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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (346074)	8/7/2007 3:46:38 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575539

Hizballah's Christian Soldiers? By ANDREW LEE BUTTERS/BEIRUT Tue Aug 7, 11:45 AM ET Sunday's Lebanese parliamentary by-election was planned to strengthen the country's U.S.-backed government against the ongoing campaign by opposition forces allied with Iran and Syria to bring it down. But once the votes were counted, the election appears to have strengthened the hand of the opposition and highlighted the weakness of the current power arrangement in an increasingly divided country. The election was held to replace two assassinated legislators from the anti-Syrian ruling coalition of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. And the government comfortably won one of those seats - the one formerly occupied by the late Walid Eido, a Sunni member of parliament who was killed in June by a bomb set next to his favorite beach club. But holding Eido's seat wasn't much of a challenge: He had represented a strong Sunni Muslim district in West Beirut where support for Siniora is strong. The bombshell came in the majority Christian district known as the Metn in the mountains just north of Beirut: There, former President Amin Gemayel, one of the stalwarts of the anti-Syrian coalition, lost to a small-time opposition candidate, Camille Khoury, who is unrecognizable to most Lebanese. Though Gemayel was defeated by just 418 votes, the loss is all the more stunning because he was campaigning to fill the seat once held by his son, Pierre Gemayel, who was gunned down in the suburbs of Beirut in November. Khoury's victory is a reflection of the popularity of his patron, Michel Aoun, a charismatic and enigmatic former general who heads the country's largest Christian political party, the Free Patriotic Movement. Aoun's popularity confounds any attempt to read Lebanon as a battlefield in a "clash of civilizations," because he and his party are openly allied with Hizballah, the Iran-backed Shi'ite Muslim political party and anti-Israeli militia that leads the opposition. What could Lebanese Christians possibly have in common with Hizballah, the Islamist resistance movement? Perhaps it is the fact that Aoun's Christian supporters and Hizballah's rank and file are motivated by a shared animus towards Lebanon's political elite, a handful of families such as the Gemayel, whose progeny resurface in government after government. In fact, many of the supporters of the current government are civil war-era militia leaders, who accommodated themselves rather nicely to the years of Syrian occupation, but who have now emerged wearing business suits and talking U.S.-friendly language about democracy and independence. Of course, neither Aoun nor Hizballah is a poster child for democratic civil society. Aoun, as head of the Lebanese army in the early 1990s, launched a series of disastrous civil conflicts, while Hizballah sparked a pointless war with Israel last summer that resulted in the deaths of almost 2,000 Lebanese, many of them children. Still, both popular movements tap into the general resentment of average people who have watched as a relatively small number of Lebanese - well represented in the anti-Syria ruling coalition - have cashed in on the post civil-war reconstruction of the country. The latest election results and the wider campaign against the government reflects not so much an attack on democracy as it does the failure of the country's sectarian system to resolve internal disputes. The system, which reserves the presidency for the Maronite Christians, the Prime Minister's job for a Sunni, the speaker of parliament for a Shi'ite and generally distributes power on the basis of ethnicity and sect, was originally created to achieve stability through a careful balance of power. Instead, it has produced political deadlock and a system dominated by leaders whose domestic power is based on alliances with foreign powers. Yes, Lebanon is a battlefield, but not in some global religious-ideological war. Instead, its politics reflects an old-fashioned power struggle between the fading regional superpower - the United States - and the rising power of Iran and its Syrian ally. And that's a conflict that is not going to be settled by any Lebanese by-election. View this article on Time.com

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (346074)	8/7/2007 6:42:14 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575539

I think Hill and Edwards make the same claim as well. One is a Methodist, the other a Southern Baptist - as was Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (346074)	8/7/2007 9:00:31 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575539

Sorry bub, wrong once again ( I thought you right wingnuts were saying he was a Muslim who went to a madrassa as a child?).. time-blog.com Obama's Religion Posted by TOM BEVAN \| E-Mail This \| Permalink \| Email Author Barack Obama says he's a Christian who came to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in his mid-20's. But does he consider himself "evangelical?" That question was posed to him recently by Cathleen Falsani, the religion reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Here is Obama's reponse: "Gosh, I'm not sure if labels are helpful here because the definition of an evangelical is so loose and subject to so many different interpretations. I came to Christianity through the black church tradition where the line between evangelical and non-evangelical is completely blurred. Nobody knows exactly what it means. "Does it mean that you feel you've got a personal relationship with Christ the savior? Then that's directly part of the black church experience. Does it mean you're born-again in a classic sense, with all the accoutrements that go along with that, as it's understood by some other tradition? I'm not sure." He continued his answer: "My faith is complicated by the fact that I didn't grow up in a particular religious tradition. And so what that means is when you come at it as an adult, your brain mediates a lot, and you ask a lot of questions. "There are aspects of Christian tradition that I'm comfortable with and aspects that I'm not. There are passages of the Bible that make perfect sense to me and others that I go, 'Ya know, I'm not sure about that,'" he said, shrugging and stammering slightly. Obama's response doesn't bother me at all, and probably won't bother most people. But some on the right have already made some repugnant insinuations about his religious beliefs and how they may affect his "loyalties," and I suspect his comments about not growing up in a particular religious tradition and not being comfortable with certain "aspects" of the Christian tradition will, unfortunately, only serve to keep those dark innuendos circulating.