CALME

The New Yorker has a very good article entitled “The Moderate Martyr: A radically peaceful vision of Islam”, by George Packer. The article is about Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, a, Sudanese scholar who put forward a vision of Islam in its original, uncorrupted form, in which women and people of other faiths were accorded equal status and which the Quranic concepts of compassion, mercy, justice, and beauty, supersede some of the less tolerant passages of the Sunna. The Pope’s statements on Islam . The statement provoked the usual reaction of: How dare he call us intolerant. We must kill him. “Anyone…

All right, allow me one more indulgence and then I will keep quite for a while. I am a pacifist. I am also pragmatic and take responsibility for my actions. I subscribe to the Kurtzian view of war. If you are going to fight a war, fight it to win. War is an act of barbarism. Thus, to have rules such as the Geneva conventions govern the conduct of fighting and treatment of combatants, to me, seems ridiculous. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now argued for the right to drop the bomb on the Chinese and the Vietnamese. He understood the horror…