American Jihadists

Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, "Into a Moral Desert of our own devise" (click here for entire article)

"As events would have it, though, our nation is led by men who have carefully avoided both war and literature. By men devoid of a sense of the nation's and their own moral fallibility. By men who have led us into a moral desert and aren't even looking for a way back home."

An interesting article until you realize Jesus George's intellectual, moral, and political horizon (like many "Born Againer's"--including Osama Bin Laden's Islamic version), is informed by the story of the Christian Book of Revelations. I call him Jesus George ironically, because he has obviously failed to understand the sublime message of love and compassion in the Christian Gospels. "Hubris" or arrogance, of course, is the psychology of resentment and the defining characteristic of Satan himself. Maybe Chavez was right, the UN pulpit smelled of sulfur. For those who believe in such a personification of social and psychological forces that inform the evils of our world, the Luciferian characteristics of Georges "War on Terror" is both ironic and instructive.

A related thought: Why did George Bush and his "evil twins", Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, define our response to 911 in terms of a "War on Terror"? Why did we not define our response as a "War on Al Queda", the perpetrator of 911 and numerous other attacks on Americans? Why pick a fight with organization like Hamas and Hezbollah, Iraq and Iran? After all, as Noam Chomsky, and others have pointed out, "terror" is a strategy of war (one that American has also used as numerous times in history--remember Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the fire bombing of Tokyo in WWII). How better off would we be today, if this "war" was defined as a war on Al Queda? Was this characterization of a "War on Terror" consciously defined with the politics of fear in mind, a clear advantage for Republicans and their war mongering, Evangelical base? If this is so, is not GW, his evil twins, and the Evangelical Republican Right's continuous war (ala Revelations) on somebody ("pagans", "communists", "liberals", popular culture, abortion, gays, lesbians, multi-culturalism, "Islamo-fascism"etc.) really just a strategy of "terror"? Is our government--and the Republican Party (not all Republicans), run by political terrorists?

This video deserves to be seen again and again.

Sesame Street of the Religious Right?



Short Film "Submission" referenced in George Will's op ed, 'A Dissident Of Islam' (click here for entire article)



George Will: "It was shown twice before Nov. 2, 2004, when van Gogh, bicycling through central Amsterdam in the morning, was shot by an Islamic extremist who then slit his throat with a machete. Next, the murderer (in whose room was found a disc containing videos of "enemies of Allah" being murdered, including a man having his head slowly sawed off) used another knife to pin a long letter to van Gogh's chest. The letter was to Hirsi Ali, calling her a "soldier of evil" who would "smash herself to pieces on Islam.""

Leave it up to George Will and the Right to use this art and tragedy to rail against European and American multi-culturalism. For those of you who are interested, I will be glad to explain the pedagogical philosophy of milticulturalism--multi-culturalism does not necessarily lead to cultural relativism. That is a separate, yet related, issue of Moral Philosophy.