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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (38889)	4/11/2004 12:47:07 AM
From: frankw1900	Respond to of 793801

Hasn't this guy been to Spain? Everywhere you look is St Sebastien full of arrows. The rings with which they hung Jews and heretics from buildngs are still in place. Pilgrimage shops full of ghastly bon deiusiary almost on a par with the Shiite stuff. Every church has several images of a tortured, crucified man, mortally wounded, writhing as he suffocates to death. Yet, despite the machinations of Opus Dei, they manage to run elections and a secular society. In Iraq's Shiite areas where they manage to run elections, they don't elect religious militants. So this guy writes this armchair pyschology: But the religious sect is bound together in large part by a reverence for Hussein, who, in the Shia imagination, combines infallibility in the secular realm with absolute piety in the religious The problem is, of course, this creates an image of perfection that no human being ? not even Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamofascist successors ? can realize, leading to the Shiites' perpetual disappointment, alienation and eventual violence against governing authorities. "...eventual violence against governing authorities," he writes, mindless of the fact that far beyond living memory Iraqi Shiites have been governed by utterly corrupt, violent people, who were not Shiites, and against whom most self respecting people would revolt from time to time, regardless of the darker images of their religious symbolism. Most Shiites regard Khomeini as a heretic and expect no perfection from his followers - quite the opposite. They managed to take Iran in a putsch reminiscent of Hitler's move against Germany. This was no religious movement at all, despite the religious vocabulary with which it was dressed from time to time. The ungovernability of Iraqi Shiites is not a fact but a figment of Steven Vincent's imagination. They are cranky and view the US with some suspicion - which is not surprising given their history with the US, and given that the US is in charge there still, and given that previous governments over them have been nasty and brutish.... But nothing Vincent describes demonstrates they're medieval mouth breathers who can only be understood by peasants and pious movie actors. They vote secular, as no doubt, does the pious movie actor. Even the story Vincent quotes at beginning of the article has a twist doesn't it? There is a story told among Shiites today that as the revered Imam Hussein lay dying on the fields of Karbala in 680 A.D., he cursed the people of what is now Iraq for having deserted him in his hour of need. "May you never satisfy a ruler," he gasped. "And may you never be satisfied by a ruler. Seeds of modernity. Be self rulers. Take up democracy. Then when you're unsatisfied, vote the rascals out. Vincent's been reading too much Foucault.