“Owning The Monstrosities Of Our Past”: Obama Was Right To Compare Christianity’s Violent Past To The Islamic State
Conservative critics are in hysterics thanks to a few short remarks made by President Barack Obama on the subject of Christian history during Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast. Addressing religiously motivated conflict abroad, Obama said, “Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Naturally, conservatives were displeased with the suggestion that Christianity might be in some sense comparable to contemporary religious terrorism. At RedState, a contributor adduced Obama’s comments as further evidence of the president’s alleged fondness for Islam, while Rush Limbaugh interpreted the remarks as an insult to Christianity and a defense of radical Islam. Former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore said, “The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” adding that Obama “has offended every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.”
Critics who viewed Obama’s speech as a bold defense of Islam seem to have missed the segment wherein he labeled the Islamic State a “vicious death cult,” and offered its horrific acts of terrorism as evidence of the evil that can be done in the name of (admittedly distorted) faith. The example of past Christian atrocities was given only to counterbalance the reproach aimed at religiously motivated violence committed outside the Christian world; it was not a stand-alone condemnation, and further, it did not go nearly as far as it could have.
By limiting his criticism of Christian violence to the Crusades and Inquisition, Obama kept his critique of Christian horrors to centuries past. But one need not look back so far to find more recent Christians behaving terribly in the name of Christ. The atrocities of the Bosnian War, including the systematic rape of women and girls, was perpetrated largely by Christians against Muslims; meanwhile, many of the Christian churches of Rwanda were intimately involved in the politicking that produced the genocide of 1994, with some clergy even reported to have participated in the violence.
The degree to which, in retrospect, we are willing to condemn violent perversions of faith often has to do with their proximity to us. Most will now admit, however grudgingly, that the Crusades and Inquisition were efforts to carry out some construal of God’s will, however mistaken and otherwise motivated. With more recent conflicts, such as Bosnia and Rwanda, we are more apt to see Christianity as a single thread in a web of ethnic and political tensions that was ultimately only one cause among the many that ultimately culminated in brutality. And this analysis is probably right.
But it is also probably true of the terrorism perpetrated by ISIS, which has been roundly denounced as contrary to the principles of Islam by a host of Muslim leaders and clerics, most recently after the murder of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Like war crimes and individual acts of brutality committed within the Christian world, the pattern of tensions that has produced ISIS, in all its unthinkable cruelty, seems to be broader and deeper than its self-proclaimed religious convictions. For those not searching for a source of personal offense, this is the only point Obama’s remarks on the religious violence enacted by Christians really conveys.
And it is, at last, a hopeful point: If we in the Christian world are capable of owning the monstrosities of our past, identifying their sources as multivalent and contrary to our faith, and holding one another accountable for the behavior we exhibit moving forward, then so are the members of the faiths we live alongside in the world. But accountability requires honesty, and pretending that Christians have never attributed violence to the cause of Christ is a disservice to modern peacemaking and to the victims of the past. Obama was right to take a clear-eyed view of the years that have come before, and to look hopefully to what we can do together as a multi-faith nation in the years to come.
By: Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, The New Republic, February 6, 2015
“A Triumph Of American Culture Welcoming Immigrants”: Why Republican Fear-Mongering About France Is Detached From Reality
One frequent criticism conservatives make of Barack Obama when it comes to terrorism is that he doesn’t “understand” the threats we face. This supposed lack of understanding, they say, is what leads the President to be so weak when what is needed is more strength, more military action, more belligerence. Those who “understand” terrorism know that this is the only path to combating it effectively.
With the attacks in Paris last week, conservatives and Republicans are again asserting that Obama’s lethal combination of ignorance and weakness is leaving us vulnerable, because terrorist incidents like the ones in France are soon to occur here in America. For instance, here’s an excerpt from a glowing story about John McCain in today’s New York Times:
He said in an interview last Thursday that Mr. Obama’s decision not to send more American troops to Iraq to thwart the Islamic State had put America at risk.
“That attack you saw in Paris? You’ll see an attack in the United States,” Mr. McCain said. He repeated his frequent assessment that the president’s foreign policy is “a disaster” and “delusional.” He said “of course” he would have made a better commander in chief.
Let’s follow the logic here. McCain is arguing that because we don’t have enough troops in Iraq, someone could get some guns and shoot a bunch of Americans — presumably at ISIS’s behest — whereas if we had more troops there, ISIS would still want to launch (or order, or encourage, or inspire) that kind of an attack, but they wouldn’t be able to.
So what exactly does McCain think was required for those two men to attack the Charlie Hebdo offices? Was it an international conspiracy involving a huge mobilization of resources and the coordination of large numbers of people spread across the world? No. Despite the fact that al Qaeda in Yemen is trying to claim responsibility for it, all that the attack required was two guys and a couple of guns.
Yet McCain thinks that whether such an attack occurs in America will be determined by how strong and aggressive we’re being against ISIS.
McCain’s good friend Lindsey Graham had a similar interpretation of the events in Paris: it’s going to happen here, and it’s because President Obama is weak. “I fear we can expect and must prepare for more attacks like this in the future,” he said, adding that, because of Barack Obama’s poor policy choices, “I fear our intelligence capabilities, those designed to prevent such an attack from taking place on our shores, are quickly eroding.”
But even if you believed that Obama is eroding our intelligence capabilities (and I have no idea what he’s talking about on that score), does that make us more vulnerable to a couple of guys with guns shooting up a public place? If such an attack were in the works, it wouldn’t require getting resources from overseas, and it wouldn’t require coordination and communication of the kind American intelligence might intercept. All that would be necessary is for someone who is angry enough to go to a gun show, pick up some heavy weaponry, and he’d be on his way. And he probably wouldn’t have to go far — according to this calendar, there are 61 gun shows happening this week in America — not this year or this month, but just this week.
Given how easy it would be to carry out an attack like the one on Charlie Hebdo, the real question is why it doesn’t happen all the time. While there have been a number of cases in recent years in which right-wing terrorists have tried to shoot a bunch of people, there have been only a couple of occurrences of politically motivated jihadist attacks like the ones in Paris — not an attempt to plant a bomb or do something similarly elaborate, but just somebody taking a gun and shooting a bunch of people — most notably that of Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 people at Ft. Hood in 2009 (there was also a Seattle man who killed four people last year and claimed it was revenge for American military actions).
So why doesn’t it happen more here? The answer is that unlike their European counterparts, American Muslims are as a group extremely assimilated and patriotic. So there’s virtually no one here who wants to carry out such an attack. Our relative safety on this score isn’t a triumph of intelligence, it’s a triumph of the American culture of welcoming immigrants.
Of course intelligence is important in preventing terrorism. But Republican critics, who are so proud of their supposedly deep understanding of national security issues, seem to believe that every kind of terrorist attack is exactly alike, and is made more or less likely for exactly the same reasons. That’s the kind of sophisticated thinking on terrorism we’ve supposedly been missing for the last six years.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 14, 2015
“Conquest Is for Losers”: Putin, Neocons And The Great Illusion
More than a century has passed since Norman Angell, a British journalist and politician, published “The Great Illusion,” a treatise arguing that the age of conquest was or at least should be over. He didn’t predict an end to warfare, but he did argue that aggressive wars no longer made sense — that modern warfare impoverishes the victors as well as the vanquished.
He was right, but it’s apparently a hard lesson to absorb. Certainly Vladimir Putin never got the memo. And neither did our own neocons, whose acute case of Putin envy shows that they learned nothing from the Iraq debacle.
Angell’s case was simple: Plunder isn’t what it used to be. You can’t treat a modern society the way ancient Rome treated a conquered province without destroying the very wealth you’re trying to seize. And meanwhile, war or the threat of war, by disrupting trade and financial connections, inflicts large costs over and above the direct expense of maintaining and deploying armies. War makes you poorer and weaker, even if you win.
The exceptions to this dictum actually prove the rule. There are still thugs who wage war for fun and profit, but they invariably do so in places where exploitable raw materials are the only real source of wealth. The gangs tearing the Central African Republic apart are in pursuit of diamonds and poached ivory; the Islamic State may claim that it’s bringing the new caliphate, but so far it has mostly been grabbing oil fields.
The point is that what works for a fourth-world warlord is just self-destructive for a nation at America’s level — or even Russia’s. Look at what passes for a Putin success, the seizure of Crimea: Russia may have annexed the peninsula with almost no opposition, but what it got from its triumph was an imploding economy that is in no position to pay tribute, and in fact requires costly aid. Meanwhile, foreign investment in and lending to Russia proper more or less collapsed even before the oil price plunge turned the situation into a full-blown financial crisis.
Which brings us to two big questions. First, why did Mr. Putin do something so stupid? Second, why were so many influential people in the United States impressed by and envious of his stupidity?
The answer to the first question is obvious if you think about Mr. Putin’s background. Remember, he’s an ex-K.G.B. man — which is to say, he spent his formative years as a professional thug. Violence and threats of violence, supplemented with bribery and corruption, are what he knows. And for years he had no incentive to learn anything else: High oil prices made Russia rich, and like everyone who presides over a bubble, he surely convinced himself that he was responsible for his own success. At a guess, he didn’t realize until a few days ago that he has no idea how to function in the 21st century.
The answer to the second question is a bit more complicated, but let’s not forget how we ended up invading Iraq. It wasn’t a response to 9/11, or to evidence of a heightened threat. It was, instead, a war of choice to demonstrate U.S. power and serve as a proof of concept for a whole series of wars neocons were eager to fight. Remember “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”?
The point is that there is a still-powerful political faction in America committed to the view that conquest pays, and that in general the way to be strong is to act tough and make other people afraid. One suspects, by the way, that this false notion of power was why the architects of war made torture routine — it wasn’t so much about results as about demonstrating a willingness to do whatever it takes.
Neocon dreams took a beating when the occupation of Iraq turned into a bloody fiasco, but they didn’t learn from experience. (Who does, these days?) And so they viewed Russian adventurism with admiration and envy. They may have claimed to be alarmed by Russian advances, to believe that Mr. Putin, “what you call a leader,” was playing chess to President Obama’s marbles. But what really bothered them was that Mr. Putin was living the life they’d always imagined for themselves.
The truth, however, is that war really, really doesn’t pay. The Iraq venture clearly ended up weakening the U.S. position in the world, while costing more than $800 billion in direct spending and much more in indirect ways. America is a true superpower, so we can handle such losses — although one shudders to think of what might have happened if the “real men” had been given a chance to move on to other targets. But a financially fragile petroeconomy like Russia doesn’t have the same ability to roll with its mistakes.
I have no idea what will become of the Putin regime. But Mr. Putin has offered all of us a valuable lesson. Never mind shock and awe: In the modern world, conquest is for losers.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 21, 2014
“Coaching Sessions Have A Long Way To Go”: Rick Perry; ‘Running For The Presidency’s Not An IQ Test’
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is wrapping up his 14-year tenure as his state’s chief executive – the longest such tenure in Lone Star State history – and as he gets ready to launch a second national campaign, the governor is talking more to the national media. The goal, in all likelihood, is to help reintroduce Perry in the wake of his failed 2012 presidential bid.
It’s off to a curious start.
The recently indicted Texas Republican talked with the Washington Post earlier this week, for example, “for a wide-ranging 90-minute interview.” It was a reminder that Perry hasn’t quite shaken off some of his bad habits.
Last week, Perry studied income inequality and economic mobility with experts Scott Winship, Erin Currier and Aparna Mathur. In the Post interview, he was asked about the growing gap between rich and poor in Texas, which has had strong job growth over the past decade but also has lagged in services for the underprivileged.
“Biblically, the poor are always going to be with us in some form or fashion,” he said.
I’m not a Biblical scholar, but I can find no Scriptural references to the notion that that the poor “are always going to be with us.” [Update: see below]
Perry acknowledged that the richest Texans have experienced the greatest amount of earnings growth, but dismissed the notion that income inequality is a problem in the state, saying, “We don’t grapple with that here.”
I suppose that’s true – in order to “grapple with” a problem, policymakers have to at least try to address it – though the fact remains that income inequality has gotten much worse in Texas in recent years, and a 2012 analysis of income trends published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that Texas was the nation’s seventh-worst state when it comes to the gap between rich and poor.
The governor’s new interview with msnbc’s Kasie Hunt was arguably even more informative about Perry’s progress as a national candidate.
For example, Hunt asked the governor, quite candidly, “Are you smart enough to be president of the United States?” He replied:
“Running for the presidency’s not an IQ test,” he said. “It is a test of an individual’s resolve. It’s a test of an individual’s philosophy. It’s a test of an individual’s life experiences. And I think Americans are really ready for a leader that will give them a great hope about the future.”
I’m a little surprised the governor didn’t reply with a more direct, “of course I’m smart enough” answer.
As part of the same interview, which was conducted Tuesday, Hunt asked Perry about the torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The governor’s answers didn’t quite bring his position into focus. For example, Perry sounded like he opposes torture:
“I agree that what happened to John McCain was abhorrent. It is inhumane. And the United States Government should never ever condone that type of activity. America has a record, going all the way back to George Washington when George Washington said that those British soldiers need to be treated with respect.”
And Perry also sounded like he understands Bush-era torture.
“But in the fog a war, you think back to 2001, and George W. Bush standing on that pile a rubble after he had talked to mothers and fathers and wives, loved ones of Americans who’d been killed by these soulless terrorist – you think back to Abraham Lincoln, suspending habeas corpus – you know, in retrospect, you know, sometimes decisions made in the fog a war, we can criticize ‘em, some years later.
And then Perry switched back, sounding like he opposes torture.
“But I think more importantly here is that the message that America is not going to be– like ISIS and cut the throat of innocent children– that we’re not going to– commit heinous acts, is clearly a message that Americans want to hear…. I respect [John McCain] for standing up and saying America will not be involved in torture. ‘No one in this country will ever do to any combatant what they did to me.’ And I totally agree with that.”
And then asked whether waterboarding is torture, Perry changed the subject.
“One of the most important things, though, that we need to do as a country, is that when the leader of the United States says, ‘Here’s a red line,’ that that’s what it means. Words matter. And hollow words hurt us as a country. They hurt us as an ally. And the words that come out of the president of the United States need to mean something.”
By all accounts, the Texas governor is meeting regularly with advisers who are helping him shape his agenda and vision. The coaching sessions apparently have a long way to go.
* Update: Several alert readers have brought Matthew 26:11 to my attention, which, depending on the translation, actually says, “The poor you will always have with you.” I stand corrected.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 11, 2014
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