Hello Mullah, Hello Fatwah

A London paper got a letter from Saddam, but you don't have to read it. It goes something like this. Trust me.

(To the tune of Amilcare Ponchielli's "Dance Of The Hours" by way of Allan Sherman)

Hello Mullah
Hello Fatwah
I still haven't
Gotten caughtwa
From the country
I am bolting
Now it's time for all of you to start revolting

I am wearing
Silk pajama
On the beach here
With Osama
Frozen Mai Tai
With umbrella
Send the bill to Mr. Bush who's quite a fella

Take me back
Oh Baathist party
Take me back
Don't be a smarty
I'll be nice
And I do swear that from
your livers
I won't take a slice

Take me back
My dear Iraqi
Take me back
Don't act so cocky
You've been took
Without the statues
How will you remember how I look?

Dearest Mullah
Darling Fatwah
How much misery
Have you gotwa?
Let me come home
If you miss me
I will even let a bunch of Shi'ites diss me

Wait a minute
Sons are calling
Lots of torture
Hear that bawling
Billion dollars
Gee that's better
Mullah Fatwah kindly disregard this letter

“Weapons of Mass Destruction” Discovered in Iraq

Baghdad boy band signed by William Morris.

Two Definitions

Several issues ago, I asked If the definition of Semites includes "Hebrews and Arabs," why is the definition of anti-Semitism just "hostility toward or discrimination against Jews" instead of all Semites?

It took a month but here's the official answer from Merriam-Webster itself...

The definitions are not contradictory, in that they, like all the definitions in all our dictionaries, accurately reflect the ways in which words are used and understood in English. Whatever logic may seem to say about what "anti-Semite" should mean, there is no question that its actual meaning is restricted in the way shown in the dictionary. 

"Anti-Semitic" and related words like "anti-Semitism" have a complex history. Our chief etymologist, James Rader, once addressed this question in some detail in response to an e-mail query, and I'm including a copy of his comments as a matter of interest. 

Though not indicated in our dictionary, English <anti-Semitism>, <anti-Semite>, <anti-Semitic>, etc., as well as corresponding terms in other European languages (French <anti-semitisme>, Russian <antisemitizm>, etc.), are all borrowings from German <Antisemitismus>, <Antisemit>, and <antisemitisch>, which first became widely current in Germany in the fall of 1879. 

To understand how this word arose, we have to look more generally at the history of prejudice against Jews in western Europe. Up until the late 18th century anti-Jewish feeling was grounded mainly on perceptions of Jews as an unconvertible religious minority, the only non-Christians in a monochromatically Christian society. A number of developments led to fundamental changes in this view.  The German historian A.L. Schlozer and the Biblical scholar J.G. Eichhorn began to use <Semit>, "Semite," and <semitisch>, "Semitic," based on Biblical references to the progeny of Shem, as precise terms defining Semites as a group of ancient and modern peoples, and <Semitic> as a family of languages that included Hebrew and Arabic. Later scholars opposed to the Semites the Aryans (German <Arier>) who were supposed to be the ancestors of the Indo-European-speaking peoples of Europe. The Jews came to be regarded as descendants of one branch of the Semites, and hence a people or nation rather than a religious minority. It was typical of 19th-century Romantic conceptualizations of world history to attribute a <Geist>, or intellectual and cultural essence, to every nation. Not surprisingly, the pre-modern stereotype of the Jew as a usurer preoccupied with financial gain was assigned to Jews as a national characteristic. Jewishness as perceived by non- Jews in western Europe was defined in a completely secular way, and early socialists, in particular Karl Marx--himself of Jewish heritage--identified Jewry with the rise of capitalism. The culmination of this reevaluation was the notion that someone born of Jewish parents was by definition a Jew, in other words, that Jews constituted not just a nation but a physical race. 

It was in this context in the 1870's in Germany that <Semit>, <Semitismus>, and <Semitentum> began to be used as euphemistic catchwords more or less synonymous with <Jude>, "Jew," and <Judentum>, "Jewry" or "Jewishness," as a fashionable if inexact way to characterize Jews as a supposed ethnic and racial group. Of course, in the discourse of politicians and publicists within German society <ein Semit> was unambiguously <ein Jude>, as Arabs and other Semitic peoples were not minorities in German society then and so were hardly at issue. 

What called forth the term <Antisemitismus> was a fairly specific set of historical circumstances. With the abolishment of all anti- Jewish legal restrictions in Prussia in 1869, Jews became increasingly prominent in civil society and the target of conservative hostility, as the putative prime exponents of everything considered "modern." This hostility became more focused after the financial crash of 1873 and the general decline of German liberalism in the early years of the Second Reich. The actual first appearance of <antisemitisch> and <Antisemit> is datable to Sept., 1879, when the Berlin publicist Wilhelm Marr announced a new weekly newspaper with overtly anti-Jewish tendencies. Marr has been credited with coining the terms, but in his own writing he used only <antijdisch>, "anti-Jewish," until 1880; <antisemitisch> actually first appears in a Jewish newspaper commenting on the advertisements for Marr's weekly. In any event, <antisemitisch> and <Antisemit> gained rapid currency in the ensuing months. Of course, <Antisemitismus> was not a term of opprobrium for those German conservatives who wanted to roll back Jewish emancipation, but simply defined a cultural and political movement. 

The word was quickly picked up by British and French journalists writing about Germany and extended more generally to anti-Jewish ideology. The perception of <anti-Semitism> as a word denoting something by its very nature reprehensible really only dates from the 20th century. In English, at least, <anti-Semitism> works better than <anti-Judaism>, which seems to imply mere hostility towards a religion. 

Curiously, in 1935 the Reichspropagandaministerium of the National Socialists--who put into practice anti-Jewish measures surpassing even the wildest dreams of German conservatives in 1879--attempted to officially phase out <antisemitisch> in favor of <antijdisch>. External political considerations may have provided some of the motivation for this shift: the foreign policy planners of the Third Reich must have realized that the Arabs of North Africa and the Middle East, chafing under French and British rule, could have been potential allies of Germany in the event of conflict with France and Britain. The continued use of a policy label that seemed to imply hostility toward all Semitic peoples would not have won the Arabs' favor. 

I hope you find this helpful, and thank you for writing. 

Regards, 
James Kossuth 
Assistant Editor Merriam-Webster, Inc.

Calling all Gullible Idiots

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.), Rep. Joe Barton (Tex.), Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (La.) and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.) steadfastly deny a connection between $56,500 in campaign donations last year from executives of a Kansas-based energy company and the involvement of the four Republican lawmakers in legislation of interest to that company.

Under-Reported Story of the Week

Did you hear about that plane that crashed in the Jewish Fairfax district of Los Angeles? Probably not. After the Department of Homeland Security declared it was "Not a Terrorist Attack," the media basically ignored it as just another accidental mishap. Nobody mentioned the possibility it might be a Remote Control QU-22 Bomb.

Fun Internet Doohickey of the Week

Step one: Select your salary. Step two: Select a person to compare your tax savings with. Step three: Click on the elephant. Voila! A visual chart showing what Bush has saved YOU in taxes compared to what he saved, oh, let's say the CEO of HP, who recently laid off 5,000 workers, in taxes.

The War Against Humanity

Israel demolished the home of this disabled Palestinian

I Feel So Much Safer Now

Bush has found incontrovertible proof of Iraqi acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

Thanks to Bush's tax cuts cause, we're going to see huge budget deficits that will weaken the economy and send us back to the high levels of concentrated poverty we saw in 1990.

General Tommy Franks has quit the army to pursue solo bombing projects.

The White House silenced experts who questioned Iraq intelligence info six months  before the invasion.

There are Mexicans in solidarity with the Palestinians who consider Osama bin Laden the Pancho Villa of Islam.
 
 

Big Surprise

The DEA is using the RAVE Act to stop political events.

Calling All Plagiarists

Steal this article.

Poll from Hell

40% of Americans don't even know that no WMDs have been found in Iraq.

Dust Off Your Bong

Yep, Hempfest 2003 is coming

Don't Take My Word For It

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
- Jack London -

"Your own practice can show you the truth. Your own experience is all that counts."
- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana: Mindfulness in Plain English -

"If you detach yourself from identification with the body and remain relaxed in and as Consciousness, you will, this very moment, be happy, at peace, free from bondage."
- Ashtavakra Gita -

"It's kind of contradictory for them. You bomb them and three roads over you're fixing the school."
- Carleigh McCrory: US Army Reserves, on the Iraqis -

"Integrity has no need of rules."
- Albert Camus -

"There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle."
- Bill Moyers -

"...the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
- William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming -

"What most people call freedoms - such as speech, assembly or religion - are not granted by the state, but by nature."
- unamerican -

"Having killed anger you sleep in ease.
Having killed anger you do not grieve.
The noble ones praise the slaying of anger
with its honeyed crest & poison root
for having killed it you do not grieve."
- Buddha: Samyutta Nikaya II, 70 -

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
- Mario Savio: Sproul Hall Steps, University of California, Berkeley, December 3, 1964 -

"Bill ran after me, tackled me, threw me to the floor of the kitchen in the mansion and cocked his fist back to punch me. You grabbed his arm and, yelling at him to stop and get control of himself, pulled him off me. Then you walked me around the grounds of the mansion in the minutes after, with your arm around me, saying, 'He only does that to people he loves.'"
- Dick Morris: Setting the Record Straight, An open letter to Hillary Clinton -

"From high over Iraq yesterday, President George Bush cast his Olympian eye over ancient Mesopotamia after praising the Americans in Qatar who had 'managed' the war against Saddam Hussein. But far below him, on a dirty street corner in a dirty town called Fallujah that Mr. Bush would prefer not to hear about, was a story of American blood and American power and American boots smashing down the front gates of Iraqi homes."
- Robert Fisk: Fallujah (where troops fired on unarmed protesters) has sprouted a resistance -

"Friends, foreigners are like Jews told by caring Baptists that their faith is worth less than an option on a Sally Struther's sitcom - they have absolutely no gratitude! We made the effort to go over to the Iraqis' dreadful country to kill their check-stop flaunting tykes and lower their museum admission prices. And how do they respond? They whine (in that wildly oscillating 'I'm praying in my pajamas' yelping of theirs) about all the looting and lawlessness! Gracious me, it's not as if we didn't warn them! President Bush specifically promised that he would make their country a little more like America. Just because he wasn't more specific and mentioned that it was Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdicts he had in mind is hardly his fault."
- Betty Bowers -

For those blind readers of Disinfotainment Today, here's an MP3 of the administration lies about WMDs.

Belated Christmas Gift of the Week

You can protect yourself and your loved ones from implanted biochips
powered by bodily fluids that are capable of transmitting voice signals, 
high voltage pulses, and emitting a small tracking beacon signal.

Mr. Conspiracy Says...

You know all those wackos locked up in asylums claiming the reason they act crazy is because the government put implants in their bodies that tell them what to do through remote mind control technology? They're not so crazy.

Make it easier for the Bush Administration to round up dissidents like yourself by letting them know you think they should be investigated for manipulating evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the preemptive attack.

If you live in Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, or West Virginia, you can reserve your space in a Federal relocation camp by letting the Senate Commerce Committee know you're against the FCC letting giant media companies get even bigger.

Who knows how many US Government lists you'll end up on if you join the international boycott of South Dakota for their heartless destruction of indiginous Indian burial grounds.

While you're at it, get yourself on some international lists by signing a petition to end the political crackdown in Myanmar.

Internet Porn of the Week

Don't Tell Your Kids

Oakland high school students are getting their principal fired because he's an asshole.

Cartoon of the Week

Everything Else

Mandatory reading: All hail to the pods by Al Kennedy because "only a pod person would stand up in public and claim that, because something can't be found, it must be there."

If you didn't get a Father's Day card on Sunday, that's okay, you can look at this one.

Pledge allegiance to outer space. (And while you're at it, get some incredible stickers, t-shirts, and mugs)

The U.S. Navy's Low Frequency Active (LFA) sonar system is a new technology that blasts ocean habitats with noise so intense it can maim, deafen, and even kill marine mammals.

In New Mexico, three state prisoners face the electric chair, accused of killing a guard in an August 1999 riot that also left an inmate dead. Can a book save their lives?

Next time you think you're all alone, check out this humungous list of anti-Bush links.

Pissed off that your site hasn't won any awards. Just go here, download any icon, post it to your site and, voila, you're an award winner.