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iamafanofcartoons · 2 years ago

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RWBY Character Analysis: Ozma aka Ozpin-- A Humorous Explanation by Lurker-Archon

Found this fantastic R/RWBY comment and had to share it here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fnki/comments/wikl33/comment/il2tvpv/?context=3

Are you a masochist that will take an impossible task by gods who will kill you all if you ever call them back before you finish?

Do you have an interest in reincarnating into a boy and take over his life, and eventually, his very mind?

With or without consent, let us hop right into RWBY.

RWBY, an obscure spin off of the Valthirian Arc flash game series, is set in the world of Remnant, occupied by the 4 corners the political compass: Authoritarian Right, Authoritarian Left, Libertarian Left, and Libertarian Right, which are Atlas, Mistral, Vacuo, and Vale respectively. As you can guess, this can lead to disagreements and conflict. However, all four nations have come to mutual understanding of who the real enemies are: the Grimm. Mindless monsters that are indiscriminate on who they attack and bear no allegiance to any political ideology: the Centrists. And as we all know, all centrists must die.

Now, before we get into the excruciating, torturous gameplay, we must first get into the excruciating, torturous lore.

There once were two gods, God of Light and God of Darkness. Don't let the names fool you into thinking this is some gay New Testament Jesus and Satan bullshit. This is Greek mythology bs where the gods' personal drama personally fucks up the life of some random mortal, whom in this case was your wife Salem. After you died of ligma, Salem asked the gods to revive you. GoL refused because death is sacred part of life she must accept, while GoD refused because he's offended she asked GoL first.

As punishment for her arrogance, GoL gives Salem immortality. Is it the messed up kind where she gets older indefinitely? No, she stays young forever and is invulnerable to any damage. You might say, "I don't get it, that sounds exclusively beneficial", I would say, um, well, it's supposed to teach her the value of life and death or something.

Anyways, GoL's "punishment" resulted in Salem desiring death very much. So in a way, it worked really well on one half. However, unable to learn the other half, Salem instead gathers every army in the world by promising them immortality and YOLO-ing them against the Gods. This just ticked off GoD, who then proceeded to blow on the moon and bring armageddon, leaving her all on alone on a burning surface of the planet, a Remnant of the previous world.

Left utterly alone, Salem does the unthinkable. She takes the Centrist pool and becomes the queen over the creations of GoD also known as Grimm. Before, these centrist creatures were mostly harmless due to being disorganized, united by no cause. Now ever since Salem took control, they are an international threat to all political orientations, one of them even specifically designed to make our young generation apathetic to current politics..

Where do you fit into all this? After the planet was glassed medium-rare, GoL brought you back to life to give you the ultimate mission: unite humanity. He then gives you four exclusive premium MMO items called the Relics that will summon him and GoD back. But if he comes back and he still sees the players unable to decide how to split raid loot, he will finish what GoD started.

What a nice guy. He just wants to help a brother out.

Armed with your objective, the first thing you did was actually team up with Salem, not knowing her betrayal to everything good. To be honest, I don't blame you. You both ruled over the new world as gods, and even had 4 beautiful children. But soon it became apparent she had no governing philosophy, establishing no tax policy. I must clarify. I don't mean there were no taxes. There just wasn't any "policy". She "taxed" by taking anything she wanted, at any time, which could mean taking the very rockbed below your house to build her castle, eating the very last peach you were saving for your children, and, gods forbid, sitting next to you in the movie theater and taking your buttered popcorn bucket.

Disgusted by this barbarism, you decided to sneak out with the children, only to be caught and fight magic duels until the castle collapses on your children and you die. Salem is neither pro-life nor pro-choice. She is anti-life and anti-choice. Truly, no greater evil can be conceived by any other than the diabolical centrists.

Oh, and when you die, you reincarnate in the mind of another person, whose name must start with O. And after some time, both of your minds will eventually meld, into one. Now, where does individuality begin and end? Did the host disappear, or was it slowly eroded? Did Ozma die long ago, or is he a conjoined twin of your evergrowing minds?

There's only one thing to be certain, and that is to stop asking those questions, and focus on your goal. Stop Salem from destroying humanity by spreading her non-ideology throughout this world, and hopefully, eventually, maybe, unite humanity divided by opposing ideologies.

Good luck~

What is at your disposal? Who are you in this world? You are Ozpin, Headmaster of a Huntsmen school where all the students and teachers have guns. "School shootings" isn't something to prevent; it's something to encourage and integral to your school's security. It's also your deterrent to anyone trying to get into your office.

As the person in charge of these promising youths, your job is to prepare them for the harsh and cruel world. Therefore it is imperative that you make sure to cut out the chaff from the wheat by whatever means necessary. That includes throwing them with a catapult and see if they land without becoming red mist, putting them on opposite ends of a shooting range to teach them how to dodge, and prepare them for the international political debate where they persuade the masses that you are right by using your opponent's face to plug hot geysers.

Now you might ask yourself, what would happen if, say, some stupid noodle blonde that doesn't even know how to survive getting shot, applies to your school? Answer: let him in. See if he survives. Worst case, what happened was natural selection, and the gene pool is now less polluted. If his parents get angry and sue you, pay a visit to the judge. If he or she is a true Valean, the problem won't even come up in the newspaper.

Put your students in co-ed dorms. Because as a wise man once said, "There are no mistakes. Only happy accidents, that will fight and kill for your cause". And as your pool of students grows, so does potential recruits as agents in your shadow council.

What do you do with agents? Among just making sure Salem's agents aren't pulling their social experiment prank of the century, they can make sure to make sure 4 certain women in the world isn't going crazy or kidnapped. What's special about these women you ask? Remember the 4 reality-breaking divine items you were given? Well you locked them away in the 4 different countries in their respective schools, and turned some girls into their keys and gave them superpowers. Why did you do all that? Because you are a wizard, and you are just following the examples of your god to make things needlessly complicated, probably for some tangentially related moral lesson.

Just remember, you are not the protagonist. You are nurturing the protagonists who will save this world, so guide them through the difficult moral questions. Are the White Fang misunderstood, or are they Centrists? Is it unethical to dab over the enemy over winning the fight? Is there ever point where a weapon is nothing more than a convoluted impractical monstrosity?

Answer however you like, because all your attempts to try to nudge them in your directions will fail. So join in for the ride. When Salem plays her cards and apocalypse start, select your heroes and go on the world tour to gather the Relics.

How will they unite the world and fulfill the Gods' request to "unite humanity"? Will they tell the truth and suggest annihilation is the only alternative? Will they take the utilitarian approach and kill everyone who disagrees until all that are left, are the united?

Perhaps it's none of these things. Perhaps, ideologies are not important. Perhaps the answer to all of this, to all the answer to life and all its conflict, was smug anime faces.

Gods help us all

As always, more contents to come, so stay tuned. A warm thanks to the many members of the merchants guild. Generously funding, and bankrolling these videos.

You're all truly wonderful. Have a good one.

___________________________________________

Lurker-Archon’s comment was a delicious treat from start to finish.

If you have a reddit account, please drop some awards their way, they deserve it.

#political satire #rwby commentary #ozpin #ozma #rwby ozma #rwby ozpin #rwby salem #rwby #rwby discussion #rwby analysis #rwby abridged #rwby crack #reddit shitpost

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friend-clarity · 6 years ago

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The History of Jihad from Muhammad to Isis

Robert Spencer's new must-read book.

Here's the general idea. Islam emerged approximately 1,400 years ago. Its origins are obscure and disputed. One thing is certain. Arab conquerors, exploiting weaknesses in the aging and warring Roman and Persian Empires, burst out of the Arabian peninsula and, with unprecedented speed, conquered territories from Spain to India. They eventually claimed that their sacred texts, the Koran, hadith, and example of Muhammad, informed and sanctified their warfare. Their sacred texts told these warriors, in explicit terms, to brutalize non-Muslims. Brutalizing methods included decapitation, dismemberment, and the placement of decapitated heads between the corpse's feet. These are all traditional methods of dehumanization and desecration. Sanctioned and modeled tactics also included rape, sex slavery, torture, totalitarian rule, crucifixion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Muslims were ordered to make war in perpetuity until everyone on earth was a Muslim. Non-Muslims' rights were rigidly curtailed. Fighting and dying in battle was the very best thing that any Muslim could do, and it guaranteed the warrior bliss in paradise. Every good thing in life owed its existence to warfare. "Paradise lies under the shade of swords."

For the past 1,400 years, continuously, without pause, in every century and, eventually, reaching every inhabited continent, Muslims have obeyed these verses.

July 20, 2018, Danusha V. Goska

Friend, this is what you need to do. Go to your favorite brick-and-mortar store, or your favorite online site, and purchase a copy of Robert Spencer's, "The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS." Producing this book was a tremendous act of courage by Spencer and Bombardier Books. The same opponents of Western Civilization who rioted over the Danish Muhammad cartoons, who slaughtered the team at French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo, who murdered 37 innocent Turks at the Sivas Massacre, and who stabbed and shot the Japanese and Italian translators, and the Norwegian publisher, of Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" – those same dark forces want to riot and stab and bomb and slaughter over the words on these pages. Spencer and Bombardier deserve at the very least your investment in its full purchase price.

Jihad is a sword over your head. You may have been lulled into thinking that your odds are good. After all, there are seven billion people on earth. Compared to that number, the victims of terror attacks make up a negligible fraction. That calculation provides a false sense of security. Dr. Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard Kennedy School writes that, "on the current path, nuclear terrorism is inevitable … we would likely see terrorists succeed in their aspirations for an 'American Hiroshima.'"

Even if we are lucky enough to avoid nuclear war, jihad remains as a cultural, not merely a military, struggle. Jihad's victories are won not just on the battlefield, but in American textbooks. Indeed, as the South Park controversydemonstrated, jihad is victorious in deciding when Americans are allowed to laugh. Jihad is aimed even at your right to say the word "jihad," and, accurately, to define it. "While serving as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, John Brennan declared, '…jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering men, women and children." Brennan's definition is BS. You deserve, you need, to know the truth. Jihad is a weapon aimed at you – at your freedoms, your sense of beauty, your relationships, your understanding of your own history and your intellectual honesty. "You" includes everybody. Yes, Muslims, I am talking to you. Jihad has been used, and is being used, as a tool for some Muslims to decide that other Muslims are not Muslim enough. Iran characterized the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war as a jihad. That war killed and injured hundreds of thousands of Muslims. More recently, ISIS justified its genocide of Shia Muslims as jihad.

The book's contents are grim, repugnant, and terrifying. I want you to finish, as well as begin this book, so I will be so bold as to offer advice. Read quickly. Power through. Don't pause. You won't remember the name of every killer, torturer, rapist and thief. That's okay. Get the general idea.

For the past 1,400 years, continuously, without pause, in every century and, eventually, reaching every inhabited continent, Muslims have obeyed these verses. Any given jihad might look something like this. Invaders arrived. They identified themselves as jihadis. They identified their victims, Muslims or not, as infidels. The invaders massacred civilians. They erected mountains of decapitated heads, or they used heads to terrorize their opponents, shooting them from catapults, for example. They took sex slaves. Slaves were so plentiful that slave prices plummeted. Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu, houses of worship were ransacked of their jewels and precious metals. Booty was divided up lavishly among the suddenly enriched jihadis. The wrecked remains of the house of worship were pulverized and the rubble and dust was spread on the road leading to the mosque, so that Muslims could feel, with their every step, their superiority over the highest aspirations of those they humiliated.

Jews and Christians were taxed and forced to wear a distinguishing mark on their clothing, perhaps in the shape of a monkey or pig. They were denied the right to repair their houses of worship, or to ring bells, or to speak of their faith in public. Pagans, including Hindus, were simply massacred. Those who did not massacre enough Pagans were threatened and reminded that to live by their scripture and their prophet's example, they must kill as many as possible, as ruthlessly as possible. Conquerors insisted on sexual access to the prettiest princess, even if only to humiliate her, by, for example, forcing her to work as a household servant while naked. In other cases, the most handsome boy might be demanded for the conqueror's pleasure.

If there was a library, no matter how ancient and revered, it was despoiled. Legend depicts Caliph Omar justified his burning of the books, to heat bathwater, of the library of Alexandria. "The books will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous." No one knows if Omar said this, but we do know that both Muslims and non-Muslims believed it, which suggests that enough jihadis behaved like this that it was plausible. Indeed, the same story is told, about the same caliph, regarding the destruction of Persian libraries. It is true that Saladin's son attempted to bring down Egypt's pyramids, because they are un-Islamic. And Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr did order the removal of the nose of the Sphynx. The remains of the Colossus of Rhodes, that had survived hundreds of years of Christianity, succumbed to Islamic invaders, who sold them as scrap metal. A Muslim ordered that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, site of Jesus' entombment, be razed to bedrock. Hagia Sophia, a millennia-old Christian church, was desecrated and used as a mosque. Countless Hindu temples faced the same fate. Ctesiphon, one of the largest cities in the world, with a mixed population of Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, became a ghost town all but overnight. Muslim conquerors used its bricks to construct their edifices. Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan provided unimaginable booty to divinely sanctioned plunderers. The territory, as of the 21st century, has never come close to its former glory. Formerly wealthy Afghanistan and Pakistan are today among the countries whose own citizens most long to escape.

This process, or something very like this process, didn't happen once or twice. It didn't just happen during Islam's first hundred or two hundred years. Jihads like this happened over and over. Indeed, biographies of Muhammad describe him as a warrior and raider of caravans who massacred and tortured captives, took sex slaves, and ordered his men to rape captives even in front of their still-living husbands. Across the globe, in a multitude of tongues, jihadis cite the same Koran verses and hadith to sanctify their behavior. Tamerlane, "The Sword of Islam," who is estimated to have killed five percent of the world's population, cited jihad verses. As did the Barbary Pirates who enslaved Americans, and as did Osama bin Laden.

The cultural, as well as the biological, genocide aspect of jihad is also not of the distant past. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini's right hand man, Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, wanted to bulldoze the tomb of Persian emperor Cyrus the Great, the tomb of Iran's national poet, Ferdowsi, and Persepolis, the 2,500 year old royal Persian city. In 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, the largest standing Buddha carvings in the world. In 2012 and 2013, jihadis from the Ansar Dine destroyed ancient Muslim shrines and library manuscripts in Timbuktu, Mali. In 2016, ISIS took time out from the murder, torture, and sexual enslavement of human beings to destroy culture, including two-millennia-old Roman structures at Palmyra. Again, these Pagan structures survived hundreds of years of a Christian Middle East. It took devout Muslims to bring them down.

Spencer's book will dispel pernicious, politically motivated canards, including the following: that there was a Golden Age when Islam was peaceful and tolerant and Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Sikhs, and Hindus lived happy, productive, free lives under its protection; that Islamic terror is a relatively recent innovation, born, in various versions, with the state of Israel, or with Western colonial incursion; that the primary translation of "jihad" should be "peaceful struggle for noble, personal goals;" that the Crusades were an offensive action, or that they started the conflict between Islam and the West, or that their goal was forced conversion of Muslims; that jihad can be "fixed" through actions by non-Muslims. "If only we had a Palestinian state … If only those Hindus were not so fanatical and nationalistic … If only American films did not depict terrorists as Muslims … If only American school children were forced to recite the shahada … If only Americans were not so xenophobic, white supremacist, Christian fascist … If only we keep Tommy Robinson in solitary confinement a bit longer." None of these will ever end jihad.

Critics will bash this necessary book, if they pay any attention to it at all, by insisting that Robert Spencer is an unreliable narrator. It's not Spencer's words that inevitably paint jihad as one of the most lurid, destructive, and grotesque forces in human history. It is Muslim chroniclers and conquerors themselves. Spencer quotes contemporaneous, canonical sources. Muslim chroniclers boast with pride of their string of unprecedented atrocities. "I bring you slaughter," Muhammad said. "I have been made victorious through terror … the treasures of the world were put in my hand," Muhammad bragged, distinguishing himself from previous Jewish and Christian prophets and saints who were, in Muhammad's estimation, longwinded, but not booty-rich warlords like him. Spencer also quotes non-Muslim eyewitnesses, and books published by the university presses of Princeton, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Georgetown, Fairleigh Dickinson, NYU, Crete, the Universities of Pennsylvania and California, and the State University of New York. Indeed, Spencer does not pretend that he is saying anything new or innovative. Rather, he is merely performing the excellent service of providing a reader-friendly outline of 1,400 years of jihad.

Another possible detraction. "Yes, but, if someone published a history of the colonization of the Americas, that would make for very tough reading." No doubt.

First, committing atrocities is a violation of, not obedience to, Biblical mandates. Conversion by force is almost unknown in Judaism, and there is no Old Testament verse that commands Jews to conquer the world or to force Gentiles to become Jews. As early as the fourth century, when, after three centuries of Pagan Roman persecution, Christianity was beginning to gain worldly power, Saint Augustine wrestled with the concept of "just war." Augustine asked, and attempted to answer, when and how is it consistent with Christian belief to take up arms.

When Christians do take up arms wrongly, they violate the example of Christianity's founder, Jesus Christ. Jesus did not make war; he practiced peace. Jesus did not rape captives; he uplifted women, including the most stigmatized: the ritually unclean woman with a hemorrhage, a woman who had been possessed, and the sinful woman taken in adultery. Jesus did not raid caravans and steal their contents; he said "Render unto Cesar what is Cesar's." Jesus did not torture anyone; Jesus healed. Jesus did not practice ethnic cleansing; he and his followers interacted respectfully with their fellow Jews, Roman Pagans, and Africans. Christian scriptures do not recommend murder, rape, theft, or war.

Indeed, Christianity, with lightning speed, with its emphasis on a loving God's relationship to each human, whom he made in his image, became a support for oppressed peoples. Our Lady of Guadalupe was one such support. She is said to have appeared to an Aztec and to have reassured him that Christ's love and promises extended to all people, not just conquistadors. Just so, the Abolitionist Movement was informed by the Biblical narrative of "let my people go."

Second, accounts of Western Christians' misdeeds are plentiful and well-known. These accounts first appear, invariably, at the same time as Western Christians' misdeeds. This is the case because the Judeo-Christian tradition demands self-examination and public confession when one has failed to live up to Biblical ideals. Witness Psalms 32 and 51. King David engineered the death of his rival, Uriah. David begs for forgiveness, and vows to change. God forgives David, but David suffers horribly as the result of his crime. Witness Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican friar, who recorded, and acted on, crimes committed by conquistadors.

When Christians engage in destructive behaviors, they critique themselves or they are critiqued by others. Indeed, in "The History of Jihad," Robert Spencer himself is quite open about, and critical of, atrocities committed by Crusaders. There are Western scholars whose careers were founded on, or advanced by, their muckraking, exposing the dark side of Western Civilization. Adam Hochschild, the white, male son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, won numerous awards for "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa" about a previously little-discussed atrocity. Taylor Branch, a white man from Atlanta in the American South, won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Humanities Medal, and a MacArthur Genius Award. He wrote a massive, three-volume biography of Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Struggle. John Cornwell, a former Catholic seminarian, won fame with his controversial book, "Hitler's Pope." When Cornwell's many critics found inaccuracies in his work, they did not riot or kill; they wrote and published.

Where are the analogous practitioners of confession, redemption, and repair in the Muslim world? Where were they a thousand years ago? Bartolome de las Casas did not have a voice only. He also had ears willing to hear his words. Inspired by this one friar, Pope Paul III issued a papal bull, Sublimis Dei, insisting on the full humanity of the newly discovered Indians. Can anyone imagine a Muslim de las Casas having a chat with Muhammad, arguing for the full humanity of the kuffar?

Where are the contemporary Muslim historians exposing the brutal history of jihad? Where are their prestigious prizes, university chairs and awards? Where are the passionate Muslim authors dedicating their lives to robbed, enslaved, raped, and murdered kuffars' long-since-evaporated tears? Where are the affirmative action programs for descendants of the Muslim slave trade? Where are the reparations for the Christians Slavs whose Muslims overlords kidnapped their daughters for sex slave markets, their sons for slave armies? Eastern Europe, historians say, is poorer than Western Europe to this day at least partly because Eastern Europe had to devote so much energy to fighting off jihad. Eastern Europeans provided a bulwark that allowed Western Europe to flourish. Where is Eastern Europe's apology? All of these acts of contrition on the part of Muslims exist in the same imaginary dimension where "jihad" means "befriending Christians."

Consider what happens even to the most circumspect of social critics in the Muslim world. Bassem Yousef is often dubbed "the Egyptian Jon Stewart." Youssef's audience and influence dwarfed Stewart's. Youssef's TV program made gentle fun of anti-democratic trends in the Middle East. The powers-that-be, with the participation of average Egyptians, destroyed him. He lives in exile in the US. Consider Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel-Prize-winning novelist in "modern, secular" Turkey. Pamuk merely mentioned the Armenian genocide. Pamuk was criminally charged. His countrymen burned his books. Consider the stabbings, hacking to death with machetes, and other murders of proponents of secular government in contemporary Bangladesh. Consider the fate of Raif Badawi, a Saudi man sentenced to ten years in prison and a thousand lashes because, in his blog, he dared to say things like this, "What increases my pain is the Islamist chauvinist arrogance which claims that innocent blood, shed by barbarian, brutal minds under the slogan 'Allahu Akbar,' means nothing."

In place of the self-examination and self-correction typical of Judeo-Christian cultures, too many apologists have tried not to confront jihad, but merely to redefine it. CAIR has money and power. It could put those resources to use exposing and rejecting violent jihad. Instead, CAIR made a tawdry attempt to pimp "jihad" as a synonym for "calisthenics" and "making friends with Christians." CAIR was topped by the BBC, who dubbed their TV show "My Jihad," "a tender and funny love story." I'm sure viewers can't wait to see the BBC romantic comedy, "My Holocaust."

One must remind those relativists who wish to relative-ize away 1,400 years of jihad, that, yes, all humans, regardless of ethnicity or religion, do destructive things. Motivations include mental illness, fear, and greed for resources, power, or glory. We can't eliminate greed, fear, or psychopathology, but we can tame them with civilized advances like the Geneva Convention, diplomacy, and forensic psychiatry. The concept of jihad adds to an already overburdened humanity another, completely unnecessary, and diabolically seductive reason to kill and destroy. Shahids, or those who die in jihad, are promised the highest paradise, multiple heavenly virgins, and the opportunity to intercede on behalf of, and be granted divine favors for, seventy relatives.

The final nail in the relativist coffin on jihad: the chroniclers Spencer quotes were themselves not sheltered innocents. These people had seen conflict. The Roman and Persian Empires waged war for seven hundred years, on the same territory jihadis first invaded. Both non-Muslim victims and Muslim chroniclers announce that jihadis fought ruthlessly, destroyed totally, and obeyed no previous military convention.

Thought police censors will claim, with zero evidence, that Spencer's book is anti-Muslim. Repeat this as many times as necessary: Muslims are themselves victims of jihad. Muslims are killed. Muslim culture is destroyed. This Muslim-on-Muslim death and destruction is not new. Spencer's book begins with the bloodbath that was proto-Islam. One Arab warlord after another decided that he had a monopoly on Islam, and decided that his neighboring tribe was deviant. Slaughter ensued, all in the name of jihad. The killing was shockingly intimate. Muawiyah, founder of the Umayyad dynasty, Muhammad's brother-in-law and distant cousin, murdered Aisha, Muhammad's widow. One of the oldest copies of the Koran is said to be stained with the blood of Uthman, the very caliph who first called for the Koran to be compiled. His blood was shed by his fellow Muslims.

Immediately upon Muhammad's death, Khalid ibn Al Walid waged war on anyone in Arabia who wasn't in line with emergent Islamic orthodoxy. He was called "the drawn sword of Allah," "the friend of death," and his motto was, "We love death more than you love life." Khalid betrayed and killed his fellow Muslim Malik, put his head in a cooking pot, and raped his wife Layla "like a donkey." "I love the battlefield more than I love my wedding night with a beautiful woman," he said. Khalid had had many "wives." Normal people love life more than they love death, and normal people enjoy making love more than they enjoy killing other human beings. Indeed, the Koran itself, in verse 2:216 says that though Islam "prescribes" fighting" "fighting is hateful" to Muslims. A book exposing jihad is a gift to Muslims as much as it is a gift to the rest of us.

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declassroomedteach-blog · 7 years ago

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Jailhouse Salvation 101

(word count approx 1570)

By Gina Fournier

The Merchant-Ivory movie adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View features a poignant scene following a street fight that ends in murder. Lucy (Helen Bonham Carter) comments that you witness something memorable and think you’ll never be the same, but then you forget and return to your old self. I hope to do a better job holding onto my jailhouse conversion, from skeptical to convinced about the existence of God.

Disclaimer: My conviction has wavered intensely even before I finished editing this essay.

Thanks to my former employer and its bad actors, an institution I’ll call Land of Motown Community College, where I served as an English teacher, I’ve seen the best and the worst of pure Michigan humanity. If God created humans, God sure must have a sense of humor.

Even a smattering of details from my story sound like a rollercoaster Lifetime movie no one wants to watch. Since 2012, I’ve been sexist witch-hunted through an ongoing living nightmare that has included hack shrinks, illegal and involuntary lock up in a Catholic mental health ward and now incarceration for thirty-four days in a mid-Michigan county jail for a crime I did not commit. College administrators, union teachers, dirty cops, dirty doctors, dirty nuns and dirty priests, plus the state’s top most government officials, have participated in the protection of white collar criminals and encouraged my simultaneous downfall. All this for me, so one man can prove his power over unions near union ground zero.

The U.S. Constitution’s first amendment makes clear that government is not to establish any official religion, not protect any particular religion from existing laws. Perhaps the founding fathers could foresee the distant future. Nearly two hundred fifty years later, a female citizen has found cause to invert the phrase “God bless you” with blasphemy, attempting to redress grievances.

I’ve never met the emergency room doctor who signed me into a Catholic looney bin for a week. To my horror, I was held in a Catholic Siberia, it turns out, on campus with my all girl Catholic high school. I was raised and violated by the same church, which now pretends it’s never met me. Thirty five years ago, for Halloween, classmates mimicked the Robert Redford movie Brubaker to stage a failed, backboneless prison break. These classmates, who have also turned away from my plight, dressed not in hospital gowns or orange as the new black, but plaid skirts and knee socks adorned temporarily with stripes. (Good girls, we stopped mock rioting when the nuns glared.)

Unfortunately, there is no law or principle governing the intersection of religion and families. In my time of need, even my immediate and extended family has turned away, exponentially multiplying my distress. My extended Catholic family has not advocated for me, though it would cost nothing except some skin. The anger caused by this and so many betrayals envelops like nuclear explosion.

However, I realized something on day thirty-three of my lock up in the big house. Because the ties between families and religion tend to act like strangleholds, my estranged Catholic mother is incapable of doing the one thing I want and need her most to do: to demand that Livonia Catholics honestly investigate me claims. Because of my new found belief, I forgive my aging mother. She’s only human and doing the best she can. (Unfortunately, the damage done feels irreparable. Forgiveness does not mean I can tolerate her presence.)

Through five solid years of loss, I have been cornered mentally and financially into a nearly impossible position. But the kindest of strangers have helped me to survive. Downstate, nice generous neighbors responded to my cries for help by giving. Up north, the same. People have given money, food, house wares, helpful supplies such as wood, shoes, warm clothes, plus their time and honest well wishes. I wish I would have kept better track of the names and faces of the many regular people who have been so kind, forming a lifeline, keeping me alive.

My fighting spirit has kept better track of my transgressors, including Fox News Detroit, which ran a sexist hack piece in 2015 cutting together footage I asked them not to shoot in order to make me look looser than loopy. In search of more positive and helpful press, my creative and liberal mind encouraged me to tag my own, downstate old-ring suburban home with a metaphoric phrase that offended and confused. “A religious figure criminally violated me!” Only my version was Twitter-short. Basic sentence: subject, verb, object.

Passersby assumed I was nutz. I’m not. Unfortunately, the human resources’ labor attorney and architect of my nightmare is smart enough to know that once a crone-aged female is labeled crazy dangerous, most people won’t bother to parse the facts. Just ask Hillary. Voters elected a man without ethics, unwilling to practice stability, a sexual harasser, eager to “lock her up!”

I recreated my civil rights protest up north at a lake named after the largest city in New Brunswick. Maybe I watched too many episodes of Little House on the Prairie, after numerous rereadings of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. In middle age, without an income, I’ve been forced to gather wood and water for two years, for two winters, with a third approaching, in order to survive in my dead husband’s summer cabin, which is facing tax forfeiture, and soon. In both iterations, I repainted my eye-catching sacrilegious phrase with “Act Peace.” I’m not a bad person, or dangerous, or interested in spreading evil. But Fox News Detroit has been not interested in my actual story.

While I was incarcerated, nasty locals ran down my mailbox to which my sign “Act Peace” was nailed, and then took the sign. Two paintings espousing the Statue of Liberty have been stolen. My sign about the connection between the dirty cop who put me in jail and Land of Motown Community College was stolen, I’d guess by the dirty cop. My cries for “help!” with needed justice have been ignored. Instead, community officials at this private lake community have bent the law with the help of dirty local county officials, who may try to re-arrest me over the care of my feces. Yes, you read correctly. My troubles continue. Danger surrounds. This is not a pretty story.

(FYI. Please believe me. I’m still be getting my proverbial shit together, but I’ve always I properly and responsibly discarded my poop.)

Something wicked this way came, and stayed, but I pray to harness goodness and finally slay the beast on my back. I’ve been falsely accused of being suicidal and a danger to society within a country that has grown accustomed to men mass murdering and sexual harassing. I know the pain of mental illness in the form of mental torture, so I feel very sympathetic to those, especially military veterans, who suffer from PTSD. Mental pain is real. And can be excruciating. I realize no matter my idiosyncratic tendencies, finally winning a measure of justice will require the help of other people, and, well, by any name, I guess God. I know that God may not intercede with my legal and financial problems but belief in a higher power does help with gratefulness and tranquility.

In jail, every day is a good day to die. However, the smallest graces save a tattered soul and help a person carry on to the next long minute. I want to thank the two women who ran Bible study every Tuesday. Yes, you read correctly. Unbeknownst to them, they gave me gold for a writer without means: a composition notebook, on my 54th birthday, which was an otherwise desolate milestone. Moreover, these women of God showed me a respectable and inspirational version of Christianity.

On cable tv, my cellmates preferred back-to-back episodes of Cops, shows about zombies, the shallow high jinks of Jerry Springer, endless sci-fi. (I prefer comedy and drama.) The day I was eventually sprung from the slammer, my legal troubles abated but not erased, Unsolved Mysteries ran a segment on St. Pio, an Italian priest who was said to develop stigmata and miraculously heal. Angered, under stress, I admit I acted out loudly like an ass (even by jail standards): “I hope they roast his nuts!”

Many jail birds claim to accept Jesus as their savior, though none gave up their bottom bunk for the pregnant woman in our ranks. Critically, I recognized around me the kind of souls who would have rejected Mary and Joseph. But I was forced to realize this was not a television segment that was going to uncover more Catholic dirt. Although St. Pio may have self-inflicted his wounds, trapped in a county cell block, I dropped my bad attitude and truly felt in my body an undeniable wave of love.

No surprise, in the short time since my release on PR bond, my nascent jailhouse conversion has been tested and wavered, fallen apart, and needing rebuilding. Im not a saint. My days are terrifying and unresolved. But. If I breathe calmly and deeply, and repeat my affirmations, what some call prayers, I recognize a connection between hope and light.

House of Hope in Hersey, Michigan, offered me a composition notebook. Any additional help readers may offer with legal defense, plumbing, back taxes, transportation, work or grace are appreciated. Thank you.

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declassroomedteach-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Jailhouse Salvation 101

(word count approx 1570)

By Gina Fournier

Disclaimer: My conviction has wavered intensely even before I finished editing this essay.

(FYI. Please believe me. I’m still be getting my proverbial shit together, but I’ve always I properly and responsibly discarded my poop.)

�!�-�`Pe��

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