Green Oasis

The Death of Yugoslavia is an excellent BBC documentary on the causes and course of the wars in the former republics of Yugoslavia. It is primarily told through extraordinary interviews with those in power. I am amazed that they got so many leaders to speak so candidly about the war. It reminds me that the power to do great evil is in the banal hands of democratically elected political leaders. (via kottke.org)

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we (i.e. Americans) eat.

I avoid posting all the police abuse stuff that I hear about if for no other reason than that there’s so much of it. The quantity threatens to make me blasé about the subject. This story (and others) makes me shake my head in disbelief.

Police tasered a 17-year-old boy who was in paramedics’ care because he had a seizure. When he woke up, he became disoriented and frightened due to a condition known as postictal psychosis. He struck a paramedic and the police attempted to restrain him by tasering him twelve times!

The police and paramedics lied in their reports stating that he had only been tasered twice despite ample physical evidence to the contrary.

The idea that the taser is nonlethal makes us too willing to use it. Tasering someone twelve times is excessive. It’s fortunate that this didn’t end in tragedy.

Sam Harris made a provocative comparison between the FLDS and Islam:

A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was immediately followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In Texas, police raided an FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage girls into custody to spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their menfolk. While mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded to all major religions in the United States, its fundamentalist branch, with its commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides (and, therefore, child rape) is often portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in terms of its most negative instances, is far more despicable than fundamentalist Mormonism. The Muslim world can match the FLDS sin for sin–Muslims commonly practice polygamy, forced-marriage (often between underage girls and older men), and wife-beating–but add to these indiscretions the surpassing evils of honor killing, female “circumcision,” widespread support for terrorism, a pornographic fascination with videos showing the butchery of infidels and apostates, a vibrant form of anti-semitism that is explicitly genocidal in its aspirations, and an aptitude for producing children’s books and television programs which exalt suicide-bombing and depict Jews as “apes and pigs.”

Any honest comparison between these two faiths reveals a bizarre double standard in our treatment of religion. We can openly celebrate the marginalization of FLDS men and the rescue of their women and children. But, leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of traditional Islam?

Update: Jesus and Mo’ weigh in on the issue.

Warning: This video contains disturbing depictions of violence.

Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, recently released Fitna, a film representing his views on the Islamization of Europe and its consequences for liberal democracy.

I object to the film’s conflation of Islam with extremism. There are many Muslims who do not follow the kind of Islam portrayed in this film.

Having said that, the film speaks the truth about the barbarity of humanity and its relationship to religion. Liberal Muslims face similar challenges to the Judeo-Christian West when we contemplate our past and its holy books. The Qur’an and the Bible are both farces of antiquated violence, reminders of how far civilization has come. There are beautiful pearls of wisdom in their verses, but they are buried in page after page of shit. This confusion of wisdom and madness makes it easy for bigots to cloak themselves in the robes of a priest, pastor, or imam. Religion is often the torch bearer for our brute past. Religion often makes this kind of hatred and bigotry look respectable and good.

Gone are the days when we can hold a live-and-let-live attitude regarding religious extremism. Everyone who values the freedoms that came out of the Enlightenment—such as freedom of religion, speech, and the printing press—must fight side-by-side to give birth to a better world where humanity has left behind its violent past. We cannot, however, win this fight by reverting to violence ourselves, but must be willing to disrespect violent religious beliefs while preserving the right to hold those beliefs. We must be willing to break the social taboo against openly criticizing another’s religious beliefs. We must start a verbal war against those who would take our freedoms from us. Christians, Jews, Muslims, non-believers, humans of all stripes must find common cause against fundamentalist religion which clings so tightly to our violent past.

Update: Fitna was taken down for a few days due to death threats received by liveleak.com. Some Muslims out there are doing a good job persuading me that Islam in fact is a religion of violence. Accuse Islam of being a religion of violence and get threatened with violence. Ironic, n’est-ce pas?

30/3/2008: Liveleak Update **

On the 28th of March LiveLeak.com was left with no other choice but to remove the film “fitna” from our servers following serious threats to our staff and their families. Since that time we have worked constantly on upgrading all security measures thus offering better protection for our staff and families. With these measures in place we have decided to once more make this video live on our site. We will not be pressured into censoring material which is legal and within our rules. We apologise for the removal and the delay in getting it back, but when you run a website you don’t consider that some people would be insecure enough to threaten our lives simply because they do not like the content of a video we neither produced nor endorsed but merely hosted. (emphasis added)