New Word Of The Day

I note that the Oxford English Dictionary 'adds' words to the English language that achieve common usage or cultural significance and rise above simple slang. 'Blog' was added a year or so ago IIRC, and 'truthiness', which is the act of discussing something one wishes were true or as if it was true, as opposed the simple 'truth'.

Well, here is my entry for the Zeitgeist Sweepstakes of 2006:

Beheadering (v): 1. The shutting down of a website by hackers motivated by their dedication to the Muslim faith, e.g., "That Danish website where we got those cool wooden toys was beheadered yesterday. We couldn't check our order status all day."

Michelle Malkin has a big writeup on all the DDoS and defacement attacks that have hit or tried to hit multiple sites since the Cartoon War began. Of course, she doesn't have my word to describe the act, so she's forced to use long, cumbersome workarounds like 'Islamist War On The Internet' and 'Virtual Jihad'. 'Beheadering' works better, IMO.

And BTW, what about this silly Cartoon thing anyway? This is such an AstroTurf (as opposed to grassroots) protest, one of the leaders of the MMA, and Islamist political group in Pakistan was on BBC (heard it on XM) and said that in principle they are against violence, but since the Danish cartoonists aren't in Pakistan (presumably to be torn apart by the mob), they have to lash out at anything Western they can find, so they burn down the KFC and attack a South Korean-owned bus terminal.

Right.

I'm sure that if I were Muslim I would find it offensive to have someone depict something my hard-core fundamentalist Imam tells me should never be depicted. But it seems idiotic on the face of it to decry a picture of Muhammaed with a bomb in his turban as convicting all Muslims as being violent extremists, and then go be a violent extremist to demonstrate how angry being falsely accused of being a violent extremist makes you. Does this make sense to anyone else? Logically, a peaceful demonstration would seem to be a better choice, but I guess the effigy vendors in Pakistan would suffer if there weren't protests in which to burn things, so it's good for some businesses, in a way. I saw that they burned the Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen in effigy...seeing as most people don't know what the Danish PM looks like I find that to be quite silly. I mean, other than a T-shirt that says 'Anders Fogh Rasmussen' there would be no way to know which light-haired white person was being burned in effigy. Makes me wonder if they just put some steel-rim glasses on an old Carter effigy and burned that, I dunno. The logistics of acting like fools in a group for TV cameras is just nothing I had considered before today.

So remember, pass along the term 'Beheadering' whenever your favorite website gets crashed by Muslim extremists, and remember that you heard it here first.

And do buy Danish if you get the chance. Havarti is probably the best cheese in the world, you can have a smooth creamy cheese experience and support the right to free expression in the same bite.