Remember Farfour, the Hamas TV version of Mickey Mouse, who taught children about the evil of the Jews, and how they ought to get guns and take care of business? Well, today on Hamas TV, Farfour was beaten to death by an Israeli official trying to buy his land. No kidding, the producers decided to kill the children's character by having an actor playing an Israeli murder the mouse:
"Farfour was martyred while defending his land," said Sara, the teen presenter. He was killed "by the killers of children," she added.
This is beyond pathological.
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" But I don't plan on imposing my beliefs on you or anyone else at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun." You do precisely that by proxy. The American taxpayer imposes Bush's nominally Christian beliefs on the larger Middle East via the poorly paid all-volunteer US military and the larger army of well-paid mercenaries and arms dealers.
This is the war that Rod Dreher and other nominally Christian journalists howled for from the pages of the main-stream newspapers after 9-11. This is also the war that was condemned by the pope. This is the war that the Methodist bishops implored Bush not to start. This is the war that Franklin Graham cheered for after 9-11.
No, you don;t impose your beliefs at the tip of the sword or the barrell of a gun. That's way too messay and tactile for today's 'crunchy conservative' It's much less messy to have someone else impose your will with cruise missiles and stealth bombers.
Bill, the argument of moral equivalency is bankrupt. There is no comparison. The US does not teach irs children to hate. the US does not send its children on "martyr's missions."
It was bullcrap like Farfour that brainswashed 19 hate-filled bastards to murder 3,000 American on 9-11.
Please show me the U.S. equivalent of Farfour and the Madrassas schools where hate and intolerance are passed on to grade school kids, because otherwise, you don't have an argument worth spit.
"The US does not teach irs children to hate."
Why "Islamaphobia" then?
"the US does not send its children on "martyr's missions."
Rod,
Our children are in Iraq on a martyr's mission. A cowardly fool's mission.
"It was bullcrap like Farfour that brainswashed 19 hate-filled bastards to murder 3,000 American on 9-11."
And it was fertilizer like yours than convinced (and convinces) the American public that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9-11.
"Please show me the U.S. equivalent of Farfour and the Madrassas schools where hate and intolerance are passed on to grade school kids, because otherwise, you don't have an argument worth spit."
We don't need overt hatred and intolerance to get our kids to kill; we have cool, disspassionate 'Christians' who convince their children to kill causally with high-tech weaponry in the name of God and country. You don't have Abu Graib and extraordinary without children who have learned the lessons of hatred and intolerance from their elders.
Boy oh boy Bugg, I don't mean to call you flat-out wrong... but I can't think of a way to finish that sentence.
First of all, the murderers of 9/11 killed 3,000 innocent people NOT because they were Christians but because they were Americans. We both know a lot of Jews and even some Muslims were killed in 9/11. You committed the fallacy of "false cause"... again.
Second, Egypt is still about 5-10% Coptic; although their treatment isn't perfect, most Copts are comforable (I've spent time in Egypt too, Bugg) Many of them serve in government and are prominent members of Egyptian society like Onsi Sawiris, the richest man on the continent of Africa.
Third, your grouping a very small group of psychopaths with the overwhelming majority of Muslims, be they in Palestine where I am or in other places in the Middle East, is beyond ludicrous. They simply want to raise their family in peace and economic stability. They don't speak out because they are afriad of that tiny minority. You cite the desire of a mass exodus from the Middle East by the Christians? Well, let me tell you, you give a Muslim the chance to come over and get a job and raise his kids in peace in the US, with very few exceptions, every one will accept. The murderers of 9/11 were too late in the game - already been brainwashed. They are not the preserve of Muslims though!
I will agree with you that Islam is not a "religion of peace" and if push came to shove, many of them would have to agree as well. Furthermore, "peace" is a culturally relative term; it shouldn't be, but it is. In the West, peace is the absence of war. In the East, it is the fullest manifestation of Justice on a societal level, and this means everyone must be in "the club" of Islam, to a certain extent. Their prophet Muhammad accounts for Christians as "ahl al kitab" or "people of the book," rather, people who should be relatively left alone and not systematically slughtered. Islam is not about "love thy neighbor and turn the other cheek" but about "all must submit to the one indivisible God, by any means necessary." But these precepts, at the beginning of this past century were starting to fizzle out with the advent of the modernate. Unfortunately, there has been a wild resurgence that is only exacerbated by the past century of colonialism (and neo-colonialism), Zionism and and profound economic poverty which have resulted.
Theologically, you need to go back and doublecheck St Paul, wherever you extracted that. For 2000 years of Christian history, we've been unable to exactly put our finger on what the nature of Christ is, to the point that we see on both the individual level, and the ecclesiastical level, a return of many of the ancient heresies. There are morons today who dabble in Arianism and believe Christ earned his divinity; there are vestages of Nestorianism and Monophysite churches who don't agree on Christ's nature; there are Mormons who don't recognize the Trinity in the Nicean sense. There are Unitarians, Quakers and Scientologists who trivialize the divinity of Christ. Now, I'm sure you think I'm bolstering your claim, however, what you ultimately are getting at is the affirmation of orthodox Christianity -as defined by Nicea, Calcedon and Constantinople. Fair enough, I agree with you there, I'm an orthodox Roman Catholic. But your point with the Muslims is invalid based on the precept that Christ, according to Islam, can do all the things we say he did AS A PROPHET - and a miraculous one at that, born of a virgin as well. St Paul, who wrote 500 years before the emergence of Islam, wrote to ex-Pagan and Jewish readers who might have initially had written Christ off as another one of those run-of-the-mill scripture thumping hacks.
Bugg, I'm sure you're a wonderful person to be around and are excellent at whatever it is you do, but I think you need to read up a little more, or travel to the Mid East, for you to make such blanket cultural, political and theological claims.
Scott R.: Are you insane? Most of my posts have been perfectly civil, serious and cogent. Even the one you're crazily referring to, although brief, consists of a pertinent and non-insulting assertion.
Rod, it's a straw man to ask me to defend what you're criticizing in your original post; relatedly, that's why I think you're simple black and white criticism of it is insupportable. What one is dealing with in Palestine is a society that has had its psychological wires snipped and gummed and rearranged for more than 50 years by external forces vastly stronger than itself (not to mention physical damage to persons, e.g., malnutrition, poverty, land grabs, and deaths). There is _enormous_ validity to their anger and grievances from their POV -- and to their dysfunctions from any fair exterior POV. (It's very analagous to the blacks in America who are descended from slaces, even though in my opinion enough time and efforts have gone toward helping them that I give them much less of a free pass.)
It's morally and intellectually a cop-out for you to do the easy, self-righteous, self-satisfied thing and just wag your finger at this childrens' TV show, which is just one of the wretched spars tearing at the pathetic fabric of a culture to which the Palestinians have been reduced.
The fact that Palestinians (like, to a lesser extent, black slave-descended Americans) have failed to resist falling into all the dysfuntions that now mar them is tragic, but if one possesses any moral humility than one will realize that it's not possible to know oneself would act if subjected to exactly the same conditions that have greeted each Palestinian born since the 1950s.
What is needed is not facile judgments but slow, steady, incremental work. If you love Israel so much, and reprehend Palestinians activities so much, then do something to change it for the better.
-O
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