Lewis Perdue's Blog, page 13

8 Great Philosophical Questions We’ll Never Answer

This blog post on io9 is an awesome one: 8 Great Questions We’ll Never Solve.

We’ll never answer them, but there is an existential imperative to keep asking them and to wrestle our own private angels (or demons) for an answer.

If you’re an atheist, wrestle because you can prove the answer. Otherwise, wrestle because you don’t.

I wrestle because I thought I knew the answers.

Then realized I don’t.

So I now believe that –  since not knowing is the best we can do — then wresting for the answers is what we are supposed to do.

My recent thrillers wrestle with four of these eight awesome these questions:

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” – Die By Wire
“Do we have free will?” – Perfect Killer
“Does God exist?” – Die By Wire , Perfect Killer , Daughter of God
“Can you really experience anything objectively?” – Perfect Killer

I suppose I need to start addressing the other four?

I’ll get there, but right now I’m too busy killing people in the Bahamas. (Nassau Directives is coming!)

Read the blog post. It’s so on target.

Tesla Lives Here … And Edison Lives There (#1 In A Series)

Tesla Lives Here



Edison Lives There








Fluorescents, mercury vapor lamps,

neon, modern. Alternating current

More heat than light. Energy waster.

So yesterday.




Read The Tesla Bequest, now a Kindle ebook at at Amazon.

It’s Not Orange, It’s Persimmon, Damnit!

CLICK IMAGE BELOW TO MAKE IT INTERACTIVE

This article from The Atlantic: got me to thinking about describing colors in my writing.

According to The Atlantic article:

Stephen Von Worley used data from an , where more than 5 million users were shown colors and had to type in a word or phrase to describe the color. The bigger the dot on the interactive, the more people wrote that color.

The higher up it is plotted, the more women used that name. The lower on the chart, the responses were more male. The simpler color names like red, green and blue are the large dots, and they tend to skew about 55 percent male. The top half of the chart shows the color names more women volunteered: dark moss green, buttercup, or lilac.

(To explore the graphic above in a very cool interactive way, .)

EVEN MARS WRITERS MUST KEEP ONE FOOT ON THE PLANET VENUS

For me as a writer, there’s a lot more to this than a Mars and Venus thing. Every writer must paint the most accurate picture possible in a reader’s head. You get a certain amount of information you read  the word “dog.”  But a lot MORE information is conveyed by Golden Retriever or Alsatian. Same thing describing color.

Pink may be from Mars and fuchsia from Venus, but Venus is offering more information about the shade, tint and precise color. Even though I’m your basic Mars guy, when I’m writing, I have to channel Venus.

Click image to enlarge

 

To do that, I use The Pantone Book of Color which is now out of print and expensive as all Hell. But it gives me pages like the image above with names of colors next to the color (click image to enlarge). Instead of staying on Mars with Orange, I get a Venus translation guide and descriptions like Persimmon, Paprika Salmon, Peach and Grenadine.

Often the book gives me inspiration and I come up with another name. Other times, I have a color in mind and have to flip through the pages to match what I have in mind (literally).

I think it must be cool to be a “native speaker” of Venus colors. Like any other sort of language, fluency and accuracy are always better than in translation.

TELL ME HOW I’M DOING

If you already have one of my books, please leave a comment, tell me how I did on the Mars/Venus color thing.

And if you don’t have one of my books … GET ONE! Try Die By Wire which was just re-edited and uploaded this past weekend, or check out descriptions of one of my others at Lew’s Books

 

Free Die By Wire Ebook Update, Complete Re-Edit

 

A new Die By Wire update is available as of Friday and is free to everyone who already owns the Kindle version.

I’ve received many … MANY emails from Die By Wire readers who have suggested format changes, or who have been less than pleased by typos.

I also received a very thorough vetting of my Dutch words and locales by talented new author Martyn Van Halm who helped me tweak things as only an Amsterdammer could. Martyn’s first novel, Reprobate – A Katla Novel (Amsterdam Assassin Series) is a great thriller shot through with some unique psychological insights and the sort of northern-latitude European tone-of voice that Stieg Larsson fans will find familiar.

All of those are my fault because I was so anxious to get my new book out. Mea culpa!

I want to make sure readers are happy, and don’t want minor annoyances to get into the way of the story. So, I’ve completely re-edited Die By Wire and we’ve reformatted the text to make reading easier and clearer.

If you don’t already have Die By Wire, get the new version while it’s on sale at $2.99.

HOW TO GET THE FREE UPDATE

There are a couple of fast, automatic ways to get the free update, but according to Amazon, those could take a month (see THE WHOLE KINDLE DIRECT PUBLISHING UPDATE PROCESS, at the bottom of this post).

If you want the free update now, the fastest way for someone who already owns Die By Wire to get the free update  is to click on this link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/kindle-help.html/

That link will lead you to a screen that looks like this. Fill in the blanks as indicated in the image

AFTER YOU CLICK “SEND US AN EMAIL” you will get the following screen

COPY AND PASTE THE FOLLOWING TEXT into  the “Enter additional information” box as shown above.

I have learned there is an update to Kindle Book Die By Wire (http://www.amazon.com/Die-By-Wire-ebook/dp/B006HWGOOG/)

I own that book and would like for you to send me the free updated version.

The update option is not available at http://www.amazon.com/myk

Thank you!

Then click “Send E-mail.” Pretty soon you should get your response from Amazon Kindle support. Follow their instructions and you’ll have the updated version.

CLARIFYING AMAZON’S INSTRUCTIONS

After you send the email, you will get the following response, the first part of which can be confusing. I have added a short explanation in red to help you along.

FROM KINDLE SUPPORT EMAIL:

Hello,

I’ve sent the updated version of “Die By Wire” to your Kindle.

To complete your download, verify that your device is sufficiently charged and your wireless connection is enabled.

First, delete the current version of the book you have on your Kindle Home screen.To do this on Kindle hardware, first highlight the Die By Wire icon/cover. Then press the left arrow navigation key  That will offer you the choice to delete the version you have. Go ahead and delete it.

Then, press Menu from the Home Screen and select “Sync & Check for Items.”It will show up as an archived item.  Click on it and it will download to your Kindle.

If you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact us over the phone or chat for live assistance.

THE STORY ON KINDLE’S LONGER UPDATE PROCESS

This is the email I received today after requesting that current Die By Wire owners be notified of the availability of a free update.

Hello,

We received your request to provide updated content to customers who purchased your book. Thanks for providing specific details about the changes made. We’ll perform a review of the changes to determine the most appropriate way to describe the updates to your customers. This review will be complete within four weeks, and the possible results of our review listed below.

1. If the changes made to your content are considered critical, we’ll send an email to all customers who own the book to notify them of the update and improvements made. These customers will be able to choose to opt in to receive the update through the Manage Your Kindle page on Amazon.com. www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/manage

2. If the changes made to your content are considered minor, we won’t be able to notify all customers by email, but we will activate their ability to update the content through the Manage Your Kindle page on Amazon.com.

3. If the changes made to your content have caused unexpected critical issues with the book content, we’ll temporarily remove your book from sale. We’ll notify of you the issues found so you can fix them. Once the improvements are made, just let us know and we’ll then email customers as in case 1.

Once our review is complete, we’ll email you to share the results and action taken. You can let your readers know about this process, so they will know you already updated the content.

Thanks for using Amazon KDP.

We Are All Salman Rushdie In The War Against Radical Islam

Amid the lurid insanity of Islamists rioting and killing over insults, we forget that the leading powers of political Islam as practiced today have been trying to kill Salman Rushdie for 23 years now.

Not over a sophomoronic attempt at a video, but because he wrote The Satanic Verses — a remarkably well written and artistically imagined novel that dared to express a view at odds with the global dictators of religious intolerance.

Rushdie has a new book now, Joseph Anton, which is a memoir about being radical Islam’s #1 criminal apostate.

WE ARE ALL SALMAN RUSHDIE, LIKE IT OR NOT

My biggest take-away is what should be obvious to every person who is not a radical Islamist: We are all Salman Rushdie. Yes Islamists want to kill each of us for being Christians, Jews, atheists, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, followers of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence or Dykes on Bikes.

They especially want to kill gays, lesbians, “uppity” women, and apostate Muslims — those who are against child brides and female genital mutilation and who support religious tolerance, the education of women, or have some other unorthodox view of Islam.

This New York Times interview with Rushdie — “Life During Fatwa: Hiding in a World Newly Broken” — offers a taste of what underpins Joseph Anton. In it, he says:

“I found myself caught up in what you could call a world historical event. You could say it’s a great political and intellectual event of our time, even a moral event. Not the fatwa, but the battle against radical Islam, of which this was one skirmish.

“There have been arguments made even by liberal-minded people, which seem to me very dangerous, which are basically cultural relativist arguments: We’ve got to let them do this because it’s their culture. My view is no. Female circumcision — that’s a bad thing. Killing people because you don’t like their ideas — it’s a bad thing.

“We have to be able to have a sense of right and wrong which is not diluted by this kind of relativistic argument. And if we don’t we really have stopped living in a moral universe.”

STRIKE  NO RISK PERSONAL BLOW AGAINST RADICAL ISLAM

No risk at all:

First read the NYT review: Rushdie Relives Difficult Years Spent in Hiding. That will show you where the book’s headed.

Second, buy Joseph Anton. And The Satanic Verses .

Third, form a reading group … even an impromptu one with close friends. Discuss the books.

Fourth — and most importantly — try to imagine what would be like if you were in Rushdie’s shoes.

Because you really are.

FEAR THE FUTURE

As Rushdie says, what we see so far are skirmishes. The war remains. Iran’s active support of Syrian President Assad’s slaughter of his own people. A nuclear Iran. Nightmare upon nightmare, around the globe, 24/7/365.

The death and destruction we have seen in the last weeks, the rioting and burning in a score of countries all whipped up by Islamist demagogues are scenes of a primitive past that is a harbinger of the future.

And we will not sweet-talk them into any sense of peace, sanity or co-existence. Obama and the UN have already tried that.

Now, imagine what alternatives the future holds.

Bless The Dutch Libraries!

The Netherlands is a small country, but my books have always been popular there.

However, I didn’t expect to get a check for $240.12 as payment for copies of Daughter of God that had been lent by libraries!

Thank goodness that my agent, Natasha Kern, managed to keep foreign rights when the book was sold to McMillan/Forge. That’s particularly relevant since that publisher hasn’t send me a royalty check in years despite the fact that the puny advance was paid back a decade ago.

This is a bright spot. I’ll take it!

ICKY! ICKY! ICKY! ICKY! ICKY! ICKY! ICKY! ICKY! ICKY! ICKY! ICKY! ICKY!

Lots of people just turn away when confronted with the reality of the icky-ness of what an obstetric fistula is.

Totally gross.

GET OVER IT!

And help the 30,000 – 50,000 women who suffer from this EVERY YEAR.

Read my last post, (Watch PBS, Help Fight Today’s Primitive Horror Against Women) then … DO IT NOW!

Then head over to the Fistula Foundation.

If you think fistula ain’t pretty to think about, just imagine … focus REAL hard on … what it it must be like to live with.

Sometimes life’s not pretty, but you can do something to make this part better.

Watch PBS, Help Fight Today’s Primitive Horror Against Women

The horror of child brides extends far beyond stolen childhoods and includes horrendous injuries and death.

As I’ve written recently on the web and in my book Die By Wire, it’s a primitive practice abandoned in the developed world, but perpetuated and justified today by cultural Islamists who insist that Islam’s founder deflowered a young wife when she was just eight years old.

One of the most horrendous results of children having babies is the obstetric fistula. This is a horrible injury that results in wounds among the uterus, large intestine and bladder that do not heal naturally and result in blood and body waste mingling in and leaking from the vagina.

This description from the Fistula Foundation explains how the injuries are caused — especially in child brides whose hips are not sufficiently mature to accommodate a proper birth canal:

Help Women with Fistula through Film
Save the Date: Half the Sky airs on PBS October 1 and 2, 2012

“In 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, launched their best-selling book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. The Book asserts that the most pervasive human rights violation of the 21st century is the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.

“Their book has been turned into a documentary film that will air on PBS stations across the United States in October 2012, with international broadcasts to follow. In the film, Kristof and WuDunn travel to 10 countries to introduce celebrity advocates to women and girls who are living under some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable — and who are fighting bravely for change. In these stories of struggle, viewers can find a blueprint for taking action to empower women and girls worldwide.”

CLICK HERE – To read more about Half The Sky

Anti-Muslim Film Obscures Real Islamist Evils

The biggest problem with a crude video like the “Innocence of Muslims” is that it obscures a rational, fact-based discussion of the very real evils underpinning today’s Islamist movement.

Sam Bacile’s badly done, incendiary polemic provokes a psychological reaction that discourages critical thinking. It encourages some people to dismiss the valid evils of current-day Islamists. Or it encourages others to brand Muslims as evil rather than the political and cultural factors that pervert Islam to promote abhorrent practices. (Burn a Quran and Die: Is Islam Evil?)

NOTE: I use the words “Islamist” to refer to today’s violent, intolerant hijacking of Islam by those who manipulate religion for their own personal and political goals. “Islamist” is not a synonym for “Muslim.” or “Islam.” In fact, I consider them exact opposites.

One of several of my shelves on Islam. Overall, I have just under 1,000 books on religion, history of religion, philosophy of religion and religious scriptures. Click this image to enlarge.

In my fact-based, faith-driven thrillers (Die By Wire, Perfect Killer and Daughter of God) I always focus on the chasm that exists between faith and its frequent perversions by power-hungry religious authorities and the “deals with the Devil” that they usually cut with governments and cultures.

Those deals with the Devil provoke and perpetuate many evils.

In Daughter of God (which was soundly plagiarized by The Da Vinci Code) I focused on the oppression of women by the Catholic Church and its predecessors, looking at the factors that caused concepts of God to evolve from female to male.

In Perfect Killer , I used racial discrimination in my birth state of Mississippi, to look at how fundamentalist Protestant theology persecuted people of color and other faiths (primarily Jews and Catholics).

And in Die By Wire — my newest book — I took a look at how backward cultural practices and totalitarian,  male power hunger drove deaths and degradation of Muslim women.

One of those disgusting cultural practices I dealt with in Die By Wire is the perpetuation of the practice of child brides — essentially the sanctioned rape of girls as young as nine. (See: Stop The Global Horror Of Child Brides)

RELIGIOUS “PEDOPHILIA” ONCE WIDESPREAD

Enlightened people today find that disgusting. But it’s vital to realize that child brides were once a widespread and accepted practice among all culture, even in the United States and other developed countries up to 150 years ago. This was provably the case among Christians, Jews and those of other world cultures in the year 610 A.D. which is the traditional date for the founding of Islam.

The Islam=pedophile accusations are usually based on the anecdotal belief that the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was a pedophile because one of his wives, A’ishah was supposedly just eight years old when he first had intercourse with her.

At the very bottom of this article, you will find an entire fact-based chapter dealing  with this issue from my book, Die By Wire.

Of course, this interpretation has been disputed. It could have been an attempt by early transcribers of the Qu’ran to add enough verbiage so that it legitimized the cultural practice of the time. These sorts of justification-by-scripture have been provably documented in other major scriptures like the Christian and Jewish bibles.

But challenging anything at all in the Qu’ran today is apostasy that’s punishable by death. It’s the reason that any Qu’ranic scholar brave enough to write about the development of the Qu’ran can escape death only by writing under a pseudonym.

Of course, there was a time in the not all that distant future when challenging the words of the Christian bible could also get you killed. But Western culture has evolved to reject that form or lethal censorship just as it has come to abhor child brides and other practices.

CULTURE AND RELIGIOUS PRACTICE INEXTRICABLY LINKED

The point here is that culture, power games and societal pressure often have more influence upon the behavior of religious adherents than their faith or their scriptures. That distinction needs to be heard and understood before any attempts to deal with it can succeed.

That is why “Innocence” obscures the real evils and thwarts the sort of intelligent consideration that might eventually bring benefit to the world.

Finally, understanding the origins of abhorrent cultural practices like child brides should never mean those practices should be condoned. They should be vigorously opposed. Certainly, many will see condemnation of child brides as an attack on Islam. Others, like Bacile, will see them as a poor excuse to attack the faith rather than the cultural practice.

And both of those misguided attitudes will continue to succeed as long as rational, thinking people fail to understand the difference.

 

Die By Wire
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Amsterdam

Zahra had been Mira’s spotter and guide in Ossetia. Her keen mind and photographic memory could log targets, prioritize them, then later create the indictment that became their death sentence.

Maarika handed Zahra the remote control, then stood in the shadows just beyond the screen.

Without preamble, Zahra lifted the remote.

Click.

Aliyah sat next to a man with graying hair who looked like a father or grandfather.

“This is a wedding photo. Aliyah and her husband.”

Mira’s took a deep breath. Swallowed against her anger and sought the cold places in her mind. Emotions at this point were counterproductive to the mission. She exhaled.

Zahra’s eyes connected with Mira’s for a moment, then pulled back to encompass the entire room.

“Aliyah is eleven years old, the child of this woman.”

Click.

A woman who looked on the far side of forty.

“This photo of Aliyah’s mother was taken on her twenty-fifth birthday, a week before the husband discarded her.”

“According to shariah, Islamic law, as it’s been incorrectly interpreted for centuries — all a man needs to do to dump a wife is to say ‘I divorce you’ three times. It’s probably a pre-Islam cultural artifact. But that doesn’t really matter because it’s the reality on the ground today.”

Click.

The terrified countenance of a weeping woman, buried standing up with just her shoulders and head showing.

“After the divorce, her brothers stoned her to death for having an unchaperoned meeting with a man.

“But just when you think things cannot get more perverse, we must embrace Aliyah,” Zahra continued. “The man in the photo here, Aliyah’s husband, is her first cousin, her father’s brothers eldest son. He’s forty-one, but looks older because life is hard in the countryside outside of Quetta.

“Marriage among close relatives in the Islamic world is common,” she continued. “The Center for Arab Genomic Studies in Dubai found that Arabs have the highest rate of genetic defects in the world, and that 63 percent of those come from in-breeding. Despite that, the Dutch government has been warned that if it fails to honor the legality of such marriages, or those of very young girls, it will be in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights and would lose its case in court in Strasbourg.”

In unison, every head in the room rolled in disbelief.

Mira struggled with the angry fist clenched in her gut.

“Faulty but widely followed interpretations of shariah allow girls as young as nine to be married,” Zahra continued. “And for that marriage to be consummated sexually. Some Islamic countries have tried to outlaw this form of institutional incest and pedophilia, but the laws have had little effect on practice. I do not blame Islam for this. People of all faiths will practice their culture even when it runs counter to their holy scriptures.”

Eleven broad, astonished faces perfectly reflected the light from Aliyah’s innocent expression.

“Aliyah got pregnant on her wedding night. She died in childbirth eight and a half months later. Her hips had not developed sufficiently to allow an adequate birth canal. The baby died too.

“But she was lucky in her own way,” Zahra said. “If she had survived, she would likely have developed an obstetric fistula.”

Blank looks from half the women.

“Caused by a narrow birth canal. The baby’s head presses too hard against the pubic bone. That cuts off circulation to the vagina and to the bladder or the colon and opens up holes among them. Tissue dies, gangrene sets in. If the victim survives, body waste leaks through the permanent wounds. Incontinence, horrible odors. The girl is seen as unclean. Ostracism, and abandonment follow. You connect the dots.

“Most of you have never heard of obstetric fistula because it has long disappeared from the developed world. But it’s a growing problem in regions linked to forced marriages and child brides having babies.”

Click.

The banally evil man again.

“Like many other commodities, child bride supply suffers from geographical trade imbalances,” Zahra said. “In the same manner that this man moves microwave ovens and bulk sulfur from where they are in abundance to locations with ready customers, so too does he deliver young girls to satisfy a ready market demand.”

She nodded to the audience.

“It is a growing market worldwide,” Zahra continued. “In the Netherlands alone, the import of child brides has risen more than thirty percent in the past two years and tops 15,000. What’s more, the traffic goes both ways. Every summer when school ends here in the Netherlands, girls disappear from the system, sent back for a forced marriage in the home country. Significantly, it’s big business.”

Click.

Screen captures from a web site, the writing in Arabic. It resembled a school yearbook with rows and columns of photos of young girls.

“Most of the largest web sites like this one accept their substantial payments via our target’s hawala system. And use his transport system for delivery of the goods.”

“The main sites have more than 7 million subscribers lusting over 1.2 million  young girls.”

Scroll wheel. Page bottom.

“There,” Zahra said. “Next-to-last row. Second from the right.”

She waited. Some in the room leaned forward for a better view.

Aliyah.

“Many young girls are imported one by one as a business deal between poor relatives in the old country and those here who wish to buy a bride. But most are physically smuggled here by this man who receives thousands of dollars for the purchase and transport. All handled by this man’s hawala network.”

“Aliyah was smuggled in, jammed in with twelve other girls in a hidden compartment in an Antonov cargo jet owned by this man’s network. Only one of the bride buyers paid our target extra for solid identity papers. Without those, a girl spends her life as a sex slave.

“Aliyah had no papers. Her owner-husband locked her in a dark bedroom and raped her repeatedly. She died in childbirth in the bloody bathroom of a government-subsidized apartment in Osdorp. Southwest Amsterdam. Not far from us.”

“A Caesarian would have saved Aliyah’s life, but without papers, taking her to a doctor or to an emergency room would have exposed the husband to a world of legal problems. So she and her baby died.”

Zahra squinted, made her face solid and strong, then surrendered the remote to Maarika. Mira saw the tears in Zahra’s eyes as she reclaimed her seat.

“In addition to the child bride sex trade, evidence confirms this man’s empire commits tens of thousands of evil, and illegal acts every day, all around the globe,” Maarika said. “Governments have failed to stop him. But when we take him out, that will not only strike a blow for Aliyah and her sisters in slavery, it will stop his other evil too.”

A light scattering of politely enthusiastic applause rippled through the shadows. Maarika turned to Mira.

“Please ask your questions to the Sisters who have created this mission. You’ll have the opportunity to review the indictment materials afterwards.”

 Read more and get more free samples at Amazon, Die By Wire

 

Crude Video Obscures The Real Evils Of Islamist Oppression

The biggest problem with a crude video like the “Innocence of Muslims” is that it obscures a rational, fact-based discussion of the fundamental evils underpinning today’s Islamist movement.

Sam Bacile’s badly done, incendiary polemic provokes a psychological reaction that discourages critical thinking. It encourages some people to dismiss the valid evils of current-day Islamists. Or it encourages others to brand Muslims as evil rather than the political and cultural factors that pervert Islam to promote abhorrent practices. (Burn a Quran and Die: Is Islam Evil?)

NOTE: I use the words “Islamist” to refer to today’s violent, intolerant hijacking of Islam by those who manipulate religion for their own personal and political goals. “Islamist” is not a synonym for “Muslim.” or “Islam.” In fact, I consider them exact opposites.

One of several of my shelves on Islam. Overall, I have just under 1,000 books on religion, history of religion, philosophy of religion and religious scriptures. Click this image to enlarge.

In my fact-based, faith-driven thrillers (Die By Wire, Perfect Killer and Daughter of God) I always focus on the chasm that exists between faith and its frequent perversions by power-hungry religious authorities and the “deals with the Devil” that they usually cut with governments and cultures.

Those deals with the Devil provoke and perpetuate many evils.

In Daughter of God (which was soundly plagiarized by The Da Vinci Code) I focused on the oppression of women by the Catholic Church and its predecessors, looking at the factors that caused concepts of God to evolve from female to male.

In Perfect Killer , I used racial discrimination in my birth state of Mississippi, to look at how fundamentalist Protestant theology persecuted people of color and other faiths (primarily Jews and Catholics).

And in Die By Wire — my newest book — I took a look at how backward cultural practices and totalitarian,  male power hunger drove deaths and degradation of Muslim women.

One of those disgusting cultural practices I dealt with in Die By Wire is the perpetuation of the practice of child brides — essentially the sanctioned rape of girls as young as nine. (See: Stop The Global Horror Of Child Brides)

RELIGIOUS “PEDOPHILIA” ONCE WIDESPREAD

Enlightened people today find that disgusting. But it’s vital to realize that child brides were once a widespread and accepted practice among all culture, even in the United States and other developed countries up to 150 years ago. This was provably the case among Christians, Jews and those of other world cultures in the year 610 A.D. which is the traditional date for the founding of Islam.

The Islam=pedophile accusations are usually based on the anecdotal belief that the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was a pedophile because one of his wives, A’ishah was supposedly just eight years old when he first had intercourse with her.

At the very bottom of this article, you will find an entire fact-based chapter dealing  with this issue from my book, Die By Wire.

Of course, this interpretation has been disputed. It could have been an attempt by early transcribers of the Qu’ran to add enough verbiage so that it legitimized the cultural practice of the time. These sorts of justification-by-scripture have been provably documented in other major scriptures like the Christian and Jewish bibles.

But challenging anything at all in the Qu’ran today is apostasy that’s punishable by death. It’s the reason that any Qu’ranic scholar brave enough to write about the development of the Qu’ran can escape death only by writing under a pseudonym.

Of course, there was a time in the not all that distant future when challenging the words of the Christian bible could also get you killed. But Western culture has evolved to reject that form or lethal censorship just as it has come to abhor child brides and other practices.

CULTURE AND RELIGIOUS PRACTICE INEXTRICABLY LINKED

The point here is that culture, power games and societal pressure often have more influence upon the behavior of religious adherents than their faith or their scriptures. That distinction needs to be heard and understood before any attempts to deal with it can succeed.

That is why “Innocence” obscures the real evils and thwarts the sort of intelligent consideration that might eventually bring benefit to the world.

Finally, understanding the origins of abhorrent cultural practices like child brides should never mean those practices should be condoned. They should be vigorously opposed. Certainly, many will see condemnation of child brides as an attack on Islam. Others, like Bacile, will see them as a poor excuse to attack the faith rather than the cultural practice.

And both of those misguided attitudes will continue to succeed as long as rational, thinking people fail to understand the difference.

 

Die By Wire
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Amsterdam

Zahra had been Mira’s spotter and guide in Ossetia. Her keen mind and photographic memory could log targets, prioritize them, then later create the indictment that became their death sentence.

Maarika handed Zahra the remote control, then stood in the shadows just beyond the screen.

Without preamble, Zahra lifted the remote.

Click.

Aliyah sat next to a man with graying hair who looked like a father or grandfather.

“This is a wedding photo. Aliyah and her husband.”

Mira’s took a deep breath. Swallowed against her anger and sought the cold places in her mind. Emotions at this point were counterproductive to the mission. She exhaled.

Zahra’s eyes connected with Mira’s for a moment, then pulled back to encompass the entire room.

“Aliyah is eleven years old, the child of this woman.”

Click.

A woman who looked on the far side of forty.

“This photo of Aliyah’s mother was taken on her twenty-fifth birthday, a week before the husband discarded her.”

“According to shariah, Islamic law, as it’s been incorrectly interpreted for centuries — all a man needs to do to dump a wife is to say ‘I divorce you’ three times. It’s probably a pre-Islam cultural artifact. But that doesn’t really matter because it’s the reality on the ground today.”

Click.

The terrified countenance of a weeping woman, buried standing up with just her shoulders and head showing.

“After the divorce, her brothers stoned her to death for having an unchaperoned meeting with a man.

“But just when you think things cannot get more perverse, we must embrace Aliyah,” Zahra continued. “The man in the photo here, Aliyah’s husband, is her first cousin, her father’s brothers eldest son. He’s forty-one, but looks older because life is hard in the countryside outside of Quetta.

“Marriage among close relatives in the Islamic world is common,” she continued. “The Center for Arab Genomic Studies in Dubai found that Arabs have the highest rate of genetic defects in the world, and that 63 percent of those come from in-breeding. Despite that, the Dutch government has been warned that if it fails to honor the legality of such marriages, or those of very young girls, it will be in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights and would lose its case in court in Strasbourg.”

In unison, every head in the room rolled in disbelief.

Mira struggled with the angry fist clenched in her gut.

“Faulty but widely followed interpretations of shariah allow girls as young as nine to be married,” Zahra continued. “And for that marriage to be consummated sexually. Some Islamic countries have tried to outlaw this form of institutional incest and pedophilia, but the laws have had little effect on practice. I do not blame Islam for this. People of all faiths will practice their culture even when it runs counter to their holy scriptures.”

Eleven broad, astonished faces perfectly reflected the light from Aliyah’s innocent expression.

“Aliyah got pregnant on her wedding night. She died in childbirth eight and a half months later. Her hips had not developed sufficiently to allow an adequate birth canal. The baby died too.

“But she was lucky in her own way,” Zahra said. “If she had survived, she would likely have developed an obstetric fistula.”

Blank looks from half the women.

“Caused by a narrow birth canal. The baby’s head presses too hard against the pubic bone. That cuts off circulation to the vagina and to the bladder or the colon and opens up holes among them. Tissue dies, gangrene sets in. If the victim survives, body waste leaks through the permanent wounds. Incontinence, horrible odors. The girl is seen as unclean. Ostracism, and abandonment follow. You connect the dots.

“Most of you have never heard of obstetric fistula because it has long disappeared from the developed world. But it’s a growing problem in regions linked to forced marriages and child brides having babies.”

Click.

The banally evil man again.

“Like many other commodities, child bride supply suffers from geographical trade imbalances,” Zahra said. “In the same manner that this man moves microwave ovens and bulk sulfur from where they are in abundance to locations with ready customers, so too does he deliver young girls to satisfy a ready market demand.”

She nodded to the audience.

“It is a growing market worldwide,” Zahra continued. “In the Netherlands alone, the import of child brides has risen more than thirty percent in the past two years and tops 15,000. What’s more, the traffic goes both ways. Every summer when school ends here in the Netherlands, girls disappear from the system, sent back for a forced marriage in the home country. Significantly, it’s big business.”

Click.

Screen captures from a web site, the writing in Arabic. It resembled a school yearbook with rows and columns of photos of young girls.

“Most of the largest web sites like this one accept their substantial payments via our target’s hawala system. And use his transport system for delivery of the goods.”

“The main sites have more than 7 million subscribers lusting over 1.2 million  young girls.”

Scroll wheel. Page bottom.

“There,” Zahra said. “Next-to-last row. Second from the right.”

She waited. Some in the room leaned forward for a better view.

Aliyah.

“Many young girls are imported one by one as a business deal between poor relatives in the old country and those here who wish to buy a bride. But most are physically smuggled here by this man who receives thousands of dollars for the purchase and transport. All handled by this man’s hawala network.”

“Aliyah was smuggled in, jammed in with twelve other girls in a hidden compartment in an Antonov cargo jet owned by this man’s network. Only one of the bride buyers paid our target extra for solid identity papers. Without those, a girl spends her life as a sex slave.

“Aliyah had no papers. Her owner-husband locked her in a dark bedroom and raped her repeatedly. She died in childbirth in the bloody bathroom of a government-subsidized apartment in Osdorp. Southwest Amsterdam. Not far from us.”

“A Caesarian would have saved Aliyah’s life, but without papers, taking her to a doctor or to an emergency room would have exposed the husband to a world of legal problems. So she and her baby died.”

Zahra squinted, made her face solid and strong, then surrendered the remote to Maarika. Mira saw the tears in Zahra’s eyes as she reclaimed her seat.

“In addition to the child bride sex trade, evidence confirms this man’s empire commits tens of thousands of evil, and illegal acts every day, all around the globe,” Maarika said. “Governments have failed to stop him. But when we take him out, that will not only strike a blow for Aliyah and her sisters in slavery, it will stop his other evil too.”

A light scattering of politely enthusiastic applause rippled through the shadows. Maarika turned to Mira.

“Please ask your questions to the Sisters who have created this mission. You’ll have the opportunity to review the indictment materials afterwards.”

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