge of Allegiance, but without the implication that it was like selling soap, or jello. And I remember being taught in grade school about WHY ‘God’ was added, and when. There’s no way to help that most people went to crappy schools, or didn’t do their homework, and thus don’t know their history.
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Realizing this was “Cracked” doesn’t exactly make this legitimate journalism, but, was there a point to be made by this post? Maybe it’s too nuanced for me. Or I missed the tongue in cheek aspects?
But after having spent 6 months of my life over there in 1979 over these murdering morons, then my younger son was in Iraq in 2002, and my older son is about to do his 5th Navy cruise over there starting soon, perhaps I’ve lost any sense of humor over RADICAL Islam, the followers of What’s-the-hell’s-so-hahaha-bism, the Saud family, the bin Laden clan or anyone who thinks there’s humor to be had concerning a group of people who want me, my family and everything I love, and took an oath to protect, totally eradicated from the planet.
But like I said, maybe I just missed the point.
Maybe I need to read an article on the “Cracked” site, from the 30th odd year of WWII, huh? Just to see if Auschwitz, The Bataan Death March, Hiroshima or D-Day were traditionally funnier than I’d heard or read before today.
I’ve heard that the Pledge was the creation of an American Socialist who wanted to inculcate immigrant kids with the Cult of the State. I don’t know if that’s true, but I enjoy the irony.
What made radical Islam such a pain in the ass was WWI. After that, and as a result of the royal screwing delivered unto the Arabs by the British and the French, the Islamic Brotherhood was formed (about 1923, IIRC).
Bin Laden, a Wahhabist, glommed onto the Islamic Brotherhood when he hooked up with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of the Brotherhood. Although the Saudis were technically Wahhabists, the royals at least were relatively secular. Then some Sunni nuts stormed the temple at Mecca, and many problems ensued. This was 1979, and got somewhat lost in the shuffle of our Iranian problems.
BTW, the reason there are 20 spellings of Wahhabi is that we’re transliterating from a different alphabet. See, Czar vs. Tsar for another example.
The fact that the website is brought to you by the folks who bring you Cracked Magazine, the lame wannabe runner-up to Mad Magazine, should tell you all you need to know about how seriously to take this. The only question is how long it took you to realize the authors are seriously off-base. In my case, thirty-five seconds, and I’m not proud it took that long.
bbbeard, while it’s true that CRACKED the magazine has always been, as you say, “the lame runner-up to MAD magazine,” their website has some brilliant stuff, much of it dervied from history. Look up their “5 Most Bad-Ass Presidents.” I read that at my desk during lunch hour and it was all I could do to keep from laughing like a madman right there at the office.
The wise learn even from fools. You can always check the facts.
The Lame runner up to MAD gets Islam wrong. Islam was murderous anti-women, intolerant and all that, from the minute MOhammed began executing Jewish prisoners, forcing people to convert to Islam or pay extra taxes for the joy of living as disarmed second class citizens with few, if any rights. That was not in the 1950s…it was in the Fifteenth Century. Radical Islam is nothing more than Islam being lived the way Mohammed did it. The Turks, touted as enlightened, provided no real religious rights for minorities, routinely conducted massacres of refractory minority faiths and ethnic groups, and conducted Devshirmes, which were a periodic sweep in which they would find the prettiest girls and boys in the subject non-Muslim population and enslave them. This system was called “dhimmitude” and was established by Mohammed himself. Turkey became more tolerant, so to speak, as the West became more powerful. Ditto for the rest of the Muslim world.
SInce Islam’s justification is not spiritual, but physical worldly success (read: conquest) the backwardness and defeat of Islam led to an existential crises and a rethinking of Islam by some. The Ahmadiuyyas of Pakistan had a “prophet” whose only real change in Islam was to take Jihad or religious war, out fo the five pillars. He did this during the period of the British Raj. For taking Jihad out of the religioun, he and his followers have been persecuted and murdered ever since as “heretics.”
Every Moslem state flourished until the percentage of its non-Moslem population declined below the point where the subject people could no longer produce enough wealth to support the oarasitic conqueror state. After reaching that tipping point, military, economic and intellectual stagnation invariably took hold.
Islam became more aggressive and “radical Islam” more popular when the West lost its cultural self-confidence, and also became addicted to oil. Petrodollars, produced for non-Moslem economies, and extracted and sold using the labor and technology of non-Moslems, in essence became the new unearned and extorted income for the Moslem states, replacing the wealth produced by the Dhimmi populations. As this oil economy came into its own during the Fifties, Muslims suddenly found themselves with the wealth that allowed them to revert to the severe and warlike Islam of Mohammed.
FInally, Cracked, as would be expected by a lame would-be MAD magazine, has its history all wrong. They repeated the lie that Islam was creating all this great science, blah-blah-blah, while savage EUorpeans were throwing rockets at each other. Actually, Christian Europe was fihgting off Viking pagans on one side, and Moslem invasions on the other. But they did remember the Greek heritage. And, for what it is worth, the Hindus, not the Moslems, invented the Zero and all that.
I’ve always been very fond of Wahhabi. Sushi wouldn’t be the same without it…
(Everyone, hold up your drawings of Mohammad!)
MfK,
if you knew sushi, like I know sushi…
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that sushi is some sort of modern joke that the Japanese came up with to get gullible Westerners to eat the left-over parts no sane Japanese would eat, and that the word really means something like “bait” or “chum”.
And let’s not forget that ancient African holiday , Kwanzaa…
I guess eating blackened sushi to celebrate Kwanzaa and Ramadan is right out, then.
Well, FWIW their take on Bushido is B***shi*.
“if you knew sushi, like I know sushi…”
…you’d take penicillin, too.
I wonder whether or not the Middle East would be more radical if we suddenly became energy dependent and no longer funneled billions of dollars into their economy. After all, one of the most powerful purveyors of peace is the all mighty dollar. When enough money flows between countries it is no longer in their financial interest to openly wage wars with each other. In fact the segments of Arab society that are vehemently violent to the west are those that are actively suppressed by their own local governments and denied the fruits of their countries commodities. They live in slums that have progressed little from the 18th century and yet their “betters” live in opulent palaces and drive gold plated Bugatti Veyrons. What should be done to address this issue is to enhance the life and well being of these oppressed segments of Arab society so they don’t feel like dogs whipped into snapping at the first strange hand they see.
What level of peace we do enjoy today is because of our moolah for Mullahs.
Raoul;
To some extent, yes. The rice and vinegar taste comes from peasants storing fish and things fermenting a bit. But the Japanese are hardly unique in gradually shifting what my anthropology professor called “starvation food” to haute cuisine. Personally,I don’t find it too surprising a phenomenon, because when are people going to experiment with new types of foods and preparations? Mostly when they’re starving.
Old Annoying Guy, the whole point of starvation food is that it is beneath you, until you really need it. Sometimes it’s because the food sucks. You’d only eat it, if you were starving. Other times it’s because the food is thought of as implying that you too are of a lower social station. That is, why eat rice when you can eat caviar like the other bastions of society? What I think has happened is that cooks discovered how to tart up starvation food so that it is acceptable to the snobs. Sure, peasants eat potatoes and turnips, but your potatoes and turnips have a far more elegant presentation.