...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Pearl the cherry-picker: In her authoritative whitewash of Canada’s “human rights” industry in the current issue of Maisonneuve magazine, “human rights” diva Pearl Eliadis quotes Mark Steyn as referring to Muslims as “sheep-shaggers”. That, she suggests, is merely one of the many, many “dangerous” utterances which prompted the Hosiery Three to launch complaints against Maclean’s Magazine with three of the nation’s “human rights” bodies. In my post about Pearl’s article, I commented that, if indeed Mark had written such a thing, I was certain it had been “cherry-picked”—i.e. taken out of context (like so many of those Meccan-era passages—“there’s no compulsion in religion” and the rest—that those who wish us to have only warm ‘n fuzzy feelings toward Islam often pluck, willy-nilly, from the Koran). Turns out I was right. Here’s the sheep-shagging comment in context--a Steyn column about Oriana Fallaci--which Pearl plucked like a ripe, "Islamophobic" cherry (I’ve taken the liberty of bolding the pertinent ovine passages):

…Signora [Oriana] Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam -- for example, Ayatollah Khomeini's "Blue Book" and its helpful advice on romantic matters: "If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer." I'll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: "A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin." Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year-old wife, but the Ayatollah's not clear on that.

Kinky as this is, it has nothing on Fallaci's next circle of cultural diversity -- the weirdly masochistic pleasure European leaders get out of talking themselves down and talking Islam up. Beginning with the German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher at the 1983 Hamburg Symposium for the Euro-Arab Dialogue, Signora Fallaci rounds up a quarter-century's worth of westerners who've insisted that everything you know was invented by Islam: paper, medicine, sherbet, artichokes, on and on and on . . .

"Always clever, the Muslims. Always at the top. Always ingenious. In philosophy, in mathematics, in gastronomy, in literature, in architecture, in medicine, in music, in law, in hydraulics, in cooking. And always stupid, we westerners. Always inadequate, always inferior. Therefore obliged to thank some son of Allah who preceded us. Who enlightened us. Who acted as a schoolteacher guiding dim-witted pupils."

This, it seems to me, is the most valuable contribution of Oriana Fallaci's work. I enjoy the don't-eat-your-sexual-partner stuff as much as the next infidel, but the challenge presented by Islam is not that the cities of the Western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers.

So it appears that it was that late, great holy rollah, Khomeini, who brought up the subject of sheep-shtupping and whether or not, having had one’s way with lambikins, it was appropriate to then ingest him/her for lunch. The idea was not, as Pearl Eliadis would have you believe, something that suddenly popped into Steyn’s mind, “flagrantly Islamophobic” though she and the sockies may consider that mind to be. Steyn was merely riffing (and goofing) on the Ayatollah. In which case, maybe the Socky triad should consider hauling the late Ayatollah’s mouldering carcass in front of the HRCs, since, clearly, he’s the one who had the "dangerous" ideas.

Update: Mark Steyn comments on Pearl's cherry-picking, and on the way the humourless "human rights" types have set themselves up as the arbiters of comedy/satire/joking in the Great White North. (Wasn't it the perceptive Ayatollah Khomeini who once noted "there's no fun in Canada"? How right he was!)

Update: Further to Mark's comments, it occurs to me that Canadians are notoriously leery about putting weapons in the hands of regular folks--the reason we have gun-control and, now it seems, joke-control.

Update: Let's give credit where it's due. At least the Ayatolloh cleared up the vexacious matter of whether it's possible to have one's sheep and eat it, too.

Update: Exercising tremendous self-restraint, I have decided not to do a parody of a Marvin Gaye classic, the chorus of which would have gone "I heard it through the grapevine/That your concubine is ovine."

You're welcome.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:02 | link | comments

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