Bin Laden in Heaven

Usama Bin Laden finds himself at the entrance to Heaven after being "double-tapped" in the middle of the night by a US Special Forces team. There to meet him is the Archangel Gibreel (Gabriel to Christians), who says, "Now, my son, you will taste of the destiny that I foretold."

With that, the Pearly Gates open, and out marches President George Washington, who punches Bin Laden in the stomach. Then President Thomas Jefferson punches UBL in the face. Then a kick to the groin from General Robert E. Lee. Then General "Light Horse Harry" Lee knocks UBL to the ground and kicks him in the kidney, while President James Madison kicks him in the chest. And there seems to be an endless line of figures coming to do more of the same.

"This is nothing like what you promised me!" shouts the anguished Bin Laden.

"You should have listened better to me," admonishes Gabriel. "I told you that if you persisted in your behavior, you would be met at the gates of Heaven by 72 VIRGINIANS."

When will the War be Over?

While cleaning up my files, I came across this reply to a friend, who wanted to know when I thought the war in Iraq would end.

To me, Iraq is not a war - it is a battlefront in a larger war: The War of Facism-with-an-Islamic-face against Liberal Democracy. It is indeed a world war, which started with the Iranian Revolution and finally caught our attention with the 9/11 attacks.

It is true that the US chose to initiate Iraq as a battlefront, and also true that it was a bad idea to do so (as we can all see in retrospect). But even if we pull out of Iraq, the war will go on against us.

We keep thinking of war in terms of our own culture - jump into a war, fight it full time, get it over with and then get back to normal. Our way of war decends from ancient Greece, in which the soldier-citizens were farmers, and had to get the war over with in time to get back to their fields to avoid starvation.

The horse-riding nomads of the Eurasian steppe thought of war differently. For them, war was something you did part time. You could spend part of any day fighting, and the rest of the time you grazed your horses. There was no "getting it over with," because if there was no more war, then there was no more honor to be won. The Islamofacist style of war descends from that of the horse peoples of the steppe - you work at your job, spend time with your family, and help place a bomb when you have a spare evening.

In other words, there is no Greco-Western ending to this conflict. This is just a phase of Globalization. The Islamofacists fear that their women will become liberated by the influx of Western values, and are fighting it with everything they've got. Ergo, the war will be over when women everywhere actually become liberated. There will be no surrender, just nothing to fight over anymore.

Women are the key to victory. Weapons can at best perform holding actions.

...

I think we all need to take a more global and more long term perspective, before precipitously acting - either to fight more or to fight less. We need to choose our battles more carefully, and fight them less intensively - with more emphasis on social relations than on firefights.

On the day of the 9/11 attacks, one of my neighbors and I put up the Stars and Stripes in front of our houses, and agreed to keep displaying it until the war was over. I guess I'll be keeping it there for a while yet.

Bin Laden is Dead

President of the United States Barack Obama has announced that Usama Bin Laden has been killed in a US raid on a compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan. I'm glad, but I'm not overjoyed. If I could have had my way, Bin Laden would have spent decades imprisoned in the basement of a building in Langley, VA, with only the disembodied voice of his interrogator for company. He could then die the natural death that is often slower and harder to bear than a bullet's impact.

Even now, the Obama Administration is seeing to it that Bin Laden's body is handled according to Islamic custom. I think this is far above what he deserves. To be a Muslim means to submit one's will to God's will, to become a willing servant of God. Bin Laden made himself a servant to his own Jihad, and conjured up an idol in his own diseased imagination which he also made to serve his Jihad. He then blasphemed by calling his idol God (Allah in Arabic). As such, Bin Laden had actually left the true path of Islam and become a Jihadi-Takfiri (Warfare-Apostate). He compounded his idolatry, blasphemy, and apostasy by getting others to do acts of outrageous violence, and by seducing others to follow him into his spiritual abyss.

No, I wouldn't give Usama Bin Laden an Islamic burial. I'd feed his body to wild pigs, collect the dung, and flush it into the sewers at the Pentagon, and around site of the former World Trade Center. Then, any converts to his cause who want to worship him could stick their heads in a toilet at either of these locations.

Oh well. There are bigger things going on. Japan has been going through a terrible time following the earthquake/tsunami of March 11 and aftershocks. The Arab peoples are attempting to throw off the chains of their oppressive governments, and are having a pretty grim time of it in some places. Let us pray for them all.

And then, let us thank God that Usama Bin Laden is now to appear in the history books, rather than the news.