A conversation between three people, call them Wahid, Ithneen and Thalatha…
Wahid: A believing, but fanatical, Christian could easily interpret words in the Christian Bible to rationalize violence and genocide.
Ithneen: Oliver Cromwell –love him or hate him– immediately comes to mind. But, there are lots of others. Christians quickly went from being tortured to being torturers, but they’re only human. If they weren’t, they’d act like Christ who said something like “Forgive them for they know not what they do” and “love your enemies.
Thalatha: Forget Cromwell, when George W. Bush called the French President to ask if France would join the ‘coalition of the willing’ .. Daily Kos reported that …
Bush’s Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to “Erase” Mid-East Enemies “Before a New Age Begins”
Bush explained to French Pres. Chirac that the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Mid-East and must be defeated.
May 25, 2009 |
The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means?
The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush’s Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.
In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.
Same again from the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/aug/10/religion-george-bush
In the winter of 2003, when George Bush and Tony Blair were frantically gathering support for their planned invasion, Professor Thomas Römer, an Old Testament expert at the university of Lausanne, was rung up by the Protestant Federation of France. They asked him to supply them with a summary of the legends surrounding Gog and Magog and as the conversation progressed, he realised that this had originally come, from the highest reaches of the French government.
President Jacques Chirac wanted to know what the hell President Bush had been on about in their last conversation. Bush had then said that when he looked at the Middle East, he saw “Gog and Magog at work” and the biblical prophecies unfolding. But who the hell were Gog and Magog? Neither Chirac nor his office had any idea. But they knew Bush was an evangelical Christian, so they asked the French Federation of Protestants, who in turn asked Professor Römer.
If you combine that with the 500,000 deaths in Iraq and use a complete moron to do the analysis, you could easily conclude that Christianity is somehow deeply flawed and a horrendous religion.
However most normal thinking people wouldn’t tar all Christians, or Christianity with the stupidity of the millenium nutters, dominionists etc. Yet that is what people do with Muslims. In … claiming all muslims are bad because of the acts of a few intolerant lunatics, and you can prove it by using an interpretation of Islam coming from those very same lunatics or from frauds like Robert Spencer or Bat Yeor.
Ithneen: I also wanted to say that you bring up an important point. People condemn Muslims for what they’ve done in the name of Islam. Yet, Christians tend to dissociate their religion from what Christians actually “do.” It’s always interesting to read what people admit they do in the name of their religious beliefs.
Thalatha: What struck me the most about Al Qaeda type terrorism is why they are making the religious link. I see it as a fringe grouping trying to convert muslims to a radical and new interpretation of Islam in order to gain a power base in muslim countries. They are trying to cause mayhem, provoke a backlash which ordinary muslims will be on the receiving end of, and then say aha, our credo was right all along, join our group.
The problem is that we seem to be playing their game, by their rules. Anyone who has fought knows that is the stupidest strategy possible. We need to highlight how extremists on all sides seem to be waging a private war for the souls of ordinary people.
Ithneen: I agree: it’s not about religion; it’s about gaining power. The excuse doesn’t matter: it could be the Great Satan or the Jew or even (and especially) other Muslims who co-operate with them or share their views. And, you’re right that the tactic is used by other power-seekers as well. In fact, though, history tends to show that fundamentalists are as hard or harder on their own kind than on their enemies.
