[Peace-discuss] Robert Fisk article

[Morton K. Brussel]

About what the religions have to offer…

Sorry not being able to attend the send off party this evening.  But  
to all who are going, give them hell!

--mkb

We Have Long Ago Lost Our Moral Compass, So How Can We Lecture The  
Islamic World?

Years of Western interference in the Middle East has left the region  
heavy with injustices

By Robert Fisk

09/17/05 "The Independent" --- In an age when Lord Blair of Kut al- 
Amara can identify "evil ideologies" and al-Qa'ida can call the  
suicide bombing of 156 Iraqi Shias "good news" for the "nation of  
Islam", thank heaven for our readers, in particular John Shepherd,  
principal lecturer in religious studies at St Martin's College,  
Lancaster.

Responding to a comment of mine - to the effect that "deep down" we  
do, however wrongly, suspect that religion has something to do with  
the London bombings - Mr Shepherd gently admonishes me. "I wonder if  
there may be more to it than that," he remarks. And I fear he is  
right and I am wrong.

His arguments are contained in a brilliantly conceived article on the  
roots of violence and extremism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam -  
and the urgent need to render all religions safe for "human  
consumption".

Put very simply, Mr Shepherd takes a wander through some of the  
nastiest bits of the Bible and the Koran - those bits we prefer not  
to quote or not to think about - and finds that mass murder and  
ethnic cleansing get a pretty good bill of health if we take it all  
literally.

The Jewish "entry into the promised land" was clearly accompanied by  
bloody conquest and would-be genocide. The Christian tradition has  
absorbed this inheritance, entering its own "promised land" with a  
ruthlessness that extends to cruel anti-Semitism. The New Testament,  
Mr Shepherd points out, "contains passages that would ... be  
actionable under British laws against incitement to racial hatred"  
were they to be published fresh today.

The Muslim tradition - with its hatred of idolatry - contains, in the  
career of the Prophet, "scenes of bloodshed and murder which are  
shocking to modern religious sensibilities".

Thus, for example, Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli military doctor who  
massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, committed his mass  
murder on Purim, a festival celebrating the deliverance of the Jewish  
communities from the Persian empire which was followed by large-scale  
killing "to avenge themselves on their enemies" (Esther 8:13).

The Palestinians, of course, were playing the role of the Persians,  
at other times that of the Amalekites ("... kill man and woman, babe  
and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey" - 1, Samuel 15:1, 3).  
The original "promised land" was largely on what is now the West Bank  
- hence the Jewish colonisation of Palestinian land - while the  
coastal plain was not (although suggestions that Israel should  
transplant itself further east, leaving Haifa, Tel Aviv and Ashkelon  
to the Palestinians of the West Bank are unlikely to commend  
themselves to Israel’s rulers).

The "chosen people" theme, meanwhile, moved into Christianity - the  
Protestants of Northern Ireland, for example, (remember the Ulster  
Covenant?), and apartheid South Africa and, in some respects, the  
United States.

The New Testament is laced with virulent anti-Semitism, accusing the  
Jews of killing Christ. Read Martin Luther. The Koran demanded the  
forced submission of conquered peoples in the name of religion (the  
Koran 9:29), and Mohammed’s successor, the Caliph Abu Bakr, stated  
specifically that "we will treat as an unbeliever whoever rejects  
Allah and Mohammed, and we will make holy war upon him ... for such  
there is only the sword and fire and indiscriminate slaughter."

So there you go. And how does Mr Shepherd deal with all this?  
Settlement policy should be rejected not because it is theologically  
questionable but because the dispossession of a people is morally  
wrong. Anti-Semitism must be rejected not because it is incompatible  
with the Gospels but because it is incompatible with any basic  
morality based on shared human values.

If Muslim violence is to be condemned, it is not because Mohammed is  
misunderstood but because it violates basic human rights. "West Bank  
settlements, Christian anti-Semitism and Muslim terrorism ... are not  
morally wrong because theologically questionable - they are  
theologically questionable because morally wrong."

And it is true that most Christians, Jews and Muslims draw on the  
tolerant, moderate aspects of their tradition. We prefer not to  
accept the fact that the religions of the children of Abraham are  
inherently flawed in respect of intolerance, discrimination, violence  
and hatred. Only - if I understand Mr Shepherd’s thesis correctly -  
by putting respect for human rights above all else and by making  
religion submit to universal human values can we " grasp the nettle".

Phew. I can hear the fundamentalists roaring already. And I have to  
say it will probably be the Islamic ones who will roar loudest.  
Reinterpretation of the Koran is such a quicksand, so dangerous to  
approach, so slippery a subject that most Muslims will not go near.

How can we suggest that a religion based on "submission" to God must  
itself "submit" to our happy-clappy, all-too-Western " universal  
human rights"? I don’t know. Especially when we " Christians" have  
largely failed to condemn some of our own atrocities - indeed, have  
preferred to forget them.

Take the Christians who massacred the Muslims of Srebrenica. Or take  
the Christians - Lebanese Phalangist allies of the Israelis - who  
entered the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut and slaughtered  
up to 1,700 Palestinian Muslim civilians.

Do we remember that? Do we recall that the massacres occurred between  
16 and 18 September 1982? Yes, today is the 23rd anniversary of that  
little genocide - and I suspect The Independent will be one of the  
very few newspapers to remember it. I was in those camps in 1982. I  
climbed over the corpses. Some of the Christian Phalangists in Beirut  
even had illustrations of the Virgin Mary on their gun butts, just as  
the Christian Serbs did in Bosnia.

Are we therefore in a position to tell our Muslim neighbours to  
"grasp the nettle"? I rather think not. Because the condition of  
human rights has been so eroded by our own folly, our illegal  
invasion of Iraq and the anarchy that we have allowed to take root  
there, our flagrant refusal to prevent further Israeli settlement  
expansion in the West Bank, our constant, whining demands that  
prominent Muslims must disown the killers who take their religious  
texts too literally, that we have long ago lost our moral compass.

A hundred years of Western interference in the Middle East has left  
the region so cracked with fault lines and artificial frontiers and  
heavy with injustices that we are in no position to lecture the  
Islamic world on human rights and values. Forget the Amalekites and  
the Persians and Martin Luther and the Caliph Abu Bakr. Just look at  
ourselves in the mirror and we will see the most frightening text of  
all.

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd. 
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