Blood and fire

The rhetoric of Islamic terror is based on old, shared beliefs in a millennium which is imminent and which will be reached through conflagration and slaughter. Here, for example, is a translation of the farewell poem recovered from Amsterdam Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri after he had shot dead and slit the throat of Theo van Gogh:

The blood on Mohamed’s clothes is clearly intended to be the purifying blood which Christians find in a certain rider on a white horse, “clothed with a vesture dipped in blood[,] and his name is called The Word of God”. But this apocalypse will not be led by Alfonso X’s “obispo armado en vn cauallo blanco [que] leuaua en la mano la lança con que nuestro redemtor Jesu cristo fuera herido en el costado” (Gran conquista de Ultramar), being about the vanity of auto-redemption via the roots of Islamic unity’s remake of the lord Krishna’s personal road-movie, Juggernaut. (Please tell me if I am being unclear.)

Curiously, Mohamed B seems not to have been determined to be killed, leading one to surmise that some Muslim fanatics place less faith in their spiritual leaders than in the old-fashioned notion that paradise is a Dutch prison. The End.

more stuff

Someone told me last week that I don’t insult the French enough (at all) on this blog. All I can do is say that I will try my best, and proffer some more information regarding the Knights of Death. I think Mohamed’s scriptwriter intends these to be the Muslim nephews and nieces of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse rather than characters from a video game, but real, live Knights of Death do pop up in history.

Take, for example, the Battle of Gagliano (different English doc), Sicily, when 300 elite French knights thought the name would scare off the Almogavers, a nasty bunch of mercenaries from the Pyrenees with a reputation for baby-eating. Whether the Almogavers were scared is not recorded, but the French did live up to the label on the tin, although not perhaps in the way they had anticipated. And “live” may not be quite the right word to use in the circumstances.

(I would like to know more about Tawheed. My impression is that over the past century the concept has become more prominent and unpleasant, but I’m a silly old wuzzock.)

Trevor @ 6 November 2004 11:24 PM

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