The image is already grotesque in itself. But the meaning is worse. Because swearing on the Koran is not a folkloric act, it is not an “inclusive” gesture good for Instagram. It is an assumption of total responsibility. The Koran is not just a sacred book: for Islam, it is what the consecrated host is for the Catholic – a word that becomes a norm, a law that becomes life. With it, the hadith, the sunna, the sharia enter the scene: a nebulous yet stringent body, incompatible – radically, structurally – with the Christian, liberal and civil West, founded on Greek philosophy, Roman law, customary law and distinction of powers.
Translated, without pretense: Zohran Mamdani also symbolically swears on the stoning of adulteresses, on the death penalty for homosexuals – carried out, with macabre imagination, from the roofs of buildings – and, above all, on the deliberate confusion between religion and politics. That confusion that Europe began to overcome precisely with the advent of Christianity.
And a large part of the intellectuals – odiotores sui, as always – applauds. Not out of conviction, but out of spite. It’s a jab at Donald Trump, they say. End of analysis. Typically “sinistrorza”: hatred as the only compass, even when it leads straight to the rocks.
The other photograph comes from Tehran. There the kids, and this time even the poor traders crushed by the economic policy of a free state of Katonga, take to the streets to demand the restitution of the freedoms taken away from Persia – yes, Persia: that’s what it’s been called for three thousand years, and that’s what we’ll call it again – since 1979, the year of the clerical usurpation. The ayatollahs, those stinking Shiite pretties, respond as always: lead, prisons, and a phone call to Vladimir Putin, a natural ally of every armed theocracy.
The dead, for now, are about ten. But we are only at the beginning. Also because the Western press seems not to have noticed the matter. As usual: we cry only where it is convenient.
So yes: how disgusting.