peace, etc.

Global Warming: A Dialogue (Part 2)

2011-12-20T03:24:00.001-05:00

The Temperature Record, Surface Temperatures

THE DENIER: If you look at the science, you’ll see that, since 1998, global land and marine surface temperatures are actually on the decline. Even the lamestream media has been forced to admit this. From a 2009 BBC article: “For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.” The article proceeds to point out what real scientists have been saying all along, that the Earth is cyclical, that global temperatures have historically ebbed and flowed for naturally reasons and that humans can have very little impact on nature.[11]

THE PHILOSOPHER: It’s true that 1998 was the warmest year in Climatic Research Unit’s data set, which goes back to 1850. Although NASA, it should be pointed out, claims that 2005 was slightly hotter. Whatever the case, there’s no reason to believe we’ve entered into a period of global cooling. For the fact is that any number of factors can cause global temperatures to temporarily rise or fall. For instance, many believe that 1998 was so hot because an especially strong El Nino hit that year. In order to determine whether or not global warming exists, we can’t cherry pick the data but must instead look at the big picture, at long-term trend.[12]

And when we look at long-term trend, it becomes clear that the planet is warming. According to the Climatic Research Unit, temperatures have been steadily rising since around 1910 with the first decade of this century being the hottest century on record. After 1998, the next nine warmest years on record all occurred between 2001-2010. Although 2008 has thus far been the coldest year of the century, it’s still the 12th hottest year on record.[13]

THE DENIER: Your whole argument presupposes that the temperature data we have is accurate. But it’s not. Temperature stations are unevenly distributed; “the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas (‘heat islands’), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas (‘land use effects’).”[14]

THE PHILOSOPHER: Have you ever heard of Richard Muller? Richard Muller is a physics professor who for years claimed that the urban heat island effect had rendered the data coming from temperature stations unreliable. Along with ten other scientists, Muller recently started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project in the hopes of “resolv[ing] current criticism of the former temperature analyses.”[15] The project’s biggest funder, I should point out, is none other than the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. “Oil billionaires Charles and David Koch,” the LA Times reminds us, “are the nation’s most prominent funders of efforts to prevent curbs on the burning of fossil fuels, the largest contributor to planet-warming greenhouse gases.”[16]

And what did Muller’s team find? Let me allow Muller to speak for himself: “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK. This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”[17]

The Temperature Record, Ocean Temperatures

THE DENIER: Surface temperatures don’t even matter that much anyway. Ocean temperatures are a far more accurate measure of overall global temperatures. And ocean temperatures are undoubtedly falling. For example, in 2006 NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reported that its 3,000 Argo floats had found that oceanic temperatures were cooling. Given that even environmentalists have claimed that “80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters,” I think this is a pretty resounding deathblowm.[18] Or as you philosophers are fond of saying, QED.

THE PHILOSOPHER: It’s true that in 2006, Josh Willis and another scientist at the JPL reported that oceanic temperatures had fallen between 2003 and 2005. But this data contradicted other scientific data. For example, researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia had long studied the amount of solar energy entering and leaving the Earth and had found that more energy was entering than leaving. This and other contradictory data caused Willis to scrutinize his data.[19] When he did so, he found that a software glitch existed in some of the floats, causing “the temperature and salinity data to be associated with the wrong depths. When the problem data [was] excluded from the analysis, the cooling trend [dropped] below the level of statistical significance.”[20]

THE DENIER: Funny how you word that: “the cooling trend dropped below the level of statistical significance.” So in other words, the oceans are still cooling, they’re just not cooling as much as previously claimed. But still, the fact remains that they’re cooling. Which obviously contradicts the claims of global warming.

THE PHILOSOPHER: First, it’s not at all clear that ocean temperatures are falling, even slightly. The Argo float data has been interpreted differently by different scientists. Willis’ analysis shows that temperatures have slightly fallen, while other analyses have shown temperature increases.[21] Second, even if ocean temperatures have fallen, this in no way disproves global warming. As I argued earlier, we need to look at long-term trends, not cherry pick the data to suit our needs. If you look at ocean temperatures over the past half century, you’ll see periods, sometimes consisting of a couple years or more, in which temperatures fell. If you look at the entire data set, however, you’ll see that ocean temperatures have been trending upwards. Numerous factors can cause ocean temperatures to temporarily fall; Josh Willis believes that the recent fall in ocean temperatures (if they have in fact fallen) is largely attributable to ice melt. What matters is the long-term trend, which unmistakably shows ocean temperatures rising.[22]

* * * * *

Notes

[11] “What happened to global warming?” Paul Hudson, BBC, 9 October 2009. See also “Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008,” Robert K. Kaufmann, et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, 2 June 2011.

[12] “Warming Stopped in 1998,” A Few Things Illconsidered, 2006 April 25.

[13] “Global Temperature Record,” Climatic Research Unit, accessed 22 November 2011.

[14] “Myths and Facts,” Climate Change 101.

[15] Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature.

[16] “Critics’ review unexpectedly supports scientific consensus on global warming,” Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times, 4 April 2011.

[17] “Global warming ‘confirmed’ by independent study,” Richard Black, BBC, 20 October 2011.

[18] “The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat,” Richard Harris, NPR, 19 March 2008.

[19] “Correcting Ocean Cooling,” Rebecca Lindsey, NASA Earth Observatory, 5 November 2008. See also “Is It Me, or Did the Oceans Cool?” Josh Willis, U.S. Clivar, Vol. 6, No. 2, September 2008.

[20] “Artefacts in ocean data hide rising temperatures” [.pdf], Nature, Volume 447.3, May 2007.

[21] “How we know global warming is still happening,” John Cook, Skeptical Science, 28 September 2009.

[22] “Does ocean cooling prove global warming has ended?” Skeptical Science, 6 September 2010.

Global Warming: A Dialogue (Part 1)

2011-11-23T12:38:00.000-05:00

The Scientific Consensus

THE DENIER: First of all, I object that you’re being referred to as “The Philosopher,” while I’m simply called “The Denier.” That’s not just offensive, but entirely inaccurate—for the fact is that most thinking people, specifically most scientists, don’t believe in global warming. For instance, a recent study found over 31,000 scientists, including over 9,000 Ph.D.s, who dispute that human-caused greenhouse gases have or will in the foreseeable future cause “catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”[1]

THE PHILOSOPHER: The study you’re referencing isn’t actually a study at all. It has never been proven that those 31,000 people are scientists or that they’re even people. Anybody can get their name added to the above-cited petition. All you have to do is print a copy of the petition, sign your name (or anyone’s name, for that matter), claim you’re a scientist, and then mail the petition to a place called the Petition Project, which is based in La Jolla, California. And that’s it, that’s all you have to do.[2] The Petition Project—whoever they are—never does anything to confirm that you are who you say you are.

So if I wanted to increase the number of petition signers, all I’d have to do would be print out the petition, sign my name (for kicks, I might call myself something like I.P. Freeley), state my field of science (let’s go with oceanography), and send it in. A few years ago, environmental activists “successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list, including John Grisham, Michael J. Fox, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (from the TV show M*A*S*H), an individual by the name of ‘Dr. Red Wine,’ and Geraldine Halliwell, formerly known as pop singer Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls.”[3]

THE DENIER: Many of our best scientists have come out against global warming. Given your obvious reliance on the mainstream media, you probably haven’t heard about such dissenting scientists as Richard Lindzen, Sallie Baliunas, and Roger Pielke, but they’re there, and their mere presence debunks the so-called “scientific consensus.”[4]

THE PHILOSOPHER: Two points here. First of all, these and other dissenting scientists have far more nuanced positions than you imply. None of the three individuals you cited, for instance, denies that global temperatures have increased over the past several decades, although they claim that the human contribution to global warming is less than the mainstream of scientists has claimed. Second, it’s simply irrefragable that the majority of scientists, especially earth scientist, believe in anthropogenic global warming. For instance, a 2008 study conducted by the University of Illinois found that 90% of geoscientists agreed the global temperatures have increased since 1800 and that 82% of them agreed that this increase has been largely anthropogenic. According to the study, the more research scientists had conducted in climate science, the more likely they were to believe in anthropogenic warming; for instance, while only 47% of petroleum geologists believed in such warming, a full 97% of climatologists did.[5] A 2010 study conducted at Stanford University found that over 97% of surveyed climate researchers believed in anthropogenic global warming.[6]

Moreover, only one reputable scientific body—the American Association of Petroleum Geologists—has come out against anthropogenic warming. By contrast, as I’ve listed in the following footnote, a large number of reputable scientific organizations have issued statements affirming their belief in global warming.[7]

THE DENIER: Yeah, well science isn’t done by consensus. The majority of scientists once believed that the sun revolved around the earth, but that didn’t make it so.

THE PHILOSOPHER: True enough.

Conspiracy Theories, Climategate

THE DENIER: Besides, most of these “scientists” aren’t really scientists at all, not in the true sense of the term. They’re propagandists and shills, most of whom undoubtedly stand to profit if they can convince people to surrender more rights to the government in the name of “saving the planet.” That this whole thing is a hoax, a conspiracy, was proven by the Climategate controversy. For the first time, the public was able to see what climatologists were saying to one another when they didn’t think that anyone else was listening. We now have proven that even they know it’s a hoax.[8]

THE PHILOSOPHER: It’s certainly true that many people—for instance, those who’ve invested in certain green technologies—stand to profit if governments tighten environmental regulations. Of course, it’s also true that many business leaders stand to profit if such regulations are loosened.[9] That’s why this debate cannot be ultimately decided by consensus. What matters are the facts, the temperature records, etc. So let’s talk about the facts. I’d like to hear why you doubt global warming.

Before we do that, though, I feel the need to point out that your take on Climategate is off. If you read these emails in their entirety, you’ll see that they’re really not so game-changing after all. If you pull a line or two of the emails out of context, you might be able to convince others that these scientists knowingly falsified evidence, but a proper exegesis reveals that such was not the case. In 2009, the Associated Press conducted an extensive review of the emails, involving five reporters, as well as experts in research ethics, climate science, and science policy. The AP found that the scientists were “keenly aware of how their work would be viewed and used, and, just like politicians, went to great pains to shape their message” and that they often refused to share their data with global warming skeptics. Despite this, the AP concluded that the emails “don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked.”[10]

* * * * *

Notes

[1] Global Warming Petition Project.

[2] “Instructions for Signing Petition,” Petition Project

[3] “Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine,” SourceWatch. See also “Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project,” 11 March 2010, Skeptical Science.

[4] “List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming,” Wikipedia; “Roger A. Pielke,” Wikipedia.

[5] University of Illinois researchers approached geoscientists listed in the 2007 edition of the American Geological Institute’s Directory of Geoscience Departments (“Surveyed scientists agree global warming is real,” CNN, 19 January 2009; “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” EOS, Transactions American Geophysical Union, Vol. 90, No. 3, Page 22, 2009.”

[6] The Stanford researchers “compiled a database of 1,372 climate researchers. They then focused on scientists who had published at least 20 papers on climate, as a way to concentrate on those most active in the field. That produced a list of 908 researchers whose work was subjected to close scrutiny” (“Study Affirms Consensus on Climate Change,” NY Times Blogs, 22 January 2010).

[7] Scientific organizations that have affirmed their belief in anthropogenic global warming: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the Australian Institute of Physics, the European Physical Society, the European Science Foundation, the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, the American Geophysical Union, the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America, the European Federation of Geologists, the European Geosciences Union, the Geological Society of America, the Geological Society of London, the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the American Meteorological Society, the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Royal Meteorological Society, the World Meteorological Organization, the American Quaternary Association, the International Union for Quaternary Research, the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the American Society for Microbiology, the Australian Coral Reef Society, the Institute of Biology (UK), the Society of American Foresters, the Wildlife Society (international), the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Preventative Medicine, the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the Australian Medical Association, the World Federation of Public Health Associations, the World Health Organization, the American Astronomical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Institution of Engineers Australia, the International Association for Great Lakes Research, the Institute of Professional Engineers New Zealand, the InterAcademy Council, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the International Council of Academics of Engineering and Technological Sciences, the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council (US), and the national science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, the Caribbean, China, France, Ghana, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, India, Japan, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, New Zealand, Russia, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Sweden, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe (“Scientific opinion on climate change,” Wikipedia).

[8] “The Global Warming Conspiracy,” 4 February 2011, Conspiracy Watch; “Global Warming Conspiracy Theory,” Wikipedia; “Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?” James Delingpole, The Telegraph, 20 November 2009;

[9] For more on those profiting from global warming denial, see, “The Truth About Denial,” Newsweek, 12 August 2007. See also “Climate change denial,” Wikipedia.

[10] “Climategate: Science Not Faked, But Not Pretty,” Seth Borenstein, Malcolm Ritter, Raphael Satter, Associated Press, 12 December 2009.

My Problems with Libertarians

2011-11-14T13:10:00.000-05:00

#1) They offer no realistic way of safeguarding the environment. In other words, the tragedy of the commons. If the government isn’t there to protect the environment, then I see no way to prevent the environment from being trashed. Although it’s become a conservative-libertarian talking point to endlessly bash the EPA, I’m grateful for the EPA, as will be future generations. I only wish it had more power.

#2) They have no sense of priority. Most libertarians believe that we should cut back government wherever and however we can. Whatever we can get on the chopping block—military spending or social spending, it makes no difference—we need to hack. But this seems utterly cruel to me.

If we cut corporate welfare, especially the military industrial complex (which soaks up nearly half of all discretionary spending) and then go about cutting social programs, I wouldn’t be so worried. For cutting corporate welfare would free up an enormous amount of money that those in the private sector could use to help those in need. But if we cut social welfare first, as most libertarians would gladly do, then society’s most vulnerable citizens will be devastated, for millions of Americans depending upon government programs for their very survival.

Of the Corporations, By the Corporations, For the Corporations

2011-10-20T14:21:00.002-04:00

This pretty much describes modern-day America. We are a democracy in name only. Although we the people have the right to vote in free elections every other year, our “representatives” habitually act against us and in favor of corporations. Examples of this abound:

The 2008 Bank Bailout. Big banks favored the bailout. Most Americans opposed it. Washington sided with the banks.
The Public Option. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies have long opposed the public option. Most Americans have long demanded it. Last year, Congress sided with the insurance and pharmaceutical companies and excluded the public option from its Healthcare Reform Bill.
The War on Afghanistan. Defense firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing love the war. Most Americans oppose it. Washington continues siding with the defense firms.
Military spending. Defense firms want more military spending. Most Americans want less military spending. Washington continues siding with the defense firms.
Corporate Tax Loopholes. Big corporations oppose closing corporate tax loopholes. Most Americans favor closing such loopholes. Washington continues siding with big corporations.

The reason that the will of corporations always trumps the will of the American people should be obvious enough. It’s about money. It’s all about money. Corporations dump massive amounts of money into political campaigns and in so doing manage to essentially buy the loyalties of politicians. Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has shown that “[o]ver a long period…you can pretty well predict policies by just looking at concentration of campaign funding.” To see who’s funding your congressperson and senators, just go to OpenSecrets.org.

Although corporations have been buying politicians for some time, it’s now easier than ever, thanks to a January 2010 Supreme Court decision. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled that corporations can “spend unlimited amounts of their treasuries’ money on political advertisements.” Moreover, the ruling allows such giving “to take place without complete or immediate disclosure of who funds such communications, preventing voters from understanding who is truly behind many political messages.” It should have come as no surprise then that, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, “outside spending during the 2010 midterms was more than four times the amount recorded during the 2006 midterm election.” Forty-two percent of this spending came from undisclosed donors.

These facts should outrage all of us, not just leftists and libertarians but also Tea Party activists. Democracy has been subverted before our very eyes and both parties are to blame. (See The vindication of Dick Cheney,NYT confirms Obama made deal to kill Public Option, Obama’s $3.7 Trillion Budget Calls for Military Spending Increases and Deep Cuts to Social Service Programs, The Great Tea Party Sell Out.) For this reason we need to follow the lead of Ralph Nader and Ron Paul and start working together. No more bickering about the things that divide us. Instead we need to join forces against corporatism, which is by and far the most pressing issue of our time. Lefties need to swallow their pride and start promoting the likes of Ron Paul and Chuck Baldwin, and conservatives and libertarians need to start promoting people like Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich. We can hash out our differences later. For now we need to stand as one.

Time to Get Together

2011-10-12T01:50:00.004-04:00

The problem with the Republican Party has nothing to do with it being too conservative, and the problem with the Democratic Party is not that it’s too liberal.

If you got a group of sincere conservatives and sincere liberals in a room together, I guarantee you they’d come up with some sensible solutions to many of our nation’s problem. There wouldn’t be total agreement, but I’m convinced there’d be enough agreement to get things moving in the right direction. For both conservatives and liberals agree on numerous important issues: for example—

that we should uphold the Bill of Rights
that we should end corporate welfare
that we should audit the Federal Reserve
that we should use our military for defensive purposes, not for nation-building, not for perpetuating the American Empire.

Obviously many disagreements would remain. But imagine what a better world this would be if just these four values were implemented. Just imagine what would happen if we brought our troops home from Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, Japan, etc., etc. Imagine all the money we’d save, all the money Americans would have to spend and invest. You want to fix the economy, that seems like a pretty effective way to do it.

But Republican leaders really aren’t conservative, and Democratic leaders really aren’t liberal. They’re opportunists, unprincipled opportunists who might sound different from one another but govern pretty much the same way.

I can’t tell you how sick I’ve grown over the past few weeks listening to the likes of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry tout the virtues of the free market system. If they really believed their talking points, I might be encouraged, for genuine advocates of free market capitalism reject the current faux capitalist—better described as crony-capitalist—system. But I just can’t believe that these guys would do what they promise. Remember the last time we had a “free market” guy in the oval office and “free market” guys and gals running Congress? Remember their legacy?

[S]choolchildren struggling under No Child Left Behind, which federalized K-12 education to an unprecedented degree with nothing to show for it other than greater spending tabs…[T]he bizarrely structured Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the largest entitlement program created since LBJ…[T]he simple reality that taxpayers now guarantee some $8 trillion in inscrutable loans to a financial sector that collapsed from inscrutable loans...

The most basic Bush numbers are damning. If increases in government spending matter, then Bush is worse than any president in recent history. During his first four years in office—a period during which his party controlled Congress—he added a whopping $345 billion (in constant dollars) to the federal budget. The only other presidential term that comes close? Bush’s second term. As of November 2008, he had added at least an additional $287 billion on top of that (and the months since then will add significantly to the bill). To put that in perspective, consider that the spendthrift LBJ added a mere $223 billion in total additional outlays in his one full term.

If spending under Bush was a disaster, regulation was even worse. The number of pages in the Federal Registry is a rough proxy for the swollen expanse of the regulatory state. In 2001, some 64,438 pages of regulations were added to it. In 2007, more than 78,000 new pages were added. Worse still, argues the Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, Bush is the unparalleled master of “economically significant regulations” that cost the economy more than $100 million a year. Since 2001, he jacked that number by more than 70 percent. Since June 2008 alone, he introduced more than 100 economically significant regulations. (Nick Gillespie, “Bush Was a Big-Government Disaster,” 26 January 2009)

And the Democrats—let me just say this about the Democrats. From 2009-2010, we had a Democrat in the White House and Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, and we got no real change. It’s as though Bush and the Republicans never left. With regard to issues like war, civil liberties, and corporate welfare, the policies remained almost exactly the same, as David Bromwich has so cogently articulated (“Symptoms of the Bush-Obama Presidency,” 18 August 2011) (See also Glenn Greenwald’s “”The ACLU on Obama and core liberties,” 7 September 2011 and “Can OWS be turned into a Democratic Party movement?” 11 October 2011.)

All of which means that we need to stop supporting these jokers, these Republocrats and Democans. Conservatives need to stop wasting their votes on these anti-conservative Republicans, and liberals need to stop wasting their votes on these anti-liberal Democrats. We need to stop searching for the Lesser of Two Evils Candidate. For even if we’re actually able to determine the Lesser Evil (and I’m not sure that’s possible), we’re still throwing our votes away. Yes, one candidate might lead us to hell at a slightly slower pace than the other, but we’re still going to end up in hell.

It’s time for coalition building. It’s time for all of us—conservatives, liberals, everyone—to stand together against the corporate-state monster and all its appendages (in other words, pretty much all mainstream politicians). It’s time to follow the lead of people like Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Chuck Baldwin, and Cynthia McKinney and recognize that we agree about the most important issues—war, civil liberties, corporate welfare—and worry about hashing out our differences another day.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-09-30T12:21:00.002-04:00

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

See also Official Website of General Assembly at #OccupyWallStreet

See here for FAQ

Why I’m No Longer a Christian

2011-09-19T17:14:00.076-04:00

Introduction

During my sophomore year of college, I had what can best be described as a radical conversion to Christianity. Up until that point in my life, my religious beliefs had largely been shaped by my mother, a Reformed Jew who essentially believed in Jefferson’s god. My mother always observed the Jewish holidays, but her god seemed more open-minded and accepting than the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; moreover, he didn’t seem to intervene all that much, if ever, in the lives of humans.

For the sake of this essay, there’s no need to describe my conversion experience. It’s enough to mention that, when I converted to Christianity, I truly converted. I genuinely believed. I prayed and went to church regularly. I studied the Bible, eventually learning Koine Greek. I strived to bring my life in line with the teachings of the New Testament.

And then in the spring of 2009, approximately twelve years after my conversion, I stopped believing. I stopped believing for two main reasons, the first being the immorality of modern Christians, the second being human suffering.

The Problem of Christians

The beginning of the end of my faith can be traced back to 2003, when George W. Bush began his war against Iraq. Although I’d initially liked Bush, believing him a sincere man, after some research it seemed clear to me that his war was based on lies. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and he didn’t pose a threat to us; and even if he had WMDs, he wasn’t crazy enough to use them against us, nor was he crazy enough to share them with his longtime enemy al-Qaeda.[1] I didn’t know the full consequences of the US invasion, but I knew that many innocent Iraqis would be killed and I couldn’t understand why anyone of conscience would support this.[2]

But almost all the Christians I knew supported the invasion. Not because there was any evidence backing up Bush’s claims but because they had faith in him. That’s what one woman in my church, essentially a forty-something suburban soccer mom, told me: “I don’t know all the facts here. None of us do. I just know that the president prays to God every morning, and I believe that he’s doing his best to listen to the Holy Spirit.”

And it wasn’t just the Christians in my circle. Polling conducted in October 2002, for instance, found that 69% of conservative Christians supported going to war.[3] Once the war begun, this number rose to 87%.[4] Moreover, most prominent Evangelical leaders supported the war.[5]

As the months passed and Bush’s lies became even more apparent and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis began dying, I thought that the truth would finally sink in.[6] But it didn’t. Christians continued to defend Bush and his evil war, rushing to the polls the following year to reelect him.[7] And not, I should point out, reluctantly—not, for example, because they believed he was the lesser of two evils—but because they genuinely admired him and approved of the job he was doing. As he began his second term, 78% of white Evangelicals approved of his job performance [8]

I just couldn’t fathom this. Real people were being killed. People just as real, just as precious and vulnerable, just as capable of love and joy and sadness as you and me. Yet nobody seemed to care. Without having ever even read it, Christians had convinced themselves that the Qur’an commanded Muslims to murder Christians—an outright falsehood, I should point out.[9] Therefore they weren’t saddened that innocents, even innocent children, were being slaughtered. After all, those dead children were just going to grow up to be jihadists anyway, right?

I began seeing Christians for who they really were. Not a group that gave evidence of being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, but a group that actively promoted evil and did so with more fervor than the general population. Christians, I now saw, took their marching orders, first and foremost, from the Republican Party. Never mind the actual teachings of Jesus. All conflicts between the GOP and Jesus were decided in favor of the GOP.

* * * * *

And it’s not just the Iraq War. As one sociologist writes: “White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus.”[10] Evangelicals, for instance, are the group “most supportive of the death penalty, draconian sentencing, punitive punishment over rehabilitation, and the governmental use of torture.” Never mind all that stuff Jesus said about love and mercy and forgiveness.[11] And Evangelicals are “the most opposed to institutional help for the nation’s poor;” they oppose “food stamp programs, subsidies for schools, hospitals, job training.” Never mind Jesus’ condemnation of the rich and his command to the ruler to sell everything he had and give his money to the poor.[12]

Evangelicals are also far more likely than the general public to blindly support the State of Israel, even as it daily violates the basic rights of Palestinians, often murdering them.[13] Again, Jesus’ teachings plainly condemn such behavior. Despite the assertions of televangelists like John Hagee, the New Testament in no way justifies such evil; this whole notion that “the promised land” belongs to the Jews and that they must be allowed to rebuild their temple in order for Jesus to return is plainly unbiblical.[14]

Christian theologian Ronald J. Sider writes: “Whether the issue is divorce, materialism, sexual promiscuity, racism, physical abuse in marriage, or neglect of a biblical world view, the polling data point to widespread, blatant disobedience of clear biblical moral demands on the part of people who allegedly are evangelical, born-again Christians.”[15]

* * * * *

I didn’t stop believing just because Christians were so unchristian, but I began grappling with what I like to refer to as the Problem of Christians. Similar to the more-widely debated Problem of Evil, the Problem of Christians can be stated as follows:

If Christianity is true, then you would expect Christians as a whole to be morally superior to non-Christians.
Christians are not morally superior to non-Christians; in many important ways, they in fact seem morally inferior.
Therefore, Christianity doesn’t seem to be true.

Whenever I gave this argument to other believers, they inevitably said something like, “Well, you know, you can’t expect Christians to be perfect.” And I didn’t. But I’d read the New Testament, and I knew that it claims that all believers are indwelt by the Holy Spirit and are consequently being daily sanctified—that is, made holy—by him. For example, we’re told that the Holy Spirit lives inside every believer and that, among other things, he helps believers, teaches them, reminds them of Jesus’ teachings, and bestows them with spiritual gifts.[16] We’re also told that, when “filled with the Spirit,” believers will bear such “fruit” as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”[17]

Given all this, I couldn’t help but expect Christians to be at least a little better than unbelievers. I certainly didn’t understand how, in so many crucial ways, they could be worse. I didn’t understand how they could be the nation’s biggest supporters of state-sanctioned mass-murder. If these individuals were part of the church, with Christ serving as the living, active head,[18] then I just couldn’t understand how this was possible.[19]

But I still believed; therefore, I felt it would be wrong to “forsake the fellowship”[20]. I tried to see myself as a missionary to fellow believers and did my best to point out how they were being unfaithful to their professed principles.[21] I failed miserably.[22]

I finally tried a new church, and then another one, and then another one. In 2007, I tried two dozen or so different congregations. Some were better than others. Most contained friendly, smiley parishioners. I felt that all of them were glaringly un-Christian. I don’t recall any of these churches raising money to help the poor, although a few of them had building funds, even though their current buildings seemed just fine. Many of them had state-of-the-art electronic signs, giant flat screen TVs, cappuccino makers. I learned that one church spent over $400 a week on gourmet coffee, donuts, and bagels.[23]

No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around the cognitive dissonance found in these church leaders and laypersons. During praise and worship, they seemed to genuinely love Jesus, raising their hands and singing beautiful songs to their Lord. But after service, they were completely different people. Close-minded, arrogant, materialistic, militaristic, jingoistic.

I finally stopped looking for a new church, concluding that Jesus was real but that his people were quite literally doing the work of Satan.[24] I just couldn’t be around them anymore; I couldn’t in good conscience continue giving them my money.

The Problem of Evil

Amid all this church-hopping, my uncle was diagnosed with liver cancer. David was one of those people who just seemed to embody life. Always on the go, cleaning, making dinner, shaking your hand, telling you one of his crazy stories. One of those people who truly seemed to relish life. He loved his pot, he loved good music, he loved his family and friends, he would never hesitate to help someone in need.

I watched in helplessness as his sickness began to devastate my family. My grandparents, my mom, and aunts—all seemed stuck in this state of numbed disbelief. I began to pray like I’d never prayed before. It got to the point where I stopped praying for pretty much everything else. All my needs now seemed so paltry. Everyday, throughout the day, I would pray with as much faith as I could elicit that God would heal him. That God would heal him and in so doing draw my entire family to Him.

It didn’t help. David grew worse. Every treatment failed. He finally went into hospice and soon thereafter, just 54 years old, died. I tried to be there for my family but knew there was nothing I could do. During his funeral, I kept thinking of the word “bereavement,” which I’d once seen defined as the state of being “left desolate.” That perfectly described what I saw. His wife and children, his parents and siblings, his friends, something inside them had died, something good and carefree and beautiful, and they would never recover.

I’d never been all that troubled by the Problem of Evil, which can be stated as follows:

If the world were run by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good being, you would not expect the world to contain suffering, at least as much suffering as our world contains. For an all-powerful being would be able to prevent suffering, an all-knowing being would know how to prevent suffering, and an all-good being would desire to prevent suffering.
Suffering—a great deal of it, in fact—exists.
Therefore, it doesn’t seem likely than an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good being exists.

Although I knew the existence of suffering had destroyed the faith of many others, I had always accepted William Lane Craig’s theodicy. Craig claims that God very likely allows diseases and natural disasters because “a world containing gratuitous natural evils may be necessary for people to come to a knowledge of God. God’s overriding aim is for people to come to the knowledge of Himself in a free, uncoerced way. Perhaps it is just a fact that only in a world containing pointless natural suffering would people turn to God.”[25]

But now seeing my family, I couldn’t help but feel that Craig’s argument was absolutely ridiculous. No good could come from my uncle’s death. It would not draw anybody to Christ; if anything, and most probably, it would cause people to lose their faith. As this reality weighed down on me, I started to feel, more strongly than I had since becoming a Christian, that the whole thing might be a lie.[26]

My prayer life became almost non-existent, my feelings pretty well summarized by this funny but devastatingly astute George Carlin bit: “I’ve been praying to Joe [Pesci] for about a year now. And I noticed something. I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci are being answered at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don’t. Same as God, 50-50. Same as the four-leaf clover, the horseshoe, the rabbit’s foot, and the wishing well…It’s all the same, 50-50. So just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself.”[27]

* * * * *

Shortly after David’s death, I began experiencing headaches. Given the nature and intensity of these headaches, my doctor determined that they were not migraines. Wanting to rule out that I had a brain tumor or aneurism, she set up for an immediate CT-scan. Within an hour, I found myself lying on a table in a nearby hospital, watching as a giant sci-fi-looking machine passed over me.

Once the procedure was finished, I stepped into a side room, not much bigger than an old-time telephone booth, and waited for my doctor to examine the scan and call me. Still scarred from my uncle’s death, I refused to pray, I just didn’t see the point. Sitting there, I felt more strongly than I had before that Jesus wasn’t there. As my mind began to imagine the worst, an inoperable tumor, I felt overwhelmed with terror. I realized that, deep down, I didn’t really believe I knew what happened after death. I didn’t know if there would be a god and a heaven or if there would be nothing.

I ended up being fine. No tumor, no aneurism, just a series of especially intense stress-induced headaches. Completely shaken in my faith, I began to probe my psyche, specifically my true feelings about faith and mortality. After watching the documentary Flight from Death, I turned to Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Reading this book proved to be epiphanic.

It was as though Ernest Becker had looked directly into my psyche and grasped all my twisted motivations and self-delusions. In passage after passage, he explained the wellspring of my behavior. It was often overwhelming to read. At different points, I remember closing the book mid-section, simply unable to take any more for the day. In the end it seemed so obvious that he was right and my faith had been a defense mechanism.

I need to be more specific here. I’d long told myself that I believed because of the evidence. I’d told myself that archaeological discoveries had proven many key events in the Bible, that there was overwhelming historical evidence proving that Jesus rose from the dead, etc., etc.[28] But reading The Denial of Death made me realize that I’d been lying to myself. I now understood that, deep down, I’d always known that the evidence wasn’t really all that convincing. I understood that I had embraced Christianity in order to assuage certain anxieties, specifically anxieties stemming from rejection and my fear of death. Believing in Christianity had mitigated the former anxieties by allowing me to feel important, initiating me into God’s family and making me one of his chosen ones. It had mitigated my fear of death by assuring me that my faith would grant me eternal life. All this, of course, had happened subconsciously. My subconscious, feeling the need to mitigate these anxieties, had essentially tricked me into believing that the arguments worked.

I began reexamining these arguments that had once bolstered my faith and saw that they were full of holes.[29] I’m not saying they’re horrible arguments. I’m just saying I now saw that they weren’t foolproof. The truth about such metaphysical matters, I now realized, is something we simply cannot know. Christian apologists make some good arguments, but the other side’s arguments are ultimately just as persuasive, and, in the end, the truth remains elusive.[30]

The Present, the Future

I currently consider myself an agnostic, albeit a reluctant one. One who hopes that God really is there. And not just any god but the Christian god. For although there is much that I hate about Christianity, I still believe that it contains the greatest story ever told. Nothing compares to the story of God becoming a man and dying for the sins of humanity. And nobody in my opinion compares to Jesus. His teachings—namely, his injunctions to turn the other cheek, to return insults with love, to forgive those who wrong us—strike me as being utterly true, as close to divine as anything ever uttered.

Sometimes I find myself wanting to take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. And if I ever again embrace faith, this is how I’d have to do it. Honestly. Realizing that the object of my faith cannot be “known,” not in the sense that philosophers and scientists know something, but believing nonetheless.[31] Other times, I feel that I’m just unable to make this leap; I feel that doing so would be weak-minded and dishonest.

[1] “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” October 3, 2006.

[2] Little did I know at the time how truly devastating the war would be. We now know that the war killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more, Iraqis (“1 Million Dead in Iraq? 6 Reasons the Media Hide the True Human Toll of War—And Why We Let Them,” John Tirman, July 19, 2011; “The Number,” Dale Keiger, February, 2007). For some of the war’s other disastrous consequences, see “From ‘Liberation’ to Occupation: 10 Reasons Iraq Was No Cakewalk,” Medea Benjamin, Charles Davis, March 18, 2011.

[3] Conservative Christians in U.S. Biggest Backers of War on Iraq,” Jim Lobe, October, 2002.

[4] Charles Marsh, “God and Country: What it means to be a Christian after George W. Bush,” Boston Globe, July 8, 2007.

[5] Some of the more prominent leaders who publicly advocated the invasion include James Dobson, Chuck Colson, Bill Bright, James Kennedy, Carl Herbster, Richard Land, Charles Stanley, Franklin Graham, Marvin Olasky, Tim LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson (“Interview With Dr. James Dobson,” CNN Larry King Live, November 22, 2006; “Land Letter,” October 3, 2003; Charles Marsh, “Wayward Christian Soldiers,” New York Times, January 20, 2006; “Robertson called Democratic war criticism ‘treason’,” Media Matters, December 12, 2005).

[6] Lest you’re still one of those who believes that Bush didn’t lie but just made mistakes, I encourage you to read the following articles: “It Was Never About WMDs,” September 5, 2008; “How Did Bush Lie to Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,” September 19, 2008.

[7] “U.S. President / National / Exit Polls,” CNN, November 2, 2004.

[8] “Will White Evangelicals Desert the GOP?” Pew Research Center, May 2, 2006.

[9] “Top Ways 9/11 Broke Islamic Law,” Juan Cole, 9/11/10; “O’Reilly’s Muslim-Hatred and Christian Terrorists,” Juan Cole, 7/27/11; “Stop Blaming Religion,” June 5, 2009; “Flanders Does Islam,” August 19, 2010.

[10] Phil Zuckerman, “Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus,” Huffington Post, March 3, 2011.

[11] Matthew 5.38-48.

[12] Luke 18:18-25; “Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus;” “Few Say Religion Shapes Immigration, Environment Views,” Pew, September 17, 2010. See also: “Opposition to Interracial Marriage Lingers Among Evangelicals,” Christianity Today, June 24, 2011; “The Evangelical Torturemongers Strike Again,” May 22, 2009; “The Blame Islam Game,” November 6, 2009.

[13] “Conservative Christians in U.S. Biggest Backers of War on Iraq,” Jim Lobe, October, 2002.

[14] “Mike Huckabee Visits East Jerusalem, Gets His Eschatology Wrong,” August 18, 2009; “Abraham, Israel, Palestine,” May 26, 2010.

[15] The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, 2005.

[16] Romans 8.9; Galatians 4.6; John 14; 1 Corinthians 12.11.

[17] Galatians 5.22-23.

[18] Ephesians 5.23.

[19] Note that I’m not saying that all Christians are bad. To the contrary, I think that there are many good, conscientious Christians out there; I think that even many of the most right-winged Christians are doing some good in the world. But none of this refutes my argument. Even the Nazis did some good in the world, building roads, schools, hospitals, and the like.

Some might be tempted to reply: “Yes, but Christians don’t mean to do evil. They’re simply misinformed, unfortunately propagandized. Not everyone, after all, can be as smart as you, Don.” In response to this, I’d simply say that yes, to some extent, I agree. I don’t think that most Christians have evil hearts; I don’t think they supported the Iraq War because they wanted to murder a bunch of Iraqi children; I think they genuinely believed, just as their leaders told them, that the war was an act of self-defense. In the same way, I should point out, I don’t think that most Germans in the 1930s meant to do evil; I think most Germans genuinely believed that the Jews were a threat to the German people and the driving them from their land was an act of self-defense. But the good intentions of Christians in no way refutes my argument. My point, to put it once again, is simply this: Given the claims of the New Testament, it seems to follow that, if Christianity were true, believers would be more likely, not less likely, than the general population, to embrace Jesus’ ethical teachings; it seems to follow that there would be more Daniel Berrigans and less Chuck Colsons in the world.

[20] Hebrews 10.25.

[21] See, for example, “More on Saddam Hussein and the War with Iraq,” July 20, 2004; “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” October 3, 2006; “Is God Really Pro-War?” October 17, 2006; “My Letter of Admonishment to Professor Doug Groothuis,” November 1, 2008; “The Evangelical Torturemongers Strike Again,” May 22, 2009; “Doug Groothuis Responds to My Post,” July 26, 2009; “Chuck Colson: Evil or Just Stupid?” June 17, 2010.

[22] It’s nearly impossible to talk a fundamentalist out of his or her political beliefs. For fundamentalists tend to be epistemically deficient and thus extraordinarily dogmatic. As Ernest Becker argued, they tend to embrace religion for the same reason that they embrace reactionary political ideologies—for psychological, not ethical or rational, reasons. In other words, both their religion and their politics serve the same death-defying function, allowing them to feel that they’ve transcended the basic terror of existence.

[23] For a more thorough description of one such church, see “Trendy Churches,” August 1, 2007.

[24] Or, to quote Søren Kierkegaard, “Christianity is the invention of Satan” (Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, Joakim Garff, 714)

[25] No Easy Answers, 96-97. For my own previous thinking about the Problem of Evil, see “The Problem of Evil: A Dialogue Between a Believer and a Skeptic,” January 1, 2002.

[26] I can’t help but quote George Carlin, who, it seems to me, provides a far more logical answer to the Problem of Evil than the erudite William Lane Craig: “When it comes to believing in God, I really tried. I really, really tried. I tried to believe that there is a God who created each of us in his own image and likeness, loves us very much, and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize that something is fucked up. Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a supreme being. This is the kind of shit you’d expect from an office temp with a bad attitude.

“And just between you and me, in any decently run universe, this guy would’ve been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say this guy, because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if this is a god, it has to be a man. No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this.

“If there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he’s at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn’t give a shit. Which I admire in a person and which would explain a lot of these bad results. So rather than be just another one of these mindless religious robots, blindly believing that all this is in the hands of some spooky, incompetent father figure who doesn’t give a shit, I decided to look around for something else to worship” (You Are All Diseased, 1999).

[27] Ibid.

[28] “Critique of William Paley’s Design Argument,” January 1, 2006; “The Kalām Cosmological Argument,” April 1, 2009; “The Resurrection of Jesus,” December 16, 2002; “The Historicity of the Gospels,” December 15, 2002; “The Resurrection of Jesus (1 of 2),” December 1, 2007; “The Resurrection of Jesus (2 of 2),” December 2, 2007.

[29] For more on this, I can’t recommend highly enough Dale Allison’s Resurrecting Jesus. In this book, Allison himself a committed Christian, explains why the arguments that apologists have given for the resurrection are deeply flawed. Although personally believing that Jesus rose from the dead, he explains that the historical evidence for this is scant. For my own thoughts on Christian apologetics, see my Nietzschean-inspired diatribe “Christian Sophists,” July 10, 2009.

[30] Realizing all this proved to be liberating. Liberating and unsettling. Unsettling because I no longer felt assured that Christianity was true; ipso facto, I no longer had an insuperable hedge against my most troubling anxieties. Liberating because I finally felt at peace with myself.

Believing in Christianity had disconnected me from myself. My real self, just like all people’s real selves, is unique. My real self has similarities with others but also its distinctive thoughts and feelings and talents. By becoming a fundamentalist Christian, I had forced myself into a mold. I had forced myself to adopt beliefs I didn’t really agree with—for example, that homosexuality is sinful, that husbands are the spiritual heads of their wives, that unbelievers deserve to spend eternity in hell. I had forced myself to deny certain feelings; I felt afraid to acknowledge certain desires, to laugh at certain jokes. In sum, I no longer felt free to be myself, to be the unique, free-thinking, spontaneous individual I was born to be.

I love how psychologist Karen Horney puts it: “[T]he human individual, given a chance, tends to develop his particular human potentialities. He will develop then the unique alive forces of his real self: the clarity and depth of his own feelings, thoughts, wishes, interests; the ability to tap his own resources, the strength of his will power; the special capacities or gifts he may have; the faculty to express himself, and to relate himself to others with his spontaneous feelings. In short, he will grow, substantially undiverted, toward self-realization” (Neurosis and Human Growth, 1950).

Admitting to myself that Christianity might not be true opened up the floodgates of self-realization. I started to realize who I really was and what I really felt and believed. Perhaps for the first time ever, I started to accept myself, warts and all. This proved to be just as glorious as becoming a Christian had been twelve years earlier. The self-deception was gone. The need to conform to someone else’s standard was gone. I could finally be myself. I finally wanted to be myself.

My feelings are well exemplified by John Lennon’s beautiful song, “God” (John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1970). In the song, Lennon denounces various idols, all at the cost of self-actualization, of course. “I don’t believe in magic. / I don’t believe in I-Ching. / I don’t believe in Bible. / I don’t believe in Tarrot…” He himself had previously identified with many of these idols. After listing these idols he no longer believes in, he declares, “I just believe in me, Yoko and me.” He then tells us that he’s no longer the “dreamweaver” but now is reborn; he’s no longer “the walrus” but now is John. In other words, he no longer has a mistaken, idealized view of himself. He finally sees himself as he really is; he’s just himself, he’s just John.

[31] Essentially I’d like to adopt the thinking of CS Lewis’ Puddleglum: “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I'm going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia” (The Silver Chair, 1953).

Context, Context, Context: Understanding the Recent Escalation of Violence in Gaza

2011-04-10T14:35:00.024-04:00

On April 7, Hamas militants fired an anti-tank missile at a school bus near the Gaza-Israeli border, critically wounding the bus’s only passenger, a sixteen-year-old boy (CNN). Hamas has admitted to firing the missile, although it claims that it didn’t intended to target children, pointing out “the road where the bus was travelling was often used by Israeli military vehicles” (Haaretz).

The events which followed the school bus attack were predictable:

The IDF retaliated to Thursday’s rocket fire with strikes in Gaza that day, resulting in the death of five Palestinians.

On Friday, a barrage of rockets and mortar shells was fired at Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip…Although no one was hurt, the mortars exploded near homes and chicken coops, causing damage.

On Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces spokesman's office confirmed that IAF jets attacked three top Hamas officials in the Gaza strip, as well as a smuggling tunnel and a truck carrying ammunition, after southern Israel suffered a barrage of rockets overnight.

The early morning air strike brought the two-day death toll from Israel's ongoing retaliation to 17 Gazans—10 militants, a Hamas policeman and six civilians—amounting to the bloodiest tally since Israel and Hamas wrapped up their three-week-long war more than two years ago. (Haaretz)

Ma’an News adds that the Israeli strikes have resulted in 60 injuries, 12 of them serious (Ma’an).

* * * * *

Unlike Israeli officials would have us believe, history did not begin with the April 7 school bus attack. The International Crisis Group helps provide us with some context. The Group notes that, following Operation Cast Lead, Hamas “had largely withheld fire at Israel” and had “sought, with a fair degree of success, to contain” other militant groups in Gaza (“Gaza: The Next Israeli-Palestinian War?”). Consequently, “fewer rockets were launched from Gaza in 2010 than in any year since the first Qassam missile was fired toward Israel in February 2002” (“Radical Islam in Gaza”).

Despite this, Israel has continued to prevent an adequate amount of humanitarian goods from entering Gaza and has continued to prevent exports from leaving Gaza (OCHA). Moreover, Israel “increasingly has targeted Hamas for rocket attacks launched by unaffiliated groups—particularly Islamic Jihad and various Salafi-Jihadi militants” (“Gaza: The Next Israeli-Palestinian War?”).

It needs to be noted that Hamas does not have complete control over these more radical militant groups. A recently released WikiLeaks cable shows former Israeli Chief of General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi admitting this to US Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand (Juan Cole). More recently, GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Tal Russo stated, “There is anarchy in Gaza, inside Hamas and inside the other [militant] organizations. No group exerts control there” (Haaretz).

On March 16—three weeks before the school bus attack—Israel killed two Hamas militants in response to a rocket fired by non-Hamas militants. According to the Crisis Group, this attack marked a major turning point. “A [Hamas] movement leader argued that these actions violated what Hamas had considered reasonable rules of the game: that when Palestinian projectiles hit open space—as did the ones launched on 16 March—Israel aims at open space in response.”

It came as no surprise then when on March 19 “Hamas—for the first time in many months—fired and immediately claimed responsibility for a large-scale attack, some 33 mortars aimed at what it alleged were four Israeli military bases.” Israel soon retaliated, and Hamas called for a ceasefire on March 21 (Ma’an).

The following day, non-Hamas militants fired two Grad missiles and several mortar shells into Israel (Haaretz). Israel responded by carrying out two separate attacks in Gaza, killing 8 Palestinians. Among the victims were five members of a single family, including two children, in the Gaza City neighbourhood of Shajaiyya. This brought the total for the week to ten dead (including five under the age of eighteen) in addition to 38 wounded (including fifteen under the age of eighteen).” Although Benjamin Netanyahu expressed “regret” that innocents were killed, the Crisis Group notes that “the damage was done, and Hamas immediately announced its intention to exact further retribution.”

* * * * *

It should be clear then that Israel, not Hamas, has initiated this recent round of violence. Israel’s primary reason for doing this seems clear enough; its strategy has long been to provoke Hamas into firing rockets. Once the rockets start flying, attention in the United States and Europe is no longer on the many crimes Israel is committing in both Gaza and the West Bank, but on those dastardly, violence-loving Palestinians.

From Israel’s perspective, there are few costs to this strategy, which can best be described as perpetual war for perpetual colonization. Yes, rockets from Gaza sometimes kill Israelis, but very rarely. Since 2001, “just” 28 Israelis have died in rocket attacks (Wikipedia). Certainly Israeli politicians find this regrettable, but, given that this tragedy allows them to continue their colonization of the West Bank with complete impunity, it’s obviously a price they believe is worth paying.

* * * * *

UPDATE: Norman Finkelstein has posted a helpful timeline of major events regarding Israel-Gaza since February 17.

UPDATE 2 (4/12): Regarding Israel’s motives here, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that, in the weeks preceding its March 16 attack, both Hamas and Fatah had been making “enhanced attempts” to be reconciled with one another (Jerusalem Post). If Israel provoked Hamas into fighting in order to thwart reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, it wouldn’t have been the first time. Remember back to November 4, 2008, when Israel broke its ceasefire with Hamas by entering Gaza and killing six Hamas militants who were supposedly building a tunnel into Israel. The raid, Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “came shortly before scheduled Hamas-Fatah talks in Cairo aimed at ‘reconciling their differences and creating a single, unified government,’ British correspondent Rory McCarthy reported. That was to be the first Fatah-Hamas meeting since the June 2007 civil war that left Hamas in control of Gaza, and would have been a significant step towards advancing diplomatic efforts” (Chomsky).

UPDATE 3 (4/13): From Human Rights Watch:

Attacks since April 7, 2011, by Hamas and Israeli forces appear to have targeted civilians or otherwise violated the laws of war...

Hamas's armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, claimed responsibility for an attack on an Israeli school bus on April 7 that wounded two people, while various Palestinian armed groups fired mortars and rockets deliberately or indiscriminately at Israeli population centers. Israeli attacks in Gaza on April 7 and 8 apparently targeted an ambulance, killed a mother and daughter in an indiscriminate attack, and killed and wounded other civilians in Gaza without taking adequate precautions to minimize civilian harm. (HRW)

UPDATE 4 (4/13): Jonathan Cook argues that both Israel and Hamas have much to gain by this recent conflict—namely, the weakening of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel, Cook argues, worries about the “diplomatic tsunami” that Ababs hopes to unleash by seeking UN recognition for a Palestinian state later this year. If things are calm in Gaza, then Benjamin Netanyahu finds himself in a major bind: “either break with his Greater Israel ideology and produce a credible peace plan; or wait for Mr Abbas to make his move at the UN.” But with Hamas and other groups firing rockets into Israel, Netanyahu can claim, as commentator Aluf Benn recently wrote in Haaretz, that “any area Israel gives up in the West Bank will become a base for the launching of missiles against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.”

Additionally, Netanyahu realizes that Abbas’ “chances of winning much-needed European support for a declaration of statehood in September, and maybe even of staving off a US veto, depend on elections to refresh his mandate. And credible elections require Hamas’s participation.” As long as there is war in Gaza, there will not be unity talks.

Hamas, Cook continues, also has reason to avoid unity talks. Hamas, he points out, “is growing stronger by the day. Mr Abbas's loss of Mr Mubarak was the Islamist group's gain. Popular sympathy in Egypt for Gaza's plight has already ensured a weakening of the siege, allowing more smuggling through tunnels under the single shared border.”

Moreover, “Hamas’ regional supporters, including Iran and Syria, are likely to exploit this change to arm Gaza’s militants in the hope of making life more difficult for Israel. That appears to explain the shipment of weapons seized by Israel on a ship in international waters last week.

“For this reason the militants in Gaza are choosing to revive the armed struggle, if only briefly, in preference to unity talks and fresh elections. Why play second fiddle to Mr Abbas when the future looks to be moving in their direction?” (Cook)

UPDATE 5 (4/13): MJ Rosenberg makes many of the same points as Cook in an op-ed for Al-Jazeera (Al-Jazeera).

The Goldstone Retraction: Additional Comments

2011-04-06T16:32:00.009-04:00

(Updated Below)

Three items today.

(1) Yesterday Richard Goldstone told the Associated Press that he did not intend to ask the UN to rescind the Goldstone Report. Although Goldstone continues to hold that the Report's conclusions about the January 5 shelling of Wa'el al-Samouni's house should be retracted, he does not believe that any other part of the Report should be retracted (AP).

(2) I've spent the past few days looking through the Goldstone Report. One thing that struck me, and that I hadn't realized, is that the Reports spends just 8 paragraphs on the shelling of Wa'el al-Samouni's home. Eight paragraphs out of a total of 1,776 paragraphs. Recall that this shelling is the only part of the Report that Goldstone has retracted. (As I've explained, unlike he implied in the op-ed, the Report never claimed that Israel had a policy of intentionally targeting civilians.) So it should go without saying that even if we excised these 8 paragraphs, the Report would remain essentially unchanged.

(3) I'd like to thank Samaa Elibyari for interviewing me about the Goldstone op-ed on her radio show on CKUT-FM in Montreal. You can listen to the show here. My interview begins at 15:50.

* * * * *

UPDATE: I try not to be a cut-and-paste blogger, but sometimes I just can't help myself. Here's a letter someone sent to Norman Finkelstein in response to the Goldstone op-ed:

An amazing magic trick by Israel. Now you see it…now you don’t.

Judge Goldstone wrote:

“Simply put, the laws of armed conflict apply no less to non-state actors such as Hamas than they do to national armies. Ensuring that non-state actors respect these principles, and are investigated when they fail to do so, is one of the most significant challenges facing the law of armed conflict. Only if all parties to armed conflicts are held to these standards will we be able to protect civilians who, through no choice of their own, are caught up in war.”

I wonder if Judge Goldstone would also agree that non-state actors have the right to defend their population against foreign occupation using proportional responses. If he does, I wonder as to what Judge Goldstone suggests a proportionate response from Hamas could look like? Because in my opinion offering to renew a ceasefire is quite a proportional response to caging in a civilian population under military occupation and causing the majority of children to become anemic. I wonder if he also agrees that international law protects civilians in non-state regions from foreign aggression. I’m also curious as to how Judge Goldstone’s opinion has changed on the legality of dropping white phosphorous on schools and hospital[s] or on what the military purpose of destroying chickens and flour mills is. How has Judge Goldstone’s opinion on incinerating policemen at a graduation ceremony changed. Perhaps he feels that they are legitimate targets because they are within the Hamas organization. Would he then also agree that an IDF soldier sitting in a cafe is also a legitimate military target for a suicide bombing and that any Israeli civilians killed would be tragic but not “intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Hamas? Hamas is no angel, they receive NO sympathy from me. But they appear to be much more efficient than Israel at not killing civilians using makeshift rockets and suicide bombings even though Israel is using state of the art U.S weaponry. Perhaps Israel should get some pointers from Hamas on how to avoid civilian deaths. And as far as I know Hamas hasn’t prevented freedom of movement or the oportunity to have a future for Israeli civilians. Funny how opinions can change. It’s like magic.

UPDATE 2 (4/7): William A. Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, points out what I've been emphasizing for the past several days: "I have reread the Commission’s Report in light of Judge Goldstone’s statement. I do not believe that the Commission ever alleged that there was an Israeli policy of intentionally targeting civilians. The furthest it goes, I think, is to talk of a ‘low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population’ (para. 44), which is not the same thing as intentionally targeting civilians. Judge Goldstone could not retract a conclusion that the Commission did not make" (Shabas) (h/t Mondoweiss).

Why the UN Should Not Rescind the Goldstone Report

2011-04-04T18:17:00.009-04:00

From the Associated Press:

Israel is launching an international campaign to push the United Nations to rescind a scathing report on Israeli war conduct in Gaza two years ago, after the report's author backtracked from key allegations against the Jewish state.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet he had ordered the diplomatic offensive in response to the new admissions from international jurist Richard Goldstone, who wrote in The Washington Post at the weekend that his most serious accusation against Israel—that it deliberately targeted civilians—appeared to be wrong. He said that in hindsight his report would have been very different.

Mr. Netanyahu said Mr. Goldstone’s comments vindicated Israel’s wartime conduct and that the report, which accused both Israel and Hamas militants of possibly committing war crimes, should be scrapped. (AP)

As I’ve already explained, Richard Goldstone has only retracted one of the claims of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. One. Writing in the Washington Post, he stated that he now believes Israel’s January 5 missile attack against a home containing around 100 members of the al-Samouni family “was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image” (Washington Post).

Despite what’s being claimed, Goldstone has not retracted the Fact Finding Mission’s claim that many Israeli soldiers deliberately targeted civilians during Cast Lead. Rather, he has simply stated that he doesn’t believe that Israel “intentionally targeted civilians as a matter of policy.” But the Mission never claimed that Israel had a policy of intentionally targeting civilians.

So, to repeat, Goldstone has only retracted one of the Mission’s allegations against Israel, that the above-mentioned missile strike was a deliberate attack against civilians. The other members of the Mission—Hina Jilani, Desmond Travers, and Christine Chinkin—have not retracted any of their allegations against Israel. To the contrary, since the publication of Goldstone’s op-ed, both Hina Jilani and Desmond Travers have come out and reaffirmed their support for the Mission’s findings (Middle East Monitor, Haaretz).

Even if we excise this one allegation from the Goldstone Report, Israel still stands accused of committing numerous crimes. Here is a list of some of the charges made by the Mission, none of which either Goldstone or the other members of the Mission have retracted:

1) On several different occasions, Israeli soldiers intentionally attacked civilians. According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, such attacks amount to war crimes.

2) Israel deliberately attacked Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including factories, farms, homes, mosques, hospitals, water treatment installations, and a sewage treatment plant. Most of these attacks had no military purpose and thus constitute war crimes.

3) Israel tortured many Palestinian detainees, a war crime.

4) Israel’s shelling of al-Fakhura junction in Jabalya was an indiscriminate attack, a violation of international humanitarian law.

5) Israeli political and military leaders ordered soldiers to use disproportionate force in response to rocket attacks, a violation of international law.

6) IDF soldiers repeatedly used Palestinian civilians as human shields, a violation of international law.

7) Israel’s attacks against the Palestinian Legislative Council and Gaza’s main prison “constituted deliberate attacks on civilian objects,” a violation of international law.

8) Israel’s December 27 killing of 199 police officers “failed to strike an acceptable balance between the direct military advantage anticipated” and “the loss of civilian life,” a violation of international law.

9) Israel repeatedly failed to take feasible precautions to protect civilians, a violation of customary international law.

10) Israel has refused to allow a sufficient amount of humanitarian goods to enter Gaza, a violation of international law and a possible crime against humanity.

11) Israel violently, often lethally, suppressed protests in the West Bank, a violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law. (UN Fact Finding Report [.pdf])

Unless sufficient evidence can be produced showing why the Fact Finding Mission’s arguments for such charges are ill-founded, there’s absolutely no reason for the UN to take Benjamin Netanyahu’s advice and rescind the Mission’s Report.

Much Ado About Nothing: Richard Goldstone's Supposed Retraction

2011-04-02T16:36:00.030-04:00

Writing in the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone claims that, had the Goldstone Commission known in 2009 what it knows now, its report would have “probably” been different. Specifically, he writes, the Commission most likely wouldn’t have concluded that Israel had a policy of intentionally targeting civilians (Washington Post).

Not surprisingly, Benjamin Netanyahu has jumped all over this, claiming that this op-ed exonerates Israel of all wrongdoing in Operation Cast Lead. He added: “The fact that Goldstone changed his mind must lead to the shelving of the [Goldstone] Report once and for all” (Haaretz).

There’s just one problem with all this: the Goldstone Report never claimed that Israel had a policy of intentionally targeting civilians. As Yaniv Reich writes, “This is a red-herring; nobody seriously believes there is a high-level policy to murder civilians. The actual issue is that ‘these incidents indicate that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population’ (Goldstone report, pp. 16). This low threshold was an intentional policy, as has been confirmed by dozens of soldiers’ and officers’ statements” (Mondoweiss).

So, despite what Netanyahu has claimed, Goldstone has not actually retracted any of the allegations of war crimes made by the Goldstone Commission, officially called the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. It should also be pointed out that the other members of the Commission—Christine Chinkin, Hina Jilani, and Colonel Desmond Travers—continue to stand by the Report’s findings (Mondoweiss).

All of which means that Israel still stands accused of committing several war crimes—among them, using civilians as human shields, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, and conducting indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks.

Goldstone proceeds to praise Israel for conducting investigations into “over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza.” But the UN Committee of Independent Experts, which was charged with following up on the Goldstone Report, has reported that Israel has not adequately investigated many of the allegations made by the Goldstone Commission. Most significantly, “there is no indication that Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead” (Committee of Independent Experts [.pdf]).

In his op-ed, Goldstone mentions one, just one, specific allegation made by the Goldstone Commission which he believes should be retracted: “[T]he most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Samouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack.”

As proof that the IDF didn’t target civilians in this instance, Goldstone simply states that an IDF investigation concluded that it didn’t target civilians. Needless to say, this argument is highly flawed. Both the Goldstone Commission and the Committee of Experts concluded that, for obvious reasons, Israel cannot be expected to conduct an unbiased investigation into its own affairs (Goldstone Report [.pdf]).

It’s also worth mentioning that the Committee of Experts doesn’t share Goldstone’s conclusion here. First, the Committee states that, as far as it knows, Israel has not completed its investigation of the massacre. Second, the Committee notes that, according to an October 2010 Haaretz report, although the commander who authorized the missile attack claimed that he had not been informed that civilians were present, several air force officers had in fact warned him that “there could be civilians in the area” (Haaretz).

Richard Goldstone’s motives in writing this op-ed are completely irrelevant. What matters is the evidence. And the evidence—documented not just by the Goldstone Commission, but also by the Arab League [.pdf], Breaking the Silence [.pdf], Amnesty International [.pdf], and Human Rights Watch—indicates that Israel committed numerous war crimes in Operation Cast Lead.

Don't Stop Boycottin'

2011-03-30T04:15:00.004-04:00

(Updated Below)

Resorting to violence isn't the answer. Neither is letting our hearts fill with despair and hatred.

If we want to help Palestinians, then we need to follow the lead of the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel and look for creative and loving ways to educate people and raise awareness.

UPDATE (4/9): It looks like YouTube has removed this video from its site. For more on this, see "YouTube silences a boycott video."

Daily Show: America's Freedom Packages

2011-03-25T13:32:00.000-04:00

The Daily Show - America's Freedom Packages
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Instead of Bombing Libya…

2011-03-24T14:50:00.008-04:00

Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis offer a better way to fight tyranny overseas:

If protecting civilians from evil dictators was the goal...—as opposed to, say, safeguarding natural resources and the investments of major oil companies—there’s an easier, safer way than aerial bombardment for the U.S. and its allies to consider: simply stop arming and propping up evil dictators. After all, Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi’s reaped the benefits from Western nations all too eager to cozy up to and rehabilitate the image of a dictator with oil, with those denouncing him today as a murderous tyrant just a matter of weeks ago selling him the very arms his regime has been using to suppress the rebellion against it.

In 2009 alone, European governments—including Britain and France—sold Libya more than $470 million worth of weapons, including fighter jets, guns, and bombs. And before it started calling for regime change, the Obama administration was working to provide the Libyan dictator another $77 million in weapons, on top of the $17 million it provided in 2009 and the $46 million the Bush administration provided in 2008.

Meanwhile, for dictatorial regimes in Yemen, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, U.S. support continues to this day. On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even gave the U.S. stamp of approval to the brutal crackdown on protesters in Bahrain, saying the country’s authoritarian rulers “obviously” had the “sovereign right” to invite troops from Saudi Arabia to occupy their country and carry out human rights abuses, including attacks on injured protesters as they lay in their hospital beds.

In Yemen, which has received more than $300 million in military aid from the U.S. over the last five years, the Obama administration continues to support corrupt thug and president-for-life Ali Abdullah Saleh, who recently ordered a massacre of more than 50 of his own citizens who dared protest his rule. And this support has allowed the U.S. [to] carry out its own massacres under the auspices of the war on terror, with one American bombing raid last year taking out 41 Yemeni civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, according to Amnesty International.

Rather than engage in cruise missile liberalism, Obama could save lives by immediately ending support for these brutal regimes.

Benjamin and Davis proceed to note that US support for these regimes is largely driven by arms sales. Regarding this point, Nick Turse recently wrote:

Beginning last October, the Pentagon started secretly lobbying financial analysts and large institutional investors, talking up weapons makers and other military contractors it buys from to bolster their long-term financial viability in the face of a possible future drop in Defense Department spending. The Gulf States represent another avenue toward the same goal. It’s often said that the Pentagon is a “monopsony,” the only buyer in town for its many giant contractors, but that isn't entirely true.

The Pentagon is also the sole conduit through which its Arab partners in the Gulf can buy the most advanced weaponry on Earth. By acting as a go-between, the Pentagon can ensure that the weapons manufacturers it relies on will be financially sound well into the future. A $60 billion deal with Saudi Arabia this past fall, for example, ensured that Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and other mega-defense contractors would remain healthy and profitable even if Pentagon spending goes slack or begins to shrink in the years to come.

So, in other words, the US keeps supporting these evil regimes because these regimes buy arms from US defense contractors.

And why, you might be wondering, would the Pentagon be concerned about keeping the likes of Boeing and Lockheed Martin so rich? One reason, a big reason, is that there is a revolving door between the Pentagon and defense contractors. As William Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca noted in a 2004 report for the World Policy Institute:

When the Bush administration first took office, it appointed 32 executives, paid consultants, or major shareholders of weapons contractors to top policymaking positions in the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the Department of Energy (involved in nuclear weapons development), and the State Department. Since that time, the “revolving door” has continued to spin, including a high profile scandal in which Air Force procurement official Darleen Druyun pled guilty to criminal charges for negotiating for a position at Boeing while simultaneously negotiating with the company on the terms of a controversial scheme to lease 100 more Boeing 767 airliners for modification and use as aerial refueling tankers. Another controversial move involved Pentagon acquisition chief Edward “Pete” Aldridge’s decision to move straight from Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon to a position on the board of Lockheed Martin.

For more on this revolving door, see Richard Cumming’s 2007 article “Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.”

Our Dictator in Bahrain

2011-03-20T02:43:00.006-04:00

President Obama claims that the US has gone to war against Libya for humanitarian reasons:

I want the American people to know that the use of force is not our first choice and it’s not a choice that I make lightly. But we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy, and his forces step up their assaults on cities like Benghazi and Misurata, where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government. (NY Times)

Of course, anyone who’s been following the news for the past two months must smell the hypocrisy here. If Obama really cared about protecting innocent men and women from tyrants, then his administration would have also declared war against the tyrant in Bahrain, a.k.a. King (read Dictator) Khalifa.

That King Khalifa a brutal dictator is beyond dispute. Although he periodically allows parliamentary elections, these elections are essentially meaningless. First of all, he can veto any legislation he likes, without any recourse on the part of parliament. He can also dismiss parliament at will (Stephen Zunes). His government is repressive in many other ways, as well; even the State Department acknowledges that it “restricts civil liberties, freedoms of press, speech, assembly, association, and some religious practices” (Mark LeVine).

This February 14, activists took to the streets in Bahrain, demanding a series of political reforms. Although the protests were nonviolent, the government responded with brutal force, wounding dozens of protestors and killing one (Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Al Jazeera). The following day, security forces fired on protestors during the funeral service for the man who had been killed the day before and in the process killed another protestor. Despite this, the protests grew as thousands moved into Pearl Square, a roundabout in Manama (NY Times).

Although the protests were by and large nonviolent, the government continued responding with brutal force, attacking, not just peaceful protestors, but also children and paramedics (NY Times, HRW, HRW, HRW). On February 18, the New York Times released video footage showing “the moment that Bahraini protesters, holding their hands in the air and chanting ‘peaceful, peaceful,’ were shot at close range by soldiers” (NY Times). Since then, government atrocities have continued (Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, NY Times).

And how has the Obama administration, which purports to be so concerned about human rights violations in Libya, responded to the atrocities committed by the Bahraini government? Did it declare war on the king? Did it announce that it would no longer be sending the king “large quantities of military materiel, ranging from trucks and aircraft to machine-gun parts and millions of rounds of live ammunition”? (Nick Turse). No, and no. What it did instead was simply call upon the king to exercise restraint (Hilary Clinton) and to respect the “universal rights” of his people (Obama) (Telegraph, CBS).

And then on February 23, Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with King Khalifa and Crown Prince Salman and, according to his spokesman, “reaffirmed [America’s] strong commitment to [its] military relationship with the Bahraini defense forces” and even thanked the men “for the very measured way they have been handling the popular crisis here” (Stephen Zunes). A few weeks later, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates met with the two men and, according to Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell, offered them “reassurance of our support” (Nick Turse).

Morally speaking, there are obviously no good reasons why the US, which claims to be so concerned about Libyans, continues supporting the dictator in Bahrain. Although the king has long claimed that his opponents are Iranian lackeys, a 2008 WikiLeaks memo reveals that US diplomats have never taken this charge seriously (Guardian). Bahraini Shias, as Stephen Zunes writes, tend to be fiercely independent and most of them do not follow ayatollahs. Although the king wants to portray the uprising as a “fundamentalist Shiite revolution, the protests in Bahrain have the support of both the progressive Sunni and secular populations. This pro-democracy movement is as legitimate as the popular struggles in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Signs and chants at the demonstrations indicate that they eschew sectarianism, emphasizing Shia-Sunni unity in the cause of democracy” (Zunes).

By continuing to support the king, Obama has further shown the world that he has absolutely no regard for human life. He doesn’t care about the lives of Americans, and he certainly doesn’t care about those living overseas. Like most American politicians, he only cares about perpetuating the American Empire and the giant corporations that profit from it.

Japan's Quake Could Have Irradiated the Entire US

2011-03-14T01:41:00.006-04:00

Harvey Wasserman writes (h/t David Swanson):

Had the massive 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake that has just savaged Japan hit off the California coast, it could have ripped apart at least four coastal reactors and sent a lethal cloud of radiation across the entire United States. (source)

The two huge reactors each at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are not designed to withstand such powerful shocks. All four are extremely close to major faults.

All four reactors are located relatively low to the coast. They are vulnerable to tsunamis like those now expected to hit as many as fifty countries.

San Onofre sits between San Diego and Los Angeles. A radioactive cloud spewing from one or both reactors there would do incalculable damage to either or both urban areas before carrying over the rest of southern and central California.

Diablo Canyon is at Avila Beach, on the coast just west of San Luis Obispo, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A radioactive eruption there would pour into central California and, depending on the winds, up to the Bay Area or southeast into Santa Barbara and then to Los Angeles. The cloud would at very least permanently destroy much of the region on which most Americans rely for their winter supply of fresh vegetables…

The most definitive recent study of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster puts the death toll at 985,000. (source) The accident irradiated a remote rural area. The nearest city, Kiev, is 80 kilometers [50 miles] away.

But San Luis Obispo is some ten miles directly downwind from Diablo Canyon. The region around San Onofre has become heavily suburbanized.

Heavy radioactive fallout spread from Chernobyl blanketed all of Europe within a matter of days. It covered an area far larger than the United States. (source)

Chernobyl Unit Four was of comparable size to the two reactors at Diablo Canyon, and somewhat larger than the two at San Onofre.

But it was very new when it exploded. California's four coastal reactors have been operating since the 1970s and 1980s. Their accumulated internal radioactive burdens could exceed what was spewed at Chernobyl.

All of which makes me think that leaders here, and everywhere, need to start turning to green energy. Juan Cole notes:

Germany generates 17 percent of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar, in both of which it is a leading innovator. The achievement is largely owed to government policies giving incentives for use of alternative energy, policies implemented when the SPD/ Green Party coalition was in power.

In contrast, Japan’s government has done little to promote alternative sources of energy such as wind, an area in which the country has fallen behind leaders such as Germany and China. Projects at harnessing the power of ocean waves are planned off Scotland and Oregon, but apparently not Japan (surely a natural in this regard).

Portugal gets 45% of its electricity from renewables, mostly because of government policy and investments in a smart grid. Lisbon has demonstrated that renewables are practical sources of a majority of a country’s electricity even now.

The Japan crisis has renewed fears among environmentalists in India about that country’s plans for 21 nuclear power plants. Given that solar energy is now reaching grid parity in some markets, at $4 per watt, sun-rich India is daft to subsidize expensive and dangerous nuclear plants.

Nuclear power plants are inherently unsafe, can facilitate nuclear weapons proliferation, and produce nuclear waste that is impossible to dispose of safely. Advocates for this industry use propaganda and corrupted ‘science’ in an attempt to cover up these obvious conclusions, an activity called “greenwashing.” Government and industry investments in the dead end of nuclear plants divert precious resources away from solar and wind, which are far more viable.

Japan is in the midst of a very difficult set of challenges. But when they are met, its government should make an ambitious turn to promoting green energy on the Portuguese model. And India should rethink its ill-conceived turn to nuclear plants. It is a seismically active area, and infrastructural upkeep is difficult in a developing nation.

Four Things You Need to Know About Rep. Peter King’s Anti-Muslim Witch Hunt

2011-03-09T22:05:00.005-05:00

1) The Threat of Homegrown Islamic Terrorism Has Been Greatly Exaggerated.

According to the FBI, Muslim-Americans were responsible for just 6% of all domestic terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2005. Latinos were responsible for 42% of terrorist attacks, left-wing extremists for 24%, and Jewish extremists for 7%. Yes, that’s right, Latinos and Jews have committed more domestic terrorist attacks since 1980 than Muslims (LoonWatch).

Since 9/11, America has drastically increased its terrorism against Muslims living overseas, thus fueling an increase in anti-American Islamic terrorism. Despite this, the number of terrorist attacks committed by Muslim-Americans is still relatively low. Last year, for instance, 10 Muslim-Americans were suspected of planning domestic terrorist attacks; of them, just one, Faisal Shahzad (aka the Times Square Bomber) actually carried out his plot, which, we all know, failed. Let me repeat that: last year, one Muslim-American attempted an act of terrorism on US soil. One. One attempt, zero deaths (Duke).

By contrast, 20 non-Muslim-Americans were suspected of planning domestic terrorist attacks last year, including right-wing suicide terrorist Joseph Stack, who flew a small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an innocent bystander, a father and grandfather named Vernon Hunter. Richard Cohen points out that, “when measured against ordinary violent crime,” the threat of Muslim-American terrorism “is slight” and that “the threat from non-Muslims is much greater” (Washington Post).

2) Muslim-Americans Have Played a Key Role in Fighting Terrorism.

Although King has claimed that “85 percent of the mosques in this country are controlled by ‘extremist leadership’” (and also that there are “too many mosques in this country”) (Politico), the University of North Carolina’s Charles Kurzman notes that the evidence suggest that “Muslim-American communities have been active in preventing radicalization. This is one reason that Muslim-American terrorism has resulted in fewer than three dozen of the 136,000 murders committed in the United States since 9/11” (CNN).

A recent study conducted by Kurzman and others found that tips from Muslim-Americans have been the government’s “largest single source of initial information” in bringing terror suspects to the attention of authorities. Since 9/11, Muslim-Americans have provided the government with tips in 48 of 120 terrorist cases (Duke).

3. King’s Witch Hunt Could Fuel Anti-American Terrorism.

As Paul Pillar notes: “The focus of the hearings should be of greater concern for the message they send overseas as well as to communities at home. They will be widely read as an indication that U.S. postures and policies that are ostensibly aimed at combating terrorism are really more about combating Muslims. And that reading will in turn stir more anti-Americanism among Muslims” (National Interest).

Pillar’s reasoning has been corroborated by the likes of General David Petraeus, who claimed during last year’s planned Koran-burning in Florida that such actions can be easily exploited by Islamic radicals overseas and in turn harm American national security (Washington Post). Similarly, Brian Fishman, an associate at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, has warned “that anti-Islamic rhetoric feeds into the message of al Qaeda propagandists like Anwar al-Awlaki, who try to recruit terrorists by advancing claims that American Muslims face a dark future of ever-worsening discrimination and vilification” (Human Rights First).

4. Peter King Has a History of Supporting Irish Terrorism.

The Washington Post recently noted that in the 1980s King, “then a local politician on Long Island, was one of the most zealous American defenders of the militant IRA and its campaign to drive the British out of Northern Ireland. He argued that IRA violence was an inevitable response to British repression and that the organization had to be understood in the context of a centuries-long struggle for independence.

“‘The British government is a murder machine,’ King said. He described the IRA, which mastered the car bomb as an instrument of urban terror, as a ‘legitimate force.’ And he compared Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing, to George Washington…

“The IRA was responsible for half of the more than 3,500 people killed in the ensuing 30-year conflict; of those killed by the IRA, about 600 were civilians, according to statistics compiled by researchers in Northern Ireland” (Washington Post).

Bradley Manning Now "Catatonic"

2011-03-08T00:23:00.003-05:00

From Glenn Greenwald, March 5:

To follow-up on yesterday's observations about the prolonged forced nudity to which Bradley Manning has been subjected the last two days: brig officials now confirm to The New York Times that Manning will be forced to be nude every night from now on for the indefinite future -- not only when he sleeps, but also when he stands outside his cell for morning inspection along with the other brig detainees. They claim that it is being done "as a 'precautionary measure' to prevent him from injuring himself."

Has anyone before successfully committed suicide using a pair of briefs -- especially when under constant video and in-person monitoring? There's no underwear that can be issued that is useless for killing oneself? And if this is truly such a threat, why isn't he on "suicide watch" (the NYT article confirms he's not)? And why is this restriction confined to the night; can't he also off himself using his briefs during the day?

Let's review Manning's detention over the last nine straight months: 23-hour/day solitary confinement; barred even from exercising in his cell; one hour total outside his cell per day where he's allowed to walk around in circles in a room alone while shackled, and is returned to his cell the minute he stops walking; forced to respond to guards' inquiries literally every 5 minutes, all day, everyday; and awakened at night each time he is curled up in the corner of his bed or otherwise outside the guards' full view. Is there anyone who doubts that these measures -- and especially this prolonged forced nudity -- are punitive and designed to further erode his mental health, physical health and will?

(For more on the US government's torture of Bradley Manning, see Greenwald's December 15, 2010, article, "The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention.")

From War Is A Crime, March 7:

As Obama's crime of the destruction of Bradley Manning continues to unfold before our very eyes, Manning friend David House now tells us that over 8 months in isolation with movement and sleep restrictions placed on him have been having their intended effect. House has told MSNBC that by the end of January Manning appeared "catatonic" and that he had "severe problems communicating," with it having taken House nearly 45 minutes on a recent visit to engage in any meaningful way (video below.) House said Manning's demeanor was as "if he had just woken up and didn't know what was going on around him." Manning was "utterly exhausted physically and mentally...it was difficult to have any kind of social engagement."

Of the Corporations, By the Corporations, For the Corporations

2011-03-01T19:31:00.000-05:00

The 2008 Bank Bailout. Big banks favored the bailout. Most Americans opposed it. Washington sided with the banks.
The Public Option. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies have long opposed the public option. Most Americans have long demanded it. Last year, Congress sided with the insurance and pharmaceutical companies and excluded the public option from its Healthcare Reform Bill.
The War on Afghanistan. Defense firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing love the war. Most Americans oppose it. Washington continues siding with the defense firms.
Military spending. Defense firms want more military spending. Most Americans want less military spending. Washington continues siding with the defense firms.
Corporate Tax Loopholes. Big corporations oppose closing corporate tax loopholes. Most Americans favor closing such loopholes. Washington continues siding with big corporations.

Colbert on Wisconsin

2011-02-24T02:32:00.000-05:00

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Meanwhile in Gaza…

2011-02-23T19:50:00.002-05:00

You might remember that last June, Israel, after coming under international condemnation for murdering nine humanitarian aid workers aboard the Mavi Mamara, promised that it would ease its blockade on the people of Gaza. “The announcement, which offered few details, said that the security cabinet had decided to ‘liberalize the system by which civilian goods enter Gaza’ and to expand the inflow of construction materials for civilian projects that are under international supervision” (NY Times).

Well it turns out—brace yourselves for this—that Israel hasn’t substantially changed its policy. According to a December 2010 report issued by Amnesty International and a host of other human rights organizations, Israel has continued banning items that don’t fall under “the international definition of dual-use items” and has kept total imports into Gaza to just 35% of pre-blockade levels. The report also stated that:

“[Israel] has so far only approved 7 per cent of the building plan for UNRWA’s projects in Gaza, and of that 7 per cent only a small fraction of the necessary construction material has been allowed to enter for projects including schools and health centres.”
“Although there has been a significant increase in the amount of food stuffs entering Gaza, many humanitarian items, including vital water equipment, that are not on the Israeli restricted list continue to receive no permits.”
“Two thirds of Gaza’s factories report they have received none or only some of the raw materials they need to recommence operations.”
“More Palestinian businesspeople than before have been allowed to leave Gaza, but ordinary Gaza residents are still denied access to their friends and family, and to educational opportunities in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and abroad.” (Amnesty et al.)

After the European Union admonished Israel for “fail[ing] to live up to its commitments on easing the blockade” and urged Israel to both increase the number goods entering Gaza and also begin allowing exports out of the territory (Haaretz), Israel’s cabinet, sensing the need for some quick damage control, announced on December 8 that it would “significantly increase exports of goods from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank and abroad” (Haaretz). According to the above Amnesty report, “[e]xcept for the humanitarian activity of exporting a small amount of strawberries, not a single truck of exports has left Gaza since the ‘easing until now.’”

The importance of allowing exports from Gaza cannot be stressed enough. Gaza’s businesses, just like businesses in most small economies, depend upon exports for their survival. “[P]revious goods regularly exported from Gaza included 76 percent of all Gaza-manufactured furniture products, 90 percent of garments and 20 percent of all food products.” Not surprisingly, then, as a result of the blockade, 95 percent of Gaza’s “industrial establishments” were forced to shut down and “the remaining five percent were forced to reduce their level of activity” (OCHA). Today, 39% of Gazans are unemployed and 80% of Gazans depend upon international aid for their survival (Amnesty et al.). So, in other words, without the ability to export goods, Gaza’s economy can’t survive, which means that, even are satisfactory number of goods are entering Gaza, few people can afford to buy them.

Well it turns out—again brace yourselves for this—that Israel still isn’t allowing exports to leave Gaza, this according to a recent report from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Just thought I’d remind ya’ll that Palestinians are still suffering. Most people’s attention lately has been on Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Bahrain, Yemen, etc., and understandably so. But let’s be sure not to forget Palestine.

Bill O’Reilly Fact Check: The Wisconsin Protests

2011-02-22T01:34:00.001-05:00

Saith Falafel Boy:

Times columnist Paul Krugman, a far left zealot, says that Wisconsin state workers make less than those doing corresponding jobs in the private sector…That seems to be false. For example, a state worker in Wisconsin making $48,000 a year gets a monthly pension of $1,700. A worker in the private sector making $70,000 a year gets $400 less than the state worker.

But Paul Krugman never said that. What Krugman said was that “public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications.” As Alternet's Joshua Holland explains: “Public sector workers have, on average, more experience and higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector (they are twice as likely to have a college degree). When you adjust for those factors, they make, on average, 4 percent less than their private-sector counterparts.”

Krugman’s article, by the way, is excellent. I suggest you read it. For other great articles on the protests in Wisconsin, I recommend the following:

Also, please take the time to sign this petition.

The Great Tea Party Sell Out: The Truth About the House Republican Budget

2011-02-19T21:38:00.007-05:00

(Updated Below)

What the House Republican budget would do:

Cut about $60 billion in spending from last year’s levels in many domestic programs, including education, environmental protection and community services.
Eliminate federal family planning and teen pregnancy prevention grants.
Cut the Social Security Administration, which the agency has warned might force it to furlough workers.
Prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing regulautions curbing emissions of gases that cause global warming.
Reduce Pell Grants for lower-income college students by $5.6 billion.
Cut $747 million in food aid for poor pregnant women and women with children up to the age of 5.
Halt financing for the Americorps national service program, which pays people to do public service jobs and encourages volunteerism.
Prevent the administration from enforcing a proposed rule making it harder for students at for-profit colleges to get federal loans and grants.

Meanwhile—and please brace yourselves for this shocking revelation, dear reader—the bill leaves corporate welfare and military spending essentially unscathed.[1] Let me repeat that: House Republicans have proposed $60 billion in spending cuts that will hurt middle-class and lower-income Americans—yet they refuse to touch the Corporate Welfare Queens and Parasites in the Military Industrial Complex.

There’s a word for this: Immoral.

Even if you’re a Ron Paul-loving libertarian who believes we need to scale back social welfare, you have to admit that this is the wrong way to do it. You don’t start by taking subsidies away from people at the bottom. You don’t start by slashing food aid programs. You start with the Corporate Welfare Queens, who currently receive around $90 billion every year from taxpayers. You start with the Military Industrial Complex, which, when all is said and done, receives over $1 trillion every year from taxpayers.

I can’t tell you how sick I’ve grown listening to conservatives tell us that the days of reckless spending are over, that it’s time we all tighten our belts and make some sacrifices. Bullshit. The poor and middle class have made enough sacrifices. In fact, we’ve been the only ones making sacrifices. We’re in this shitty condition—unemployed, underemployed, losing our homes, watching our 401Ks struggle to recover—because politicians and their evil corporate buddies have spent the past several decades screwing us over.

It’s time that Washington’s fuck fest with Big Corporations comes to an end. It’s time that we start following the example of all those brave men and women in Wisconsin and finally stand up for ourselves.

I agree we need to cut spending. Absolutely, let’s cut spending. Let’s start by ending the war on Afghanistan, which will cost us an additional $100 billion this year. One hundred billion dollars for a completely insane, immoral, unnecessary, and ultimately unwinnable war. And then let’s go all the way and finally end the American Empire, which benefits nobody but our politicians and all the sociopaths at Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the like. I’m all for national defense. But I don’t see why we need to be the world’s police force. I don’t see why we need to have over 1,000 overseas military bases, bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Guam, Greenland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Bulgaria, Brazil, Spain, Diego Garcia, the Philippines, and many other countries. I don’t see why need to continue spending as much on defense as the entire rest of the world combined.

And then once we’re done with the Military Industrial Complex, let’s move on to the other Corporate Welfare Queens. No more bailouts for big banks, no more “direct cash payments” for agricultural firms and automobile manufacturers, no more “loans, research, and marketing support” for every other corporate slimeball who can afford to buy himself or herself a congressperson.

That’s the responsible, moral way to cut spending.

So please take a stand and contact your congressman and senators and demand that they cut military spending and corporate welfare, not programs that people actually need.

* * * * *

Notes

[1] Over the past several days, Republicans voted against amendments which would have: (1) cut $19 billion from the Defense budget, (2) prohibited the Pentagon from sponsoring cars in Nascar races, (3) eliminated the Innovative Research Fund, (4) eliminated money allocated for alternative energy in the Pentagon, and (5) cut the Pentagon’s research and development budget by 10%. As far as I can tell, the only defense cut they approved was an amendment to eliminate $450 million in funding to develop a second engine for the F-35 fighter jet, hardly a controversial vote given that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has long demanded that this program be cut.

* * * * *

Update: Please see Kevin Zeese's excellent article, The Security Budget vs. the Necessities of Americans.

More Lies About the Muslim Brotherhood

2011-02-14T00:35:00.007-05:00

(Updated Below)

Adding to the anti-Muslim Brotherhood frenzy that’s currently consuming much of the American right, Evangelical leader Chuck Colson writes:

The sad truth is that while Mubarak can’t be called a “friend” of the Copts, he at least tried to reign in his and their common enemy: the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is the original and still most influential Islamist group in the world. Its progeny include al-Qaeda and Hamas.

While the Brotherhood has participated in the electoral process, it’s with an eye to creating an Islamic republic at the center of the Arab world. To call the Brotherhood a force for democracy is insane—and dangerous.

In its vision of a society where the Qur’an is the “sole reference point” for the ordering of family and social life, there is no room for the Copts. The Brotherhood has been implicated in the burning of churches, seminaries and Copt-owned businesses, as well as the murder of Coptic Christians.

All of this makes talk about “democracy” in Egypt and “everyone being an Egyptian” a bit premature. It’s not at all clear whether Copts, whose ancestors have lived there since time immemorial, would be recognized as “Egyptians” in a new government.

Before dealing with the specifics of Colson’s argument, I think it’s important to address his assumption that a democratic Egypt would more than likely be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Out of a population of some 80 million people, the Brotherhood only has around 100,000 members. Writing shortly after the uprising began, Scott Atran noted that support for the Brotherhood has been

less a matter of true attachment than an accident of circumstance: the many decades of suppression of secular opposition groups that might have countered it. The British, King Farouk, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar el-Sadat all faced the same problem that Hisham Kaseem, a newspaper editor and human rights activist, described playing out under Mr. Mubarak. “If people met in a cafe and talked about things the regime didn’t like, he would just shut down the cafe and arrest us,” Mr. Kaseem said. “But you can’t close mosques, so the Brotherhood survived.”

If Egyptians are given political breathing space, Mr. Kaseem told me, the Brotherhood’s importance will rapidly fade. “In this uprising the Brotherhood is almost invisible,” Mr. Kaseem said, “but not in America and Europe, which fear them as the bogeyman” (New York Times).

A recent poll conducted by the Washington Institute of Near East Policy shows that the Brotherhood has an approval rating of just 15% and that “its leaders get barely 1% in a presidential straw vote. Asked to pick national priorities, just 12% choose shariah over national power, democracy, or economic development. Asked to explain  the uprising, economic conditions, corruption, and unemployment (30-40% each) far outpace ‘regime not Islamic enough’ (7%)” (Washington Post).

Now moving on to Colson’s argument.

First, it’s absurd to lump the Muslim Brotherhood together with such jihadist groups as al-Qaeda and Hamas. Although it’s true that both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were once associated with the Brotherhood, Colson fails to mention that these individuals left the Brotherhood because, as they became more and more radical, their beliefs became incompatible with the group’s. As Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke write, “The Brotherhood is a collection of national groups with differing outlooks, and the various factions disagree about how best to advance its mission. But all reject global jihad while embracing elections and other features of democracy” (Foreign Affairs). The Brotherhood has repeatedly condemned al-Qaeda and other radical groups and has in turn been condemned by these groups (AFP, New English Review, Foreign Affairs).

Colson’s claim that the Brotherhood is against the Copts, that there would be “no room” for the Copts in a Brotherhood-dominated Egypt, is equally absurd. The Brotherhood has long defended Egyptian’s Coptic Christians. Last November, for instance, when an al-Qaeda group declared that all Christians were “legitimate targets,” the Brotherhood, not only condemned this belief, but called upon all Muslims to protect Christians (The National, Xinhuanet). After radicals bombed an Alexandrian church on New Year’s day, the Brotherhood put its words into action and attended “Christmas Masses with their Coptic Christian brethren, serving as human shields against further potential acts of extremist violence on the Christian holy day” (Washington Post, Juan Cole, ABNA). As anti-Mubarak protests began last month, the Brotherhood again “called on prominent members of the Muslim clergy in Egypt to help protect the churches in the country” (Waging Nonviolence, The Peninsula).

While Colson insists that the Brotherhood intends to impose an Islamic system upon Egypt, the group insists that it’s committed to democracy. Last week, it publicly rejected calls by Iran’s Ayatollah Kahmenei for an Islamic revolution, maintaining instead that it “regards the revolution as the Egyptian People’s Revolution not an Islamic Revolution” and “asserting that the Egyptian People’s Revolution includes Muslims, Christians, from all sects and political [sic]” (Eurasia Review).

After spending two weeks talking to members of the Brotherhood, James Traub, an American journalist and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, remarked how struck he was “by their reluctance to impose their views on others and their commitment to [the] democratic process.” As one member told Traub, “We do not want to establish a country like Iran, which thinks that it is ruling with a divine mandate. We want a government based on civil law, with an Islamic source of lawmaking.” Traub proceeds to write:

And just what is an “Islamic source of lawmaking?” Muhammad Habib, then the Muslim Brotherhood's deputy supreme guide—its second-ranking official—explained to me that, under such a system, parliament would seek the advice of religious scholars on issues touching upon religion, though such views could never be binding. A democratically elected parliament, he asserted, would still have the “absolute right” to pass a law the Brotherhood deemed “un-Islamic.” And the proper redress for religious objections would be a formal appeal process in the constitutional court.

Maybe they were lying. But I didn’t think so. More to the point, the Muslim Brotherhood's then 88-member caucus in the legislature studiously avoided religious issues and worked with secular opposition members on issues of democracy and human rights. They all lived together in a hotel, showed up for work every day, and invited outside experts for policy briefings. It was widely agreed that the Brothers took parliament far more seriously than members of the ruling party ever had. (Foreign Policy)

(See also Carrie Rosefsky Wickham’s “The Muslim Brotherhood After Mubarak.”)

Now I don’t write any of this to suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood is a perfectly benevolent organization and that, if it somehow gains power, we should blindly trust it to do the right thing. No group of people, especially one given power over others, should be trusted blindly. But I do think it’s important to understand that the narrative being forwarded by such people as Chuck Colson has almost no basis in reality.

* * * * *

Update:

Some more reading on the Muslim Brotherhood:

peace, etc.

Global Warming: A Dialogue (Part 2)

Global Warming: A Dialogue (Part 1)

[4] “List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming,” Wikipedia; “Roger A. Pielke,” Wikipedia.

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