Yakov Smirnoff does The Middle East

First I must apologize for my lack of quality posts lately; I’ve been nursing a botfly larva living in my back which I picked up during a recent trip to Costa Rica. Mine hasn’t emerged yet, but I’ve been researching what to do with this sucka. I’ve included a video below for everyone’s enjoyment. Is it just me or do we seem to have a strange obsession with tropical parasitic diseases here?

The real reason I’m checking in of course was because of the outrageous stuff contained in my damp copy of the Sunday Times that it seems was poorly covered in the “news-analysis”/blog community today. I’ll focus on the special in the Week in Review called The Guidebook for Taking a Life. This is of course highly relevant because in this day and age of “Islamo-terrorism”, many serious Islamic scholars contend that murder in the name of Islam is inconsistent with a number of ideals.

This article takes the other side and explores how those involved with suicide bombing, insurgent fighting, and the larger issue of Jihad actually justify their actions with respect to the Koran and the Islamic community. The piece is really interesting for a variety of reasons, it examines the following rules, which I’ll list below and allow you to review at your leisure:

1. You can kill bystanders without feeling a lot of guilt.
2. You can kill children, too, without needing to feel distress.
3. Sometimes, you can single out civilians for killing; bankers are an example.
4. You cannot kill in the country where you reside unless you were born there.
5. You can lie or hide your religion if you do this for jihad.
6. You may need to ask your parents for their consent.

By this point you must be wondering what Yakov Smirnoff has to do with this post, other than adorning it with his amazing jew-fro-ed mug up top. It turns out that a part of Rule No. 6 above is mentioning to your affiliation and intention to blow oneself up in the name of jihad to your wife after you’ve been married.

In Zarqa, Jordan, the 24-year-old Abu Ibrahim says he is waiting for another chance to be a jihadi after Syrian officials caught him in the fall heading to Iraq. He is taking the parental rule one step further, he said. His family is arranging for him to marry, and he feels obligated to disclose his jihad plans to any potential bride.

“I will inform my future wife of course about my plans, and I hope that, God willing, she might join me,” he said.

It turns out this isn’t so different from those hypothetical situations in America where you’re a member of a highly secretive government force like the CIA or other fictional force and you’ve got to wonder whether to disclose your affiliation to your spouse. Which makes it easy to reframe the whole mess in the form of a Yakov Smirnoff routine:

In America, Wife goes on the Crimson Jihad.
In Middle East, Couple gets married and Husband asks wife to join Crimson Jihad.

The Guidebook for Taking a Life [NYT]
Yakov Smirnoff [wikipedia]