OCTOBER 2005
We have long ago lost our moral compass, so how can we lecture the Islamic world?
Years of Western interference in the Middle East has left the region heavy with injustices
By Robert Fisk
09/17/05 "The Independent" --- In an age when Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara can identify "evil ideologies" and al-Qa'ida can call the suicide bombing of 156 Iraqi Shias "good news" for the "nation of Islam", thank heaven for our readers, in particular John Shepherd, principal lecturer in religious studies at St Martin's College, Lancaster.
Responding to a comment of mine - to the effect that "deep down" we do, however wrongly, suspect that religion has something to do with the London bombings - Mr Shepherd gently admonishes me. "I wonder if there may be more to it than that," he remarks. And I fear he is right and I am wrong.
His arguments are contained in a brilliantly conceived article on the roots of violence and extremism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam - and the urgent need to render all religions safe for "human consumption".
Put very simply, Mr Shepherd takes a wander through some of the nastiest bits of the Bible and the Koran - those bits we prefer not to quote or not to think about - and finds that mass murder and ethnic cleansing get a pretty good bill of health if we take it all literally.
The Jewish "entry into the promised land" was clearly accompanied by bloody conquest and would-be genocide. The Christian tradition has absorbed this inheritance, entering its own "promised land" with a ruthlessness that extends to cruel anti-Semitism. The New Testament, Mr Shepherd points out, "contains passages that would ... be actionable under British laws against incitement to racial hatred" were they to be published fresh today.
The Muslim tradition - with its hatred of idolatry - contains, in the career of the Prophet, "scenes of bloodshed and murder which are shocking to modern religious sensibilities".
Thus, for example, Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli military doctor who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, committed his mass murder on Purim, a festival celebrating the deliverance of the Jewish communities from the Persian empire which was followed by large-scale killing "to avenge themselves on their enemies" (Esther 8:13).
The Palestinians, of course, were playing the role of the Persians, at other times that of the Amalekites ("... kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey" - 1, Samuel 15:1, 3). The original "promised land" was largely on what is now the West Bank - hence the Jewish colonisation of Palestinian land - while the coastal plain was not (although suggestions that Israel should transplant itself further east, leaving Haifa, Tel Aviv and Ashkelon to the Palestinians of the West Bank are unlikely to commend themselves to Israel’s rulers).
The "chosen people" theme, meanwhile, moved into Christianity - the Protestants of Northern Ireland, for example, (remember the Ulster Covenant?), and apartheid South Africa and, in some respects, the United States.
The New Testament is laced with virulent anti-Semitism, accusing the Jews of killing Christ. Read Martin Luther. The Koran demanded the forced submission of conquered peoples in the name of religion (the Koran 9:29), and Mohammed’s successor, the Caliph Abu Bakr, stated specifically that "we will treat as an unbeliever whoever rejects Allah and Mohammed, and we will make holy war upon him ... for such there is only the sword and fire and indiscriminate slaughter."
So there you go. And how does Mr Shepherd deal with all this? Settlement policy should be rejected not because it is theologically questionable but because the dispossession of a people is morally wrong. Anti-Semitism must be rejected not because it is incompatible with the Gospels but because it is incompatible with any basic morality based on shared human values.
If Muslim violence is to be condemned, it is not because Mohammed is misunderstood but because it violates basic human rights. "West Bank settlements, Christian anti-Semitism and Muslim terrorism ... are not morally wrong because theologically questionable - they are theologically questionable because morally wrong."
And it is true that most Christians, Jews and Muslims draw on the tolerant, moderate aspects of their tradition. We prefer not to accept the fact that the religions of the children of Abraham are inherently flawed in respect of intolerance, discrimination, violence and hatred. Only - if I understand Mr Shepherd’s thesis correctly - by putting respect for human rights above all else and by making religion submit to universal human values can we " grasp the nettle".
Phew. I can hear the fundamentalists roaring already. And I have to say it will probably be the Islamic ones who will roar loudest. Reinterpretation of the Koran is such a quicksand, so dangerous to approach, so slippery a subject that most Muslims will not go near.
How can we suggest that a religion based on "submission" to God must itself "submit" to our happy-clappy, all-too-Western " universal human rights"? I don’t know. Especially when we " Christians" have largely failed to condemn some of our own atrocities - indeed, have preferred to forget them.
Take the Christians who massacred the Muslims of Srebrenica. Or take the Christians - Lebanese Phalangist allies of the Israelis - who entered the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut and slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian Muslim civilians.
Do we remember that? Do we recall that the massacres occurred between 16 and 18 September 1982? Yes, today is the 23rd anniversary of that little genocide - and I suspect The Independent will be one of the very few newspapers to remember it. I was in those camps in 1982. I climbed over the corpses. Some of the Christian Phalangists in Beirut even had illustrations of the Virgin Mary on their gun butts, just as the Christian Serbs did in Bosnia.
Are we therefore in a position to tell our Muslim neighbours to "grasp the nettle"? I rather think not. Because the condition of human rights has been so eroded by our own folly, our illegal invasion of Iraq and the anarchy that we have allowed to take root there, our flagrant refusal to prevent further Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank, our constant, whining demands that prominent Muslims must disown the killers who take their religious texts too literally, that we have long ago lost our moral compass.
A hundred years of Western interference in the Middle East has left the region so cracked with fault lines and artificial frontiers and heavy with injustices that we are in no position to lecture the Islamic world on human rights and values. Forget the Amalekites and the Persians and Martin Luther and the Caliph Abu Bakr. Just look at ourselves in the mirror and we will see the most frightening text of all.
© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
enrique.ferro@mailshell.com
TALKING ABOUT KATRINA:
>
A God With Whom I am Not Familiar
By Tim Wise
This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, in
Nashville, at lunchtime, with the Brooks Brothers shirt:
You don't know me. But I know you.
I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the restaurant
where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for your own safety, several hundred
miles away from the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans.
You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to spend the better part of your meal--and mine, since I was too near your table to avoid hearing every word--morally scolding the people of that
devastated city, heaping scorn on them for not heeding the warnings to leave
before disaster struck. Then you attacked them--all of them, without distinction it seemed--for the behavior of a relative handful: those who have looted items like guns, or big screen TVs. >
I heard you ask, amid the din of your colleagues "Amens," why it was that
instead of pitching in to help their fellow Americans, the people of New
Orleans instead--again, all of them in your mind--chose to steal and shoot at relief helicopters. >
I watched you wipe salsa from the corners of your mouth, as you nodded
agreement to the statement of one of your friends, sitting to your right,
her hair neatly coiffed, her makeup flawless, her jewelry sparkling. When
you asked, rhetorically, why it was that people were so much more decent
amid the tragedy of 9-11, as compared to the aftermath of Katrina, she had
offered her response, but only after apologizing for what she admitted was
going to sound harsh.
"Well," Buffy explained. "It's probably because in New Orleans, it seems
to be mostly poor people, and you know, they just don't have the same regard."
She then added that police should shoot the looters, and should have done
so from the beginning, so as to send a message to the rest that theft would
not be tolerated. You, who had just thanked Jesus for your chips and guacamole, said you agreed. They should be shot. Praise the Lord.
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar. >
Two thoughts.
First, it is a very fortunate thing for you, and likely for me, that my two
young children were with me as I sat there, choking back fish tacos and my
own seething rage, listening to you pontificate about shit you know nothing
about.
Have you ever even been to New Orleans? And no, by that I don't mean the New Orleans of your company's sales conference. I don't mean Emeril's New Orleans, or the New Orleans of Uptown Mardi Gras parties.
I mean the New Orleans that is buried as if it were Atlantis, in places like the lower 9th ward: 98 percent black, 40 percent poor, where bodies are floating down the street, flowing with the water as it seeks its own level. Have you met the people from that New Orleans? The New Orleans that is dying as I write this, and as you order another sweet tea? >
I didn't think so. >
Your God--the one to whom you prayed today, and likely do before every meal, because this gesture proves what a good Christian you are--is one with
whom I am not familiar.
Your God is one who you sincerely believe gives a flying fuck about your
lunch. Your God is one who you seem to believe watches over you and blesses you, and brings good tidings your way, while simultaneously letting thousands of people watch their homes be destroyed, and perhaps ten thousand
or more die, many of them in the streets for lack of water or food.
Did you ever stop to think just what a rancid asshole such a God would
have to be, such that he would take care of the likes of you, while letting
babies die in their mother's arms, and old people in wheelchairs, at the
foot of Canal Street?
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar.
But no, it isn't God who's the asshole here, Skip (or Brad, or Braxton, or
whatever your name is).
God doesn't feed you, and it isn't God that kept me from turning around
and >beating your lily white privileged ass today either.
God has nothing to do with it.
God doesn't care who wins the Super Bowl.
God doesn't help anyone win an Academy Award.
God didn't get you your last raise, or your SUV.
And if God is even half as tired as I am of having to listen to self-righteous bastards like you blame the victims of this nightmare for their fate, then you had best eat slowly from this point forward.
Why didn't they evacuate like they were told? >
Are you serious?
There are 100,000 people in that city without cars. Folks who are too poor to own their own vehicle, and who rely on public transportation every day. I know this might shock you. They don't have a Hummer2, or whatever gas-guzzling piece of crap you either already own or probably are saving up for. And no, they didn't just choose not to own a car because the buses are so gosh-darned efficient and great, as Rush Limbaugh implied yesterday, and as you likely heard, since you're the kind of person who hangs on the every word of such bloviating hacks as these.
Why did they loot?
Are you serious? >
People are dying, in the streets, on live television. Fathers and mothers are watching their baby's eyes bulge in their skulls from dehydration, and you are begrudging them some Goddamned candy bars, diapers and water?
If anything the poor of New Orleans have exercised restraint.
Maybe you didn't know it, but the people of that city with whom you likely
identify--the wealthy white folks of Uptown--were barely touched by this storm. Yeah, I guess God was watching over them: protecting them, and rewarding them for their faith and superior morality.
If the folks downtown who are waiting desperately for their government to
send help--a government whose resources have been stretched thin by a war
that I'm sure you support, because you love freedom and democracy--were
half as crazed as you think, they'd march down St. Charles Avenue right now
and burn every mansion in sight. That they aren't doing so suggests a decencyand compassion for their fellow man and woman that sadly people like you lack.
Can you even imagine what you would do in their place?
Can you imagine what would happen if it were well-off white folks stranded
like this without buses to get them out, without nourishment, without hope?
Putting aside the absurdity of the imagery--after all, such folks always have the means to seek safety, or the money to rebuild, or the political significance to ensure a much speedier response for their concerns--can you just imagine?
Can you imagine what would happen if the pampered, overfed corporate class,
which complains about taxes taking a third of their bloated incomes, had to
sit in the hot sun for four, going on five days? Without a Margarita or hotel swimming pool to comfort them I mean?
Oh, and please, I know. I'm stereotyping you. Imagine that. I've assumed,
based only on your words, what kind of person you are, even though I suppose I could be wrong. How does that feel Biff? Hurt your feelings?
So sorry. But hey, at least my stereotypes of you aren't deadly. They won't
effect your life one bit, unlike the ones you carry around with you and
display within earshot of people like me, supposing that no one could
possibly disagree.
But I'm not wrong am I Chip? I know you. I see people like you all the time,
in airports, in business suits, on their lunch breaks. People who will take
advantage of any opportunity to ratify and reify their pre-existing
prejudices towards the poor, towards black folks. You see the same three video loops of the same dozen or so looters on Fox News and you conclude that poor black people are crazy, immoral, criminal.
You, or others quite a bit like you, are the ones posting messages on chat room boards, calling looters sub-human "vermin," "scum," or "cockroaches."
I heard you use the word "animals" three times today: you and that woman across from you--what was her name? Skyler?
What was it you said as you scooped the last bite of black beans and rice into your eager mouth? Like zoo animals? Yes, I think that was it.
Well Chuck, it's a free country, and so you certainly have the right I suppose to continue lecturing the poor, in between checking your Blackberry and dropping the kids off at soccer practice. If you want to believe that the poor of New Orleans are immoral and greedy, and unworthy of support at a time like this--or somehow more in need of your scolding than whatever donation you might make to a relief fund--so be it.
But let's leave God out of it, shall we? All of it.
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar, and I'd prefer to keep it that
way
Tim Wise. He is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a
Privileged Son (http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-932360-68-9).He lived in New Orleans from>1986-1996. He can be reached at timjwise@msn.com