"Irony" in the National Post

Rex Murphy writes:

Ahmadinejad is just the latest vessel of the oldest hate. How strange it is that he was speaking to a forum of the United Nations, the one institution built to dam-up for all time the baneful furies released by the Second World War, of which murderous anti-Semitism was the principal. Irony is far too feeble a term for this ominous charade.

George Jonas writes:

A few years ago I used the word "ironic" to describe the absence of a Palestinian state. A reader wrote a rather testy letter to ask me what was ironic about it. I'm not sure what he thought "ironic" meant. Anyway, one dictionary definition is "an incongruous gap between the expected and the actual."

If there's a person on Earth who thinks the Palestinians should not have a state, I haven't heard of him or her yet. I've heard of many people, though, who think there should be no Jewish state. My own father had reservations about it. Yet, in spite of this, there's no Palestinian state, while the Jewish state has existed for over 60 years. For a highly disputed state to exist while a completely undisputed state doesn't is about as ironic as it gets.

And here's more irony, of the kind that doesn't employ the actual word--a letter from a chick claiming that the "law of the Koran liberates women":

Re: Islamism's War On Women, editorial, Sept. 21.

It is sad that the actions of certain Muslims has given Islam a bad name. Although it can be said that "Islamism" has waged a war on women, we cannot say that Islam or shariah has done so. Shariah is an Islamic term referring to the law of the Koran. The horrific practices in certain Muslim countries are not based on the Koran. In reality, the law of the Koran came to liberate women from the cruelties inflicted on them by mainstream society. Islam gave women legal rights of inheritance and rights within marriage, something the "whites" adopted centuries later. It was Islam that abolished female infanticide and instituted the veil - not to confine and degrade women, but to prevent molestation.
Mansoora Rauf, Toronto

Yeah, if only those repressing women in Islam's name could go back to what's written in the Koran, everything would be perfect. (Ironically, smart women like Mansoora--any relation to the Rauf who spearheaded the Ground Zero mosque?--have always fallen for this tripe. A lot of us "whites," however, especially ones who are familiar with the Koran's contents, don't buy it. Also--if you need to encase yourself in an all-encompassing shroud to avoid "molestation," maybe it's the menfolk who should be so clothed--to make it more difficult for them to act on what is apparently an uncontrollable impulse.)