Jaweel Kaleem The Miami Herald

September 8, 2010

Jaweel Kaleem
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693

RE: There’s holy and then there’s holy – Some comments on your Page 1 story about literary recycling in Gainesville.

Mr/Ms Kaleem,

I still don’t know what gender you are. I do know that if you are female but it will pose no official impediment to your advancement in your profession here. If you are you can use it for rapid advancement. By the way, are there any female reporters with Page 1 stories in the Mecca Herald? Are there any female reporters anywhere in, let’s start with, Saudi Arabia. The Miami Herald had a reporter who wrote articles about the homosexual community in South Florida. His readers knew his sexual orientation. Are there any homosexual reporters, non-gender specific, in any country ruled by Muslims? Do you know whether La Cage aux Folles will be staged in Medina?

Should a Muslim homosexual couple living in Florida seek to adopt a child would they be fatwaed? Theo van Gogh was neither Muslim nor was he homosexual and he was cut up like a snitch from The Sopranos.

Fraud can be committed two ways. Commission is the most common way but omission, particularly of a material fact, makes you just as guilty. If you are a Muslim I think it is a material fact and should be disclosed.

Bernardo Oliveros was a native born Algerian. He was a Cistercian of Strict Observance, a Roman Catholic monastic order. They are also known as Trappists. Thomas Merton was the best known American Trappist. The Order can trace its roots back to Saint Benedict. You may not know it but Saint Benedict did all his work 100 years before the founding of Islam.

6 Muslim thugs hacked to him to death as he prayed in his chapel. They yelled “Allah Akbar” as the cut off his head, his arms, and his legs.

In a world saturated with something called moral relativism why is the murder of one presumptively holy man in a sacred place deemed less important than the destruction of one book? The Christian World did not rise up and kill Muslims in the streets because of this murder most foul. 12,000 miles away, in Indonesia, several thousand fanatical Muslims burned property belonging to Americans. And that was before any books were burned. What do they do for an encore? We know what they did to a Catholic priest in his chapel. Is what’s past prologue?

Would it be acceptable to burn a Christian bible in a country ruled under the precepts of Sharia Law?

I am told that there is an Islamic theological debate about what size rocks can be used when stoning an adulteress to death. If they are too big, or so I read, the harlot dies too quickly. If they are too small it takes to long for her to die. Do American Muslims have a position on this? If they have can you tell us what it is?

America sees Islam as a religion that permits no internal criticism. It reacts to external criticism with a feral ferocity that beggars description. A Dutch film maker is knifed to death on a city street. An American reporter has his head hacked off on TV. Where is the outrage at those evil deeds? When did the Imams condemn those acts?

Did Islam become a religion of peace after Tours? After Lepanto? After Vienna? After Omdurman?

There is a bit of humor to be found in this contretemps.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that everybody condemns the burning of the sacred, holy Koran. “Even”, she said, “Jewish Rabbis.” I didn’t think there was any other kind but, what the Hell, this is a big, noisy country with room enough for everybody, right? I can’t find any Buddhist or Shinto Rabbis. Are there any Muslim Rabbis? Should one appear would he [or she] be Sunni or Shia?

As a curmudgeonly White American Christian male I wish, “on the whole”, that T.E. Lawrence had stayed in Tunbridge Wells with Dryden.



Kevin Smith


PS - Speaking of “holy” and “sacred” why is Qom, a mud hut village in Iran, always called either “holy” or “sacred”? If Qom, a city that appears to be without the benefits either of indoor plumbing or modern dentistry is “holy” or “sacred”, where would Rome be on the “holy” or “sacred” scale? I mention Rome because since St. Peter’s Basilica was built Muslims have always said that they would stable their horses there.