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Thursday, December 02, 2004
Unpleasant Thoughts
There aren’t many things short of outright murder that are quite as horrifying as female genital mutilation. Historian and geopolitical analyst Jamie Glazov reminds us that this is an ongoing nightmare, inescapable by many thousands of young girls born into Muslim households. The supposed authorities of Europe, in service to the official leftist / cultural relativist / moral relativist ideology, have willfully failed to act against it.
There are an estimated six million Muslims in these United States, the majority of whom come from the Middle East. How many babies born to Muslim families in America will have their genitals mutilated, their adult lives shorn of all sexual pleasure and in many cases filled with unending pain, for the execrable crime of having been born female?
HAMAS, the world’s second most notorious terrorist organization, has announced that it will boycott the upcoming Palestinian elections.
GAZA (Reuters) - The Palestinian Islamic militant faction Hamas will boycott a Jan. 9 presidential election for a successor to Yasser Arafat (news - web sites), a senior Hamas leader said on Wednesday.
“We in the Islamic resistance announce our boycott and our non-participation in the presidential elections for the Palestinian Authority (news - web sites),” Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader, told reporters in Gaza City.
“All Hamas members will abide by the decision to boycott the elections. The Palestinian people understand the need and are well aware of the Hamas position but there is no call for ordinary Palestinians not to vote,” he said.
Please note: “the Islamic resistance.” Make a point of showing this piece to anyone who maintains that the Palestinian terror war against Israel has nothing to do with religion.
Your Curmudgeon finds himself wondering whether HAMAS will be staging any gentle little “demonstrations” against polling places on January 9. You know, the sort that employs automatic rifles and high explosives.
In a world that often seems filled to the brim with loathesomeness, Princeton University “ethics professor” Peter Singer stands apart. No, not as a counterweight; as an indicator of how much further into vileness we could yet descend.
Singer first came to prominence with the rise of the animal rights movement. His book Animal Liberation is widely regarded as the seminal tract in that line. In it, he takes a utilitarian approach to the entire question of rights, and concludes unabashedly that there is no way to differentiate Man from the lower species in a moral or ethical sense. Not long thereafter, he proclaimed himself an “ethicist,” and was elevated to his current stature at Princeton. From that chair, he’s issued a number of opinions on moral controversies, some of the choicest of which are:
- That bestiality and necrophilia are morally acceptable;
- That mothers should have an unrestricted right to kill their newborn babies for at least a month after birth;
- That there’s nothing morally objectionable about conceiving and giving birth to a child specifically to carve him up for transplant organs;
- That executing one-year-olds with physical or mental disabilities would be acceptable, though this would be “preferable” if done at birth.
Marvin Olasky has posted an incisive column on Singer at TownHall. In it, he notes that both the New York Times and the New Yorker consider Singer the most influential philosopher of our time. Please read it.
