Cobblestones said:
Is that really news? I've always been under the impression that a lot of the GWB middle east policies were guided by some weird belief of bringing along the rapture. It was actually a pretty big point among religious conservatives and it wasn't really kept a secret.
Yes, I agree politics and religion get mixed up sometimes (unfortunately), but some of the posts here were entirely focused on religion.
Of course this isn't news. I was simply being purposefully melodramatic for effect, even though there's nothing melodramatic about the situation given that it is simply the actual state of things and has been now for quite some time.
I have always stated that when religion becomes political we get a public disaster. It was that way with the Neocons under Bush, who prayed together daily at the White House and who believed they were under a divine mission in the Middle East, for hundreds of thousands in the zone; just as it is this way for the equally, but
no different, instrumental use of religion among the Islamic terrorists toward their victims. Naturally if we are to be objective when the political class, or in any case group leadership, believe they have been chosen by God, who then provides justification for their actions (a justification which, naturally, can't be democratically challenged because based on a so called Higher Authority), then we go against every Enlightenment principle upon which the modern democratic State was founded, "modern democratic State" underlined.
And make no mistake about it: when the US military tortures people, when they cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians with their missiles in the interests of the economy, then it behaves like the largest and most destructive international terrorist organization on planet earth. Or when the US multinationals, backed by the political establishment, rape and exploit the resources of a nation for their own immense profit while the local populations starve, because often in the Third World, and/or are repressed by the worst forms of dictatorship that they directly or indirectly support by their business practices: than that corporate establishment, and hence the American government and the people it represents, justifiably rouses the ire of those starving and repressed local populations, who then, in their desperation, are inclined to strike back with any means at their disposal. Many, indeed, have been recruited from such populations in Africa, Southern Asia and the Middle East by Al Qaeda and its affiliates.
Or when the US government unconditionally supports the Israeli State, even when that state breaks every international law in building new colonial residential districts beyond the UN established borders of 48 - at times even diverting what precious little water there is for those illegal developments away from the Palestinians. A local Arab population, moreover, that has been there
historically for the past 1400 years and yet which, to add insult to injury, has been given no
historical recognition by neither America nor the UN in having the right to form their own State as Israel has been permitted. An Israeli State which, furthermore, finds justification in such illegality by allowing the ultra-orthodox faction within the Knesset to bring the necessary pressure to bear on government to approve the colonies in the public (which means political) name of religion; because it claims that their God gave them the land according to their sacred book. But apart from this still being illegal according to international law, it is in addition anti-rational, anti-intellectual and, above all, anti-historical. Yet any criticism of the Israeli State from Westerners about its illegal actions, is immediately branded and conveniently derided as antisemitism. Not only is no State above criticism, but it has become a mystifying alibi. And so the rest of the world looks upon powerless at a
regional problem, which eternally threatens us all with war.
There's no mystery here, for anyone with an objective eye on what has been taking place: namely prepotency in the fullest. Such grave injustices and hypocrisy also comes from a nation that claims the moral high ground, even says acts in the interests of freedom and democracy around the globe and, among some of its leadership, actually believes that it does so on behalf of righteousness and the Lord; which is something quite frankly base and appalling.
If there are so many populations these days that hate America, as I have personally experienced in my travels throughout the world, and therefore would find nothing more pleasurable than doing it harm, that see the Nation as a
mendacious promoter of repression and evil for economic gain: then these are precisely the reasons why.
PS: And I'm not suggesting that there aren't grave problems, crimes and injustices coming from the Arab world - where the worst forms of oppressive totalitarian religious regimes hold power over the State, which are the worst forms of government - but that these things also take place in the US and Israeli body politics. The only difference being that such religious bigotry resides within a democratic State, where at least a modicum of constitutional civility and checks and balances to power still exist. Though these very religious elements in politics today are precisely the same forces that place those democratic principles under threat, as we saw during the Bush administration, and as was demonstrated by the article I referenced above.
One can, of course, go around telling people how to clean up their yards, but only on one condition: that one has cleaned up one's own yard first. Otherwise you merely seem like a vile hypocrite. And this is exactly the problem with the image of America's global leadership in many places around the world today.
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