Echoes in Eternity

"The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefited them."

~ Thomas Sowell

A fun and thought-provoking piece by Dalrymple on the topic of the World Cup.

Dalrymple has an absolutely brilliant piece on the hazards of excessive sympathy for the poor, particularly when applied to politics.

To sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive. But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to combine all three errors.

No subject provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained what it had long been—one of the worst countries in the Western world in which to grow up.
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My remarks were poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child psychologists. One fellow panelist ... dismissed my comments as nonsense. For her, poverty was simply the “maldistribution of resources”; we could thus distribute it away. And in her own terms, she was right, for her charity stipulated that one was poor if one had an income of less than 60 percent of the median national income.

This definition, of course, has odd logical consequences: for example, that in a society of billionaires, multimillionaires would be poor. A society in which every single person grew richer could also be one in which poverty became more widespread than before; and one in which everybody grew poorer might be one in which there was less poverty than before. More important, however, is that the redistributionist way of thinking denies agency to the poor. By destroying people’s self-reliance, it encourages dependency and corruption—not only in Britain, but everywhere in the world where it is held.
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The British state is today as much a monopoly provider of education to the population as it is of health care. The monopoly is maintained because the government and the bureaucratic caste believe, first, that parents would otherwise be too feckless or impoverished to educate their children from their own means; and second, that public education equalizes the chances of children in an otherwise unequal society and is thus a means of engineering social justice.
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As in Tanzania, the state-dominated system became self-reinforcing. Because of the high taxation necessary to run it, it reduced the capacity and inclination of people to pay for their own choices—and eventually the habit of making such choices. The British state now decides the important things for British citizens when it comes to education and much else.
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The only time I ever saw [President] Nyerere in person was in Dodoma, the dusty town designated to become Tanzania’s new capital. He was expected to drive by, and by the side of the road sat a praise singer—a woman employed to sing the praises of important people. She was singing songs in praise of Nyerere, of which there were many, with words such as: “Father Nyerere, build and spread socialism throughout the country and eliminate all parasites.”

The great man drove past in a yellow Mercedes. The praise singer was covered in dust and started to cough.

This New York Times column shows why just throwing money at Third World poverty will continue to reap nothing but more poverty. It's even more true in the U.S. Many times, economic poverty is led by the nose ring of impoverishment of the soul. You can't cure the former without first fixing the latter.

Dalrymple has a great column this week on the impotency of foreign aid (specifically that which is given by governments). It brings to mind the same principles behind the book When Helping Hurts. The same is true in both: more times than not, foreign aid only serves to undermine its purpose. Send federal money to an impoverished country and you'll likely increase the suffering, not lessen it.

The New York Times on March 10 quoted a United Nations report to the effect that aid given to Somalia was not reaching the people most in need of it, that is to say the malnourished and the starving.

I would not be telling you the truth if I said that, when I read the news, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Can there be anyone left in the world who thinks that aid will go only, or even mainly, to the people most in need of it? By comparison with such a belief, faith in Father Christmas is a model of rational expectation. At least the presents arrive, even if Father Christmas doesn’t.
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In most African countries, it is not the enterprise of the local people that had led to the extraction of mineral wealth, but rather that of foreigners, exploitative as they may often have been. Even though local people have supplied the manual labour necessary to the extraction, the wealth as a whole that accrues to African society as a whole comes as a free gift, more or less as aid does.

This is a disaster for the rounded development of a backward country, for it makes control of the government (which receives the bulk of the wealth accruing to African society from mineral extraction) the most important, and sometimes the only, path to personal or ethnic advancement. Ambition itself is wholly politicised, therefore, and the humble task of producing things is left to the unambitious and perhaps the less able.
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If you mix in a little ethnic discord with government control of mineral revenues, the scene is set for prolonged, indeed endless and often bloody political struggles. Far from being a blessing, therefore, oil wealth has been a curse for Nigeria.

In countries less well-endowed with extractable wealth, foreign aid has played the part of oil in Nigeria. Oil constitutes at least 80 per cent of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings; in several African countries, foreign aid constitutes very nearly as much.

This results in the same perversions of the national economy, and the same obstacles to real development, as oil has done in Nigeria. The ambitious and able people want to join the government, and so life in general is deeply politicised; genuine economic life is paralysed, and becomes a desperate zero sum game.

When this happens, there is a built-in and deeply perverse incentive to continue to follow policies that impoverish, for a flourishing economy would obviate the supposed need for the foreign aid which is the source of the power, influence and wealth of the elite through whom it is funnelled. Here is one case in which poverty really is a source of wealth.

The most extreme instance of the above syndrome is civil war. It is therefore not in the least surprising that aid to Somalia is not reaching the neediest; it would be very surprising, indeed it would be absolutely astonishing, if it were. Neither is it surprising, however, that it should be reported as if it were surprising (unsurprising news not being news). For otherwise, the fact that aid does not reach the neediest would be a threat to our sense of power, our feelings of omnipotence. How could a few lousy uneducated Somalian gunmen be thwarting our infinite benevolence?

Mark Steyn has his usual witty analysis in full gear this week, this time taking on the recent attempt by a Nigerian Muslim to blow up a jet over Detroit.

On Christmas Day, a gentleman from Nigeria succeeded (effortlessly) in boarding a flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Pretty funny, huh?

But the Pantybomber wasn't the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet. First, the bureaucrats at the TSA swung into action with a whole new range of restrictions.

Against radical Yemen-trained Muslims wearing weaponized briefs? Of course not. That would be too obvious. So instead they imposed a slew of constraints against you. At Heathrow last week, they were permitting only one item of carry-on on U.S. flights. In Toronto, no large purses.

Um, the Pantybomber didn't have a purse. He brought the bomb on board under his private parts, and his private parts weren't part of his carry-on (although, if reports of injuries sustained in his failed mission are correct, they may well have been part of his carry-off). But no matter. If in doubt, blame the victim. The TSA announced that for the last hour of the flight no passenger can use the toilets or have anything on his lap – not a laptop, not a blanket, not a stewardess, not even a paperback book. I can't wait for the first lawsuit after an infidel flight attendant confiscates a litigious imam's Koran as they're coming into LAX.
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The only good news was that the derision was so universal that the TSA promptly reined in some of their wackier impositions a couple of days later. But by then Janet Incompetano, the Homeland Security secretary, had gone on TV and declared to the world that there was nothing to worry about: "The system worked."

Indeed, it worked "smoothly." The al-Qaida trainee on a terrorist watch list, a man banned from the United Kingdom and reported to the CIA by his own father, got on board the plane, assembled the bomb, and attempted to detonate it. But don't worry 'bout a thing; the system worked.

Twenty-four hours later, Secretary Incompetano was back on TV to protest that her words had been taken "out of context."
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But by then the president of the United States had also taken to the airwaves. For three days, he had remained silent – which I believed is a world record for the 44th president. Since Jan. 20, 2009, it's been difficult to switch on the TV and not find him yakking – accepting an award in Oslo for not being George W Bush, doing Special Olympics gags with Jay Leno, apologizing for America to some dictator or other... but across the electric wires an eerie still had descended. And when the president finally spoke, even making allowances for his usual detached cool, he sounded less like a commander-in-chief addressing the nation after an attempted attack than an assistant DA at a Cook County press conference announcing a drugs bust: "Here's what we know so far... As the plane made its final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device... The suspect was immediately subdued... The suspect is now in custody and has been charged..."

Etc., etc., piling up one desiccated legalism on another: "Allegedly..."

"suspect..." "charged..." The president can't tell an allegedly alleged suspect (which is what he is in Obama fantasy land) from an enemy combatant (which is what he is in cold, hard reality). But worse than the complacent cop-show jargonizing was a phrase it's hard to read as anything other than a deliberate attempt to mislead the public: the president referred to the Knickerbomber as an "isolated extremist." By this time, it was already clear that young Umar had been radicalized by jihadist networks in London and fast-tracked to training in Yemen by terror operatives who understood the potentially high value of a westernized Muslim with excellent English from a respectable family. Yet President Obama tried to pass him off as some sort of lone misfit who wakes up one morning and goes bananas. Could happen to anyone.

But, if it takes the White House three days to react to an attack on the United States, their rapid-response unit can fire back in nothing flat when Dick Cheney speaks. "It is telling," huffed the president's Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, "that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the administration than condemning the attackers."

"Condemning the attackers"? What happened to all the allegedly alleged stuff? Shouldn't that be "condemning the alleged isolated attacker"? The communications director seems to be wandering a bit off-message here, whatever the message is: The system worked, so we're inconveniencing you even more. The system failed, but the alleged suspect is an isolated extremist, so why won't that cowardly squish Cheney have the guts to condemn the attacker and his vast network of associates?

The real message was conveyed by Fouad Ajami, discussing the new administration's foreign policy in The Wall Street Journal: "No despot fears Mr. Obama, and no blogger in Cairo or Damascus or Tehran, no demonstrator in those cruel Iranian streets, expects Mr. Obama to ride to the rescue." True. Another Iranian deadline passed on New Year's Eve, but the United States will set a new one for Groundhog Day or whenever.

And, just as the thug states understand they now have the run of the planet, so do the terror cells. A thwarted terror attack at Christmas is bad enough. Spending the following week making yourself a global joke is worse. Every A-list despot and dime store jihadist got that message loud and clear – and so did American allies already feeling semi-abandoned by this most parochial of presidents. Expect a bumpy 12 months ahead. Happy New Year.

My wife and I went to see Clint Eastwood's new film, Invictus, this past weekend. The movie tells the true story of Nelson Mandela's coming to power in South Africa and how the national rugby team helped unify the country. Morgan Freeman plays Mandela perfectly, and Matt Damon does a pretty decent job as the captain of the rugby team. It's a very good movie overall, teaching a great message about forgiveness and reconciliation. The only thing I found wanting was the complete lack of any reference to God. In fact, it's a largely humanist piece; the title of the movie comes from a poem of the same name which ends with the words "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul." Outside of that nitpick, it's a well-made, uplifting film.

Sickening...

The Prosperity Gospel from The Global Conversation on Vimeo.

Dr. Dalrymple has an excellent column this week in the New English Review on the thrill of reading (and writing) about evil in comparison to doing likewise about good. As he points out, "a newspaper that reported only acts of kindness and generosity would be insufferably boring and would go bankrupt." People want to hear and read about bad people and evil deeds.

To write of good people is often to sound either naïve or priggish; whereas to write of the bad is to appear worldly and sophisticated. One of the reasons, of course, for the difficulty of writing interestingly of the good is that there seems so much less to say of them than of the bad. The good act according to principle, and are therefore lamentably (from the literary point of view) predictable. Once you know how they behave in one situation, you know how they will behave in others. The bad, by contrast, have no principles beyond the pursuit of short-term self-interest, and sometimes not even that. They are therefore not predictable and their conduct is infinitely various.
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At the same time, of course, there is the problem of evil: how it arises, and how it triumphs. No one troubles himself to anything like the same extent over the problem of good: how it arises, or how it triumphs. Perhaps this is testimony to the victory of Rousseau’s idea that we are fundamentally good by nature, though deformed by society, over that of Original Sin, which proposes that we are all sinful from birth.
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It occurred to me in view of the problem of good – I mean the literary problem, not the metaphysical one – to try to write interestingly of some of the very good people whom it has been my fortune to encounter in my passage through this vale of tears we call the world.
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I think... of the adolescent son of a female alcoholic patient, nasty and violent in drink, whom I expected to be adversely affected by growing up in an atmosphere of every conceivable kind of squalor, physical, emotional and moral. If he had been truculent and aggressive I should have understood it; if he had thought he was hard done by, I could hardly have disagreed with him. But instead of being such a young man, he was extremely well-mannered and attentive to his own education, not resentful in the least; moreover, he looked after his disagreeable mother with a tenderness that was amazing to behold and (frankly) impossible to understand, considering the dog’s life she had led him. Where did such goodness come from? It was at least as difficult a problem as that of evil.
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I met in an obscure part of Nigeria an aged Irish nun, well into her seventies, living in an isolated convent with other nuns, who made it her work to bring food to the prisoners in the local prison. I have very little doubt that they would have been severely malnourished or even starved to death without her arduous attentions; she made sure that each of the prisoners, some of whose sentences had expired but who had not the requisite money to bribe the gaolers to release them, and others of whom had been on remand for ten years, was fed. For it was a matter of fact, accepted as a law of nature, that officialdom would steal whatever there was to be stolen.

The nun had nothing but her moral authority to effect her work, and she had no reward but the gratitude of the prisoners and the compliance of the guards. It was clear that they all now had both a respect and an affection for her; she carried around with her an aura of invulnerability to the world’s evil. But none of this had gone to her head, on the contrary; her humility was genuine and unselfconscious, and I suppose if asked she would have denied any special merit in her conduct. The reproach to one’s own comparative lack of humanity was implicit rather than explicit. The power of example is that it is exemplary, not declarative, much less declamatory.

It is not of course for me to say whether I have been able to interest the reader in some of the remarkably good people whom I have met, or whether they would really rather have heard about the baby-sitter whom I met who killed the three infants in his charge because he didn’t like the noise they were making that interfered with his concentration on television. It might be said that, having described the goodness of these five people, I would have nothing more of interest to say about them; whereas, had I chosen the four or five greatest moral monsters whom I had encountered, I would have much more to say.

But this is not quite right; the fact is that we are much more interested in the life histories of the moral monsters than in those of people like the five exemplars whom I have described. Their lives were neither uniform nor without interest, but I did not enquire into them with the same curiosity that I have employed in the cases of the moral monsters.

In summary, it may be said that evil attracts and engrosses us in a way that good rarely does.

The eyes of someone you kill are immortal, if they face you at the fatal instant. They have a terrible black color. They shake you more than the streams of blood and the death rattles, even in a great turmoil of dying. The eyes of the killed, for the killer, are his calamity if he looks into them. They are the blame of the person he kills. - Pancrace Hakizamungili

The above words of a Hutu murderer from Rwanda come from the book I just finished last weekend, Jean Hatzfeld's Machete Season: The Killers of Rwanda Speak. It is an amazing book, consisting primarily of in-person interviews (conducted by Hatzfeld) of a group of Hutu men in prison for their crimes during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. During the hundred early summer days that the genocide raged, over half a million Tutsis were slaughtered, mostly with the use of machetes and knives.

In Machete Season (the follow-up book to Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak), Hatzfeld has divided the interviews into different chapter subjects. For example, the quote that begins this post comes from the chapter entitled "The First Time," which is comprised by the killers' recollections of their first murder. Another chapter is "And God in All This?", which contains the killers' response to the question of rationalizing religion (Rwanda, colonized by the French, is primarily a Roman Catholic country, so many of the killers attended mass with their victims) and genocide.

Though not particularly gruesome or bloody in its details, the book does not hide any of the awfulness of the genocide and is not a read for the weak of heart. Neighbor cut neighbor, best friend stabbed best friend, doctor murdered patient, child killed child. What struck me most was the ability of these people to mercilessly butcher former friends, soccer teammates, and choir members with rarely a sign of compunction, and what little regret there was mostly became evident only AFTER the killers were brought to justice.

Another thing that stands out are the motives for the killing. While there were plenty of socio-political "reasons" for genocide in the political and intellectual arena (Hatzfeld makes mention of how the Hutu intelligentsia spurred on the idea of genocide for years prior to 1994, drawing striking parallels with 1930's Germany), the typical poor Hutu farmer who did most of the killing cared little for those motives. Instead, what drove them to wipe out the Tutsis was primarily a sense of entitlement, a deep-rooted spirit of envy, and an attitude of covetousness entrenched in the population. Hutus are mostly crop farmers, while Tutsis are known for their ability to raise cattle. Hutus don't know how to raise cattle, and the Tutsi herds would sometimes trample their crops. Furthermore, even though Tutsis are mostly indistinguishable from their Hutu neighbors in physical appearance, they were generally thought of as the taller, more handsome ethnic group. From what I understand, Tutsis were, at least in the eyes of Hutus, a more prosperous people, so they were quite envious of the Tutsi wealth. So when the killing started, each morning almost every Hutu man would go out into the forests and marshes to hunt and kill Tutsis while their wives and children would loot the abandoned Tutsi homes. When the men came home in the evening, they would all eat freshly slaughtered beef for supper. They all became extravagantly rich and stopped tending to their crops during the hundred days of killing.

The killing was not only left to the men. Women joined in at times, and even children were shown how to kill Tutsis. While some of the wives were disgusted by what was going on, they were by no means a more merciful group. As one killer's wife astutely put it, "there were also men who proved more charitable toward the Tutsis than their wives, even with their machetes in hand. A person's wickendness depends on the heart, not the sex."

There was significant pressure to kill, but usually not via deadly threats. If a Hutu didn't want to get his hands "dirty," he could pay a fine every day so that he didn't have to go out into the marshes. And if he couldn't pay the fine, he probably could hang back from the front lines of genocide and conceal his disinterest and moral qualms. While some Hutus were killed for showing mercy to Tutsis, generally the worst punishment a Hutu could expect for not partaking in the killing was a smaller share of the loot, a stiff fine, and the daily scorn of his Hutu neighbors. However, the interviewed killers said there were very few who attempted to keep their hands (and consciences) clean.

Eventually the reader asks if there were ANY Hutus who stood up for truth and right. Hatzfeld tells us that there were a few, but only a few. "In Search of the Just" is his chapter on just that: the handful of Hutus who stood up against the genocidal evil. Most of them were killed, which leads the reader to believe that it was truly a kill or be killed situation. That is only partially true, and ignores the role of the years building up to that point. Hutus everywhere freely joked on the radio, in pubs, at school, etc. about how they would someday kill all the cockroaches. The time to snuff out that genocidal hatred was NOT in the spring of 1994, but before that whenever an ethnic joke or a Tutsi slur reared its ugly head. The Rwandan genocide gives credence to the belief that ideas do indeed have consequences and words mean something.

Lastly, as a Christian, I was struck by something wholly unintended by the author: God's divine forbearance. It amazes me how God can be so patient with humanity, and I am left in further awe of His ABOUNDING forbearance, mercy, and righteousness.

"What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory..."

Romans 9:22-23

In case you haven't heard this story amongst all the "the sky is falling" financial news, it appears that Kenya is in the process of becoming the next Rwanda. Let us hope and pray that cooler heads and more loving hearts prevail.

The marvelous Mark Steyn...

The holiday season is here, and that means it's time to engage in the time-honored Christmas tradition of objecting to every time-honored Christmas tradition. Australia is a gazillion time zones ahead of the United States – it may even be Boxing Day there already – so they got in first this year with a truly fantastic headline:

"Santas Warned 'Ho Ho Ho' Offensive To Women."
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If I were a female resident of Sydney, I think I'd be more offended by the assumption that Australian women and U.S. prostitutes are that easily confused.
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But the point is that the right not to be offended is now the most sacred right in the world. The right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, all are as nothing compared with the universal right to freedom from offense. It's surely only a matter of time before "sensitivity training" is matched by equally rigorous "inoffensiveness training" courses.
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For example, when I said the right not to be offended is now the most "sacred" right in the world, I certainly didn't mean to offend persons of a nontheistic persuasion. In Hanover, N.H., home to Dartmouth College, an atheist and an agnostic known only as "Jan and Pat Doe" (which is which is hard to say) are suing because their three schoolchildren are forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Well, OK, they're not forced to say it. The pledge is voluntary. You're allowed to sit down, or, more discreetly, stand silently, which is what the taciturn Yankee menfolk who think it's uncool to sing do during the hymns at my local church. But that's not enough for "the Does." Because the pledge mentions God, their children are forced, as it were, not to say it. And, as "Mr. and Mrs. Doe" put it in their complaint, having to opt out of participation in a voluntary act exposes their children to potential "peer pressure" from the other students.
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Let us now cross from the New Hampshire school system to the Sudanese school system. Or as The Associated Press headline put it:

"Thousands In Sudan Call For British Teddy Bear Teacher's Execution."

Last week, Gillian Gibbons, a British schoolteacher working in Khartoum, one of the crumbiest basket-case dumps on the planet – whoops, I mean one of the most lively and vibrant strands in the rich tapestry of our multicultural world – anyway, Mrs. Gibbons was sentenced last week to 15 days in jail because she was guilty of, er, allowing a teddy bear to be named "Mohammed." She wasn't so foolish as to name the teddy Mohammed herself. But, in an ill-advised Sudanese foray into democracy, she'd let her grade-school students vote on what name they wanted to give the classroom teddy, and being good Muslims they voted for their favorite name: Mohammed.

Big mistake. There's apparently a whole section in the Quran about how, if you name cuddly toys after the Prophet you have to be decapitated. Well, actually there isn't. But why let theological pedantry deprive you of the opportunity to stick it to the infidel? Mrs. Gibbons is regarded as lucky to get 15 days in jail, when the court could have imposed six months and 40 lashes. But even that wouldn't have been good enough for the mob in Khartoum. The protesters shouted "No tolerance. Execution" and "Kill her. Kill her by firing squad" and "Shame, shame to the U.K." – which persists in sending out imperialist schoolmarms to impose idolatrous teddy bears on the youth of Sudan.
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Still, at exactly the time Gillian Gibbons caught the eye of the Sudanese authorities, a 19-year-old Saudi woman was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail. Her crime? She'd been abducted and gang-raped by seven men. Originally, she'd been sentenced to 90 lashes, but her lawyer had appealed and so the court increased it to 200 and jail time. Anybody on the streets in Sudan or anywhere else in the Muslim world who wants to protest that?

East is east, and west is west, and in both we take offense at anything: Santas saying "Ho ho ho," teddy bears called Mohammed. And yet the difference is very telling: The now-annual Santa lawsuits in the "war on Christmas" and the determination to abolish even such anodyne expressions of faith as the Pledge of Allegiance are assaults on the very possibility of a common culture. By contrast, the teddy bear rubbish is a crude demonstration of cultural muscle intended to cow and intimidate. When east meets west, when offended Muslims find themselves operating in Western nations, they discover that both techniques are useful: Some march in the streets, Khartoum-style, calling for the pope to be beheaded, others use the mechanisms of the West's litigious, perpetual grievance culture to harass opponents into silence.

Perhaps somewhere in Sydney there's a woman who's genuinely offended by hearing Santa say "ho ho ho" just as those New Hampshire atheists claim to be genuinely offended by the Pledge of Allegiance. But their complaints are frivolous and decadent, and more determined groups are using the patterns they've established to shut down debate on things we should be talking about. The ability to give and take offense is what separates free societies from Sudan.

Alanis Morissette needs to update her song "Ironic" with some witty rhyme involving this story from Kenya. Of course, her song would no longer be ironic, since it would then actually contain real irony.

With apologies...

"It's like having 490 shillings when all you need is some food,
It's being an orphan outside an anti-poverty forum,
and realizing that it's not doing you any good."

This is a man who will truly deserve his reward in heaven... most American Christians can't even comprehend what it is like to truly suffer for Christ. Stories such as his make me wonder how God would ever accept me, one who has never suffered significantly for Christ, and perhaps never will. It also makes me wonder how it can be that Christians in this country have lost so much perspective that they DARE to preach a prosperity gospel. Such a self-centered, narcissistic message was not the one that my Savior brought to the earth 2000 years ago.

P.S. Ah, the Religion of Peace™ is at it again. A city in Somalia has made it a capital offense to not pray 5 times a day to Allah. Sheik Hussein Barre Rage (ironic name) said that those who don't follow the new edict will "definitely be beheaded according to Islamic law." Mr. Rage continued, "As Muslims we should practice Islam fully, not in part, and that is what our religion enjoins us to do." Well, on the bright side, you have to admire their religious conviction. Now, if only they would channel it in positive ways.