Iraq al-Qaida says pope, West are doomed

Oh, no. Doomed?

Dammit. I am so tired of being doomed.

I haven’t read what the Pope actually said– and I ain’t a’gonna– but they tell me he was reading from an ancient text, which never fails to get me into trouble with somebody. Given the reaction to the Pope’s story hour and the cartoon hullaballoo a few months back, do you ever get the sense that the Arab Street gets a lot of its news from a game of Telephone? He asked, failing to read the article about which he was commenting?

Still. “He said what? ‘Violent religion’?? Get him!” Don’t really have to underline much in that paragraph. At the same time, Islam is said to be a religion of tolerance and peace. I don’t really understand how a religion could encompass such contradictory and bewildering ideas. For as my Bible says,

Remember what the Amalekites did to you on your way from Egypt, how they met you along the way and cut off all your stragglers in the rear of the march when you were exhausted and tired; they were unafraid of God. So when the Lord your God gives you relief from all the enemies who surround you in the land he is giving you as an inheritance, you must wipe out the memory of the Amalekites from under heaven – do not forget!

And I do my best to live by that every day. Once we get this s*** straightened out,
you can forget about those Amalekites. Which, come to think of it, seems to entail deleting them from the Bible. That’s going to complicate some things.
(That’s Deuteronomy 25:17, a near neighbor of favorite passage Deut 25:12. If your wife breaks up a fight by hitting your opponent in the nuts, the Bible commands you to chop off her hand, and I quote, “pitilessly.” Feel free to look that up.)