Christian terrorism: possible?

A ‘Christian suicide bomber’ attempted to blow up his car at an alleged abortion clinic on Tuesday by ramming his vehicle through the doors of the buidling and soaking it in gasoline. At the last moment, he decided not to light himself or his car on fire. Second degree arson is the charge.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment: A ‘Muslim suicide bomber’ attempted to blow up his car at a church on Tuesday by ramming his car through the doors and soaking it in gasoline. At the last moment, he decided not to light himself or his car on fire.

What do you expect the charge would be in that case? Still second degree arson? Or would Homeland Security have ushered him off in secrecy to a black site somewhere? Would he be in Cuba, in Eastern Europe, in Turkey? Would he have the right to counsel? Almost certainly not. We must ask ourselves why this man is not being classified as a terrorist — what specifically about his actions or his religion are excusing him from the horrid death sentence label of Terrorist?

Is it because he failed to light himself on fire or blow up his car? Certainly he had still done material damage to the façade of the building. Additionally, the administration glories in telling us of terrorist plots it disrupts when they are still in the planning stage, long before the perpetrators could have dreamt of driving a car into a building.

Is it because this is an alleged abortion clinic (in truth, it did not perform abortions)? Is it because this man is a Christian, or an American citizen? No sensible person would excuse him from the Label simply because he is a Christian, that’s simply prejudice. And American citizens have been held and extradited in the aforementioned fashion, as well as stripped of their Constitutional guarantees with the execution of a simple rubber stamp.

Or is it some other reason? Perhaps it is because he is a Christian, and perhaps this nation is so black-and-white, so prejudiced and so consumed of the “Us versus Them” mentality that they refuse to believe that one of their own could possibly be a Terrorist. A good chunk of the American populace, as well as the District Attorney responsible for charging this man, should rethink their arguments.

Confirming what we already knew

The New York Times is reporting today on a leaked intelligence report which confirms what we all (on the Left) already knew: that the war in Iraq has decidedly exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, international terrorism. The report, detailed to the Times by twelve government employees, all talking under condition of anonymity, is the work of sixteen separate administration intelligence agencies.

Two comments: First of all, I laud the Times for reporting this. Despite the fact the report was Classified information (highly classified, almost certainly), it’s of dire importance that the American people know they are being decieved by their leadership. (Additionally, the details leaked are entirely vague and nonthreatening to “national security.” All that has come to light is that the administration has made a grave mistake, and these several separate agencies all know it. The article leaks no security secrets, or anything that would be aiding the enemy — as I suspect Bush will claim while denouncing our free press.)

Bush and his cronies have long portrayed the war in a highly favorable light, through rose-colored glasses, and have refused to acknowledge any regrets or anything they would do differently, had they another chance.

My second point is that the confirmation of our fears is somewhat bittersweet. We on the left undoubtedly feel the shameful joy of being vindicated in our shouts of “Told you so,” but it is unfortunate we had to be right about a claim with such dire consequences. The world, it appears, has indeed been stirred to action, the opposite action we were hoping for. Much of the Muslim world is united against us, because of our foreign policy.

Now it’s no secret, and the administration will have a tough time explaining this one away. Sixteen separate American spy agencies have come to a “unanimous” conclusion, as the Times put it. The war, meant to combat terrorism — indeed, “taking the war to the enemy” — has been a colossal disaster, a mistake costing hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and worsening the problem it sought to alleviate. And the administration has no regrets.

Religion + Reason

The Pope, after railing against Islam about a month ago, went on to call Christianity the merging of religion and reason. I scoff.

Jesus calls a starving Canaanite woman a dog and refuses to feed her.

Because I worked last Sunday, everyone in my town should stone me to death.

If a woman is raped in the city, she is killed. If she is raped in the country, she marries the man.

Do these sounds like the recommendations of a ‘reasonable’ ethic? Lord, no! These are ridiculous instructions, contradicted by the slightest minutia of rational thought, yet this is what the Bible tells its adherents. Religion and reason, you will find, are relegated to two entirely different realms of reality. It is impossible for them to ever meet.

There is a God, whom I should believe in with no further proof than a seventeen-hundred year old book with forty authors and God knows how many different translations. (Are they all the word of God?) What’s reasonable about this?

Is the Pope Infallible?

The Pope is God’s representative on Earth, as Catholics believe. Is he infallible? If something can get lost in transition from God to man, then it opens the door to arguments against Biblical Inerrancy, as well. Catholics and Fundamentalists had better be sure to defend the Pope’s infallibility, lest they loose the sacredness of their own beloved tome.

But, then, why would the Pope have to apologize? Does that imply he made a mistake? Well, if you read his apology carefully, he says that he is sorry people got offended, not that he is sorry he said the words in the first place. This merely shifts the blame to the Muslims who took offense. It doesn’t imply any wrongdoing on the Pontiff’s part.

Besides, let’s step into a Christian — Catholic — mindset for a second: If the Pope is God’s agent on earth, and God is acting through him, then, yes, he is infallible as the Lord Himself. If he does anything at all, it is God’s will. Alright, step back out.

It’s easy for Fundamentalists to throw up that veil and hide behind it. All but the best metaphysical arguments or attempted resolutions to the Problem of Evil can simply say, “It’s God’s will,” and leave it at that. How silly of us humans to attempt to decipher God’s divine logic with our puny “rational” minds. We must submit unquestioningly to God’s will.

If the Pope were infallible, we would never know it.

A Third Revival

Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln’s strongest supporters were religious people “who saw life in terms of good and evil” and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.

Casting the world in black and whites, in “good and evil,” is a gross truncation of logic, or, rather, an utter ignorance and scathing betrayal of logic. The tendency to do just that is a side effect of strong religious faith — it is one of the reasons people seek religion, for easy answers to hard questions.

People don’t want to consider that terrorists are humans with the same feelings and motives as we, that they legitimately feel victimized, and that maybe, just maybe it’s not our “freedom” but our foreign policy that shapes their beliefs.

You will find few strict dichotomies in the real world, just like you will find few absolutes. To jump to conclusions, to exaggerate, to hastily label: these habits have no place in civil and constructive rhetoric. It is unfortunate, indeed, that our President would resort to such tactics and — more sadly — that they would find broad appeal and acceptance in the populace. I just ask that you take a step back and analyze things.

Hindsight is 20/20

The U.S. invasion “was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it again, we would do exactly the same thing,” [Cheney] said.

I would like to think that that’s a metaphorical defense — that we would remove Saddam from power, and remove his oppressive regime and all that, but that the intricacies would be better planned.

If, however, Cheney does me that we would do the exact same thing, he means that, knowing what we know now, we would have no qualms about plunging a country into chaos, or igniting a bloodbath that, while short of civil war, is widespread and anarchic. And we’d also kill an estimated hundred thousand civilians. Knowing what we know now, those were all good choices. And we’d gladly do it all over again.

Black Sites

The recent admission of the existence of CIA Black Sites — secret prisons — is sweet and sour. It is refreshing that the President will, after he has come around, tell the truth. The reverse, however, also holds — to come clean, he has to have at first lied.

(Add it to the laundry list of misleading or blatantly false statements: Iraq and 9/11, Katrina and the levees, NSA wiretapping, “We do not torture,” etc.)

Still, the President came down in defense of the prisons, saying they are ‘necessary tools’ in the war on terror. Are secret prisons necessary tools in the war on crime here at home? What advantage to secret sites have?

Let us deal in extremes for a moment: Which is more effective: building a monolithic and oppressive structure on a hilltop that proclaims, “If you attack us, you will go there,” or conducting our war and quietly shuffling off the enemy combatants, under cover of darkness and without a nod to their whereabouts to somewhere underground and ignored? Granted, it may be more ominous for the enemy to realize that they will be hidden and their wellbeing unbeknownst to the outside world, but I insist that, as with criminals at home, it’s more effective for terrorists to have prisons to look forward to.

But that’s okay, our administration has done both — with Abu Ghraib as a regrettably all-too-visible prison, and now our Black Sites are in the open as well. Both sides of this coin — the visible and the invisible were executed poorly by the administration: although the latter should have never been attempted, the former was an exercise in gross abuse of power.

Although it is refreshing for the President to come clean, it is still unfortunate to have had this situation to own up to.

World Development Aid

I have previously commented on the United States’ failure to contribute the requested 0.7 per cent of its GDP to the United Nations for international development. It seems the idea has run headlong into fierce opposition here in the States, and has been painted as an unnecessary and draconian ‘tax’ implemented by an authority outside the jurisdiction of a national government.

That’s true to some extent, just as it is true that judges are unelected. But there are few in government who do not, at some point, answer to an elected official. Judges in many local municipalities, for example, are elected directly. At higher levels, like at the Supreme Court, judges are nominated by the elected President, questioned by the elected legislature, and then voted on democratically by our elected representatives. Your government in action, people. Though it is true the judges may be a step or two removed from the democratic process, they ultimately are chosen by the people. Republicans thusly have no one to blame for the ‘tyranny of the judges’ except for the people.

Our representative to the United Nations, John Bolton, underwent similar rigors, for which the Democrats were criticized, when he was nominated to represent this country to the world. He was nominated by the elected President and withstood the interrogation of the elected legislature, and sent as an emissary to the world stage. The United States, with its powerful standing in the United Nations, should have the power, one would think, to prevent something like this “tax” from coming into existence. As well, this is nary a tax in the traditional sense — there have been no penalties for our repeated failure to pay, there are no jack-booted thugs coming to repossess our cars. The chest beating and shouting is nothing but a symbolic gesture against a demi-authority that has time and again proven itself impotent. The people have nothing to fear but right-wing demagoguery.

In spite of my point thus far, I find it somewhat atrocious that the government has not seen fit to donate such a scant portion of its Gross Domestic Product to international aid.

Economist Lord P. T. Bauer, said, “The argument that aid is indispensable for development runs into an inescapable dilemma. If the conditions for development other than capital are present, the capital required will either be generated locally or be available commercially from abroad to governments or to businesses. If the required conditions are not present, then aid will be ineffective and wasted.”

But I contest this statement — oftentimes what is lacking is knowledge of the vicious Zero Sum game of capitalism that the West requires for survival. Africans may very well have the land to farm, but to assert that wealth will spring forth spontaneously from natural resources — when the truth is that these people are, if productive and knowledgeable, certainly the target of robber barons and economic tyrants — is absurd. You cannot expect a person to be born into this world with Wealth of Nations ingrained in their mind and an intimate knowledge of the world’s market economy. It is very much possible — and observable today — that a wealth of resources and a dearth of only capital will not necessarily generate capital in the magical inerrant Free Market way that the Right so dearly wishes it would. The fact that sweatshops in, say, Mexico have been set up at incredible rates in recent decades has led to an influx of capital into the region, but not the development of the local populace. Arguably, it has increased the amount of poverty.

One need only look around to see that the third world, left to the West’s Free Market devices, does not benefit. The need for aid and, perhaps more so, education, remains. And the United States’ reluctance to provide aid for the basic needs and development of foreign countries belies its claim to compassion.

Too much of a good thing

http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=pressreleases&agId=Eeohhs2&prModName=dphpressrelease&prFile=pr_060829_nicotine.xml

A study conducted by the state government of Massachusetts involving data collected on cigarettes over the past several years revealed some disturbing trends. Cigarette makers are tailoring their cigarette filters to fool government benchmarking machines, for example.

As well, makers have been drastically increasing the amount of nicotine cigarettes contain, generally regarded as their most addictive ingredient. Between the years 1998 and 2004, the amount of nicotine in cigarettes surveyed increased ten percent on average.

So, while funding anti-smoking campaigns (which seems odd from a legal perspective — being fined to produce marketing campaigns that act against your very financial livelihood), cigarette makers have been attempting to cut their losses and reinvigorate their bottom line by hooking smokers all the more. Hey, it’s just capitalism.

Philosopher kings

Jon Bon Jovi on Larry King described Al Gore as funny, intelligent, and a great conversationalist when the cameras weren’t rolling. In fact, he described Gore as one of the smartest men he’d ever met.

He then remembered a poll taken during the 2000 election that asked whom the electorate would rather share a beer with between Bush and Gore. Bon Jovi contested that this was an altogether wrong way to assess a man running for President. “I don’t want to share a beer with my candidate,” he said, “I want to stand in awe of my candidate.”

I wholeheartedly agree with Bon Jovi: that intelligence and intellectual pursuit should be valued in a candidate above beer-drinking likeability. Perhaps that identifies me as a cookie-cutter East Coast liberal.

The debate here is a potentially good and revealing one. For example, my idyllic philosopher king (an aristocrat of Plato’s Republic) could be chided for the same reason Bush was lambasted for flying over post-Katrina New Orleans in Air Force one, thousands of feet above the real suffering. Would my philosopher king have to trade compassion and street-smarts for his intellect? Would he necessarily be aloof and disconnected from the people, in an ivory tower (presumably on the East Coast)?

There is no question that I would rather have an informed and rational president than one who can get by on the image of drinking beer with his base. But I am similarly convinced that a leader should be able to relate to the populace. Perhaps a common man who possessed a singular intellect and interest in intellectual pursuits, and had legitimately risen from the working class to the highest office in the land is a perfect compromise. For now, I’ll file this under conundrum.