Mr
George W. Bush's cruel god
On looking at the latest OpEdNews, I note the very proper
adjunction to voters to get rid of Mr George W. Bush and
his cruel god. As a Catholic Christian, I am
totally in agreement, and we have traditionally known his
god as Mammon, as opposed to the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, revered by Jews, Christians and Muslim (the only
deity for whom I can use a capital initial "G").
Our God is described variously as being the loving Lord, the
Compassionate and the Merciful, who made a covenant with
Abraham and Moses, whereas Mr Bush's god is indeed cruel
and takes no interest in the poor or in any other excluded
persons. We can see that Mr Bush's god is also
worshipped by such persons as Mr Oussama bin Laden and
other cruel men totally bereft of conscience.
They deride or misuse the most wonderful texts of the
Bible and/or of the Qur'an, and refuse the most elementary
rights to those who try their best to live according to
the teachings of our
faiths based on love for one's fellow human beings.
By all means reject Mr Bush's cruel god, but please do not
make the mistake of thinking that this concept has
any connection with our God who remains the fount of love,
compassion and mercy, caring for the weakest members of
society throughout the world.
The whole world will be affected by your choice, and this makes
me feel that I have the right to beg all citizens of
the U.S.A. to put an end to the present hypocrisy
incarnated by Mr Bush, and to vote as honest folk to end
his (apparently unelected) hold on office. I
address my request particularly to those who, as spiritual
descendants of Abraham, believe in our
God and in his essential goodness.
None of us is going to live for ever on this earth, as my
present fight with cancer has made it cristal-clear to me,
but we all have a duty to our successors to leave the
earth a better place for our passing. In
my view this excludes failing to vote on such a vital
occasion.
The latest issue (of
OpEdNews.com email newsletter), which I received early
this morning our time (i.e. CET - Central European Time),
I found the articles particularly rich, especially those
by Steve Consilvio, Rick Perlstein and Sandi Magathan
Droubay, which are very informative for outsiders such as
myself about the specifics of "religious"
attitudes in your vast country.
As you know, I am myself a
committed Catholic Christian, and I find it strange to
read about those who claim to be Christians in the U.S.A.,
but who seem to have no idea of reality in the
world. For example, the idea that the
Palestinians are all Muslim is far from the truth, when
one thinks of the numerous leading Palestinian
Christian personalities who are trying to make peace, and
I have the greatest respect for the Latin Patriarch of
Jerusalem, Michel Sabah, as for many
others. Such ill-informed views make me think
of the motto which appears to inspire so much of the
gutter press in many countries that one "must never
let the truth get in the way of a good story".
This same avoidance of
reality is manifest in the actions of Mr George W. Bush
and his neo-conservative masters, and I find these
analyses of his claims to Christian inspiration extremely
useful, since all that we, on our side of the
Atlantic, can discern is a deep and fundamental
commitment on their part to the worship of Mammon.
It looks at first sight
simplistic on the part of Steve Consilvio to give the
title of "The Christian Assault on Freedom and
Christianity" to his illuminating article, since we
cannot see why those whom he criticises can claim any link
with the essential Christian belief that God is
love. We find it close on impossible to
conceive how or why they call themselves
Christians. We have the concept, expressed in
our national motto of "Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity", that every citizen should make his or
her best endeavours to reach the correct balance of these
three essential elements of civilised life, including the
vital (but often overlooked) recognition that one's
exercise of one's own individual Liberty has the
limitation that one must not excessively impinge upon, and
thereby restrict, that of any other fellow human
being. We find the strange sects which are
described very worrying indeed, and we have great
difficulty in understanding how they manage to gain so
many followers anywhere (including, it has to be
admitted in our own country, where they have
been pursued for serious financial frauds on gullible
individuals).
I may well have
misunderstood some parts of his text, since I consider
that it is most important that those of all religious
traditions should do their best to take part in political
life, but not by giving false impressions of those of
other faiths and/or telling lies about them.
As a Christian, I believe in the spiritual family of
Abraham, which includes all those who do their best to
follow Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and I support all
efforts for us all to work together for the good of the
whole world. We are accustomed in France to
hearing prominent spokesmen for the Christian Churches
(Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant), Judaism and
Islam, joining together to speak with one voice on serious
questions of morality, including (and even especially)
when they affect politics. Recent examples of
this have included strong united statements opposing those
who make political capital out of the promotion of racism
and xenophobia, and/or who advocate religious intolerance.
As a Christian, I am active
within my chosen political party (the centrist UDF), where
I can work happily with those of other or no faiths, but I
know other Christians, Jews and Muslim who have chosen to
work within other political parties. I do not
believe that our disagreements on policies mean that they
are necessarily dishonest or
"damned". We can discuss such
differences in a civilised manner, and agree to
disagree. We then vote in our different ways,
as we shall be doing on 13th June in the elections for the
European Parliament.
The most surprising thing
which runs through these three articles is the curious
meaning given to the battle of Armageddon, which we read
as it appears in the Second Book of Kings and in the
Revelations of Saint John, but I personally cannot
understand why these sects give it other
meanings. It all probably arises from dubious
translations from the original languages - one of the
constant problems faced by those who accept the literal
truth of the translations available to them.
It is extraordinary that they should refuse to accept the
realities of the Bible, in particular the basic fact that
the various books were written at different periods of
history, and each in the language of its day.
In any case, I am very
grateful to these excellent authors for dissipating some
of the mist which still clouds my view of politics in your
country.
With every good wish to you
and to all of them, I remain
Horrors and Testimony
or will Mr Bush act against terror
The people of the U.S.A. have the
sympathy of the whole world after we have all been shown on our
television sets the revolting scenes from Fallujah of the murder
and total lack of posthumous respect for the civilians and
soldiers caught in an ambush in the town. It brings
back memories of past similar horrors in Somalia.
There is unhappily a close link
between this horror and the rare item of good news that Dr
Rice is to give evidence to the Enquiry into what
was known in advance of the proposed attacks on 11th September
2001, and that your President and Vice-President will also give
private testimony. We cannot know how useful,
or even complete, their respective answers will be to the
questions which we are all asking. I, like many
others, have serious doubts on this point.
Whatever we may think about the
highly repressive re'gime of Saddam Hussein, it is certain that
he kept wild terrorist groups under control -
often, admittedly, by very unpleasant means.
Well before Mr Bush gave the order
to invade Iraq, many of us were well aware that one of the
great dangers facing the world was likely to come from
destroying the whole structure of the state before having a
replacement ready for immediate installation. This
view is not tainted by hind-sight, since it was expressed
clearly by so many of us well before the invasion.
There was nothing especially clever in this, it was so obvious,
and I suggest to all Christians that they should re-read Saint
Matthew's Gospel chapter 12, verses 43 to 45.
The scandalous lack of any fully
prepared new structure for the Iraqi state created the
conditions for trouble-makers from anywhere in the world to find
fertile ground for their implantation before a new Iraqi
government could be installed. Mr Bush's advisers
must have known, and they very probably told him, that, although
there was no direct cooperation between Saddam Hussein and
Oussama bin Laden (who have always shown deep hatred for one
another), an attack on Iraq (with its vast Muslim majority)
committed under the banner of Mr Bush's foolishly announced
"Crusade" would give excuses to such groups as Al-Qa'eda
to focus their activity on "defending"
Islam. His suicidal use of this emotive word gave a
boost to the recruitment (to swell the ranks of Islamist
terrorists) of ignorant and easily misled Muslim all around our
planet who were informed (quite correctly) that the
President of the most powerful country in the world had so
openly, and so specifically, declared war on Islam.
If the broad thrust of Mr Richard
Clarke's accusations is correct, we have to assume that the Bush
re'gime was willing to overlook facts which got in the way of
its fundamental (perhaps fundamentalist) aims. What
is more worrying for us all is that, despite the clear evidence
already in the public domain of his administration's
extraordinary manipulation of untruths, the electorate across
the U.S.A. seems still to be willing to trust Mr George W.
Bush. Politicians in democratic countries
normally find it wiser to resign when faced with the discovery
of their having endorsed untruthful statements, even if they
have done this in completely innocence and/or ignorance.
Mr Bush's trusted
"friend", Mr Anthony Blair, is now in the middle of a
quite separate scandal of dishonesty among his ministers, which
follows on from his own remodeling of information given to him
by the British intelligence services in his frantic desire to
please Mr Bush. Many in his own Party would
like him to leave his post, in order to clean up the image of
the Labour government, which (as was the previous Conservative
administration under Mr John Major, himself closely linked with
the Carlyle Group) is now sinking under a flood of
sleaze. If he were to go, it is probable that his
fellow-Scot, Mr Gordon Brown, would take over, with uncertain
results on policy in general, and particularly in the
international field.
The failure of the Bush re'gime to
be prepared for the attacks on 11th September 2001 was followed
by the use and manipulation of those tragic events to whip up
wide national support for the attack and invasion of
Iraq. At the same time, Mr Bush, his supporters and
his backers seem to have overlooked the steadily increasing
danger represented by Islamist groups, not only to the U.S.A.
but also (and above all) to the leaders of states with Muslim
majorities. Unless and until Mr George W. Bush
retracts, and above all apologises humbly for, his declaration
of a "Crusade", the danger will continue to
grow. To me, and to many others, his inaction is a
sign of sheer irresponsibility, and shows an unwillingness on Mr
Bush's part to engage in a concerted campaign against terror
throughout the world.
Thoughts from France
by Robert Thompson
Sorrow, horror
and our own guilt
We are all still reeling from the
horrible shock of Thursday's mass murders in Madrid, exactly
thirty months after those committed in New York and elsewhere in
the U.S.A. After some initial doubts, it seems
likely, but not certain, that this was the work of Islamist
extremists. I most carefully use the word
"Islamist" and not "Islamic".
The latter word refers to the religious faith of Islam, whereas
the former describes those who, in direct breach of the
teachings of the Qur'an, wish to impose their very special
(severely twisted) version of Islam by force.
There can be no excuse for such mass
murders as we have witnessed, and they most certainly cannot be
justified by anything in the Qur'an, which tells us throughout
of a loving and merciful God, ready to forgive our
imperfections.
This brings me back inexorably and
logically to the Islamic concept of jihad, whose
meaning has been so drastically modified by Islamists whose only
language is that of terrorism.
The attacks on ordinary people in
Madrid led me yesterday to re-read the clear explanations of
this concept, one of the Seven Pillars of Islam, in the masterly
work on Islam written many years ago by Louis Gardet (who died
in 1986). I also took the opportunity to talk
about this with our eldest daughter, who is visiting us from her
home in a profoundly Islamic area of Indonesia. She
lives in Central Sulawesi, and evil persons there have tried to
foment trouble between the Muslim majority and the Christian
minority. In other words, she has encountered
this particular abberation (and sharp departure from the
teachings contained in either the Bible or the Qur'an) on the
ground.
I asked our daughter what
interpretation her Muslim friends and colleagues had given her
of the jihad, and she gave me a reply very close
to that given by Louis Gardet. This states (in my
translation):
The principle one (of the pillars of
Islam), to which the Qur'an returns often; is the "effort (jihad)
along the road to God" which Westerners call a holy
war. The Arabic expression at no point speaks of war
(harb). ... It is erroneous to represent
the jihad as a war of extermination ...
Furthermore, treatises of public law
deal with warriors with no religious connotation, and set out
laws governing them. However, over the years, many
governments have had a tendency abusively to declare a jihad
and to make use for political ends of this call to support
the rights of God.
The author then goes on to give
modern examples of jihad, such as great efforts towards
the economic independence of one's country, the spread of Arab
culture, the awakening of people's civic responsibility,
and (expecially among pious Muslim men and women) repentance and
interior personal improvement. In other words, it
refers for these worthy people to the effort in which they must
engage to overcome their own weaknesses and failings.
As Louis Gardet wrote, it is
erroneous for us Westerners to confuse jihad
and harb, as such terrorists as Mr Oussama
bin Laden wish us to do, with powerful support from
spokesmen of the present administration in the U.S.A. such as Mr
John Ashcroft. Unfortunately, such manipulators of
the truth have been far too successful in leading our peoples
astray.
The Islamists have every reason to
wish us to make this confusion, as they wish to engender strife
between faith communities, just as in Iraq Sunni extremists
(with particularly strong support from members of the Wahabi
sect in power in Sa'udi Arabia, of which Mr Oussama bin Laden is
an example) are currently trying to do against the substantial
Shia majority in Iraq. These extremists are able to
show (alas, only too easily) what appears to many to be a
treacherous link between the Shia and the occupying forces.
We in the West must refuse to be led
astray in this manner by the Islamists (and such as Mr John
Ashcroft) and all those who support any such form of extremism,
and I, as a Christian, realise that far more unites me to
genuine Muslim than divides us. Let us take each
person as he or she is, and not treat any of them as being
necessarily hostile to ourselves and our values. At
the same time, we must recognise that there are those
who are bitterly opposed to us, as they are to any form of
decency and freedom. As we know so well, they can be
found not only among those who claim to follow Islam but
also among those who claim to follow Christianity.
Thoughts from France
by Robert Thompson
(just a brief note)
Mr Bush's "Crusade" casts its shadow over Madrid
It could hardly have come as a surprise that Al Qa'eda has now
claimed responsibility for the horrors committed in
Madrid. From this morning's television news, it
appears that the writer of the letter making this claim to Al Quds,
a highly respected Arabic language newspaper published in London,
has suggested that the fact that Spain had joined the infamous
"Crusade" announced by Mr George W. Bush was the reason
for this series of terrorist attacks on commuter trains going in
to Madrid on Thursday morning.
Anyone who has any knowledge, even very slim and sketchy, of the
Near and Middle East knows that this highly emotive word, so
stupidly used by Mr Bush, would have been of enormous help to Mr
Oussama bin Laden in gaining recruits to take part in his
nefarious activities.
If, as it has been put to me by a former U.S.A. Academic, Mr Bush
used the word "Crusade" without knowing what it meant,
this can only mean that he is too ignorant to be fit for
office. If, on the other hand, he used the word
knowingly to gather support from Christians, his cynicism alone is
highly culpable.
Throughout the Near and Middle East, the folk memory of the
"Crusades" is of marauding thieves who oppressed the
local population, which was then (as now) a mixture of Muslim,
Christians and Jews. These locals united under such
leaders as Salah-ud-Din, a Muslim Kurd from Tikrit (now in Iraq)
whose household and advisers included both Christians and Jews,
against the "Crusaders".
Mr Bush should apologise fully and in great detail for his use of
this word, and, if he used it in ignorance, he should admit most
penitently his lack of education and knowledge. In any
case, this dreadful event should lead him to retire from the
Presidential Election.
March 8, 2004
The French political scene
as seen from the inside
I have written for you about my
views of the world and the place therein where you in the U.S.A.
and we in France fit in, but I have not given you any idea of
our own political situation. We are holding later
this month the Regional Elections which have significant effects
on our daily lives, and in June we vote for our Members of the
European Parliament.
Our political spectrum goes from the
extreme left to the extreme right, and thses terms have an
explanation in the lay-out of both our National Assembly and our
Senate. Looking from the Chairman's seat of the
Assembly, and the same thing applies in the Senate, there is a
semi-circle of seats all facing the Chair. In the
present Assembly, the Chairman will see furthest to his left the
Communists and the Greens, then the Socialists, then the UDF
(the centrist party), then the UMP (the party of Mr Chirac and
of most members of the present government) and
finally furthest to the right the Front National
(often described as being neo-fascist, perhaps the nearest thing
that we have to your neo-conservatives).
It is in this context that we refer
to right, left and centre, but the most extreme left-wing
parties do not currently have any seats in the Assembly or in
the Senate, and the other extreme right-wing party, which
splintered off from the Front National following a
clash of personalities, is also without any elected
representative on the national scene. This does not
prevent them putting up candidates for the Presidential
Elections, which explains why there are often over a dozen
candidates in the first round, as there were in
2002. No candidate needs to dispose of any large
sums of money to submit his or her name, but they do have to be
proposed by a certain number of holders of certain elected
offices, such as mayors or their adjoints
(deputies), of which there can be several per commune.
In this respect it is worth noting that the communes
can range in size from large cities to villages of fewer
than one hundred inhabitants, and even the smallest of these
villages has its mayor. Our commune has
about 120 inhabitants including children and a few
foreigners. There are well over 3,000 communes
across the country.
Every commune is
situated in one of the departements, which can
vary considerably in size. The smallest is the
Terrritoire de Belfort in the East of Metropolitan France, and
the largest, by far, is Guyane, in South America, where France
has common frontiers with Brazil and Surinam. The
nearest departement to the U.S.A is Guadeloupe,
which includes the French part of the island of Saint Martin,
with the departement of Martinique further south
in the Windward Islands. We also have Overseas
Territories, such as those in the Pacific and in the Antarctic
Ocean as well as Saint Pierre et Miquelon which lies just
off the coast of Newfoundland. The native
inhabitants of all these Overseas Territories are full citizens
and are thus able to vote in Parliamentary and Presidential
Elections, but they have different administrative systems
tailored to their size and situation.
The Regions, which are economic
groupings of departements, have a large say in the
provision of certain services such as transport within their
boundaries. Any political party or group of
political parties can put forward a list of candidates and these
are submitted to the electorate in the first round.
Any list which gains fewer than 10% of the votes cast is then
eliminated, and those which have passed over that hurdle go
ahead into the second round. It is also commonplace
for different parties, which are not too far apart in their
views, to enter into pacts to submit combined lists for the
second round. We shall be voting in a first round on
21st March and then a week later in the
second. The seats in each regional assembly
are allotted according to the order in which each list
comes in the second round, with extra weight being given to
the list which comes first.
We have no electoral colleges,
except for the Senate, for which the voting takes place between
the holders of certain elective offices, such as, once again,
the mayors and their adjoints in the different communes.
In our Presidential Election, the
first round makes it possible to see what support the various
parties can attract, since it is done on a nationwide "one
citizen one vote" basis with the first electors to vote
being in the Pacific Islands and the last in the departements
bordering on the Carribean, depending upon the time
zone. Only the two candidates who have managed to
get the highest number of votes go into the second round (a
fortnight after the first), and in 2002 I was among those to be
shocked to find that the extreme right-wing Front
National candidate, Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen, had come second,
although not far ahead of the expected Mr Lionel Jospin of the
Socialist Party. This caused the vast majority of
the electorate, including our family, to vote in the second
round for Mr Chirac, who does at least belong to a party which
supports our national motto of "Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity". For the record, and to be open
with anyone who has read this far, I have to admit to being a
card-carrying Member of the centrist U.D.F., which meant that
we voted for our own Chairman, Mr Bayrou, in the first
round - he came fourth just after Mr Jospin (with a very
respectable score).
For every election we vote in a
voting station in our own commune (in ours there is of
course only one), and we do this by putting in the urn, inside
an envelope, the name of the person for whom we are voting, or
in the Regional (or European Parliament) Election the list
of the party which we support. We are given the
envelope on presenting ourselves before the electoral officers
(who have to be citizens resident in the commune) after
they have checked that we are indeed entitled to
vote. We then go into a booth where we can put our
chosen name or list into the envelope. After putting
the enveloppe in the urn, we sign against our name on the
electoral roll. To avoid electoral fraud, each urn has a
counting device which clocks up the number of envelopes put into
it, and the number of envelopes is checked against that counter
before they are opened. At the close of poll the
envelopes are opened up in public and the votes are
recorded. It is the mayor's duty to report the
result in his or her commune to the departement
for collation, and where appropriate passing on up to the next
tier of government. This ensures that every vote can
be checked, and the original voting slips and records are kept
for a period of time in case of dispute.
This may seem very primitive to you
who have sophisticated voting machines, but it works well, and,
above all, there is a record which can be checked in case of any
doubt or dispute. When we have a referendum, we go
through a similar procedure putting our "yes" or
"no" into the envelope and then into the urn.
I have tried my best not to make
this sound boring, but the lesson is that we are encouraged to
vote, and the turn-out of voters in rural communes
such as ours tends to be high, usually above 80% of the
electorate, but much lower in urban areas. I hope
that the electors in your coming election will turn out in large
numbers, because, as it is so often said here, voting is not
only a right but is also a civic duty. If we do not
vote when we can, we cannot complain if anti-democratic forces
take control of our lives.
Thoughts from France
by Robert Thompson
Super Tuesday
and the war against terrorism
I am one of many outside the
U.S.A. who have never previously heard of Mr John Kerry,
or for that matter of Mr John Edwards. Of the
original starting candidates for the Democrat nomination to
oppose Mr George W. Bush in November's election, the only ones
known to us were General Wesley Clark, for obvious reasons,
and the former vice-presidential candidate, Mr Joseph
Lieberman, known vaguely by name only as having been Mr Albert
Gore's vice-presidential running mate in 2000.
Our press and other media have
started to fill in the yawning gaps in our knowledge, and we
learn many good things about Mr Kerry, while all that we seem
to have been told about Mr Edwards is that (a) he is a lawyer
and that (b) he has a charming smile. Of Mr Kerry,
we are told that he gives an impression of being cool in
manner, which we often consider a very good thing in a serious
politician, but is (so we are told) little appreciated among
voters in the U.S.A. We are also told that he is
able to put himself forward because he has substantial money
behind him, which seems (most extraordinarily to us) to be
essential in your country. You will appreciate
that we are accustomed to a very strict tight control here on
the expenses which any candidate is permitted to spend in an
election at any level.
Although we are comparatively far
from your shores, we have every reason to take a very close
interest in your election, because of the enormous financial
and military power which the U.S.A. have, and which they can
always use or misuse. Under the Bush regime, we
have become accustomed to a brutal misuse of this power, and
it is probable that, except for certain unpatriotic
politicians, such as Mr Anthony Blair, Mr Silvio Berlusconi
and Mr Jose-Maria Aznar (all of whom are, on this
question, far from reflecting the views of their
respective publics), we all hope for
a change. It is certainly not for us to say
whether any citizen of the U.S.A. should vote for one or other
of the final candidates, since we do not understand your
polarised political party system.
Furthermore, we also fail to understand why the
Republican Party should be keeping a candidate who has shown
himself so inept and unfit for any kind of elected office.
It is fair to be blunt and to say
that we would like the U.S.A., for their own future as well as
for that of the world, to return to the glories both of the
Rule of Law and of the resolute defence of freedom and
democracy. In other words, we would like to see
the U.S.A. return to being the great nation which they have
been in the past. We cannot understand how the
public in the U.S.A. can accept the application in their
country of such Stalinistic measures as the Patriot Act, which
reminds us of the warnings given by Franz Kafka and Eric
Arthur Blair (better known under his pen-name of George
Orwell). In fact, if we look back to the latter's 1984,
we can see how the manipulation of a perceived danger can keep
the people of any state sufficiently docile while their rulers
do as they like.
We read with horror (and some
surprise) of the dubious practices involving various kinds of
voting machines, the accuracy of which can never be checked,
and other shady manoeuvres by certain leading politicians and
their henchmen. The surprise does not come from
the fact that such behaviour takes place, since dishonesty
goes on everywhere, and is certainly not
the prerogative of a bunch of nasties in your country
alone. What startles us is that you should not
have the benefit of our highly independent justice system and
also of our free press to investigate and reveal what has been
going on. We get a very sad picture of the
capabilities and desire on the part of these public watchdogs
in the U.S.A. to carry out their essential
function. They seem most effectively to have been
neutered by powerful corporate interests. I would
like to have as much feedback as possible on this point to
enable me (and my compatriots) to understand better the
processes by which they have so ruthlessly been
muzzled. As a lawyer myself, I am most
disappointed by the supine attitude of the judiciary, but
I am told by some of your compatriots that much of this arises
from the holders of many judicial posts being elected, and
thus (most inappropriately for any judge) subject to pressure
from public opinion.
To come back to our preoccupations
as people living outside the U.S.A., Mr Bush's most assiduous
lackey, Mr Anthony Blair, made a speech in his
parliamentary constituency on Friday 5th March in which he
defended his having taken his country into an illegal war to
please Mr Bush. He is supposed to be a lawyer, but
he attempts to justify his spineless servility by using a
one-page extract from a legal Opinion written by the British
Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, which extract is notable,
above all, for its weakness and lack of clarity.
There is much pressure in the United Kingdom for the
publication of the entirety of this Opinion, since most
lawyers have increasingly severe doubts about its
validity. To be blunt, it is believed to have been
written to order to give a
"fig-leaf" of legality to what was so obviously a
criminal venture. One leading English
lawyer said yesterday on the BBC Radio that he supposed
that Mr Blair fears prosecution before the International
Criminal Tribunal for his breaches of the Nuremberg
Principles, which so clearly define so many crimes against
humanity. Sadly, the U.S.A. have so far refused to
accept the principle of the International Tribunal, and it is
obvious that Mr George W. Bush and many others in his
administration also have good reason to fear prosecution
for very serious criminal offences.
We have to think again about the
scene painted with such clarity in Orwell's 1984
to see what is happening in your country.
Even before August 2001, your security organisations had ample
warning of the threat to your country from such persons as Mr
Oussama bin Laden (whose family had close connections with
that of your President), but they did failed to
act. When tragedy struck, your country benefitted
from a huge wave of sympathy from around the world, and
statesmen everywhere, including Mr Yasser Arafat (who gave the
lead in offering blood), made it clear how horrified they
were. Your President, for reasons which have never
been explained, then made a speech in which he raised the
spectre of a new "Crusade" with all the terrifying
undertones of that emotive word for the people of the Near and
Middle East (including all the numerous indigenous
Christians). By making crude and obvious party
political use of the disaster, he managed within a very short
space of time to obliterate the world's sympathy, and created
ideal conditions for terrorists to flourish throughout the
Islamic world. Once Mr Bush had made this dreadful
declaration, Mr Oussama bin Laden could (and did) point to an
explicit and specific desire of the "West", as
personified by Mr Bush, to wage war against Islam and any and
all of the states of whose population the majority were
of the Muslim faith and tradition.
I know that when in 2001 I heard
on the radio that Mr Bush had made this declaration, I
immediately had the most cynical thought that this must be his
"thank-you" to Mr bin Laden for the terrible crimes
which had been committed on 11th September, since these crimes
had enabled Mr Bush to claim to be the "great defender of
the people of the U.S.A. against terrorism".
This statement came as a clarion call to many ignorant and
ill-informed Muslim to rally around a criminal venture, since
Mr Bush had quite simply announced a war against
Islam. Its effect was strengthened
by statements coming from your Attorney General, Mr John
Ashcroft, when he gave his full support to Mr bin Laden's
vicious interpretation of jihad as being a
"holy war" against the arch-oppressor of so many
Muslim peoples, particularly in Palestine. The
clamour raised by this surprising support drowned out the
statements by many Muslim thinkers and leaders who were
explaining that the traditional meaning of jihad
remains the battle which all human beings must wage within
themselves against their own weaknesses and failings.
Fairly obviously, Islamist
fanaticism cannot be defeated by strengthening the appeal of
the fanatical terrorists to the ordinary people, and can only
be combatted by careful and gentle argument. Such
argument can only be put forward if it based on a sympathetic
understanding of all the ideas and influences which might
possibly affect the whole Islamic world.
Announcing, as Mr Bush did, that the U.S.A. was going to start
a new "Crusade" could only have, as mentioned above,
the effect of bringing in new recruits to the cause of hatred
so strongly preached by Mr bin Laden and his like.
A correspondent of Texas origin has given me his theory that
Mr Bush knows nothing of the meaning of the word
"Crusade" nor of what happened when the
"Crusades" took place. This gentleman's
suggestion seems to be that Mr Bush may never even have heard
of the sack of Constantinople nor of the cruelties inflicted
on the inhabitants of the Holy Land, whether Muslim, Christian
or Jewish, by the Crusaders. I have been told by
Arab Christians that they think of the Crusaders as having
been murderous invaders, much as they view today's
Zionists. This means that when Mr Bush said that
he was going to support a "Crusade", this was merely
direct confirmation that he was anti-Arab, as well as being
willing to oppress all Muslim. Mr Oussama bin
Laden could not have hoped for any stronger support for his
evil aims.
I should be grateful for some
clearer explanation, either by way of confirmation or by
alternative suggestions, of why Mr Bush was so disastrously
willing to give this massive help and succour
to Mr bin Laden and other terrorists, who have become the
enemies not only of the U.S.A. but also of the rest of the
world, especially those where the majority of the population
is Muslim. We can understand that the main
arguments in your election will concern internal matters
such as the provision of health care and schooling to the
whole population, but we ask you nevertheless to think of the
rest of the world from time to time. We want
to fight terrorism, but we know that those, such as Mr George
W. Bush, who have proved so willing to give Islamist
terrorists a helping hand, are never going to be effective.
Freedom Fries
or ignorant unbridled xenophobia
About one year ago, when debate and
discussions about how to deal with Saddam Hussein's bloody
Ba'athist regime in Iraq were rife in the United Nations, our
government through it spokesman, our Foreign Minister, Mr
Dominique de Villepin, tried to urge caution on the Security
Council in order to allow the teams under Dr Hans Blix to complete
their work. At that time, our armed forces were active
in peace-keeping operations in many parts of the world, mainly in
the Balkans and in Africa. In the latter continent
only a few nations were willing to risk their troops, and we, the
French public, accepted this sad situation and broadly understood
the need for such action in the general interest of the
world. Many of us still think that it would have been
much better for the Bush administration to have waited to get
support from the whole world as represented by the Security
Council, which would probably have avoided the current slaughter
not only of Iraqis but also of troops from the U.S.A.
It was accordingly particularly
hurtful when certain elected representatives in the U.S.A. started
suggesting that our attitude, supported by a massive proportion of
our electorate, was cowardly, and suggested that what you had
previously called "French fries" should henceforth be
known as "Freedom fries". Obviously, we
understood only too easily that the Bush regime had an interest in
pretending at last to be doing something about its promised
"war on terrorism", but we did not appreciate being the
butt of all such unpleasant xenophobic comments and attitudes
emanating from the White House and Capitol Hill. We
also failed to appreciate the desire of some of Mr George W.
Bush's more strident supporters to reclassify or rename the Statue
of Liberty presented to the U.S.A. by France. These
moves seemed particularly ironic when we came to learn more and
more about your iniquitous Patriot Act, inspired by Mr John
Ashcroft, which so effectively limits liberty in your country.
On the other hand, we seem to have
retained sufficient control over our indignation to realise that
the voices preaching this kind of bombastic hatred were not
typical of those individual citizens of the U.S.A. with whom we
came into contact. Most of your citizens whom I have
met are what I can decribe as perfectly normal human beings,
although, as with other nationalities, we do come across some
extremely unpleasant individuals.
I was the Agent Consulaire de
France (French Consular Representative) in Dover in the days
when the U.S.A. refused to allow French citizens to enter their
territory, even just to change flights, without a
visa. Obviously perhaps, our government applied the
same rule to citizens of the U.S.A. who wished to visit
France. As a result, many U.S.A. citizens were turned
back by our Immigration Officials, and many of them came to see me
to ask if I could help. As it so happened, my position
did not allow me so to do directly. However, one day I
had the visit of two delightful gentlemen, accompanied by their
charming ladies, who had this difficulty and turned to be Members
of your Senate. They were most courteous, and I
explained the problem as we saw it, namely that we ought to get
the same treatment as British citizens. It was a great
day, some months later, when our Consulate General in London
informed me that the U.S.A. had finally relented and was
giving us the same status as these others. The two
governments synchronised their simplification of travel and
immigration procedures so that they took effect on the same date.
In ghastly contrast there was a young
man, probably in his early twenties, who came and told me that, as
an "American Citizen", he considered that he had an
absolute right to travel anywhere and everywhere. I
have to admit that I lost my natural sympathy for anyone in
trouble, and fell into the temptation to ask him (perhaps
excessively sarcastically) "since you say that you are an
American, just as we are Europeans, can you tell me your
nationality, are you perhaps Peruvian or Colombian ?"
My bantering tone made him very
obviously lose his temper, and I felt threatened, while he kept
repeating that he was an "American Citizen", and was not
at all impressed when I reminded him that America was a continent
and not a nation. Afterwards, I felt some remorse,
since I recognised that I should have tried to dispel his
clearly apparent ignorance more politely, but, in my defence, I
have to state that his arrogance was very distasteful.
Arrogance is the first word which comes to the lips of French
people when describing the attitudes of such insensitive and
overbearing visitors from your country, and it contrasts
vividly with the warmth and humanity of so many others who come
here.
Humility when facing the stranger
should our rule, and I tell this tale of the young man to
emphasise that I realise my own weakness in having given in
to temptation, however strong this may have been. Such
humility should have reigned in Washington D.C. a year ago, but it
did not, and, from remarks made about our country by many
politicians in the U.S.A., mainly Republicans, it appears unlikely
to come into fashion on Capitol Hill.
We must not pretend that any one of us
is perfect, but we can take the first step which permits us to act
with decency towards the foreigner or stranger in our
midst. We must all examine our consciences in depth to
make sure that we expunge all traces of racism, however we define
that word, and unreasoning xenophobia. If we do this,
we can then be free to criticise openly and in the spirit of
friendship the behaviour of other states. For example,
we find difficulty in understanding why the U.S.A do not have the
universal health coverage which so many European countries
consider to be the minimum requirement for our peoples.
This leads me logically to think of
bananas, which fruit is very popular in Europe and is grown in the
French departements of Martinique and Guadeloupe, as
well as in other Carribean and African lands. The
French workers who produce and gather the bananas grown on these
islands have the same social security coverage as workers anywhere
else in France, whereas certain corporations from the U.S.A. run
banana plantations in Central and South America where they provide
no health and other social security cover and pay wages which are
close to slavery. This is fair trade according to
these same corporations, with powerful backing from your
government, but we do not see it this way. Many people
here make sure every time that they buy bananas that they are
grown in France, and I saw this morning that our latest purchases
bore labels to show that the fruit had come from Martinique.
We are also very concerned that we
should not import grain and other agricultural products which are
genetically modified, or meat from cattle which have been injected
with hormones. These actions do not mean that we are
hostile either to your country or to its people. Such
behaviour on our part is an example of our constant desire neither
to support oppression nor to take serious risks with our health
just to please the huge corporations such as Monsanto or the
banana plantation companies.
Let us
continue to criticise one another courteously and constructively,
as friends should do, but let us also put an end for ever to the
xenopobic attitudes which engendered the "Freedom
Fries".
Thoughts from France
by Robert Thompson
Hatred or Love
Christian voters in the U.S.A. must make a
choice
Feb 27, 2004
This is my first contribution to
OpEdNews, and I, being myself a committed Christian, feel that in
the season of Lent it should be addressed principally to all who
try their best to follow Christian precepts. As to you
who read these lines but are not Christians, I beg you to excuse
this, and assure you that I have no intention of showing any
disrespect for your beliefs or lack of any belief.
There was a reason, however hideously
twisted might be the logic behind it, why the terrorists inspired
by Mr Oussama bin Laden committed their vile crimes on 11th
September 2001. He and his followers claim
(unfortunately quite justifiably) that successive administrations
in the U.S.A. have been guilty of crimes against Islamic people
(among others, of course), and this, in their warped view, gave
them the right to commit crimes against the ordinary people of the
U.S.A. regardless of their religious affinities.
We must never believe that one wrong
justifies another, because two wrongs can never make a
right. If we are to claim to support the Rule of Law,
we cannot justify terrorist actions against those whom we accuse,
often quite accurately, of terrorism. In other words,
we must not descend to the abysmal moral level of the terrorist.
As mentioned above, we Christians have
now entered the period of Lent, when we are encouraged to examine
oru consciences, and also to pray for those who are suffering, and
close to the top of my concerns is the fate of the people of the
Holy Land, and I can take as a simple example of that tortured
country the city of Bethlehem, the birth-place of Jesus, most of
whose inhabitants are Christians, which is therefore particularly
close to our hearts.
As Christians, we cannot understand
why the present administration in power in the U.S.A. does not cut
off the massive quantities of arms and finance which it lavishes
so freely on the oppressors who are building a wall, reminiscent
of that which divided Berlin, to prevent the inhabitants of
Bethlehem, who are as already indicated mostly Christians, from
reaching their homes, fields and olive groves. All
that the representatives of the U.S.A. have done is to express
mild disapproval of the illegal behaviour on the part of the
invaders. They do this at the same time as the
President of the U.S.A. claims that all his acts are inspired
by Christianity. Such behaviour on his part explains
why so many of us consider him to be one of the world's
leading hypocrites. He must know that, although this
infamous wall was supposed to be going to be built to separate the
territory of the State of Israel from the occupied Palestinian
territories, it is now absolutely clear that it is being built
entirely well within the occupied lands, with brutal disregard for
the rules which should apply to the behaviour of any state which
invades and occupies the lands of another.
This does not mean that
we Christians do not sympathise with our Muslim and Jewish
brothers and sisters who try as best they may to live their faith
in the same Holy Land. Every true Christian must
condemn suicide murders, but this also makes us condemn the
systematic murder and theft by expropriation which the State of
Israel commits against the people of the land which it has
invaded. If we are to accept the existence of the
State of Israel (recognised de facto by the United
Nations since 1948), this state must show come respect for
international law, and the widest
territorial claims that have ever been accepted or recognised
internationally are within the borders which existed up to
1967. Even those who accept the concept of a state
based essentially on religious origin and ethnic cleansing have to
agree that this state must behave in accordance with international
law. The only reason why the State of Israel has
managed to escape condemnation by the Security Council of the
United Nations is that on so many occasions (e.g. a total of 24
times between July 1973 and December 2001) the U.S.A. without
being joined in this opposition by any other state, have vetoed
the resolutions in question.
Your President and his advisers should
make up their minds whether they wish to act as Christians or to
continue supporting the crushing of Christians just because they
happen to live in the Holy Land. This is a live issue
which every Christian should in this season of Lent take to his or
her heart. I specifically refuse to fall into the
trap, set by both those for and those against the State of Israel,
that criticism of that state is in any way
anti-Jewish. I would never make any confusion between
Judaism, for which I have the deepest respect, and Zionism which I
consider it almost impossible to justify.
I was shocked to hear a Senator of the
U.S.A., whose name and party I did not catch, speaking on the BBC
Radio some weeks ago, who described the State of Israel as the
"beacon of democracy in the Midle East". He
obviously has difficulty in understanding arithmetic, since we
always think of democracy, with all its weaknesses, as being based
on "one person one vote". I suggest that
this man should think of two things in this
connection. Firstly, the late unlamented Mr Adolf
Hitler was first elected in Germany through a (more or less)
democratic process, but this did not mean that the invaded peoples
of occupied Europe had any say in choosing him to be their
ruler. Secondly, the Palestinian people, together with
the inhabitants of the occupied part of Syria, outnumber the
Israelis, and similarly have no means of choosing their effective
rulers. Curiously enough the only freely elected
governmental body in that part of the world is the Palestinian
Parliament, whose views your present rulers refuse to take into
account because it is, understandably, hostile to their land being
occupied by an invader. Following the logic of Mr
Bush's administration, we must praise the collaborationist Vichy
regime of Marshal Petain in France and condemn those whom we
consider to be anti-Nazi Resistance heroes as groups of
terrorists.
It would be arrogant of me to suggest
that the Democrat Party's candidate when he is finally chosen,
whether or not he turns out to be Mr. Kerry, is a better or worse
individual person than Mr George W. Bush. However, it
is hard to see how any present day Christian can vote for a man
whose first world-shattering comment after the horrific events of
11th September 2001 was that he wished to start a
"Crusade". It has, during the past few days,
been explained to me by a former academic in the U.S.A. that
Mr Bush probably did not know the historical meaning of this word,
and had been thinking of something else. According to
this source, he would probably not even have known anything of the
many atrocities which were committed under this name in the
Near and Middle East, against the local populations whether Muslim
or Christian. He has presumably never heard of the
sack of Constantinople by the "Crusaders".
His use of this word was probably the greatest publicity coup
managed by Mr Oussama bin Laden, and must have boosted the
latter's recruiting figures enormously, thereby greatly increasing
the dangers of terrorism. This is a sad commentary on
Mr. Bush's education, background and fitness for office.
Please, Christian voters in the U.S.A.
when you come to the polls in November, use your right to vote to
oppose Hatred and stand up for the Christian doctrine of
Love in its widest sense.
Having accepted the invitation, or
perhaps challenge to contribute regularly to OpEdNews, I feel it
necessary to explain in advance where I am coming
from. My aim is to encourage thought among those who
give themselves the trouble to read my writings, and not to impose
my views on those unwilling to think for themselves. I
accept that many will disagree with me, but that is part of human
life.
I was born in England in 1931 where I
was taught French from an early age. From 1947 (when I
went to school in Normandy) onwards, I have moved to and fro'
several times between England and France, and I finally settled in
1990 in Northern France where I
live in a very rural village of some 120 inhabitants in an area of
traditional countryside of farms and villages, with our largest
town having some 2,400 residents. I married my wife,
Sheila, in 1955 and we have five children and three
grandchildren. We became French citizens over a
quarter of a century ago.
After my military service, followed by
being a Reserve Officer until 1986, I studied Jurisprudence at
Saint Edmund Hall, University of Oxford and was later admitted as
a Solicitor (with Honours) in England and Wales. After
I took a post for eight years at the International Chamber of
Commerce in Paris, and other work done since then on both sides of
the Channel, French became my principal working language, as well
as of my thoughts and reflections. My last years of
professional activity before retiring in December 2000 were spent
as an Avocat at the Boulogne-sur-Mer Bar, spending
most of my time defending persons accused of serious criminal
offences.
My view of national politics
I have a deep dislike and distrust of
extremism of all sorts, and am an active member of the UDF,
usually described by commentators as being the Centrist Party.
When I watch televised debates in our National Assembly, I see our
Members sitting in the semi-circle sandwiched between Mr Chirac's
governning UMP to the right, with the neo-fascists of the Front
National beyond them, and the Socialists to the left, with
the Greens and Communists sitting beyond them.
My view of international relations
I have hardly ever travelled beyond
the borders of what I consider to be the region where I live, and
throughout which i have always felt at home. This is,
from my point of view, made up of Europe, the Near and Middle east
(including the Arabian Peninsular) and North Africa, with its
eastern boundary running down the Urals and beyond Iran and its
southern limit being the Sahara. The centre of this
region is most appropriately known to us as the Mediterranean
(i.e. the sea in the middle of the land). In the
course of my professional career, I have, within this region, been
in several European countries and in thirteen of the twenty-two
states in Asia and North Africa which make up the Arab League.
To the east lies the rest of Asia,
with its (currently or potentially) powerful nations of China,
India, Indonesia and japan, and within that region I have only
visited India and Pakistan in the course of my work.
To the south, beyond the Sahara lies
the rest of Africa, which I have never visited.
To our west, beyond the Atlantic li
the Americas, where again I have never been, with its powerful
nations being headed by yours, but also including Brazil, Mexico
and Canada which are becoming more and more important in economic
terms as time passes. Your country is for me a
constant source of mystery and wonder, and, just when I think that
I am beginning to understand something of it, I am given new
insights into its realities, thanks to the kindness of my numerous
correspondents, mainly by e-mail.
Well beyond lie the lands of Oceania,
Australasia and Antarctica, of which, sadly, I have little
knowledge, but which are closer to you.
My views on human rights
My views and attitudes arise from my
being a committed and practising Catholic Christian, with a wide
range of friends who belong to other obediences, including many
who are Muslim or Jewish. I have a deep respect for
all of them, and am strongly against those who misuse the Bible
(often in very dubious translations) or the Qur'an, usually by
incomplete quotations being deliberately used out of context, to
inspire and encourage hatred of those who are in any way
different. This makes me a strong opponent of such
anomalies as the deformation of the concept of jihad
by Mr Oussama bin Laden, in which he is given constant support by
Mr John Ashcroft (whom I consider to be a prominent
"Bible-bender"). I have to admit that I find
it much easier to understand the attitudes of genuine followers of
both Islam and Judaism, who with Christians recognise their
spiritual descent from Abraham, than those of other faiths,
but I recognise that this is because I know so little of their
ways of thought.
Summary
The above should enable you to
understand my approach to any matter, and you will also realise
that my weaknesses are those arising from my life history,
including my ignorance of your internal affairs. It is
hard for me to comment with any kind of confidence on internal
affairs on your side of the Atlantic. although as a lawyer with
over forty years experience I can comment intelligently on
such matters as your infamous Patriot Act, which has been
considered on our continent as being among the most retrograde
pieces of legislation in the world in recent years.
Robert Thompson Robert.Thompson (at) wanadoo.fr
