Where my Limits Stop

It's good to test one's limits. So after I've been blogging ceaselessly about the shortcomings of my religion of birth and my co-religionists (such as it were), it is quite relieving, in a way, to be offended by some crass type of assault on Islam. It almost makes me realise I still have some religious bones in my body; or perhaps I still have some concept of good taste.

The latest viral video to be doing the rounds in this part of the world, which will completely not help the "dialogue of civilisations", a recording of a young American woman soldier describing how a mosque on her base in the Middle East is regularly used for sexual liasons or, as our friend here from (what I believe is) Camp Doha in Kuwait puts it "a fuck". So when we learn that not only the rank-and-file but that Commissioned Officers are going into a "Hajji Church" to escape the heat of the desert and the monotony of barracks life, I was surprised to find myself in a mad rage. This type of thing should not be treated lightly, which is why I'm hoping this video gets a wide circulation--it is building steadily in Kuwait--and that somebody finds a way of doing something about it.

Now I'm wise enough to know that this sort of thing does and will happen--in an almost reciprocal way, I knew of Arab immigrants abusing the hospitality of churches in Europe (I remember having to explain to some fellows who I was helping with assylum applications that they shouldn't be putting out their cigarettes in a church garden), and amongst Europeans themselves there is the regular use of churchyards by the downtrodden to shoot heroin and sleep rough. The difference is, these people were not the downtrodden of the world; they were armed, trained members of a foreign army for which the host country has been ludicrously welcoming. What's more, and I suspect this will be the biggest factor in the dessemination of this video and its contents, our lovely GI Jane here saw fit to publicise her act through an oh-so-Yankee game of Truth or Dare, as if it were a flippant indiscretion, on the same level as kissing your married boss on the lips after one too many drinks at the Christmas party. Maybe this is how we deserve to be treated: We've gone and allowed this foreign army to come down and take out another Arab leader. This is what you get.