A "good" Muslim

Ayman al-Zawahri was barely mentioned in yesterday's post, but the point of the quoted New York Times article was that he had just been named to succeed Osama bin Laden. What can we say about him?
    Scary dude. He is possibly driven by a fiercer hatred of the United States than was Bin Laden himself, or than Sayyid Qutb.
    Zawahri helped Bin Laden plan the 9/11 attacks. The Miami Herald reports today (in "Zawahri succeeds bin Laden as al Qaeda leader" that

His fanaticism and the depth of his hatred for the United States and Israel are likely to define al Qaeda's actions under Zawahri's tutelage. In a 2001 treatise that offered a glimpse of his violent thoughts, Zawahri set down al Qaeda's strategy: to inflict "as many casualties as possible" on the Americans.
    "Pursuing the Americans and Jews is not an impossible task," he wrote. "Killing them is not impossible, whether by a bullet, a knife stab, a bomb, or a strike with an iron bar."

"One dark tale from Mr. Zawahri’s past" was reported by Scott Shane in yesterday's New York Times (in his article, "Qaeda Selection of Its Chief Is Said to Reflect Its Flaws"). The tale is

recounted in Growing Up Bin Laden, a 2008 memoir by Bin Laden’s son Omar bin Laden. He describes an episode in Afghanistan in the 1990s when a friend—a teenage boy—was raped by several men in the camp where they lived. The men snapped photos of the abuse and circulated them as a joke.
    Mr. Zawahri was incensed by the photos, believing that the young man was guilty of homosexual activity, Omar bin Laden wrote. Mr. Zawahri had the teenager put on trial and condemned to death.
    “My friend was dragged into a room with Zawahri, who shot him in the head,” he wrote. The episode was a factor, he said, in his decision to break with his father and leave Afghanistan.

    As a good Muslim, Zawahri might have had his own daughter stoned to death for dishonoring him by being raped. It's hard to discern what honor he might have fancied he was avenging in the case of the teenage boy.
    Shane reported that Zawahri said last week, in a videotaped eulogy to Osama bin Laden, that "Today, praise God, America is not facing an individual, a group, or a faction. It is facing a nation than is in revolt, having risen from its lethargy to a renaissance of jihad."
    "Praise God"? The lunacy manifest here (as in the act of executing the victim of a rape) is all but incomprehensible to, say, Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), the author of Psychopathia Sexualis: With Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct.
    Quaint phrase, "contrary sexual instinct." It might apply to Zawahri (and Qutb—remember his terror of teenage American girls?); Krafft-Ebing wrote:

While up to this time contrary sexual instinct has had but an anthropological, clinical, and forensic interest for science, now, as a result of the latest investigations, there is some thought of therapy in this incurable condition, which so heavily burdens its victims, socially, morally, and mentally. [Emphasis mine]

It occurs to me, though, that equally lunatic actions described in the Bible and the Qur'an (many of them attributed to God in the former and Allah in the latter) can be dismissed as merely "primitive" or "of an earlier time," before our race's average morality and cultural intelligence had advanced to its current state of almost being half-civilized.
    In other words, Zawahri is (as bin Laden and Qutb were) men planted firmly in a past the race hopes to have left behind.
    But it's not likely to be fully left behind until books like the Qur'an are no longer read believingly.

The reason for my recent disappearance

To my regular readers, who may be wondering why I haven't posted anything lately, I think I owe an explanation. The simple truth is that my spirits have been rather down lately over the utter banality and craziness of one-half of the "health care debate" in this country. I don't know which depresses me more, the fact of Fox News [sic] and Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, or the fact that a large number of supposedly adult Americans listen to and believe them.
    And it doesn't help that some of these bewildering (and possibly bewildered) people are my neighbors and relatives. A letter printed yesterday to the editor of a local newspaper castigated another letter-writer, saying, "I don't know where that liberal gets his information, but a recent poll on Fox News says...."
    And a cousin emailed me this morning about a conversation in his extended family:

Yesterday I visited them, and they started telling me about Hitler, and how he wanted to socialize everything. I'm like, "Whoa! Obama is nothing like Hitler. It's irresponsible to compare the two. Hitler was like the most evil person of the 1900's."
    Then they were like, "You know what would happen if the Democrats got their way? They would euthanize H----d's son because he's mongoloid."
    It's not even worth arguing with them anymore. A lot of senior citizens watch Faux News most of the day and listen to AM radio when they aren't watching their crazy propaganda "news." It's mind-boggling how irresponsible some of those crazy right-wingers are. They are scaring people into starting militias, and that shit is dangerous.

Are any of you depressed about this, too? The false rumor-starting, the fear-mongering, the hate-inciting? If you want to unburden yourself a little (as I have here), my comment box is open.