Thursday, December 01, 2011 12:28 PM
"Hey Jack, which way to Mecca?"
Peter Arno, The New Yorker, 1938
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This week's syndicated column:
Having written countless columns and blog posts arguing that the see-no-Islam counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) has led to failure in two wars in the umma and the dhimmification of the U.S. military, it's almost funny to see the debate more or less officially joined over my recent column on what appears to be simply the gross-out, PG-13 movie topic of peeing toward Mecca. Or, rather, not peeing toward Mecca.
The latter is the lesson that an Afghan Muslim contractor has been teaching Marines before they deploy to Afghanistan, in accordance with an Islamic canonical hadith called "The Prohibition of Facing the Qiblah When Relieving Oneself." But maybe the debate had to take this excretory turn with the Pentagon awash in the phony fundamentals of Greg Mortenson's discredited "Three Cups of Tea."
Scatological or not, what we are talking about here is an untenable invasion of privacy of American citizens in uniform via religious dictate as taught by the U.S. Marine Corps.
The Nov. 28 print edition of Marine Corps Times carries both an article and a lead editorial on what the paper is politely calling "excretory etiquette" regarding Marines and Mecca – which, incidentally, is about 2,000 miles from Afghanistan. But this isn't just about etiquette. Given its Islamic religious derivation, the Marines' excretory instruction strikes me as a violation of religious freedom. Who is the U.S. Marine Corps to instruct American citizens to bring their personal hygiene practices into accord with Islamic law? The Corps in this case is acting as a vehicle of Islamic law, which comprehensively rules on all manner of personal habits, as well as on civil and legal affairs. Read the rest by:
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