The Fall of the Shah - One of America's Worst Foreign Policy Blunder

I have always believed that one of America's worst foreign policy blunders was its failure to support the Shah of Iran and defeat Islamic extremists back in 1979 - obviously the Vietnam War and the Iraq War may take the prize for the worse blunders, The Iraq War proving that nothing had been learned from the Vietnam fiasco.  Now a new book, "The Fall of Heaven,” by Andrew Scott Cooper, looks at the Shah and argues that much about the Shah was misinterpreted and that the United States and many in the media were duped and played for fools by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his fellow Islamic extremist revolutionaries.  From the fall of the Shah forward in time the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran have helped spread Islamic terror across the Middle East.  Ironically, Iran's regional arch rival, Saudi Arabia, has funded the same spread of terrorism.   I just received the book today, but a review in the Washington Post looks at the book and some of its disturbing findings. Here are excerpts:

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, known as the shah, has always been portrayed as both ruthless and craven — the last emperor of Iran who fled on the eve of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Nearly four decades after his death, a new book offers a more sympathetic, nuanced portrait of him and the dynasty he was born into. In “The Fall of Heaven,” Andrew Scott Cooper uses newly declassified U.S. documents from the Carter administration, interviews with the shah’s aides and revolutionary leaders as well as his own research in Iran to make the case that the shah has been misinterpreted, reduced to “a bloodless enigma.” Cooper, a Middle East specialist and the author of “Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East,” offers a convincing narrative about who the man was and the dynamics that led to his downfall. The shah came to power in 1941 after the British and the Soviets forced his father, Reza Pahlavi, to abdicate in his favor. He survived two major political upheavals, and by the early 1960s, oil wealth enabled him to modernize Iran. Religious leaders, however, accused him of Westernizing the country. Communist and nationalist activists criticized him, saying he distributed wealth and power among the ruling elite. His secret police grew more repressive, seeking to end opposition but instead alienating students and intellectuals.

The seeds of the shah’s downfall began in 1977, Cooper argues, after Saudi Arabia flooded markets with cheap oil. The shortfall in Iran’s oil revenue, combined with a drought, forced dissatisfied laborers to flock to larger cities, looking for work. The shah introduced political and social liberalization to ease the mood, unaware, Cooper notes, that his policies provided religious extremists with a context to mobilize the masses against him. According to Cooper, by the time he left the country in January 1979 the shah had, by his reforms, reduced his role to that of a constitutional figure­head. A series of missteps, economic disruptions and miscalculations by Western powers, as well as a well-funded opposition, crippled the shah’s efforts to save himself.
 Most shocking perhaps were the deceptive tactics the opposition used to demonize him. Cooper claims, for example, that Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, a nationalist-left activist who deposed the shah with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and later served as the first president, told him how they manipulated the Western media’s coverage of Iran. The revolutionaries “studied western journalists’ reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement’s facts and figures,” Cooper argues, citing Bani-Sadr. This led to the publication of grossly inflated numbers of activists jailed and executed by the shah’s secret police. The figures, Cooper says, helped provoke anti-shah sentiments and were not corrected, even after Red Cross inspectors investigated and rejected the claims. Revolutionaries themselves, the book notes, have since refuted the numbers. To bolster the impression that the shah was bent on murdering his people, the opposition initiated violence and blamed it on the shah. In the year before the victory of the revolution, the Islamists burned hundreds of private businesses, including cinemas, Cooper writes. The most brutal attack came in August 1978, when 430 men, women and children were burned to death at Rex Cinema in the southern city of Abadan — the worst arson since World War II. The inferno was intended “to destabilize and panic Iranian society,” Cooper argues. It also successfully fanned the flames of hostility toward the shah across the country.  The culprit, . . . was Hossein Takbalizadeh, an Islamist linked to a local Khomeini underground cell who was eventually tried and convicted of murder by an Iranian court after the revolution.
 The arrival of William Sullivan, U.S. ambassador to Tehran, in the summer of 1977 was not good news for the shah, Cooper contends. “He showed little or any sensitivity to the unique pressures that the shah faced at home by supporting U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East . . . . Sullivan continued to dismiss worries by moderate religious leaders — including opponents of the shah — over the consequences of the shah’s departure, arguing that their fears “were not very coherent or well reasoned.” It was only in the shah’s final days in Iran, Cooper concludes, that “Ambassador Sullivan received crucial intelligence suggesting that he might have backed the wrong horse after all.”
 Until the end, “nationalism was like a religion” for the shah, Cooper argues. Over nearly four decades, the shah transformed a backward, poverty-stricken country into a powerful one with the most educated workforce in the Middle East. This sober narrative will resonate with many Iranians — including myself — who lived under the grim conditions Khomeini introduced after the revolution. As other countries in the Middle East are going through similar transformations and vying for political reform, Cooper reminds us of the ability of power-hungry leaders, capable of manipulating people’s desire for change, to build even more brutal and unaccountable systems.

I have always seen parallels between the fall of the Russian imperial dynasty to the Bolsheviks and the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty to  Khomeini and his thugs.  In each case the revolutionaries who claimed to represent the people once in power unleashed a blood bath of repression and set back the respective nations by decades.  And like Lenin, Khomeini had been exiled instead of executed as, in my view, he deserved.  The Bolsheviks referred to Nicholas II as "bloody Nicholas," yet then went on to murder millions - tens of millions if one counts Stalin's famines in the early 1930's to wipe out wealthy peasants.  Khomeini depicted the Shah as a wanton murder, yet it was his own regime that oversaw a vast bloodbath using, of course, religion as a justification.

The Shah's real sin in the eyes of Khomeini and his faction was that he was modernizing and westernizing Iran and in the process weakening the power of the "holy men" and the hatred and ignorance they represent.  America should have fully supported the Shah and assisted in stamping out Khomeini and his fellow Islamic extremist.  Had that been done, much of the horrors since 1979 might have been avoided. 

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, in 1954

Orlando Club Shooter Identified; Texas Lt. Gov. Tweets Gays Had it Coming to Them

Mass murderer Omar Mateen

CBS News and ABC News are both reporting that the shooter in the terror attack on Club Pulse in Orando has been identified as Omar Mateen, reportedly from an Afghani immigrant family.  Also noted is that Mateen had been on the radar of federal authorities for some time.  Disturbingly, he was a licensed gun owner who seemingly got his murder weapons legally.  Sadly, in addition, one updated report suggest the death toll may now be 50, with 52 rather than the initial 42 injured.  This from ABC News:

Omar Mateen, a U.S.-born citizen, has been identified as the suspect in Sunday's mass shooting that left at least 20 dead and 42 wounded at Pulse Nightclub, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Mateen's parents were born in Afghanistan, and he was "on the radar" of U.S. officials for some time, but was not the target of a specific investigation, law enforcement officials told ABC News.

CBS is carrying similar information:

Sources have confirmed to CBS News that authorities are investigating whether the suspect, who has been named as Omar Mateen, had ties to Islamic terrorism. Mateen, of Port. St. Lucie, Florida, is a U.S. citizen with no apparent criminal history, according to sources.

As horrible and disgusting as all of this is, likewise frightening is the reaction of Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick posted this message to the LGBT community:

Make no mistake.   Religion and its fundamentalist followers are perhaps the greatest evil in the world.  Religion's gift to mankind is a trail of death, destruction and ruined lives over the centuries with the perpetrators of evil typically claiming to be doing "God's" or "Allah's" work.  Let burn every Bible and every Koran and obliterate every reference to them from humanity.

Why Religious Fundamentalists Are Sex Obsessed

There's a reason that religious fundamentalists of both the Christian and Islamic variety share a common obsession with sex.  It is all about control.  Control of people's lives and, at least in the minds of the theocrats, control of people's thoughts.  Thoughts that might lead the populous to over throw the theocrats' influence and control, especially political control.   In Iran, the religious extremist government is waging a war against women who fail to wear head covers.  While utterly different on the surface from the American Christofascists' war on LGBT citizens, the root motivation is the same: power and control - and thought control so that the masses don't begin to release that they are being sold a bunch of fairy tales that help keep their religious elite in power.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at both the sex obsession of Iran's rulers and how it translates to American Christofascists.  Here are excerpts:

Welcome to Operation Spider 2. Yes, Iran’s War Against Hair even has a code name. In a sting led by no less significant a unit than Iran’s cybercrimes division, eight other models were arrested and charged with “promoting western promiscuity.” State prosecutor for cybercrimes Javad Babaei confirmed that his unit was focused on Instagram and is concerned with “sterilizing popular cyberspaces.” Many of the country’s leading models have reportedly suffered this clampdown. They are accused of promoting "immoral and un-Islamic culture and promiscuity.”

As moderate political forces continue to gain ground in Iran’s educated city centers, establishment clampdowns against “Western promiscuity” are becoming more visible, and more desperate. 

A desire to restrict any of these voices is a desire to control. When enforced on others, religion becomes nothing but a tool of power and control. Sexuality, in particular, obsesses male theocrats more so than any other topic. 

Whether in Iran and Saudi Arabia, where women’s dress is government enforced, or in Syria and Afghanistan, where Islamist terrorists seek to enforce it, or across Muslim-majority nations more generally, sexual expression has fast become a dividing line for fundamentalists harboring presumptuous assumptions about a “pure” East and a “promiscuous” West. 

Oddly, hundreds of years ago it was the opposite. A Europe in the Dark Ages, plagued by the Inquisition and conflicts caused by religious intolerance, placed a similar premium on sexuality. Back then, it was the East that European Orientalists fetishized as overly “promiscuous,” while the West valued its prudishness. The one common factor is a correlation between the rise of theocratic demands anywhere, and restrictions on sexuality.

In this way, sexuality has become the axis upon which enlightened values and progress have pivoted between nations. Sexual freedoms have become a litmus test between open societies and closed ones. The drug that dogmatic ideologues are usually addicted to is control, and the thirst for control almost always manifests itself in sexual control. This is why the subject of sex among women, gays and “unmarried” youth fascinates extremists of all bents. And it is why—regardless of our gender or sexual orientation—the struggle against controlling sexuality should preoccupy us all. 

Saudi Arabia Seeks Death Penalty for" Coming Out"

Saudi executions

As heinous as North Carolina's new anti-LGBT law is, it pales in comparison to the utterly vile efforts going on in putative American ally, Saudi Arabia, a consistent violator of human rights.  North Carolina Republicans seek to strip LGBT citizens of their civil rights.  In Saudi Arabia, the royal family and their sycophants want to deprive LGBT individuals of their very lies if they admit reality and "come out."  It goes without saying that, in my view, if anyone deserves execution, it is the Saudi royals and the Islamic fundamentalist clerics that they help fund.  The Washington Blade looks at this disturbing situation which is yet further proof that America needs to seriously rethink its support for such a foul regime and the religious extremists that it nurtures.  Here are highlights:

A published report indicates that people who come out online in Saudi Arabia could face the death penalty.

Oraz, a Saudi newspaper, reported on Saturday that prosecutors in the city of Jiddah have proposed the penalty in response to dozens of cases they have prosecuted over the last six months. These include 35 people who received prison sentences for sodomy.

Okaz reported that Jiddah authorities have prosecuted 50 cases in which men allegedly dressed as women. A doctor who lives in the port city on the Red Sea has been released on bail after officials arrested him for allegedly raising an LGBT Pride flag over his home.

A gay Saudi man who lives outside the kingdom told the Washington Blade on Monday during a telephone interview the enhanced penalties that Jiddah prosecutors have proposed would apply to the entire country. The man, who operates a Twitter account that publishes LGBT-specific news and other information from Saudi Arabia, said the proposal has caused fear among LGBT people in the country.

Social media users in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have begun to use the hashtag “You will not terrorize me. I’m gay” on Twitter to express their opposition to the proposed penalty.

Saudi Arabia is among the countries in which consensual same-sex sexual activity remains punishable by death.

 The source, who asked the Blade not to publish their name because of safety concerns, said reports that Jiddah authorities are seeking the death penalty against those who come out online highlights “the horrific reality of the situation” in the country.

“We can’t do a thing about it, but try to make some noise so activists from other countries would hear about it and talk to their politicians to pressure Saudi to change its policies,” said the source. “The Internet is the only safe haven to LGBT individuals in the Middle East. If this is taken from us, we won’t have anywhere else to go.”

Write you Senator and Congressman and tell them you want America's relationship with Saudi Arabia re-evaluated and American aid to cease.  

France - and America - Struggle With Faith on the Job

In the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, France's strict legal separation of religious and civic life which formally discourages, and in some situations expressly bans, public religious expression is ruffling feathers, particularly with Muslims.  Personally, I approve of the policy and wish that America had a similar approach to keeping religion out of the work place.  True, it would prompt screams of religious persecution from Christofascists who believe their rights trump those of everyone else, but at some point, but at some point dress codes and restrictions on conduct are in keeping with some types of jobs.  If one refuses to comply, the solution is simple: find other employment. I suspect that as time goes by, America will face a similar balancing act, except it will be right wing Christians who will be making the loudest demands for special rights.  Indeed, the legislatures in Georgia and West Virginia along with Virginia have passed bills granting special rights to religious extremists (thankfully, the Virginia bill is headed towards a veto).  The New York Times looks at the issue in France.  Here are excerpts:

Reconciling the religious precepts of observant Muslims with the secular norms in the European workplace has long been a sensitive subject. France’s strict legal separation of religious and civic life — a legacy of the French Revolution known as laïcité — formally discourages, and in some situations expressly bans, public religious expression. It is a brand of secularism that coexists uneasily with Islamic traditions, making workplace negotiations about religious practice particularly difficult and prone to misunderstandings.

The issues have become thornier after the latest wave of terrorist activity, including the November attacks in Paris that left 130 dead. With much of the region on edge, the French government has set a forceful tone, granting sweeping emergency powers to the police and stepping up the scrutiny of mosques, Islamic associations and individuals. The sense of unease is particularly palpable for companies operating in sensitive areas like transportation, security and infrastructure.

Adding to workplace conflicts like the one at Securitas, as well as reports of tensions at other large employers, is that many Muslims have become more assertive in fighting stigmatization on the job. But many managers and union leaders in France report feeling ill equipped to respond to employee demands for things like dedicated prayer rooms or pork-free canteens — let alone to detect and combat genuine radicalization at work.

“Today, we are in a very complicated situation,” said Philippe Humeau, a researcher at InAgora, a consultancy that specializes in religion and the workplace.

While France’s workplace rules around religion are relatively distinct, the broad concerns are playing out globally, as countries confront the rise in terrorist activities. . . .  “Most companies don’t know much about Islam,” he said. And in the current climate, “we are seeing companies confuse strict religious practice, which is already difficult to accept in France, with radicalization.”

The risk is that companies, in a quest to protect their staff and their clients, unfairly profile certain employees.

The security company said the beard rules, and the subsequent firings, adhered to the law. As a private company working on behalf of public sector clients like the airport, Securitas said it must conform to France’s strict secularism laws.

“We are confident,” Michel Mathieu, the head of Securitas’s French operations, said, in reference to the decision to fire the Orly guards. The company has not accused the guards of any illegal activities, nor has it presented any evidence that they engaged in radical behavior on the job. But he said that recent events had led Securitas to revisit its approach to all forms of religious practice in the workplace.

What some might view as overt religious profiling, Mr. Mathieu insisted had become a necessity for a company like Securitas, whose mission is to protect against potential dangers that now include Islamic terrorism. The risks, he added, were no longer abstract. Last year, Securitas alerted the French authorities to four security agents who, despite a rigorous vetting process that includes multiple background checks, were found in possession of jihadist propaganda on the job.

The principle of laïcité, however, applies only to those who work in France’s vast public sector economy. For private companies like Securitas, the situation is murkier. . . . .  Some labor union leaders complained that managers, fearful of complaints from Muslim employees, had long tolerated religious behavior on the job that was explicitly prohibited by the company’s own policies. 

Officially, France’s vigorous brand of secularism applies to all religious faiths. But over the last decade, regulations on laïcité (pronounced lie-EE-see-tay) have tended to focus on Islam. A law prohibiting government employees and high school students from wearing head scarves and other “conspicuous” religious attire was introduced in 2004. A specific prohibition against women wearing full-face veils in public went into effect in 2011.

Opinion polls show such bans have broad public support — and they have been upheld recently by Europe’s top human rights court. But they are resented by many of France’s five million Muslims who see the rules as unfairly stigmatizing their religion.

Under French labor law, private employers are required to respect the religious freedom of their employees, meaning that such companies are expected to tolerate religion on the job. Only proselytizing and acts of pressure toward other employees are expressly banned.

The regulations do, however, allow for a number of exceptions, like employee health and safety, operational continuity and protecting commercial interests. . . . In strict practice, the rules mean that an employee who accepts a job at a butcher shop, for example, could not refuse to handle pork. A train driver would not be allowed to stop on the tracks to pray. A waitress could not decline to serve alcohol to customers.

Employers indicate that conflicts over religion in the workplace are on the rise. A 2015 survey of 1,300 French companies by the Observatory of Workplace Religious Practice, a research group based at the Institute of Political Science in Rennes, France, found that 12 percent of human resources managers had faced disputes over religious practices that were difficult to resolve, up from 6 percent in 2013. Among the most difficult situations cited included employees’ rejection of the company’s authority to set limits on religious behavior as well as refusals by some men to work alongside women, either as a colleague or a boss.

There is more that is worth a read.   Given my view that religion is toxic and an embrace of ignorance, I admittedly have little sympathy for anyone regardless of faith who cannot let go of what amounts to superstition, myths and ignorance.  They, not society are the ones that need to change.  If you want to live in a backward country that places adherence to myths and legends ahead of modernity, then move to one of the hell holes in the Middle East or Africa.  And this applies to Christofascists as much as Muslims.  It's the 21st century, not 1000AD.  The toxicity of religion needs to be eradicated.

Death and Sadness - The True Fruits of Fundamentalist Religion

Almost daily we hear of horrors and brutal atrocities committed by ISIS in the Middle East and other locations where its foul form of fundamentalist Islam brings death and injury to others merely trying to lead their lives and find some degree of happiness.  But fundamentalist religion, both Christian and Muslim, have a less visible wake of death and unhappiness in their wake.  It takes many forms that range from gays living unhappy lives in the closet because of deep family homophobia, women remaining with abusive foul husbands because their "faith" tells them to be subservient wives, ignorance embracing bigots who cling to myths and fairy tales who mistreat others.  The permutations are endless.  And then there are those driven to suicide by family rejection and parents/family who care more for the words of delusional maniacs and/or nomadic goat herders than for their own children.   A piece in The Guardian looks at a tragically lost life thanks to family rejection (read the entire piece - it will make your blood boil and want to make a donation to this foundation).  Here are excerpts:

In the spring of last year, Matthew Ogston and Nazim Mahmood moved into their dream home. The apartment, on the top floor of a mansion block in north-west London, offered stunning panoramic views of London. Nazim was a doctor who ran three London clinics, Matthew a web designer.

The life Nazim enjoyed seemed a world away from the working-class traditional Muslim community in which he had been raised. It was that world – conservative and closed – that he had left behind for a new life. In their first week in the flat, the two men stood on the balcony as London glittered in front of them. Matthew looked at Nazim and said, “Darling, I think we’ve finally made it.” They both smiled. Four months later, Nazim jumped off the edge of that same balcony to his death. He was 34.

On the rare occasions they [Nazim's family] visited London, Matthew had to spend the night in a bed and breakfast. “We had to ‘de-gay’ the house,” says Matthew. “That meant putting pictures of Kylie into the cupboard, Cher too – and any photo or memento that suggested a relationship had to go.”

Nazim didn’t like to talk about his family. He had left Birmingham and felt that to talk about pain or sadness or guilt would have infected the new life they had created in London – he was resigned to playing the dutiful Muslim boy to his family in Birmingham when, in fact, he was a happily gay man in London.

The following year, Matthew came out to his parents, who were loving and accepting of both of them, but for Nazim, whose family were culturally conservative Muslims, the only strategy was to keep the solid borderlines between the old life in Birmingham and the new life in London.

On the last Saturday of July 2014, Nazim and Matthew drove north to Birmingham. It was a strange time: a close friend had died and they had to be back in London on the Monday for his memorial service. It was also the weekend of Eid, the Muslim festival.

When he arrived, Nazim’s family were annoyed that he was late for the Eid celebrations and planned to leave early for the memorial. Things were said – Matthew does not know what, exactly – that left Nazim distraught. “I am a good person,” Nazim said, weeping. “Why can’t people accept me for who I am?”

“Is it because you like men?” his mother had asked him, out of the blue. And Nazim, who had spent years hiding and pretending, to protect his relationship with Matthew, did something he had never expected to do: on the spur of the moment, he told them everything.

Nazim was in a state of shock as he drove back to London. It emerged at the inquest in December 2014 that he had told his mother he was gay and had been in a relationship with a man for 13 years, and planned to marry him. Her response was to tell Nazim to consult a psychiatrist with a view to being “cured”.

The couple went to the service for their dead friend that evening and a second ceremony the following day, but Matthew recalls Nazim being distant, but trying to put on a brave face. On Tuesday evening, Nazim helped with paperwork for the new job Matthew would start the following morning and then they retired to bed.

In the office next day, Matthew got a text from his sister, saying simply “call me now”. It was early evening on Wednesday 30 July. He rang her and was told to go home immediately; she would not say why. It couldn’t be Nazim – they had talked at lunchtime and Nazim had called again at just after 3pm and then twice after 5pm, but it was Matthew’s first day in a new office and he had been too busy in meetings to take the calls, though he had tried to call Nazim back. 

“I was pushing people out of the way and as I came round the corner I saw flashing blue lights and police cordon tape, then I saw this red blanket on the floor covering something up.”  He began to scream. He was bundled into a police car as friends started to show up, faces grey with shock.

Matthew arrived at Handsworth cemetery early on the day of Nazim’s funeral. . . .  With less than half an hour to go, nobody else had arrived and Matthew began to worry. In the distance he could see a burial taking place. “I went over and asked one of the officials where Nazim was being buried,” he said. “She said, ‘I’m really sorry – they have already buried him.’” . . . . Nazim’s family had apparently given him the wrong time for the funeral.

He is convinced that Nazim spoke to him, telling him to set up a foundation to help other young gay men and women driven to depression because of religious homophobia. He had a reason to go on at last.  The Naz and Matt Foundation was announced at a special service held in London for Nazim, two weeks after his funeral.

Who does Matthew blame for Nazim’s death? “I blame a community that is so closed minded to allow these bigoted views that make families believe that their honour is more important than loving their children,” he says. “The respect and honour of the family is more important than the happiness of the children they gave birth to. How sick is that?”

The purpose of the Naz and Matt Foundation is to confront and challenge these views. 

Make a donation to this important work here.   Meanwhile, never forget that the fruits of fundamentalist religion of every stripe is hate, division, mistreatment of others and death.  Fundamentalist religion needs to be eradicated from the face of the planet.  It is a pervasive evil.

Religion's War on Freedom Strike in Paris

Suspected shooter in Paris Massacre

Religion - or in this case, conservative Islam - has added new names to the death toll that goes hand in glove with religion over the centuries.  For centuries, those deemed guilty of blasphemy or who refused to live by certain creeds and beliefs have been murdered by the "true believers" who, due to their own psychological issues, religious brainwashing, and/or ignorance, cannot stand to see anything or anyone challenge or mock their delusional fairy tale like religious myths.   I increasingly view deep religious fundamentalism to be a form of mental illness.  The New York Times has new details on the cowardly mass killing at the offices of French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, in Paris.  Here are highlights:

The terrorist attack by masked gunmen on the newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, left 12 people dead — including the top editor, prominent cartoonists and police officers — and was among the deadliest in postwar France.

Officials said late Wednesday that the suspects had been identified and that two were brothers. They were identified as Said and Cherif Kouachi, 32 and 34, and Hamyd Mourad, 18. French news reports said the brothers had been born in Paris, raising the prospect that homegrown Muslim extremists were responsible.

Officials and witnesses said at least two gunmen carried out the attack with automatic weapons and an unusual degree of military-style precision. President François Hollande of France called it a display of extraordinary “barbarism” that was “without a doubt” an act of terrorism. 

The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said witnesses said the attackers had screamed “Allahu akbar!” or “God is great!” during the attack, which the police characterized as a “slaughter.”

Corinne Rey, a cartoonist known as Coco, who was at the newspaper office during the attack, told Le Monde that the attackers spoke fluent French and had said they were part of Al Qaeda.

An amateur video of the assailants’ subsequent gunfight with the police, showed the men shouting, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad. We have killed Charlie Hebdo!” The video, the source of which could not be verified, also showed the gunmen killing a police officer as he lay wounded on a nearby street.

The victims at Charlie Hebdo included some of the country’s most revered and iconoclastic cartoonists. The weekly’s editorial director, Stéphane Charbonnier, had already been received light police protection after earlier threats, the police and the prosecutor said. An officer assigned to guard the newspaper’s offices and its top editor was among the victims.

Mr. Molins, the prosecutor, said that two men armed with AK-47 rifles and wearing black hoods, had forced their way into the weekly’s offices about 11:30 a.m., firing at people in the lobby, before making their way to the newsroom on the second floor, interrupting a news meeting and firing at the assembled journalists.

The attackers then fled outside, where they clashed three times with the police, shooting one officer as he lay on the ground on a nearby street.

One journalist who was at the weekly during the attack and asked that her name not be used, texted a friend after the shooting: “I’m alive. There is death all around me. Yes, I am there. The jihadists spared me.”

What's frightening is that religious extremists - both Christian and Muslim - want to deprive others of freedom of expression and freedom of religion - and/or freedom from religion.  Their beliefs are so fragile and psychotic that they cannot tolerate anyone who suggests that their beliefs are based on lies or myths.  These religious fundamentals deserve no deference, no respect and their belief systems need to be irradiated.

The publisher of Charlie Hebdo who was murdered in Paris

Four of the murder victims

Can Tradional Religion Survive Contact with Extraterrestrials

I frequently note that knowledge and science are the enemies of traditional religions, especially Christianity and fundamentalist Islam.  The "holy book" on which they are based are Earth centric and view human kind as the top of the heap in terms of ruling the Earth and creation.  The human genome project has already demonstrated the lie of the Adam and Eve myth - i.e., that they never really existed as historic personages. Now, with new discoveries on Mars increasing suggesting that life may have existed on that planet and the likelihood that out of the billions of solar systems in the universe other life exists, a piece in The Week queries whether these religions can survive the existence of extraterrestrial life.  For the fundamentalist adherents, I personally believe the answer is no.  Their literalism and claims of inerrancy (ridiculous as they may be) set the stage for collapse when objective proof blows away the focus of their myths.  Here are article highlights:

[T]here are now a pair of books — and a number of essays about and reviews of those books — that reflect seriously on how the major religions of the world would respond to first contact with extraterrestrial life.

From this range of writing, a broad consensus emerges.  Buddhism, as a nontheistic belief system, would be largely unshaken by the discovery of intelligent life on other worlds. Among Christians, the Vatican's long history of adjusting itself to the findings of modern science would lead Catholics to be relatively unfazed. More literalistic Protestants — especially evangelicals of various stripes — would have a much harder time of it, while certain sects with origins in 19th-century America (Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons), which already have folk beliefs about the existence of life on other planets, might actually thrive.

I'm afraid I'm skeptical about much of this, too. Yes, Buddhism and other nontheistic forms of spirituality might emerge relatively unscathed from a close encounter with extraterrestrial life. But most forms of Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) would be profoundly shaken by the definitive demonstration that life — let alone intelligent life — exists elsewhere in the universe.

Consider the theological implications of discovering even the most primitive form of microscopic unicellular life on another world (perhaps in the polar ice caps on Mars, or in a subsurface ocean of water on Jupiter's moon Europa). Such a discovery would seem to vindicate the evolutionary hypothesis that life can and does emerge from (seeming) nothingness all on its own, without divine intervention of any kind. And that would raise the possibility — perhaps a greater possibility than ever before in the minds of believers — that precisely the same thing could have happened on Earth.

In order to shoot down this theologically troubling possibility, believers could always leap to the view that God lies behind all life everywhere. But surely that would complicate the Judeo-Christian creation story in ways that go far beyond the usual debates about reading the Book of Genesis literally or allegorically. Wouldn't it have been more accurate for the text to speak of God creating a universe containing many worlds with life on them instead of implying that life on our planet is somehow unique?

But theological adaptation to the discovery of simple extraterrestrial life is one thing. Adapting to the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be something else entirely — and I seriously doubt that most of the world's great theistic faiths could succeed in pulling it off, at least short of a truly radical shift in orientation.

Think of it as a theological Copernican Revolution. Just as the scientific Copernican Revolution destabilized and downgraded humanity's place in the cosmos by substituting heliocentrism for a geocentric view that placed the Earth and its inhabitants at the center of creation, so the discovery of advanced life on other planets would imply that human beings are just one of any number of intelligent creatures in the universe. And that, in turn, would seem to imply either that God created many equally special beings throughout the universe, or that God cares for us more than he does for those other intelligent beings.

Did God create those other intelligent creatures, too, but without an interest in revealing himself to them? Or did they, unlike human beings, evolve all on their own without divine origins and guidance?

How believers answer those questions will be a product, in part, of what the extraterrestrials look like. If the aliens have symmetrical body structures — two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils — then it may be plausible to assume that they were created in the image and likeness of the same God as we were. But if they look nothing like us at all, the case for separation between "our" God and these alien intelligences would grow much stronger.

But I have an equally hard time accepting that believers would be capable of wrapping their heads around the possibility that God loves all intelligent creatures on all planets equally.

I suspect that these puzzles are so corrosive in their skeptical implications that contact with intelligent life from other worlds would produce a rapid collapse of faith rooted in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Quran, with a rapid spread of atheistic secularism in their place.
But not necessarily. Here are two other options.

One possibility would be a growth in the kind of philosophical theism David. B. Hart defended in his recent outstanding book The Experience of God. This would be a form of Platonism, with God treated less as a person who intervenes and reveals himself miraculously and providentially in history than as the ontological unity of Plato's three transcendentals: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. God in this sense stands behind the scenes, invisibly making possible and sustaining every entity and action in the universe — here as well as on any conceivable alien world — from the beginning to the end of time.

But there is another possibility — one that moves in the opposite direction, toward greater divine anthropomorphism. Here Mormons may be able to offer some guidance. Some Latter-day Saints (including, on some readings, Mormonism's founding prophet Joseph Smith) have claimed that God resides within the universe rather than serving as its transcendent ground, that he began as a human being and evolved into his current state of exaltation, that he has a body, that he didn't create the universe so much as form parts of it from preexisting matter, and that Mormon men and women can themselves evolve into gods and goddesses. Such a view — with its hints of polytheism and suggestion of finite divine power — would seem to be far more compatible than traditional Judeo-Christian monotheism with a vision of the universe populated by a multitude of intelligent beings.

As I said at the outset, I don't think religious believers will ever have to cope with an extraterrestrially inspired theological crisis — because contact with intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe is exceedingly unlikely. But we shouldn't kid ourselves about the challenges that such contact would pose, if it were to happen, to the world's religious traditions.

If we are honest with ourselves, there is no tangible, objective support for either Christianity and Islam, both of which springboard off of the Jewish Old Testament that has little archeological evidence to support its most striking claims.  A case in point: Moses.   The newly released Exodus: Gods and Kings, starring Christian Bale, has been condemned by some as not being "historically accurate."  As Wikipedia notes:

The existence of Moses as well as the veracity of the Exodus story are disputed among archaeologists and Egyptologists, with experts in the field of biblical criticism citing logical inconsistencies, new archaeological evidence, historical evidence, and related origin myths in Canaanite culture. Other historians maintain that the biographical details and Egyptian background attributed to Moses imply the existence of a historical political and religious leader who was involved in the consolidation of the Hebrew tribes in Canaan towards the end of the Bronze Age.

While the general narrative of the Exodus and the conquest of the Promised Land may be remotely rooted in historical events, the figure of Moses as a leader of the Israelites in these events cannot be substantiated.

How can there be historic accuracy about someone who likely never existed, or at least not as recited by the Bible?

The Gay Divide: Victories in the West and Renewed Repression in the East

In the euphoria of watching anti-gay laws crashing down in America and other modern nations (a term that in my view does not include Russia and some of the former Soviet Republics since they are largely governed as feudal dictatorships), it is easy to forget that LGBT people in other parts of the world are facing a horrific backlash prompted by factors that vary from (i) American Christofascists exporting hate and homophobia to nations with ignorant and gullible populations, (ii) continued Islamic fundamentalism, to (iii) the cynical use of homophobia by near dictators to distract their countryman of the failures of their rule.  Vladimir Putin, of course, falls into this latter category.  Uganda and other African nations fall into the first.  A piece in The Economist looks at the sad divergence in what is happening to LGBT people.  Here are excerpts:

THERE was a teenager in Arizona in the 1970s who “could no more imagine longing to touch a woman than longing to touch a toaster”. But he convinced himself that he was not gay. Longing to be “normal”, he blamed his obsession with muscular men on envy of their good looks. It was not until he was 25 that he admitted the truth to himself—let alone other people. In 1996 he wrote a cover leader for The Economist in favour of same-sex marriage. He never thought it would happen during his lifetime. Yet now he is married to the man he loves and living in a Virginia suburb where few think this odd.

The change in attitudes to homosexuality in many countries—not just the West but also Latin America, China and other places—is one of the wonders of the world (see article). This week America’s Supreme Court gave gay marriage another big boost, by rejecting several challenges to it; most Americans already live in states where gays can wed. But five countries still execute gay people: Iran hangs them; Saudi Arabia stones them. Gay sex is illegal in 78 countries, and a few have recently passed laws that make gay life even grimmer. The gay divide is one of the world’s widest (see article). What caused it? And will tolerance eventually spread?
 
The leap forward has been startlingly quick. In the 1950s gay sex was illegal nearly everywhere. In Britain, on the orders of a home secretary who vowed to “eradicate” it, undercover police were sent out to loiter in bars, entrap gay men and put them in jail. In China in the 1980s homosexuals were rounded up and sent to labour camps without trial. All around the world gay people lived furtively and in fear. Laws banning “sodomy” remained in some American states until 2003.

Today gay sex is legal in at least 113 countries. Gay marriages or civil unions are recognised in three dozen and parts of others. In most of the West it is no longer socially acceptable to be homophobic. Gay life in China is now both legal and, in cities, undisguised. Latin America is even more gay-friendly: 74% of Argentines and 60% of Brazilians believe that society should accept homosexuality.
Yet there are still parts of the world where it is not safe to be homosexual. Extra-judicial beatings and murders are depressingly common in much of Africa and in some Muslim countries. African gangs subject lesbians to “corrective rape”. In some countries persecution has intensified. Chad is poised to ban gay sex. Nigeria and Uganda have passed draconian anti-gay laws (though a court recently struck Uganda’s down). Russia and a few other countries have barred the “promotion” of homosexuality.

This is partly a reaction to the spread of gay rights in the West. Thanks to globalisation, people who live in places where everyone agrees that homosexuality is an abomination can now see pictures of gay-pride parades in Sydney or men marrying men in Massachusetts. They find this shocking. Meanwhile some homophobic Western preachers have gone to fire up anti-gay audiences in Africa, and American conservatives offer advice to countries thinking of drafting anti-gay laws.
 
By taking up arms against an imaginary Western plot to spread perversion, Vladimir Putin and Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan doubtless hope to distract attention from the corruption and incompetence of their own regimes. But they have picked their scapegoats shrewdly: 74% of Russians and 98% of Nigerians disapprove of homosexuality.

Nonetheless, there are reasons for optimism, at least in the long term. Urbanisation helps. It is easier to find a niche in a big, anonymous city than in a village where everyone knows your business. Gay life in the Indian countryside is still awful; in Mumbai or Delhi it is much easier, despite being illegal.

Emerging countries in Asia and Latin America have generally grown kinder to gay people as they have grown richer, more open and more democratic. The hope is that as Africa and the Arab world catch up, they will follow suit.

What could help spread tolerance? If the past half-century is any guide, the prime movers will be gay people themselves. The more visible they are, the more normal they will seem. These days 75% of Americans say they have gay friends or colleagues, up from only 24% in 1985. But it is hard to be the first to come out in a country where that means prison or worse.

For those who cling to the notion of progress, it is hard to believe that tolerance will not spread. After all, gay people are not demanding special treatment, just the same freedoms that everyone else takes for granted: to love whom they please and to marry whom they love.

 Note again the importance of living one's life openly and in the process dispelling the lies and stereotypes our enemies work to keep alive.   Living totally "out" both socially and professionally has not only allowed me to at long last come to self acceptance, but I suspect the husband and I help changes some minds on a daily basis.  Step out of the closet and change your life and change society.

Iran's Secret World of Sex

Remember how former Iranian President and utter nut case Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that there were no gays in Iran?  Well, a new study shows just how out in fantasy land Ahmadinejad was - 17% of the Iranians interviewed sad that they were gay.  Not only, that sex is much more prevalent among unmarried heterosexuals than the mullahs (who bear a bizarre resemblance to the Catholic Church hierarchy when it comes to being obsessed with policing the sex lives of others) want to admit.   Note how clerics are suspected of being the most common users of "sigheh," i.e., temporary marriage, to cover their adulterous affairs.  It seems whether it is the Catholic clergy of Islamic mullahs, no one is more engaged in hypocrisy than the "holy men."    The Economist has details: 

IT IS the last thing Iran’s religious rulers want to talk about, but they may just have to. An official report has documented the nation’s worst-kept secret: sex of every kind is taking place outside the marital bed in the Islamic Republic. Something, in the ruling ayatollahs’ view, must be done.

An 82-page document recently issued by Iran’s parliamentary research department is stark in its findings. Not only are young adults sexually active, with 80% of unmarried females having boyfriends, but secondary-school pupils are, too. Illicit unions are not just between girls and boys; 17% of the 142,000 students who were surveyed said that they were homosexual.

In Tehran, the capital, long known for its underground sex scene, chastity is plainly becoming less common. The scope and pace of change are challenging the government and posing a headache for the clerics who dispense guidance at Friday prayers.

The report is also a rare official admission of the unspoken accord in Iran: people can do what they want so long as it takes place behind closed doors. Parliament’s researchers, on this occasion, were allowed to say the unsayable.

Their suggestion for stopping unsanctioned sex is remarkably liberal. Instead of seeking to cool the loins of the youngsters altogether, they should be allowed publicly to register their union by using sigheh, an ancient practice in Shia Islam that lets people marry temporarily.

Clerics themselves have long been suspected of being among its biggest beneficiaries, sometimes when they are on extended holy retreats in ancient religious cities such as Qom.

Iran’s media, always wary of being shut down, have played safe by ignoring the report. So have members of parliament. In most official circles, sex in Iran is still too hot to talk about.

Historically, Iran - or Persia as it has been known through most of history - was an advanced culture, something that continued under the Shah.  That all ended when the Islamic extremists overthrew the Shah and brought in a reign of terror that either killed or drove into exile some of the country's best and brightest.  If one wants a glimpse of what America would be under Christofascist rule, Iran offers a good example.  Fundamentalist religion and knowledge/modernity and personal freedoms are mutually exclusive.   It really is that simple.

Brunei Law To Allow Death By Stoning For Gay Sex

I condemn conservative Christians who are best defined by their hatred of others frequently on this blog.  But Christian fundamentalists are not the only foul force in the world.  Right along side them are the Islamic fundamentalists who likewise cling to ignorance, spew hatred towards others and fight a rear guard battle against modernity itself.   The latest example is what is happening in Brunei where an extreme sharia law penal code has been enacted which imposes the death penalty for an array of offenses including same sex relations. If anyone deserves the death penalty, it is those who passed the new penal code and those who advocated for it.  Huffington Post looks at this development which violates international law:

The United Nations has responded to the nation of Brunei, a sovereign state in southeast Asia, where officials are reportedly set to roll out a new penal code including death by stoning as punishment for same-sex acts.

Other offenses referenced in the revision of capital punishment regulations reportedly include "rape, adultery, sodomy, extramarital sexual relations for Muslims, insulting any verses of the Quran and Hadith, blasphemy, declaring oneself a prophet or non-Muslim, and murder." 

The revised penal code is slated to go into effect April 22, according to Gay Asia News and other media outlets.

“Application of the death penalty for such a broad range of offenses contravenes international law,” Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement. “We urge the Government to delay the entry into force of the revised penal code and to conduct a comprehensive review ensuring its compliance with international human rights standards,” he told a news conference in Geneva.

Brunei is the latest in a series of countries to pass anti-gay laws that could result in extreme punishments for those engaging in same-sex acts. In February, Uganda's president signed a bill that calls for first-time offenders of same-sex acts to be sentenced to 14 years in jail, and "repeat offenders" could receive life in prison. Additionally, Nigeria has a similar anti-gay law that makes same-sex relationships illegal and sets penalties of same-sex acts at up to 14 years in prison.

Conservative/fundamentalist religion is always an evil.  The public needs to open its eyes to this reality and not be distracted by charitable activities that in no way outweigh the evils done and by claims of "religious freedom" on the part of those who seek to oppress others. 

Death Toll Rises in Keyan - More Foul Fruits of Merger of Politics/Religion

The fruits of religion

At the moment there are 59 known dead, at least 175 injured and 30 held hostage after an Al Qaeda Somali terror group al Shabaab attack on a luxury shopping mall in Kenya.  Meanwhile at least 60 are dead as a result of a church bombing in Pakistan directed at Christians.  Thus, once again we see the evil of religion particularly when it is merged with political aspirations.  As is always the case, the aggressors are driven to impose their beliefs and agenda on all others.  Yet people ask why I am increasingly anti-religion in general.  Do they not know their history and do they not watch the news?   The BBC has some of the latest details:

At least 59 people were killed and 175 injured in Saturday's attack on a Nairobi shopping centre, Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta has said.

More than 1,000 people were brought out of the Westgate shopping centre and the rescue operation continues, Mr Kenyatta said at a news conference on Sunday.

Between 10 and 15 attackers - thought to be militants from the Somali al-Shabab movement - are still inside.

Some civilians are still trapped, either as hostages or in hiding.

Mr Kenyatta's nephew and his fiancee were among the dead, the president said.

The UK Foreign Office has confirmed that three Britons have been killed, and says the number is likely to rise.

French, Chinese, Ghanaian and Canadian citizens are also among the foreigners confirmed killed, along with a dual Australian-British national.

British Prime Minister David Cameron called it "an absolutely sickening and despicable attack of appalling brutality".

The Somali militant group al-Shabab says it carried out the attack in response to Kenyan military operations in Somalia.  There are about 4,000 Kenyan troops in the south of Somalia, where they have been fighting the militants since 2011.

The attack began at about 12:00 local time (09:00 GMT) on Saturday, when the militants entered the Westgate centre, throwing grenades and firing automatic weapons. A children's day was being held at the time - children are among those reported killed.

Witnesses report seeing many bodies strewn round tables of unfinished fast food - with pop music left playing in the background.

 Meanwhile, here in America politicians continue to give deference and respect to religious belief that is every bit as hate filled toward others, just not as violent - at least not yet.

Moderate Cleric Hassan Rouhani Wins Iran’s Election

In a result that many did not expect, a moderate reformist has won Iran's presidential election and has started pundits speculating as to why the reigning mullahs did not try to fix the election and have it go to one of their hand picked cronies.  Some speculate that they believe they can control Rouhani (pictured at left) and the country regardless of who holds the presidency.  Others wonder if the mullahs feared a reprise of the 2009 violence if they moved to stifle.  The larger lesson is that the Iranian people should not be seen as holding identical views and beliefs as their murderous dictators who have ruled since the over throw of the Shah back in 1979.   The larger lesson is that most people be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu, gay or straight all want largely the same thing: security and good health for their families, a better future for their children, the freedom to lead their lives as the wish and to be simply left alone.  Its the religious fundamentalists time and time again who bear the responsibility for depriving the rest of us these simple wants and desires.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post on the surprise in Iran:

TEHRAN — Hassan Rouhani, a moderate Shiite cleric known as one of Iran’s leading foreign policy experts, has won the election to succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Islamic Republic’s next president, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar announced Saturday evening.

With results from all the precincts in, Rouhani had won 50.7 percent of the votes, avoiding a runoff, Mohammad-Najjar said.

The mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, came a distant second, with 16.6 percent of the vote. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s hard-line nuclear negotiator, came third with 11.4 percent. A handful of other conservative candidates fared poorly.

After a surge of support in the final week of campaigning from Iranians who did not plan to vote, Rouhani won a surprising decisive majority in a field of six candidates considered loyal to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Rouhani took a majority of the votes, which is already being viewed as a repudiation of not only the Ahmadinejad years but also the hold conservatives have held over Iranian politics since 2005.   Rouhani has pledged to bridge the divides between conservatives and reformists, and if his past record is any indication, he is well positioned to do so.

With the backing of former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Rouhani will have a powerful mandate to improve Iran’s international relations and attempt to negotiate a settlement of Iran’s nuclear activities.

Rouhani has since been a harsh critic of Ahmadinejad’s economic and foreign policy.   In Washington, the White House responded to the election of Rouhani by congratulating the Iranian people “for their participation in the political process, and their courage in making their voices heard,” and offering to hold talks with the new Iranian government over its nuclear program.

Ray Takeyh, a former State Department adviser and Middle East expert, said the results probably “even surprised Rouhani,” who appears to have been an unexpected beneficiary of pent-up resentments among Iranians after years of political repression and the recent economic hardships brought on by Western sanctions.

“This was supposed to be a well-regulated, well-crafted election, and then the wheels came off,” Takeyh said. “It appears that the leadership miscalculated on Rouhani’s appeal, and also miscalculated on the ineptness of its preferred candidates and the impact of the divisions among the conservative coalition.”

Rouhani will likely bring with him a cadre of more moderate diplomats, technocrats and nuclear negotiators who favor a more pragmatic foreign policy, said Trita Parsi, author of “A Single Roll of the Dice,” a book on the Obama administration’s dealings with Iran.  

London Attack: The New Face of Terror - Where Are the Good Muslims?

I will admit that I am hard on those I call the "good Christians" - those Christians who silently stand by and never speak a word of condemnation against far right Christians who spew nothing but hatred towards others.  They are akin to the "good Germans" who stayed silent as the Nazi regime rose to power and who later denied any knowledge of the horrors done by Hitler, et al, including the wholesale murder of Jews.   In London today a horrible murder occurred and now, I am waiting for Muslims around the globe to rise up out of silence and condemn the horrible deed and also condemn clerics who preach such hate and violence.  Bad things happen when good people remain silent.  And silence ultimately translates into complicity.  I am an equal time critic of fundamentalist  religion and the evils which seem to be its principal fruits.   I expect nothing less from "good Muslims" than I do of "good Christians."   The Daily Beast looks at events today in London when a soldier was attacked and beheaded by apparent Jihadists.  Here are highlights:

A blood-splattered jihadist with a meat cleaver in one hand declaring to a bystander’s smartphone camera “Allahu Akbar” and “we will always beat you” in a pronounced south London accent?  While waiting twenty minutes for the police to arrive after he’s taken part in what seemed like a ritual assassination of a British soldier?  Exactly what terrorist profile does this conform to?  None.

And that’s what concerns British terrorism officials. Is this bizarre episode the beginning of a new, unpredictable pattern of loners operating without any organized backing behind them, or a one-off?

The two assailants could, indeed, just be a couple of deranged freelancers. But the guidance British ministers have been giving reporters assumes something much graver, a form of terrorism so unsophisticated and amateur that it can’t be detected by existing surveillance methods.

The fact that the wild, bloodied harangue to camera was delivered by a black man with no trace of a foreign accent – indeed, in an accent that seemed to originate in south London in particular – suggests homegrown militants, perhaps men radicalized via the Internet, through a form of widely dispersed propaganda rather than targeted brainwashing.

Many witnesses saw two men in a car deliberately run down the off-duty soldier, then hack away at him with a meat cleaver, apparently attempting to decapitate him.

The BBC has been reporting that one of the attackers was a Nigerian known to have had connections with the Somalia-based terrorist group Al-Shabaab, from as far back as 2003.

Fundamentalist religious belief to me is a form of sickness or, better yet, a form of mental illness.  How else to explain the hate and savagery that seems to go with it?  But, this judgment doesn't apply to all members of faith groups. That said, I have a number of Muslim clients who are decent, respectful individuals.   Unfortunately, they and others will be painted with a broad brush if Muslim leaders do not immediately condemn this atrocity in the strongest means possible.   Fundamentalist religion of all faiths is a dangerous evil that needs to be eradicated from the face of the earth.  Once again I find myself believing that a world entirely without religion would be a far better place.