Sunday, December 16, 2007
Friday, December 14, 2007
Fwd: report
last couple of weeks.
Let me catch up a little.
TOM WAITS: Somehow, I was invited to his aftershow birthday party in
Chicago at a bar. Family and friends were there. We talked and drank
for a while. Later, I wrote an article for the News-Gazette about the
evening and the newspaper received a scathing postcard from Waits'
wife and collaborator, Kathleen Something (I would look it up, but I'm
working on an old iMac at the middle school in Urbana, where I am
subbing in advanced math class), who excoriated me for breaching their
privacy. Well, gee, I only said nice things. But anyway, it kind of
soured me on Waits after that.
CURT MCDOWELL: Filmmaker. Died with AIDS in the early years. I
stayed at his San Francisco apartment for a while and collaborated
with him on a movie that I've never seen. I read the narration. Curt
will never be famous and I doubt that his films will ever be put on
DVD. But some of us remember him fondly.
SAM FULLER: Filmmaker. Interviewed and spent time with him at Athens
Film Festival one year when I was a judge. Nice old coot, always
smoking his big cigars. His B movies are still striking in their
fierce bluntness and independence.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Christians in Iraq today
(CBS) From the time of Jesus, there have been Christians in what is now Iraq. The Christian community took root there after the Apostle Thomas headed east.
But now, after nearly 2,000 years, Iraqi Christians are being hunted, murdered and forced to flee -- persecuted on a biblical scale in Iraq's religious civil war. You'd have to be mad to hold a Christian service in Iraq today, but if you must, then the vicar of Baghdad is your man. He's the Reverend Canon Andrew White, an Anglican chaplain who suffers from multiple sclerosis and from a fanatical determination to save the last Iraqi Christians from the purge.
White invited 60 Minutes cameras and correspondent Scott Pelley to an underground Baghdad church service for what's left of his congregation. White's parishioners are risking their lives to celebrate their faith.
"The room is full of children, it's full of women, but I don't see the men. Where are they?" Pelley remarked.
"They are mainly killed. Some are kidnapped. Some are killed. In the last six months things have got particularly bad for the Christians. Here in this church, all of my leadership were originally taken and killed," White explained. "All dead. But we never got their bodies back. This is one of the problems. I regularly do funerals here but it's not easy to get the bodies."
Many Iraqi Christians' churches are destroyed or abandoned. The congregation is smuggled in and out of this secret sanctuary. Even letting 60 Minutes come to the service was a terrible risk. White is among the last Christian ministers here, a savior with crosses to bear. Larger than life, stricken with MS, and by his own reckoning, driven a little bit mad.
He was first sent to Baghdad by the Archbishop of Canterbury nine years ago, well before the Christian persecution.
"You were here during Saddam's reign. And now after. Which was better? Which was worse?" Pelley asked.
"The situation now is clearly worse" than under Saddam, White replied.
"There's no comparison between Iraq now and then," he told Pelley. "Things are the most difficult they have ever been for Christians. Probably ever in history. They've never known it like now."
"Wait a minute, Christians have been here for 2,000 years," Pelley remarked.
"Yes," White said.
"And it's now the worst it has ever been," Pelley replied.
To understand the history of Iraqi Christianity, start with the Last Supper. One saint to the right of Jesus is the Apostle Thomas, who took the gospel and headed east after the death of Christ.
In modern times, under Saddam, Christians were treated much the same as Muslims; Saddam's right hand man, Tariq Aziz, was Christian.
Before the war, it's estimated there were about a million Christians in Iraq. They were a small minority, but free to worship, free to build churches, and free to speak the ancient language of Jesus, Aramaic. But, after the invasion, Muslim militants launched a war on each other and the cross.
On Sunday, Aug. 1, 2004, five churches were bombed. The Iraqi Christian community, which had survived invasions by Mongols and Turks, was driven out under American occupation. No one can be sure, but Canon White estimates most of Iraq's Christians have fled or been killed. Those still here are too old, too ill or too poor to run.
"Why are you feeding them all?" Pelley asked.
"Because, this is the only decent meal they'll have in the week," White explained. "They can't afford food. So we're just moving from every other week to every week because they've got nothing."
Nothing for many, not even their families. The 60 Minutes team was confronted with one of many stories of depravity as the congregation left.
"Outside the church service this gentleman put these pictures in my hand. I can't show you the pictures. They're just too much. They're pictures of his children. His daughter who was 15 years old. And his son who was about four years old. They've both been shot in the head," Pelley said.
His children were killed, the father said, because he ran a liquor store. Liquor stores are typically Christian businesses here, legal, except under the Islamic street justice that rules since the invasion.
"So I hear stories of shootings, death, torturing, kidnapping, mutilation. I hear it all," White told Pelley.
The people with those stories once lived in a neighborhood called Dora, where Christians, Sunnis, and Shiites had lived together. 60 Minutes wanted to see what happened there so, we took a ride with U.S. Army Colonel Rick Gibbs. His men picked Pelley and the team up under a rusting relic of Saddam's tyranny, a parade archway made of two enormous swords, and from there they headed to ethnic cleansing's "ground zero."
"We have 13 churches. None of them are operational," Col. Gibbs said.
Asked if this was the worst neighborhood in town, Gibbs said, "It's the toughest neighborhood in town."
Gibbs commands the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division out of Fort Riley, Kan. In Dora, he set up a combat outpost in an abandoned Catholic seminary.
"I was at a secret church service yesterday. A man came up to me and handed me some photographs of his children. They'd been shot to death. Somebody had come by their house and murdered his children because they were Christians. What are you seeing?" Pelley asked Gibbs.
"I don't see a lot of that anymore. But when we first arrived we saw lots of that. We have 500 a month. That's what we were tracking," the colonel replied. "It would not surprise my soldiers to walk down a street on a patrol and see three or four bodies laying in the street with a bullet behind their head."
U.S. forces do not protect the churches. There's a hands-off policy for all religious sites and Gibbs says there's another reason.
"The Christians do not what us to guard the churches openly," he said.
Why wouldn't the Christians want Gibbs and his soldiers to protect the churches?
"They feel that if we are overtly protecting the churches that someone underground covertly will come in and murder the Christians because they're collaborating with the U.S. forces," Gibbs explained.
There seems to be less violence now in part because of the surge of U.S. forces but also because the purge of Christians from Dora is largely complete. Gibbs says Islamic militants are on the run now.
"We hear that through our intelligence sources on the ground people telling us they're running that's how we knew to come down here with our next big fight to keep getting after them," Gibbs said, as shots could be heard in the background. "And that's what you hear over there is us in that fight trying to go get them."
60 Minutes wanted to see one church that had been destroyed but Gibbs couldn't take us there -- roadside bombs blocked the way. So he walked us over to a church next to his combat outpost. Because of the proximity, it hadn't been looted. In fact, it hadn't been touched by anyone for a very long time.
"This is one of the abandoned churches of Dora," Pelley remarked inside the church. "It looks like it was left suddenly and completely. There's a fine coat of dust over everything in the church. It was all left just as it was. One of the reasons these churches have been abandoned is in this letter, a letter that went out to the neighborhoods of Dora about a year ago. It reads like this: 'To the Christian, we would like to inform you of the decision of the legal court of the Secret Islamic Army to notify you that this is the last and final threat. If you do not leave your home, your blood will be spilled.' And in case there was any chance that anyone would not get the message, the letter ends like this: 'You and your family will be killed.'"
Pelley talked to a young man, a Baghdad Christian, whose name we cannot use. He told Pelley that after the invasion, posters appeared near his home.
"They were like telling us that Christians were against Islam, that we're infidels, that women shouldn't drive and a woman that doesn't wear a scarf would get her head cut off," the man told Pelley. "And I thought, 'What, are we going back to the Middle Ages?'"
He told us his family began going to Mass in shifts. Asked why, he told Pelley, "If like the church gets bombed on like one of the Masses, so like half of the family will be there and half will be safe."
Ultimately, the church was bombed.
Asked what has become of the people he used to worship with in that church, the young man told Pelley, "I simply don't know. A lot them are in Syria. I don't know any of 'em that stayed in Baghdad."
His family, unharmed, fled to neighboring Jordan. But most Christians ran north to Syria where they've filled a Damascus neighborhood. Knock on any door and you'll find a story.
"They threatened this young girl," one woman told 60 Minutes. "They want her to become a Muslim. The boy is in danger of being kidnapped. My other boy is in danger of being kidnapped because we're Christians."
Another woman was on a bus outside Baghdad, when gunmen boarded and demanded to know her husband's faith. "They told him, 'How come you have not embraced Islam yet?' He said, 'To each his own religion,'" she recalled.
"He told him 'I am a Christian.' He told him to get off the bus," a child added.
And they never saw him again. Christian refugees are now swept up in an exodus of historic proportions. The U.N. estimates more than four million Iraqis of all faiths are running from the war. The United States has promised to help, but so far about 2,000 Iraqis have been allowed into the U.S., less than one tenth of one percent of all the refugees.
Those who remain in Iraq are bound together by a particular kind of faith known only to those under siege.
Why is this happening?
"It's happening because religion has gone wrong," Canon White told Pelley. "And when religion goes wrong, it kills others."
"Some of your parishioners must ask you, 'Why is God allowing this to happen to us?'" Pelley asked.
"To them I say, 'God is with you and he is with me and I am with you and I'm not going away,'" White replied.
everybody hates us
Follow the Leaders
by Hendrik Hertzberg
December 10, 2007
Regime change was one of the stated goals of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Unlike cleansing the place of weapons of mass destruction and breaking up the alleged Baghdad-Al Qaeda nexus, it was a reality-based goal; and, unlike the other two (which were as unattainable and unnecessary as ridding the moon of green cheese), it was actually accomplished. Saddam Hussein's regime has indeed been changed—though what it has been changed into, of course, is not quite what was intended.
And regime change, it turns out, is infectious—a militarily transmittable disease, almost invariably fatal, so far, to any political party or head of government so careless of hygiene as to have had intimate relations with the Bush Administration's Mesopotamian misadventure. The contagion set in less than a year into the war, when, three days after the Madrid terrorist bombings of March 11, 2004, Spain's conservative government, which had sent thirteen hundred soldiers to Iraq, was defeated at the polls. The soldiers were out within three months. In May of 2005, it was the turn of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, of Italy, President Bush's loudest West European supporter, who had sent three thousand troops; his successor, Romano Prodi, brought them home. In June of this year, Tony Blair was finally obliged to relinquish his grip on Britain's Labour government, largely because of Iraq; the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has signalled that he intends to withdraw Britain's troops—some five thousand of the original commitment of forty-five thousand remain—by the end of 2008. Six weeks ago, Poland's premier, the twin brother of the country's President, lost to an opponent whose platform included bringing back the nine hundred Polish troops that are still in Iraq. Other countries whose voters have dispensed with the services of leaders who enrolled them in Bush's "coalition of the willing" include Hungary, Ukraine, Norway, and Slovakia.
A week ago last Saturday, John Howard, the second-longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia, became the newest casualty of this political epidemic. Howard's case is unusual, both for the slavishness with which he has followed Bush's lead and for the comprehensiveness of his defeat. After a decade in office, and at a time of widespread economic contentment, his center-right coalition was decisively ousted at every level of government. He even lost his parliamentary seat. His fealty to Bush, not only on Iraq but also, and at least as important, on climate change, was, of course, not the only factor. But it colored everything.
Two episodes helped solidify the public's fed-upness. As close observers of our own election campaign may recall, the Australian Prime Minister greeted Barack Obama's entry into the Presidential race—and his proposal, at about the same time, for an American withdrawal from Iraq by next March—with a sneer. "If I was running Al Qaeda in Iraq," Howard said, "I would put a circle around March, 2008, and pray as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats." Kevin Rudd, then the leader of Australia's opposition, now Prime Minister-elect, gave him hell for this. But the crispest rebuke came from Obama himself, who, after calling the attack flattering, said, "I would also note that we have close to a hundred and forty thousand troops on the ground now, and my understanding is that Mr. Howard has deployed fourteen hundred. So if he's ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he call up another twenty thousand Australians and send them to Iraq. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of empty rhetoric." This point, which an Australian politician might find it awkward to make, exposed the gap between Howard's talk of the civilizational imperative of victory in Iraq and the relative paltriness of his commitment to that victory. Australian troops have suffered zero combat deaths in Iraq to date. Rudd plans to get them out before any occur. He also plans to sign the Kyoto climate-change protocol in Bali this week, leaving the United States isolated as the only major Western country to reject it.
Then, in early September, Bush decided to drop in on the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group to give his old mate an electoral boost. The event, which officially described itself as "the most significant international gathering of an economic kind that Australia has hosted," was supposed to be the zenith of Howard's premiership. It turned out to be the nadir. He was humiliated when Kevin Rudd chatted with the President of China in perfect Mandarin. He was humiliated when a popular TV satire troupe called the Chaser mounted a fake motorcade, flying a Canadian flag and featuring a rented limo with an actor dressed as Osama bin Laden in the back seat, and got within ten yards of Bush's hotel, making a mockery of an elaborate, war-on-terror-inspired security lockdown that had encased downtown Sydney in a "ring of steel." Bush, for his part, made a fool of himself (and, by extension, of his host) by calling APEC "OPEC" and Australian troops "Austrian troops." The Bush boost was a Bush bust.
They don't much like our President in the land Down Under. In the most recent poll by Australia's Lowy Institute, huge majorities disapproved of American foreign policy in general (sixty-three per cent) and of George W. Bush in particular (sixty-nine per cent). But similar majorities take a positive view of America (sixty per cent) and Americans (seventy-six per cent). The rest of the world, alas, is not so discriminating. According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes's "America Against the World" (2006), based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project, there was a time, not so long ago, when foreigners "found it easy to say their problem with America was really President Bush, not a considered judgment of the American people. But the results of the 2004 U.S. presidential election made that rationalization untenable." An avalanche of new international polls—from Pew, the German Marshall Fund, the BBC, and others—show that anti-Americanism has reached astronomical levels almost everywhere and has solidified even in the Northern European belt from Britain to Poland. "Countries that would once have supported American foreign policy on principle, simply out of solidarity or friendship, will now have to be cajoled, or paid, to join us," Anne Applebaum, a conservative commentator not given to sentimentality about "world opinion," wrote recently in the Washington Post. "Count that—along with the lives of soldiers and civilians, the dollars and equipment—as another cost of the war."
Last week's gathering of Israeli and (Sunni) Arab leaders at Annapolis was a sign that it has finally dawned on the Bush Administration that its six-year policy of ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian morass has aggravated America's troubles in the Middle East. The President may at last have realized that while the issue is not the sole cause of Islamist extremism, it cannot continue to fester––for the sake not only of Israeli survival and justice for the Palestinians but also of beginning to restore some of the global influence and esteem this Administration has squandered. But in suddenly capping six years of obtuse neglect with a one-year timeline, President Bush has probably dithered too long to have any hope of solving the world's most complicated and persistent rebus. His late awakening is yet another cost of the Iraq war. Those costs keep mounting, and they're not likely to abate until there's regime change a little closer to home. ♦
Friday, December 07, 2007
The Founders Wanted Separation of Church and State
The Crisis of Faith
Mitt Romney obviously felt he had no choice but to give a speech yesterday on his Mormon faith. Even by the low standards of this campaign, it was a distressing moment and just what the nation's founders wanted to head off with the immortal words of the First Amendment: A presidential candidate cowed into defending his way of worshiping God by a powerful minority determined to impose its religious tenets as a test for holding public office.
Mr. Romney spoke with an evident passion about the hunger for religious freedom that defined the birth of the nation. He said several times that his faith informs his life, but he would not impose it on the Oval Office.
Still, there was no escaping the reality of the moment. Mr. Romney was not there to defend freedom of religion, or to champion the indisputable notion that belief in God and religious observance are longstanding parts of American life. He was trying to persuade Christian fundamentalists in the Republican Party, who do want to impose their faith on the Oval Office, that he is sufficiently Christian for them to support his bid for the Republican nomination. No matter how dignified he looked, and how many times he quoted the founding fathers, he could not disguise that sad fact.
Mr. Romney tried to cloak himself in the memory of John F. Kennedy, who had to defend his Catholicism in the 1960 campaign. But Mr. Kennedy had the moral courage to do so in front of an audience of Southern Baptist leaders and to declare: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute."
Mr. Romney did not even come close to that in his speech, at the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas, before a carefully selected crowd. And in his speech, he courted the most religiously intolerant sector of American political life by buying into the myths at the heart of the "cultural war," so eagerly embraced by the extreme right.
Mr. Romney filled his speech with the first myth — that the nation's founders, rather than seeking to protect all faiths, sought to imbue the United States with Christian orthodoxy. He cited the Declaration of Independence's reference to "the creator" endowing all men with unalienable rights and the founders' proclaiming not just their belief in God, but their belief that God's hand guided the American revolutionaries.
Mr. Romney dragged out the old chestnuts about "In God We Trust" on the nation's currency, and the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance — conveniently omitting that those weren't the founders' handiwork, but were adopted in the 1950s at the height of McCarthyism. He managed to find a few quotes from John Adams to support his argument about America's Christian foundation, but overlooked George Washington's letter of reassurance to the Jews in Newport, R.I., that they would be full members of the new nation.
He didn't mention Thomas Jefferson, who said he wanted to be remembered for writing the Declaration of Independence, founding the University of Virginia and drafting the first American law — a Virginia statute — guaranteeing religious freedom. In his book, "American Gospel," Jon Meacham quotes James Madison as saying that law was "meant to comprehend, with the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination."
The founders were indeed religious men, as Mr. Romney said. But they understood the difference between celebrating religious faith as a virtue, and imposing a particular doctrine, or even religion in general, on everyone. As Mr. Meacham put it, they knew that "many if not most believed, yet none must."
The other myth permeating the debate over religion is that it is a dispute between those who believe religion has a place in public life and those who advocate, as Mr. Romney put it, "the elimination of religion from the public square." That same nonsense is trotted out every time a court rules that the Ten Commandments may not be displayed in a government building.
We believe democracy cannot exist without separation of church and state, not that public displays of faith are anathema. We believe, as did the founding fathers, that no specific religion should be elevated above all others by the government.
The authors of the Constitution knew that requiring specific declarations of religious belief (like Mr. Romney saying he believes Jesus was the son of God) is a step toward imposing that belief on all Americans. That is why they wrote in Article VI that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
And yet, religious testing has gained strength in the last few elections. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, has made it the cornerstone of his campaign. John McCain, another Republican who struggles to win over the religious right, calls America "a Christian nation."
CNN, shockingly, required the candidates at the recent Republican debate to answer a videotaped question from a voter holding a Christian edition of the Bible, who said: "How you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you. Do you believe every word of this book? Specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand, do you believe this book?"
The nation's founders knew the answer to that question says nothing about a candidate's fitness for office. It's tragic to see it being asked at a time when Americans need a president who will tell the truth, lead with conviction and restore the nation's moral standing, not one who happens to attend a particular church.
