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Monday, November 07, 2005

Fatwas Against Rioting 

Can there be rioting without a fatwa? Apparently not these days:

From an outburst of anger in suburban Paris housing projects, the violence has fanned out into a nationwide show of disdain for French authority from youths, including the children of Arabs and black Africans angered by high unemployment, poor housing and discrimination.

The country's biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree. It forbade all those "who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others."
Well isn't this one a bit of a conundrum? After all, as far as we're mostly not being told, these riots continue to be all about anything-but-Islam.

It's about poverty, social exclusion, failure to integrate with French society, rampant French capitalism and the price of a Big Mac. It's not about Islam, no mention of it. Sure there are a lot of Tunisians and Arabs and what-not involved, and many Arabs and Tunisian people are Muslim, but only a hollow-headed knee-jerk lizardoid would think that this logically implied that these were Muslim riots.

So why the fatwa?

Maybe because the Union for Islamic Organizations in France recognizes the great love rampaging French youth hold for Islamic jurisprudence and social justice. Obviously a fatwa would be just the thing to inhibit all the rampaging Christian and Jewish and Buddhist French youth. Only the Religion of Peace has bothered to come out in opposition to the Fiat Flambe. And it's not even their riots.

Makes it all the more appalling that there is, so far, not a peep of a fatwa from any Christian or Jewish or Buddhist leaders calling on their adherents to behave peacefully. They must be pro-riotting. Or maybe they're too busy planning the backlash.

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