What do you do when you don't agree with your uncle's way of life?
If you're members of al Qaeda, you kill him, and his wife, while his children watch. If he's committing crimes as serious as wearing Western-style clothing and you suspect that he's omitting his prayers, you believe that you are completely justified in acting in this way.
The only good news in the Reuters article is that many Iraqis have had enough, and are taking steps to rid themselves of the menace that is al Qaeda:
Sunni Arab communities across Iraq have been turning against al Qaeda because of its indiscriminate killings and strict interpretation of Islam, which includes a ban on smoking in public and forcing schoolgirls to wear veils.Sunni Arab tribal sheikhs have been organizing their young men into neighborhood police units to drive out al Qaeda, a practice which U.S. and Iraqi officials say has helped bring down violence levels across Iraq.
Security operations by U.S. and Iraqi troops have also been targeting al Qaeda in ethnically and religiously mixed Diyala in recent months after the Sunni Islamist fighters were driven out of western Anbar province.
Anyone who seriously believes that "Christianists" are as much of a threat to liberty and justice as radical Islamic terrorists are probably hasn't been paying attention.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
There is a certain party which always believes we are just on the very verge of losing all our freedoms and falling under the "Whatever It Is This Decade" Oppression.
When I was in high school "the Communists" were the Oppressors Du Jour. I lived in very conservative Orange County California, and many of my friends and the parents of my friends were members of the John Birch Society (a bunch of wackos if ever there was one). They were all in the kind of hysteria ds0490 illustrates: our freedoms are being taken from us even as we speak! The Communists are everywhere, undermining the republic! They have infiltrated to The Highest Levels!
After that it was the Nixon White House (with the FBI in its camp) or the Weathermen (according to your preference).
Now dso490 thinks it's the "Christianists", whoever that may be.
(In the 19th Century for a while there it was The Catholic Church.)
I'm not suggesting that the Communist Party or the Nixon White House or the Weathermen or even the "Christianists" are not at least a potential threat to our liberties. Of course they are. Or were. (I even had my phone tapped, back in the day, illegally of course, by the second threat in that list. I hope the FBI had fun listening to all our somewhat addled conversations.)
But Erin is not being youthfully naive, Erin is being sophisticated beyond her years when she has the sense to see that whatever the internal threat to our liberties (real or fancied or both), this Republic has withstood many such threats, and will undoubtedly survive this one too. (I can't even figure out who these "Christianists" ARE, but to tell the truth I had the same problem with the "Communists" back in the day. No one at the John Birch Society could define that term to my satisfaction, and I was only 16!)
These frights come and go. Mostly they come. I see no hard evidence whatever that we're going down before this one. Now don't rush in and tell me all about Gitmo or Homeland Security watching us, OK? I didn't say everything was perfect, I said we'll survive this one with our liberties intact, and we'll beat back the forces which would oppress us, yet again, as we always have.
Also, little is accomplished by running about calling names.
In my opinion, the appropriate comparison is to our Civil War, and WWII. In each case, our government saw fit to enforce significant reductions to civil liberties. In each case, it was done by explicit legislation or executive order, discussion of it -- and vocal opposition to it -- was rife, and it was rescinded when the objective threats diminished or were removed.
What we have today is significantly different. We have no objective threat against which to pin a formal declaration of war or anything else -- the "war" on terror is propaganda that cannot be supported by objective journalism; the ramping up to the present curtailment of civil liberties -- using the standard* that if one person is denied his civil rights, we are all at risk of the same -- is perfectly described by the frog in the pot metaphor; and while Bush and his staff certainly cannot be blamed for inventing it, they have certainly perfected the use of secrecy and suppression of objective journalism in their quest to do whatever it is they are doing -- that secrecy being complete, and we being left to know only what they choose to tell us.
* I avoid using other people's holy texts, especially out of context, if only out of respect for the fact that it is not only not my holy text, but I am unlikely to understand it to the extent I should. In this case, I will just humbly refer Christians to Matthew 25:41-46, and ask that they comment on whether national security is sufficient justification for the denial of civil rights to just one person.
Yeh, but Franklin, they did the very same thing around the "Cold War," another ill-defined, non-declared, piece of mostly propaganda. This went on for decades. When did it start? (1945? 1946 (Yalta)? 1918? 1889 (Haymarket)? When will it end? What exactly is going on here? Is it foreign? Is it domestic (the Communist-under-every-bed theory)?
The Struggle Against International Communism (a fiction to start with, seeing how poorly Russia and China seemed to be getting along with each other) was held to justify all the same ugly behavior by the Defenders of Freedom: torture, unauthorized wire-tapping, taking pictures at legal demonstrations so you can persecute the attendees later; auditing the tax returns of your political opponents (we haven't got to that one yet this time around, but we may soon), discrediting perfectly loyal citizens so as to deprive them of their livelihood (ditto).
Was all this "rescinded when the 'objective' threats were removed"? Well, not really, what happened was that domestic resistance to this kind of tyranny arose and was largely effective before the fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Russia.
I believe that our real enemy now is not the Islamists or the "Christianists" (whoever that may be), just as our most dangerous enemy in the 1950's was not Communist Infiltration. The enemy of our freedoms is, as usual, our own government. (Is that who the "Christianists" are? I'm confused.)
We need to continue to demand that our traditional freedoms from government interference are maintained regardless of what chimerical threats are conjured up to justify compromising them. I believe that we are, and that we will. This isn't the first threat on this front, and it won't be the last. Eternal vigilance and all that.
You have an excellent point about the "Cold War", Susan. Our worst enemy truly is ourselves, and the loss of vigilance in those to whom we delegate the powers invested in us by the founders. I submit, however, one thing for your consideration: who was it who started the downfall of McCarthy and HUAC? Was it a new president with an executive order? Was it a Congress finally getting it's collective asses out of their seats and taking McCarthy's gavel away?
No. It was journalism. One of the most important pieces of historical reenactment ever made is the movie "Good Night, and Good Luck". It should be required viewing in every civics classroom... if there were any left in this country, that is. I see no such thing happening in the corrupted world of Fox "News" and reporting by opinion and comment. The importance of "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" is their dead-on scathing critique of modern journalism. Our best weapon against corruption has itself succumbed to corruption. We are ripe for a popular uprising, not that I am hopeful of such a thing happening.
:-(
Franklin, I don't know much about journalism. But wasn't it the Boston Globe who brought down the Catholic Church? They acted like a bunch of jackals, but don't journalists always do that? It seems to me that they did us a public service. Why do you think journalism has "succumbed to corruption"?
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.