New Voices

Burning Man: Vatican Edition! / How to Make a Pope Pinata.

In response to the Pope’s controversial speech in which he discussed the historical role of violence in Islamic faith, a group of Muslims in India have built a straw mock-up of the pope, doused it in gasoline and lit it on fire in front of the All Saints Cathedral Church. The group “also threw stones in the church compound and damaged the lamp-post at its main gate.[story]”

Meanwhile in Kashmir, approximately 150 protesters marched through the state capital Muzaffarabad chanting “Death to Pope.” -- Not to be outdone, they also burned what one Muslim called “a much bigger and better effigy than the one in India.” To this an Indian Imam countered "Oh those Pakistanis just have effigy envy."

And the Mujadeen consultative council released a statement in which it said “We say to the servant of the cross (the Pope): wait for defeat. We say to infidels and tyrants: wait for what will afflict you. We continue our jihad…We will smash the cross,” and, it added, “conquer Rome”. [Story]

Al Queda also declared another Jihad, though experts say that with all the Jihads they’ve got on their plate they probably won’t get to this one till approximately “sometime in the mid 2250’s, C.E.”

In unrelated news, today Rabbi Yitzhak ben Shlomo gave a talk about the historical role of Irony in Jewish and Islamic faiths.

"You see the Jews have always had a sort of… sense of humor about these kinds of things... In Egypt, when we were persecuted, the Jews laughed and said that one day we will be free. In Germany when we were slaughtered like animals, we laughed and said that someday we will have a state of our own. In Israel, when we were attacked by forces conspiring to destroy us in our entirety, we laughed and said 'America has lots of bombs and we're friends." Chuckling nervously, he said “Whereas Muslims, on the other hand, have a tendency to effigize first and ask questions later; which actually, come to think of it, may be why there are about 5 million Jews and 50 million Muslims… I wonder if there’s any extra lighter fluid in the synagogue…”

posted by Shlomocles @ 12:11 PM