The Latest Excuse for Terrorism

I think anyone would have to admit it was a mild response, by radical Islamic standards. The house and office of Martin Rynja, the UK publisher of The Jewel of Medina has been firebombed. The book, which has already been pulled by Random House in the US, tells the story of Muhammad and Aisha. Aisha was the wife he married when she was nine years old.

Of course there have been the usual fatwas calling for the death of the author, in this case Sherry Jones, but these seem to apply to anyone connected with publishing the book as well. It’s a good excuse to authorise the killing of as many infidels as possible. London-based radical cleric Anjem Choudhary is promising more attacks if the publication of the book goes ahead.

I’m not saying I support the publication of the book. Publishing any literature describing the sexual relationship between a nine-year-old and anyone should be in violation of all sorts of obscenity laws. But that’s not the problem for radical Muslim clerics. The forced marriage of pre-pubescent girls is not uncommon in the countries and cultures in which they were born. No, it’s that whole insult to Muhammad thing.

It’s not insulting to say that he had sex with a nine-year-old – that’s history. It seems it’s just insulting for an non-Muslim to write about him or for someone to novelise him. Apparently the book even tries to put a positive spin on this love story. You’d think the clerics would love that.

Wonderful Tonight

I just finished Eric Clapton’s autobiography.

I thought it was quite good. While it chronicled his relationships with family, various girlfriends, and lots of musicians, the overriding theme focuses on his recovery from drug and especially alcohol addiction. He attributes his experience of finally getting dry to prayer, though he is not sure who God is.

He comes across as a very down-to-earth person and not full of himself. It is very self-deprecating. He did wait 62 years to write about himself, as opposed to a lot of celebrities who write autobiographies in their 20s and 30s.

For some reason I was drawn to want to read the book, so my father-in-law got it for me for Christmas. It is only the second musician bio I’ve read (Mick Fleetwood’s was the other and I had never owned a Fleetwood Mac album when I bought it) – I’m normally not big on celebrity lives of any kind.

I never been a huge Clapton fan, though I’ve enjoyed his music since I discovered it in the wake of the Unplugged album. This came at a transitional time in my own songwriting, just as I was starting my band. The music of my song “Won’t Somebody Dance With Me?” influenced by songs like the live (slowed down) version of “Wonderful Tonight”. No doubt there are other strands of his influence in my songs from that period.

Harry Potter and Immigration

Over at Mere Comments, I was reading Steve Hutchens interesting view of the Harry Potter books and how they are analogous to the Gospel – something I can’t comment on as I haven’t read them – so I scrolled through the comments to see what others thought of this.

What struck me was not the debate of whether CS Lewis’ Narnia or JRR Tolkien’s LOTR is the gold standard of Christian fiction. Rather it was that even in this context people can get really pissy about illegal immigration – and with only a thin veil, immigration generally. Now I’ve written about this before, and even though it is a hot button issue, I get remarkably low traffic on such posts and no comments. Perhaps this is because my regular readers (dwindling number that you seem to be) completely disagree with me, but can’t be bothered to say so – or maybe I’ve made too many readers angry and they’ve vowed never to return.

If you can’t be bothered to scroll through it all, there is a particularly funny sparring exchange that went like this:

• At the same time, I don’t recall freedom to migrate being written into the Ten Commandments,

• It’s more than a little ironic, given the context for the delivery of the Commandments.

• But, in fact, they weren’t migrating to a foreign country–they were leaving a foreign country to go HOME. For the Exodus analogy to hold, the illegals in the U.S. would have to be enslaved and prevented from LEAVING. Now, if some Mexican prophet were to emerge from the Barrio, go to Washington, pound on the White House door, and demand of President Bush, “Let my people go!”, I would think that the President would say, “Sure thing, compadre. Can we order up some busses and trains to help y’all out?” Certainly beats having the Potomac run red with blood (it’s bad enough in its normal state), or for a plague of locusts to descend on the land (we just got rid of the seventeen year cicadas), or for the first born to be taken (but I know the secret for getting out of that one). Don’t let it be said we can’t learn from the mistakes of the Egyptians.

It is strange that no one thinks of the original settlement of America by immigrants as a problem. I suppose the argument is that the Injuns didn’t have a complex legal system with a refined idea of private (or even public) property law. Therefore it was fair game to take it all and push them into reservations or kill them in the process. Right of conquest and all of that.

I think the last commenter is inaccurate in his depiction of the Mexican prophet. If he were to get anywhere near the door of the White House without being shot, he would be captured, hog tied, and shipped to Guantanimo Bay faster than you can say, “Hasta la vista, Baby!”