News Headlines 9_16_06
Transcript
Pope calls kettle black Muslims demand peaceful bloodshed. Bush wants Geneva Convention clarified just a little. In the UK terror suspects says Bontoc was just a joke. News headlines around the world I'm comfort eating here are tonight's top stories.
The Vatican has issued an apology to Muslims all over the world after the Pope's quoted a 15th century emperor, claiming that Islam was a violent religion that brought nothing new to the world. The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church and an ex Nazi youth leader, not the same Pope who sided with Hitler in the Second World War. This pope is head of a religion that massacred millions of people over the years from Europe to South America, plundering the continents of Africa and South America whilst destroying and demonizing their culture.
In the apology, the Vatican didn't say we had no wish to itself another stupid, evil medieval voodoo cult, in order to assure Muslims of our sincerity. We would like to state categorically right now that we are just as violent and evil as they are. And even Buddhists have been known to kill people and bless Kamikaze planes. So there's no need for them to be upset or feel they're the only oppressive Mad Dog evil fanatical fucked up religious nutters on the planet, far from it.
Why even in America in the 21st century, superstitious mumbo jumbo rubbish is trotted out on a daily basis by supposedly intelligent enlightened people. Before the apology was released to Muslims all over the world, staged protests, burned effigies and threatened the pope with death. Just to make sure nobody thought the Pope's comments about them being violent were true. In America, President Bush has called for the Geneva Convention to be clarified.
So American interrogation techniques can be used without the fear of prosecution. A White House spokesman didn't say we don't want to break the law when we're torturing and abusing humans that we have jailed all over the world with no representation. So it would be nice if the law could be changed or clarified just a little bit so that we can beat the shit I mean, interrogate suspects successfully.
The issue of prisoner treatment arose as bush tries to pass a law through Congress allowing harsher treatment for Guantanamo Bay prisoners. He didn't say, abducting people like firing them off in secret with no legally representations, keeping the evidence and charges against them secret denying them human rights, medical treatment for speeding them. subjecting them to torture and degrading inhuman practices, as well as force feeding hunger strikers just isn't enough in our fight for freedom and justice for the world.
We need these tools. More on that story later. In the UK, Omar Khayyam, an alleged terrorist has been given evidence at his trial in the high court he says comments he made to friends and contacts about blowing things up and killing people. Were just a joke.
My friends and I often joke about killing people and blowing things up. It's just a laugh. Of course, as a Muslim, I am upset by the merciless oppression of my people in the occupation of Islamic countries. And I do like to see American and British troops getting blown up all over the world.
Yes, that does make me happy. But I know killer just a comedian. He went on not to say that ton of bomb making great fertilizer found in my walk up. That was in fact from a stand up comedy routine.
Do you see a highlight joking about killing so much. I was planning a comedy club act with some mates. We're going to appear on stage with rucksacks full of homemade explosives just for a laugh a call blimey that would crack them up down the stand. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for our next act.
A lovely bunch of fellas just back from a tour of terrorist training camps of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they're on explosive brand of post 911 comedy. These boys will really blow you away. Give it up for al Qaeda and the suicide bombers. Yeah, sports news now, football set to become even more interesting in your life.
Business money still worth fucking up the planet and killing 50 species a day for and finally the weather. The planets fucked. It's getting worse. And it's your fault.
Have a nice weekend.
Themes in this episode
Analysis essay
This episode is built around the week after Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture, in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor saying Muhammad had brought “evil and inhuman” things, especially violence. The remarks triggered protests across the Muslim world, some of them angry enough to include threats and effigy burning, which allowed Western media to present a neat irony: outrage at being called violent expressed through violent imagery. In the United States, the Bush administration was pushing Congress to authorize military commissions and redefine interrogation rules after Supreme Court limits on Guantanamo procedures. In Britain, the Omar Khyam fertiliser-bomb trial was underway, tied to the 2004 “Operation Crevice” plot.
Deek’s parody attacks all sides at once. The Pope is mocked not as a moral authority but as the head of an institution with its own long history of conquest, massacre, cultural destruction, and authoritarian superstition. The Muslim protestors are mocked for confirming the stereotype they oppose. The joke is not “Islam bad, Christianity good,” but “religion as a whole is tribal madness with better costumes.” Bush’s Geneva Convention “clarification” becomes a bureaucratic euphemism for legalizing torture: the law is not a limit on cruelty but an obstacle to be rewritten.
The recurring FKN themes are visible in the collision of holy war, state violence, and media hypocrisy. Religion is treated as mass delusion; Western liberal democracy as a mask for kidnapping, secret prisons, force-feeding, and torture; and anti-terror trials as grim farce. Deek also keeps returning to the Iraq/Afghanistan grievance beneath domestic terrorism: rage, occupation, blowback, and the absurdity of governments pretending violence appears from nowhere. The fake newscaster bit works because every official actor sounds morally insane once their polite language is stripped away.