This keeps happening at the Mecca pilgrimage.  Haven’t these idiots ever heard of ‘crowd management’?  There must be experts in that very thing who could help them out.

By ‘these idiots’ I mean the civic leaders of Mecca.  Like any civic leaders, the safety of the public is their responsibility and they seem to have awfully short memories.  Or is there a heavenly reward for being trampled at Mecca?  I’m asking; I really don’t know enough about Islam.

This keeps happening at the Mecca pilgrimage.  Haven’t these idiots ever heard of ‘crowd management’?  There must be experts in that very thing who could help them out.

By ‘these idiots’ I mean the civic leaders of Mecca.  Like any civic leaders, the safety of the public is their responsibility and they seem to have awfully short memories.  Or is there a heavenly reward for being trampled at Mecca?  I’m asking; I really don’t know enough about Islam.

DOF, give them a bit more slack. They HAVE crowd managment experts. In fact, they are often hiring people and engineers from the west to do this stuff, which kinda shows that this is important enough to them (seeing that Non-Muslims ain’t even ALLOWED to enter Mecca by law!).

But the fact is that according to islamic custom, the main events of the pilgrimage have to happen on ONE specific day a year (as far as I understand it, its really only one day) and they have over TWO MILLION people to move through the holy sites on that day.

May not make much sense to an atheist, but thats the way it is. In such logictic constraints, accidents do happen. What are (speaking very coldy) a few hundred dead when you got millions moving through? Heck, they probably have thousands of deaths from natural causes…

Weird additional fun fact: Saudia Arabia had to institute quotas for pilgrims. 1000 per year per million citizens oper country. Get that? That means that if a nation is 100% muslim, and they all want to do the pilgrimage, they will have to wait 1000 (!) years until all were able to.

Weird additional fun fact: One of the mainstays (and in ‘crowd control’ terms most dangerous) parts of the Hajj is the stoning of the devil, represented by three stone pillars. In former days. These days, the pillars have been replaced by walls, and a two-level platform has been constructed around it (soon to be expanded to four levels) to allow as much stoning at a time as possible.

Or is there a heavenly reward for being trampled at Mecca?

Someone dying on the Hajj will gain instant entrance into heaven according to Islamic tradition.

Have you, or they had any luck blaming Bush for this one?

Have you, or they had any luck blaming Bush for this one?

You don’t blame a monkey when he shoots someone, you just shrug and say ‘whaddya expect?  He’s a monkey!”

Have you, or they had any luck blaming Bush for this one?

It wouldn’t make sense to blame Bush for something he obviously has no potential to affect. That would bring into question all the actual mistakes he’s made.

Though I will say when in doubt, blame the Bush administration. Chances are always good you’ll end up being right.

When I read the headline, and first sentence, I figured that it was a bomb in a suitcase. Nope, just some guys partially clean clothes.

-Bob