Totalitarianism Featured One year of Western escalation submission in Ukraine: what lessons? The power of nuclear weapons lies not in their use, but in their possession, provided you maintain escalation dominance. Conceding escalation dominance reduces you to one of two states: ineffective nuclear weapons; or nuclear war. Unless you are a nihilist, your nuclear weapons become useless.
Polemics Featured There are NO human rights violations in Iran: Answer to Dr Alon Ben-Meir There are no human rights in Islam, so there can be no human rights in an Islamic Republic. There are no human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, so there can be no human rights violations in Iran.
Totalitarianism Featured And STILL they prattle on about a “women’s revolution” - Part 3 The Iranian regime is not against women per se; it is against everyone who is not the Supreme Leader. Everyone is subject to arbitrary control, and the arbitrary power of all strata ends up borne by women, in Iran instrumentalised in the hijab.
Israel Misguiding the Perplexed - Part 2 Had Salman Rushdie been Jewish, we would have welcomed him as an absolutely standard member of the Jewish community. It didn’t even register on the Richter scale in terms of Jewish challenge
Totalitarianism Featured And STILL they prattle on about a “women’s revolution” - Part 2 I point this out neither to absolve men, nor to tarnish women, but only to make the point that the woman-man divide obscures, rather than illuminates, the events in Iran. It obstructs, rather than facilitates, understanding.
Karl Popper Featured Tolerating Popper Popper would find it very hard to believe that something so much worse than Nazism had been a plague upon the earth for more than a thousand years, and that, after the horrors against which he warned, we hold it as a virtue to tolerate Islam and to go easy on Muslims.
Totalitarianism Featured Christopher Hitchens’s “Axis of Evil” speech, Part 2: Iran The Iranian mullahs lost so many young people in the suicide waves that they sent against Iraq, the sending of gangs of school children and teenagers to clear minefields on the Iraqi border. There's not enough room in large parts of Iran to bury the number of people they killed.
Polemics Featured Msreading Iran "Women Life Freedom" is not a feminist slogan and this is not a “women’s revolution.” The events unfolding in major parts of the Muslim world mean that after almost 200 years, the 1848 revolutions finally resume: the autonomous individual is far from dead, with a tip of the hat to George Orwell.
Polemics Featured "Islam is not a religion," Answer to Lloyd de Jongh - Part 4 It might offend Lloyd de Jongh to learn that for Islam, his religion is not important enough to warrant "correcting" its errors.
Jihad Featured Anatomy of a madness, Part 2 I read The Satanic Verses in the winter of 1996-97, unemployed and frozen, and again in the winter of 2014-15, Charlie Hebdo on TV 24/7. The third time was in that magical realist summer of 2020, with a fresh-ish MFA to my name, to study the work as art. 12 August 2022: the author survived.
Jihad Featured Anatomy of a madness, Part 1 I read The Satanic Verses in the winter of 1996-97, unemployed and frozen, and again in the winter of 2014-15, Charlie Hebdo on TV 24/7. The third time was in that magical realist summer of 2020, with a fresh-ish MFA to my name, to study the work as art. 12 August 2022: the author survived.
Jihad Featured "Will Nupur Sharma ever lead a normal life? Should moderate Muslims speak up?" - A commentary - Part 4 I hate to be borne out in such a horrible way, but this sorry state of affairs obtains only because too many people, in their self-righteous ignorance and arrogance, insist on making a distinction between so-called "radical" Muslims and "moderate" Muslims.
Totalitarianism Featured Eid al-Adha, sacrifice no more While the relationship between Islam and the kufaar expands Islam, the relationship between the scholars and lay Muslims sustains it. The rejection of the relationship between the scholars and lay Muslims is huge, for it is existential.
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 12 "a boot stamping on a human face, forever." — George Orwell.
