A Vote Against

These are tough times for western civilization. In many ways, we in the west face choices similar to those faced by people living in Nazi Germany or the communist USSR. While we may not be in a situation to hide the persecuted or to save them from a savage death, we can fight against the dark forces that make it easy for "intelligence" operatives to torture people for information and that treat "warriors" who target innocent civilians with air strikes and missile attacks as heroes and not war criminals.

This evening I got an e-mail from someone who is very dear to me, a woman who goes to church and thinks of herself as a civilized Christian. She did not write the email herself -- she forwarded it having received it from someone else -- but she obviously agreed with the contents, which attempted to explain "why Muslim terrorists are so quick to kill themselves". This is not the first time I have received e-mails like this, but I have never said anything before.

This time I cannot remain silent -- to do so would be the moral equivalent of watching the smoke bellowing from the crematorium at Auschwitz and pretending nothing was happening. I want the world to know that I am fed up with the hate and the racism. I am fed up with the smug superiority that acts as if the west (especially the US) is in the right and everyone else is in the wrong. Lord knows, I support my country's troops in Afghanistan, but I do not and will not condone the sort of hateful, arrogant ignorance that fuels the fires of conflict.

The brilliant Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn once wrote, "You've got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight." In that spirit, I am going to give my comments to the content of the e-mail I received. I apologize in advance for quoting the content.

I bet you have been wondering!!!
Everyone seems to be wondering why Muslim terrorists are so quick to commit suicide.
Let's see now ...

• No Jesus (By Jesus, I guess they mean the man who commanded us to love our neighbours as ourselves. The same guy who said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.)
• No Christmas (That's right, no commercialized celebrations of consumer excess, because let's face it -- that's what Christmas has largely become.)
• No cheerleaders (Somehow, cheerleaders don't even make it on my list of 100 reasons to love life and to stay alive.)
• No baseball (If only they had professional athletes who regularly inject themselves with dangerous performance-enhancing drugs to admire. Then the terrorists would think twice about blowing themselves up.)
• No football (Just like baseball, except you can add athletes who commit violent crimes.)
• No hockey (As above, but add gratuitous violence during games and drunk driving in the off-season.)
• No Nascar (As above, but add liquor and a prodigal waste of limited resources and voila, another terrorist puts down the bomb.)
• (By the way, I notice basketball and soccer don't make the list. Is it because they aren't "white" enough for the author of the e-mail? Or does the author feel that they are, in fact, a reason to become a suicide bomber? Hmmm.)
• No tailgate parties (There's nothing like gluttony and public drinking to dispel thoughts of suicide.)
• No Costco or Sam's Club (It is hard to motivate yourself to kill yourself for your faith when you still have half a dozen jars of mustard to use up.)
• No Home Depot or Lowe's (Thank heavens for big box stores. Easy access to consumer goods has all but wiped out suicide in western economies. How can you think of leaving this old world when there are so many projects you can work on?)
• No pork BBQ (I am not sure if the emphasis is on the "pork" or the "barbecue" here. Hmmm, Jews can't eat pork. Does that mean they are tempted to become suicide bombers too?)
• No hot dogs (Come on -- if people knew what went into hot dogs, they would be more likely to kill themselves, not less.)
• No burgers (Yeah, lower cholesterol and lower risk of heart attack is enough to make me want to blow myself up, too.)
• No chocolate chip cookies (I get it -- why live if you can't get diabetes?)
• No lobster (No point in living if you can't eat something that you cook while it's alive.)

Hmmmm.....

• Rags for clothes and towels for hats (Perhaps if we (a) didn't bomb the shit out of people and (b) did advocate an economic system that benefited more than just a narrow elite, people would all be able to wear "decent clothes". Anyhow, turbans are a step up from Von Dutch baseball hats in my estimation, and "rags for clothes" is no worse than hip hugger jeans that show somebody's thong.)
• Constant wailing from the guy in the tower (Yeah, why can't those Muslims invest in a decent set of church bells like Christians?_
• More than one wife (At least, "more than one wife at the same time." Civilized people like us have our multiple wives sequentially, the way the good Lord intended us to do it.)
• You can't shave (Hmmm, if all those guys who currently shave their heads when they start to bald were forbidden from doing so, would they become suicide bombers?)
• Your wives can't shave (We all know how hairy them there Mooslim wimmen are, don't we? Apparently bikini waxing and laser hair removal has a moral dimension that has hitherto been hidden from me.)
• You can't shower to wash off the smell of donkey cooked over burning camel dung (Yes, we all know that Muslims eat donkey cooked over camel dung. And they live in the desert and don't know how to read and live in caves and tents instead of houses.)
• The women have to wear baggy dresses and veils at all times (Don't those Muslims understand that tight t-shirts, short skirts, and visible underwear are signs of a truly moral society?)
• Your bride is picked by someone else (As opposed to here, where you pick your bride ... and your second wife ... and your third wife ...)
• She smells just like your donkey (What is this person's obsession with donkeys?)
• But your donkey has a better disposition (Is the author of this piece just racist, or does he/she have a donkey fetish?)
• Then they tell you that when you die it all gets better! (Yeah, they need a religion like Christianity that doesn't offer a vision of a "better place" in the afterlife. Nope, no one has ever tried to buy the average Christian joe off by telling them the pains of this world are insignificant because things will be better in paradise.)

I mean, really, is there a mystery here? Hello!!!

George W. Bush famously said, "If you are not with us, you're against us." If e-mails like this are any indication of what being "with them" in the war on terror means, I guess I am against them. Don't get me wrong -- I opposed fundamentalism in all of its forms and I am a huge advocate of democracy. It's just that I don't believe that justice and democracy are served by spewing hateful racist and sexist garbage like this. And you shouldn't, either.