BROOKE GLADSTONE: And now for a few of your letters: In response to our story about Kachingle, an online service that seeks to encourage online readers to voluntarily contribute to newspapers and other websites they like, Daniel from D.C. writes that the segment was, quote, “too close to a product placement. There have been several attempts at this idea, including Amazon’s honor system, but the real issues should be that direct voluntary payments for content is not sustainable.”
BOB GARFIELD: Scott from Rhode Island disagrees. He writes, “I first heard of Kachingle via this interview. Absolutely brilliant idea. It made me want to slap my forehead and say, of course. The first sensible way I've heard of to monetize the online news industry.” In response to our story, War of the Worlds, about free speech, xenophobia and a clash of cultures when it comes to Muslim immigrants in Western society, Rahim Kurwa from California wrote to point out a mistake. What I said in the piece was that Palestinian schoolchildren are taught that Jews are apes and pigs, and I was wrong about that. While we've read media reports about isolated instances in which that insult has appeared in Saudi textbooks, we could find no evidence of that in Palestinian ones, which I'd have discovered if I'd only bothered to check. My apologies.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the phrase “apes and pigs” persists in the popular culture of the Middle East. A simple Google search finds it hundreds of times, invoked by radical Muslim clerics as an insult to Jews, documented by groups who monitor those clerics very closely. So we asked Professor Gregory Starrett, an expert on Islamic education and a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, to explain the probable origin of the phrase.
GREGORY STARRETT: The phrase “apes and swine” is mentioned once in the Koran. It’s in Chapter 5, Verse 60. It talks about the cost of disobeying God. And what it says is, “Those who have incurred the curse of God and his wrath, those of whom he transformed into apes and swine.” And that can be Christians, it can be Jews, it can be Muslims. There are a couple of other passages in the Koran that talk about apes only. In those two passages, it’s reported to the Muslims that God said to the rebellious children of Israel, at some point in the past, you've broken the Sabbath and you keep disobeying me, and be as apes, or be apes, despised and rejected. There are many different ways of interpreting this, one of which is literally that God transformed some people, some of them the children of Israel, into apes and/or apes and swine, but the metaphorical interpretation of this would, of course, be that God is speaking to his disobedient children and he is telling them that if you’re not going to obey my commandments you might as well be irrational, you might as well lack the kind of reasoning capability that human beings should have. There’s a lot of disagreements in the circles of people who interpret these passages. This is a conversation that’s been going on, in fact, for hundreds of years in Islamic theology and in Koranic interpretation, and it apparently is still going on today.
BOB GARFIELD: Keep your letters and comments, and corrections, coming to Onthemedia@wnyc.org.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And post comments on our site at Onthemedia.org. Don't forget to tell us where you live and how to pronounce your name.
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