Letters

August 2006
August 14

Idiotology

In response to Amil Imani's "Useful idiot":

As opposed to Lenin's "useful idiots," I have come up with a new terminology to describe those whose memory of history is fragmented and whose interpretations of world events are based on those fragments. This fragmented knowledge or presentation of history can be attributed to two things. One is the Fox News syndrome which is self-explanatory. The other and the more malign is the wilful omission of certain parts of history to thereby advance own agenda. Members of the first group are plain idiots with the option to become useful idiots.

Members of the second group who are the subject of this article are referred hereafter as Harmful Idiots.

Harmful idiots of the Middle East can for example conveniently "forget" the glory days of Islam and its contribution to science and arts and focus on stories that took place around the time of the origin of Islam. Just look at this phrase:

The "moderate" Islam has been outright genocidal from inception.

Mr. Imani, why don't you, in the spirit of being fair, quote passages from the Bible? From the Old Testament to be exact. Here is one for you:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, "I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey." (1 Sam. 15:2-3).

The above passage clearly encourages Israelites to commit an act that is the true meaning of the word genocide. Other passages not cited here describe how they carried out the Lords commands. Who said déjà vu in Lebanon?

Does this give me the right to call Jews genocidal? No, because I would then join the Harmful Idiots club. Jews are not to be judged by what has happened thousands of years ago. Nor are the Muslims. The Christians of today are not responsible for the thousands of witch burnings across Europe and the Americas, or the Inquisition by the Spaniards.

Do you think the Muslims woke up one day some 70 years ago and decided to be the bad guys of the world and terrorize the innocents of the West? Or does it maybe, just maybe, have something to do with the arrival of western powers in the region. I call it arrival, because nobody invited them. I don't recall India sending an application to Great Britain to become a colony. The stuff-it-down-their- throats method of drawing borders in the Middle East practiced by the British to advance their goal (read oil) which created artificial countries such as Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, the Emirates, etc., was not done for the benefit of people in those regions. The synthesis of the state of Israel (its acronym is the Jewish State, religion and state hand in hand is not a Muslim monopoly apparently) was the last of these nation buildings.

Islam had not been a political factor for centuries just as Christianity had lost its political edge in Europe. So yes, political, radical, and moderate Islam are new terms, but they were not invented by useful idiots. These terminologies never existed in the Muslim world because they are terms created by the West. And utilized by the Harmful Idiots to blame the victim in this rape act and thereby exonerating the raper.

Let us look at the following:

No radical barbaric act of depravity is out of bounds for Muslims in dealing with others. They destroy precious statues of Buddha, level sacred monuments of other religions, and bulldoze the cemeteries of non-Muslims -- a few examples of their utter extreme contempt toward others.

Will it be far out if I replaced, in the above, Muslims with Christians and the statutes of Buddha with Baghdad's Museum? Were the German Nazis a secret sect of Islam?

Were the Americans bombing the Vietnamese with napalm bombs influenced by Islamic teachings? In the spirit of fairness, let us count and write down the number of people killed by the known religions and see who wins.

Such oversimplification and omission of historical events to bash ordinary Muslims is not expected of Iranian intellectuals and should be reserved for members and advocates of organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and Project for the New American Century. They have their reasons. What are yours Mr. Imani?

Mazdak

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