Is this a Holy War or not?

[S.R. Prozak]

Beginning a Modern Religious War
By: James O. Goldsborough
San Diego Union-Tribune* -

George W. Bush's Iraq war will be America's first religious war, one
inspired by groups of Christian fundamentalists and Jewish neoconservatives, a coalition whose zeal for war is as great as that of the original crusaders.

The origin of the crusades was a 1095 meeting in Autun, France, where 36 bishops made the first vows to "go to Jerusalem." Four years later, the crusaders took Jerusalem, only to see it recaptured by Saladin. The First Crusade launched centuries of war between crusaders and indigenous peoples from North Africa to Russia.

Today, the idea is to "go to Baghdad," but is rooted in a the same desire: to serve Jerusalem (Israel) and remake the Middle East. Like the crusaders, the new coalition represents the wedding of religious zeal and military power, always a fatal connection.

A central difference with the crusades is that Bush's war will be waged over opposition from organized religion. For weeks now, mainstream church leaders in America and abroad have been speaking out against war with a unity they seldom show.

Church opposition has made the crusade harder for Bush and Tony Blair, his comrade in arms. Blair's efforts to paint the war as a high moral cause was directly refuted a few days ago in an unusual joint statement by the heads of the Anglican and Catholic churches in England. Blair's assertions, said the two church leaders, "lacked moral legitimacy."

The British churchmen are part of a wide church movement against this war. Pope John Paul II has spoken out, as have leaders of most Protestant churches. The National Council of Churches, America's leading ecumenical agency representing 36 Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican churches with 50 million adherents, opposes war, as does the World Council of Churches, the body grouping national church councils in 100 nations.

Asked why the pope opposed war, John Allen Jr., Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, replied, "because he does not think this would be a just war. Both because the relationship between the good to be achieved and the harm that would be done is not there, and also because the imminence of the threat posed by Iraq is not at present convincing."

Yet both Blair and Bush paint their war in religious terms. In his State of the Union message, Bush, a "born-again" Methodist, told soldiers facing war to put faith in "the loving God." Bush's invocation of God to justify war was protested by Jim Winkler, head of the United Methodist Church, and led to a dispute between the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Frank Griswold, and the former President Bush, an Episcopalian, who objected to Griswold's remarks about his son's "reprehensible rhetoric" about war.

Unlike Europe and the Middle East, America does not wage religious wars. Founded by immigrants escaping religious conflict, our forebears wrote a Constitution separating church and state. Americans go to war over peace and security, not over God.

Bush's war has nothing to do with peace and security. It is the brainchild of a handful of neoconservatives in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle above all, who have argued for years that Iraq was the main threat to Israel. Feith and Perle have advised Israel's right-wing Likud Party and both have opposed U.S. Middle East peace initiatives, including those of President Bush I.

The Pentagon's zeal for war comes from these civilian neoconservatives, not from the military. This was well described by Anthony Zinni, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Bush's special envoy to the Middle East. "All the generals see this (Iraq) the same way," said Zinni, "and all those that never fired a shot in anger are really hell-bent to go to war."

The Pentagon neocons are joined by Elliot Abrams at the White House and
David Wurmser at the State Department. Their influence reaches deeply into the neocon media through such outlets as Fox News, the Weekly Standard and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and into Congress, where the influence of television evangelicals such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell is strong.

"Neoconservative" is an unfamiliar term in the West. Writer Sidney
Blumenthal defines them as "second-generation Jews torn between cultures." Sociologist David Riesman calls them New York provincials "whose knowledge of American history is slim and who see only each other." They are far from the Jewish mainstream.

With Bush, the extremists have found their Richard I, to lead a 21st century crusade against infidels. The Sept. 11 attacks gave them the chance they had sought for a decade, though no credible connection between Iraq and Sept. 11 has been made.

To study the crusades is to see how illusory were the triumphs. In his
history of the First Crusade, Steven Runciman wrote words that every Bush fundamentalist should memorize:

"Faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing. In the long sequence of
interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our
civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. There was so much courage and so little honor, so much devotion and so little understanding."

Source: San Diego Union-Tribune

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/goldsborough/20030303-9999_mz1e3golds.html



Is It Good for the Jews?
By BILL KELLER

Two weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims — I am not making this up — that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time. Apparently he has given similar briefings to top officials of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

Maybe we're all a little too desperate these days for a simple formula to explain how our safe world came unhinged. That, as much as anything, may explain one of the more enduring conspiracy theories of the moment, the notion that we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for the sake of Israel.

This idea has received only fleeting attention in the mainstream discussion of our looming invasion of Iraq, and it would not deserve more except for three things: (1) The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and more widely held than you may think. (2) It has interesting ripples in our domestic politics. (3) It has, like many dubious theories, sprouted from a seed of truth. Israel is part of the story. And why shouldn't it be?

The conspiracy theory appears in several variations, ranging from malignant to merely cynical, but it goes something like this: A cadre of pro-Zionist zealots within the Bush administration and among its media chorus (the "amen corner," as the isolationist Pat Buchanan crudely called them last time we threatened Iraq) has long schemed to make the Middle East safer for Israel by uprooting the hostile regime of Saddam Hussein. They have finally succeeded, the theory goes, in pushing their agenda up to the desk of a gullible president.

Exhibit A for this plot is a document entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," prepared in 1996 by a group of American defense thinkers for the hard-line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. This study proposed an aggressive redirection of Israeli strategy, including a plan for "removing Saddam Hussein from power." Three of the authors of the prescription — Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser —are now prominent "embeds" in the Bush administration.

The "Clean Break" group, interestingly, did not call for an American conquest of Saddam. With President Bill Clinton in office, there was little hope of that. They proposed that Israel handle it together with Jordan and Turkey. Jordan's Hashemite dynasty would share the management of Iraq with the Shiites — presumably leaving the fate of the poor Kurds in Turkish hands. As for America, the document proposed that Israel adopt a new policy of self-reliance, immediately declining economic aid and, eventually, military assistance. This was all a bit much, even for the ultranationalist Mr. Netanyahu.

A less conspiracy-minded observer might point out that the longstanding Bushite animosity toward Iraq is complex and hardly secret, and the fact that our interests coincide with Israel's does not mean that a Zionist fifth column has hijacked the president's brain. But that would not satisfy the yearning for a simple story.

Reinforcing this sinister narrative is the suspicion that the presidential mastermind Karl Rove designed the war as shameless pandering to Florida's Jewish voters and to the tens of millions of evangelical Christians who have taken up Israel as a passion. (Many evangelicals love Israel because in their Biblical end-of-days scenario, the gathering of Jews in the Holy Land is necessary for the Second Coming. Inconveniently for the Jews, the story calls for them to either abandon their beliefs or be exterminated in time for the great rapture.)

While the polls show that the attitudes of American Jews on a war with Iraq are not appreciably different from those of the general electorate, most of the big Jewish organizations and many donors (with the important exception of Hollywood donors) are backing war. 

I don't for a second believe that Mr. Bush is marching to war to secure the votes of Palm Beach County. But Republican strategists do foresee — and savor — the fact that a victory in Iraq could give the president new inroads with a small but politically active and traditionally Democratic constituency.

"If the policy succeeds in the war and the peace," one Republican strategist said, "then I think you'll see a further tectonic shift of Jewish political support, both in terms of money and votes, toward Bush. That's not why it's being done, but it will be a consequence if they're successful."

Mr. Bush may also be enjoying the way the question of Israel and the Palestinians has sown strife within the antiwar ranks. Michael Lerner, editor of the leftist Jewish magazine Tikkun, says he was blackballed from speaking at an antiwar rally in San Francisco because some of the sponsors refused to have a "pro-Israel" speaker, an incident that prompted considerable gloating among hawks.

You hear lowbrow versions of the it's-really-about-Israel theory at protest rallies, especially in Europe, where selective sympathy for the Palestinians runs high. You can hear more sophisticated versions, sometimes whispered or oblique, among scholars, op-ed writers and politicians. They speak of the "Israel-centric" war on terror or "Sharon's war."

Making the world safer for us — defusing terrorism and beginning to reform a region that is a source of toxic hostility to what we stand for — happens to make the world safer for Israel as well. But the idea that Israel's interests are driving one of the most momentous shifts in America's foreign policy is simple-minded and offensive. (There is also a simple-minded and offensive flip side, which holds that opposition to the war is heavily fueled by anti-Semitism — another sweeping slander with a grain of truth in it.)

What is demonstrably true is that Israelis believe that the war in Iraq is — to use a phrase that is a staple of Jewish satire — good for the Jews. Even though Israel is a likely target of Iraqi reprisals when war breaks out, it is the only country I know of where polls show overwhelming support for an invasion to oust Saddam, preferably sooner.

The administration prefers not to advertise Israel alongside Bulgaria and Spain on its marquee of allied supporters, for the same reason it has gone to tremendous lengths to keep Israel out of the coming war. No one wants to feed the dangerous idea that this is, as the jihad propagandists claim, a war of Americans and Zionists against Arabs and Islam. 

There are obvious reasons that Israelis would like to rid the region of a man who trains terrorists and pays blood money to suicide bombers' families. But the deeper explanation, says Stephen Cohen, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, is profound despair over the bloody dead end in which Israeli-Palestinian politics sit. A conquest of Iraq offers the prospect that the United States will take the region in hand. It is, to many Israelis, the only hope of change for the better.

In his speech last week to the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush for the first time seemed to embrace this thankless responsibility. He declared that success in Iraq could break the impasse and move Israel and the Palestinians toward the obvious two-state solution. He underscored this as "my personal commitment." 

The speech may have been a sop to European opinion, but a successful war would offer Mr. Bush a precious opportunity. A lot of people wish that he had engaged the Palestinian question intensively and earlier, if only to gain some credibility with the Arabs prior to disarming Saddam. But later would still be better than never.

The question is, What will Mr. Bush make of this moment? If the U.S. manages to make a more benign Iraq — and perhaps a chastened Syria — the Israelis could decide to dig in their heels: Our friend Mr. Bush is here, he's on our side; we can now sit tight, wait for the Palestinians to read the handwriting on the walls of Baghdad and maybe offer them half a state.

Or the Americans could seize the opportunity to say to Ariel Sharon, who has shown no prior gift for strategic statesmanship: "We are here now — you know we won't let you down. It's time to roll back the settlements and close a deal."

Will Mr. Bush choose to lead on this? We know now that the man isn't afraid of a big gamble. But we also know that he likes his stories black and white, and no amount of conquest will make the Middle East a simple plot. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/08/opinion/08KELL.html?th




Peace Protestors Want to Kill Jews
Jewish World Review March 6, 2003 / 2 Adar II, 5763 

Sam Schulman 

The peace movement of the 1930s made the Holocaust inevitable --- by accident; The peace movement of Today wants no more accidents: Just the death of Jews 

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | 
Our grandparents' anti-war allies enabled the Holocaust --- by accident. Your present day anti-war allies wish quite deliberately to destroy "Jewish interests" --- and the lives of many, many Jews in the process. And this is not an unintentional byproduct of good intentions --- but for many leaders of the peace movement, a precious goal. 


It was not quite thus in the 1930s. Like today, the very nicest people, the most thoughtful people, the most progressive people, the people with the highest degree of social and moral conscience, people, in short, like you and me - all aligned themselves with Hitler's interests and brought about the totally unnecessary second World War - which was very nearly lost, even after the death of 50 million people. Even though it was won in the end, it was not won soon enough to prevent making the unthinkable - the Holocaust - inevitable. 


And among those categories of people - the very nicest, the most thoughtful, the most progressive, those with the highest degree of social and moral conscience - it is not self-regard to count not only the cream of American Jewry, but probably the majority. It is not self-flattery, because the behavior of these people in the 1930s - signers of peace petitions, supporters of disarmament, idealistic Communists and socialists, New Dealers, members of the America First committee, supporters of the League of Nations - were "objectively" supporting Hitler, as George. How? They condemned "unilateral" efforts to compel him to obey the Versailles treaty (or unilateral efforts to stop Mussolini from invading Ethiopia) as warmongering; by believing in the efficacy of diplomacy - and even prayer - over preparing, they enabled Hitler to build up his arsenal and ready himself for total war - externally against free (but oh so flawed and immoral) countries, and internally against the Jews. 


The Popes of the 1930s did - like the Pope of today would, alas, do - far more harm to the Jews because they wanted and wished for "Peace" than because of any anti-Semitic feelings they may have harbored. 


It was regarded as terribly tasteless to tell the truth about the impending Holocaust. When progressive, conscientious figures such as Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago were active supporters of America First, testimony about the savagery of the Germans were dismissed as lies and Jewish propaganda. So Bruno Bettelheim, fresh from Buchenwald and Dachau, was discouraged from publishing his accounts of the camps until 1944. 


And the lingering effects of anti-war sentiment had a baleful affect on the conduct of the war itself, and the fate of the Jews. Politicians like Roosevelt could not allow themselves to be seen as actively intervening to turn the military machine to aid Jews in particular - because the anti-war activists had worked so hard and so successfully to discredit any Jewish complaint as a self-interested and selfish attempt to plunge the world into war merely to save their own cowardly hides. 


Could FDR have done more to rescue the Jews? Whether or not he could have done so militarily, the peaceniks of the 1930s had made it impossible for him to do so politically. 


So it is now - only worse. The forces aligned with the anti-war, pro-Saddam movement - the interests guiding the anti-war, pro-Sadaam movement - and most of all, the strength the anti-war, pro-Saddam movement derives from Jewish supporters - including, it would seem, most of Hollywood's Jews, the editors of The Forward, the readers of The New York Times - are objectively if not intentionally supporting the people who wish them harm, death, and total elimination. 


Language itself has changed its meaning. Three years ago, those who said they were anti-Israel but not anti-Semitic meant that they opposed the particular measures the Government of Israel was taking to defend its civilians from terrorists. Now, to say that one is anti-Israel but not ant-Semitic means generally that - if one is a moderate - one is opposed to the existence of Israel as a self-governing Jewish State where it has existed for the better part of a century. But if one is really progressive, it means that one is opposed to the notion that Jews might be permitted to live as individuals in Palestine, where they have lived and come and gone freely and continuously for over two millennia, and that, instead, they should be uprooted and dispossessed by force. 


Now one could argue that these propositions might be true - and if you were to approach any of the leaders of the anti-war movement, you will hear such an argument - as you would from any of the leading clergymen and clergywomen of the mainstream Protestant denominations - but one can hardly suggest that either the moderate or progressive versions should not be regarded as anti-Semitic. Progressive, peaceful, conscientious, well-meaning - and a policy that will, if it were allowed to win sway, result in dispossession and slaughter for the Jews - and sooner rather than later. 


So let us make room in the exhibit space of the Holocaust Museums scattered around the world some of the names that, no doubt, are now enrolled on the list of donors. The 1930s ancestors of today's peace protestors lovingly allowed the Nazis (and their evil opposite the Communists) to flourish and begin a meticulously crafted program of murder. 


Under the peace program we see today, Ba'athism, the murderous direct offspring of Nazism, has been given vital breathing space, and would, if the peace marchers had their way, continue to grow in strength until it can safely strike out at Israel, Turkey, and arm the terrorist cells among us, all the time driving its own intellectuals, Shi'ites, Assyrian Christians, Kurds, and others of proscribed faith, race, or political views, into prisons, hospitals, and grave. 

As Orwell pointed out long ago, pacifism in the face of armed evil is equivalent to a blind worship of force. For those of our race - the historic victims of so many causes - it would be disastrous to make the same mistake twice, and entrust our children's fate to the hands of these sad and complicitous pacifists. 

http://jewishworldreview.com/sam/schulman.html

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