Crusade and Jihad
Today is Sunday, 23 May 2010.
Anwar al-Awlaki, American-born and an American citizen and a Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, has called for killing American civilians as part of jihad.
I’m certain this will stir a great deal of outrage in the USA/USE, as it should, but consider: replace “Allah” with “Jesus” and “American civilians” with “Indochinese”, “Nicaraguan”, or “everybody in the world” (in the case of nuclear war), and such a statement would be characteristic of any number of American Christianist religious leaders. (Falwell, Robertson, Hargis, Cardinal Spellman, etc.)
Some cynical apologists would rationalize that such leaders never came right out and said, “Kill civilians”. However, they endorsed and justified, nay, demanded methods of warfare that they damn well knew would inevitably result in the murder of civilians as “collateral damage”. Ethically, the latter is the mealy-mouthed equivalent of calling for the extermination of civilians.
Don’t recall any great outrage on the Religious Right when their leaders called for murderous crusades.
Alas: the nature of contemporary society and warfare is such that all the world is a battlefield, and none of us are really civilians.
Anwar al-Awlaki, American-born and an American citizen and a Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, has called for killing American civilians as part of jihad.
I’m certain this will stir a great deal of outrage in the USA/USE, as it should, but consider: replace “Allah” with “Jesus” and “American civilians” with “Indochinese”, “Nicaraguan”, or “everybody in the world” (in the case of nuclear war), and such a statement would be characteristic of any number of American Christianist religious leaders. (Falwell, Robertson, Hargis, Cardinal Spellman, etc.)
Some cynical apologists would rationalize that such leaders never came right out and said, “Kill civilians”. However, they endorsed and justified, nay, demanded methods of warfare that they damn well knew would inevitably result in the murder of civilians as “collateral damage”. Ethically, the latter is the mealy-mouthed equivalent of calling for the extermination of civilians.
Don’t recall any great outrage on the Religious Right when their leaders called for murderous crusades.
Alas: the nature of contemporary society and warfare is such that all the world is a battlefield, and none of us are really civilians.
posted by HH at 9:49 PM
4 Comments:
Angry, as usual. Bet you're fun at a party.
One would think that anyone with the slightest inkling of self-preservation would be angry about god-peddlers who advocate mass murder.
You should see me wearing a lampshade and performing my famous Nixon impression.
I would rather hear you sing the Internationale in Pig Latin while wearing the lampshade and brandishing a plunger in a swashbuckling fashion that would make Errol Flynn proud.
And plaid pants.
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