Bhutto Assassination: Jihad for Dummies

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto was not about politics. It’s all about suppression of women. There I’ve said it, the nasty mean ugly truth. Religion, especially Islam, is about suppression of women, part and parcel. It’s no accident that most religions, especially the Semitic ones, have prominent father-figures, even when they have no face, as in Islam. Apparently this replaced the old dominant Alpha-male in animal societies as we made the transition from proto-human scavengers to a human society in which cooperation and sharing are essential to a successful hunt. Otherwise we would be very poor hunters, slow weak and defenseless as we are. Hence we experience the birth of collective ‘artificial’ intelligence, culture, belief systems, and ultimately, religion. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have the same God and the same histories, up to a point, that point being the branch of cultural evolution that each followed independently, the Christians branching off approximately the first century C.E., Muslims the seventh, Jews being the common stock that remains closest to the ancestral roots. Muslims knelt and prayed to Jerusalem, after all, long before they had any Mecca to turn to. Jews still do. Sibling rivalries are always the nastiest. In their zeal to ‘reform’ the original core beliefs, feelings are easily hurt. Jesus turned the old slash-and-bash war god into one of love. Muhammad accepted this while limiting it to the nuclear religious family and returning to YHWH’s annihilation of his enemies, sparing only Christians and Jews, ‘people of the book’, while subjecting them to higher taxes. He appealed to tribal instincts by denying individuality and stressing Islam, surrender, to God and to tradition. At the same time he expanded the belief system to include the state as well as the individual soul, and expanded the concept of society to include taking care of the poor. This included the obligation to take many wives, since war created many widows. Thus women were quickly put in their place, in spirit if not in the letter. Even Ibn Battutah, the ‘Islamic Marco Polo’ complained in the fourteenth century, that Muslims in the Maldives allowed their women too much freedom, and Ibn was no homie.

If you allow women total freedom, what would result, after all? If that was a problem in ancient societies, imagine how it might be made manifest in the modern world. Women would soon be selling themselves and their services on the Internet, wouldn’t they? Yes, they would. Peasant girls from remote locations, linked to the ‘real world’ only by power lines and air waves, would soon be chatting up he-males around the world, giving them false flattery, a flash of a thigh, and the urge to merge in real time in virtual space. Then she lures him into her virtual ‘private room’, where she proceeds to take off her clothes and whip him into a virtual frenzy, all for the small donation of a dollar a minute. It shouldn’t take long. What was worshipped before the male war gods anyway? The female principle, exhibited in birth, is certainly the original miracle and its recognition as such is possibly the first conscious achievement of human thought. Whereas the Alpha-male in animal societies hoarded the harem, as some humans still do, the concept was made abstract for the new whiter brighter ‘naked apes’ on the scene, killing like lions and reproducing like rabbits. They had fertility rites and carved Venus figurines. As agriculture ensued and religions evolved, so did female worship. Prostitutes had prominent roles in temple rites, best exemplified in the Lady of Kadesh, representing the fertility God Astarte, seated naked on a lion, arrows in hand. As hunters became herders and warriors, these agricultural rites of weak sedentary people were seen as repulsive. All Semites, whether Jew, Christian, or Muslim, idolized the herding hunting fighting and killing way of life. They needed a God fit for the task, and this embrace of an abstract monotheism occupies much of the Old Testament, especially in the Jews’ contacts with the culturally superior, but sedentary, Canaanites, founder of the alphabet which has been adapted and adopted almost worldwide. Sacred prostitutes wouldn’t be of much use on the battlefield, and are best left in the temple, where they remain to this day in some parts of southern India. Elsewhere they are rarely considered sacred, more often scared. They’re safer under cover of the Internet.

Hinduism and Buddhism have always been more sympathetic to the female principle, while progressing conceptually from the act of birth to a broader concept of ‘enlightenment’, as opposed to commandments, passive acknowledgement of the human condition as opposed to the active changing of it, conciliatory mediation between extremes rather than conquest and annihilation. This didn’t mean that no battles were fought, of course, only that the enemies were usually well known and the results fairly predictable. That was usually enough to satisfy the machismo cravings of a people with very little herding and hunting tradition. That is rice country, of course, densely populated and long settled, where conformity is prized above individuality, and the past and the family are co-equal with religion. The Buddhist reform of Hinduism was more a codification for export and a repudiation of its caste system than a repudiation of its essential feminine passivity. Though men may call the political shots in modern Buddhist SE Asia, women are the moral force that holds families and societies together. Not infrequently they handle the purse-strings also, deftly tucking bills away in nooks and crannies for future consumption. Control of the means of reproduction has always been the female’s original endowment and empowerment. It only runs into fierce opposition from the leaders of those religions who want to kill it by hiding it behind a veil of deceit. That’s not how evolution works. Evolution may be the survival of the fittest men, but it’s the survival of the prettiest women. I’d become a suicide bomber myself if I had to sleep with some of those Muslim women. Bring me a bigger veil, and a bottle of absinthe.

This blog post is dedicated to Benazir Bhutto, may she accomplish in death what she never accomplished in life. She was never a widely popular leader, and certainly never wildly successful. Muslim machismo would ensure that. Any corruption on her watch was probably no worse than the corruption on anyone else’s. She was lambasted for her ‘secularity’ even though her father was the one to institute Islamic law into the modern government, though certainly Islam ‘lite’ by today’s standards. Her problems were Pakistan’s, Islam’s, and increasingly, the world’s, problems: cultures in collision, intolerance, religious fanaticism, and ignorance. I personally thought she was a pretty hot babe until she went overseas and ate all that fatty food, becoming increasingly, uh… Muslim. The fact that she was G.W. Bush’s choice for Pakistan is a red herring. Given Bush’s scarce mental acuity and his oily politics, it’d be nice to think that the opposition must be the ‘good guys.’ They’re not. Islamic jihadis are a perversion of their religion and to humanity in general, trying to accomplish with religion what they are unable to accomplish with their lives and societies. This is the last gasp of an Islam that can only catch up by dragging everyone else down. Sound like someone you know? This is the last gasp of an Islam that has oil and not much else. Terrorism? Global warming? It seems like we could kill two birds with one stone if we could get that needle full of oil out of our arm. But that would take a big psychological adjustment now wouldn’t it? Change is possible, but religious sensitivities need to be taken into careful account. When Europe finally threw off the yoke of the Church a few years ago, they threw out the baby with the bath water. They are the Godless West of Islamic hatred, only recently emerged from the threat of Godless communists. Religion is better than that, better than politics. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam are the head, heart, and solar plexus of our collective soul. Only by balancing them can we advance as a people, as a person.