islamicist

but they’re cropping up in odd places.

Some of you, looking at yesterday’s entry in the Devil’s Illustrated Dictionary, no doubt expected responses like these, in the Hindustani Times:

We are now supposed to accept the participation of an Afghan woman, Vida Samadzai, in the Miss Earth beauty contest, where she?s being paraded in a bikini, as a symbol of ?progress? (Afghan beauty queen: from burqa to bikini, October 27)?

Her promotion as a doctor or a successful entrepreneur should have been lauded, but no! Somehow it had to involve the removal of her clothes for the western mass media to demonstrate to the rest of the world that the liberation of Afghan women has begun.

Yamin Zakaria, London

II

Vida Samadzai has been criticised by her countrymen for appearing in a vulgar bikini. Quite rightly, the Afghan government has disowned her for representing Afghanistan and for participating in the obscene swimming suit.

Madhu Agrawal, Delhi

Or this response from the Afghan government’s “minister for women”:

KABUL (AFP) – President Hamid Karzai’s minister for women’s affairs condemned Miss Afghanistan, as Vida Samadzai became the country’s first woman in the post-Taliban era to appear in a bikini during a beauty contest in Manila.

“Appearing naked before a camera or television is not women’s freedom but in my opinion is to entertain men,” minister Habiba Surabi told AFP on Sunday.

“We condemn Vida Samadzai, she is not representing Afghanistan’s women, and this is not women’s freedom.”

Surabi said according to Afghan culture women should not demonstrate their worth using their “beauty or bodies” but by their skills and knowledge.

A spectacular piece of flummery, that, given the indigenous Taliban’s behaviors towards women; but as they are the late unlamented Taliban, let that pass for the moment.

These perhaps come as little surprise; this kind of Islamic-puritanical backlash was inevitable.

But what are we to make of this kind of thing, when it’s coming from a reader of Instapundit?

This picture, perhaps more than anything else, will confirm the corruptive influence of American culture to the Islamic world… When I see the black shrouded women of the Middle East who look like “Cousin It” of the Adaams family, I feel pity for them and a resolute conviction that the Taliban and the “culture” that they represent must be opposed. But I must also ask, Mr. Reynolds, is this (the woman is the red bikini) all that the United States of America has to offer the world? Is this picture what America is all about?

I have greatly enjoyed your blog and read it daily, but at times such entries are rather telling… What is it that informs your understanding of what it good, true, and beautiful? Are goodness, truth, and beauty even a part of your world view? From whence comes your sense of ethics or morality? Have you ever asked yourself these questions?

Or even more puzzling, this kind of… Hyde Park nuttery… from a comment over at Samizdata:

I remember reading an article in the French left-of-centre ‘Nouvel Observateur’ in summer 2001 concerning the frightful treatment of women by the Taliban. Then right after that article came a full page advertisement for the fragrance ‘Opium’, with a photo of a naked Sophie Dahl apparently in rut or, if you like, in a state of progressive lordosis. It was then that I realised why the Taliban might appeal to quite a number of males.

Since this advertisement also appeared on billboards right across France, it can fairly be defined as an invasion of privacy, just like fornicating in public at Picadilly Circus. Such images are offensive to many people — not just Muslims or ‘reactionary’ Christians.

Ditto for the ‘Miss Afghanistan’ image. If you really want the number of Islamic terrorists to increase and multiply, fire away with pics like this.

I am appaled.

I can understand …barely… that if one grows up in a culture that teaches men are so *weak* that they cannot control themselves when faced with the sight of feminine skin, that one will think that men need to be protected from their own infirmities. it’s a crock, but I can understand how that would seep into the mind and dirty it.

But the commentators over Instapundit and Samizdata way might, one would have thought, be made of sterner stuff. They might have been hoped? expected? to be at least friends of Thomas Jefferson, if not his heirs; to feel in their very bones the fire of his challenge to tyrants of every stripe and water: “I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Guess not.

Well… tough luck.

Some of us are friends of Jefferson. We know the nature of the threat that faces us.

We know that there is a fundamentalist strain of Islam which has no truck with coexistence; no use for tolerance; no desire for freedom or liberty to flourish.

This Islamicist worldview desires a world totally enslaved. A world where religion and state are one; where dissent becomes both blasphemy and treason, all at once; where everyone is in “submission” to the ruling priesthood.

Plato’s dream… revealed as the ugly, horrid, mistake it has always been. With imams as philosopher-kings.

Slavers, overseeing a world of slaves.

Slavery.

The ugly truth is that a free world cannot coexist with a world of slavery. The slavers don’t WANT to coexist. They want more slaves. They are so scared of a woman in a red bikini–and a demure one, at that!–that they feel they must smash entire nations, such that they need never face a red bikini again.

You don’t like beauty contests with bikinis? Fine. That’s your perfect right. Free people have that choice; to look away… OR TO PARTICIPATE.

Slaves have no choices but submission.

I have no truck with slavers. And I stand with Colleen Doran in this:

The point is, my fellow Libertarians, that whether to strut down an aisle virtually naked displaying a set of gams and other natural resources that any woman on the planet would rightfully envy and any so-inclined man on the planet would rightly admire, at the very least, as a healthy and symmetrical example of human being, is a matter of PERSONAL CHOICE. Whether or not you happen to anjoy the sight of a pretty girl, think it’s a moral thing to do, or are afraid it will scare the horses is a non-issue. The woman has a CHOICE even as YOU have a choice to ignore her and get on with her lives instead of wringing your hands like a bunch of envious spinsters.

CHOICE and FREEDOM. That’s what it’s all about.

That nameless Iraqi genius was right, you know.

“Democracy! Whisky! Sexy!”

Free people work their moral issues in the fastness of their conscience. They don’t fuse State and Religion to rape the consicence of others.

I am not, nor shall I ever be, a dhimmi.

Don’t know what that is?

Well… let me rummage about, and give you more to think about, next post.