perfidy

This is truly sick.

The SNP Museum in Slovakia recently held an exhibition of photographs of women, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the death camps of the Holocaust. On September 7, 2003 a group of Arabs visited the exhibit and signed the guest book:

1. This exhibit testifies to the quality of organization and handling [of the mission]. From a historical perspective, what Hitler did to the Jews is exactly what they deserve. Still, we would have wished that he could have finished incinerating all the Jews in the world, but time ran out on him and therefore Allah's curse be on him and on them.
-- Khaled al-Zahraya from Saudi Arabia, 07.09.03

2. This is a museum showing a restaurant [specializing in] Jewish meat, which is what they deserve. Sons of apes and pigs. The day after the attempt to murder Ahmad Yasin.
-- 'Umar al-Da'm, Yemen. 07.09.03

3. The most beautiful sights of Jews.
-- Ibrahim al-'Arimi, Sultanate of Oman, 07.09.03

4. I say what they all say, and will just add that they [Jews] are cursed in this world and the next.
-- Madih, Yemen. 07.09.2003

These individuals went to a Holocaust museum to gloat. Truly sickening, in a completely literal sense. Gives the argument in this Daniel Pipes article a human face. This article, by Charles Jacobs, covers some similar territory. Links via lgf.

[wik] Mark Steyn chimes in with a story about disappearing Sudanese penises. (Now there's a sentence you won't see every day.) Read the whole thing, but this part was interesting to me:

For one thing, a week after the Malaysian Prime Minister told an Islamic summit that their "enemies," the Jews, control the world and got a standing ovation from 56 fellow Muslim leaders, it's useful to be reminded that the International Jewish Conspiracy is comparatively one of the less loopy conspiracies in the Islamic world...

It is, in that sense, the perfect emblematic tale of Islamic victimhood: The foreigners have made us impotent! It doesn't matter that the foreigners didn't do anything except shake hands. It doesn't matter whether you are, in fact, impotent. You feel impotent, just as -- so we're told -- millions of Muslims from Algerian Islamists to the Bali bombers feel "humiliated" by the Palestinian situation. Whether or not there is a rational basis for their sense of humiliation is irrelevant.

One of the things I'd feel humiliated about if I lived in the Arab world is that almost all the forms of expression of my anti-Westernism are themselves Western in origin. Pan-Arabism was old-school 19th century nationalism of the type that eventually unified the various German and Italian statelets. Nasserism was transplanted European socialism, Baathism a local anachronistic variant on 'tween-wars Fascist movements. The Arabs even swiped Jew hatred from the Europeans. Though there was certainly friction between Jews and Muslims before the 20th century, it took the Europeans to package a disorganized, free-lance dislike of Jews into a big-time ideology with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf and all the rest.

Even Islamic fundamentalism, though ostensibly a rare example of a homegrown toxin, has, as a practical matter, more in common with European revolutionary movements than with traditional expressions of Islam -- an essentially political project piggybacking on an ancient religion to create the ideology of choice for the world's troublemakers.

There's something pathetic about a culture so ignorant even its pathologies have to be imported. But what do you expect? The telling detail of the vanishing penis hysteria is that it was spread by text messaging. You can own a cell phone, yet still believe that foreigners are able with a mere handshake to cause your penis to melt away.

It becomes harder and harder for me to believe that the nastier strains of Islamic thought are actually limited to the lunatic fringe, as we are repeatedly told. This kind of thing is far more pervasive. And eventually, it is going to bite us in the ass if we keep ignoring it. This kind of malicious bile needs to be fought.