I just got back (well, not just, as it's taken time for me to write and edit this) from seeing Shortbus, for the second time. I realized I hadn't reviewed it, and I will after I write this post. But for some reason, the movie leaves me highly emotional, so I want to get some thoughts written down before I dilute them with things like a movie review. They're diluted enough as it is, just from driving back home to the suburbs. Suburbs seem to have that sort of numbing effect on people, I've noticed.

I'll start off with a nice, bland disclaimer. Nothing in the whining-to-come should be interpreted as me feeling like I "identify" with some aspect of the movie. This is no tortured Emo kid's plea to be noticed and "understood". So if you think you'll find yourself smirking over any of this, you might want to just skip it. If you venture forth and end up smirking anyway, do me a favor and just move along. Don't send me e-mail tut-tuting my self-indulgent navel-gazing. Just don't.

I'll make it easier... I'll put in a cut-line to keep anyone from accidentally reading.

(more...)

Women acting as human shields aid escape of Palestinian militants

Okay, here's a little shift in perception for you. After establishing myself as mondo-Liberal (note the capital "L"), here's an opinion you'll probably consider to be inconsistent: the Israelis in this case should have levelled that mosque long before the women had arrived to act as shields.

I am no longer at all interested in or involved with any form of organized religion. I haven't since, hmmmm, around 1992 or so when I walked out in the middle of a Sunday-evening service when the preacher was using the pulpit to push a political, rather than spiritual, agenda. But I will say this: if you want to claim that your faith is basically peaceful notwithstanding a perceived need to fight for your own freedom, then you don't get to use your houses of worship as fortresses. If and when you do, you have defiled it and it is no longer sacred. I don't care if you are Christians holed up in a church, Jews in a synagogue or Muslims in a mosque. These 70+ gunmen were hiding in a mosque, counting on the reluctance of the IDF to seriously attack it out of concern over public perception. And to make it all the worse, they used, and I mean used, women as human shields to escape. And odds are pretty good that most of the stories we read in the media will focus more on the deaths of the two women, than on the fact that there were over 70 armed people using a house of worship as a bunker.

I'm not real fan of Israel these days. There was a time when I felt that they were just doing what they had to in order to survive as a nation and as a people. I think they've been over-stepping those bounds for a long time, now. But I have to side with them in this case, because the only thing about this situation that is more cowardly and base than hiding behind the walls of a mosque (what were the rest of the local Muslim populace supposed to use for worship, while they were doing this?), the only thing lower and more deserving of scorn, was putting out an appeal to women to come and risk being shot so that the "brave" fighting "men" of Hamas could skulk away.

That building should have been (and still could be) razed to the ground. And if I read about some weird separatist Christian sect using a church to hide weapons and/or armed persons in, I'll say the same. Ditto for temples. It's bad-enough when religion is used to justify violence in the first place, but when it's also used to protect cowardice, that's beyond the pale.