@blatham,
I remember ithe construction of the Islamic Center, to which Blatham refers, very well. The Center is located In Washington on Massachusets Ave. just south of the high bridge over the Rock Creek gorge. My dad drove me by it on our way to his office and my school (which is also near the Capitol) most mornings. It's a beautiful structure, that was financed by Saudi Arabia - a country that permits no religious freedon whatever to non Muslims and even treats its own Shia minority rather badly - as my dad then pointed out to me. This was also the period of enormous infrastructure development by Saudia Arabia all done by U.S. firms. Our strategy then was to keep the mideast oil resources firmly aligned to the West and avaialble to our allies ( we were still energy independent then). As Ibn Saud's hold on the country was then tenuous, this strategy suited both partners quite well.
I am perplexed by this post of Blatham's, following so closely on his earlier post announcing a firm "**** you" to all religion and all religious believers. It makes his real motivations here very hard to guess. Indeed the only consistent model I can find is one involving the use of anything he can find to criticize, or cast doubt on, the ability and integrity of those he opposes politically ( that vast right wing movement conspiracy against which he imagines him self in a lonely but heroic battle.).
This also provides an excellent illustration of the banality and mindless stupidity of contemporary political correctitude. Any thinking adult knows from his own experience that life presents us with a stream of challenges which often appear to defy the values that we wish to apply in our lives. How to reward achievement without at the same time punishing (or at least excluding) failure? How to survive in a world that does indeed contain enemies and, in the case of nationa/cultural survival, those who would destroy us (as has occurred throughout himan history) .?
These things require judgment and a pragmatic ranking of the values we apply. How anyone could read history, observe contemporary events or indeed objectively examine his/her own actions in life, and not recognize this, is something that amazes me. Philosophers and religions all recognize these dilemmas as well. Human history is also replete with examples of temporary mass hysteria and apparent insanity with respect to such obviously flawed modes of thinking and acting. Examples abound from the Inqisition to the Reigns of terror that followed the French Russian/Soviet and Chinese/Mao revolutions, the "Cultural revolution" that followed there over three decades later, and many, many others. The contemporary cult of political correctitude is relatively benign in its effects so far compareed to the others cited here , but it is their equal in the mindless, shallow stupidity of its absurd doctrines and the categorical judgments of its members.
Blatham has some very agreable peresonal qualities, but he is also a prolific purveyor of this stupid bullshit on this site. He also amply demonstrates that his only discernable object is to criticize those with whom he disagrees politically (but only those in a neighboring country not his own), and that he is oblivious of the stark hypocrisy this often involves, as in the case at hand, Just what may be the personal obsessions driving all this is something I don't know: I can guess some possibilities, but I hope they are not true.
