Bin Ladin's rantings

We don't really know if it's actually him or someone posing as Bin Ladin, but a tape purportedly by this most-wanted criminal has been published with threats to EU. The reason? Iraq?, Afghanistan?, Palestine? Nope: freedom of speech.

Some fanatics seem to think that they can dictate their private sectarian rules to the world, that if they are not allowed by their ideology to depict certain historical character, write certain texts on a body or whatever other idiocy, everybody else must abide by their criteria. And, well, that's not the case.

Of course it's clear that the famous cartoons by a right-wing Danish paper or the also controversial film by a quasi-fascist Dutch politician are lacking of all taste (and humor) and all that. But who cares? Only a brainwashed nuthead could. And it seems these abound among Muslims: themselves not being able to express nearly any criticism for their imposed religion and not willing to allow others, with more internal and external freedom to do that.

Some ill-informed person, lost in the fallacy of cultural war, could suppose that the same kind of offenses are not done agains Jesus, Moses or Buddha... but in fact they are and have been done with increasingly boldness along the last centuries, since the Inquisition was relegated to the pages of history. Not a single historical character, religious or not, has been spared of sometimes blunt and even obscene mockery or sharp merciless criticism.

That's what freedom is about.

And Muhammad or the Quran are no exception. Sorry about you if you cannot do the same safely in Morocco, Egypt or Saudia, but that's not a pretext to try to impose fundamentalist intolerance and lack of serenity on the rest.

I also believe that these intolerant attitudes can only be blamed on one thing: the fundamental weakness of Islam (some Islam?) relies precisely on not allowing criticism, on not tolerating sarcasm, on being no fun at all. This of course applies to other religions, specially to the most reactionary subsects... but overall it would seem like many Muslims lack faith on their faith and that's why they behave so aggresively. They are semi-conscious of the weakness of a religion that demands too much from its followers and that relies on brutal machismo and misogyny. That, in brief, got stuck in the Dark Ages and never got out of them.

After all, whatever they want to believe, religions aren't but human creations: human doctrines attriuted to some "god" (or "allah" or "yaveh" - as you wish), whose existence is not directly known by anybody and cannot be proven (nor therefore disproven).

But certainly there are Muslims and Muslims. Bin Ladin is probably a caricature himself (is he anything else than a mediatic product?) of the worst of Islam. But others like good ol' Malcom X are widely admired. Why? Precisely because of his cirtical thought, his inability to bend to any predetermined set of rules.

Against the person that once was known as "the CIA man in Afghanistan", against the wealthy sheikh of Death, Ussama Bin Ladin, it brights the figure of the African-American hero Malcom X:



Certainly: let's liberate our minds by any means necessary. Muslims too.