Is This A Joke?

UPDATE: NOT A JOKE! MEMRI has the translation, and there are actually three additional elements to the fatwa, including not playing the game "surrounded" by four lines, as that is the way of the "polytheists." Thanks to Sean for that.

ORIGINAL POST:

It seems like a joke. The article claims this is a translation from a Saudi newspaper, but no link is provided; but then, not all the media of the world have an on-line presence.

There's nothing identifying it as a joke.

And it's from the Guardian UK, which, as far as I know, does not seem to have a sense of humor, except for some shitgiggle-sarcasm when Americans or Israelis are butchered.

So: Joke, or not a joke? A fatwa about soccer (known to foreign pansies as "football"), which stipulates the ways in which the game is to be changed in order to not follow the rules of the "decadent and corrupt" western imperialists.

Islamically-correct soccer. It must be read to be believed. I've read it, and I still don't believe it.

At some point we must drop the pretense of politeness and simply begin telling these people: You. Are. Fucking. Insane.

I'm sorry, but sometimes tough-love is needed. We've been sugar-coating this for a while, but it might be time for more bitter medicine.

One billion people in the world are tyrannized by a paranoid and hateful thought-system promulgated by maniacs that, were it not termed "one of the world's great religions," would be deemed a fucking psychiatric condition.

And we're all supposed to nod our heads and say "Yes, by Allah, 'Islam' means peace."

Well, perhaps. But not the way a lot of the current Defenders of the Faith are defining it.

Read the list. If this is real, then I'm afraid there's no other term that can apply to this madness than "batshit over-the-fucking moon crazy-eyed lunatic ravings."

And I mean that with all due respect.

1. International terminology that heretics use, such as "foul," "penalty", "corner," "goal", "out" and others, should be abandoned and not said. Whoever says them should be punished and ejected from the game.

2. Do not call "foul" and stop the game if someone falls and sprains a hand or foot or the ball touches his hand, and do not give a yellow or red card to whoever was responsible for the injury or tackle. Instead, it should be adjudicated according to Sharia rulings concerning broken bones and injuries.

3. Do not follow the heretics, the Jews, the Christians and especially evil America regarding the number of players. Do not play with 11 people. Add to this number or decrease it.

4. Play in your regular clothes or your pyjamas or something like that, but not coloured shorts and numbered T-shirts, because shorts and T-shirts are not Muslim clothing. Rather, they are heretical and western clothing, so beware of imitating their fashion.

5. If you have fulfilled these conditions and intend to play soccer, play to strengthen the body in order better to struggle in the way of God on high and to prepare the body for when it is called to jihad. Soccer is not for passing time or the thrill of so-called victory.

6. Do not play in two halves. Rather, play in one half or three halves in order to completely differentiate yourselves from the heretics, the corrupted and the disobedient.

7. If neither of you beats the other, or "wins", as it is called, and neither puts the leather between the posts, do not add extra time or penalties. Instead leave the field, because winning with extra time and penalty kicks is the pinnacle of imitating heretics and international rules.

8. Young crowds should not gather to watch when you play because if you are there for the sake of sports and strengthening your bodies as you claimed, why would people watch you? You should make them join your physical fitness and jihad preparation, or you should say: "Go proselytise and seek out morally reprehensible acts in the markets and the press and leave us to our physical fitness."

9. You should spit in the face of whoever puts the ball between the posts or uprights and then runs in order to get his friends to follow him and hug him like players in America or France do, and you should punish him, for what is the relationship between celebrating, hugging and kissing and the sports that you are practising?

10. You should use two posts instead of three pieces of wood or steel that you erect in order to put the ball between them, meaning that you should remove the crossbar in order not to imitate the heretics and in order to be entirely distinct from the soccer system's despotic international rules.

11. Do not do what is called "substitution," that is, taking the place of someone who has fallen, because this is a practice of the heretics in America and elsewhere.

This isn't religion. This is a worldwide pandemic of extreme-feelings-of-inadequacy-and-cultural-inferiority metastized into full-blown mental illness which expresses itself through the superficial vehicle of "religion."

Any culture with an inferiority complex stresses what it has and others don't, and denigrates what others have but it doesn't. Even in America, we denigrate... well, we have most things, but American conservatives were pretty annoyed by that whole "Socialism works in Scandanavia line" a decade ago.

The French go on and on about their fucking cheese and cafes and little tiny homo-coffees. Their culture. Which is, yes, nice in some respects, but they never shut up about it because what the French have and America doesn't is French culture, the French language, and French indifference to nostril-stinging body odor.

And etc.

The Muslim world has an enormous chip on its shoulder -- 700 years of political and technological failure can't be good for one's ego -- and they seem to be stressing the one thing they have that others don't -- Islam.

That's what makes them special. Everyone wants to feel special.

But the religion has been perverted into a hateful form of boosting-self-esteem-by-demonizing-the-world. A culture forever on the lookout for heretics, infidels, and scapegoats is not a culture that has an awful lot positive going for it.

posted by Ace at 08:22 PM

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