"Waiter, there's a zebibah in my coffee...!"

The zebibah is the dark nodular blemish smack dab in the middle of the foreheads of particularly devout Muslims, their degree of devoutness measured by how many times they bang their foreheads on the floor during their 5 times of daily prayer.  Being a small, dark, round nodule, it resembles perhaps a dead fly -- and apparently the word zebibah (or zabiba) literally means "raisin". It's not that much of a stretch to notice the resemblance of a dead fly on the table and a black raisin, is it? Which in turn has made me wonder if the Hebrew word for "fly" -- zebub -- is not related to the Arabic word for "raisin". Again, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to say that early Arabs, perhaps influenced by Hebrew and/or Aramaic, appropriated the word for "fly" in order, playfully or poetically, to refer to raisins.  The Hebrew word is most famously used in the name of the evil God of the Canaanites, Baalzebub -- later translated by Jerome in his Vulgate as dominus muscarum ("Lord of the Flies"); and subsequently becoming in the history of Western Judaeo-Christian/Graeco-Roman mythologoumena one of the many names of Satan.

What does this have to do with the Counter-Jihad? Well, only a Westerner severely compromised by political correctness (i.e., damned purt near everybody in the West) would deny that devoutness in Islam is directly related to the violent jihad against the West (along with its crucial corollary, the stealth jihad). So, a recent Jihad Watch article notes that at least one mainstream news source reported that the recent Muslim mujaheed, who killed 3 people at a Christmas festival in Strasbourg (and wounded many others, and of course, it is excruciatingly reasonable to suppose, dearly desired to kill many more), had a zebibah on his forehead.

As the savvy Jihad Watch reader who goes by the name "thebigW" noted in a comment on that article at Jihad Watch, the supposedly Moderate Muslim leader of Egypt, Al-Sisi, himself sports a dead fly on his forehead too (though considerably milder than the norm, as though perhaps his assistant applies pancake makeup to it):


I've written before (on my former blog, The Hesperado) about Al-Sisi as he reflects on the "problem of the problem of the problem" -- which we may explicate thusly: problem3 of the problem2 of the problem1, where problem1 is the problem of Islam; problem2 is the problem of the Western Mainstream's failure to deal adequately with the problem of Islam; and problem3 is the failure of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (CJM) to deal adequately with the first two problems.

Speaking of which, problem3 manifests itself in (among other things) twitches of schizophrenia -- such as these two stories on that bastion of the CJM, Jihad Watch, coming within days of each other:

1. A Jihad Watch headline, quoting Al-Sisi:  Egypt’s el-Sisi: “If you go to a country that welcomes you, you must respect its laws, traditions and culture” -- followed by Spencer's editorial remark:

A remarkably clear-sighted and honest statement. Be sure to read it all. If a European leader spoke this way, he would be excoriated as a racist, bigoted “Islamophobe.”

 (And augmenting this needless spasm of admiration for a Muslim leader, we have Spencer not too long ago penning this:

Sisi’s regime isn’t perfect. Muslims are still brutalizing Christians in Egypt, and the government has done little to protect this despised and defenseless minority. At the same time, Sisi is a bulwark against political Islam in the Middle East. With Turkey rapidly re-Islamizing and the Islamic State still in the picture, that is important. So after the Obama administration’s unwavering support of the Muslim Brotherhood, this is most welcome. [bold emphasis added by yours truly] )

 2. Then we have stories like this, for which one could find dozens of similar stories over the years since Al-Sisi (or El-Sissi) wrested power from the supposedly more extremist Morsi:

Egypt: Christian gets three years prison for insulting Islam.

Until the Counter-Jihad grows a healthy rational prejudice against all Muslims, I will see little reason for optimism for the West's long-term future as Islam continues to undergo an exponential global revival in this 21st century.