Sunday, April 09, 2006

Belly Dancing Banned - in the effort to defeat the Israelis!

Sometimes, all I have to do is look over my shoulder to feel a little better about the Lebanese political class. For all their corruption, short-sightedness and egomaniacal tendencies, at least some of them refrain from crossing certain red lines.

In one of its first major, news-breaking initiatives to help the Palestinian people overcome Israeli aggression and economic hardship, Hamas has decreed that it is now illegal to belly-dance.

Bellydancing is naked women. This is not Islamic. The Egyptians come here and do it. And there are a lot of Russian belly dancers in Egypt and they come here too

...

If the phenomenon of belly dancing spreads our people might react against it by killing people. We don't want our people to become like the Taliban.

...

There's moral corruption. The blue films Israel sends us are quite corrupting. We have to resist them.

You know, I think we have all heard of the "religion is the opium of the masses" cliche... but when I see the "solutions" that some of these Islamist political parties propose for problems (some of which we all share), I feel like puking!

Problem: Occupation by a foreign power
Islamist Solution: ban belly dancing

Problem: High unemployment
Islamist Solution: cover women from head to toe and ban them from working

Problem: Lack of education
Islamist Solution: get kids to memorize koran front to back and in reverse

Problem: Economic Deprivation
Islamist Solution: force business to close during times of prayer

Islamic political parties are full of fluff. The only reason people vote for them is because they present themselves as honest, and they effectively articulate problems that we all know exist. When people ask them "what are your solutions"? We get: "Islam."

It will take time, but sooner or later, they will fail. True they are honest... but they are not yet in power. "Islam a solution?" Solution to what? Maybe to the problem that Islam is not as prevalent in society as they would like it to be.

My only fear is oil money. If a collection of 10-year-old kids were able to somehow control the oil money pouring into the Middle East, they could rule however incompetently they wished and buy their time in power - indefinitely.

That analysis applies to the Saudis today, and will apply to any group that manages to control the immense oil reserves in the Gulf - including Islamist groups who would take the entire region back to the 7th century.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

OT, but i can't find another place for saying this. Raja, here it comes, what i had predicted a while ago: march 14 does a full 180 degree, and now is happy with seeing lahoud through to his last day in power. why? because "anything but aoun" is a logical and fair policy to a gang that can barely hold together anymore. yesterday hamade named the march 14 "candidates": the insipid nassib lahoud, your grovelling friend butros harb, and my cousin (yes she is, through the late rene') nayla moawad. for god's sake! nayla moawad: even her own family can't stand her! (and if i tell you all the insider stories...)

i asked you before: where would you stand if they changed their policy? they just have: will you follow blindly?

2 more years of totally frozen government, people starving, even the last iota of momentum of the spring revolution dying off slowly. solidere doing pretty good though. anyone but aoun. hurrah!!

Anonymous said...

Next we should forbid women from having access to public restrooms, because we all know what goes on in those places...

Need I even say anything about the green oval in AUB?

Dr Victorino de la Vega said...

Now that the new Hamas-dominated Palestinian government has been sworn in, many analysts and Middle-East experts are trying hard to assess the “true nature” of Hamas…

But there’s no need to look up their official website, or try to interpret Ismaïl Haniyyeh’s latest double-entendre cryptic press conference- always short on substance and long on pseudo-paradoxical witticism such as “we will never recognize the wicked Zionist entity, but on the other hand we’re willing to sign a peace treaty with our beloved neighbors” or vice versa or something.

The truth is easy to find: Hamas is just the local Palestinian branch of the “Muslim Brotherhood” (MB) a neo-Hambali totalitarian movement that gave birth in the past 80 years to a multitude of local organizations and franchises from Al-Qaeda’s South-Asian “Jihâdi” activists to the more presentable “quietist” Islamist technocrats now ruling Turkey and knocking politely on Europe’s (rightly closed) door.

Throughout the Cold War and even until the late 1990s when Bosnian and Albanian Islamist terrorists received generous shipments of weapons and ammunitions from NATO bases, Washington and Tel-Aviv have systematically helped, funded and trained legions of Muslim Brotherhood-type Islamist fundamentalists in order to fight the (much inflated) threat coming from the perceived enemy du jour be it “international Marxism” or “Baathist Pan-Arabism”, or even worse, “terrorist organizations” combining both ideologies such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by US-educated Palestinian and Jordanian Christians such as George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh…

But, as the Neocons have “won the Cold War”, or so they think, the Prophet’s crescent seems to have replaced Lenin’s sickle as the instrumental incarnation of evil in the minds of paranoid Pentagon planners and on the TV screens of America’s living rooms: the Neocons are now desperately trying to close the Islamist Pandora Box they had deliberately opened in the first place.

Clearly, this is bad news for the bearded bigots now in power in the West Bank and Gaza strip. These days, Hamas views itself as a “centrist” Islamist organization laying somewhere in the middle of the MB ideological spectrum, as the movement’s self-deluded leaders still believe they can be both Erdogans in the West and Talebans in the Orient, an increasingly untenable positions as their (former) Israeli benefactors have started calling their bluff, using a deadly mix of financial strangulation and “targeted” mass killings to convey their message to the newly-elected Palestinian government.

As usual, innocent Palestinian civilians will be caught in the crossfire while America’s Neros pursue their geopolitical “great game” and Europe’s Pontius Pilates wash their hands and courageously look the other way.

Anonymous said...

Raja i think you are better adept at Lebanese issues although even at those I think you are not so adept.

Beiruti AKA
Professor Emeritus Eric the Red of the Glorious Vikings son of Hernandez Alvaron de Don Quixote qui Asta La Meurta commo la neo-Raspotinos a Vodka Moskovskaya

Anonymous said...

Well you seem to have completely ignored the fact that Hamas has declared an end to suicide bombings. When did they "cover women from head to toe and ban them from working", "get kids to memorize koran front to back and in reverse" or "force business to close during times of prayer"?

There's lots to be said about Hamas in particular and Islamists in general but it appears you're not the one to do it with any serious insight. Stick to Lebanon.

JoseyWales said...

Don't worry Raja,

All these good commentators are secular and modern and enlightened. They just happen to like Hamas, it's just that irresistible Palestinian thing. (You know, don't matter what they do, they're lovable, because in 1948 .....)

PS. Can someone update me: is it OK to have sex with clothes off or not? Where's that scholarly debate?

PPS. Latest Vic stauts update: still an idiot.

Anonymous said...

is it OK to have sex with clothes off or not?

Silly you. How did the thought of taking off your cloth passed by your mind? pervert.

Raja said...

Acrobat,

you touch a very raw nerve. I don't think any more can be said about the inability of FPM and March 14 to arrive at a consensus regarding the President. It is a pathetic situation!

Anonymous said...

pathetic is the word...

By the way, this time on-topic, let's put things in perspective here... islam supposedly is a few *centuries* younger than christianity... but here's a quote from 1956 by an american minister (priest) Albert Carter:
"The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness; impair nervous stability and destroy the sanctity of marriage. It is an evil influence on the youth of our country."

more gems:
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/war.html

lecentre said...

Actually, this failure is already visible; read Allah economics by Luigi Frascatti, which basically explains that
Islam Doesn't Work with Capitalism (that's the link to Allah Economics). It's an in-depth, erudite analysis.
Hope that helps
lecentre
centrerion.blogspot.com