Mr. Islam's Blindfold and Machete

Sultan Knish

Islam is peaceful. At least that is the likely defense of Rafiqi Islam, a loving husband, who told his wife that he had a present for her, blindfolded her to make it a surprise and then cut off her fingers. Then the rest of the Islam family mopped up the blood, while Mr. Islam threw her fingers into the trash, and after a few hours took her to the hospital where they warned her to tell the doctors that she had an accident.

The proximate cause of this event was that Mrs. Islam wanted to continue her education and Mr. Islam being a good Emirati Muslim was not so fond of the idea. Islam must be given credit for directness. When Muslims want to punish women for their sexuality, such as not wearing the Hijab, they throw acid in their faces. When they want to punish them for getting an education, they cut off their fingers with a machete.

But before the machete comes down, the blindfold goes up. We ourselves have had quite a few Muslims asking us to put on a blindfold because they have a present for us and they don't want to spoil the surprise. All we have to do is close our eyes for twenty years or so and we'll be missing a hand or a head too. Surprise, you're a backward theocracy with a legal system overseen by child abusing Mullahs. Now blow out the bomb belt and make a wish. There are a number of lessons here. The first is don't go into a room with Mr. Islam. The second is don't put on a blindfold when he tells you that he has a surprise for you. The third is don't marry Mr. Islam in the first place.

Unfortunately the free world has been forced into an arranged marriage with Mr. Islam. One day he just showed up on our doorstep and the authorities told us we would be living with him from now on. Sometimes he cuts off a head, plants a bomb or kills a few thousand people-- but when we complain to the authorities, they warn us not to cast any aspersions on the good name of Mr. Islam. There might be people doing these terrible things, but it's only because we haven't made them feel at home. We didn't make their coffee just right, we told the wrong jokes and didn't prop up their self-esteem. But whoever those people are, they are certainly not Mr. Islam who is a fine peaceful gentleman and would never harm a fly.

There are quite a few people who would like to be able to get a divorce from Mr. Islam, but the authorities won't hear of it. Mr. Islam is here to stay and we had better make him feel at home or he'll have another surprise for us.

That leaves us with a choice between putting away the books and learning to Salaam with the worst of them, or go on trying to learn while wearing a blindfold so that we don't see the machete coming. The leaders of the West have donned the blindfold and are eagerly awaiting the surprise that Mr. Islam has for them. Will it be moderation they wonder, or perhaps some of that Islamic science we have been hearing so much about. Unfortunately it's just a machete. It's always a machete.

Lucy always pulls away the football and Mr. Islam always brings down the machete. And if Charles M. Schultz had allowed Mr. Islam to emigrate to Peanutsland, then Lucy would soon have no hands. But those who wear the blindfold go on being fooled, believing that the moderate Muslims will be in their corner when they need them and that the football will be there when they kick it. And if it isn't, then it must be their fault.

Within a generation our leaders have turned the West into the battered spouse of the East, always going around with black eyes or missing parts, while singing the praises of Mr. Islam, that very peaceful gentleman who wouldn't harm a fly. There's no shelter for the free world to go to, not when it used to run the shelter for the battered peoples of the world. But now that their Muslim batterers have boarded and are having their way in London, Paris and New York, there's no shelter anywhere.

Still early divorce proceedings are underway in the Netherlands, overseen by Mr. Wilders, ESQ, but they are rather controversial. Parts of Europe are looking to renegotiate the terms of the marriage to bar some of its more unpleasant aspects, such as burqas and machetes, but they haven't gotten all that far.

In Canada, the Minister of Immigration has gotten into trouble for insisting that people taking the citizenship oath should have noticeable faces, rather than be wearing a giant faceless disguise. An organization has denounced, "This coercive demand to strip a...Muslim woman of her identity in order to make her 'freely and openly' affirm 'our' identity...is outrageous... "

It is outrageous that Canada is trying to take away the non-identity of Muslim women. The point of a Burqa is to strip a Muslim woman of her identity, a proposal advanced by one of Mohammed's drinking buddies. A woman in a Burqa has no personhood, but to insist that she take the oath as a person is to take away her identity which is based on not having an identity. Next thing you know Canada will coercively strip Muslim women of their identity as abuse victims by allowing them into battered women's shelters.

But when the blindfold is on, then even the most awful things seem to make sense. CNN is running a cheerful story about "Young Egyptians" who use "Coffee and Facebook to bring religions together" This sounds like one of those feel good stories that usually mean nothing, but this is actually a piece on Egyptian Salafists trying to improve their image during the election.

Salafis are not some exotic new pasta, they're a movement that burns churches and bars women from running for office. When reporters claim that the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate, they point to the Salafists as the extremists. But there is no Islamic horror that the media cannot find a way to fit into a blindfold. Salafis are not monsters, they're just misunderstood.

There's even a new term for misunderstanding Salafis.You guessed it. Salafiphobia.

Let's face it, if tomorrow a new branch of Islam debuted, and its theology included eating babies, cutting the legs off women to prevent them from going out of the house and boiling Christians in oil; then the day after tomorrow CNN would run a news story explaining that its participants are just ordinary people who are misunderstood and that only EatingBabyandCuttingOffWomensLegsPhobes would have any issues with them.

There's no word on whether Mrs. Islam has become an Islamophobe ever since Mr. Islam cut off her fingers. But it wouldn't be an irrational response. When Islam cuts off your fingers, it's natural to feel a twinge of unease when he shows up at your door with a gift wrapped machete. And if Americans, Europeans, Israelis, Canadians, Australians, Filipinos, Thais, East Timorese, Greeks, Paupans, Armenians, Serbians, Russians, Ivorians, Nigerians and any of the other countless peoples who have had their lives made more interesting and more final by Islam are made a little uneasy by Mr. Islam, it's not really a phobia, more of a sense memory.

Naturally we mustn't confuse Mr. Islam with Islam. There are millions of Muslims who have not yet chopped off their wives' fingers and probably never will. Granted those numbers will decrease as the Taliban roll back into Kabul, firing their machine guns into the air, to reclaim it as the capital of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. But as the media will tell us, we mustn't confuse the Islamic Emirate with Islam. Or the Muslim Brotherhood with Muslims, except when the media is doing positive stories on all the good work that it's doing with the underprivileged and the excessively alive.

All this can be a little confusing, but the rule of thumb (if they haven't been chopped off yet) is that Islam is never associated with anything bad, only with something good. If you see Mr. Islam tossing a coin to an orphan on Eid Eve, then he's being a Muslim, but if he's chopping off his wife's fingers then he has nothing to do with Islam. Hamas' social services are to be praised, but its rocket launches are to be deplored.

The easy way to do this is to always wear a blindfold and hope for a surprise. Think Eid dinner, not September 11. And if your hand is intact, then it's an Eid miracle. But for those who want a life without playing the game of blindfold and machete (Machete and Blindfold (TM) is the official game of Ramadan) then there's no choice but a divorce.

Divorce is still controversial in the multicultural household, but sometimes it's the only answer. The more we wear the blindfold and hope that this time it will be a good surprise, the harder it is to contemplate breaking the "Till Death Do Us Part" part, even with someone who takes the death part rather literally in the way that Salafis do. But it's not as if we have any choice.

This arranged marriage of ours with Islam is going very badly. Our home has become a dangerous place and every plane trip has become another opportunity to experience one of Mr. Islam's surprises. The longer this marriage goes on, the more we forget who we used to be, courageous peoples who used their minds and were not afraid of anything. Artists, warriors, scientists writers, builders. And it can be hard to do remember what we used to be capable of doing when we're trying to build up the self-esteem of Mr. Islam, who gets very upset when we read too many books because it makes him feel inferior.

Either we go on playing the game of blindfold and machete, or we take off the blindfold, take away the machete and show Mr. Islam the door.