I agree.

Coming to think of it, Islam is not hypocritical at all. Among all major religions and worldviews in general, Islam is the one that most clearly, openly and neatly differentiates between “us” and “them”. Whatever “we” do, “we” are always right and “they” are always wrong. “We” have all the rights.

For instance, much of the West, from the Vatican to the White House (under Clinton), has, at some time or another, made apologies (whether sincere or not, that’s a secondary issue) for past crimes, mistakes, omissions etc.

But almost a hundred years after the genocide of the Armenians it is still unlikely that we’ll soon hear the Turkish government even admitting it took place.

And, as so many other nations or religious groups, Arabs and Muslims do actually have an imperial past, don’t they? Nowadays, however, empire is out of fashion: it became a 4-letter word. With one exception: Arab and Muslims empires (say, Al Andalus) were absolutely peaceful, progressive and positive.

Dealing with the (bloody) conquest of the Iberian Peninsula (or North Africaon the same terms as one deal with the Raj or with the conquest o Mexico would be considered Islamophobic and racist.

Most religions and worldviews deal in double-standards, but, in the case of Islam (and not only of “Islamism”) they are its very core. If Islam means “submission”, it is submission exactly to those double-standards.

Your aphorism would have more of a bite if Khomeini’s “morals” and actions weren’t perfectly congruent with Mohammad’s.

Of course it is entirely obvious that Mohammad didn’t follow God’s orders (were that even possible), rather “Allah” followed Mohammad’s orders.

As they are under Sharia law, they may have a similar Islamic rule to the halachic (orthodox) Jewish one on adultery, which is that it is only provable if there have been two (or is it three) observant Jewish male witnesses to the act. And if there are not such witnesses, you are not allowed to say it happened. The rabbis regarded the law as being there to avoid suspected adulterers being stigmatized. The ritual for discovering if a woman had indeed committed adultery in the time of the Temple suggests that this was the case. The woman had (if she denied she had committed adultery) to drink a bowl of water in which the ink from a piece of paper bearing the divine name had been dissolved. If her stomach then split open or she dropped dead, this would prove she had committed adultery (and incidentally punished with death for it). If she did not, she was proclaimed innocent and her husband was required to treat her as such (NB quite different from the secular category “not guilty”).

You can imagine, then, how rarely such droppings-dead took place after the ritual had been completed.

There are some traditional Jewish folktales about how an adulterous woman got her sister (presumably veiled) to undergo the ritual in her place, but was then struck dead by the breath (infused with the sanctified detective water) her sister exhaled when the adulteress kissed her in thanks after the trial. Others have the woman being subsequently struck dead in some other obvious hand-of-the-Almighty way.

To this, the moviemaker answered that he was going away exactly because the regime disliked Jews — like him. Goebbels then said: here, we determine who is a Jew and who isn’t.

Well, the point of being powerful in a traditional despotic society is not to make and then to implement unfair rules, but to be able to break at will even those very rules.

In a teocracy like Iran, Khomeini doesn’t follow Allah’s orders, it is Allah who obeys Khomeini.

The ultimate expression of perpetrators having infinite rights is the we-all-pretend-he-didn’t-say-it ruling from ayatollah Khomeini that anal sex with young children is permissible because the children are too young to be guilty…

The idea of the guy on the top being at fault doesn’t even enter into it.

When you mention this ruling, sometimes people chime in and say it must never have happened, or that there are websites that claim it’s a hoax. However Christopher Hitchens once mentioned that Khomeini’s grandson confirms much worse than that he said it, but rather that he did it.

I know exactly what you mean and am already familiar with the type of hetero(?) who is convinced that buggering and blow jobs leave them intact as macho males. But I was thinking of shariah law for which practically all acts of sex are filth. How can the Ayatollahs tolerate such acts from which the perpertrators derive pleasure – and no absolute line can be drawn between heteros and gays. If I were a very nasty macho gay serving that regime I would apply for a job as prison guard.

By the way, I have known such, initially hetero-preserving males to extend their love-making as time went on.

The thing to do is to ask the Islam authorites themelselve whether buggery by ‘heteros’ is acceptable, and whether Ahmadinejad would be allowed to perform such acts on ‘traitors’ and ‘infidels.’

But ofcourse the authorities would turn a hypocritical blind eye to what happens in their prisons. Let me make a prophecy to the Iranian authorities: if you believe in a life after death, you will be hurled down to the lowest levels of hell, there to be violently buggered by devils for the rest of eternity.

Once again I’m left with the question are “traditional cultures” designed to cater to fetishists and rapists?

many traditional cultures tend to see sex as something dirty and/or humiliating someone does to someone else, whether to a woman or another man. Only the active agent gets pleasure, while the so-called passive one, if he/she derives any pleasure from the act, it is because he/she is a sinful pervert who loves to be humiliated, who, btw, loves submission. Sex in those cultures is a zero-sum game: one partner wins while the other loses. Curiously enough, there’s no lack of Western feminists who think along similar lines, saying that any sexual intercourse is always rape, whether the “victim” knows/likes it or not.