Harmless fandom, or something more sinister?

The innocence of muslims, a student film made earlier this year, has sparked outrage in the muslim world. Widespread protests have occured and several people have been murdered. With damage to property, assaults, murders and outrage; there are pockets of Islam that are acting anything, except innocent! (hahaha)



The film itself has been around since June but was only picked up by the press in September, around about the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It is for this reason that many people think that this is not a co-incidence and is probably part of some covert media war. The fact that the film looks like an absolute piece of shit filmed on a shakey cam with cardboard sets and arabs being played by people with boot polish on their face.




Towel? Check. Cardboard Desert Backdrop? Check... Lights... Camera... ACTION!

It is important that we don't single out Islam as being the only touchy group when it comes to their way of life or their beliefs being criticised. When 'The Last Temptation of Christ' was released, it recieved widespread criticism and attracted outrage from the Vatican for suggesting that Jesus was taken down from the cross by Satan and lived a normal life, having a wife and children.



...and portraying him as a ginger.

So it isn't just muslims who who get upset about their religion getting messed around with. This doesn't excuse Islam, it doesn't get a free pass to carry on smashing up US embassies. It's simply not cricket.

So it's all religions fault not Islam or Christianity? Well, not really: we could find examples of extremism well away from religion.

Let's have a look at some of the comments that Selena Gomez got while she was with Justin Bieber...

"Stay away from Justin pedophile. I'm gonna kill ya in the night underneath your smelly bed" If you liked that one you'll love... "Dear Selena Gomez. I hate you more than life. Go jump off a cliff. K?" This isn't all that far from "Behead those who insult Islam."



Alright, chill out.


Bieber is a case in point about how fans can issue fatwas just as quickly as Muslim Clerics, but just as fundamentaslist are the Twilight fans...

www.ranker.com has three examples of Twilight fans assaulting non fans for making disparaiging comments about the book and film franchise, one where a flaregun was fired at a group of people and another where a schoolgirl tried to slit the throat of a classmate.







So it is starting to look like fanatacism isn't just for the religious, in fact there is a whole new breed of fanaticism being bred right under our noses, some might say that we are nurturing. Why is this not in the newspapers? Why are we not doing anything about it? Why is there no shady prison camp in Cuba or some other remote part of the world to deal with these fuckers? Well this is where I can start to construct a whole conspiracy theory about the children we (or more specifically, the media) are raising.

At the same time as covertly declaring a war on Islam, the media is also covertly raising an army of militants to fight them. Westernised people, no longer bring up their children, they leave it to shows like Barney and Adventure Time and Spongebob Squarepants. When they realize at the age of twelve that the world isn't full of bubbles and rainbows and bright colours and talking animals, they seek shelter. Either in a fantasy world, like Harry Potter or the Twilight series, where they can get lost, indoctrined and radicalized.



In the mean time the media continues to construct Islam as the enemy. The next logical step is Fox news announcing that Muslims have kidnapped Justin Bieber and Robert Pattinson. Naturally, the Twihards and Beliebers will unite and mobilize. This will set in motion the final battle.

My point is simple, are we going to allow the media to portray Islam as a threat, when there is an even greater threat lurking in every street across the UK. It could be our children, our nieces or our nephews. We can only walk around with our eyes shut for so long before we realize, we are allowing 20thCenturyFox to use our children as the soldiers of tomorrow against Muslims.

It's obvious isn't it?

So what can we do to stop our kids being dragged into the final conflict and stopping them from becoming foot soldiers in Rupert Murdoch's hitleresque scheme to rid the world of Islam? Don't let them buy the Sun, obviously.

Equally, we can't blame everything on the Sun or Newscorp. We are to blame for allowing Murdoch to get to a point where he could dictate how we should be thinking, what summer blockbusters we are all going to see this year, who our enemies should be. In all honesty, What has Islam ever done to us? (apart from blow up a few planes, trains and busses of course.)

Asteroid?

If you are a massive geek, you will be aware that in recent days, Jupiter took a direct hit from a giant asteroid which was heading roughly in the direction of the Earth.






While it is great news that Jupiter got hit and not Earth, Jupiter isn’t going to be here every time to save us, it has other places to be it’s got moons to look after and an orbit to fulfil.



With several asteroids sharing an orbit with the Earth, inevitably, we will eventually get one, hopefully it will land on America like it always does in the films, they will be able to sort that shit out won’t they? They have the self belief and the gumption and the never say die attitude that would get us through.

Well, no. Not really. The size and speed of the asteroids on the orbit path of Earth would probably destroy 70-85% of all life on the continent it hits in the first few days. The Tunguska Event involved a small comet disintegrating some 5000 ft above ground level in Siberia. Even so, its effect on ground level was 1000 times more powerful than the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I would like to see Bruce Willis have a crack at sorting that.




Too old for this shit etc...


If you are lucky enough not to be in the epicentre of the blast, it would be a good idea to get up a hill, a mountain, the highest ground you can find really (although bear in mind that oxygen starts to get thinner the higher you go.) The chances are that any asteroid would hit the sea, as it covers 75% of the Earth, this will cause the sea levels to rise by between 3 metres and 300 metres, so all you smug people who live in Brighton or San Francisco because you’re cool. HAHA.





If you are hill people or particularly good at surfing, then you have survived phase one of the tidal wave, well done. Next up, the firestorms! Most of these Asteroids contain a core of dense radioactive material, and as well as that, if they are to dent the Earth deeply enough they will release magma beneath the surface of the earth by between 12 and 120 miles depending on the angle that it hits at. Expect global firestorms. The water that you were running away from now becomes your only real means of survival. The trick is to get on high ground, but not too high. Fortunately the firestorms will only last for a week or so, so umbrellas at the ready.



So, providing we survive the impact, tsunamis and firestorms, we’re safe right? Well not really. For the following 12-15 months as a result of the nitrogen and sulphur dioxide in the air, there will be a constant flow of acid rain. Killing most plantlife, destroying and disfiguring statues and buildings made from limestone and leaving our drinking water supply decimated. Good job there are hundreds of millions of litres of bottled drinking water stored in supermarkets across the globe.

Any plants that survive the acid rain will not be able to photosynthesise because of the giant dustclouds obscuring sunlight from the Earth. But never fear, with millions of supermarkets worldwide, there will be a large amount of food to hunt down in the following months. So surviving the famine and droughtas well as the acid rain firestorm tsunami and actual impact of the Asteroid hitting, will probably leave us able to get back to normal? Well, there is the small matter of nuclear radiation.



You think that's bad? just wait until the asteroid hits.

Asteroids tend to be made from bits of stars and tend to be incredibly radioactive, due to the fact that the atoms which make up these are heavier due to having extra neutrons, as well as that, the centre of the earth is also incredibly radioactive, due to the fact that the earth is essentially made up of several asteroids that have crashed into each other, all of which were incredibly radioactive. This means most of the surviving population will be subject to radiation sickness, birth defects or sterility and cancer. I don't mean to paint a bleak picture but it really doesn't look good. This doesn't necassarily have to drastically effect your way of life, providing either you are a survivalist, or we colonise other planets in the not too distant future.

So don't despair, I have given you a head start, and if you clicked on this link expecting a gushy geeky reminisce about the 1970s computer game 'asteroid', then appy poly gys, as Anthony Burgess might say, just so you are not completely dissapointed, here is a screenshot.



because life used to be so simple when asteroids could be destroyed by a triangle with three dots coming out of it.

Other things that happened on September 11th

Today is a day synonymous with the worst attrocity on anyone in history ever (apart from maybe the holocaust) (and the Armenian Genocide) (and maybe the slavery thing) (and probably lots of other stuff upon reflection.) but the fact is that September 11th will always be known for the attacks on the world trade centre by a group of Afghan Iraqi Saudi and Egyptian terrorists, of course a plane went into the pentagon as well, but because there wasn't any shakey cam footage of that happening, it kind of gets forgotten.



Mohamed Mohammed Atta, who was neither Afghan or Iraqi.

All this kind of overshadowed all of the other things that have happened on other September 11th's. My first thought from this is that it is a good job that other historical events don't get jealous, or there would be a lot of events that fell on previous or subsequent september 11th's's. But then I had a second thought, and that was this: Just because an event can't speak or doesn't have a physical embodiment, it doesn't necassarily mean that it doesn't have feelings, it is for this reason that I am going to give some other things that happened on september 11th the airtime that they deserve.

What is interesting is that there have been a few other air crashes on september 11th, one in 1968 off the coast of Nice, in the south of France, and another in 1974 crashing near North Carolina in the US.

So having 3 planes crash on September 11th 2001, is nothing special really, planes have a historical knack of crashing on that date, so why should the world trade centre attacks be considered special?

Not only that but it wasn't even the first hijacking to occur on the 11th of September, the culmination of the Dawson Field hijacking by the PLO occured on september 11th, when 88 hostages were released. of course, the hijacking occured on september 6th but it wouldn't have made sense to mention that in a blog titled 'Other Things That Happened on Sept 11th' so pretend I never said it.




Another terrorist attack occured in New York when a group of Croatian nationals planted a bomb in Grand Central station in 1976, killing a rather unimpressive one people which I know isn't gramatically correct but I can't bring myself to say 'person' because it would make their efforts even less impressive, and they obviously made an effort. they popped a bomb in the station and everything.

So far I've only gone on about disasters, hijackings and terrorism, which is kind of what september 11th is all about, unfortunately.


In 1978, then president Jimmy Carter pushed through a bill making September 11th national Grandparents day, which is much nicer than having to remember a terrorist attack, if I had to choose between remembering my grandparents and the world trade centre attacks, I'd much rather remember my Grandparents... well the ones on my dads side anyway, the ones on my mums side were fucking horrible, I'd rather remember any number of things before them.

Her voice had to be disguised on TV for political reasons.

See? I tried to make that one a nice one and even then a nice little reminisce about my grandparents descended into an obscure reference for IRA terrorism that anyone growing up in the 80s in Britain would recognise.

So trying to reclaim September 11th as a day when we remember nice things has been a total failure, which has left me rather disheartened, which is rediculous because at the start I don't think I was even trying to make september 11th more fluffy.