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November 7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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November
8, 2003
Persecuting the Truth
Claims
of Christian Victimization Ring Hollow
By TIM WISE
David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, has been making
the rounds lately, promoting his new book, Persecution: How Liberals
are Waging War Against Christianity. Therein, Limbaugh claims
that the left, broadly defined, is doing everything possible
to eliminate all mention of the nation's majority faith from
the public square.
Limbaugh digs up hundreds of cases that
ostensibly make clear the systematic campaign of denigration
aimed at Christians. Most of these involve instances of so-called
religious persecution in public schools, from which, to hear
Limbaugh tell it, God has been fully expunged and where expressing
one's faith is sure to result in suspension, a failing grade,
or having one's Bible thrown in the trash by a humanist teacher
who proclaims "this is garbage," as she slings the
good book to the paper receptacle like so much refuse.
How telling and appropriate then, that
in the same month Limbaugh's book became a best-seller, what
with its hyperbolic claims of a leftist putsch against followers
of the man from Nazareth, we should also learn of the comments
of U.S. General William Boykin, who has announced a jihad of
his own against Muslims.
Boykin, for those who have been living
under a rock for the last several weeks, has claimed that God
is on the side of the U.S. in its fight against terrorism, and
that Islam is essentially a "Satanic" faith, led by
idol worshipers whose God isn't as big or real as the God of
Christianity. That Allah, the name for God in Arabic, is actually
the exact same God as the one Boykin worships naturally escapes
him. After all, everyone knows the Lord only speaks English.
Boykin's comments, far from being attacked
by those in positions of power and authority, despite the supremacist
mindset behind them, were shrugged off by the Bush Administration.
Boykin himself was praised by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and
isn't even being reprimanded, let along persecuted for his nuttiness.
That's what it means to be a member of the majority faith: you
can be a bigot, spew intolerant and ignorant diatribes against
those of other traditions and never get in trouble. On the other
hand, let a Muslim with any real position of authority go around
attacking Christianity, especially after 9/11, and see how quickly
they would end up on John Ashcroft's shit list, investigated
under the Patriot Act.
Sorta like Ann Coulter, who said right
after 9/11 that the U.S. should invade Muslim nations, kill their
leaders and convert everyone to Christianity: a vacuous stream
of putrid bombast that not only didn't hurt her career but has
helped it, making her more ubiquitous than ever. Imagine for
a second that an Arab writer, perhaps the late Edward Said, had
written that because of U.S. policy in the Middle East or because
of our support for Israel, a force of Muslim armies should invade
this country, kill its leaders and convert everyone to Islam.
How long would Said have remained a free man, let alone a free
and employed man?
Or consider the President, who said during
the 2000 campaign that Jesus Christ was his favorite philosopher.
In a land where professing Christianity was a one-way ticket
to the gulag, such a person could never get elected by the people,
or even close to elected the way Bush almost did.
On the other hand, if a candidate for
any major office were to say that his favorite philosopher was
Mohammed, or Buddha, or some prominent atheist, well, not even
the Supreme Court and a rigged ballot recount would be able to
dig that candidate out of the hole in which they would find themselves.
Indeed, imagine what would happen if a Presidential candidate
were to announce that there was no God, or even that they were
agnostic and simply unsure as to the nature or existence of God.
Persecution of the faithful indeed.
That Limbaugh's case for Christian victimization
is weakened by these kinds of examples, however, is hardly the
full extent of his book's deceptive and nonsensical claims.
Within weeks of Persecution's release,
intrepid web bloggers had already discovered the falsity of several
of the most dramatic examples of anti-religious oppression in
the volume. Like the kid who was supposedly "pounced on"
by teachers when he dared to pray in his school's cafeteria (actually
he was punished for fighting, the prayer part was made up).
Although there are surely true examples
of heavy-handed school administrators, employers and others overstepping
legitimate concerns about church/state entanglement and unfairly
limiting religious expression, Limbaugh has hardly made a case
that such a problem is endemic to the culture as a whole. After
all, with more than 30 million kids in school in the U.S., even
a thousand legitimate cases like this would constitute nothing
even remotely resembling a trend.
Indeed, if a few hundred examples out
of 30 million kids amounts to a conspiracy, then there must likewise
be a conspiracy of food poisoning, since at least that many will
get sick eating lunchroom food each year.
There are plenty of things that school
children have to worry about, and being punished for expressing
their religiosity is simply not among them, especially if they
are in the majority, that is to say, Christian. On the other
hand, to be of another faith, or purely secular is to invite
regular abuse from peers and authority figures alike.
Don't believe me?
Well then, you can go to hell.
Now tell me, how did that feel?
Probably not very good, right? Well keep
reading, and try and put aside how offended you may be, and should
be, at the above epithet hurled your way so as to make a point,
for indeed there is a point to be made here.
You see, when a person says "Go
to hell," as I just did, we all recognize it as a personal
attack, a slur of sorts, an ad hominem invective that is wholly
inappropriate to rational discourse. It is not a comment that
invites discussion or debate, rather it shuts down both. It is
a period at the end of the sentence, not a comma or colon leading
to something more prosaic.
Now try this one on for size: You are
going to hell.
A little more abstract, a few extra letters
on the end of the word go, and stated as opinion rather than
exclamation, but overall pretty similar.
And to some of us, every bit as offensive.
Yet "you are going to hell"
is what many of us hear day in and day out, from the time we
are children, if we fail to adhere to the "one true faith"
proclaimed by the likes of William Boykin and most every evangelical
Christian in the United States.
To we who are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists,
Hindu, Sufi, Sikh, some combination of these or of no faith tradition
at all, being told that we are going to hell is no different
than being commanded to go to said place in a moment of anger.
In fact, the former is more offensive than the latter precisely
because it comes from a place of judgment, it involves casting
aspersions not just upon our persons (which is also implicit
in telling someone to go to hell) but our souls. It is to say
that we are less than whole, less than precious in the eyes of
the Creator of the Universe. It is to say, in short, that we
are inferior peoples.
And it is something that no Christian
has ever been told by a single one of our number, so no, they
cannot possibly relate. Christians may think they are persecuted
because the law won't allow them to read Christian prayers over
the school intercom, or because they can't plop a giant monument
of the Ten Commandments down in a public building, but trust
me, that is not persecution.
It is not persecution to be given a failing
grade when your class paper on Jesus as an historical figure
uses only one source, the Bible, as a reference, as happened
to one student a few years ago. Such a paper deserves an F, and
the student who thinks a few lines from John or Matthew constitute
an acceptable bibliography should put down scripture, pick up
a dictionary and look up the meaning of the term research.
It is not persecution to be told that
you can't send a stack of Christian comic books to your son serving
in the Middle East, as happened to one family recently, and as
Limbaugh laments in his book. Such a prohibition owes to the
admittedly repressive customs laws existing in many Muslim countries,
which restrict importation of large quantities of non-Muslim
religious literature, and has nothing to do with political correctness
in the United States, let alone its military for goodness sake.
It is not persecution to be told that
you can't pray out loud in a classroom when such prayer would
disrupt other students who for whatever reason don't want to
be subjected to your verbalized pronouncement of faith.
It is not persecution when schools, seeking
to be more inclusive of non-majority students, change the annual
Christmas pageant or celebration to a generic holiday celebration.
It may be silly, it may or may not be Constitutionally-required,
but it is certainly not a form of anti-Christian repression.
Persecution is having a teacher tell
you that the faith of your family is illegitimate and that you
are going to spend eternity in a lake of fire surrounded by demons,
and being told that all of your family who have died heretofore
are already there preparing a space for you. Been there, done
that.
Persecution is being corralled into an
assembly in your public school and being forced to listen to
a proselytizing representative of a Christian youth group call
the students to proclaim their devotion to Jesus, and to imply
that those who won't do so are lost souls. Been there, done that.
Persecution is writing an eighth grade
term paper in that same public school, in which you examine both
sides of the school prayer issue evenhandedly, but are graded
down because the title you chose, "Our Father Who Art in
Homeroom?" is deemed sacrilegious by your fundamentalist
teacher. Been there, done that.
Persecution is having a teacher place
anti-abortion pamphlets on every desk in his room, which not
only call for an end to the procedure but do so in explicitly
Christian terms, insisting that all who disagree are de facto
baby-killers and agents of Satan. Been there, done that too.
Persecution is, in short, being told
that your personal relationship with God is based on a lie, and
that you should turn against the faith of your family in order
to be saved: an interesting variation on "honor thy father
and mother" if ever there was one.
Persecution is being told that you are
cut off from the Creator; that you are spiritually bankrupt.
It is having to listen to the likes of William Boykin and know
that most Christians at least implicitly agree with him and want
nothing more than to see your faith eliminated from the face
of the Earth.
That those who adhere to the fundamentalist,
evangelical line can't possibly understand how terroristic their
actions are to the rest of us only serves as proof of just how
privileged they are in this society, how un-persecuted they have
really been.
Having atheists make fun of you for being
superstitious, as offensive as that must be, simply doesn't compare
to having someone tell you that you are unholy. Especially when
those atheists hold almost no power anywhere in the culture,
unlike fundamentalist Christians. The power of Christians is
what makes their absolutism so much more dangerous than that
of even the most militant non-believer. It is the power, plus
the prejudice towards other faiths, that amounts to religious
persecution, to faithism if you will.
Persecution of the dominant group in
a society is an oxymoronic concept, because only the dominant
group can persecute by definition. Less powerful folks might
be able to offend, they might be able to mistreat on an individual
level, but they can not oppress. They can not materially and
substantively limit one's life choices and chances because of
their non-belief, or different beliefs.
Ultimately, if David Limbaugh thinks
it's tough being a Christian in the United States, he should
try being anything else.
Tim Wise
is an essayist, activist and father. He can be reached at timjwise@msn.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
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