When I mentioned a while back that the New York City firemen’s friar, Mychal Judge, was a gay man, some of you asked me for evidence. Here’s a poignant piece on the man, partly prompted by my posting about him a while back, in the current New York Magazine. Prepare to be surprised and inspired.
THE WAGES OF RELATIVISM: The terrorist-supporter Robert Fisk asks the following question in today’s Independent: “If the US attacks were an assault on “civilization”, why shouldn’t Muslims regard the Afghanistan attack as a war on Islam?” The answer is obvious. The 9/11 massacre was an act designed exclusively to kill thousands of innocent civilians in the name of some perverted fanaticism. The bombing of Afghanistan is a) an act of self-defense against these murderers; b) designed to avoid civilian casualties as far as is humanly possible; c) aimed not at Islam, whose adherents the United States has rescued and defended in its three most recent international interventions, but at a terrorist state based upon an extreme version of Islam. These facts are not obscure. They are bleeding obvious. Fisk’s deliberate avoidance of them speaks volumes. The rest of Fisk’s piece – his description of Walter Isaacson’s memo to instill some balance in CNN’s reporting as “shameful,” “unethical,” “disgraceful”; his preference for the press in the Pakistani dictatorship over the New York Times; and so on – is a sign that he has actually lost it. Reading him a while back, one was aware of a kind of visceral hatred of Israel, but not a full-bore support for murder, terrorism and any murderous ideology as long as it came wrapped in p.c. Third Worldism. I guess Fisk has decided to go down with the ship. Good riddance.
BODY HAIR AND ALLAH: Well, I asked for it. This looks like a pretty definitive answer to the question. Yes, there’s some sort of religious duty to shave body hair – including your privates. There’s a forty-day maximum hair-growing limit. It applies to women too. Here’s another online guide to the bizarre physical requirements for Muslims, including groin hair. I know we should be respectful of the traditions of religious cultures, but this strikes me as really weird. But then, compared to mutilating the penises of infants, I guess it’s pretty harmless.
The Dish 