Newsletter #5: Glasgow Bacchanalia, the Taliban Resurgent, and More
First of all, apologies for being late again. I can’t quite claim to have had a busy week, but it’s been one of those weeks where somehow I’ve been very free while being unable to get anything done. So it goes. Mea culpa and all that. But I’m here now, and will hopefully be posting something more substantial later on today or tomorrow as well.
On Saturday last, I spent the day, from noon till midnight, in Glasgow with some friends in celebration of one of their birthdays. We ate, drank, and made merry, and it was a very fun day. Two things of broader interest stand out.
One: we’d forgotten the new Indiana Jones film is shooting in the city and so we witnessed some extras dressed up as sailors and lots of American flags and old-style New York ambulances taking up a lot of space in the city. It seemed like they were filming a Fourth of July celebration or something: the actors were directed to cheer as vehicles rode past. All this was seen from a distance, so don’t take anything I say as an indication of what the film will contain. But it’s a funny reflection that as children watching Harrison Ford’s anti-Nazi archaeological adventures, we would never have thought that one day the filming of a new instalment of that franchise in Glasgow would shut off the street where the Wetherspoons we were ardently trying to get to was located.
Two: near midnight, as we walked through the central thoroughfare to get our train, we heard and then saw a crowd of people making lots of noise. Earlier in the day we’d passed by stands dedicated to Muslim proselytisation and the plight of Palestine, so we (half-jokingly) assumed that the Muslims had whipped up some drunk Glaswegians into a Koranic frenzy. Alas and thankfully, no. The stands were gone and it was just a crowd of people singing and dancing as some police officers looked on, unable or unwilling to stop the very much non-socially distanced gathering from its merriment.
So, that was nice to see, and it was a good day all around. It’s been far too long since I’ve been to Glasgow and yet it felt as familiar as an old coat.
That was the main event of my week. As I said, not much has happened and yet I’ve been pretty lax when it comes to doing stuff. Still, a lot has happened in the world at large, three of which (all related to Islam as it happens) I take a particular interest in.
First, one of my heroes was the intended victim of an Iranian kidnap attempt. Masih Alinejad, the exiled feminist fighter for women’s rights in Iran, revealed this week that the FBI just foiled a plot by the Iranians to abduct her. Almost certainly she would have been executed in Iran had the plan succeeded. Well, it failed, and this defeat of the theocratic fascists of Tehran ought to be celebrated, even as the West continues to bargain in a futile attempt to make peace with the murderous mullahs whose long arm extends across the globe in an (equally futile) attempt to suppress Iranian citizens’ secular, democratic, feminist, revolutionary aims. I’ll write more on this later or tomorrow.
Second, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. For those of us who predicted, back when Donald Trump announced the plan to abandon the Afghans, that nothing good would come of such a cowardly surrender, it’s hard not to feel vindicated. But vindication in prediction of such a sorry outcome is nothing to be celebrated. I’d rather have been proven wrong. I only hope that, despite the West’s betrayal of Afghanistan, despite the fearful scurrying away of America and Britain, despite the Taliban’s numerous victories, the people of that country, and especially the women, have enough strength to fight against the evil that is befalling them. Whatever one thinks of the US involvement in Afghanistan in the first place, and whatever the failings of the western intervention there, the fact remains that abandoning the country now means slaughter and fascism and terrorism and misogyny institutionalised and then some.
Let me put this on the record yet again: since the Taliban is likely still in cahoots with al-Qaeda, the aim of the intervention to oust the bin Ladenists, who plotted 9/11 and had the backing of a sovereign nation from there, has failed. I wish it wasn’t so, but America and the West and Afghanistan and anywhere and anyone that opposes Islamic fascism will one day pay dearly for their abandonment of the fight against it. Above all, the sheer stupidity of the move to leave Afghanistan astonishes me. It’s so fucking obvious that this will not end well, that the women of Afghanistan will suffer as, or worse than, before, that al-Qaeda has been given a nation-state back to use as a base, and that the people of Afghanistan have just lost their (imperfect and corrupt, admittedly) democracy, so why? For Joe Biden to boast that he has ended the US’s longest war? And on top of all that, to make the departure deadline September 11? The disgust I feel right now is indescribable.
It’s not all bad. The western intervention achieved a lot despite this and despite its failures. But still, September 11 will soon become a day dedicated to sadness and the remembrance of evil in Afghanistan as well as America (and Chile). For shame, for shame!
Third: Kurt Westergaard, the man behind the most ‘controversial’ 2005 Danish cartoon of the alleged prophet Muhammad, has died. Despite the sickening murders and mayhem that followed the cartoons’ publication (some of the pandemonium was artificially whipped up by faithful liars, however, let us not forget), Westergaard quite rightly never repented. As the BBC reports, he had to live the life of a fugitive hunted by fanatical fascists, but said that ‘I would do it the same way (again) because I think that this cartoon crisis in a way is a catalyst which is intensifying the adaptation of Islam … We are discussing the two cultures, the two religions as never before and that is important.’ We still live in a world in which writers and satirists are routinely slaughtered for their activities by religious bigots, even in the supposedly enlightened West.
The only defence against this evil is the unflinching assertion of secularism and free speech, both among the citizens of the ‘Free World’ and those in the Muslim world, many of whom are fed up with religion’s deleterious effects on their societies. So I salute Kurt Westergaard and all those who have resisted theofascism of whatever flavour (Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu) on pain of torture and death and recommend that whosoever happens to read this does the same. In honour of Westergaard and all those other brave people, I attach Westergaard’s cartoon of Muhammad below.
On that note, I shall end. Later today or tomorrow I intend to publish my ‘proper piece’, as I’ve come to call it, but that is only available for those who have signed up (for free, let me add- you just have to put your email address in and you shall receive it; these newsletters, on the other hand, are public).
For now, all the best and have a lovely week,
DJS