by cameron | May 26, 2009 | Christianity, geopolitics, US politics
While there is some doubt as to the author of this article in AlterNet (the byline says it’s by Clive Anderson, while the bio down the bottom says it’s by Australia’s own Clive Hamilton), the subject matter is fascinating. And a little bemusing. I had always assumed that George W. Bush’s religiosity was a sham, a cynical attempt to convince the unthinking American God-fearing public to go along with his crazy schemes. This article, however, claims that Bush told French President Jacques Chirac that:
"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins".
Apparently Chirac himself confirms this in a new book published in France last March and the conversation had been published earlier by a French theology professor who the French government turned to for clarification about what the hell Bush might have been talking about.
I seriously never thought of Bush as really nuts. I figured he just put on the whole Jesus-lovin’ Texan ol’ boy routine purely as manipulation, just as a way to squeeze extra votes out of the Religious Right. Could I have been wrong? Is Bush simply insane?
And if Obama continues his "war" in Afghanistan (I still laugh at how the US likes to declare that it’s a war but refuse to classify their prisoners as Prisoners Of WAR under the Geneva Convention), is he perpetuating Bush’s Holy Jihad?
Yet again we see Christianity used as a justification for the murder of tens of thousands of civilians. It’s just another reason why we need to treat Christianity in the same way we treat any other intolerant, violent philosophy – with extreme disdain and our own (non-violent) intolerance.
by cameron | May 25, 2009 | Christianity, climate change
I’m reading tonight about the case of Dale and Leilani Neumann, an American couple who let their 11 year-old daughter, Madeline Kara Neuman, die of diabetes last year. When it was obvious that she wasn’t well, her parents didn’t seek medical care for her. Instead, they prayed to God.
Last week, Leilani Neumann was found guilty of second-degree reckless homicide.
Then there is this mother who is on the run with her 13 year-old cancer-stricken son to avoid chemo.
This highlights what I’ve often said is one of my major concerns with religion. It invariably teaches that faith is not only equal to reason but actually superior to it. I’ve often said that this is a dangerous and despicable kind of brain washing. The death of this child is just one example of why faith is dangerous. On a larger scale, it seems to me that once people come to accept that faith is all you need, they are less likely to challenge authority figures when told things like "Saddam is going to use WMD on us" or "climate change is natural". If we live in a society that conditions us not to say "well hold on a second, where’s the proof?" but "ummm okay, if you say so", then we can be lead like sheep to the slaughter house by figures of power and authority.
Madeline Kara Neumann, known as Kara, died on Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008. Three weeks before that, on Feb 28, her mother wrote this article on a Christian site called "America’s Last Days". In the article, she talks about how she and her husband had been ‘laying their hands’ on people so that, as with one woman they touched, "the power of God fell on her and she immediately felt the Holy Spirit fill her with His Presence". She also writes:
"Many times The Lord has told me things that are going to happen many years down the road…"
Apparently he neglected to tell her that her daughter had Type 1 diabetes, was going to die in three weeks, and needed to see a doctor urgently.
The Neumann’s are part of a church called Unleavened Bread Ministries which is run by the preacher David Eells. Apparently in his conversations with God, the subject of Kara’s disease didn’t come up either.
Even worse than adults being inculcated with faith is when kids are brain washed before they are old enough to know better. In a press release Leilani wrote after the trial, she claims:
"Madeline Kara was a very mature Christian of deep faith in God’s Word; she did her own study on doctors and medicine exactly one week prior to her death…. Kara found out through her study of God’s Word that the Bible did not advocate doctors or medicine but, rather, that modern-day medicine is a counterfeit to God’s healing power."
I’m torn between feeling genuinely sorry for the Neumann’s and feeling disdainful at their ignorance. I can’t imagine how awful it must be to lose a child. And I don’t doubt for an instant that they thought they were doing the right thing. On the other hand, believing that your imaginary friend is going to heal your sick child is just plain stupid and irresponsible. There’s no excuse. She writes:
Dale and I thought we were within our rights to pray for our daughter’s recovery.
I agree. But why not take her to a doctor as well? What about Kara’s right to live? What about her right to have medical care? As a society, where should our priorities lie – respecting people’s religious beliefs, no matter how primitive and ignorant, or protecting children from their irresponsible parents?
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling in the case of Prince v. Massachusetts ruled:
The right to practice religion freely does not include the right to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill-health or death… Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion when they can make that choice for themselves.
Neumann writing about the progress of her daughter’s illness:
Later on Sunday, I recognized a change in Kara’s condition, as we witnessed the deep sleep and a completely limp body, but for reasons some may not understand, I was not fearful — thinking this was something my daughter could fully recover from. Again, I did not understand what the changes in Kara’s body meant, whether good or bad, so we sought for answers from God.
"We sought answers from God." No doctors.
Now – if you’re a Christian reading this, and you’re saying to yourself "oh yes, well those people are obviously stupid Christians, but my particular kind of Christianity has it right", let me ask you: what’s so different between what you believe and the Neumann’s believed?
I continually talk to Christians who tell me that they have a "relationship" with God or Jesus and that one or both of them "talks" to them. What makes them different from the Neumanns?
Perhaps you’re thinking "well *we* would have taken our child to the doctor." Well good for you. But what areas of your life *do* you put faith ahead of reason and facts? If you put faith ahead of facts in any circumstance, then I submit to you that you are just as deluded and dangerous as the Neumanns.
Faith is dangerous. The people who told you that faith is superior have brain washed you so that you won’t question them while they pick your pocket and lead you down a blind alley. Faith is basically not thinking for yourself. Anyone who tells you not to think for yourself is someone who you should not trust.
The only sensible way to evaluate anything in life is to collect as much data as you can, think about it as best you can, and make the most educated decision you can.
“’Faith’ means not wanting to know what is true” – Friedrich Nietzsche
by cameron | May 23, 2009 | geopolitics
Last night I went to the cinema to see "The Baader Meinhof Complex", an excellent film about the rise and fall of The Red Army Faction (RAF), an urban guerilla movement started by disaffected students in West Germany in the 60s who carried out bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and robberies in an attempt to bring awareness to the corruption in the West German government which, they felt, was being run by former Nazis with the support of large American corporations. Were they terrorists, guerillas or freedom fighters? It all depends on who is telling the story.
I totally recommend this film although it’s not for the faint of heart and you won’t come out of the cinema feeling uplifted or positive about the state of the world. The issues that the RAF were protesting in the 60s are still around – and in a worse state – today. American imperialism runs rampant across the globe, using the ‘free media’ as its propaganda tool and manipulating the minds of the populace with suggestion that an Obama is really more than a couple of degrees different from a Bush.
The film stars a couple of familiar faces –
Horst Herold, who played Hitler in the brilliant DOWNFALL (which has served for unlimited parodies on YouTube) and here plays the president of the Federal Police, and warns the politicians that the guerillas won’t stop until their issues are actually addressed, something none of the politicians wants to hear.
Moritz Bleibtreu who I remember as the lead role in DAS EXPERIMENT, another brilliant film, and here plays Andreas Baader, the flawed but fearless leader of the RAF. As his girlfriend says at one point "Andreas has more revolution in him than the rest of us put together."
Anyway, go see the movie.
With the question of "terrorist or freedom fighter" fresh in my mind, I was reading from Robert Fisk’s excellent book "The Great War For Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East" today and the following lines jumped out at me. He’s writing about Afghanistan in the late 70s:
For "terrorists", read "guerillas" or – as President Ronald Reagan would call them in the years to come – "freedom fighters." Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russian, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always "terrorists." In the seventeenth century, governments used "heretic" in much the same way, to end all dialogue, to prescribe obedience. Karmal’s policy (CR Note: Karmal was the President of Afghanistan who was in support of the Russian invasion) was simple: you are either with us or against us. For decades, I have listened to this dangerous equation, uttered by capitalist and communist, presidents and prime ministers, generals and intelligence officers and, of course, newspaper editors.
Click on the book cover to order the book from BookDepository in the UK – free worldwide shipping!
As Fisk points out – every time you read or hear the word "terrorist", be aware that it’s being used to shut you up. It’s a manipulative word, a weasel word, and the use of it by politicians or the media should tell you something about their true agenda.
by cameron | May 20, 2009 | geopolitics
Update 21/05/09: According to Gulf Times, Hersh is denying he ever said that Cheney’s hit squad killed Bhutto. AmericanThinker delights in providing more details.
Original Post: According to Dawn.com, US journalist Seymour Hersh claims a US government hit squad assassinated Benazir Bhutto on the order of Dick Cheney. Why? Apparently because she announced (on the below TV interview with David Frost) that Osama Bin Laden. Remember how the BBC, when they ran the clip (originally aired on Al Jazeera), edited out the comment about Bin Laden? Hersh says the US was pissed that she leaked that Bin Laden is already dead, which would reduce their justification for continued occupation of Afghanistan and so they had her whacked. And who did the job? Probably JSOC, the top top secret "snake-eating, throat-slitting" black ops team formerly lead by Obama’s new Afghanistan leader, General Stanley McChrystal.
Do I buy it? Yes and no. Do I believe the US assassinates foreign leaders from time to time? Of course I do. They have admitted it. Do I believe they might have been involved in killing Bhutto? Yes, I do. But not because she spoke out about Bin Laden. More likely because the US had invested a LOT ($10 billion) in Pakistan’s military dictator Musharraf and they didn’t want to see that go to waste under a Bhutto government. Of course, it didn’t buy them much time. Musharraf was forced to resign in August 2008 amid corruption allegations and Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, is now President.
Watch Bhutto’s interview on Frost:
Watch Hersh interviewed on Gulf News:
by cameron | May 20, 2009 | geopolitics, US politics
Noam Chomsky has written a penetrating piece on the USA’s history of using torture, explaining that it isn’t a new thing and that Obama really isn’t putting a stop to the USA’s use of torture – he’s just returning their use of it to pre-Bush tactics.
As Allan Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: "What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system’s torture, which is done by foreigners under U.S. patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so."
Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely repositioned it," restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. "[H]is is a return to the status quo ante," writes Nairn, "the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."
He also explains that the Obama administration is continuing to fight the courts to allow the USA to continue to send prisoners to international prisons where they will continue to be denied basic legal and human rights, away from the prying eyes of the US legal system.
While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our unwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on substantially reinstating the extremist Bush measures. In the important case of Boumediene v. Bush in June 2008, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional the Bush administration claim that prisoners in Guantanamo are not entitled to the right of habeas corpus.
Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviews the aftermath. Seeking to "preserve the power to abduct people from around the world" and imprison them without due process, the Bush administration decided to ship them to the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, treating "the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game — fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process."
Obama adopted the Bush position, "filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue," arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United Arab Emirates) "can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind — as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo."
In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo." The Obama administration announced that it would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama’s Department of Justice, Greenwald concludes, "squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions," in radical violation of Obama’s campaign promises and earlier stands.
Of course, it now looks like Obama’s first Presidential act – closing down Gitmo – might not happen after all. Surprise, surprise, surprise.
(Thanks to Marcelo Castro for the link to the Chomsky piece.)
by cameron | May 19, 2009 | geopolitics
The Bilderberg Group‘s 2009 invite list (this year they are meeting at the Astir Palace resort in Athens, Greece) has been published by Alex Jones’ Infowars. He doesn’t name his source but someone in his comments section claims the list was originally posted on a Russian site but doesn’t provide a link either. No Australians are on the list. We don’t have a single person important or powerful enough to get an invite to the elitist of the elite club on the planet?
It’s interesting that Fareed Zakaria is going (according to this list anyway). He’s a regular guest on The Daily Show.
