1. Promoting virtue or some busy-body's meddling into other people's affairs?

Arabian, are you actually suggesting that Mr. Busybody's action is praiseworthy? I'm no big fan of public displays of affection, but the young couple were fully clothed, and they weren't doing anything outrageous. True, they'd have done better to find a more secluded spot. But the behavior of Busybody and his friends, the Peeping Tom with the camera and his snickering, voyeur pals, is far more offensive than the couple's.

Those couple were in 21^st Century London, where their embrace was nothing extraordinary or unacceptable. They're not in the Arabian desert or the Middle Ages. Busybody would do well to adapt rather than try to pull everyone back a few centuries into a backward, benighted society.

Disclaimer: Inasmuch as I neither speak nor read Arabic, I can't tell whether Busybody is related to the young lovers, so there might possibly be some mitigating factors we Kufars are oblivious to.


2. Sol, I'm with you and Satan on this one.

Private parts uncovered? Half-naked? Huh? What's that wack-job al-Munajid talking about anyway. What, were the girls topless? They wore bikinis while playing beach volleyball, and that's how women dress at the beach, covering up their private parts. (Granted that bikinis aren't for everyone. They look a lot nicer on nubile ingenues than obese women or old crones. Before you get on me for sexism, the same thing goes for Speedos and guys.) Is it even possible to play volleyball in a chador or a burqa?

Maybe someone should clue al-Wackjob in about a basic fact: The ancient olympic games -- but not the modern ones -- were played in the nude. Starkers. The full Monty. (Check out the Greek roots of the word gymnastics or gymnasium.) If anyone actually got aroused watching the beach volleyball or women's shot-put events, he's almost as sick and mixed-up as al-Wackjob.

Btw, didn't al-Wackjob exhort people to get up off the couch and actually play sports. Well, you don't make it to the Olympics by being a couch potato. Does he really think the Olympians need to get up and work out?


3. The conquerers of Andalusia brought monotheism to what we know as Spain?

Uh, I don't claim to be an authority on Christianity, but AFAIK, Christianity was a monotheistic religion the last time I looked. Also, there were Jews there too, representing the first monotheistic religion. Yeah, some Christians believe in the Holy Trinity; they don't see the Father, Son and Holy Ghost as separate deities but as three aspects of the Divine. So what if Catholics can get hung up on saints or if their veneration of Mary, Mother of God, can seem to some like their worshiping her as a deity.

Give me a break. What a hutspah for al-Wackjob to talk about bringing monotheism to the Iberian Peninsula. (This was before the Spanish-speaking peoples united into the country of Spain, which happened during the Reconquista when the Moors, read: Arab overlords, were booted the Hell out of there. Al-Wackjob waxes nostalgic for Andalusia because that region was the last holdout of Arab power in Spain, the last one to again come under the control of the indigenous Christians. I don't know when the Roman Empire converted the pagans in Spain to monotheistic Christianity, but there's a window of a few centuries between Constantine and the Arab conquest.