A rchive Date
[ 28-08-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/MeedWard_Marianne/2005/08/28/1191004.html
Assassination cheaper than war
By MARIANNE MEED WARD
Sun, August 28, 2005
Maybe U.S. evangelist Pat Robertson's Bible has a typo in it. Instead of "thou shall not kill" perhaps "thou shall not till" (yeah, leave that to the underpaid migrant workers). How else to explain his bizarre "fatwa" against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Last week Robertson said it was too costly to have a war to take out the "strong-arm dictator." "It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with," he said. "We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability." Robertson later apologized, but you wonder whether he no longer believes this or he's just sorry he said it out loud. And this is a guy who once ran for U.S. president.
Robertson's diplomatic preferences are stuck in a cold war spy-vs-spy model. Which makes sense because that's where his social and religious preferences are stuck. Among his other wacky statements over the years: "The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today."
Feminism is "a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." (Yeah, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with gender-based wage disparity and career limitations.)
Jerry Falwell was right when he said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were God's punishment for "pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union and the People for the American Way." Hurricanes in Florida are God's retribution against gays and lesbians.
It's tempting to dismiss Robertson as an aging white male quack self-exiled to a 1950s version of an American utopia that never existed. But Robertson can't be dismissed because a sizeable portion of Americans (and some Canadians) listen to him. His Regent University, based in Virginia, has 3,000 students worldwide, and his TV show The 700 Club claims a daily audience of 1 million (carried in Canada by Vision and CTS).
His remarks were considered destabilizing enough for no less than Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld to criticize them. Rumsfeld archly pointed out that assassinating foreign leaders is "against the law" and "our department doesn't do that kind of thing." Yeah, right.
Robertson and Rumsfeld probably aren't all that different in their philosophical, political and religious leanings - although Rumsfeld probably knows better when to use his outside voice, and when to keep his yap shut. Without doubt Robertson delivered some voters to President George Bush.
The problem here isn't so much that Robertson has said what he has over the years, but that he is merely giving voice to what a number of conservative Christians in the U.S. believe. Within the evangelical community, there is a pocket of paranoid cowboys - the types who will split a church over some obscure theological point even if there are only two members left, demonize those who disagree and put up their sign for the First Church of Absolute Truth that afternoon.
It's not a stretch for these cowboys - and it is boys who run the show - to think of taking matters into their own hands. They do it all the time theologically (it's called "taking a stand" or "refusing to compromise" or some equally high-minded sounding bit of absolute rubbish). What it really is is thick-headed arrogance and muddled thinking.
Occasionally it rises to the level of creative semantics. As in, the 6th Commandment "Thou shall not kill" - well it's not really killing if a guy breaks into your house and you grab your AK-47 and blow off the top half of his body. That's "self-defence."
It's not really killing if you take out Iraqi or Afghan citizens in search of one or two terrorists and despots; that's "collateral damage." It's not really killing if you strap a potentially innocent man to the electrical chair. That's getting your just desserts. And now, apparently, it's not killing to suggest assassinating a foreign leader whose politics you don't like. That's just business (can't let Chavez jeopardize access to the vast oil reserves in Venezuala that are flowing like water into American SUVs). Sounds like something Tony Soprano would say.
Killing is redefined to the point where killing is only killing if I say it is.
This would be comical if it weren't so prevalent. Robertson needs to stop trying to vicariously live out his dream of running the White House and hit the books - the Good Book, preferably.
Ironically, in this whole debacle, Chavez comes off sounding like the better Christian:
He once said socialism is Christ's way "because it puts human beings ahead of money and social values ahead of the values of capital."
Amen.
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