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The War Against Tolerance
By Chris Hedges
12/02/08 "TruthDig" -- -
Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani are the
three stooges of the Christian right. These self-described
former Muslim terrorists are regularly trotted out at Christian
colleges-a few days ago
they were at the Air Force Academy-to spew racist filth
about Islam on behalf of groups such as
Focus on the Family.
It is a clever tactic. Curly, Larry and Mo, who all say they are
born-again Christians, engage in hate speech and assure us it
comes from personal experience. They tell their audiences that
the only way to deal with one-fifth of the world’s population is
by converting or eradicating all Muslims. Their cant is
broadcast regularly on Fox News, including the Bill O’Reilly and
Neil Cavuto shows, as well as on numerous Christian radio and
television programs. Shoebat, who has written a book called “Why
We Want to Kill You,” promises in his lectures to explain the
numerous similarities between radical Muslims and the Nazis, how
“Muslim terrorists” invaded America 30 years ago and how
“perseverance, recruitment and hate” have fueled attacks by
Muslims.
These men are frauds, but this
is not the point. They are part of a dark and frightening war by
the Christian right against tolerance that, in the moment of
another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, would
make it acceptable to target and persecute all Muslims,
including the some 6 million Muslims who live in the United
States. These men stoke these irrational fears. They defend the
perpetual war unleashed by the Bush administration and
championed by Sen. John McCain. McCain frequently reminds
listeners that “the greatest danger facing the world is Islamic
terrorism,”
as does Mike Huckabee, who says that “Islamofascism” is “the
greatest threat this country [has] ever faced.” George W. Bush
has, in the same vein, assured Americans that terrorists hate us
for our freedoms, not, of course, for anything we have done.
Bush described the “war on terror” as a war against totalitarian
Islamofascism while the Israeli air force was dropping tens of
thousands of pounds of iron fragmentation bombs up and down
Lebanon, an air campaign that killed 1,300 Lebanese civilians.
The three men tell lurid tales
of being recruited as children into Palestinian terrorist
organizations, murdering hundreds of civilians and blowing up a
bank in Israel. Saleem says that as a child he infiltrated
Israel to plant bombs via a network of tunnels underneath the
Golan Heights, although no incident of this type was ever
reported in Israel. He claims he is descended from the “grand
wazir” of Islam, a title and a position that do not exist in the
Arab world. They assure audiences that the Palestinians are
interested not in a peaceful two-state solution but rather the
destruction of Israel, the murder of all Jews and the death of
America. Shoebat claims he first came to the United States as
part of an extremist “sleeper cell.”
“These three jokers are as much
former Islamic terrorists as ‘Star Trek’s’ Capt. James T. Kirk
was a real Starship captain,” said Mikey Weinstein, the head of
the watchdog group
The Military
Religious Freedom Foundation. The group has challenged
Christian proselytizing in the military and denounced the visit
by the men to the Air Force Academy.
The speakers include in their
talks the superior virtues of Christianity. Saleem, for example,
says his world “turned upside down when he was seriously injured
in an automobile accident.”
“A Christian man tended to Kamal
at the accident scene, making sure he got the medical treatment
he needed,” his Web site says. “Kamal’s orthopedic surgeon and
physical therapist were also Christian men whom over a period of
several months ministered the unconditional love of Jesus Christ
to him as he recovered. The love and sacrificial giving of these
men caused Kamal to cry out to the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob acknowledging his need for the Savior. Kamal has since
become a man on a new mission, as an ambassador for the one true
and living God, the great I Am, Jehovah God of the Bible.”
This creeping Christian
chauvinism has infected our political and social discourse. It
was behind the rumor that Barack Obama was a Muslim.
Obama reassured followers that he was a Christian. It
apparently did not occur to him, or his questioners, that the
proper answer is that there is nothing wrong with being a
Muslim, that persons of great moral probity and courage arise in
all cultures and all religions, including Islam. Christians have
no exclusive lock on virtue. But this kind of understanding
often provokes indignant rage.
The public denigration of Islam,
and by implication all religious belief systems outside
Christianity, is part of the triumphalism that has distorted the
country since the 9/11 attacks. It makes dialogue with those
outside our “Christian” culture impossible. It implicitly
condemns all who do not think as we think and believe as we
believe as, at best, inferior and usually morally depraved. It
blinds us to our own failings. It makes self-reflection and
self-criticism a form of treason. It reduces the world to a
cartoonish vision of us and them, good and evil. It turns us
into children with bombs.
These three con artists are not
the problem. There is enough scum out there to take their place.
Rather, they offer a window into a worldview that is destroying
the United States. It has corrupted the Republican Party. It has
colored the news media. It has entered into the everyday clichés
we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. It is ignorant and
racist, but it is also deadly. It grossly perverts the Christian
religion. It asks us to kill to purify the Earth. It leaves us
threatened not only by the terrorists who may come from abroad
but the ones who are rising from within our midst.
Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was
for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York
Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right
and the War on America.“
©2008 TruthDig.com
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