* “That guy’s crazy!”

It was something Archie Bunker might have said. “The best way to avoid sex perpetrators is to wear protection.” And then he would have glared at the Meathead, adjusted his glasses, glanced at Edith and Gloria and ruffled his newspaper. “My intention is not to offend women,” he would have said sententiously, “but to safeguard them from sex maniacs.” And Edith would have said, “Oh, Archie!”

But Abu Hassan Din Al-Hafiz is not Archie Bunker—a Meathead perhaps, but not an Archie Bunker and what Archie might have said; he said, “Women should wear protection.” Abu Hassan is not just anybody; he is a man of stature. He is royal religious advisor to Agong, King of Hulu Terengganu in northern Malaysia. Hulu who? Hulu Terengganu—also known as ‘Darul Iman’ Arabic for ‘Abode of Faith.’ If that sounds Islamic, it is. Muslims make up 60 percent of the population of Malaysia and are most numerous in the north where Imam Abu Hassan holds sway than they are in the south where lotus blossoms and Buddhists are still popular.

The Imam was addressing his followers in the Maal Hiraj Forum in Kampung Pelandan when he expressed his unalterable Islamic views on women, sex, perpetrators and protection. If only Archie could have heard that speech! Nothing angers Archie more than to hear some woman has been the victim of a sex perpetrator. But he departs from Abu Hassan on the matter of protection. Archie recommends mace or a 9-millimeter Glock 21. It all goes back to when he was 10-years old and saw Mae West pull a derringer from the top of her stocking. Scared the bejabbers out of the perpetrator! That was some movie! W.C. Fields didn’t take a drink for a week! Or was that Mary Pickford and Lon Chaney Sr? Archie’s memory isn’t that good.

And there was the time on the subway when the Meathead clobbered an obnoxious masher—man style—and couldn’t understand why he felt good about hitting the creep. Archie said, “You’re supposed to feel good!” But not every woman is as strong as Ma Kettle or as determined as Mammy Yokim or as resourceful as Mae West—besides it’s quite a chore dragging a derringer out of the waistband of control-top pantyhose. And how often does Michael Stibbitz ride the subway? Not as often as Peewee Herman. No, a can of mace or a 9-millimeter Glock is a girl’s best friend. And remember, little girl, what Ulysses S. Grant said at Shiloh, “Aim low and make every shot count.”

But Islam is a religion of peace and toleration and the last thing Allah and the Prophet would recommend would be for women to take justice into their own hands. So the Islamic version—Abu Hassan’s version—of protection differs substantially from Archie’s mace and 9-millimeter Glocks. (So does their version of who the perpetrators are, but that’s another discussion)

The Qur’an says: (33:59) “Prophet! Tell your wives and daughters and all Muslim women to draw cloaks and veils all over their bodies (screening themselves completely except for one or two eyes to see the way). That will be better.” No chastity belts, they hadn’t been invented yet, but it was protection of sorts. The Qur’an also says (4:15) “If any of your women are guilty of lewdness, take the evidence of four witnesses from amongst you against them; if they testify, confine them to houses until death (by starvation) claims them.”

This sounds harsh, but Abu Hassan, a child of the 20^th Century and a modern thinker, wants to save women from themselves. “We have even come across a number of unusual sex cases, where even senior citizens and children were not spared,” he said. And being a man of justice and toleration Abu Hassan would spare them. He would spare the young, the old, the ugly, the virtuous and those unable to control their urges. He would have them wear chastity belts to thwart sex maniacs. Yes, chastity belts! (Abu Hassan’s leap into modernism has carried him from the 7^th to the 14^th Century, no mean feat for a 21^st Century Imam!) Husbands would thank him he said, “if you know what I mean.” If one doesn’t, one should contact Hugh Hefner or Bill Maher.

Chastity belts were worn as late at the l960s he said. Abu Hassan is incorrect. The chastity belt is still popular among the trendy set—bondage lovers, sadomasochists, and college professors studying the Marquis de Sade. Type ‘chastity belt’ on a search engine. They are out there. One website advertises: The Kinky Gear You Need To Add Spice to Your Sex Life. Has Abu Hassan been Googling? But chastity belts—

What might appeal to George Costanza and Cosmo Kramer would give Archie Bunker a slight arythmia. It’s the perpetrators who should suffer not their potential victims. Yet, the Qur’an says: (33:51) “You may have whomever you desire; there is no blame.” The Qur’an, not the Bible; the Qur’an, not the Bhagavad-Gita; the Qur’an, not the Mahayana Sutras.

Two out of very three men charged with rape in Norway are immigrants. It would be Islamophobic to say they are all Muslims, but most of them are. “There is no blame.” The statistics are just as depressing for the rest of Europe. It is Jihad against women. The European governments are in a state of denial. The correlation between Muslim immigration and the increase in rapes across the Continent, is not only alarming, it is disheartening, mystifying and destructive. What would have been cause for a lynch mob in Tombstone or Dodge City has been met in Oslo and Paris with surrender. If anybody should be wearing chastity belts it should be Mohammad, Mahmoud and Habib. Jack the Ripper and Bluebeard would have been at home in the 21^st Century. The Jihadist view is that Europe—and eventually America—will become part of dar al-Islam and the property of the dhimmis, their women, will be theirs. Qur’an 8:39 “So, fight them till all opposition ends and the only religion is Islam.”

It will be a long war—the beaches today, the fields tomorrow. Pepper spray and a 9-millimeter Glock will come in hand, little girl. And for Abu Hassan—he should be fitted with one of the Marquis de Sade’s innovations, the ball gag, only $99 at ErosBoutique. Anybody care to start a collection?

Dear Bill Maher—On behalf of all vain half-wits, dolts and rubes…

* Come on, I only called him a vain half-wit.

“On behalf of all vain half-wits, dolts, rubes and yokels, we issue this challenge to that whining, spineless, devil-worshipping, over-sexed, over-aged, over-rated, overpaid excuse for an American, Bill Maher, to meet any of us on the field of honor at a place of his choosing to settle our differences man-to-man—Gilligan, the Captain, Yokels United Against Injustice, Dumkopfs and Schweinhundts Tired of Being Called Dolts, Potsy Weber, the Society for the Advancement or Rubes, and N.R. Ticulate.

WOW! That ought to settle Bill Maher’s hash! The nerve of him calling the President a dolt—a yokel—a rube! But a duel…on the field of honor…between men… Maher has none of the former and only loosely qualifies as the latter. Why he couldn’t draw a six-shooter from a well-oiled, genuine Texas-cowhide holster even if he used both hands. Maybe he could get a peashooter out of a shoulder holster on the Rosie O’Donnell Show (The View) and what kind of a duel he might arrange with Peewee Herman in a darkened porno theatre is his own business, but those rubes and yokels are tough guys. Many of them idolize Jethro Bodine. They don’t know the meaning of the word ‘fear.’ They drive Humvees and gas-guzzling SUVs and power pickups. Exhaust fumes don’t bother them; they’re not afraid of global warming like Maher and his fruitcake pals who drive fuel efficiency cars all week to save the world and then jet to France for the weekend, burning more fossil fuel than the entire population of Mud Slide, Alabama, does in a year.

Take a good look at Maher. It’s easy to see his brain wasn’t the result of Intelligent Design. No one would ever mistake him for a down-to-earth, workaday Neanderthal. Look at that smile—late Cro-Magnon at best. And the high forehead! Is he one of George Wallace’s pointy-headed intellectuals or is it true as some scientists say that Darth Vader’s ancestors visited planet Earth during the early Pleistocene Period? That could explain a lot of things.

Maher has a bachelor of arts in English from Cornell University. Maybe that’s where he learned to talk so much and say so little. Cornell is famous for that. “I think religion is a neurological disorder,” he said on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country. Maybe he was quoting Ted Turner or had just had lunch with Michael Moore. “When you look at beliefs in such things as, do you go to heaven, is there a devil, we have more in common with Turkey and Iran and Syria than we do with European nations and Canada and nations that, yes, I would consider more enlightened than us,” he said.

Obviously, anyone who would support a dolt, a rube, a yokel or a vain half-wit in the Oval Office is unenlightened. The fact that most of Maher’s Hollywood friends fit these descriptions, with an emphasis on the vain, seems to have escaped his notice. Nonetheless, by Maher’s reckoning, in addition to being a dolt, a rube, a yokel and a vain half-wit, the President also qualifies as unenlightened because he believes in Heaven. America, from Jethro Bodine to Jerry Falwell, is a Fool’s Paradise. Europe, on the other hand, is awash in enlightenment. Hans and Fritz scoff at Heaven; Jacques and Pierre can’t abide the thought of an afterlife; and the Belgies, God bless their cowardly souls, believe in cremation—at government expense, of course. This is not to say Hans and Jacques and Ingemar don’t believe in anything, they do, they believe in a 32-hour work week, universal health care, guaranteed jobs, workman’s comp for those who can’t or won’t work, social security from the cradle to the grave—everything Marx and Engles promised, unless one happens to be a senior citizen in a nursing home in the middle of a heat wave. What a sad, sad fate. The handwriting was on the wall when Jacques and Pierre replaced their one time favorite American Jerry Lewis with Michael Moore.

At Harvard University, Maher quoted Jesse Ventura, one of the great minds of the 20^th Century. “Religion is a crutch for weak-minded people,” said Maher. That is definitely not what an enlightened person would say. Enlightened persons don’t insult the unenlightened. And it wasn’t original. It’s what Marx said; what Chairman Mao said; what Lenin said; what Robespierre said. Remember Robespierre? He was a big man during the French Revolution. He planned to raze all the church steeples because they were ‘undemocratic.’

In spite of Maher’s endless séances with the Libertarian God and his vast knowledge of France, he has failed to grasp the essence of the French Revolution. Secularism was replacing religion as the opiate of the masses. While Robespierre was lopping off heads, Christianity was becoming more democratic and—horror of horrors—was beginning to embrace capitalism and that is why, to this day, Europe’s French-fried Fourth International despises Christianity, George W. Bush and Rooster Cogburn. Religion is not a neurological disorder; it is secularism and its cheap harlot, socialism, that stand in need of a psychological exorcism.

Undaunted, Maher insists that Europe is on the cutting edge of civilization. Apparently he missed the London and Madrid bombings. He has said American servicemen are cowardly because they fire missiles from 2,000 miles away instead of flying passenger planes loaded with innocent civilians into tall buildings.

No one wants to call Bill Maher a coward—or a dolt or a rube or a yokel or a vain half-wit—but there is little risk in insulting the President of the United States or casting aspersions on the manhood of America’s ‘fighting men.’ They will not kill him; they will not harm him in any way. If Maher is as brave and fearless as she would have one believe, why doesn’t he prove it? He could go Theo van Gogh one better. He could set up an easel on Real Time with Bill Maher, invite Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR, and draw a picture of Mohammad. It wouldn’t have to be a masterpiece—a long nose, a wart, an eye-patch, a toilet bowl or a bomb on Mohammad’s head or maybe just a beard with fleas in it. He could wear a flak jacket and a protection cup—no one would expect him to be Rooster Cogburn. And after it was over he could hide out with Salman Rushdie and those rubes and yokels and dolts and vain half-wits would die to protect him. Isn’t American a great country?

Please, Bill Maher—show everybody you have two hands.

JOHN KERRY, THE PARIAH SENATOR FROM THE PARIAH STATE

A pariah? Who’s a pariah? John Kerry or the United States of America? John Kerry or George W. Bush? John Kerry or Jimmy Carter? John Kerry or Aaron Burr? John Kerry or Michael Richards? John Kerry or O.J. Simpson?

Simpson is finished; Burr is dead. Seinfeld was a great show—great enough to drag Richards, body if not soul, into the 2050s. Bush is President, Kerry isn’t—that has to be irritating as all get-out to a Princeton grad with a C+ average and an A+ ego. Carter has become the quietist loudmouth in the history of America. He has made himself incomparable—no, wait, that’s incomprehensible. What’s left is John Kerry and the United States of America and Kerry has said the US is a ‘sort of’ pariah nation.

It’s always good to get in the first lick in a name-calling contest but it’s best to insult one person at a time, not 300 million. Kerry is a lot like Jimmy Carter. They were both in the Navy. One wears a halo, the other would like to. One thought he was Admiral Rickover; the other thought he was John Paul Jones. Jimmy didn’t stay in the Navy long enough to become a pariah, the Massachusetts Senator did. Kerry was almost as popular with his fellow Swift Boat commanders as Billy Budd was with Master-at-Arms John Claggart. Kerry’s association with Jane Fonda didn’t win many friends and admirers in the Red States and when he compared GI Joe and GI Jane to something less than Kotter's sweathogs he lost what little respect he had left with the military. So why would John Kerry accuse his own country of being a ‘sort of’ pariah nation? Not many votes in than kind of language. His chances of replacing Howard Dean are slim. When he slings mud he gets more on himself than on his opponents.

But there he was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, taking part in a panel discussion when—lo and behold—someone asked him about America’s failure to actively engage Iran in the period preceding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election to the Iranian presidency in 2005. Maybe he was packing mud balls and wasn’t paying attention. Mohammad Khatami, Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, was there and so was Iraq’s vice-president, but that didn’t bother Kerry. He called upon his vast experience in the field of economics—he had acquired and assimilated two great fortunes—and let fly his mud ball on the run.

“When we walk away from global warming, (from) Kyoto,” he said, “when we are irresponsibly slow in moving towards AIDS in Africa, when we don’t advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy. So we have a crisis of confidence in the Middle East__in the world, really. I’ve never seen our country as isolated, as much, as a sort of international pariah for a number of reasons as it is today.”

Is Kerry right? Is America isolated? A pariah? There could be some truth in that. It’s not because of Kyoto or AIDS in Africa though, it’s because there are more dictatorships in the world now than there were in the 1930s and dictatorships are notoriously hostile toward democracies. Socialism, the opiate of the masses, is running amok in South America; Islam, the opiate of the sexist, chauvinist, homophobic pig, holds sway in the Arab countries and is devouring Europe; Russia and China are not now and never have been democracies; and the Democratic Party, once the haunt of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, is now the preserve of Dennis Kucinich and Keith Ellison. Surrender and appeasement are in the air.

Thirty years ago Eric Hoffer said it was too late for America to be loved by the world—instead it should set an example for what is right and just. What would Eric Hoffer have thought of John Kerry? What would Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson have thought of John Kerry? What would George S. Patton and Blackjack Pershing have thought of John Kerry?

“We should be less engaged in this ‘neocon’ rhetoric of regime change and more involved in building relations and living up to our own values so that people make a different judgment about us,” said Kerry—obviously a C+ student on the loose. Look for more of this nonsense in his midterm.

And what did he mean by ‘neocon’ rhetoric and regime change? Had he consulted Noam Chomsky or was he talking off the cuff? There would be no ‘neocons’ or ‘neocon’ rhetoric if Liberals had not deserted liberalism for a kinder, more gentler, Communism, and there are times when bad guys have to be put in the way of extreme unction. Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison were Abolitionists; today they would be ‘neocons.’ One is always on the right side of history if he opposes slavery, whether in the antebellum South or in today’s Iran, Iraq and Saudi Barbaria. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party no longer apposes slavery—it has returned to its roots. The Vietnam War took the guts out of liberalism. The Democracy is once again the party of James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, willing to make concessions to Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun (or to Keith Ellison, CAIR, or any Mad Mullah who professes peace and toleration). The ‘neocons,’ whether they like it or not, are, by default, the new liberals—laissez-faire 1880s style, to be sure—because they stand for something besides Socialism.

One might feel sorry for Massachusetts for being burdened with John Kerry, but they did elect him. It is sad. From John Adams, John A. Andrew and John F. Kennedy to John Kerry, Teddy Kennedy and Marty Meehan, the Old Bay State has fallen a long way. Where have the Abolitionists gone? Where have the Patriots gone? The light has gone out on Beacon Hill. Paul Revere weeps. America might be losing it—Massachusetts has lost it.

Is the US a pariah nation? It could be, but even if it’s true, it’s not the end of the world nor is it necessarily bad. Italy was a pariah nation in the 1930s. It joined the Pact of Steel—pariahs love company. Kerry would have the US suck up to Ahmadinejad and Assad to avoid the same fate. Take a good look around—the world is an ugly place. The United Nations is a combination of the Capone Gang and the House of Frankenstein. Being a pariah isn’t that bad, it depends upon the circumstances. The Founding Fathers were pariahs. Jefferson, Adams, Washington…the Founders had few friends among the crowned heads of Europe and none among the beys and deys of Araby. The situation today is similar. America is divided, enemies abound; no one can be trusted. America the beautiful is America the pariah. And where does that leave John Kerry, a pariah in a pariah nation? Turncoat…renegade…apostate…none of them seems to fit. Pariah sounds good. It will have to do—John Kerry, the pariah Senator from the Pariah State. James Wilkinsen, move over.