[Janice D. Soderling]

Hello, I live in Europe.

I remember now why I know Ayaan Hirsi Ali's name and face. It was because of the killing of Theo van Gogh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Wrhivp7eQ

She was much interviewed in Swedish media conjunction with her film. I think she has been used in that Fox News reportage and in other neocon interviews. On the other hand she has (IMO) tended to become increasingly less nuanced and sometimes isn't intellectually honest.

Basically what she says can be said about other two religions in their fundamentalist form.

Women should submit to the will of their husbands.
Polygamy is acceptable
Women should marry their rapists
Adultery is punishable by death.

http://mic.com/articles/121596/bible...age#.WC6QNWSFv

Islam will become more secular in time, just like the Christian and Jewish religions have become.

I don't know enough about the so-called scandals to comment them.

[Andrew Frisardi]

But America is far away and none of you are in danger. Yet.

Really? ISIL just threatened Washington, John. What makes you think the U.S. isn’t in danger?

I live in Europe too, btw. And I agree with Roger.

[John Whitworth]

Thank you, Janice. Other religions used to be like Islam five hundred years ago. It seems a long time to wait, don't you think. Meanwhile Islam is a present danger.

Isil threatens everybody. At the present time the risk in the USA is much smaller than it is here.In England now most people agree with me. Polls have been done. So I'll manage with being unpopular with a few American liberals. In Europe in general the picture is the same.

I must say the spectacle of women and gay people busily sawing off the branch on which they are sitting on is curious. Would any of you go and live in a country controlled by muslims? Which one would you choose?

[Janice D. Soderling]

You are welcome, John.

I would not like to live in any theocracy and would be happiest to see all superstition consigned to the city dump. No matter what the name of the god worshiped, it seems to be ingrained in the psyche of the human being to seek a Great Controller to deal with contingencies he cannot control. Which is just about everything in the human lifespan: earthquakes, deadly disease, winning the lottery.

To this end, mankind has sought to placate the gods. Sometimes, in our more peaceful eras, by building Gothic churches and writing cantatas. In fiercer times by sacrificing weaker creatures, children, war captives and slaves. Always this violence: make Baal happy by sacrificing the firstborn, feed Huitzilopochtli by daily ripping out the hearts of some sacrificial victim, ensure good crops by hanging a ritual number of male animals and humans in honor of Woden, ad nauseam. Agamemnon killed Iphigenia so his ships could sail to Troy. Jephthah sacrifices his daughter as a thank-you present for having defeated his enemy. Abraham hears voices and is ready to kill his son Isaac, until another voice rises in his psychotic fog to call off the assassination.

Oh, but we have come beyond that, you say. But modern Christian churches are full of crosses showing the barbaric sight of another son tortured and killed by the will of his father.

Is it surprising that in our day young men full of testosterone and superstition seek a short-cut to everlasting life by annihilating people who do not believe in their god.

Of course ISIS is a threat. There have always been threats, sometimes called Crusaders, Jacobins, Bosnian Serbs, Buddhist Brigade, Boko Haram, Nazis, Brit HaKanaim, Army of God (a Christian terrorist anti-abortion organization), Rote Armee Fraktion or whatever. The list is long.

But the majority of people whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist or nonbeliever just want to live a good life. Celebrate their children's birthdays, go out to have burgers and ice cream or merguez and baklawa.

Enough with the Muslim-bashing.

[John Whitworth]

Thank you, Janice. I am dumb. When I worked in London our book-keeper was a pakistani muslim called George Ansari. A very nice man. And one of my younger daughter's good friends is a muslim woman, though it has to be said she doesn't practise it at all. Oh, and there's a chap down the street who lent me a very good book. We disagree about politics but agree about good books.

[Nigel Mace]

I am more than fed up with John's presumption that he can 'speak' for public opinion in this country (I'm writing this in Yorkshire, John) let alone Europe. What polls? It is certainly not the case in Scotland - nor does it seem to be the case in England outside of the strange atmosphere apparently inhaled in one small part of Kent.

Religions as a whole have a baleful record - yet they include now, as always, many millions of peaceful sensible people, whose adherence to their 'creed' is only nominally 'observant' but largely parked alongside decent and humane standards of civilised life; they also include the tiny minorities of the deranged, who plead the cover of supposedly divine sanction for their own proclivities to extremes of inhumane and uncivilised behaviour. While we are about it, let's remember the allegedly God-inspired decision-making which allowed Bush and Blair to unleash the illegal mayhem in whose hellish aftermath we are all now living. As to your 'arguments', they smack of the same delusional quality. Since when was marriage to a right-wing historian a guarantor of the wisdom of any controversialist's views?

Since this is a thread among poets (or would-be rhymers), let's reflect on Auden's lines,
"I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return."

Are we really fated to be led into yet another blood-soaked repetition of brutal and failed policies, which destroy our own once cherished values as much as huge numbers of entirely innocent people? One thing is certain. If we wrap ourselves in cloaks of 'religious' rationale - in praise of 'ours' or in disparagement of 'theirs' - the only outcome will be policies which produce more and more death.

[Ann Drysdale]

The nymph Thetis has commissioned Hephaestos to make a replacement shield for her son Achilles, whose own armour was borrowed and lost, along with his life, by his "gentler self", Patroclus.


The Shield of Achilles
W. H. Auden

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

.

[Roger Slater]

Of course America is in danger from terrorists. I was in the World Trade Center exactly twenty-four hours before the attack, and my meeting could just as easily have been scheduled for the next day. I don't really need a lecture by John about what it feels like to live in a place that is a likely target for terrorism. America is the prize, and you don't even have to bring your own gun to claim it. You can buy one almost anywhere with the greatest of ease, no background check required most of the time.

[Bill Carpenter]

It seems that developed European countries are facing three quite distinct classes of arrivals: enemy jihadist soldiers; Syrian refugees; and economic migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The policies, and rhetoric, regarding each should be kept distinct. This seems elementary, but you can see people confusing them at every turn, possibly under the influence of shock. Keeping out enemy soldiers is a very high priority, since every one of them that lax policies (or even strict policies) let in could cause untold harm. The presence of the first group makes admitting the second group more difficult -- very slow and painstaking -- but not impossible. The third group makes keeping out the first group and letting in the second group even more difficult. It appears that European countries need very strict border controls now and need to turn back all but bona fide asylum seekers until further notice.

We now have the largest Somali population outside of Somalia, thanks to receiving refugees from civil war starting in the 1990s. We are even supplying Somali soldiers for ongoing conflicts in the region. Their presence in such numbers here is a source of low-level controversy, and serves as an example of the absence of democratic decision-making in what you would think is a fundamental aspect of social and political life, the demographic character of the community. Our democratically elected governor, however, has a solution for those who question his policies: "if they don't like it they can move to another state." I think that puts us in a good position to understand something of what is going on in Europe and England.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Swedish photographer series: Where Syrian Children Sleep. Varsågod.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lynzybilling...eep#.qqDWdXK9n