Wahabbism and the World Cup
Other members of the Islamophobia Watch collective will no doubt disagree, but I'm with the Wahabbis on this one. Saudi scholar Muhammad Al-Munajid complains that "the West has managed to captivate the hearts of most of the human race with an inflated piece of leather flying between three wooden beams".
Mind you, on past experience, OutRage and Harry's Place will no doubt be attributing this quote to Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Speaking of whom, we didn't post anything in response to the most recent attack on Sheikh Qaradawi by the Middle East Media Research Institute. This is in large part because MEMRI has been so completely discredited that nobody pays much attention to it any more. Having been exposed for splicing sections of tape together in order to misrepresent Qaradawi, MEMRI now diligently provides ellipses in its transcripts, with the result that you can see how the whole cut-and-paste operation was effected, which only discredits it further. The few websites to take up MEMRI's latest contribution to its anti-Qaradawi campaign included Ynetnews, Pink News and Harry's Place who have something of a common agenda. (I thought the Pink News headline "Muslim cleric backs gay burnings" was particularly inventive.)
An Arabic-speaking contact who has seen the relevant episode of the Al-Jazeera programme Sharia and Life writes that MEMRI "quoted many parts of that episode and all the translation was right, but it quoted only small parts of what Sheikh Qaradawi said in about 48 minutes. For the part of 'burning homosexuals', Qaradawi was speaking about different Muslim schools of thought which disagreed for 14 centuries how to deal with this 'phenomenon', and when he came to his opinion he said 'We are not hostile towards these people. On the contrary, we pity them' and also he said in other parts which were not mentioned in the clip 'the one who is homosexual, we have to cure him ... we have to help them'."
In other words, not much different from the position on homosexuality that you'd hear in Britain from leading representatives of the Catholic Church or Orthodox Judaism.
Martin Sullivan