Meow

I gotta tell you kids I’m having some trouble shaking this bug I picked up last week. Tonight marks the 6th day I’ve been afflicted with the most hellish gastroenteritis I’ve ever had. If it doesn’t stop soon I don’t know what I’m gonna do. This is seriously cutting into my carousing-around-town-drinking-wine-and-holding-forth-on-political-topics time.

Just when you thought the Islamic clerics couldn’t go off and do something even dumber then kill a nun over a misinterpretation of the Pope, you have this from the Daily Mail:

“A Muslim cleric's claim that women who do not wear the veil are like 'uncovered meat' who attract sexual predators sparked outrage around Australia yesterday.
Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, the nation's most senior Muslim cleric, compared immodestly-dressed women who do not wear the Islamic headdress with meat that is left uncovered in the street and is then eaten by cats… In a Ramadam sermon in a Sydney mosque, Sheik al-Hilali suggested that a group of Muslim men recently jailed for many years for gang rapes were not entirely to blame.
There were women, he said, who 'sway suggestively' and wore make-up and immodest dress "and then you get a judge without mercy and gives you 65 years. But the problem, but the problem all began with who?" he said, referring to the women victims.
Addressing 500 worshippers on the topic of adultery, Sheik al-Hilali added: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it, whose fault is it - the cats or the uncovered meat?
"The uncovered meat is the problem."
He went on: "If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab (veil), no problem would have occurred. Women, he said, were 'weapons' used by Satan to control men. "

Here’s where cultural relativism dies for me and the ugly side of biblical literalism shows its face. If Islam is to be accepted in Europe, its mullahs have to read a few books other than the Koran and understand that living in the West means, at the very least, that you cannot publicly espouse a view that equates women to meat left out for stray alley cats. It does nothing to advance the cause of interfaith dialogue and makes you sound like a lunatic.