“I hope not,” I said. But I was pleasantly surprised as we landed smoothly and taxied down the runway. “Look, Julia, a gun salute!”
“Duck, girls!” she yelled, as a SAM missile pierced the window, shot through the First Class curtain and took out the Economy toilet.
“Now don’t you worry, Mark,” she said once we were safely in the limo. “Your material’s hardly been changed at all. Just remember, when you and Tony Orlando do ‘Thank Heaven For Little Girls’, there’s a Sudanese warlord in a third-row aisle seat who’s got a new 12-year-old wife you don’t want to be caught looking at.”
“Got it,” I said. The house band, made up entirely of Hausa band members, played the opening strains of Stevie Wonder’s classic love song and Julia pushed the revised culturally sensitive lyrics into my hand. It was then that the first nagging doubts began to gnaw at the back of my mind. But what the hell, I was in my tux and they were playing my song.
I bounced out on stage, grabbed the mike and punched the air:
The audience seemed wary and an alarming number appeared to be reaching into their robes. But I ploughed on:
There was a momentary silence, just long enough for me to start backing upstage nervously. And then the crowd went wild! The guys in the balcony cheered deliriously and hurled their machetes across the orchestra pit, shredding my pants. An Afghan wedding party grabbed their semi-automatics and blew out the chandeliers, sending them hurtling to the aisle, where they killed a Japanese camera crew. Tough luck, fellers, but that’s what happens when you get between me and my audience.
I took my usual seat with the celebrity judges, in between “Baywatch” hunk David Hasselhoff and Princess Michael of Kent. Lorraine Kelly said: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s give our panel a really big hand!” A really big hand landed on the table with a dull thud, courtesy of a Saudi prince in the royal box.
“How’d they like you?” I asked Princess Michael.
“Well, by the end of ‘Man, I Feel Like A Woman’, I had the crowd with me all the way. But I shook ’em off at Kaduna.”
“Who’s the bloke next to you?”
“Oh, he’s a judge.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, duh!”
“No, I mean, he’s a real judge. He’s some Fulani bigshot who’s here to decide who gets stoned.”
“And which mother of a Mick Jagger love-child is on the panel this year?”
“That’s Marsha Hunt. Had an affair with him in the late Sixties.”
The small talk was somewhat stilted. “Have you ever been stoned?” asked the judge. Marsha tittered.
Princess Michael explained that the fellow on Marsha’s left was Alhaji Abdutayo Ogunbati, the country’s leading female circumcisionist, there to ensure every contestant was in full compliance, and next to him was Hans Blix, there to ensure every involuntary clitorectomy was in accordance with UN clitorectomy inspections-team regulations.
I glanced at my watch. “For crying out loud, when are they going to raise the curtain?”
“They have raised the curtain,” said David. “Those are the girls.”
I peered closer at the shapeless line of cloth, and he was right: there they all were, from Miss Afghanistan to Miss Zionist Entity.
I sighed. “How long till the swimsuit round?”
“This is the swimsuit round,” said David.
THE ONE-WAY STREET
Facing down the crazies
FATE CONSPIRES to remind us what this war is really about: civilizational confidence. And so history repeats itself: first the farce of the Danish cartoons, and now the tragedy – a man on trial for his life in post-Taliban Afghanistan because he has committed the crime of converting to Christianity.
The cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were deeply offensive to Muslims, and so thousands protested around the world in the usual restrained manner: rioting, torching, killing, etc.
The impending execution of Abdul Rahman for embracing Christianity is, of course, offensive to westerners, and so around the world they reacted equally violently by issuing blood-curdling threats like that made by State Department spokesman Sean McCormack:
“Freedom of worship is an important element of any democracy,” said Mr McCormack. “And these are issues as Afghan democracy matures that they are going to have to deal with increasingly.”
The immediate problem for Mr Rahman is whether he’ll get the chance to “mature” along with Afghan democracy. The President, the Canadian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister have all made statements of concern about his fate, and it seems clear that Afghanistan’s dapper leader Hamid Karzai would like to resolve this issue before his fledgling democracy gets a reputation as just another barbarous Islamist sewer state. There’s talk of various artful compromises, such as Mr Rahman being declared unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity on the grounds that (I’m no Islamic jurist so I’m paraphrasing here) anyone who converts from Islam to Christianity must ipso facto be out of his tree.
On the other hand, this “moderate” compromise solution is being rejected by leading theologians. Let this guy Rahman cop an insanity plea and there goes the neighborhood. “We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die,” says Abdul Raoulf of the nation’s principal Muslim body, the Afghan Ulama Council. “Cut off his head! We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there’s nothing left.” Needless to say, Imam Raoulf is one of Afghanistan’s leading “moderate” clerics.
For what it’s worth, I’m with the Afghan Ulama Council in objecting to the insanity defense. It’s not enough for Rahman to get off on a technicality. Afghanistan is supposed to be “the good war”, the one even the French supported, albeit notionally and mostly retrospectively. Karzai is kept alive by a bodyguard of foreigners. The fragile Afghan state is protected by American, British, Canadian, Australian, Italian, German and other troops, hundreds of whom have died. You cannot ask Americans or Britons to expend blood and treasure to build a society in which a man can be executed for his choice of religion. You cannot tell a serving member of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in Kandahar that he, as a Christian, must sacrifice his life to create a Muslim state in which his faith is a capital offense.
As always, we come back to the words of Osama bin Laden: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” That’s really the only issue: the Islamists know our side has tanks and planes, but they have will and faith, and they reckon in a long struggle that’s the better bet. Most prominent western leaders sound way too eager to climb into the weak-horse suit and audition to play the rear end. Consider, for example, the words of the Prince of Wales, speaking a few days ago at al-Azhar University in Cairo. This is “the world’s oldest university”, though what they learn there makes the average Ivy League nuthouse look like a beacon of sanity. Anyway, this is what His Royal Highness had to say to 800 Islamic “scholars”:
The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others. In my view, the true mark of a civilized society is the respect it pays to minorities and to strangers.