Holympic Games (II)
I thought that the Egyptian Holympic team had scored amazing points (see Holympic Games I).
But the Saudis quickly challenged when in 2010 their Grand Mufti insisted that girls are ready for marriage by age 10 or 12. They climbed further in Holympic rankings when a Saudi cleric issued a fatwa (an Islamic ruling) calling on women to give breast milk to their male colleagues or men they came into regular contact with so as to avoid illicit mixing between the sexes.
But without their ascending global and regional power, no Holympic game without the Turkish presence would have been complete.
To challenge the eccentric Tibetan, Greek and Cypriot Orthodox, Saudi, Egyptian and Indonesian teams, Professor Mehmet Görmez, Turkey’s top Muslim cleric, declared that, “Conquest is not the occupation of lands... Conquest is the conquest of hearts!” That’s why, Professor Görmez explained, “In our history there has never been an occupation.” Instead, he said, “In our history, there has always been conquest.” It was so gracious that we Turks did not occupy but conquered (hearts)!
According to Professor Görmez, one of the two pillars of conquest is to “open up minds to Islam and hearts to the Quran.” Therefore, the top cleric reasoned, the Conquest of Constantinople was the conquest of hearts.
Naturally, I asked in “The conquest of the heart,” “With their hearts already conquered by Muslim Turks in 1453, I do not see why the Orthodox Greeks fought for independence 368 years later. Did the ‘conquering’ Turks ask the Byzantines if they consented to be ‘conquered by the heart?’ How many Byzantine hearts were opened up to Islam and the Quran?”
Most recently, books were distributed to hundreds of students in Ankara after the government’s local education authority had approved their content. The book on Charles Darwin states that the evolutionary biologist had two problems: “First, he was a Jew, and second, he hated his prominent forehead, big nose and misshapen teeth.” No challenge about Darwin’s appearance but, needless to say, he was not Jewish. A separate book on Albert Einstein describes the physicist as filthy and slovenly and accuses him of eating soap. The director of education for the district had a perfect defense: “It is not possible to check all the books distributed in the district.”
Speaking of Jews, I still recall how a university professor, a Jew, had explained to me the virtues of the “Shabbat elevator” in which we had bumped into each other in a Tel Aviv hotel many years ago. “Since this elevator is programmed to stop at each floor I need not press any button. Smart way to climb to the 21st floor without using technology, eh?” he winked at me.
Two years ago, New York’s ultra-orthodox Satmar Hasidim got Mayor Michael Bloomberg to cancel a bicycle path in their neighborhood. For some reason this group is known to recoil from bicycles – of all other less innocent vehicles. And earlier this year an explanation came in the form of a wall poster, “Teachers and parents, look at the plague of bicycles that is present in our environs.” The anonymous writer of the poster complains that bicycles are a game, a pleasure that “steals a large part of the holy Torah from children.”
Of course, in no way could I have guessed that while I was writing this article, Harley Davidson motorcycles would present Pope Benedict XVI with two commemorative “gas tanks” which the Holy See happily “blessed.”
Holympics are perfect games featuring blessed mountains and motorbike gas tanks, 10-year-old brides, husbands having sex with their dead wives, prosecutions based on Mickey and Minnie Mouse pictures, religiously not permissible cheese and soap operas, porn crimes for miniskirts, the church as panacea for financial crises, Darwin as a big-nosed Jew, women breastfeeding their colleagues, the conquest of hearts instead of cities, elevators programmed to cheat God and bicycles as the enemies of holy books…
Dear holy men of wisdom, love and kindness: Thank you for the fun you so kindly inflict upon us, the spectators!