Saudi Cleric Issues a Fatwa Banning "Dangerous Games"

This is what the nanny state looks like when nanny wears a burqa:

IRO – Dangerous sport games such as wrestling are banned in Islam because they are posing harms to athletes, a Saudi scholar has said.

“It is not permissible for a Muslim to hurt oneself in one way or another,” said Sheikh Ali Al-Hikmi, a member of the Supreme Scholar Authority, Alhayat newspaper reported.

“Dangerous games like wrestling and other fighting duels could lead to impairment or harm in the brain or the body.

“Therefore, it is prohibited to practice such games.”

Islam encourages followers to practice sports.

The general rule in Islam is that if sports are free from things which are prohibited in Shari`ah, then practicing those sports is beneficial and permissible...

That leaves--what? Camel racing and tiddly winks?

Two Ways "Youts" in the EU Have Fun With Cars

In Knightsbridge, a posh London neighbourhood, Arab "youts" from oil-rich sheikdoms race their outrageously expensive cars at all hours of the night, a habit which doesn't exactly endear them to the locals. Meanwhile, over in Paree, local "youts" sans mega-petrobucks continue to see a car-b-cue as the epitome of a good time.

"It's Better to Walk as a Tortoiose in the Right Direction Than to Walk as a Gazelle in the Wrong Direction"

Just one of many, many sage utterances from the Reviving the Islamic Spirit confab. My personal fave is the one in which "deep thinker" and token infidel John Ralston Saul appears to throw free speech under the bus, a great way to appeal to the anti-"blasphemy" crowd.

Funniest Comment of the Year (So Far)

"I expected One Fish, Two Fish and Fun with Dick and Jane," writes Andrew E., reacting to Heather Mallick's column wherein she lists her favourite books of 2012.


NOT on Ms. Mallick's reading list

Bruce Bawer Boldly Goes Where Others Don't or Won't--Through the Sludge of Zion-Loathing "Peace" Groups

Having spent some time poking around in the peaceniks' websites, Bawer observes:

Perusing these friends-of-Palestine websites, one discovers certain phenomena over and over again – among them a staggering naivete and sentimentality, a colossal ignorance of history (or a remarkable determination to block it out), and a reflexive, vicious hatred of Israel and, yes, Jews. On these sites, Palestine often seems less like a real place on the map, a place where real people live out their lives, than some perverse combination of a poverty-and-suffering theme park for idle, affluent Americans, a laboratory in which Peace Studies practitioners can carry out their experiments, and a destination for left-wing Christian pilgrims in search a virtue fix. On none of the websites I looked at was there so much as the slightest hint of awareness that more than a few Palestinians are in the grip of a self-destructive psychopathology that has been instilled in them by terrorist movements and on which they have brought up their children, almost surely guaranteeing that their people, however much “help” they may receive from all over the Western world, will not develop a normally functioning society or a productive economy in any of our lifetimes, but will continue to be fixated on murder and mayhem.

It's the same old lupine Jew hate, only this time around it wears the fleecy disguise of "peace" and "justice" for the Palestinians.

Fun Gal

Alleged comedian Kathy Griffin scares New Year's Eve co-host Anderson Cooper by showing how she'd perform oral sex on him.

"Social Justice" Education Comes to the Fore at OISE (the Folks Who Teach Our Teachers)

Found this gem on the OISE site:

The Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education (HSSSJE) is a multi- and interdisciplinary graduate program developed from the past programs of History and Philosophy of Education as well as Sociology and Equity Studies in Education. This new department provides students with critical understandings of the social, historical, cultural, political, economic, and ethical contexts of education, broadly conceived. Based on the diverse intellectual traditions of the humanities and social sciences, the department is committed to multi- and interdisciplinary studies in education, with a focus on history, philosophy, sociology and social justice education. 

Through humanities, social sciences, and/or social justice education, faculty and students may pursue studies including anti-racism, critical race theory and Indigenous studies; aesthetics, media, and communication; feminist and gender studies; class and poverty studies; francophone studies; post-colonial, diaspora, and transnational studies; queer and disability studies; and/or may follow traditional disciplinary inquiry...

Call it indoctrinating the indoctrinators. (And you wonder why the kids can't read.)

Sharia Finance Outfit Targets Alberta ('Cuz That's Where the Oil Is)

Useful Fool/Tool Justin Trudeau Proudly Posts His "Reviving the Islamic Spirit" Address on His Website

Wilfrid Laurier, Justin? Seriously? I'm pretty sure the folks you were speaking to are apt to be far more inspired by the likes of, say, Sayyid Qutb than by an old Liberal prime minister you and your speech writers dusted off for the occasion.


Laurier, Shmaurier. It's Qutb who'll "revive" the "Islamic spirit"

Ikwan "Oracle" Close to Mo Morsi Says Israel Will Disappear Within a Decade

Dream on, jihad breath.

Update: "How a regional war could signal the end of Israel"--more wishful-hateful thinking, this time from our unfriendly local Khomeinists.

Do We Dare To Eat a Peach?

Bruce Bawer says that we in the West had better shake off our inner Prufrock if we want our civilization to have a shot at surviving the onslaught of a determined enemy:

In his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” first published in 1915, T.S. Eliot wrote: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” Prufrock, the speaker of the poem, is aware – hyperaware, intensely and neurotically aware – that even his slightest action does indeed “disturb the universe,” and that every year, indeed every moment, he’s lived through has, to some degree, however minuscule, been shaped by him. Some people never think this way about their lives, and, on the contrary, are eager to put their stamp on the world; a larger percentage, I suspect, are, like Prufrock, so fiercely conscious of the potential consequences of their every move that they can barely bring themselves to step out of their long-established comfort zones for fear of doing or saying the wrong thing – and of having to take responsibility for it. They prefer to keep their heads down, to keep their mouths shut, and to mind their business. In most premodern societies, and in many modern ones, such caution was certainly understandable – it was a survival mechanism, pure and simple.

In the twenty-first century, however, in a free country in peril of losing its freedom, such a posture, such a policy, is pusillanimous and unconscionable – unworthy of responsible adults, citizens, and parents. For the fact is that we face enemies who are determined not just to disturb but to destroy our Western world, our free societies, our way of life. Enemies who are intensely conscious of their own history, and of the violent history they share with us – a history that saw them turned back, but just barely, at the gates of Vienna in 1683, a victory without which I would not be sitting here writing this and you would not be reading it. Enemies who have no other goal than to write the history of the years to come, and to make the future their own. While too many of us slip passively into yet another year, waiting to see what it will bring us, those enemies are doing everything they can to usher us into a time in which all our calendars will count back not to A.D. 1 but to A.D. 622.

Recalling that old T.S. was the dude who observed, all too presciently for my taste, that "humankind cannot bear very much reality," I fear that the Prufrockian may be too deeply entrenched (for isn't multiculturalism, "diversity" and all the other relativistic tommyrot the work of the Prufrocks among us?) to save our cringing, crumbling, self-loathing civilization.