Fitzgerald: Burning down the cinemas

Movie theatres are a favorite target of maddened Muslims of the poorer sort. They may be unaware of the kinds of material their ruling classes possess for private delectation, and target the products of Bollywood and Hollywood with equal outrage.

The most famous example of this is the burning down, with 400-500 people inside, of a cinema in Abadan, Iran, during the days when Khomeini-maddened crowds were toppling the pillars and pylons of the Shah's establishment. They were inflamed by those audiocassettes made in France by Khomeini. From his French-police-protected exile in Neauphle-le-chateau, he made the tapes which were then sent to Iran, recopied by the bazaris, and distributed far and wide by a nest of mullahs. And those mad Muslim mobs his tapes enflamed were similar to the maddened Muslim mobs that attacked American institutions, including the embassy and consulate in Pakistan, when one group of Muslims tried to seize the Mecca mosque and wrest it from the control of the Al-Saud. The House of Saud was properly viewed as corrupt, and necessarily viewed, by those same Muslims, as "Infidels" -- because the worldview of Muslims always requires that everything, including indignation at greed or corruption, be phrased solely by reference to Islam, in terms that will arouse Muslims.

The short-sighted French, so oblivious to their own future interests (as teachers of property like to say, when they inflict archaic topics on helpless law students), had previously given refuge to Khomeini (whose horrific views had all been published, and were accessible to any Farsi-reader -- and surely there were such people in the employ of the French security services). But were those security services, or the French diplomatic corps, or the French government, any worse then than they are now, or than the security services, diplomats, and government officials of other Western countries, so slow to come to their senses?

There is nothing secret about what Islam teaches. Nothing mysterious about the actual passages in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. Bin Laden is not a bad Muslim. Al-Zawahiri is not a bad Muslim. For that matter, the views of any intelligent Muslim cleric who knows his Islam will, in the attitudes toward Infidels, be hair-raising -- unless he simply chooses to ignore what Islam teaches, or to lie about, or fail to recognize for what they are, his own views.

Well done, Deuxieme Bureau! Well done, Couve de Murville, Jacques Chirac, Hubert Vedrine. Well done, Dominique de Villepin. And well done too, all those English and American diplomats who for decades kept telling us that Saudi Arabia was, is, cannot but be, our "staunch ally" -- and that we need not, in 1970, or 1973, or 1979, or 1989, or 1999, or now, go hellbent for leather on an energy program that, in its size and scope, will show that at long last people have come to their senses, and realize the OPEC oil revenues, or much of them, will inevitably fund the Jihad all over the world. It is not a question of this or that bank account being closed down. There are a thousand ways to transfer money. The Saudis and other Arabs know them all. The very amounts available to be transferred have to be diminished. For that money goes to build mosques, to support mosques, to do the same with madrasas, to pay for propaganda and Western public-relations firms that serve any master that pays them, even a declared enemy of their own civilization, the Western hirelings of every kind -- professors, diplomats, ex-intelligence agents, journalists -- who will always have their hand out, ready to provide whatever plausible excuse is needed, and serves the current purpose.

Saudi Arabian and other OPEC oil revenues have to both go down, or be seen to be on a downward slope. Every conceivable way of soaking up the discretionary income of the Saudis and others should be employed -- seizure of assets abroad to pay for monitoring the very Muslims the Saudi money helps inflame, head-taxes on Saudis who wish to visit the West, whether "students" or students, or simply the rich Arabs who need medical care, entertainment, brothels and fun fairs and non-stop shopping in the West. They should pay far more than they do for the privilege even of stepping on Western land, considering what is in their mental baggage, and what harm they have done, are doing, and will -- if allowed -- do.

There should be no more French or other Infidel protection for those who, like Khomeini, whip up crowds through audiocassettes to burn down cinemas. And there should be no more access to Infidel hospitals, or buying of property for future safe-houses, by those who, like the Saudi rulers, do nothing about cassettes calling for the destruction of such dens of iniquity as the local Cineplex. (The grand picture-palaces of yore in America and England often had such names as Grenada or Alhambra, meant to evoke a world of exotic, and pleasing, fantasy -- forever changed as recovered civilizational memory has at long last allowed to dawn, here and there, a more realistic sense of what Islam is all about.)

One does not have to approve of most movies in order to wish that cinemas not be burned down. They are at their worst dens of stupidity, not dens of iniquity. A tribute to Radix malorum pretending, as it so often does, to be something else. But then something comes along that's better. "City Lights" or "Some Like It Hot" or "Dr. Strangelove" or Doillon's "Ponette" for example, which takes me back to my imaginary days in maternelle, at Ecole Jules-Ferry on rue Gambetta, running around with that little cartable on my back, and then in class taking out my little cahier upon which I could write absolutely nothing, because I was then as unable to write as 50% or 60% or 80% of the adult population of the Muslim world, despite the umma al-islamiyya having received $10 trillion in revenues from oil and gas since 1973 alone.

And in my imaginary maternelle I was 4 years old. What's their excuse?

Posted by Hugh at November 23, 2007 5:30 AM
Print this entry | Email this entry | Digg this | del.icio.us