Archive for the ‘Articles & Essays’ Category

My Library

Monday, June 8th, 2009

In Czarist Russia there were officially only three classes of people: nobility, clergy, and peasants. By the end of the 19th century though, there were coming to be more and more individuals who didn’t fit into the recognized categories. The children of merchants for example, or Jews, those with some university education, or ethnic minorities… Quite a few people were falling between the cracks and they became known as razochinetski, meaning those of no clearly defined social class. The label could be derogatory. Sometimes the word just meant “middle-class intellectual.” The czarist officials didn’t trust these people because knowing their background didn’t tell you much about them. They might be either communists or nationalists. In an unsettling way, each razochinetz seemed to be self-defined.

Osip Mandelstam, the poet, proudly accepted the label and said that the biography of a razochinetz was his bookshelf. In other words, he was what he had read. In the United States, social classes are said to be fluid, but we still have razochinetski and a library can still serve as a biography of sorts, especially for self-educated people, who have complete freedom to choose what they read.

Nobody made me read any of the following books. It’s not a list of every book I’ve ever read, just those I still have copies of. Actually I don’t have them because they’re in storage in two different countries.

The first book I ever read was called “The Cozy Little Farm,” and I have a picture of myself holding it. The first adult book I read was “Edison” by Josephson. It was a bit over my head at age ten, but Edison was my hero and I still recall many scenes. One of the illustrations is a reproduction of a letter, showing Edison’s unique calligraphy, which he developed when he was a telegrapher. It was designed to be clear, beautiful and fast. I retrained myself to write in that style, and still do, more or less.


MY LIBRARY (What’s Left of It)


HISTORY


Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

The Peninsular War, Jac Weller

Ivan’s War, Catherine Merridale

A Nation Made by War, Geoffrey Perret

Eisenhower, Geoffrey Perret

The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer

The Second World War, John Keegan

The Boer War, Thomas Pakenham

The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger

Stalin, The Court of the Red Czar, Simon S. Montefiore

Lincoln, Redeemer President, Alan Guelzo

The Impending Crisis, David M. Potter

A Narrative History of the Civil War, Shelby Foote

Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward S. Gibbon

Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose

The Reformation, Diarmuid MacCulloch

A Short History of the Argentines, Felix Luna

At Home Among the Patagonians, George Musters

The Thirty Years War, C.V. Wedgwood

Anabasis (The Upcountry March), Xenophon

The Conquest of Mexico, Bernal Diaz

The Conquest of Mexico, W.S. Prescott

Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence

The Command of the Ocean, N.A.M. Rodger

The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman

The Face of Battle, John Keegan

Maus I & II, Art Spiegelman

Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest

Treason By The Book, Jonathan Spence

Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus trans. Grant

Army of the Caesars, Michael Grant

Adventures of Capt. Alonso Contreras, trans. Dallas

Memoirs, vol. I, George Kennan

The Pacific War—1931-1945, Saburo Ienaga

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence

Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose


FICTION, (novels, stories, drama)


Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

The Riverside Shakespeare (1 vol.)

A Dance to the Music of Time (12 vols.), Anthony Powell

Sixteen Plays, Henrik Ibsen trans. Michael Meyer

Plays of Moliere, trans. Richard Wilbur

Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz

Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz

The Master & Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa

Walls Rise Up, George Sessions Perry

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler

The Third Bank of the River, Joao Guimaraes Rosa

Maiden, Cynthia Buchanan

Stories, Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol

The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa

The Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. By Constance Garnett

The Plays of Chekhov, trans. by C. Garnett

New Grub Street, George Gissing

The Odd Women, George Gissing

Kim, Rudyard Kipling

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

Ashenden Stories, W. Somerset Maugham

Moon & Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham

Child 44, Tom Rob Smith

The Secret Speech, Tom Rob Smith

Old Goriot, Balzac

Cousin Bette, Balzac

The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald

Tender Is The Night, F.Scott Fitzgerald

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

Sword of Honor, Evelyn Waugh

The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad

The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad

Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen

Emma, Jane Austen

Animal Farm, George Orwell

1984, George Orwell

The Sorrows of Young Werther, J.W. von Goethe

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford


BIOGRAPHY, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIR


The Shorter Pepys, ed. Robert Latham

Pepys,The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin

Mr. Pepys, Samuel Ollard

Goethe, 2 vols. (so far) by Nicholas Boyle

Orwell, Jeffrey Meyers

Edmund Wilson, Jeffrey Meyers

Ibsen, Michael Meyer

Edison, Matthew Josephson

Alexander Pope, Maynard Mack

Chekhov, Donald Rayfield

Chekhov, Henri Troyat

Letters of Chekhov, ed. by Simon Karlinsky & M.H. Heim

Wellington, The Years of the Sword, Antonia Fraser

Witness, Sam Tannenhaus

Eugene O’Neill (2 vols.), Louis Schaeffer

Hindo Holiday, J.R.Ackerly

Henry James, (1 vol.) Leon Edel

W.Somerset Maugham, Ted Morgan

Italian Journey, J.W. von Goethe

A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis

Daedalus Returned, Baron von der Heydte

Oscar, Peter J. Wilson

The Lives of Talleyrand, Crane Brinton

Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi

The Reawakening, Primo Levi

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi

Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey

The Double Life of Stephen Crane, Christopher Benfey

Isaiah Berlin, David Ignatieff

Spinoza, Nadler

Chaucer, John Gardner

Chaucer, Donald Howard

Whittaker Chambers, Sam Tannenhaus

The Baburnama, Sultan Muhammad Babur, ed. Thackston

The Quest for Corvo, A.J.A. Symons

Parallel Lives, Plutarch

Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence

The Long Walk, Slawomir Rawicz

Comrade Valentine, Richard E. Rubenstein

Lords of the Sea, John R. Hale

Coyotes, Ted Conover


POETRY


The Odes of Horace, ed. by McClatchy

The Odes of Horace, trans. James Michie

Horace in English, ed. D.S. Carne Ross

The Complete Odes & Epodes of Horace, trans. W.G. Shepherd

Complete Odes & Satires of Horace, trans. Sidney Alexander

Sonnets of Shakespeare, ed. Helen Vendler

Collected Poems of Richard Wilbur

Collected Poems of W.H. Auden

Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats

Poems, Robert Frost

A Net of Fireflies, trans. Harold Stewart

Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Poems of George Gordon, Lord Byron

Norton Anthology of Classical Literature, ed. Bernard Knox

Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz

Collected Poems of Houseman

Piers Plowman, Norton Edition

Poems of F.G. Tuckerman

Poems of Thomas Hardy

Poems of John Gay, 2 vols., ed. Dearing

Psalms of Sidney & Pembroke, ed. Rathnell

The Aeneid, Vergil trans. P.Dickinson

Complete Poetry of Mandelstam, trans. Raffel & Burago

Iliad, Homer trans. Fagles

The Divine Comedy, Dante trans. Ciardi

Complete Poems, Andrew Marvell

Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus, R.M. Rilke trans. Poulin

Faust, Goethe trans. Kaufman

Complete Poetry, Alexander Pope


ESSAYS, CRITICISM


The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz

Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, Paul Fussel

Cultural Amnesia, Clive James

Forwords and Afterwords, W.H. Auden

Essays Ancient and Modern, Bernard Knox

Essays, Letters, Journalism (4 vols.), George Orwell

Less Than One, Joseph Brodsky

Intellectuals, Paul Johnson

The Sense of Reality, Isaiah Berlin

The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Isaiah Berlin

Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson

Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson

To The Finland Station, Edmund Wilson

Essays, Montaigne trans. Frame

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, Lionel Trilling

Distant Neighbors, Alan Riding

Mexican Etiquette & Ethics, Boye de la Mente

Narcocorrido, Elijah Wald

To Keep The Ball Rolling, Anthony Powell

Miscellaneous Verdicts, Anthony Powell

Under Review, Anthony Powell

True Tales From Another Mexico, Sam Quinones


RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY


Jews, God & History, Max Dimont

Judaism, Roy Rosenberg

This Is My God, Wouk

Jews, Arthur Hertzberg

The Sabbath, A.J. Heschel

Farewell, España, Howard M. Sachar

The Essential Talmud, Adin Steinsaltz

A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson

The Gospel According to Jesus, Stephen Mitchell

The Book of Job, Stephen Mitchell

Jesus of Nazareth, J. Bornkamm


HISTORICAL FICTION


Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar

I, Claudius, Robert Graves

The Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault

The King Must Die, Mary Renault

Captain From Castille, Samuel Shellabarger


ENTERTAINMENTS

(thrillers, mysteries,

romances, adventure tales, etc.)


The Flashman series, George M. Fraser

The Travis McGee series, John D. McDonald

The Hornblower series, C.S. Forester

The Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O’Brian

The Bernie Rhodenbarr series, Lawrence Block

The Masters of Rome series, Colleen McCullough

The Sharpe series, Bernard Cornwell

87th Precinct series, Ed McBain

Arkady Renko series, Martin Cruz Smith

Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household

Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini

Captain Blood, Rafael Sabatini

Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

The Big Clock, Kenneth Fearing

Treasure Island, R.L. Stevenson

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

Outsourced, R.J.Hillhouse

Con Ed, Mathew Klein

Citizen Vince, Jess Walter

The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers

The Faithful Spy, Alex Berenson

Six Suspects, Vikas Swarup

The Alibi, Joseph Kanon

The Club Dumas, Arturo Perez-Reverte

Captain Alatrice, Arturo Perez-Reverte


ISLAM


The Closed Circle, David Pryce-Jones

The Arab Mind, Raphael Patai

Why I Am Not A Muslim, Ibn Warraq

The Media Relations Dept. of Hizbollah

Wishes You A Happy Birthday, Neil MacFarquhar

The Rise, Coming Fall and Corruption

of Saudi Arabia, Said K. Aburish

The Two Faces of Islam, Stephen Schwartz

The Siege of Mecca, Yaroslav Trofimov

Islam, Robert Spencer

Terror’s Source, Vincenzo Olivetti

Hatred’s Kingdom, Dore Gold

The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright

The 9/11 Commission Report

Understanding Arabs, Margaret Nydell

Princess, Jean Sasson

Sultana’s Daughters, Jean Sasson

Sultana’s Circle, Jean Sasson

Now They Call Me Infidel, Nonie Darwish

Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott

Islam and Terrorism, Mark Gabriel

Wahabism, A Critical Essay, Hamid Algar

Islam, A Short History, Karen Armstrong

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

The Blood of Lambs, Kamal Saleem

Nadia’s Song, Soheir Kashoggi

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Stephen Schwartz Not In Favor Of Genocide?

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

 

  

 

          I have received an email from Stephen Schwartz objecting to a post on my blog entitled “Cheerleader For Genocide.” Actually I’ve received two objections from him and I will discuss them in order.

          In my original post, I reviewed his book, “Two Faces of Islam.” In that post I criticized the first sixty-five pages of the book, which I consider to be crude and even childish missionary propaganda for Islam, but I praised the remaining two hundred pages for the valuable information presented about the ways in which Saudi Arabia sponsors jihad all over the world. Discussing the first part of the book, I took particular exception to Schwartz’ account of the aftermath of the Battle of the Trench, in 627 A.D., where Mohammed murdered all the men of the tribe of Qurayzah and sold their women and children into slavery. I feel that Schwartz defends what is indefensible here, which was in fact genocide, by any definition. I stand by what I said concerning that issue.

          However, I made a serious error of fact when I stated that Schwartz converted to Islam from Judaism. He was in fact raised without any religion, as he pointed out to me in his first objection. I’m not sure where I got the incorrect information. I have been reading his articles in magazines for several years and somewhere I got the idea he had been Jewish before his conversion. After receiving his email I removed the post from my blog and apologized to him, in these words:

 

 “I’m sorry if I have offended you. I have removed the post.I read somewhere on the internet that you were formerly Jewish. That’s my fault for not checking more closely. Again, my apologies.
 My blog is under construction and I have not given the URL to anyone yet, nor have I linked to anyone. I was unaware that it was searchable at this time, but I realize that stupidity is no defense.”
 
 
           That appeared to satisfy him, as he then wrote:

 

“No problem, I shouldn’t have been so picky, considering that your overall comments were quite favorable.  Thanks again.
S”
  

            Today, however, I received his second objection, which follows:

 

Dear Mr Pickett

 

Your original column cannot be removed from google blogs and I really do consider the headline “Cheerleader for Genocide” to be quite offensive, and even libelous.  I have thought about this and really must insist you publish a complete apology as soon as possible. 

 

I am not a cheerleader for genocide.  I would point out to you that when the gentle Christians expelled Jews as well as Muslims from Spain, the Jews were welcomed into Morocco and the Ottoman domains, settled, and provided with resources to build homes, businesses, synagogues, and religious schools. 

 

For almost five centuries there was only one mosque in Christian Europe — the Ottoman merchants’ mosque in Venice — while there remained many Christian churches in the Muslim world.  These are incontrovertible facts that nobody can challenge. 

 

I have published a book called SARAJEVO ROSE about Muslim-Jewish relations in the Balkans that defends friendship between the two communities, not genocide.  And Albanian Sufis led a successful effort to protect Jewish refugees from the Nazis, so that Albania was the only Axis-controlled state in Europe with more Jews at the end of the second world war than at the beginning.  That is the Islam I accepted and defend, as anybody could see from my books.  Bosnian Muslim and Albanian Muslim righteous gentiles are now recognized at Yad Vashem in Israel; I was there and saw the memorial, while helping lead a delegation of moderate Muslims to the Jewish state.

 

Finally, amateur scholarship on Qur’an and the life of Muhammad is shaky ground at best and I fear your exercise in defamation against me is an excellent proof of that fact.

 

All that said, I already indicated that I appreciated your compliments to me about my expose of the Wahhabis, but referring to me as a “cheerleader for genocide” is simply not acceptable.  I am well known for helping prevent two attempted genocides, in the Balkans.

 

Sincerely

 

Stephen Schwartz

 

 

            My response is that I never said that Stephen Schwartz is in favor of all attempts to commit genocide. I am happy to hear that he has campaigned against genocide in the Balkans and I’m glad to hear that there has been interfaith understanding there in the past. My post makes it clear that my argument with him is that he definitely defends and excuses a successful genocide against the Jewish tribe of Qurayzah committed by Muhammad. This is typical of far too many Muslims who say, for example, that they are against suicide bombing if Muslims are killing Muslims, but that it is okay if they are killing Jews. You are either against terror in all cases or you are for it. The same goes for genocide. Being against it in two out of three cases isn’t good enough. Because of his current religion Stephen Schwartz is not allowed to criticize Muhammad, but non-Muslims have been criticizing the “prophet” for his atrocities at the Battle of The Trench and other places for 1300 years.

        It is amusing to see that he thinks that the title of my post is “libelous.” If we were in Great Britain, it would be. There you can be successfully prosecuted for libel even if you can prove the truth of what you have said. In the United States, however, truth is a perfect defense against libel. Readers can make up their own minds as to whether I have libeled Stephen Schwartz by reading the post in question, which is back on my blog, minus the incorrect information about his religious history: http://edmundpickett.com/blog/2009/05/31/cheerleader-for-genocide/

  

        I hope you noticed his dig at me for being an amateur student of Islam. That’s a good point, but he doesn’t list a single factual error in my revised post. The facts about the Battle of the Trench that I used are taken from canonical Muslim sources. Those who have not sworn allegiance to Allah’s Messenger have the right to form their own opinions of these facts. It should be mentioned that not all Muslims agree with Schwartz’ own scholarship. Here is an opposing view: http://www.icsfp.org/EN/contents.aspx?AID=2592

 

Another source on Stephen Schwartz are the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen-Schwartz-(author)

 

    Both the above sources make for very interesting reading. The Muslim critique is obviously written from the Wahabi point of view and defends Al-Wahab while ingoring Schwartz’ main target, which is the actions of the government of Saudi Arabia. It doesn’t matter what label you use to indicate the official religion of Saudi Arabia. That is all theological hair-splitting. What matters is what the Saudis do, and Stephen Schwartz has information about that which you can find nowhere else.

 

 

        I will conclude by saying that God gave me and all people the right to free speech. That includes freedom of religion and the freedom to have opinions. I will continue to blog on that subject. I’m now preparing a post that I doubt will please Stephen Schwartz, entitled “Muhammad’s Sex Slaves.” It also is based solely on canonical Muslim sources.

        And don’t forget, June 21st is not far away, and that will be the first “International Say Anything About Islam Day.” Read about it here: http://edmundpickett.com/blog/2009/05/14/say-anything-about-islam-days/

  

 

 

 

 

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Non-Serious Post

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

 

 

     No one can be serious all the time, not even me, so this post will consist of a couple of silly riddles, a cute animal picture, and a poem.

 

Question: What is a metaphor?

Answer: It’s for all those times when only a meta will do.

 

Question: What is a catastrophe?

Answer: A catastrophe is what you have to pay after the catastro.

 

          As far as I know, those are original. They popped into my head while I was driving, but I might have heard them decades ago and they just decided to swim up to the surface of my consciousness. I’m sure there’s a website where you could solve the question.

 

          Continuing my non-serious theme, here’s the cute animal picture. Can you identify the animal?

 chinchilla-crop

 

          It’s a wild chinchilla. I took the photo in Machu Pichu. According to Wikipedia, they are crepuscular mammals, which I suppose means that they move around mainly at dusk. I snapped him around 11 a.m., so this guy was up very early. He was sitting in a gap in the ruins caused by an earthquake, about 15 ft. (5 meters) away, and didn’t seem to mind a bunch of tourists oohing and ahhing over him. The Incas are world famous for their large irregular stone construction techniques, but they also used coursed stone, with equal sized blocks, for some important buildings, though as you can see here, it is not as stable. The buildings made of irregular fitted blocks have not shifted at all.

 

          This is still a fairly short post, so I will bulk it up with a poem from my archives. The poem could be considered serious, but it’s short.

 

 

        Your Poised Hand

 

                        1

These clothes my former lover made

Fit even better as they fade.

 

                        2

There’s frequently a lot of dust

in what we think is solid sand.

In finding out you never trust

your eye or how it feels in hand.

To quench such curiosity,

fling it to the wind! You’ll see

the powder, born in falling grit,

billow, and abandon it.

Then you’ll know exactly just

how much rock and how much dust

were in that pile of so-called sand,

lately lying in your poised hand.

 

                        3

Exactly what you had will then

be known, and never known again.

The clothes she made are wearing thin.

 

 

           © 2009 Edmund Pickett

 

     (This poem may be copied or forwarded, as long as

       you retain the copyright notice and author’s name.)

 

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Say Anything About Islam Days

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

 Say Anything About Islam

Days

 

By

Edmund Pickett

 

          The muslim campaign of violence against free speech in Europe, which began with the Danish cartoon riots, intensified recently with the firebombing of the home of a British publisher. His offense? He was planning to publish “The Jewel of Medina,” a novel about one of Mohammed’s wives. The fanatics who destroyed his house were not angry at the content of the book; it had not been published yet, and no one but the author and publisher knew what it was about. News reports since suggest that it is a historical romance which contains nothing critical of Islam or Mohammed. The author seems puzzled by the furor, which demonstrates her ignorance of present day Islam. Whether she knows anything about Arabia in the time of the founder of Islam is irrelevant. She and her book have been targeted by the fanatics because she is not muslim. To them the founder of their religion is off-limits to infidels. We are not supposed to say anything about him, and muslims can mention Mohammed only to praise him as the only totally perfect human being.

          After the bombing, the usual suspects popped up on TV– the supposedly moderate muslim leaders who said what they always say: “I do not condone violence of course, but naturally I understand the terrible pain that pious muslims feel when our religion is treated disrespectfully.” The muslims have got this one-two punch down to a perfect routine by now. First the violence, then the so-called moderates who always speak more in sorrow than in anger, who never condone violence, but always understand it. When police use this trick, it is called the good cop/bad cop routine and the dumbest crooks figured it out a long time ago. Unfortunately the progressive intellectuals of Europe are still falling for the bad muslim/good muslim charade. The muslims know that they have found a winning strategy and they’re going to keep using it.

           In reality, moderate muslims do not understand the thugs who commit violence in the name of Allah. They consider them evil or insane, but they are afraid to say that on TV or in print, because they don’t want their own homes to be firebombed. They have been frightened into silence, just as the media in Europe as a whole have been frightened into self-censorship. The newspapers, and even more so the TV networks, have been scared off the entire subject of Islam. No one wants to be the spark that sets off the next wave of riots, and since the muslims are so unpredictably touchy about their religion, Islam is considered to be too dangerous to write about. Silence is said to be more ‘respectful’ and the fanatics thereby win their battle against free speech.

          They win, but only because no one wants to be singled out as their enemy. That small newspaper in Denmark was vastly outnumbered when the fanatics whipped the whole muslim world into a frenzy, and that editor discovered that very few of his colleagues jumped to his defense. But, we don’t have to play this game on the fanatics’ terms. They can’t pick us off one by one if we don’t fight them one by one.

          When Benjamin Franklin signed the United States Declaration of Independence, he said to the other rebels who had also signed it, “Well, gentlemen, now we will have to hang together, or we will surely hang separately.” I think now is the time for all the news media of the free world to hang together to fight the muslim attack on free speech. I’m saying we’ve got to stop giving them one target at a time.

          I propose that four days per year be designated as “International Say Anything About Islam Days.” On those days every newspaper, TV station, website and blog should carry information and comment on Islam. I’m not suggesting that they should criticize or attack Islam. I’m saying that they should use their God-given freedom to say anything they want to say about Islam. Some commentators will criticize, others will praise, some will delve into dry history. The fanatics will be furious about a great deal of it, at least in the beginning, but they will be outnumbered and they will have no single target for retaliation, as long as everyone who believes in free speech takes part. The four days that suggest themselves to me are the two equinoxes and the two solstices: March 21, June 21, September 21, and December 21. They are all three months apart and they have the same non-ideological, non-religious meaning all over the planet. The equinoxes especially are a perfect symbol of equality. On those two days, in March and September, every spot on earth has twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness. To me this symbolizes all that we should be willing to grant to Islam: equality, and no more. They want the right to criticize other religions, but they want their own religion to get a free pass. Christians, Jews and Hindus long ago recognized the right of others to comment freely on their respective religions. I can say that I don’t believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and there are no Christians anywhere on earth who will want to kill me. But if I say that I don’t believe Mohammed was a prophet of God, there are plenty of muslims who will want to kill me. They want the freedom to say that Jews are the descendants of pigs and monkeys. They want the freedom to say that Christianity today is debased from the time of Jesus and therefore not worthy of respect, but they don’t want anyone to say that Islam is a fake religion on the same level as Scientology. They are trying to get laws passed in Europe that would make it a crime to show disrespect to a religion.

          I think Islam should get the same protection that all other religions get: none. A religion cannot be slandered. It will be respected if its followers lead respectable lives. I also believe that respect must be voluntary. It cannot be demanded under threat of violence. This is something that far too many muslims do not understand—the difference between respect and fear. They will learn the difference only if their threats fail.

          I think that International Say Anything About Islam Days could begin an educational process for muslims. Since the four days will come on the same dates every year, those muslims who do not want to read or hear anything controversial about their religion can simply avoid Western media on those days. However, there are moderate muslims. At present they are marginalized in their own communities by fear. They might look forward to four days per year when they could learn things that their own mullahs and imams would never tell them.

          Say Anything About Islam Days is not the program of any group or government. It’s my own wild idea and I will resist seeing it formalized, regularized or bureaucratized in any way. It will only flourish if it fills a real need. Participation is voluntary. However, for those newspapers, TV networks and websites who don’t see any need to get involved, I suggest that you enjoy your freedom while you still have it. When the Islamic Dome of Silence descends over your country, you will not have the right to say anything about Mohammed. You will only be allowed to say how much you love him.

 

Edmund Pickett

Not Copyrighted

         

         

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