On 4/29/07, Perelman, Michael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I admire the Berrigan brothers for the humanity rather than for their Catholicism.
That is good of you, but I think that people who are interested in the Muslim Brotherhood, from left to liberal, are interested in neither their humanity nor their religion but are motivated by a similar question to the ones that Stalin asked: "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" (qtd. in Winston Churchill, "The Gathering Storm," Vol. 1, Ch. 8, The Second World War, 1948, <http://www.bartleby.com/66/30/55130.html>); and "If the Pope or you can tell us what armies, artillery, machine-guns tanks and other weapons of war he possesses, let him become our ally. We don't need an ally for talk and incense" (Enver Hoxha, Memoirs from My Meetings with Stalin, 1981 <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/stalin/meet3.htm>). For Stalin, the questions were rhetorical, but today they aren't. In other words, people are interested in the Brotherhood and the like first and foremost because they do have many divisions, not necessarily in the literal military sense (though Hizballah and the Iranian state have them in this sense also) but in a political sense of mass membership. -- Yoshie
