Sick, sick, sick:

CAIRO — Conservative Egyptian lawmakers have called for a ban on imports of a Chinese-made kit meant to help women fake their virginity and one scholar has even called for the “exile” of anyone who imports or uses it.

The Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, distributed by the Chinese company Gigimo, costs about $30. It is intended to help newly married women fool their husbands into believing they are virgins — culturally important in a conservative Middle East where sex before marriage is considered by many to be illicit. The product leaks a blood-like substance when inserted and broken.

Sheik Sayed Askar, a member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood who is on the parliamentary committee on religious affairs, said the kit will make it easier for Egyptian women to give in to temptation. He demanded the government take responsibility for fighting the product to uphold Egyptian and Arab values.

“It will be a mark of shame on the ruling party if it allowed this product to enter the market,” he said in a notice posted on the Brotherhood’s parliament Web site on Sept. 15.

“If this thing enters Egypt, the country is going to go to waste. God protect us,” commented a reader on the Web site of Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm Al-Sabie.

Will Saletan says:

If you’re a woman in a conservative Muslim country, you had better bleed on your wedding night. If you don’t, your husband or his family will know you aren’t a virgin. For that, you could be beaten or killed.

If you’re a man, on the other hand, all you have to do on your wedding night is ejaculate. Nobody expects you to bleed or produce any other proof of virginity.

Some day, this barbaric and hypocritical tradition will end. Until then, the best we can do is fool it. You want blood on your wedding night? We’ll give you blood. Fake blood…

Pause for a moment to consider what these men are asking God to protect them from: a cheap, mass-produced insert that releases fake blood. It’s the technical equivalent of a Halloween gag. But to them, this is no gag. It’s an offense against God.

In this way, the artificial hymen serves as a useful test of religious idiocy. If a $30 item that leaks fake blood violates your faith so profoundly that you must ban it, then what you have isn’t really a faith. It’s a fetish.

I’m gonna just go ahead and say it: Islam as practiced by the majority of its adherents around the world is a scourge, a blight, a curse, and a cancer. It is the most perverted, twisted religion ever to poison the human mind. And don’t give me any crap about all religions being essentially the same in their repressive tendencies; if there really is a wise and loving God of the type Christianity espouses, the Islamic obsession with sexuality and the savage punishments inflicted on those who threaten Muslim males’ near-universal insecurity would be an affront to Him, a blasphemy in the truest sense.

And it will never change; no amount of scorn and ridicule from civilized people will ever sway or shame these pud-jigging freaks out of their twelfth-century dysfunction. Islam is simply incompatible with modern civilization and liberty. I hate to have to say it, but it’s the naked truth. Those weak-kneed multiculti milksops in the West who insist that we “respect” this anti-human abomination are fools, cowards, or both.

Somebody a while back, can’t remember who, sort of semi-satirically asked in a column or blog post, “can there be a decent Islam?” The answer is evident to anyone with open eyes: as things now stand, no. No, there really can’t. Not without a reformation of the type that moderated Christian views several centuries ago. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it if I were you; “Submission” doesn’t allow for much in the way of reflection and rebellion, after all.

(Via Insty)

Update! And if you think it’s unrelated, better think again:

Steve (that would be Green, here) explains what he means by the term. I still don’t really think that he defines the meaning of “victory,” so much as he explains a strategy for remaining in Afghanistan and gathering intel and killing bad guys.

He describes Afghanistan as being “not so much a country as it is a spot on the map where other countries aren’t,” and I think that is a reasonable take. But then, what is victory in such a place? He points out that, in theory, we could more or less pave the entire place and turn it into a shopping mall, but that such an outcome would not solve the principal question of our time, which is “the Middle East’s failure to adapt to modernity.”

Here he begins to veer off the reality, because the real problem is Islam’s failure to adapt to modernity. And that is not only a Middle Eastern problem, it is a global problem. Saying that they “export their problems as terrorism” overlooks the possibility that a lot of Islam’s problems aren’t exported or imported, but are ingrained.

Read the rest. He’s right as rain.