Paris Reels But Courageously Rallies Against Violence

A couple of weeks ago I met somebody who said she hated Muslims because they kill and torture people. Members of other religions might point fingers, seek political domination over and say insulting things to those whose religion is different but they don’t kill them just because they say or believe something disagreeable.

What about the IRA? I said. And that the problem isn’t the Muslim religion but the seriously psychologically damaged fundamentalists, who kill in the name of Allah.

She argued that I was wrong. The IRA were fighting for independence from the British; they weren’t going into other countries around the world killing, torturing and maiming innocents because they weren’t Catholics. She had a point. And admittedly it’s been a while since the Spanish Inquisition. But hallo, what about the damage done to Iraq on a trumped up justification for war? She didn't want to hear it. Something about Islam, she said, produces these ruthlessly violent, egotistical men who have an absolute absence of general humanity and integrity. Yeah, but what about westerners who open up on a school? I said. Her comeback was quick: they don’t do it in the name of religion.

What’s the big deal about the religion thing, I asked her. No matter what you’re doing violence in the name of you’re still hurting people. She said it’s doing violence in the name of that which stands for peace, love and tolerance; it’s twisting what is good into what is evil and using something that most of us have profound respect for and that many live by as justification for violence.

I don’t like it any more than she does but I argued that it seemed to me to be more complicated than her perspective. Muslims who immigrate to foreign countries in search of a better life and who often aren’t even particularly religious are rejected and relegated to the outskirts of society if they’re poor, which they often are, as are those who are second generation even. That kind of demoralization does a lot to a person and the first thing to fragment into a thousand pieces can be integrity. It can happen to anybody regardless of their religious beliefs. Then fundamentalists provide what’s missing and create such a bond of loyalty that they can easily brainwash their subjects into believing that maiming, torturing and killing is a good thing and that Allah wants them to do it.

Exactly, she said. And are those fundamentalists Christian or Buddhist or Mormon or Protestant? No, they’re not. They emerge from Islam. There’s some kind of underpinning permission for men in it that allows for the emergence of that kind of person.

As there is in the cultures that produced the Mafia, apartheid, white supremacists and the KKK, I said, not to mention the CIA sociopaths. Boiling a problem down to something so one-dimensional doesn’t allow for a helpful solution. If anything, we need to look at what young men are missing that attracts them to that violence; why do we reject them, what is it in us that makes us so scared of them? Is it as basic as “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out”? Could we embrace them instead and find out that if we share, nobody is the loser? If we did, fundamentalist ‘scouts’ wouldn’t have any power over them.

My friend was unconvinced. We parted still arguing but without any desire to level a Kalashnikov or anything at one another. Then a few days later she called me up and said have you seen the news?
In Paris two masked gunmen had burst into the offices of political satire newspaper Charlie Hebdo, that has been firebombed previously for its disrespectful cartoons about Mohammed and Allah. The gunmen slaughtered 12 people - in the name of Allah. Then a policeman was shot dead and Amedy Coulibaly, an ally of the two gunmen Said and Cherif Kouachi, held hostages in a kosher store. Eventually, in separate incidents, the police killed all three, along with some of the kosher store hostages. Horrific.

You see, my friend said, I was right. That conversation went nowhere, too. I’ll admit that I don’t like a religion that’s so prescriptive towards women and not nearly as much towards men or from which has emerged secular law that dictates amputation for stealing, stoning of women who dress incorrectly, execution for blasphemy and the slaughter of your enemies. I think it’s barbaric and I believe it gives men an unnatural entitlement, one that they too often don’t have the integrity to wield for the good of all. That’s just my opinion. But even if Islam is inherently at fault for producing so many violent psychopaths, it also produces millions of peaceful, kind, decent people. Who are as horrified as everybody else. Who want it to stop as much as everybody else. So is Islam a good religion or a bad one? Statistically, it's a good one.

After 9/11 the rage against Muslims in general was frightening. But whilst racism, xenophobia and right-wing radicalism are on the rise everywhere, so is tolerance amongst the level-headed. It’s been impressive to see that so many people at all levels and in so many countries have make the clear distinction between the fundamentalists and Muslims in general while Paris reels.

I've also been so inspired by the courage of Parisians who have made that distinction in the face of such trauma and who have risen en masse to protest just the jihadist violence, as people have in other French cities and around the world.

At the giant rally today were, amongst other leaders, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, the most prominent Muslim leader scheduled to be there, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. At least 3.7 million people marched through Paris. And there was no violence.

I don’t believe that a solution for dealing with jihadism will emerge from believing that the problem is the culture or the religion. And we want a solution, right? We don’t want to perpetuate the hatred.

We highlight the end result of a process and it sticks in our minds because it’s violent and frightening. But until we wake up to the actual process that leads to that end result as it’s happening, nothing’s going to change. And it’s kind of a human thing that we don’t change until the consequences of our own behavior explode in our faces. This I know: we can’t change jihadism, we can’t wipe it out with violence of our own. But we can start to look at impoverished communities where Muslims, immigrants or not, live on the edge without enough support and social enablement. Societies and Governments can do something about that. Build on the love. And while we're about it, we could stop manufacturing guns and tighten laws on gun ownership.

My heart goes out to the families of those killed in Paris. May their loved ones rest in peace.

Fundamentalist Christianity Eroding Humanity in the US; Destroying the GOP

Fundamentalists.  The word raises spectres of all kinds – ignorance, homophobia, chauvinism, dedication to ideas and ideals that are rage-driven, politically affiliated, exclusive of the rights of majority of humanity and narrow in their definition but wildly permissive in execution. Take your pick. Since 9/11 the West, led by a media consumed with lust for big headlines, has mostly attributed fundamentalism to Muslims who are blatantly political and less noticeably religious.

By comparison Christian fundamentalism seems pretty benign and when it started it was, but it has become something pernicious now. It started out in the late 1800s, amongst British and American evangelicals who didn’t want to embrace change and rebelled against the new theological ideas that broke away from traditional interpretations of God, the Bible and the origin of life as industrialization took hold. They had a narrow interpretation of the Bible, and they stuck with it. God was talking directly to the world through a group of men and every word was His word. There were no human errors in it and it was taken literally. 

So, amongst other things, there really was an Ark and Mary was a virgin when Jesus Christ was born. He really did turn water into wine and rise miraculously and very physically from the cross after he was dead. 

Fast-forward to America today. Christian fundamentalism is no more open to new ideas than it ever was before. Now it’s characterised by homophobia, xenophobia and a belief that people are poor because they’re lazy and therefore undeserving of any kind of assistance. Passages in the Bible that seem to support any of these ideas are quoted and those that contradict it are conveniently ignored. 

This peculiar brand of Christianity has become firmly entrenched in politics and in particular the Republican Party, with politicians quoting selectively from the Bible to justify their policies. For example, in May 2013 the House Agriculture Committee convened to discuss cutting $4.1 billion from SNAP – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – by slashing the budget for the Farm Bill which funds SNAP. GOP Congressman Stephen Fincher cited 2 Thessalonians 3:10 to justify his support of slashing the budget: 

“For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” 

These were the words of Paul, a self-confessed blasphemer, persecutor and insolent opponent of Jesus Christ who shifted with the wind and then became a persecutor and insolent opponent of anybody who didn’t agree with Jesus Christ. Bit of a runaway ego there. 

Apart from that and the fact that Fincher chooses a homophobe to guide him, Fincher’s assumption – shared by many Republicans - is that people who are poor are unwilling to work. So let the bastards starve. Let their children go homeless and above all never give them access to decent medical care. No doubt if these Bible thumpers had been alive during the Great Depression they would have also attributed it to just general laziness of the American public.

Interesting that after voting to cut SNAP by more than $20 billion, Fincher supported a proposal to expand crop insurance subsidies by $9 billion over the next 10 years. Even more interesting, Fincher himself is the second largest recipient of farm subsidies in the US. Between 1999 and 2012 he has collected $4.8 million - $70,000 last year alone. The average SNAP ‘handout’ is $1586.40 a year and goes to families whose income is below a certain level. Crop insurance subsidies don’t have income limitations. Payments are direct and according to EWG (Environmental Working Group) “go predominantly to the largest, most profitable farm operations in the country.” 

In December 1.3 million people spent Christmas with an axe over their head as they stood to lose their unemployment benefits by December 28. The House refused to extend the deadline for the benefits ending. A quote from Deuteronomy is appropriate here: 

11 For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’

Not all Republican politicians are heartless bastards, though. Nevada’s Republican Senator Dean Heller has co-sponsored a bill with US Senator Jack Reed to extend the benefits for another 3 months until a compromise can be reached. Whether the House will pass it or not is another matter, but Heller, who is very conservative in many other regards, had this to say: “Providing a safety net for those in need is one of the most important functions of the federal government.” But what chance does he have against fundamentalist Christianity – an oxymoron if ever there was one – that is tearing apart the Republican Party?  

Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said in May 2012 "Conservative people of faith are playing a larger role in shaping the contours and affecting the trajectory of the Republican presidential nomination contest than at any time since they began pouring out of the pews and into the precincts in the late 1970's." Never a truer word was said. They lost that election in 2012 and since then the Tea Party has crucified the Republican job approval rating. 

South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a man of giant stature, wrote a book "God is not a Christian: And Other Provocations". Amen to that. God is definitely not an ignorant, self-serving fundamentalist politician, that’s for sure. Christianity is supposed to be about the best of humanity but the fundamentalists of today have turned it into a very different sort of animal - fundamentally anti-social, heartless, ill-informed and politically divisive. They’re doing the GOP no favors as they turn it into a party that's astonishingly low on good sense and hell-bent on self-destruction. I seriously doubt that up in heaven God, Jesus Christ and even Paul are giving them a standing ovation.

A Sober Barack Obama Wants Action Against Bashar-Al Assad's Use of Chemical Weapons

The war in Syria rages on, with media reporting contradictory stories that masquerade as the truth about what’s really happening. The war in the US rages on; a war of words, emotions and opinions that verge on ludicrous conspiracy theories. Did Bashar-Al Assad use nerve as in an attack on Damascus that left more than 1400 dead, over 400 of them children, or was it the rebels killing their own in a Machiavellian plot to make Assad look bad?

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the attack was an offense and even a crime against humanity and that if the West did nothing Assad could take that as permission to repeat the offense. David Cameron wanted to do something but British MP’s voted him off the stage, although that was before the UN report was released.

Russia and China of course refuse to get involved, and Barack Obama has been fighting a losing battle with Congress and with many US citizens, to take some kind of action. He has repeatedly said that he would wait until he received the UN report and that he was not considering troops on the ground or any kind of action that would lead to long term involvement in Syria’s civil war, but the press continues to use the most dramatic headlines possible, and whatever it is that has underpinned opposition to Obama in the US since he first got elected is feeding off the drama.

It’s par for the course that conservatives in the US don’t listen to his actual words, and conveniently ignore the reality of his actions, just as it’s predictable that they will accuse him of having no backbone no matter what he does.

But the latest is that he’s being compared to GW Bush on the eve of the Iraq war, which is so far from the truth that if it wasn’t tragic it would be laughable. Bush’s intention was clear from the start. Justification for the Iraq war, where there was none, was fabricated on the flimsiest of excuses. Well, patent lies, actually. The US military industrial complex profited immensely as people on both sides got slaughtered. By the time the truth was obvious to Americans it was too late. Not for the military industrial complex of course.

Barack Obama has no intention of creating a war as GW Bush did. He has no intention of indiscriminately involving the US in Syria’s complex civil war. He has openly refused to do so up to this point, and gotten little recognition for it.

But he once said, when criticized for attempting to work with Congress, that he knows perfectly well how to draw a line in the sand, and that when he does he doesn’t back down. He spoke to the press on Friday, having seen the UN assessment which categorically states that Assad used sarin in the Damascus attack. The following is taken from the text of Obama's speech, transcribed by Federal News Service:  

“…This kind of attack threatens our national security interests by violating well-established international norms against the use of chemical weapons, by further threatening friends and allies of ours in the region like Israel and Turkey and Jordan, and it increases the risk that chemical weapons will be used in the future and fall into the hands of terrorists who might use them against us. So I have said before, and I meant what I said, that the world has an obligation to make sure that we maintain the norm against the use of chemical weapons.”

“…But again, I repeat, we’re not considering any open-ended commitment. We’re not considering any boots-on-the-ground approach. What we will do is consider options that meet the narrow concern around chemical weapons, understanding that there is not going to be a solely military solution to the underlying conflict and tragedy that’s taking place in Syria [my italics]. And I will continue to consult closely with Congress. In addition to the release of the unclassified documents, we are providing a classified briefing to congressional staffs today, and we’ll offer that same classified briefing to members of Congress as well as our international partners. And I will continue to provide updates to the American people as we get more information.”

For this he’s recently been accused of trying to save face. I guess when you don’t want to see the truth of a man you won’t see it no matter what. Obama hasn’t said yet what action the US should take. But he’s being blasted from all sides as if he had openly and aggressively declared war and said let’s kill the bastards. Frankly, the idea that nerve gas can be used indiscriminately by a lunatic like Assad and get away with it unnerves me. But what’s more unnerving is how many people in the West are quite happy to let him get away with it because it’s not on their doorstep. Yet. And maybe because it’s about Middle Easterns.

A lot of the comments left on recent New York Times articles about Obama’s desire to take some kind of action have been of the nature “let the Syrians kill each other, they’re all violent criminals anyway”.

So much for global humanity. The callousness of conservative Americans is nauseating. They’ve forgotten – as they forget anything that contradicts their current fantastical theory, whatever it is – that the original rebels didn’t initially commit the atrocities; they just fought for their freedom. It was when they got utterly desperate and particularly when foreign, fundamentalist elements came in to support them, that atrocities started being committed on both sides.

What conservatives in the West are too short-sighted to see is that if Assad has stockpiles of chemical weapons and he uses them and nobody in the West takes him to task, a precedent has been set. And if – or maybe I should say when - fundamentalists get hold of them, hallo international terror all over again but on a much bigger and more horrifying scale than ever before. If Obama doesn’t take action now – moderate action, as he’s proposing - what will they say then? If they’re alive to say anything at all.

NRA Gun Fundamentalists Use the Connecticut Shooting for a Sales Pitch

The other day it was with a kind of ghoulish fascination that I watched LaPierre speak about how the only way to deal with the gun violence is with more guns. My fascination lasted a few seconds and then I couldn’t stand any more. Any more than I can stand to watch a film with cardboard cut-out characters being badly acted, badly filmed and badly directed.

In the entertainment world it’s annoying. When it’s reality it’s a violation of everything in you that values what is good about humanity. That level of corruption of the soul is beyond description. Of course he was making a sales pitch. Horrifying that the NRA would use the Connecticut shooting to aggrandize themselves even more.

I don’t think LaPierre achieved what he was hoping to, though. 4.3 million Americans love their guns and want the right to own them and use them. Much bigger numbers are fixated with armed conflict and domination and military might in the movies, games and TV shows. But how many of them actually want it in their daily lives?

I suspect not that many, not enough to carry the NRA on a tidal wave that will wash over the whole of America and turn it into a military state, which is what LaPierre was promoting. What he really achieved was to expose the NRA leadership for what they are – rabid, gun fundamentalists who will stop at nothing to gain power. And make a buck.

The gun lobby has developed huge political clout in America. Gun manufacturers have had and are having a heyday, providing the stock for criminals, gangsters and drug lords within America and beyond its borders. As the violence has spread into what used to be safe areas, the NRA has insidiously spread its message of the right to bear arms.

As if it had nothing to do with the gun and arms manufacturing industry. Painting itself as an angel of deliverance when in fact it’s in bed with the devil incarnate. Grossly but expertly manipulating fear amongst people not noted for their ability to think particularly rationally. Keeping politicians in power who do their bidding. 

Leaders who spearhead fundamentalism are social predators. They always understand how vulnerable their prey is, and where their weak spots are. With the accuracy of heat-seeking missiles they hone in on fears that are understandable and not completely unrealistic, like a parent needing to protect their child, and work them into paranoia. 

They mix liberal doses of national pride with an historical passion for guns that probably has its roots in a highly romanticized Wild West and feed it to a middle class that is struggling to survive and fast losing a status quo that’s been their identity for generations. The internet and all media are wonderful tools to spread the diseased word.

The NRA has succeeded in its mission with some, and that’s frightening enough, but they’re out of touch with the majority of their membership. LaPierre and all the rabids who back him cooked their own goose when they used massacred children and teachers to market themselves. That’s so way over the line of decency that even passionate gun owners are disgusted. 

It’s a scary world now, with so many psychopaths and twisted cults, so many guns and assault weapons in the hands of the violent and spiritually disabled. So much understanding of how to manipulate minds and so many different media outlets to do it with, a fertile and utterly uncontrollable internet. A resurgance of prejudice and fear.

But somehow, what is noble in the human spirit always rises through the muck. 

It’s the most remarkable thing.