The Truth Will Set Us Free
What this war is not about.
So far most of our intelligentsia have been more eager to explain what this war is not than what it is. Yet the conflict is not a hash-it-out in the faculty lounge, nor a brainstorm over a headline in the newsroom, nor flashy quippmanship in a political debate.
No, it is a deadly business about young men sleeping out in the rocks of Afghanistan and under tanks in Iraq who right now need to know whether this country is at war, peace, or something in between. So we need some straight talk, perhaps brutal honesty about a growing number of false assumptions before we go any further.
THE "IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH JUDEO-CHRISTIANITY" SCHOOL
It is pedestrian — and for that very purpose mouthed ad nauseam — that we are not at war with Jesus freaks of the world or Judeochristianity per se. Of course, we are not.
But it is also near criminal not to see that the distortion of Judeochristianity — not of Islam, not of Hinduism, not of Buddhism — is the fuel of this entire conflagration, from the Zionists and al Qaeda to Likud and US Evangelists, with plenty of secular opportunistic abettors like Ariel Sharon, Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, and the faux-holy men in the Vatican thrown in.
We need honest language, not more pablum that "all religions can be distorted by extremists" — as if the Algerian Liberation war, the Iranian Revolution, Carlos (aka Ilich Ramirez Sanchez), or the Shintoism of the Japanese militarists were contemporary events or relevant to the current struggle. They are not.
(Continued on next post) |
