Family has been visiting for a week, so I’ve been busy.
Today the adherents of the Religion of Peace had quite an impressive body count: 20 dead (so far) in Baghdad and 17 dead (so far) in Jerusalem, with a good portion of the latter being children. Yes, that’s a religion worth joining. Nothing like bloody body parts to attract worthy converts. /sarcasm
My family used to be members of the Nation of Islam, back when none of us had actually read the Koran (or the Bible, for that matter). Now I view converts to Islam, especially black ones, as either blithering ignoramuses or as sociopaths (likely ex-felons). Either, like the southern white male who says, “watch this,” is to be avoided.
I know many black people who are Muslim converts. The standard rationale goes along these lines: they want to shake off the "chains" of the American slave master, starting with the name(s) and the religion. Thus, a black Christian man named Joseph Green becomes a black Muslim man named Malik Muhammad, eschews pork, makes his wife, Anita, become Ayesha, makes her cover herself from head to toe, begins to pray five times a day, etc. Hallelujah! (Oh wait. Malik can’t say that anymore.) The chains of the (long-dead) slave master are broken!
But because Joseph/Malik hasn’t opened up a book and done his homework, he doesn’t know that Muslims were/are the biggest slavers of black Africans in history, bar none. Because Joseph/Malik doesn’t pay attention to what is going on around him in the world, he doesn’t know that Muslims are still brutally enslaving black Sudanese Christians and animists.
And even if Joseph/Malik does know these things, he doesn’t care. All he cares about is shaking off the trappings of the hated white man, never considering that the white men who enslaved his forebears are long dead (as are Joseph/Malik's forebears). Deep down in Joseph/Malik’s psyche, he thinks that he is taking revenge for the enslavement of his forefathers; he thinks that his repudiation of all things Judeo-Christian is a way of getting back at the slave masters and their progeny.
So when Muslims rape, pillage and torture the black Sudanese, when Muslims blow up and dismember black Kenyans and Tanzanians in Nairobi, Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam, when Muslims gun down respectable black (and white and other) Americans in Maryland and Virginia, Joseph/Malik ignores it or refuses to see it.
Joseph/Malik must ignore the fact that he has wrested himself from the hands of dead slave masters and put himself into the hands of living, breathing ones.
In other words, Joseph/Malik is a fool.
