Dissident Veteran For Peace

Do a Google search on the phrase "we love death" and you will get more than 37,000 hits, many of them describing a purportedly essential feature of Islam. But consider that it is primarily Christian nations that have the world's largest nuclear and conventional arsenals. Further, the predominantly Christian United States has likely been responsible for the violent and other premature deaths of more people than any other country in the last sixty years--including half-a-million children under the age of five in Iraq during the 1990s.

In the last seven years, the predominantly Christian US has invaded and occupied two predominantly Muslim countries: Afghanistan and Iraq at the cost of more than a million dead Afghanis and Iraqis. Over the last sixty years, the predominantly Christian US has been the most important backer of Israel which displaced the predominantly Muslim Palestinian people and continues to visit murder and mayhem upon them. The Christian President-elect Barack Obama has spoken openly about attacking another predominantly Muslim country, Pakistan.

In "The Spirit of Disobedience," Curtis White eloquently ties these threads together:

In the end, evangelical Christianity conspires with technical and economic rationalism. In the end, they both require a commitment to "duty" that masks unspeakable violence and injustice. In the end, the Muslim whose legs are being reduced to pulp by his American tormentor doesn't care if he's being murdered because he is despised by Christians or because he is an impediment to economic rationality. He understands far better than we do how the two become one at the end of the torturer's rod. The Predator missile, product of American scientific ingenuity, that homes in on his head is both self-righteously and arrogantly evangelical and meanly pragmatic. It is the empire that the rest of the world reads in George Bush's smirk. As John Ruskin understood 150 years ago, "The only question (determined mostly by fraud in peace, and force in war) is, Who is to die, and how?"

If we live in a "culture of death," as Pope John Paul II put it, it is a culture that is made possible by the advocates of both Reason and Revelation. In the opposition of Reason to Revelation, death cannot lose. Ours is a culture in which death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives. Our exploitation of humans as "workers" is legal and somehow, weird and perverse though it may seem, generally acknowledged as part of our heritage of freedom, and virtually the entire political spectrum falls over itself to praise it. When Wal-Mart pays its employees impoverishing wages without adequate health or retirement benefits, we justify it out of respect for Wal-Mart's "freedom," its "reasonable" need to make itself "competitive," and because what it does is legal. As George Whalin, president of Retail Management Consultants, put it, "They don't have a responsibility to society to pay a higher wage than the law says you have to pay." Similarly, our use of the most fantastically destructive military power is also legal and also somehow a part of our heritage of "protecting freedom," no matter how obscene and destructive its excesses. The grotesque violence of video games and Hollywood movies, doing God knows what to the "individual morality" of teenagers, is legal and somehow now a protected part of our freedom of expression. Even, as the more thoughtful anti-abortionists complain with some justice, the legality of abortion at times covers over an attitude toward human life that subjects life to the low logic of efficiency and convenience. The idea of abortion as a minor "medical procedure" becomes Orwellian in its intense determination not to "know what we do." Or, perhaps most destructively, the legality of property rights condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal happiness and prosperity through the ownership of private property. This legality formalizes and empowers our famous "unalienable right" to property (especially that most peculiar form of private property known as the corporation), the exercise of which will profoundly alienate those on whom this right is inflicted: workers, children, foreign enemies, and animals. In its most extreme and universal form, our constitutional rights are reducible to the right not to have to love our neighbor. The irony is that the more energetically we pursue our individual, socially isolated right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the deader the social and natural worlds become.

So, just who is it that demonstrably loves death, even if it is not articulated clearly? An American and/or Christian culture of death is abundantly evident. But what got me thinking about this subject was part of a post on the ZionistsOut blog about the head of the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor. It says:

The new JFGAA Executive Director is David Shtulman, a dual US-Israeli citizen, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) veteran, and, in all likelihood, a current IOF reservist. ... in his weekly shabbat message--wittily entitled "The New Year Enters with a Bang!"--Herr Shtulman refers to the Israeli attacks as an "Israeli counter-attack on Hamas."

Shtulman next pulls a predictable role reversal of the Judaic culture of death with the unsourced claim: "Hamas has often responded with the mantra, 'We will win because we love death and Israel loves life.' " If Hamas uses this "mantra" frequently then it is pretty strange that it is not attributed to Hamas in the New York Times even once. In fact, in searches using two different databases, the phrase "we love death" turns up in the NYT archives only three times between 1851 and the present. The "mantra" never made it onto the news pages of the NYT.

In two instances, it appears in editorials by Jewish neoconservative pundit David Brooks. In March 2004, Brooks attributed it to Al Qaeda and by September of that year he had expanded it to the "fringes of the Muslim world." The third instance, was just five days before Brooks' second invocation of the "mantra." At the invitation of the NYT "Op-Ed page," in his proposed "conclusion to President Bush's [2004 RNC] address," former Bush I speech writer Daniel McGroarty attributed the phrase "to the statement the terrorists released to claim responsibility for the carnage ... in Madrid."

Terrorism: A Documentary and Reference Guide by Burns and Peterson (Greenwood, 2005), which includes Hamas, has only one documented reference to terrorists loving death and that is a statement attributed to "al-Qaeda in Europe" in connection with the Madrid bombings. It says: "You love life and we love death." There are two problems, though.

First, this is one of at least two statements claiming responsibility for the 2004 Madrid bombings. The apparently first alleged claim of responsibility by al-Qaeda does not say anything about loving death. It was discredited by the pro-Israel group, MEMRI. More importantly, a "two-year investigation into the attacks has found no evidence that al-Qa'ida helped plan, finance or carry out the bombings, or even knew about them in advance," which would indicate that both of the claims of responsibility are fabrications.

It is plausible that Shtulman's claim began as an Israeli false flag operation to smear Islam (see also the "Gil Affair" and "Israeli Psyops Against EU and US"). If that is the case, then it is awfully helpful to have someone to discredit the competing claim of responsibility. In this case the guy doing the discrediting, author of the MEMRI analysis, was Yigal Carmon, an IOF Colonel who served at least twenty years (1968-88) in the Israeli intelligence service. In sum, there is nothing credible linking Shtulman's "mantra" to Hamas. But since when have supporters of Israel ever cared about the truth?

One other example of a Muslim claiming a love of death is, perhaps, more credible than the claims attributed to al-Qaeda in 2004. A 2001 story by the Telegraph (UK) quotes a veteran Afghan fighter:

Maulana Inyadullah, who began fighting the Soviet invasion in 1982 at the age of 16, declared that his fellow Afghans relish the prospect of an American attack.

"War is our best hobby. The sound of guns firing is like music for us. We cannot live without war. We have no other way except jihad," he said. ...

Mr Inyadullah, 35, said: "The Americans would be easier to defeat than the Russians. The Americans lead lavish lives and they are afraid of death. We are not afraid of death. The Americans love Pepsi Cola, we love death."

But only an idiot or a liar would read this as a broad cultural embrace of death or a statement of theological principle. Rather, it is not a desire to die but an express willingness to do so, if need be, in the service of home and hearth with a good dose of braggadocio mixed in for good measure.

A willingness to die is similarly expected of American combat troops. And if Americans put greater stress on killing the enemy then, perhaps, it is simply because they ruthlessly put a premium on killing others and because the commanders know overcoming the normal human aversion to kill is the more difficult task unless, perhaps, you live in America where we are programmed to kill.

The willingness to sacrifice oneself, even in battle, is more humane and noble than the willingness to kill. As Jesus Christ said, "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." But this is an ethos that Christianity turned against centuries ago when it joined with the Roman Empire--the very empire that carried out the death sentence of Jesus. The "Constantinian moment" marks the key point in the transformation of the cross from a symbol of love, self-sacrifice, and hope into a symbol of death, empire, and greed. In the wake of this transformation came forced conversions, the Crusades, the Inquisition and the like. Whatever lip service they may pay to the older, nobler meanings, it is clear that for most Americans (and their victims) the deeper, lived reality is that the cross is a symbol of death and devout American Christians are largely "guilty bystanders," if not active participants, in the crimes of empire.

See also:

• "Judaism's Culture of Death"
• "Ralph Peters on Pax Americana & American Culture"
• "The 'General Eisenhower Warned Us' Hoax"
• Women Leaders in Muslim & Christian States

Labels: abortion, Christianity, critical thinking, Curtis White, Empire, Hollywood, Islam, Islamophobia, United States, violence

I recently received a copy of a hoax chain e-mail with the subject line: "General Eisenhower Warned Us." Below, with some minor edits, is the response I sent to the more than two dozen e-mails addresses listed as having received or sent it before I received it.

The "General Eisenhower Warned Us" message below is a sad example of anti-Muslim fear-mongering. This hoax chain e-mail is based upon an earlier 2007 hoax chain e-mail that said, "Recently, this week, UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum ... " (see Snopes.com). The current version (below) says, "This week, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offends' the Muslim population which claims it never occurred."

This sweeping generalization or stereotype, even, is absurd on its face. It claims: "[The Holocaust] 'offends' the Muslim population which claims it never occurred." As a press release for a 2006 scientific poll of UK Muslims noted: "There is no universal, monolithic Muslim opinion - there is as much variety as among non-Muslims." Regarding the holocaust and Muslims, it reported, "2% denied it happened entirely." The same poll found that a plurality of Muslim respondents believe the Holocaust happened "as History teaches".

Moreover, there is no evidence that the UK ever "debated" removing "The Holocaust" from its curriculum. The 2007 report that apparently elicited the Islamophobic frenzy, "Teaching Emotive and Controversial History 3-19," is available online and you can read it yourself. Nowhere in it is there any debate about not teaching about the Nazi holocaust.

The report notes the holocaust is one of several controversial subjects for some students and references on page 15 "a history department in a northern city recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education] coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils." The GCSEs apply only to students aged 14 to 16. So, what you have here is one department in one city not selecting one topic for students aged 14-16 because of an unfounded or founded (we do not know which) fear of confronting "anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial" (whatever these mean) among SOME "Muslim pupils." That's all.

When the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth (Ynet is their online edition) covered the story in 2007, they reported:

" 'There is no evidence that schools are not teaching the Holocaust.' Orla Delegray of the Dept for Children, Schools and Families said.

" 'We have made clear there are certain, non-negotiable subjects which will be protected in schools and that includes the Holocaust,' she wrote. According to her, the British Education Ministry has even invested millions of pounds this year in subsidizing programs through which British students visit Auschwitz.

" 'The suggestion that the Holocaust is being dropped from the UK national curriculum is entirely false,' said Karen Pollock, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust."

As for the bit about "Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth,' ..." that's a hoax, too. Calling the holocaust a myth is not Iranian state policy. The president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--who is second-in-command after the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei--has been accused in the West of holocaust denial but so has Norman Finkelstein, son of two holocaust survivors and the author of The Holocaust Industry. I've read several of Finkelstein's books, including The Holocaust Industry and he is no holocaust denier.

But to return to Ahmadinejad consider the testimony of Shiraz Dossa: "... Ahmadinejad has not denied the Holocaust or proposed Israel’s liquidation; he has never done so in any of his speeches on the subject (all delivered in Farsi/Persian). As an Iran specialist, I can attest that both accusations are false. U.S. Iran experts such as Juan Cole and UK journalists such as Jonathan Steele have come to the same conclusion."

So, now ask yourself with US troops occupying two predominantly Muslim countries, with Iran in the cross-hairs of Israel and US Neo-cons, and with predominantly Muslim Palestine under the thumb of US-backed Israel, who benefits from spreading lies and distortions that cast Muslims is such a very bad light. Who gets hurt?

If you are a Christian and you passed this "General Eisenhower Warned Us" garbage on to other people or failed to challenge it then shouldn't you ask yourself if you have sinned? Leviticus 19:16 says "You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbour: I am the Lord." Christians are not under the Law but that is no license to harm our neighbors or spread falsehoods.

According to Jesus: "It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles. ... what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person ..." They didn't have keyboards and computer mice in Jesus' day but it seems to me the principle is timeless and not restricted to one form of communication.

Perhaps the most offensive and most revealing part of this hoax is the closing. It says: "God Bless America!"

See also: Turning Muslim Children into Zionists
-----Original Message-----

Sent: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:44 am
Subject: Fwd: [Fwd: Fwd: Fw: General Eisenhower Warned Us]

Labels: Christianity, critical thinking, Empire, holocaust, Iran, Islamophobia, Jesus

Below, via Behind the Lines: Poetry, War, & Peacemaking, are the first two paragraphs of an unsigned appeal on behalf of Professor Thomas Abowd at Wayne State University

Dear colleagues,

I need to write to you about a set of very serious racist and discriminatory attacks against Professor Thomas Abowd in his dispute with the Wayne State University administration and right-wing Zionist elements on campus. These circumstances are but a few of several offensive, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim happenings on this campus over the last few years, coming both before and after the attacks against Law Professor Wadie Said who applied for a job at WSU. The specific attacks against Professor Abowd are particularly troubling because, in this case, a WSU official has used racist and offensive language against Professor Abowd in the course of an official university investigation.

Included below is a short description of the line of questioning engaged in by officials of Wayne State University, particularly one Ms. Amy Stirling during her December 2007 investigation of Professor Thomas Abowd for several baseless and fabricated charges of "anti-semitism." (charges eventually all dropped for lack of evidence). A Union representative was present during this meeting with Ms. Stirling, and witnessed the racist language directed at Abowd. The Union representative took notes during the more than 2 hour conversation. It is clear to many that Stirling's line of questioning (as well as her generally hostile demeanor) was extremely inappropriate and had anti-Arab implications.

Read the entire appeal here.

Labels: Islamophobia, race, repression, thoughtcrime, Zionism

The recent howls of protest over the remarks last week by the head of my church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, shed light on Anglo-American attitudes toward Islam. The controversy is all over the air waves and printed page in the UK and on Saturday, Williams was even heckled at a memorial for his former tutor. On this side of the Atlantic, the "conservative" Islamophobes are outraged, too. Michelle Malkin's blog post on the matter is titled "Resign, Archbishop of Dhimmitude" and on Slate Christopher Hitchens froths:

For the women who are the principal prey of the sharia system, it is often only when they are shipped or flown to Britain that their true miseries begin. This modern disgrace is deepened and extended by a fatuous cleric who, presiding over an increasingly emaciated and schismatic and irrelevant church, nonetheless maintains that any faith is better than none at all.

But what did the Archbishop actually say? Here are some excerpts from his lecture on "Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective":

Among the manifold anxieties that haunt the discussion of the place of Muslims in British society, one of the strongest, reinforced from time to time by the sensational reporting of opinion polls, is that Muslim communities in this country seek the freedom to live under sharia law. And what most people think they know of sharia is that it is repressive towards women and wedded to archaic and brutal physical punishments; just a few days ago, it was reported that a 'forced marriage' involving a young woman with learning difficulties had been 'sanctioned under sharia law' – the kind of story that, in its assumption that we all 'really' know what is involved in the practice of sharia, powerfully reinforces the image of – at best – a pre-modern system in which human rights have no role. The problem is freely admitted by Muslim scholars. 'In the West', writes Tariq Ramadan in his groundbreaking Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, 'the idea of Sharia calls up all the darkest images of Islam ... It has reached the extent that many Muslim intellectuals do not dare even to refer to the concept for fear of frightening people or arousing suspicion of all their work by the mere mention of the word' (p.31). Even when some of the more dramatic fears are set aside, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes. As such, this is not only an issue about Islam but about other faith groups, including Orthodox Judaism; and indeed it spills over into some of the questions which have surfaced sharply in the last twelve months about the right of religious believers in general to opt out of certain legal provisions – as in the problems around Roman Catholic adoption agencies which emerged in relation to the Sexual Orientation Regulations last spring.

... But it is important to begin by dispelling one or two myths about sharia; so far from being a monolithic system of detailed enactments, sharia designates primarily – to quote Ramadan again – 'the expression of the universal principles of Islam [and] the framework and the thinking that makes for their actualization in human history' (32). Universal principles: as any Muslim commentator will insist, what is in view is the eternal and absolute will of God for the universe and for its human inhabitants in particular; but also something that has to be 'actualized', not a ready-made system. If shar' designates the essence of the revealed Law, sharia is the practice of actualizing and applying it; while certain elements of the sharia are specified fairly exactly in the Qur'an and Sunna and in the hadith recognised as authoritative in this respect, there is no single code that can be identified as 'the' sharia. And when certain states impose what they refer to as sharia or when certain Muslim activists demand its recognition alongside secular jurisdictions, they are usually referring not to a universal and fixed code established once for all but to some particular concretisation of it at the hands of a tradition of jurists. In the hands of contemporary legal traditionalists, this means simply that the application of sharia must be governed by the judgements of representatives of the classical schools of legal interpretation.

... recognising the authority of a communal religious court to decide finally and authoritatively about such a question [the inheritance rights of widows] would in effect not merely allow an additional layer of legal routes for resolving conflicts and ordering behaviour but would actually deprive members of the minority community of rights and liberties that they were entitled to enjoy as citizens; and while a legal system might properly admit structures or protocols that embody the diversity of moral reasoning in a plural society by allowing scope for a minority group to administer its affairs according to its own convictions, it can hardly admit or 'license' protocols that effectively take away the rights it acknowledges as generally valid.

To put the question like that is already to see where an answer might lie, though it is not an answer that will remove the possibility of some conflict. If any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognised, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no 'supplementary' jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights. This is in effect to mirror what a minority might themselves be requesting – that the situation should not arise where membership of one group restricted the freedom to live also as a member of an overlapping group, that (in this case) citizenship in a secular society should not necessitate the abandoning of religious discipline, any more than religious discipline should deprive one of access to liberties secured by the law of the land, to the common benefits of secular citizenship – or, better, to recognise that citizenship itself is a complex phenomenon not bound up with any one level of communal belonging but involving them all. ...

In conclusion, it seems that if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British law, we need a fair amount of 'deconstruction' of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment. But as I have hinted, I do not believe this can be done without some thinking also about the very nature of law. It is always easy to take refuge in some form of positivism; and what I have called legal universalism, when divorced from a serious theoretical (and, I would argue, religious) underpinning, can turn into a positivism as sterile as any other variety. If the paradoxical idea which I have sketched is true – that universal law and universal right are a way of recognising what is least fathomable and controllable in the human subject – theology still waits for us around the corner of these debates, however hard our culture may try to keep it out. And, as you can imagine, I am not going to complain about that.

It should be clear from the above that the Archbishop understands that Western, non-Muslim understandings of sharia are usually simplistic, at best, but moreover that he thinks critically, as do many Muslims, about sharia and, finally, that he is, by no means, advocating the establishment of a separate, parallel judicial system for Muslims in the UK. All of that is, however, too much for those who want to pigeonhole sharia as an oppressive system generated by a terroristic cult that is unworthy of any thoughtful consideration whatosever.

Labels: Christianity, Islam, Islamophobia, religion

Amal A has a great post: "Norma Khouri's Come Back: Still a Fake" on her Improvisations: Arab Woman Progressive Voice blog. It just goes to show you that there's always a ready Western market for Arab and Muslim-bashing.

See also:

• "The lies stripped bare." Sydney Morning Herald (Aus). 24 July 2004.
• "Bestseller's lies exposed." Sydney Morning Herald (Aus). 24 July 2004.
• "A hoax and honor lost for Norma Khouri" Daily Star (Leb.). 10 August 2004.
  
• "Report on Brigitte Gabriel Talk." Zionists Out of the Peace Movement. 6 December 2006.
• "Exposed: a literary liar and her phoney love." Independent (UK). 18 February 2007.

Labels: Arab-bashing, fraud, Islamophobia, Norma Khouri