-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020415&s=hitchens
}}}>Begin
Minority Report | April 15, 2002
by Christopher Hitchens
The God Squad
Was it lack of space or was it lack of time that made Katha Pollitt so bland and
lenient about the current state of religious leadership in our country and our culture
["God Changes Everything," April 1]? She mentioned the obvious degeneration of the
Roman Catholic Church into a protection racket for child rapists, true. She also
instanced the way in which Judaism has become prostituted to the uses of messianic
colonialism in Palestine. But this is merely to tinker with the problem. What about
Billy Graham, who has been Protestant father-confessor to every President from
Eisenhower to Clinton, and who has achieved the status of America's mainstream
cleric?
H.R. Haldeman's diaries of the Watergate years, published in 1994, gave an account
of a conversation between Nixon and Graham that included some heated talk about
"Satanic Jews," and what to do about them. This elegant exchange followed a
"prayer breakfast" that the two men had graced in February 1972. There was a brief
flap about this when the Haldeman diaries were first published, but it soon died away.
Now we have the tapes, first made public in an excellent piece by James Warren in
the Chicago Tribune, and despite their many deletions they show Graham to be an
avid bigot as well as a cheap liar.
INTERACT
Print this article
E-mail this article
Write to the editors
MORE ABOUT...
Christopher Hitchens
Religion
Nixon initiates the conversation but Graham can't wait to join in. Jewish control over
the media is assumed, of course, and Graham says, "This stranglehold has got to be
broken or the country's going down the drain." "You believe that?" asks Nixon and,
when the preacher-man says, "Yes, sir," responds, "Oh, boy, so do I. I can't ever say
that but I believe it." (This seems to me to take care, at long last, of the excuse
peddled by Nixon's defenders that he liked to talk dirty about Jews only in order to
seem tough to his gruesome subordinates.) Yet it is, admittedly, Graham who makes
most of the running. The key excerpt is this: "But I have to lean a little bit, you
know. I
go and keep friends with Mr. Rosenthal at the New York Times, and people of that
sort. And all--not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They
swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel
and so forth. They don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this
country."
In other words, Graham can put up with the "swarming" because he, too, is for a
crazed notion of a holy state in Palestine. This passage didn't get as much emphasis
as it should have in the reports of the meeting, which Graham at first pathetically
claimed not to remember. His memory came back in the form of a fawning apology,
but he was never subjected to the Farrakhan-Jackson treatment. After all, in the
National Cathedral after September 11 he was allowed in the presence of our
country's elite to assert that all the murder victims were in paradise and happy to be
there--a wild outburst of evil and stupidity that implicitly copies the fantasies of
bin
Laden. So there you have it: The country's senior Protestant is a gaping and
mendacious anti-Jewish peasant; the leaders of official Jewry are cringingly yoked
with him for the purpose of a disastrous crusade and meanwhile the cardinals are
running a rape fiesta for twitchy "celibates." All official attention turns, meanwhile,
upon the weird beliefs to be found in the Koran, which may be partly because the
Attorney General himself is a tuneless, clueless, evangelical Confederate dunce.
The struggle against theocratic fascism should, therefore, be inseparable from the
struggle for a truly secular state. This need not mean an atheist state; the religious
impulse itself seems to be partly innate at our present stage of evolution. But it need
not necessarily take the extremely backward form that it assumes in our society, nor
need its recognition eventuate in the present sickly "multiculturalism," whereby all
forms of religious stupidity are granted equal "respect" while challenges to, say,
scientific teaching are greeted with nervous tolerance.
Little, Brown has chosen the perfect moment to publish The Ornament of the World,
by Maria Rosa Menocal. It is a history of medieval "Al-Andalus," or Andalusia: a
culture where there was extensive cooperation and even symbiosis among Muslims,
Jews and Christians, and where civilization touched a point hardly surpassed since
fifth-century Athens. Indeed, that comparison itself is not inapt. It was the Abbasid
caliphs of Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries who sponsored the translation of
the whole corpus of Greek philosophy into Arabic, thus preserving it from the ban on
philosophy that had been imposed by the first Christian emperors. It was the Arab-
Andalusian scholar Averroës, known also as Ibn Rushd, who later, in the twelfth
century, made his commentaries on Aristotle available to the Latin-speaking world,
where they were yet again banned by the Church fathers before finally being
recovered by Europe. So it is no exaggeration to say that what we presumptuously
call "Western" culture is owed in large measure to the Andalusian enlightenment.
The migration of Arabic-speaking intellectuals to the southern Spanish cities of
Córdoba and Granada, and the magnetic pull exerted on Jewish scholars, was also
to have revolutionary effects on the study of medicine--with early Greek texts again
revived through translation--and upon the writing of poetry. Menocal has a wonderful
chapter on the love poems of the era and on Ibn Hazm's The Neck Ring of the Dove,
a handbook on romance and a memoir of old Córdoba. We tend to forget that
Maimonides, another great figure of this culture, wrote almost all his major works--
with the exception of the Mishneh Torah--in Arabic. Nothing could be more remote
from the bleak and arid doctrines of the Taliban.
However, it was not Muslim but Christian intolerance that put an end to Andalusia. By
1492 their Catholic majesties Ferdinand and Isabella had completed the reimposition
of orthodoxy and begun the expulsion of the Jews and Moors. It was to the Muslim
world that the Jews then looked for safety. This book partly restores to us a world we
have lost, a world for which our current monotheistic leaderships do not even feel
nostalgia.
thenation.com
Webmanager | Subscribe | Subscription Help | Privacy
© 2002 The Nation Company, L.P.
End<{{{
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Forwarded as information only; no automatic endorsement
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe
simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not
believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do
not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy Scriptures. Do not
believe in anything merely on the authority of Teachers, elders or wise men.
Believe only after careful observation and analysis, when you find that it
agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all.
Then accept it and live up to it."
The Buddha on Belief, from the Kalama Sutta
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will
teach you to keep your mouth shut."
--- Ernest Hemingway
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
