This Monday (3/6), the Wall Street Journal had a front page article about Moslems rioting in France over the staging of a play in a small village in the French Alps called Saint-Genis-Pouilly.  The play was written in 1741 by Voltaire (1694-1778), and hasn't been staged for centuries.  The title of the play is Mahomet, which is an older way to spell Mohammed.

The article provided very little information about the play's content.  The author of the WSJ article clearly did not see the performance himself.  An internet search turns up a French edition of the play but none in English.  It's far out of print, so to actually read the play, you'd have to go a large public or university library.

It just so happens, however, that I have the English translation of the complete works of Voltaire - all 42 volumes - in my personal library.  So I immediately sat down and read the entire play.  It is a drop dead, stone cold, mind blow.  It is fantastic.  And it couldn't be more perfectly written for our day than if Voltaire was a clairvoyant.

Here's the play's synopsis. 

Ever since George W. Bush won the presidency by preventing Al Gore's hanging-chad attempt to steal it, liberal Democrats have become progressively infected with BDS - Bush Derangement Syndrome. 

Here's how I think that the contagion of BDS is now infecting a number of conservative Republicans.

If you're a guy, perhaps you have endured this unpleasant and bewildering experience.  You're in a relationship and you and the lady have had some disagreements but nothing major.  From your perspective things are pretty ok.  Then one day you and she disagree on some minor trivial issue - and suddenly, inexplicably, it escalates as she unloads on you. 

It seems like the love of your life has had a personality transplant, you're facing a virago disgorging a torrent of anger, and all you can think is, "Where did this come from?"

If you're a guy, you're nodding your head in understanding.  If you're a gal, you're muttering, "Men are so clueless.  We give them all these hints for so long that things are bugging us, they never get the message, then when we finally can't take it any more and snap, they're mystified."

I think you get the analogy.

Let's see, what shall I do this Sunday night - watch the Academy Awards or rearrange my sock drawer?  That's a no-brainer:  it's the sock drawer hands down.  I'll pass on ridiculously-costumed America-hating egomaniacs spewing praise of homosexuality, tolerance for terrorists, and ridicule of everything normal Americans hold dear.

Hollywood thinks it is so avant-garde, courageously blazing new cultural trails, when the reality is that it is so behind the cultural curve.  It will spend most of Oscar night praising itself for making a movie about homosexual sheepherders and pretend it's about happy cowboys.

Cowboys herd cattle, not sheep.  "Gay" means happily carefree, as in the 1934 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie, The Gay Divorcee.  That homosexuals have hijacked the term in an act of linguistic thievery does not mean we should let them get away with it.

Finally, finally, finally, at last.  Christians are fighting back against rioting rampaging Moslem violence and oppression.

In Egypt back in the 7^th century AD, most all Egyptians were Christians.  Then Arabs swarmed out of the eastern deserts like human locusts to conquer Egypt and impose Islam.  The native Egyptians were not Arab, and a few of them held on to Christianity in the face of enormous intolerance for centuries.  These are the Copts.

Copts often have to hold their church services in secret, given all the government restrictions on building a church (there are no such restrictions on building a mosque).  So when Moslems found out that an "unlicensed" building was being used as a Coptic Church in Odayssat, a village near Luxor on the Nile, a mob of them rioted, set fires, and tried to burn the building down.

It is obviously important that OBL (Osama bin Laden) not be simply hunted down and shot to death. He should be captured and interrogated until all the information he has about his terrorist network has been extracted from him – then he should be summarily executed. No trials, no being "brought to justice."

What, then, would the most efficient and effective form of interrogation be?

It's beginning to sink in to a lot of folks - from the State Department to the French Foreign Ministry to Egyptian intelligence - that Iran's Ahmadinejad is far more dangerous and wacko than the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Perhaps most interesting is that France is bellying up to the anti-Iran bar.  There has been a major fallout, for example, between France and Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored terrorist outfit.  Chirac is so worried now about a major Hezbollah terrorist attack in Paris that he threatened Iran he would retaliate with nuclear missiles.

As we discussed last week in The Cartoon Religion, Moslems have made a colossal blunder in exposing a fatal weakness of their religion to the world: that it melts under the heat of ridicule. The ongoing crisis has now exposed an even graver weakness: that it crumbles under the scrutiny of doubt.

Islam is a mechanistic religion (an awful pun could be made here about it being Mecca-nistic, but let’s not go there). It is a shame religion. It is a religion of appearance rather than substance. Everything is about outward appearance, humiliation and shame, robotically and unthinkingly repeating the same exact word-for-word prayers five times a day at precisely the same times.

The Koran is not a book to be read, it is a chant to be robotically recited in order to put one into an unthinking trance.

As such it is an impersonal religion, an un-individual religion in which the Moslem believer has no personal relationship with God – as the Christian believer does.

This is the great gulf between Christianity and Islam.