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Edited on Sat Feb-04-06 09:31 PM by igil
I've learned to turn down the air-conditioning and be thankful I'm saving money ... at least in the summer.
But, yes. Having a bunch of crazed people calling themselves by the name reserved for members of a religious denomination and ostensibly doing reprehensible things in the name of that religion is chilling, in many ways.
Another is the inability of English speakers and the unwillingness of translators to make clear that there is no difference in Modern Standard Arabic between comparative and superlative. "Allahu 'akbar" emphatically does not use an adjective in the positive degree. It's not "God is great"; it's either "God is greater" or "God is greatest", with no meaningful difference between the two in that context. "Allahu kabir" would be "God is great." But that's not what they say: It's an affirmation of supremacy, not (at best) mere equality.
*That* is chilling.
More chilling, however, are people that quibble over exactly what to call them, split hairs over whether it's "the" religion or some simulacrum religion, all to make sure the reputation of what they believe is left intact and there's no chance of local recriminations--at least most of those people are simply rationally, if short-sightedly, self-serving. It also deprives them of any communal responsibility, in a religion that has traditionally relied on a very strongly communal sense of justice between groups.
I'm terrified of the people that debate endlessly whether this response is called for and justified, uncalled for and unjustifiable, or partially called for and only partially unjustifiable, given US atrocities in 1824, 1949, and the average price of wheat flour in Tobolsk; and given alleged but unproven, and certainly irrelevant, similarities in the composition of ink and superficial style between a Nazi cartoonist in 1938 and a number of Danish cartoonists. People who ponder endlessly what context will make the moral dilemma go away, absolve them of any need or requirement to pronounce a judgement against an ethnicity that they've so come to believe must be innocent, and then conduct their ratiocination based upon on the desired outcome, not the reported facts that should be used as input. Their only excuse is cowardice, moral or intellectual. Which it is is immaterial, when pitted against a foe (military or intellectual) that plausibly has a greater will to power.
edited for grammar.
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