Sunday, May 31, 2009

Crazy Randomness

End of the semester harks the end of the silence of Randomness.

From under the pile of term papers and final exams, out crawls La Professora to see a world that has gone on with its crazy randomness without her.

Case in point: some anti-abortion fundamentalist Christian shot a doctor at his church. For the most part, the leadership of the various anti-abortion groups have been condemning, albeit faintly, the shooting. Perhaps because of where it occurred. One, a preacher and director of Operation Save America, is reported to have said Dr George Tiller "has shed the blood of countless thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of little baby boys and girls and burned them up in his on-premises incinerator. Now this thing has come home to him."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of late term abortions. However, there is something fundamentally wrong about a group of people who believe that it is reprehensible for a doctor to abort a fetus, but it is morally commendable to kill that doctor for doing so. The mind boggles.

There is hope, however. In another part of the world, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa, issued a fatwa 'banning' weapons of mass destruction. Seems that WMDs are likely to kill Muslims as indiscriminately as non-Muslims. Not that his ruling will influence the clerics and politicians of Iran.

Speaking of Iran and having things come home, it appears that the nation known for being a supporter of terrorist activities elsewhere in the Middle East is now reaping its own whirlwind of distruction. On May 28, a bomb exploded at a mosque near the eastern portion of that country, where it borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing 25. Of course, Iranian officials claimed that the bombers were American and Israeli, with ties to al-Qaeda. The following day, gunmen attacked the campaign headquarters of the incumbent presidential candidate. Today, a bomb was discovered in the toilet of a domestic airplane. The attacks are believed to be the work of the Jundullah (Allah's Soldiers), a Sunni separatist group. While the links al-Qaeda may be overdone -- yet not inconceivable, there has been disagreement between the likes of the Taliban and the ayatollahs of Iran over the nature of a true Islamic State -- it would appear that there might be some truth to the link with America. Rumors abound that under the Bush administration, there was a $400 million fund for covert operations assisting the religious and ethnic minorities in Iran in their push to destabilize that country. It is, after all, part of the Axis of Evil.

Maybe being under that pile of student work wasn't so bad after all.

Grades are posted. Let the whining begin.