Fab Fayyad Fibs

Salam Fayyad has been quoted:

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad strongly rejected using his people as a justification for the French killings, calling them a "cowardly terrorist attack."

"It is time for those criminals to stop exploiting the name of Palestine through their terrorist actions," Fayyad said in a statement.

But wait, who has been killing hundreds * of Jewish children, women, elderly and even foreigners here in Israel but...Arabs of the former territories of the Palestine Mandate?

You know, the ones they write academic articles about?

Like here and also here. And here where you can learn that

Washington Post journalist Daniel Williams, in an article on the woman suicide bomber Abu Aisheh, estimates that there were fifty-nine acts of suicide bombings in the first eighteen months of the second intifada. Williams also notes that “the pool of potential bombers seems far from exhausted among despairing, hostile youths of Abu Aisheh’s generation.” A Ha’aretz article reports on research conducted by a psychology lecturer at Al-Aqsa University, Fadal Abu-Hin: “In Apri1 2001, Abu-Hin conducted a research study among 1,000 young Gaza Strip Palestinians, aged 9 to 16. According to the results he published, over 40 percent of the respondents said that they were actively involved in the intifada. Over 70 percent said that they wanted to be martyrs. ‘If I were to carry out the same study today,’ says Abu-Hin, ‘I am sure the figures would be even higher,’...

There's this book and this one.

________

*

The first suicide attack ascribed to the Palestinian cause occurred on 16 April 1993, [the first modern one was the US Marine barrakcs in Lebanon] when a car bomb exploded near Mechola in the Jordan Valley. Between then and March 2004, 139 suicidal-attack incidents attributed to Palestinian operators transpired against Israeli targets (Figure 1). Between 1993 and September 2000, 27 suicide missions claimed 120 of the 290 Israeli deaths attributed to Palestinian attacks; since then, 112 suicide bombings have accounted for 474 of 918 Israeli Second Intifada fatalities while wounding more than 3,000, despite composing less than 1 percent of all violent incidents. These tallies do not include failed suicide operations (i.e. attacks intercepted by security forces or crippled by device failure); the number of attempted attacks is thus higher...recently an increasing number of these attacks have been claimed by the collaborative efforts of two or more Palestinian militant groups. From 1993 through April 2004, 46 percent of all suicide bombings were carried out by Hamas, 29 percent by PIJ (Palestine Islamic Jihad), and 22 percent by Fatah (Figure 2); the remainder were by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) or were claimed by two or more groups.

and this:

Since the onset of the Palestinian Intifada in September 2000 through August 2005, 151 Palestinian suicide bombing attacks have been launched against Israeli targets, killing 515 people and injuring almost 3,500 more...

^

How A Funeral Causes Multiple Deaths

How?

When the funeral takes places in Baghdad:-

A suicide car bomb detonated Friday at a busy Baghdad intersection as a funeral procession was passing by, killing 32 people and injuring 65, authorities said.

It was the latest violent attack in the Iraqi capital in what seems to be an escalating series of bombings targeting Shiite Muslims. Many Iraqis have voiced fears that their nation could be entering a new phase of sectarian bloodshed.

^

How Not To Advertise

There is this site that promotes tourism to Beirut.

Like:

* Night Clubs
* Pubs & Bars
* Restaurants
* Coffee Shops
* Hotels & Resorts
* Time Capsule
* Radio
* About Beirut
* Newsletter
* Movie Guide
* Events
* Lifestyle
* Listing
* Music
* News
* NightLife & Beaches
* Photo Gallery
* Video


Somehow, though, this ad of theirs reminds me more of a suicide bomber that a fun night:



Literally, that's hot.



- - -

No Virgins Here

Well, maybe one:

A female suicide bomber killed four people and injured 23 in an attack Sunday on a government building in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's western Anbar province.

Local officials said the attacker detonated explosives strapped to her body in the reception room of the provincial government headquarters.

The attack came as U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden was meeting Iraqi officials in Baghdad.

But she didn't go to the afterworld exactly whole.


- - -

Suicide Bombers Study

I saw this article's summary, Education, Income, and Support for Suicide Bombings: Evidence from Six Muslim Countries by M. Najeeb Shafiq, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA and Abdulkader H. Sinno, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, which reads:

The authors examine the effect of educational attainment and income on support for suicide bombing among Muslim publics in six predominantly Muslim countries that have experienced suicide bombings: Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey. The authors make two contributions. First, they present a conceptual model, which has been lacking in the literature. Second, they consider attitudes toward two different targets of suicide bombings: civilians within the respondent’s country and Western military and political personnel in Iraq. The authors find that the effect of educational attainment and income on support for suicide bombings varies across countries and targets.The findings therefore draw attention to the difficulties of making generalizations about Muslim countries and the importance of distinguishing between targets of suicide bombings.

If I read this correctly, Islamic suicide terrorists are probably smart, intelligent, well-educated and well-off and definitely not ignorant fanatics.

Darwin Award Winner Suicide Bomber

It's terrible to laugh at this, but life goes on, right?

A would-be suicide bomber accidentally blew himself up on Thursday, killing six other militants as he was bidding them farewell to leave for his intended target, the Interior Ministry said. "The terrorist was on his way to his destination and saying good-bye to his associates and then his suicide vest exploded," a statement from the ministry said...the incident happened in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan where mainly British troops are struggling against a growing Taliban-led insurgency.

When you've stopped giggling, ask yourselves:

Do all seven go to Paradise?

Do they all get 72 virgins or only the suicide bomber, for after all, they all probably intended to be suicide bombers eventually, no?

In this case, does he get beautiful and gorgeous virgins or just ugly ones?

Islamic Incongruency

If you go here, you can watch a pro-suicide bomber video which utilizes a popular Arab singer's sing-over.

But there's a slight incongruency.

At the one minute mark, he hugs his girlfriend to say goodbye.

That could never happen in Hamastan Gaza.

Statistics of Suicide Bombers

An Arab researcher had nothing better to do than count but it is quite interesting:-

Almost 300 children have been killed while taking part in terrorist attacks over the past eight years, a new study conducted by Palestinian Authority researcher Mahdi Jaradat has revealed. A total of 3,973 PA Arabs died in the past eight years while committing acts of terrorism, he found.

Fatah had the most fatalities, with a total of 1,437 terrorists, 128 of them children, killed since September 28, 2000. Hamas was in second place with 1,410 killed in the same time period, 96 of them minors. Fifty-three children were killed while taking part in Islamic Jihad operations, five were killed as members of the PFLP, four died with the DFLP, and three with PRC.

Women were increasingly numbered among terrorists as well. A total of 95 women were killed while carrying out attacks, Jaradat found. Thirty-four women were killed working with Hamas, and 30 with Fatah. Islamic Jihad, which had a much lower casualty rate than Hamas and Fatah overall, counted 24 women among its casualties.

Hamas carried out more suicide bombings than any other group over the past eight years, with a total of 72. Islamic Jihad was next with 48 suicide bombings, and Fatah was third with 42.

Back in July, he issued this study, whcih I found quite weird:-

Most of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces during the second Intifada had traditional Palestinian Islamic names, a new study shows.

The study by Mahdi Jaradat, a researcher in Palestinian affairs, found that 11 male names and six female names dominate the list of names of Palestinians killed during the Intifada between 29 September 2000 and 4 July 2008.

The findings of the study were as follows:

Among Palestinians killed in the first have of 2008, 830 were named Muhammad (up from 700 in all of 2007); 308 were named Ahmad (up from 160 in 2007); 135 were named Ibrahim (up from 101 in 2007).

Another 87 were named Yousif, 69 were named Iyad, 64 named were Hasan, 63 named 'Alaa and 58 were named Abdullah.

As for female "martyrs," 26 were named Fatima, 14 Eiman, 11 Maryam, 9 'Aesha and 7 named Muna and 7 named Asma'.

Luttwak's Thinking (And On Black-eyed Virgins)

In response to a critique in the Times Literary Supplement, Edward Luttwak had a letter published and I submit an extract:-

...Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s theory that Islamic orthodoxy blocks development, inducing violent expressions of frustration and humiliation because Islam simultaneously promises superiority in all things to its adherents – a frustration especially acute for the Arabs, whom the Koran itself names as the world’s best people. Enzensberger’s theory can certainly be criticized (e.g. the violence started before any frustration – Muhammad himself was as much raider as preacher) but not, as it happens, with the argument advanced by Hegghammer: “If the Muslim world has been retarded for a thousand years, why does the violent reaction come now?”.

That is unhistorical twice over: first, the Muslim world was doing very nicely c1008; second, when relative decline did become manifest centuries later, the seething resentment of almost all Muslim populations, which made it easy for truculent clerics to infuriate mobs into violence, became the salient hazard of travel in Muslim lands long before al-Qaeda. So it is not “now”.

Hegghammer does note his serious reservations about Robert Pape’s theory that suicide attacks have nothing to do with Islam as such but are merely responses to occupation, and mostly by non-Muslims. Pape’s numbers are fatally flawed by the inclusion of the Liberation Tigers of Sri Lanka, a sui generis case, and by the odd classification of Hezbollah and Hamas as territorialists rather than Islamists. But then Hegghammer fails to point out the central error of Pape’s reductionism, shared by many others: the minimization of the specifically Islamic incentive to fight and if necessary die (not suicidal attacks per se), which happens to resonate especially with young men trapped in forced celibacy: a promised paradise of orgiastic sex with both women and boys.

Muslim preachers in conflicted lands are much less bashful than Western commentators in specifying what Allah himself will provide to dead Jihadists: Koran 51–55, “ . . . We shall wed them to dark-eyed houris”. Koran 55:56–57, “ . . . bashful virgins neither man nor Jinn will have touched before. Then which of the favours of your Lord will you deny?”. Koran 55:57–58, “Virgins as fair as corals and rubies . . .” . Koran 55:70–77, “ . . . Dark eyed virgins sheltered in their tents . . . ”. Koran 78:31, “. . . gardens and vineyards, and high-bosomed virgins for companions . . . ”. Later jurists universally condemned homosexuality, and no preacher would now proffer it, but the text is explicit: Koran 52:24, “Round about them will serve . . . boys handsome as pearls well-guarded”. Koran 76:19, “ . . . boys of perpetual freshness: if thou seest them, thou wouldst think them scattered pearls”.

I for one genuinely do not understand why the centrality of the sexual promises to Jihadist mobilization is so persistently ignored, or even explicitly denied, by most Western analysts, hardliners very much included. There is no such hesitation among the protagonists themselves: outwardly at any rate, death in fighting the infidel is not mourned by their families and friends but celebrated as a zawaj, a wedding.

EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
4510 Drummond Avenue,
Chevy Chase, Maryland 20815.

As for the matter of Sex and the Suicidal Muslim, see here. Fromt the transcript:-

Saudi Cleric Omar Al-Sweilem Extols the Breasts and Thighs of the Black-Eyed Virgins of Paradise

Harith Ibn Al-Muhasibi told us what would happen when we meet the black-eyed virgin with her black hair and white face – praised be He who created night and day. What hair! What a chest! What a mouth! What cheeks! What a figure! What breasts! What thighs! What legs! What whiteness! What softness! Without any creams – no Nivea, no vaseline. No nothing! He said that faces would be soft that day. Even your own face will be soft without any powder or makeup. You yourself will be soflt, so how soft will a black-eyed virgin be, when she comes to you so tall and with her beautiful face, her black hair and white face - praised be He who created night and day. Just feel her palm, Sheik! He said: How soft will a fingertip be, after being softened in paradise for thousands of years!

There is no god but Allah. He told us that if you entered one of the palaces, you would find ten black-eyed virgins sprawled on musk cushions. Where is Abu Khaled? Here, he has arrived! When they see you, they will get up and run to you. Lucky is the one who gets to put her thumb in your hand. When they get hold of you, they will push you onto your back, on the musk cushions. They will push you onto your back, Jamal! Allah Akbar! I wish this on all people present here. He said that one of them would place her mouth on yours. Do whatever you want. Another one would press her cheek against yours, yet another would press her chest against yours, and the others would await their turn. There is no god but Allah. He told us that one black-eyed virgin would give you a glass of wine. Wine in Paradise is a reward for your good deeds. The wine of this world is destructive, but not the wine of the world to come.

Wow, closest I've come to pornography.

A Rose By Any Other Name Might Smell Differently

Since the suicide bombing phenonemom has begun, yet again, I think we should review again selections from this apologia for it by Jacqueline Rose who teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. Her books include On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World and, most recently, The Question of Zion. This is from a few years back:-

All suicides kill other people. However isolated the moment, suicide is also always an act of cruelty. Anyone left behind after someone close to them commits, or even attempts, suicide is likely to spend much of the rest of their life wondering whether they themselves have, or should have, survived. Suicide is rarely the singular, definitive act it appears to be. The ego, Freud tells us, turns onto itself the hatred it feels towards the object. But the object is never spared. No one commits suicide, the psychoanalyst Karl Menninger wrote in 1933, unless they experience at once ‘the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed’. You can die, but you can’t commit suicide, on your own.

Suicide bombing is most often considered a peculiarly monstrous, indeed inhuman aberration that cannot – or must not – be understood. When the Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge observed, ‘If I had to live in that situation – and I say that advisedly – I might just consider becoming one myself,’ the Israeli Embassy responded with this statement: ‘We would not expect any human being – and surely not a British MP – to express an understanding of such atrocities.’

Tonge was sacked from her party’s front bench. We can be fairly sure that had she expressed similar understanding of the policy of targeted assassination, or extra-judicial killing, in response to suicide bombings, she would not today be out of a job. The wording she used – ‘If I had to’ – is crucial. She was not sympathising: she was trying to imagine what it was like to be a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories. (She condemned the bombings.)...But perhaps there is a logic here. If the case for war is weak – or non-existent – then the ugliness and guilt of war rise perilously close to the surface of the public mind: war, in Levin’s words, as murder and revenge. In which case, it helps to be able to point to something far worse, preferably from another culture or world, with which no reasonable human being could possibly identify...

Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the reactions it provokes must, therefore, reside somewhere other than in the number of the dead. It is, of course, feared as a weapon against which there appears to be no protection, and to which there is no viable response: targeted assassinations simply provoke further retaliation (and Israel’s security wall is already proving incapable of deterring attacks). The horror it inspires cannot, however, be explained in terms of the deliberate targeting of civilians: according to McNamara, 100,000 people were burnt to death at the end of the war in the Allied attack on Tokyo, and in On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald describes the ten thousand tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped on the densely populated residential areas of Hamburg in the summer of 1943.

The horror would appear to be associated with the fact that the attacker also dies. Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western leaders at least, to be morally superior. Why dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear. Perhaps, then, the revulsion stems partly from the unbearable intimacy shared in their final moments by the suicide bomber and her or his victims. Suicide bombing is an act of passionate identification – you take the enemy with you in a deadly embrace. As Israel becomes a fortress state and the Palestinians are shut into their enclaves, and there is less and less possibility of contact between the two sides, suicide bombing might be the closest they can get...

...There is one thing that nobody will disagree with: the story of suicide bombing is a story of people driven to extremes. ‘Children who have seen so much inhumanity,’ El-Sarraj states, ‘inevitably come out with inhuman responses.’ We need to find a language that will allow us to recognise why, in a world of inequality and injustice, people are driven to do things that we hate. Without claiming to know too much. Without condescension.

Four, Five

Four, five strikes...

Police Chief Inspector Kobi Mor, who shot and killed one of the suicide bombers at the scene of Monday's attack on a Dimona shopping center, told Ynet, "When I arrived at the scene a man told me one of the bombers was still alive… I pulled my gun and saw him reach for the (explosive) belt.

"I shot at him and so did another officer from the bomb squad… he tried to reach for the belt again, at which point I knelt down and took four shots at his head."

Darwin Awardee

A WOULD-be suicide bomber fell down a flight of stairs and blew himself up as he headed out for an attack in Afghanistan, police say.

It was the second such incident in two days, with another man killing himself and three others on Tuesday when his bomb-filled waistcoat exploded as he was putting it on in the southern town of Lashkar Gah.

Yesterday's blast was in a busy market area of the eastern town of Khost, a deputy provincial police chief said.

The would-be attacker tripped as he was leaving a building apparently to target an opening ceremony for a mosque that was expected to be attended by Afghan and international military officials, said Sakhi Mir.

"Coming down the stairs, he fell down and exploded. Two civilian women and a man were wounded,'' Mir said.

Source


(Kippah tip: Atlas Shrugs)

I Hope Potential Suicide Bombers Can't Read

Why?

Well, you can read this:-

A Californian man has been charged with using his false leg to smuggle three endangered iguanas from a nature reserve in Fiji to the United States. Prosecutors say Jereme James stole the banded iguanas while on a visit to the South Pacific island in 2002. He is alleged to have constructed a special compartment inside his prosthetic limb to move the reptiles.

Amazing, Absolutely Academically Amazing

The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 51, No. 2, 329-348 (2007), published by Sage, contains an article entitled:

Does Democracy Matter?
Regime Type and Suicide Terrorism
by Sara Jackson Wade of the Department of Political Science Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia and Dan Reiter, also of the Department of Political Science Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Here's the abstract and not the conclusion:

This article conducts quantitative tests on the relationship between regime type and suicide terrorism for 1980 to 2003. We present the recently popularized argument that democracies are more likely to experience suicide terrorism and a new hypothesis that mixed regimes are especially likely to experience suicide terrorism. We offer several improvements in research design, including using more controls, the nation-year as the unit of analysis, and more appropriate statistical techniques.

Using both Freedom House and Polity data, we find that in general, regime type is uncorrelated with suicide terrorism. We do find that there is a statistically significant interaction between regime type and the number of religiously distinct minorities at risk (MARs) with suicide terrorism, but the statistical significance of this finding is limited, and its substantive impact is marginal.

We also find that national size, Islam, national experience with suicide terrorism, and global experience with suicide terrorism affect the likelihood of suicide terrorism.

Amazing, eh?

Absolutely academically amazing.

My Letter in Canada's National Post & Their Editorial

'Bomber' Samson not appreciated
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Re: Choir to depict bible hero as a suicide bomber, March 28.

The choice of Simon Capet -- musical director of the Victoria Philharmonic Choir -- to portray Samson as a suicide terrorist is perhaps a legitimate literary licensed decision. However, it is nevertheless invidious to link the Zionist Irgun resistance underground in 1946 to the Arab terror in Israel today. Mr. Capet is not reinterpreting the Bible, he is attempting to apply a moral equivalency: Jews in the 1940s were no better than Arabs today. That parallel is mendacious and malicious.

Irgun fighters took up arms against a regime that didn't belong to the country, as it had reneged on reconstituting the Jewish national homeland as charged by the League of Nations in 1922. They never purposefully attacked targets that were civilian.

Arab terrorists, on the other hand, are active almost exclusively against Israeli citizens. They had been killing Jews even before the 1967 war, before a presumed "occupation," their excuse for their actions.

Mr. Capet's real intention, I fear, is not a perversion of history but the maligning of Israel.

Yisrael Medad, Shiloh, Israel.

===========

See this previous posting for the story and my original letter.

===========

And there was an editorial:-

Hijacking Handel
National Post
Thursday, March 29, 2007

Most attempts to transplant classic plays and operas into modern settings are artistic disasters. But if the Victoria Philharmonic Choir (VPC) wants to try staging Handel's 1743 oratorio of the Biblical story of Samson as a tale of modern Middle Eastern terrorism, good luck to them. Artistic freedom needs to be protected -- whether the goal is to provoke debate or merely to drive ticket sales. Just, please, spare us the disingenuous claims that portraying the title character as a Jewish suicide bomber circa 1946 is not intended to offend. If one is going to undertake a controversial artistic adaptation, at least have the intellectual honesty and courage to admit one's motives are, at least in part, to shock prevailing sensibilities.

We will not dispute that there are superficial parallels between Samson and modern suicide bombers. Samson's final words as he toppled his enemies' temple on himself and 3,000 others was, "Let me die with the Philistines!" His homicidal/suicidal act was undertaken to deliver his people from the hands of their oppressors, in much the same way modern Islamofascists claim they are fighting neo-crusaders bent on stealing Muslim lands.

Even in the libretto of Handel's Samson, the religious context of the hero's act is clear. On the day of his death, he is brought to the temple of the Philistine god Dagon to be displayed before the gawking crowd. Under his breath, he welcomes the "rest" death will bring and the chance "to breathe heav'n's air, fresh blowing, pure and sweet." Yet, if he is to die, he vows that first he will make "the heathen hear [God's] thunder deep."

But even if these details do supply grist for those who seek to portray Samson as a Biblical-era jihadi, why would the VPC cast Samson as a member of the postwar Zionist brigade Irgun rather than, say, Hamas or al-Qaeda? And why have him blow up the British colonial headquarters at Jerusalem's King David Hotel in 1946 years ago instead of a busload of Jewish workers and school children in 2007? It would seem that if an artist wanted to make art that is relevant to today's audiences, he would choose a plot that echoes the current scourge of Islamist terrorism, not its short-lived mid-20th-century Jewish counterpart.

Simon Capet, the VPC's music director, explains "We didn't want to just present the work as a simple morality tale. There is a social and political commentary here that's important." But we suspect there is more to it than that. There is the scent of political correctness, too. Mr. Capet is likely playing a game of moral equivalence: "Look," he is telling his audiences, "You cannot condemn today's Palestinian bombers, because not that long ago Jews were doing the same thing."

No doubt, many of Mr. Capet's supporters see his production as edgy and courageous. But we doubt the VPC would have the courage to portray Samson as a Palestinian martyr. Not only would that offend Jews and Christians -- as the current production surely will -- it would also offend Muslims and multicultural boosters, two groups most lefty artists would never dream of slighting.

While we support Mr. Capet's right to mangle the works of Handel and express whatever point of view he wishes, we wish he would be more forthcoming about his intentions.

Capet Has Gone Kaput

My good friend, Sheldon Lerman, sent me this items:

Choir to depict bible hero as a suicide bomber

Samson to be a Zionist terrorist

VICTORIA - In the Bible, Samson is a hero who used his superhuman strength to do God's will by pulling down pillars in a Philistine temple, killing thousands and himself in an act of vengeance.

But in what's sure to be a controversial interpretation of the story, a Victoria choir will next month present Samson as a suicide bomber.

Simon Capet, music director of the Victoria Philharmonic Choir, says he wanted to update Handel's Samson oratorio to be relevant to today's audiences by drawing comparisons to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

"We didn't want to just present the work as a simple morality tale," says Mr. Capet. "There is a social and political commentary here that's important."

While the music will not change, the setting of the oratorio will be 1946 Jerusalem. Mr. Capet says he chose the period to draw comparisons to the bombing of the British headquarters at the King David Hotel by the militant Zionist group Irgun in that year. Menachem Begin, who ordered the attack, would later become Israel's prime minister and win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr. Capet says presenting Samson as a terrorist is not meant to offend anyone or point the finger at one group, but to challenge our notions of what a terrorist is.

"Is there any difference between pulling down a pillar or blowing a bomb?" asks Mr. Capet.

"Samson killed thousands [thousands? nice to know he literally interprets the Bible] of people. To show him in the traditional mythological sense does a disservice," Mr. Capet says.

The choir would not be the first to drawing comparisons between Samson and terrorism.

"There's a large focus on this right now, with Israel being presented as the Samson figure," says Andrew Rippin, dean of humanities at the University of Victoria and a specialist in Islamic studies. American journalist Seymour Hersh coined the term "the Samson option" in his book about Israel's development of a nuclear arsenal.

Shadia Drury, a philosophy professor and Canada Research Chair for Social Justice, recently compared Samson to World Trade Center bomber Mohammed Atta in a talk at UVic. In her book, Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics and the Western Psyche, she argues that terrorism is a biblical problem.

"The concept of a collective guilt is a flawed morality," she says. "The idea that 'We're on the side of God and everyone else is evil' has and always will be disastrous."

Ms. Drury says she thinks the choir's modern interpretation of Samson -- scheduled to run April 5, 7 and 8--is heroic.

But local Rabbi Itzchak Marmorstein says comparing Samson and the Irgun bombing will offend Jews and Israelis.

"It's an inappropriate comparison that promotes a shallow understanding of history," says Rabbi Marmorstein. "Israelis never supported Irgun or that kind of terrorism. They weren't heroes ... and Begin went into politics legitimately decades later. He wasn't some crazy terrorist."

One man who is already uneasy about the performance is Samson himself, played by Vancouver Island tenor Ken Lavigne.

"I'm really struggling with this," says Mr. Lavigne, 33. "I can't help but feel that a number of people will not enjoy this rejigging of a biblical hero."

Mr. Lavigne says he has warmed up to the idea of putting on an Irgun uniform and wearing a bomb-belt to sing the emotionally charged part since discussing it with Mr. Capet.

"Simon wants to get people talking about music and its relevance today," Mr. Lavigne says. "In the end I've had to accept that whoever I thought Samson was, what he committed was an act of mass murder."

So, off went this letter to the editor:-

Simon Capet's decision to portray Samson of the Bible as a suicide terrorist, while perhaps a legitimate literary-licensed decision, is nevertheless invidious as he seeks to link the Irgun resistance underground and the Arab terror in Israel today. Capet is not, one should note, reinterpreting the Bible but is attempting to apply a moral equivalency: Jews in the 1940s were no better that Arabs today. That parallel is mendacious and malicious.

The fighters of the Irgun, as well as the Lechi, or Stern Group, took up arms against a country that didn't belong to the country, closed the gates to war-time immigrants fleeing Nazi Europe and its ovens and reneged on reconstituting the Jewish National homeland as charged by the League of Nations in 1922. They never purposefully attacked targets that were civilian.

Arab terrorists, including suicide bombers, are active almost exclusively against Israeli citizens. They have been killing Jews even before the 1967 war, before a presumed "occupation", their excuse for their actions. Indeed, Arab terror began in 1920 and has never let up despite attempts to negotiate with them. Israel's compromises as a result of the Oslo Accords could not prevent the Arab terror and many are convinced no amount of Israeli surrendering will ever satiate their desire for practicing terror.

Capet's real intention, I fear, is not a perversion of history but the maligning of Israel.

You Just Knew This Was Coming, Yes?

Chris Morris has a new TV script idea.

Last week, a production company began seeking actors for “a TV film about a bunch of Pakistani lads living in Britain” that Morris is writing and directing for Channel 4.

Morris fansites have been speculating for months about a rumoured “suicide bomber” project. On the Cookd and Bombd site, a well-informed fan envisaged the film as being much like an “Islamic Young Ones”.

In the casting call itself, one character, Azzam, is described as “the sort of guy who’d protest against cartoons in a bomb belt”.

Here's part of the "casting breakdown":-

CLOSING DATE:Sunday, 20 May 2007, 23:59
wt; chris morris project (Film)

a tv film about a bunch of pakastani lads living in britain now,its about what they do-for work for play,what they believe,how the relate to their parents,families,the culture around them,their sense of heritage,its being writen and directed by chris morris for channel 4.

Producer: derrin schlesinger

Director: chris morris

Casting Details:
pls send cvs+photographs to des hamilton 104c camden st,nw1 0hy,thanks.
Role:
ahmed (Male)
Description:
british/pakastani,30,bright,intense,knowlegeable,not good with people,attended islamic law school in damascus for a year.
Role:
omar (Male)
Description:
british pakastani,29,ahmeds brother,more streetwise though not a gangster,persuasive,capable of empathy,smart around people,all overlayed on a low self esteem.
Role:
maj (Male)
Description:
british/pakastani,20,less bright but not totally dim,loyal follower of omar,big guy,strong works out,fearless.
Role:
hass (Male)
Description:
british/pakastani,21,bright,more middle class poss public school,moralistic,funny,studying IT after doing good at school.
Role:
azzam (Male)
Description:
british/pakastani,,22,college mate of hass,bright,articulate,provocative,loves the spotlight, loves winding people up, sort of guy who'd protest against cartoons in a bomb belt, mouthy.
Role:
crow uncle (Male)
Description:
british/pakastani,38,fairly bright,mad brooding,watches a lot of tv between odd jobs (nightwatchman etc),seems more of a hick than the others.
Role:
crow uncles nephew (Male)
Description:
british/pakastani,17,insanely intense......bright,very very focused,blind to anything he's not focused on,small seething boffin.

Think? Who, Me?

You would think that a member of the education system would consider the faculty of thinking as the primary characteristic of education.

I know that the above might appear redundant to some but consider this:

A supply teacher has been sacked from a secondary school following complaints from Muslim pupils. Andrew McLuskey was sacked from Bayliss Court Secondary School in Slough after a Religious Education lesson discussing the pros and cons of religion.

Pupils at the predominantly Muslim school claimed Mr McLuskey said most suicide bombers were Muslim.

"I think I should've been given the chance to respond to the allegations and not in effect be ejected from a job without the chance to defend myself."

The school authorities denied they were being heavy-handed and said their first priority was pupils' welfare.

"I don't think it's important what I think," said the school's deputy head teacher Ray Hinds.

"It's what the pupils think that were in the classroom at the time. And they were very upset."

Hmmm. Now, who was really doing the thinking, what were they thinking (if they were indeed thinking), who should really be upset, and...what do you think?

(Hat tip: Melanie Phillips)