ADAMANT

Going To Pot In Penang

  Thou Shalt Not Worship

    Teapots Before Me

A Malaysian woman has been jailed for two years for hooking up with the "teapot worshipping" Sky Kingdom cult, contrary to Sharia law which prohibits born Muslims converting to other religions. Authorities have accordingly  clamped down on the cult and demolished its two-storey sacred teapot symbolising the "purity of water" and "love pouring from heaven".

While Malaysia has constitutional guarantees of freedom of worship, apostasy is off the menu for the Muslim population.

Sharia High Court judge Mohammed Abdullah  said he'd "considered aspects of public interest and the sentiments of Muslims in the country", and told the defendant: "The court is not convinced that the accused has repented and is willing to abandon any teachings contrary to Islam. I pray God will open the doors of your heart, Kamariah."

Ali's lawyer, Sa'adiah Din, protested to reporters: "This has to stop. They can't be sending her again and again to prison for this. She informed the court that she is not a Muslim. She doesn't come under Sharia court anymore."

An appeal hearing will  "consider [Ali's] plea for a lighter sentence and to defer the date of her sentencing", the Malaysia Star notes. ®

Parting The Veil

Who's behind the dastardly Danish depictions ?
The NYTimes reports the Wikipedia 's posting of  representations of Muhammad The Prophet , taken from medieval manuscripts has become the subject of an online protest.

"A Frequently Asked Questions page explains the site’s polite but firm refusal to remove the images: “Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group.”

Surveilance  reveals that far from being the handwork of an innocent Dane, darker forces are behind the cartoons that have set heads rolling and seen presses smashed- To reveal the Marxist Islamofascist  very short villain behind this attack on ecumenical comity just :

If You're Left Out In Afghanistan's Planes

And the passengers riot, hang on to your brains:

200 Afghan pilgrims returning from their Hajj pilgrimage have inverted the  airplane highjacking paradigm By refusing  to disembark from a Kam Air flight at Kandahar Airport to protest  being kept aboard for 38 hours by filght delays in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

After a further 13 hours at  Kandahar, the pilgrims insist they won't budge until the government sacks the Minister of the Hajj, and files a case against the private airlines responsible.

Reports :

"Speaking to Pajhwok Afghan News by phone from the seized aircraft, an angry pilgrim Muhammad Wali complained they were flown from Saudi Arabia to Kandahar in 38 hours. The passengers were offered no refreshments during the time. He added they were initially stranded at Raas al-Khema in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for 18 long hours due to inclement weather conditions in Afghanistan.

"Disallowed to come out, we were kept confined to the aircraft without food,"

He alleged. Another pilgrim, who did not want to be named, also echoed the feelings of Wali. The returning pilgrims including women and the elderly had their feet swollen because of being confined to their seats for a long time, he grumbled. At the Kandahar airport, officials did offer them food but the pilgrims refused to disembark, explained the man, who made it clear:

"We will stick to our stance as long as we are not flown to Kabul. Additionally, the hajj minister has to be removed and legal action taken against the airlines."

In Kabul, deputy head of Kam Air Farid Paikar confirmed the seizure of the plane by the pilgrims at the Kandahar airport. Provincial government officials tried to convince the enraged hujjaj into leaving the plane but their efforts ended up in smoke, he admitted. The passengers were twice served meals following their arrival 30 hours ago, continued Paikar, who linked pilgrim problems to a belated contract signed with the private airlines.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Khyber, Dr. Sharif Sharjif  asks in the FP's letters column : :Who is responsible for this mess

The country is burning, hard hit by load shedding of electricity, gas, fuel, water and price hike of common commodity. The beautiful country is also in grip of looters, jehadies, and evil agencies. The common man is confused, ill ,hungry, dying and have no access to the hospital, school,and justice. The arm forces have been pushed into un-necessary unknown war with loss of precious life of jawan on daily bases. The two pillars of the state are behind the bar, one is paralysed and another one is justifying all its failed action. where are we going, what is our future and for how long we will suffer at the hand of these jehadies and evil agencies (both are the production of each other with one agenda, To kill the innocent Pakistani for the reason well known to them). May God give us honest sincere bold leader to save our loving country! Amen."

A Sense of Timing

The turmoil in Pakistan has scholars worried about the country's artistic and archaeological heritage. Relatively peaceful until recently, Swat was a tourist Mecca. The flowering of Gandhahan art in the area in the centuries after Alexander the Great  reflects is place as a crossroads of the  ancient Silk Route, where Hellenistic , Roman and Buddhist styles of art and worship converged.  As Rome declined, Tte Gandhara region became part of the Sasanian Empire (224-642), which preceded Islamic rule, and the regional style a consequently  influenced Persia's artistic development

Political instability in the North West Frontier province has left literally iconoclastic Talibani  militants unchecked and gravely endangered the cultural heritage of three millennia. On Monday, October 8, dynamiters obliterated the face of the  23-foot-high seventh-century seated Buddha carved into a rock face near the  Swat  Valley village of Jehanabad, finishing  what began  early  last fall,  when militants detonated explosives above and below the Buddha, but only damaged the  surrounding rock.

Police chief Mohammad Iqbal  says it's the work of local militants who condemn the carvings as un-Islamic invitations to idolatry, but views it as" a symbolic attack to embarrass the government internationally."  The Jehanabadis say an armed group entered their village on a Monday afternoon and announced their intention to destroy the Buddha. According to provincial archaeology  official  Aqleem Khan, the militants drilled holes into the rock and filled them with dynamite.

They waited until the next day to  set off the explosion . It was  September 11.

Shrunken Webheads

A minor masterpiece of tinfoil  pith helmet journalism graces National Review's online  roundup of reasons to invade Iran  today. It claims nefarious mullahs " make entire native tribes in Venezuela and Columbia convert to Shi'ia Islam."

This is the anthropological wisdom not of Carlos Castanada, but  Gustavo Coronel, who thinks the rise of internet cafes on the Guajira peninsula proof positive Hezbollah will jihadify Wayuu tribal villages better known for blowgun darts than WiFi reception: 

"The Hezbollah group invading Venezuela...are disseminating, via Internet, a strategy "to change Venezuela," :
* Attacking the upper classes, "who are the most corrupt," all white-collar criminals and continuing the cleaning downwards,
* Attacking corruption in government and in the masses, both civilians and military,
* Attacking false idols and satanic cults, as defined by them.
* Total destruction "of the sex industry."

As no word of Wayuu  appears on the Spanish language Hezbollah website Coronel cites, and the only book available in any Guajiro language is the New Testament, speculation abounds that while exploring  magical realism's native jungles for a dervish to interview, Coronel may  have run instead into some Wayuu shaman's famously terrifying arsenal of hallucinogenic snuffs. The short lifetime of those dangerous drugs would explain the retiree newsletter publisher recovering sufficiently in the space of a few paragraphs to add:

"Is the Venezuelan Hezbollah for real or is just the product of pranksters with a macabre sense of humor? ...This ghoulish presence in Venezuelan territory certainly deserves an immediate investigation and decisive action, if true...if the country is to be saved from ...turning into a work of horror, something out of Edgar Allan Poe's House of Usher or of H.P. Lovecraft's most morbid fiction... Neanderthal-like bureaucrats...in a Stalinist-type...decree "expropriating" the golf courses."

Unfortunately, this  confession came too late for the attention span of  AEI Senior Fellow Michael Rubin, who sold the tale to  NR and other blogs

Death And Taxes In Vwuip

David Muffett OBE was riding down villains in Nigeria even before they discovered internet fraud. Sadly, he has declined his last dinner invitation. Long before I visited Biafra, the imposing Administrator of Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service looked into the Kano Native Authority with such vigor that Emir Sir Muhammadu Sanussi, abdicated, and "Aka yi masa mafed"--' they did him a Muffett' became a Hausa byword for  "Justice caught up with him."

The Falstaffean magistrate dined out on a Mandevillean tale of collaring the Tigwe of Vwuip , a sahel highlands chieftain with decidedly novel views on the relationship of death and taxes. Muffett, though a great respecter of local customs, did so because the Tigwe, impressed by a district tax collector's miraculous ability to squeeze shillings from indigent indigenes, ate him in an effort to assimilate his fiscal acumen

The problem was less the loss of the tax collector than UN officials about to arrive. Muffett maintained he " wasn't about to have one of them eaten. I considered that it would be a highly retrogressive step."  So he locked up the Tigwe "until the delegation had departed beyond the reach of his culinary aspirations."

In 1958, at the  Nigerian constitutional conference in London, he seconded his friend al-Hadji Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, whose murder in 1966 unleashed the anti-Ibo atrocities that lead to Biafran secession. It was in Owerri in 1968 that I first heard  of Muffett's efforts to end the civil war. He also preceded me as an Associate of Harvard's Center for International Affairs, lecturing on the evils of Apartheid and working on his account of post-colonial Nigeria's dictatorial woes Let Truth Be Told. Full of years and honors, he passed away in England on 30 September.

Chloroform In Print

OBL's  latest account of what he did during our summer vacation can be read here , the script perhaps reflecting input from OBL's sidekick, Adam Gadahn, AKA Azziz The American.

The result of filtering the text through Fox's idea of translation is less the King James Version Arabic of OBL's dreams than the wit and wisdom of Batman, as told by Robin.

TNR's New Embed?

Once they've sacked that wuss Beauchamp, perhaps they'll give Aidan Hartley a ticket to Baghdad. Here's his latest Spectator dispatch from peaceable Kenya:

                      RAID RAGE
I sat down to write this next to the skull of a Samburu cattle rustler who recently fell in battle. Nothing remains of him for us to bury today except his cranium, some healthy teeth and an anorak. Hyenas ate the rest. His last moments are recorded by the red ochre war paint smeared across smooth boulders, marking where he crawled on his belly. Here a posse of Pokot tribesmen surrounded him. Nearby rocks and trees are shattered by bullets. Incoming rounds blew the rustler’s head apart. The trail of war paint ends where the earth is stained in the ghostly red outline of a man.

Orientalism For Earth Day

Reviewing The Scandal of Empire for The New York Review Of Books , William Dalyrymple celebrates an environmentalist East India Company magnifico whose feather light carbon footprint should set Vanity Fair subscribers to gnawing their Prius steering wheels in shame:

The Boston-born Sir  David  Ochterlony ...every evening used to take all thirteen of his Indian consorts around Delhi , each on the back of her own elephant.

 

O, for a Muse of fire!

Hailing the 62nd Anniversary Armed Forces Day on 27 March, Myanmar's Subcommittee for Holding of the Military and Marching Song Competition of the Work Committee for the Organizing of Poem and Arts Competition , Deputy Minister for Culture U Soe Nyuntas chairman, announced there will be only one category, Professional Level, for the military marching song competition.

"Songs must be composed and based on the twelve objectives of the State, the objectives of the 62nd  Anniversary Armed Forces Day and the twelve fine traditions of Tatmadaw. Entry songs must be in accord with military song composing techniques."

                          Marching make you feel depraved?
                                     Write some songs for Burma Shave!

Words of the entry song with its ten typed copies and an origin of its music notes attached to the cassette or reel with brief autobiography of the entrant and the singer plus three passport size colour photos must be sent to SHMMSCWCOPAC secretary U Ko Ko Htwe no later than 20 December."

Madrassic Park

After the Evil Empire went infarct , some proposed a Godforsaken Siberian SSR be set aside as an unhappy homeland for superannuated Red Terrorists and KGB goons. if  Iraq doesn’t quite work out as unplanned, the end game may likewise need wider regional expanses of flypaper to divert al Qaeda wannabes from visiting terror on our shores. But where to put it?

One way to keep wayward Islamic youth from adding to the list of nations with nuclear bombs is to relocate them to states that have already up and proliferated. But  Pakistan is full up with Islamists, and keeping all your bad eggs in the same basket case is a risky proposition . We need another South Asian magnet for madrassa drop-outs and Gitmo rejects , spacious enough to serve as  an endangered species preserve for deobandicoots , mullapedes  and  whatever other other exotic  post-GWOT life forms may evolve. Call it Madrassic Park.

Marxoid Naxalites have made an eyesore of Mysore's once green  expanses of elephant grass , but there is broad grazing , safely away from Madras and madrassas alike , in the land of that bona fide band of Indian terrorists, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland. if anything can give  Syrian Social Nationalists IslamoFalangistas and/or   suicidal CaliphFatalists the screaming meemies , as a matter of praxis it's the NagaNazaxists. This may be the one place left  outside of  Antartica where OBL would offer a 25 million dollar reward for his own extradition.

The Naga nabobs are not easy-going folk like StalinoSufis or SaracenoScientologists, but hard bitten cadres whose ancestral pastime is headhunting . So ferocious are  their thank-you notes that their Yale and Vassar applications are forwarded unopened to Post Restante on Saint Helena. So severe is their factionalism that weapons of mass destruction can be delivered to them with impunity, serene in the knowledge that they will use them on each other at their next convention, if they have one.

Their last caucus is rumored to have ended in a flurry of blowgun darts and a mass release of kraits in the ladies room. Yet recently, moderates have been gaining the upper hand--sources close to Ambassador Wilson and the North Korean Consulate in Jonestown discount claims that Nagaland  has tried to obtain weapons grade  Kool Aid from Guyana.

Some may argue that the Tamil Tigers  might make more affable hosts for Post-Mahdiists , but that entails a terror risk worse than an electromagnetic pulse attack on Wall Street. A blow back into India's offshore  brokerage back rooms and American English call forwarding centers  could shatter the nation’s will to stay the course. Bin Laden might declare victory if he torpedoed Bangalore's switchboards and sent global cell phone set-up times soaring. So let’s start palavering with Nagaland while there is still time to spare for recrimination. There should be no communication problem  between the Burmese borderland and the Beltway, for while mosques abound  in nearby Bangladesh,  televangelism has turned 21st century Nagaland is as Baptist as Tennessee.

One possible intermediary is  Yaqoob Qureshi of Uttar Pradesh, also known as 'The Turbanator'. Minister Qureshu  demonstrated  his respect for both Islamic and  Naga family values  by offering a  $14 million  reward  for the head of the Danish cartoonist whose image of Mohammad wearing  explosive headgear led to a global orgy of cheese beating earlier this year.