CONCERN FOR OUR LIBERTIES AT HOME???
I sure am & read with interest what's going on in other parts of the world...
Fighting for privacy in an era of terror
http://www.timesstar.com/Stories/0,1413,125~1511~1355802,00.html
WHILE American troops have been winning the war in Iraq, privacy rights continue to come under
assault back here at home. Fortunately, we have those fedayeen of free-speech advocacy,
America's librarians, fighting back.
Arousing their dudgeon are provisions of the controversial USA Patriot Act, a 340-page
anti-terrorist law passed by Congress in October 2001 in the heat of post-Sept. 11 fears and loathings.
Sensing a threat to individuals' constitutional rights, about 90 local governments have passed
resolutions condemning provisions of the law that compel libraries and bookstores to assist
federal investigators in monitoring the reading habits of suspect American citizens. Some
libraries have acted on their own to post warning signs for patrons and even destroy paperwork
that might provide a trail of the book browsing or Web browsing of library users.
The town of Arcata went even further in March by outlawing voluntary compliance with the Patriot Act
by town officials, subject to a fine of $57. City Councilmember David Meserve, who drafted the ordinance,
called the move "a nonviolent, pre-emptive attack."
Obviously, council members are itching for a court fight. I wish them luck, but even in the unlikely
event of a confrontation with the feds in Arcata, I don't expect their protest or the rest to get very far,
at least not in the current courts. Federal law trumps local laws under our Constitution and, so far,
the higher courts have handed Attorney General John Ashcroft's office considerable latitude in detaining,
deporting, eavesdropping and other civil liberties intrusions.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia underscored that point in a March 18 speech at John Carroll University in suburban Cleveland. "The Constitution just sets minimums," he said, according to the Associated Press. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires."
Indeed. Anyone who thinks we may have too many rights already cannot be expected to fight very hard to hold onto them, even when the erosion may extend beyond wartime needs.
Ashcroft's office says the public alarm over the Patriot Act is misplaced. After all, they say, investigators must have probable cause to conduct an investigation into the books you purchase or borrow from a library, or the Web sites you visit at a library.
And that may be true, although it's hard to tell how true it is as a matter of law. Passed in the heat of post-9/11 passions in October 2001, the USA Patriot Act was approved without being fully understood, even by those who voted for it, let alone those who must enforce it.
"I don't know that 5 percent of the people who voted for that bill ever read it," David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union, quipped at a recent panel on the act held by the American Civil Liberties Union.
"You're always an optimist," quipped former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., a 1998 House impeachment manager and more recently, a consultant to the ACLU.
The gathering of well-known conservatives like Barr and Keene at an event hosted by the liberal-leaning ACLU shows how worries about Patriot Act abuse cross party lines.
Yet, Democrats did not fight its passage much. Even Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., the Senate's lone vote against the bill, was moved to fume from the Senate floor that then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle had told their party's caucus to "fold." With Democrats putting up such weak resistance then, one wonders how long Republicans can resist now before they put their megaphones down.
Fortunately, before the Patriot Act left Congress, "sun-
set" provisions were added to phase its powers out in 2005.
This was smart. If any rule holds true in Washington, it's the durability of a law, once passed, to resist ever being repealed, even when it has become obsolete. (Can you say "mohair subsidy"?)
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has proposed removing the sunset provision, instantly making the hastily passed Patriot Act permanent. And waiting in the wings is a proposed "Patriot II" the Justice Department has been working on that would further enhance the powers granted under the first Patriot Act.
What's the rush? At times like these, our national leaders need to ponder Benjamin Franklin's wise observation back in 1759: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
YES, it's a common belief that security in a time of war or national crisis requires a suspension, at least for a while, of civil liberties. But the opposite is not necessarily true. Giving up civil liberties without enough thought behind the action doesn't necessarily make us any safer.
But it does give us new reasons to worry, not only about terrorists, but also about our government.
Clarence Page writes for the Chicago Tribune
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
ALSO
Shelving civil liberties?
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~26~1348201,00.html
Librarians, bookstore owners see new threat from Patriot Act
By Heather Grimshaw, Special to The Denver Post
The book community is casting a wary eye on the so-called U.S. Patriot Act, particularly now that there is a move afoot by Republicans in Congress to make parts of it permanent. Bookstore owners and librarians are trying to walk a fine line between being good citizens and protecting the rights of their customers. It's a growing debate that promises to heat up in the months to come.
Monday, April 28, 2003
Franklin Graham's Christian Empire
In Jesus's Name
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
http://www.counterpunch.org/chuckman04262003.html
My subject is Franklin Graham, one of President Bush's very-public religious confidants.
Franklin's father, Billy, served President Nixon in a similar capacity. Billy's efforts were
crowned with a kind of earthly immortality: he's on those White House tapes in the National
Archives sharing anti-Semitic remarks with Nixon and never flinching or clearing his throat
over the idea of using atomic bombs in Vietnam.
Franklin has pretty well replaced his ailing father in leading the huge Billy Graham organization.
You may wonder about religious ministries being handed down like fifteenth-century dukedoms,
but the practice is fairly common in America, and several of the nation's big ministries - the type
of outfits that might be characterized as Las Vegas Showstoppers for Jesus - have been handed
down in this fashion. This happens in American politics, too. After all, a hand-me-down evangelist
serves a hand-me-down President who ran against (and lost the popular vote to) a hand-me-down
politician from Tennessee.
It's not that Americans accept aristocracy, but in a nation of insanely-frenzied consumers, an
established brand name always still has some juice worth squeezing.
The youthful Franklin seems to have been a bit of a trial for his mom and dad, reportedly exhibiting
more interest in sowing oats than saving souls. He had an obsession with guns one could interpret
as slightly at odds with the message of the Prince of Peace. He may just have been reflecting the
quaint traditions of America's Appalachian subculture - his home is the mountains of North Carolina
- when he once cut down a tree by blasting away at it with an automatic weapon (I did not make this up).
Apparently, he used to be fond of giving automatic pistols as gifts.
Well, at some point, I guess the lad realized he was burning out and going nowhere, and
automatic weapons are expensive when you like to give the very best, so Franklin had something
like the President's road-to-Damascus experience. I doubt he recalled Henry the Fourth's saying
Paris was worth a mass (Henry of Navarre became King of France by adopting Catholicism).
It would have weighed heavily that dad's ready-made, super-slick organization offered a
handsome, steady income, all expenses paid, especially if Franklin had come to recognize
that his next-best career option might be itinerant bingo caller.
Redemption is one of America's great ongoing themes. It's the spiritual extension of all the
plastic surgery, injections, drugs, youth-inducing potions, diets, and tales of lives changed by
lotteries or get-rich-quick schemes, but it does have to be the right kind of redemption. None
of your consolations of philosophy, peace of the Buddha, wisdom of the Great Spirit, or
following the Prophet will do. Lives lived decently and peacefully from beginning to end
are not admired because they don't make juicy entertainment.
The approved American redemption-story template includes years of inflicting hell on others, often
by abusing whisky or drugs, finally being overcome by frightful (drug-induced or otherwise) visions
of going to hell yourself, and then spending the rest of your life annoying every person who crosses
your path with the opinion that he or she does not know the truth. About 85% of the nation's
country-and Western singers and about 95% of its evangelists spend their declining years sharing
such tales in magazines, tapes, interviews, and sermons. It's a major industry.
This is all by way of background to Franklin's words about his new mission. I suppose it's possible
Franklin thinks Nazareth is a trailer park somewhere in North Carolina or Texas which would
account for his thinking that the people in the Middle East haven't heard about Jesus, but, in any
event, Franklin is now going to tell them about Jesus, at least his gun-totting Appalachian version.
Well, almost, but Franklin has probably been advised that proselytizing for conversion from Judaism
is against the law in modern Israel. With a Bush-appointed Proconsul, that kind of law shouldn't
get in the way of bringing the good word to Iraqis, although he'll be a bit late to save the souls
of those smashed and broken by American bombs.
Franklin's organization, Samaritan's Purse, claims that it intends only to bring relief services
and not evangelism to Iraq, but how valid can this claim be? The Billy Graham organization for
decades has worked only to convert people to its narrow notion of Christianity. It has been
criticized even by other Christians for the nature of its work - cranking out converts like
sausages in a vast Midwestern meat-packing plant. Perhaps when Franklin created his
offshoot relief organization, Samaritan's Purse, it was in part a response to this kind of criticism.
Franklin's own words on Islam over the last year hardly resemble a second Albert Schweitzer
yearning to help fellow beings. His tone is militaristic and has the same nasty, parochial feel
as the President's "us and them." One looks in vain for any generosity of spirit associated with the words of Jesus.
"We're not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God.
He's not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It's a different God, and I
believe it is a very evil and wicked religion."
Franklin here makes no distinction between the nineteen individuals responsible for 9/11
and the world's hundreds of millions of Muslims, yet he seems never to have made the same
kind of connections between criminals of other religious backgrounds and the religions themselves
. Did the IRA's outrages elicit such comments about Catholicism?
"the persecution or elimination of non-Muslims has been a cornerstone of Islam conquests and rule for centuries."
I suppose it would be foolish to expect any sensible perspective on history from a man of Franklin's
limited learning. The work of people calling themselves Christians in countless wars, religious persecutions,
and exterminations just since the Renaissance dwarfs the volume of spilled blood in all the rest
of human history. The Holocaust, the African slave trade, and the extermination of many aboriginal
peoples were the work of people calling themselves Christians.
"I believe it is my responsibility to speak out against the terrible deeds that are committed
as a result of Islamic teaching."
Why should it be his responsibility to speak against these particular deeds and no others?
Franklin certainly is not known as an advocate for the world's abused and downtrodden. One
does not find him shouldering this responsibility over other terrible deeds, a number of them the
dirty work of his own government. No, his time goes to "crusades," the word used for decades
by the Billy Graham organization to describe its assembly-line salvation gatherings.
The denomination with which the Graham family generally has been associated, the
Southern Baptists, has an ugly history in the United States. Extreme segregationists
founded this denomination to keep blacks out of their churches and a century later, t
hrough the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, Southern Baptists were better
known for opposing Dr. King's work than supporting it. The denomination's official view o
n a woman's role in marriage is among the most parochial in the United States. Incidentally,
the Southern Baptists' Mission Board also aims at providing aid in Iraq. Jerry Vines, former
president of the Southern Baptists, described the Prophet Muhammad not very long ago as a
"demon-possessed pedophile."
"There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement,
the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism."
These are the words of a man teaching suspicion and fear rather than understanding and
brotherhood. One has to ask what such comments have to do with evangelism or Christianity, but
American fundamentalists often ignore Jesus' clear teaching on the matter and put their visions
of government and secular affairs at the heart of sermons and pronouncements. This suggests that
politics, and a particularly nasty kind of politics, is at least as much a driving force here as religion.
Franklin recently gave a Good Friday service at the Pentagon. Reading that, I had the absurd image
of an early Christian preacher praying for Rome's Tenth Legion. True, there were probably no Christian
legionaries at the time, but the fact remains that the purpose of the Pentagon is exactly the same
as that of the legions, professional killing for the state and its policies, a purpose totally incompatible
with any words of Jesus.
But of course, the more apt comparison would be a few centuries later when the legions did t
heir bloody work for a so-called Christian empire.
John Chuckman can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org
In Jesus's Name
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
http://www.counterpunch.org/chuckman04262003.html
My subject is Franklin Graham, one of President Bush's very-public religious confidants.
Franklin's father, Billy, served President Nixon in a similar capacity. Billy's efforts were
crowned with a kind of earthly immortality: he's on those White House tapes in the National
Archives sharing anti-Semitic remarks with Nixon and never flinching or clearing his throat
over the idea of using atomic bombs in Vietnam.
Franklin has pretty well replaced his ailing father in leading the huge Billy Graham organization.
You may wonder about religious ministries being handed down like fifteenth-century dukedoms,
but the practice is fairly common in America, and several of the nation's big ministries - the type
of outfits that might be characterized as Las Vegas Showstoppers for Jesus - have been handed
down in this fashion. This happens in American politics, too. After all, a hand-me-down evangelist
serves a hand-me-down President who ran against (and lost the popular vote to) a hand-me-down
politician from Tennessee.
It's not that Americans accept aristocracy, but in a nation of insanely-frenzied consumers, an
established brand name always still has some juice worth squeezing.
The youthful Franklin seems to have been a bit of a trial for his mom and dad, reportedly exhibiting
more interest in sowing oats than saving souls. He had an obsession with guns one could interpret
as slightly at odds with the message of the Prince of Peace. He may just have been reflecting the
quaint traditions of America's Appalachian subculture - his home is the mountains of North Carolina
- when he once cut down a tree by blasting away at it with an automatic weapon (I did not make this up).
Apparently, he used to be fond of giving automatic pistols as gifts.
Well, at some point, I guess the lad realized he was burning out and going nowhere, and
automatic weapons are expensive when you like to give the very best, so Franklin had something
like the President's road-to-Damascus experience. I doubt he recalled Henry the Fourth's saying
Paris was worth a mass (Henry of Navarre became King of France by adopting Catholicism).
It would have weighed heavily that dad's ready-made, super-slick organization offered a
handsome, steady income, all expenses paid, especially if Franklin had come to recognize
that his next-best career option might be itinerant bingo caller.
Redemption is one of America's great ongoing themes. It's the spiritual extension of all the
plastic surgery, injections, drugs, youth-inducing potions, diets, and tales of lives changed by
lotteries or get-rich-quick schemes, but it does have to be the right kind of redemption. None
of your consolations of philosophy, peace of the Buddha, wisdom of the Great Spirit, or
following the Prophet will do. Lives lived decently and peacefully from beginning to end
are not admired because they don't make juicy entertainment.
The approved American redemption-story template includes years of inflicting hell on others, often
by abusing whisky or drugs, finally being overcome by frightful (drug-induced or otherwise) visions
of going to hell yourself, and then spending the rest of your life annoying every person who crosses
your path with the opinion that he or she does not know the truth. About 85% of the nation's
country-and Western singers and about 95% of its evangelists spend their declining years sharing
such tales in magazines, tapes, interviews, and sermons. It's a major industry.
This is all by way of background to Franklin's words about his new mission. I suppose it's possible
Franklin thinks Nazareth is a trailer park somewhere in North Carolina or Texas which would
account for his thinking that the people in the Middle East haven't heard about Jesus, but, in any
event, Franklin is now going to tell them about Jesus, at least his gun-totting Appalachian version.
Well, almost, but Franklin has probably been advised that proselytizing for conversion from Judaism
is against the law in modern Israel. With a Bush-appointed Proconsul, that kind of law shouldn't
get in the way of bringing the good word to Iraqis, although he'll be a bit late to save the souls
of those smashed and broken by American bombs.
Franklin's organization, Samaritan's Purse, claims that it intends only to bring relief services
and not evangelism to Iraq, but how valid can this claim be? The Billy Graham organization for
decades has worked only to convert people to its narrow notion of Christianity. It has been
criticized even by other Christians for the nature of its work - cranking out converts like
sausages in a vast Midwestern meat-packing plant. Perhaps when Franklin created his
offshoot relief organization, Samaritan's Purse, it was in part a response to this kind of criticism.
Franklin's own words on Islam over the last year hardly resemble a second Albert Schweitzer
yearning to help fellow beings. His tone is militaristic and has the same nasty, parochial feel
as the President's "us and them." One looks in vain for any generosity of spirit associated with the words of Jesus.
"We're not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God.
He's not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It's a different God, and I
believe it is a very evil and wicked religion."
Franklin here makes no distinction between the nineteen individuals responsible for 9/11
and the world's hundreds of millions of Muslims, yet he seems never to have made the same
kind of connections between criminals of other religious backgrounds and the religions themselves
. Did the IRA's outrages elicit such comments about Catholicism?
"the persecution or elimination of non-Muslims has been a cornerstone of Islam conquests and rule for centuries."
I suppose it would be foolish to expect any sensible perspective on history from a man of Franklin's
limited learning. The work of people calling themselves Christians in countless wars, religious persecutions,
and exterminations just since the Renaissance dwarfs the volume of spilled blood in all the rest
of human history. The Holocaust, the African slave trade, and the extermination of many aboriginal
peoples were the work of people calling themselves Christians.
"I believe it is my responsibility to speak out against the terrible deeds that are committed
as a result of Islamic teaching."
Why should it be his responsibility to speak against these particular deeds and no others?
Franklin certainly is not known as an advocate for the world's abused and downtrodden. One
does not find him shouldering this responsibility over other terrible deeds, a number of them the
dirty work of his own government. No, his time goes to "crusades," the word used for decades
by the Billy Graham organization to describe its assembly-line salvation gatherings.
The denomination with which the Graham family generally has been associated, the
Southern Baptists, has an ugly history in the United States. Extreme segregationists
founded this denomination to keep blacks out of their churches and a century later, t
hrough the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, Southern Baptists were better
known for opposing Dr. King's work than supporting it. The denomination's official view o
n a woman's role in marriage is among the most parochial in the United States. Incidentally,
the Southern Baptists' Mission Board also aims at providing aid in Iraq. Jerry Vines, former
president of the Southern Baptists, described the Prophet Muhammad not very long ago as a
"demon-possessed pedophile."
"There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement,
the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism."
These are the words of a man teaching suspicion and fear rather than understanding and
brotherhood. One has to ask what such comments have to do with evangelism or Christianity, but
American fundamentalists often ignore Jesus' clear teaching on the matter and put their visions
of government and secular affairs at the heart of sermons and pronouncements. This suggests that
politics, and a particularly nasty kind of politics, is at least as much a driving force here as religion.
Franklin recently gave a Good Friday service at the Pentagon. Reading that, I had the absurd image
of an early Christian preacher praying for Rome's Tenth Legion. True, there were probably no Christian
legionaries at the time, but the fact remains that the purpose of the Pentagon is exactly the same
as that of the legions, professional killing for the state and its policies, a purpose totally incompatible
with any words of Jesus.
But of course, the more apt comparison would be a few centuries later when the legions did t
heir bloody work for a so-called Christian empire.
John Chuckman can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org
Sunday, April 13, 2003
Somehow these two articles scare me. Imagine some 25,000 God fearing people going into
a country, having little if any training about their culture or language. What make Graham and
his group think the people of Iraq want them there. What about the problems of our own county.
Imagine that many people helping out in our schools, national parks, and hospitals?
Bush’s Iraq: When the Evangelists Go Marching in
http://www.republicons.org/view_article.asp?RP_ARTICLE_ID=835
4/12/2003
In a report in the British Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders reports that Iraq is bracing for a second wave of invading
forces from the US; as many as 25,000 evangelical Christians are set to descend on Iraq to spread the Word. And
you thought it was another Bush malapropism when he referred to the battle as a “crusade”.
The report details the plans to send thousands of evangelists under the auspices of providing aid to perform, what
some Christian groups are referring to as, “spiritual warfare”.
Saunders states that the most numerous group is the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which he
describes as “an ardent supporter of the war as an opportunity to bring Christianity to the Middle East”.
The group says it has 25,000 trained Evangelists ready to enter Iraq.
“That would [mean] a heart change would go on in that part of the world.” Mark Liederbach of the
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary told members of the SBC. “That's what we need to be
praying for. That's how a Christian wages spiritual warfare.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\\
Jesus in Baghdad
Why we should keep Franklin Graham out of Iraq.
By Steven Waldman
Posted Friday, April 11, 2003, at 3:23 PM PT
http://slate.msn.com/id/2081432/
a country, having little if any training about their culture or language. What make Graham and
his group think the people of Iraq want them there. What about the problems of our own county.
Imagine that many people helping out in our schools, national parks, and hospitals?
Bush’s Iraq: When the Evangelists Go Marching in
http://www.republicons.org/view_article.asp?RP_ARTICLE_ID=835
4/12/2003
In a report in the British Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders reports that Iraq is bracing for a second wave of invading
forces from the US; as many as 25,000 evangelical Christians are set to descend on Iraq to spread the Word. And
you thought it was another Bush malapropism when he referred to the battle as a “crusade”.
The report details the plans to send thousands of evangelists under the auspices of providing aid to perform, what
some Christian groups are referring to as, “spiritual warfare”.
Saunders states that the most numerous group is the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which he
describes as “an ardent supporter of the war as an opportunity to bring Christianity to the Middle East”.
The group says it has 25,000 trained Evangelists ready to enter Iraq.
“That would [mean] a heart change would go on in that part of the world.” Mark Liederbach of the
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary told members of the SBC. “That's what we need to be
praying for. That's how a Christian wages spiritual warfare.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\\
Jesus in Baghdad
Why we should keep Franklin Graham out of Iraq.
By Steven Waldman
Posted Friday, April 11, 2003, at 3:23 PM PT
http://slate.msn.com/id/2081432/
Monday, April 07, 2003
I think sometimes you may not even know or understand family members. Seems as though the
pro-forces in my family listen to a source for God that isn't even on the same wave lenght of mine.
So in the future think it best to keep my sources & such to people close to me. This is the
article that started the firestorm...
The Clash of Two Fundamentalisms
By Henri Tincq
Le Monde
http://truthout.org/docs_03/040403G.shtml
Monday 31 March 2003
"Crusade" against "jihad"? Faced with the war in Iraq's risks of getting bogged down, the feared scenario of a religious confrontation seems already in place. From one side, calls to prayer and fasting, constant references to the Bible: George Bush's speeches also mobilize Christian ritual and dogma for the legitimization of the war.
The more the war causes death and suffering, the more this sort of mystic-politic risks taking over. In a parallel way, Saddam Hussein is happy to drape himself in the garments of a modern Saladin and to demand God as a witness to the aggression of the "the impious" on his territory. In spite of reservations with regard to Saddam, his calls for the solidarity of the umma and to "holy war" resonate in most Muslim countries, from Algeria to Pakistan, by way of Cairo and Teheran. There were warnings since the attacks of September 11. One cannot do other than shiver before such a vulgar instrumentalization of the name of God and of religious themes in the Eastern cradle of the three great monotheisms.
The vision of the American Cabinet praying in the White House before deciding to go to war may make some smile on this side of the Atlantic. The least pious Muslim might be equally shocked by the exploitation of the name of Allah and a call to "martyrdom" in the mouth of the Iraqi leader, head of the ultra-secular Baathist party, who has demonstrated the low value he ascribes to human life. For the reader of the Koran or the Gospel, nothing is more indefensible than this manner of invoking God in every instance, giving God's endorsement for human decisions, sometimes among those the most criminal, to confuse faith, weapons, and right. The faithful, like the agnostic, knows that God offers no protection against the temptation of Totalitarianism. History, on the contrary, reminds us that He has often lent a hand. Gott mit uns: in the name of God, people have tortured, murdered, subjugated their consciences, destroyed countries, attempted to exterminate the Jewish people.
His father an Episcopalian, George Bush Junior belongs to the United Methodist Church of the United States, as do Dick Cheney, his Vice-President, and Andrew Card, the White House Chief-of-Staff. Condoleezza Rice is herself the daughter of a minister. Even though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, does not make a show of religious conviction, one is tempted to write that the fate of America is in the hands of a little group of Protestant bigots. In effect, George W. Bush demonstrates all the zeal of the convert. Prayer is his daily habit. He belongs to a movement of born-again Christians, for whom baptism is equivalent to a second birth, and who are ascendant to the point of counting up to 70 million American adherents, especially in the South (the "Bible Belt").
RELIGIOUS "POPULISM"
Baptized "Evangelical" or "Pentecostal", this Christian neo-fundamentalism draws its sources from all forms of American Protestant revival. It has been exported to South America, Europe, the megapolises of Asia and Africa. Experts such as Harvey Cox, a Massachusetts sociologist, consider it "the religion of the twenty-first century". This religious populism grows in response to world instability, economic somersaults, and the anonymity of cities. It does away with clerical mediation - hence the success of "televangelists" -, with the moderating interpretations that historic Protestant and Catholic churches have developed. It interprets Biblical texts literally, justifies homophobia and the death penalty, prohibits abortion. The evangelical "convert" is convinced to enter a small circle of the "chosen". He entertains a Manichean world view, divided between the forces of "good" and "evil" and the forces of "depravity", "decadence", and "obscurantism"-within which, for examp! le, Islam is often ranged. Since September 11, the preachers Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others have made a specialty of using obscene terms to attack the "criminal" Mohammed!
MESSIANIC VOCATION
Of course, to believe that this fundamentalism tipped the United States into a war with Iraq would be grotesque. Its political influence among the ranks of the neoconservatives does not exhaust all the reasons for American intervention. But the map of the Christian world is in the process of fracturing. From the Pope to the great Protestant churches, the Orthodox, the Anglicans, opposition to the war is virtually unanimous. In the United States themselves, with the exception of the Southern Baptist Convention (16 million faithful), all the churches have taken a position against the war, including the United Methodist Church, which disapproved George Bush, its adherent and the President.
But how should the America of the depths, shaken by the cataclysm of September 11, attached to symbols as powerful as the "In God we trust" on the greenback, attached to all the affirmations about the role of the United States as a "moral and universal" nation, not identify itself with "this God who legitimizes and supports the American nation, along a Providentialist register that reaches beyond any confessional cleavages", as Sebastian Fath, a French researcher specialized in Protestantism in the United States, asks?
American history is unique: the messianic vocation this pioneer people have assigned themselves, freedom established as an absolute dogma, America as the new Promised Land, Americans as the new chosen people. George Bush Junior is not, of course, the first American president to conform to this messianic role. Remember Ronald Reagan, champion of the struggle against the "Evil Empire" (Soviet). Or Jimmy Carter, Southern Baptist who was more indulgent of Saudi Wahabism, often considered a sort of Muslim Protestantism, than of Iranian Shiism. A number of observers saw the first Gulf War as a sort of "Holy Alliance" between the Bible and the gun (according to Slimane Zeghidour's _expression), between American Evangelists and the Saudis, hosts of the Holy Sites, Puritans of Islam, hostile to all clerical mediation between man and God. Even today, apart from the weight of history and strategic interests, is it surprising that so many connections unite America, this other "people ! of God" and Israel, which missionary groups of messianic Christians hostile to the Palestinians support, renewing the Biblical opposition of the Hebrews against the Philistines and the Canaanites?
Should this confrontation between Protestant and Islamic fundamentalism be viewed as a new avatar of the historic rivalry between Christianity and Islam? This war is molded by history, in effect. Or rather by "mytho-history", as Mohamed Arkoun writes in his latest work, "From Manhattan to Baghdad" (Bayard Editions), freshly baffled to see how stories of crusades and invasions can still inflame, in the twenty-first century, imaginary "holy wars", still nourish sacred systems of mutual exclusion.
Yesterday, at the onset of Nasserism, the first Palestinian revolts, the Algerian war of independence, Arab resistance was limited to the great periods of nationalist fever. However today, in spite of the existence of an isolated secular camp, largely hidden, religion has become the principal mobilizing ideology in those Arab societies heaped high in frustrations. The erosion of secular models (Zionist, Socialist, Marxist), the religious legitimization of power seizures (the Islamic revolution in Iran as well as the occupation of the territories in Israel, etc.)have tended toward a reaffirmation of all orthodoxies.
PROCESS
So even the secular Saddam Hussein has always sought to provide religious legitimacy and cover for his conflicts. In the war of the eighties against Iran, he had already manipulated Muslim opinion. During the Gulf War, he took up the complaints against the Saudis, accused of serving as an American protectorate, unworthy for this reason to administer Islam's Holy Sites for his own account.
Since then, there has been September 11, ultimate outcome of a process derivative of this defeated and fragmented Islam. The "long" process of Islamic combat in Egypt or in Algeria, which, as in Iran yesterday, aimed to conquer political power through a mobilization of opinion, has been defeated. But the "short" process of the most extreme violence, setting up an historic confrontation between a humiliated and aggressed Islam on one side and the Jews and the "Crusaders" on the other, has also failed. No more than the assassins of Anwar Sadat in 1981 succeeded in raising up the masses to fell the Egyptian government, did the authors of the September 11 attacks mobilize the Muslim masses to support them. Radical violence, writes Gilles Kepel in "Jihad" (Gallimard), has transformed itself into "a fatal trap for the Islamicist movement".
One would have thought it possible to be very economical of the "Islam Against the West" variety of commentary for a war in Iraq about which Europe and the West are not at all unanimous. The Islamicist movement itself has never been more divided between, on the one side, advocates of rapprochement with nationalist and democratic forces, and, on the other, the artificers of "jihad". But between American Evangelical Christian fundamentalism, which is gaining in the Christian sphere, and Islamic fundamentalism, two visions clash that are both founded on cartoon discourse, savage exegesis, and perversions of sacred writings. And if the religious dimension of this war is certainly now neither the most immediate nor decisive, it could still serve tomorrow as a burning ember of unforeseeable consequences.
pro-forces in my family listen to a source for God that isn't even on the same wave lenght of mine.
So in the future think it best to keep my sources & such to people close to me. This is the
article that started the firestorm...
The Clash of Two Fundamentalisms
By Henri Tincq
Le Monde
http://truthout.org/docs_03/040403G.shtml
Monday 31 March 2003
"Crusade" against "jihad"? Faced with the war in Iraq's risks of getting bogged down, the feared scenario of a religious confrontation seems already in place. From one side, calls to prayer and fasting, constant references to the Bible: George Bush's speeches also mobilize Christian ritual and dogma for the legitimization of the war.
The more the war causes death and suffering, the more this sort of mystic-politic risks taking over. In a parallel way, Saddam Hussein is happy to drape himself in the garments of a modern Saladin and to demand God as a witness to the aggression of the "the impious" on his territory. In spite of reservations with regard to Saddam, his calls for the solidarity of the umma and to "holy war" resonate in most Muslim countries, from Algeria to Pakistan, by way of Cairo and Teheran. There were warnings since the attacks of September 11. One cannot do other than shiver before such a vulgar instrumentalization of the name of God and of religious themes in the Eastern cradle of the three great monotheisms.
The vision of the American Cabinet praying in the White House before deciding to go to war may make some smile on this side of the Atlantic. The least pious Muslim might be equally shocked by the exploitation of the name of Allah and a call to "martyrdom" in the mouth of the Iraqi leader, head of the ultra-secular Baathist party, who has demonstrated the low value he ascribes to human life. For the reader of the Koran or the Gospel, nothing is more indefensible than this manner of invoking God in every instance, giving God's endorsement for human decisions, sometimes among those the most criminal, to confuse faith, weapons, and right. The faithful, like the agnostic, knows that God offers no protection against the temptation of Totalitarianism. History, on the contrary, reminds us that He has often lent a hand. Gott mit uns: in the name of God, people have tortured, murdered, subjugated their consciences, destroyed countries, attempted to exterminate the Jewish people.
His father an Episcopalian, George Bush Junior belongs to the United Methodist Church of the United States, as do Dick Cheney, his Vice-President, and Andrew Card, the White House Chief-of-Staff. Condoleezza Rice is herself the daughter of a minister. Even though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, does not make a show of religious conviction, one is tempted to write that the fate of America is in the hands of a little group of Protestant bigots. In effect, George W. Bush demonstrates all the zeal of the convert. Prayer is his daily habit. He belongs to a movement of born-again Christians, for whom baptism is equivalent to a second birth, and who are ascendant to the point of counting up to 70 million American adherents, especially in the South (the "Bible Belt").
RELIGIOUS "POPULISM"
Baptized "Evangelical" or "Pentecostal", this Christian neo-fundamentalism draws its sources from all forms of American Protestant revival. It has been exported to South America, Europe, the megapolises of Asia and Africa. Experts such as Harvey Cox, a Massachusetts sociologist, consider it "the religion of the twenty-first century". This religious populism grows in response to world instability, economic somersaults, and the anonymity of cities. It does away with clerical mediation - hence the success of "televangelists" -, with the moderating interpretations that historic Protestant and Catholic churches have developed. It interprets Biblical texts literally, justifies homophobia and the death penalty, prohibits abortion. The evangelical "convert" is convinced to enter a small circle of the "chosen". He entertains a Manichean world view, divided between the forces of "good" and "evil" and the forces of "depravity", "decadence", and "obscurantism"-within which, for examp! le, Islam is often ranged. Since September 11, the preachers Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others have made a specialty of using obscene terms to attack the "criminal" Mohammed!
MESSIANIC VOCATION
Of course, to believe that this fundamentalism tipped the United States into a war with Iraq would be grotesque. Its political influence among the ranks of the neoconservatives does not exhaust all the reasons for American intervention. But the map of the Christian world is in the process of fracturing. From the Pope to the great Protestant churches, the Orthodox, the Anglicans, opposition to the war is virtually unanimous. In the United States themselves, with the exception of the Southern Baptist Convention (16 million faithful), all the churches have taken a position against the war, including the United Methodist Church, which disapproved George Bush, its adherent and the President.
But how should the America of the depths, shaken by the cataclysm of September 11, attached to symbols as powerful as the "In God we trust" on the greenback, attached to all the affirmations about the role of the United States as a "moral and universal" nation, not identify itself with "this God who legitimizes and supports the American nation, along a Providentialist register that reaches beyond any confessional cleavages", as Sebastian Fath, a French researcher specialized in Protestantism in the United States, asks?
American history is unique: the messianic vocation this pioneer people have assigned themselves, freedom established as an absolute dogma, America as the new Promised Land, Americans as the new chosen people. George Bush Junior is not, of course, the first American president to conform to this messianic role. Remember Ronald Reagan, champion of the struggle against the "Evil Empire" (Soviet). Or Jimmy Carter, Southern Baptist who was more indulgent of Saudi Wahabism, often considered a sort of Muslim Protestantism, than of Iranian Shiism. A number of observers saw the first Gulf War as a sort of "Holy Alliance" between the Bible and the gun (according to Slimane Zeghidour's _expression), between American Evangelists and the Saudis, hosts of the Holy Sites, Puritans of Islam, hostile to all clerical mediation between man and God. Even today, apart from the weight of history and strategic interests, is it surprising that so many connections unite America, this other "people ! of God" and Israel, which missionary groups of messianic Christians hostile to the Palestinians support, renewing the Biblical opposition of the Hebrews against the Philistines and the Canaanites?
Should this confrontation between Protestant and Islamic fundamentalism be viewed as a new avatar of the historic rivalry between Christianity and Islam? This war is molded by history, in effect. Or rather by "mytho-history", as Mohamed Arkoun writes in his latest work, "From Manhattan to Baghdad" (Bayard Editions), freshly baffled to see how stories of crusades and invasions can still inflame, in the twenty-first century, imaginary "holy wars", still nourish sacred systems of mutual exclusion.
Yesterday, at the onset of Nasserism, the first Palestinian revolts, the Algerian war of independence, Arab resistance was limited to the great periods of nationalist fever. However today, in spite of the existence of an isolated secular camp, largely hidden, religion has become the principal mobilizing ideology in those Arab societies heaped high in frustrations. The erosion of secular models (Zionist, Socialist, Marxist), the religious legitimization of power seizures (the Islamic revolution in Iran as well as the occupation of the territories in Israel, etc.)have tended toward a reaffirmation of all orthodoxies.
PROCESS
So even the secular Saddam Hussein has always sought to provide religious legitimacy and cover for his conflicts. In the war of the eighties against Iran, he had already manipulated Muslim opinion. During the Gulf War, he took up the complaints against the Saudis, accused of serving as an American protectorate, unworthy for this reason to administer Islam's Holy Sites for his own account.
Since then, there has been September 11, ultimate outcome of a process derivative of this defeated and fragmented Islam. The "long" process of Islamic combat in Egypt or in Algeria, which, as in Iran yesterday, aimed to conquer political power through a mobilization of opinion, has been defeated. But the "short" process of the most extreme violence, setting up an historic confrontation between a humiliated and aggressed Islam on one side and the Jews and the "Crusaders" on the other, has also failed. No more than the assassins of Anwar Sadat in 1981 succeeded in raising up the masses to fell the Egyptian government, did the authors of the September 11 attacks mobilize the Muslim masses to support them. Radical violence, writes Gilles Kepel in "Jihad" (Gallimard), has transformed itself into "a fatal trap for the Islamicist movement".
One would have thought it possible to be very economical of the "Islam Against the West" variety of commentary for a war in Iraq about which Europe and the West are not at all unanimous. The Islamicist movement itself has never been more divided between, on the one side, advocates of rapprochement with nationalist and democratic forces, and, on the other, the artificers of "jihad". But between American Evangelical Christian fundamentalism, which is gaining in the Christian sphere, and Islamic fundamentalism, two visions clash that are both founded on cartoon discourse, savage exegesis, and perversions of sacred writings. And if the religious dimension of this war is certainly now neither the most immediate nor decisive, it could still serve tomorrow as a burning ember of unforeseeable consequences.
Sunday, April 06, 2003
Some one sent me a pin. Don't feel very comfortable about wearing it to school, being the politics of most of the other teachers & I can only imagine their questions. But if you would like to wear an Iraqi child’s name pinned over your heart, please contact the Episcopal Divinity School at peacepins@episdivschool.edu. You will receive a small pin with a child’s name on it and a card with this brief prayer:
“Oh God, Oh Allah, in your great mercy protect this child from all harm and grant to children everywhere the blessings of peace now and forever more. Amen.”
“We hope you will recite this prayer each day as you pin your child’s name to your heart,” ended Bishop Charleston. “Together, through the power of prayer, we can prevent the tragedy of war and protect the lives of the innocent. God bless you for being our partner in this witness.”
To request a pin, please contact Episcopal Divinity School at 617-868-3450, extension 377 or, via email at peacepins@episdivschool.edu . Please include your name and mailing address. The pins are free, although donations to help cover production and mailing costs are welcome and may be sent to Peace Pins, Episcopal Divinity School, 99 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.
So I will wear in pride around town. Last night went to a "dinner for eight" sponsored by a local church. We had a great discussion about the war, the media and our fears for the future. As a librarian, I keep seeing evidences of our freedoms slipping away from us. We wondered where were WMD and type of opposition the democrats might mount for the next round. It was great to talk about the issues with others and not worry about any sort of fall-out. The red buds and dogwoods are beginning to bloom and given me renewed joy in the promise of Spring...
Interesting articles...
James Ridgeway's War Log
How the Rich Go to War
They Send the Poor to Fight
April 3rd, 2003 1:00 PM
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0315/ridgewar1.php
When it comes to making war in the Bush administration, the rich call the shots, while the working class and the poor dodge the bullets or get killed. As Paul Atwood, a former Vietnam vet and researcher at the University of Massachusetts, said this morning, the men who are running this war have long been referred to as "chicken hawks."
To be sure, the people who run this country are usually rich. Just consider the fabulously wealthy Bush A-team. The president's net assets have been estimated to be anywhere from $8 to $19 million. He comes from a wealthy New England family to begin with, which bankrolled his early business ventures. Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife are worth anywhere from $20 million to $69 million. Defense chief Donald Rumsfeld's net assets range from $53 million to $175 million
Also~~
Network and Talk Radio Instigating Pro-War Rallies
by Paul Krugman Monday March 24, 2003 at 11:10 PM
http://www.sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/03/1590086.php
Who has been organizing those pro-war rallies? The answer, it turns out, is that they are being promoted by key players in the radio industry — with close links to the Bush administration.
“Oh God, Oh Allah, in your great mercy protect this child from all harm and grant to children everywhere the blessings of peace now and forever more. Amen.”
“We hope you will recite this prayer each day as you pin your child’s name to your heart,” ended Bishop Charleston. “Together, through the power of prayer, we can prevent the tragedy of war and protect the lives of the innocent. God bless you for being our partner in this witness.”
To request a pin, please contact Episcopal Divinity School at 617-868-3450, extension 377 or, via email at peacepins@episdivschool.edu . Please include your name and mailing address. The pins are free, although donations to help cover production and mailing costs are welcome and may be sent to Peace Pins, Episcopal Divinity School, 99 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.
So I will wear in pride around town. Last night went to a "dinner for eight" sponsored by a local church. We had a great discussion about the war, the media and our fears for the future. As a librarian, I keep seeing evidences of our freedoms slipping away from us. We wondered where were WMD and type of opposition the democrats might mount for the next round. It was great to talk about the issues with others and not worry about any sort of fall-out. The red buds and dogwoods are beginning to bloom and given me renewed joy in the promise of Spring...
Interesting articles...
James Ridgeway's War Log
How the Rich Go to War
They Send the Poor to Fight
April 3rd, 2003 1:00 PM
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0315/ridgewar1.php
When it comes to making war in the Bush administration, the rich call the shots, while the working class and the poor dodge the bullets or get killed. As Paul Atwood, a former Vietnam vet and researcher at the University of Massachusetts, said this morning, the men who are running this war have long been referred to as "chicken hawks."
To be sure, the people who run this country are usually rich. Just consider the fabulously wealthy Bush A-team. The president's net assets have been estimated to be anywhere from $8 to $19 million. He comes from a wealthy New England family to begin with, which bankrolled his early business ventures. Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife are worth anywhere from $20 million to $69 million. Defense chief Donald Rumsfeld's net assets range from $53 million to $175 million
Also~~
Network and Talk Radio Instigating Pro-War Rallies
by Paul Krugman Monday March 24, 2003 at 11:10 PM
http://www.sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/03/1590086.php
Who has been organizing those pro-war rallies? The answer, it turns out, is that they are being promoted by key players in the radio industry — with close links to the Bush administration.
What makes this year in American life so different? It was as if someone took the two by approach to life, using it to force
some sort of change in American life. It was bad enought that Bush was elected but throughout the Christmas season
the prospect of war loomed even larger.
Since I am a librarian in a public school in Tennesse I have been very mindful of the gradual shift in American.
The New York Times recently published an article...
April 5, 2003
Professors Protest as Students Debate
By KATE ZERNIKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/international/worldspecial/05CAMP.html
AMHERST, Mass., April 4 — It is not easy being an old lefty on campus in this war.
At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, awash in antiwar protests in the Vietnam era, a columnist for a student newspaper took a professor to task for canceling classes to protest the war in Iraq, saying the university should reprimand her and refund tuition for the missed periods.
Across the country, the war is disclosing role reversals, between professors shaped by Vietnam protests and a more conservative student body traumatized by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"It seems the professors are more vehement than the students," Jack Morgan, a sophomore, said. "There comes a point when you wonder are you fostering a discussion or are you promoting an opinion you want students to embrace or even parrot?"
some sort of change in American life. It was bad enought that Bush was elected but throughout the Christmas season
the prospect of war loomed even larger.
Since I am a librarian in a public school in Tennesse I have been very mindful of the gradual shift in American.
The New York Times recently published an article...
April 5, 2003
Professors Protest as Students Debate
By KATE ZERNIKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/international/worldspecial/05CAMP.html
AMHERST, Mass., April 4 — It is not easy being an old lefty on campus in this war.
At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, awash in antiwar protests in the Vietnam era, a columnist for a student newspaper took a professor to task for canceling classes to protest the war in Iraq, saying the university should reprimand her and refund tuition for the missed periods.
Across the country, the war is disclosing role reversals, between professors shaped by Vietnam protests and a more conservative student body traumatized by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"It seems the professors are more vehement than the students," Jack Morgan, a sophomore, said. "There comes a point when you wonder are you fostering a discussion or are you promoting an opinion you want students to embrace or even parrot?"
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