Lives in a Shoe

Urban Legends

As a girl entering my teens I shivered at hearing such urban legends as The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs, The Hook on the Car Door, The Tarantula in the Ratted Hairdo. These stories, passed from kid to kid, often had something to do with transmitting social values through icy fear.

 

Scariest of all was the Spanish Fly Story. Seems a couple went to a drive-in where the boy spiked the girl's drink with Spanish Fly which drove the girl to uncontrollable lust. The boy ran off, or variously was found prostrate from exhaustion -- but the girl was found bloody and dead from having pleasured herself on the gear shift.

 

Apparently the Saudi  Religious Council has heard the story too.

 

Repealing a ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia would result in "no more virgins", the country’s highest religous council, working with Kamal Subhi, formerly a professor at the King Fahd University has warned.  No. More. Virgins A-tall.

The report warns that allowing women to drive would ‘provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce’.

Within ten years of the ban being lifted, the report’s authors claim, there would be ‘no more virgins’ in the Islamic kingdom.

And it pointed out ‘moral decline’ could already be seen in other Muslim countries where women are allowed to drive.

Here's the best part:

In the report Professor Subhi described sitting in a coffee shop in an unnamed Arab state.

‘All the women were looking at me,’ he wrote. ‘One made a gesture that made it clear she was available... this is what happens when women are allowed to drive.’

Really, Proffessor Subhi?  All the women were looking at you?  Really?

Imagine all these Arab men in their keffiyahs whispering the story to one another in deep dismay, believing that in this universe there is something that will cause women to become sexually insatiable.  And it's a drivers license. 

 

9/11

I remember who did it -- and after ten years of studying and trying to understand, I know why.  If you really want to honor the brave and the innocent dead, educate yourself.  Read the Koran.  Then look up "Abrogation".  There is a lot more to know but that will give you a start.

All this self-indulgent wallowing around in "tribute" --  maybe it would be better to quietly put a plaque somewhere at the Pentagon, at the WTC site, and in Shanksville.  All this other hoopla is a bit too show-biz for my taste.  We are not that weak, that teary, that old-womanish. If this were a movie, somebody would slap us silly and order us to get a grip.   

We are Americans, strong and brave. That is what we should never forget.

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Having said all that, and in a nod to inconsistency:  Here's the Budweiser 9/11 tribute -- shown once.  I remember I saw it and tried to describe it to George and could not stop crying.  Still affects me like that.

 

An Infidel Looks at Islam

...and would like to share what she learned and invite discussion.

Shortly after 9/11 I believed and repeated the "Islam is a religion of peace" tune and it really bothered me that there might be a backlash against peaceful Muslims particularly in the US.

 

After awhile -- maybe a few years -- reading the news and learning about the bad behavior of Muslims worldwide I tried to understand how so many of these people could be so clueless about their own religion.  If it really is a religion of peace, and if jihad really is a spiritual quest rather than a militant one, then how come these folks didn't get the memo? 

Well Done

ACLU gets it right.  Terry Jones cannot be denied his right to demonstrate in front of a mosque in Dearborn.  And the transit worker who burned a Quran has been reinstated after being fired for doing so.

"The fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it. Indeed, if it is the speaker's opinion that gives offense, that consequence is a reason for according it constitutional protection. For it is a central tenet of the First Amendment that the government must remain neutral in the marketplace of ideas."

Chief Justice Rehnquist, HUSTLER MAGAZINE v. FALWELL, 1988

 

Girls Have Cooties But Old Ladies Don't

In late September last year, Saudi King Abdullah opened the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), billing it as the Arab world's most advanced university on the northern shores of Jeddah.

Hoping to attract high-level international talent, the king took a gamble, announcing the university would be the kingdom's first co-educational institution, with male and female students from over 60 countries studying side by side, unveiled women driving around the 14-square-mile campus, and no religious police on site.

Then came the fatwa calling for all "modernizers" advocating gender mixing in the kingdom to be put to death. "Whoever allows this mixing allows forbidden things, and whoever allows them is an infidel and this means defection from Islam," a highly influential cleric ruled. "Either he retracts or he must be killed."

...Sheikh A-Najaimi, another senior Saudi cleric who had publicly supported the Al-Barrak fatwa calling for the death of those supporting gender mixing, attended an International Women's Day conference in Kuwait last month.

A-Najaimi stands accused of eating, sitting and talking with the conference's female attendees for hours.

The sheikh justified his attendance by claiming that the majority of the women at the conference were menopausal, therefore he is permitted by Islamic law to interact with them. Islamic scholars disputed A-Najaimi's interpretation of the Sharia, Islamic law, arguing that a woman must be post-menopausal, uninterested in men, and decide on her own whether or not to announce her status.

When some of the female attendees announced that they were not, in fact, menopausal, the sheikh allegedly told them "you are post menopausal whether you admit it or not!"