And in the News [1994]

[From my pre-weblog, 14 February 1994]

A

lex Efty of the Associated Press reports that “Iranian leaders remain adamant that all Muslims have a religious duty to kill” Salmon Rushdie, because some members of the faith chose to take offense at one of his books. He adds that this decree “was en­dorsed by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which rep­resents 51 Muslim states.” If this is true, then Islam has passed judgment on itself, and joining hands with the white-robed night-riders of the Ku Klux Klan, the brown-shirted shock troops of the Third Reich, and the grey-suited gay-bashers of the evangelical right, now marches off to the gallows reserved for the outcasts from humanity. Islam is bankrupt, and no longer deserves to exist. [source: Oregonian, 14 February 1994, A5]

In the same paper I read that Oliver North, the man who supplied weapons to America’s enemies to finance his political projects, while wearing the uniform of the United States, is running for the Senate in Virginia. It’s a measure of the bank­ruptcy of the Republican party that they can stomach putting up this near-trai­tor as a candidate. As a Senator he would be privy to many of our secrets, our defenses, and god only knows what he might take it into his head to do with them the next time he got a notion to indulge in his own private foreign policy. He should not be elected to the Senate—and currently he is far behind in the polls—but if he is elected, he should not be seated. There is no place for traitors there.