In the name of God

[Spider Jerusalem]

Polly Toynbee
Friday July 22, 2005
The Guardian

Two weeks on, London is stricken once more. The death cult strikes again, unstoppable in its deranged religious mania. This time no deaths but a savage reminder of the unknown waves of demented killers lining up to murder in the name of God.

Whatever they intended, the message was loud and clear: they can and will do this whenever they want and it does indeed spread very real terror. The police have said there are many more of them. The security services have already revealed that they know absolutely nothing.

In the growing fear and anger at what more may be to come, apologists or explainers for these young men can expect short shrift. This is not about poverty, deprivation or cultural dislocation of second-generation immigrants. There is plenty of that and it is passive. Iraq is the immediate trigger, but this is about religious delusion.

All religions are prone to it, given the right circumstances. How could those who preach the absolute revealed truth of every word of a primitive book not be prone to insanity? There have been sects of killer Christians and indeed the whole of Christendom has been at times bent on wiping out heathens. Jewish zealots in their settlements crazily claim legal rights to land from the Old Testament. Some African Pentecostal churches harbour sects of torturing exorcism and child abuse. Muslims have a very long tradition of jihadist slaughter. Sikhs rose up to stop a play that exposed deformities of abuse within their temples. Buddhism too has its sinister wing. See how far-right evangelicals have kidnapped US politics and warped its secular, liberal founding traditions. Intense belief, incantations, secrecy and all-male rituals breed perversions and danger, abusing women and children and infecting young men with frenzy, no matter what the name of the faith.

more... http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/comment/story/0,16141,1534014,00.html

[newswolf56]

1. It appears (some of) the British are beginning to get it. This is...

not about policy. It is about fanaticism -- infinitely murderous fanaticism at that.

[NMMNG]

2. Excellent article

Which shows exactly how dangerous the melding of church and state, and church and public school really are to society. We need more people like Polly Toynbee, and we need them here in the US where things are moving ever towards theocracy thanks to the American religious right. Otherwise we could well end up in a pickle much like our neighbors across the pond.

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. Yes indeed...

of course, it would help if the US media were more like the Guardian and the BBC, too. Can you imagine a piece like that running in the Washington Post or the NYT, pointing out the dangers of Bush and the fundamentalists' attempts to impose their poisonous religion on American public life?

[NMMNG]

5. As if

Such an article would never go to press in a mainstream US publication. Sadly, it would only see the light of day in an "alternative" or specialty magazine or newspaper. ;(

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. Yeah. Sadly enough, although most Americans don't realise it...

America is very far from the "mainstream" in relation to the rest of the Western world. None of the other Western liberal democracies seem to have this rot eating away at their hearts...

(note to Europe: thanks for sending all of your religious fanatics over here all those years ago!)</sarcasm>

[NMMNG]

10. Insanely enough

The people who came over here on the Nina, Santa Maria and Mayflower came over to escape religious persecution (yet implemented their own variety post haste). Then the Founding Fathers put in place a wonderful government designed to avoid all of the problems that had occurred in the homeland. Centuries later the fundies are perverting their words and trying to take us back to the dark ages. :hide:

[Spider Jerusalem]

13. Only the Mayflower...

one of my ancestors came over in 1607 (over a decade before the Mayflower; supposedly the oldest English bloodline extant in America), and he wasn't fleeing anything, except maybe poverty and a dead-end existence...he wanted to get rich, like Columbus wanted to, like Cortes wanted to...only the Plymouth colony and Maryland were founded by people escaping religious persecution...

[cprise]

4. Tony Blair jumped on the policy bandwagon of a fanatic.

So, yes, this is about policy... one where powerful fanatics inspire more despair and violence.

[newswolf56]

7. Sorry but 9/11 was not a response to George Bush or even...

to U.S. policy. It was about fanatical hatred -- just as the writer noted -- hatred of women, gays, liberty itself.

(The Bush Administration is also about fanaticism: note its Grover Norquist scheme for building a theocratic alliance of U.S. Muslims and Christians on the basis of mutual hatreds of -- you guessed it -- women, gays, liberty itself.) But that doesn't make the purely Jihadist brand of fanaticism any less atrocious.

[Maple]

8. No, it is not

The Brits and Americans have been interfering in the ME for well over a century...THAT is the cause of the problem.

Not some airy fairy nonsense about a campaign of hate.

They don't 'hate us for our freedoms'...no one has bombed Sweden or Canada or other free countries. Just the ones that are bombing them.

[newswolf56]

12. Have you forgotten the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993...

during the Clinton Administration? President Clinton was the best friend the Palestinian Muslims -- and Muslims in general -- ever had in any major-power government.

[Maple]

14. No he wasn't

The US continued with it's standard policies toward the ME.

He was just very good at image.

Nothing actually changed in foreign policy in those years...illegal bombing of Iraq went on, and Albright made her callous statement about the children dying there because of the sanctions.

A 'country' that wasn't viable for the Palestinians. Bombing seemingly at random elsewhere...you don't bomb a country because you 'think' someone might be there.

Political razzle-dazzle on the homefront doesn't make up for that.

[trotsky]

21. You mean the bombing that happened...

just ONE MONTH after Clinton was sworn in?

Heh, yeah, just that one month and they knew he was going to be their "best friend."

[hippywife]

9. It was most definitely a response to

U.S. policy in the ME. The fanatacism on both sides is only what keeps fanning the flames.

[newswolf56]

11. Those who want to disagree with Polly Toynbee surely have that right...

but I believe her analysis is both historically correct and long overdue. And here's another one to go along with it:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x141499


Edit: grammatical error (haste makes waste!).

[Wetzelbill]

15. Not really, she has some validity but....

to dismiss occupation is a major mistake. It is a combination of a few factors, religious fundamentalism is definitely part of it, but there are discernible policy problems that bin Laden, specifically targets. Bin Laden is interesting in that he uses fanaticism and the xenophobia that comes with it to fan the flames of what we call Terror, but it mainly is derived from occupation. Toynbee, Tom Friedman and Olivier Roy all wrote interesting articles that talk about fundamentalism and fanaticism, but they ignore other aspects that are at least, if not more, crucial. The leading expert on suicide bombing is Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, he has done research on every single suicide bombing ever and he basically says it's conclusively an occupation and policy problem. As does Michael Scheuer the leading expert on bin Ladin in the world. They both say that. Polly Toynbee, Tom Friedman or anybody else isn't even qualified to refute that. Now, what gets interesting, according to Pape -and Scheuer to an extent - is the way the battle within Islam is used to flame Terrorist actions, or if you want to look at it from an anthropological point of view and call it what it is, political or politically inspired violence. But, don't get sucked into arguments that dismiss either the political or the fundamentalist aspects of it all, because they both play important roles. But, by and large, most suicide bombers on record aren't even religious. So there is something else going on there.

I hate typos.

[newswolf56]

16. Didn't know about Pape's work and will indeed look it up. That's...

what I love about DU -- this is one discussion site where you can sometimes actually learn something.

My perspective on this war comes from the study of history, albeit as a generalist, not a specialist, which is also the basis of my argument that the cause of most of the world's troubles is Yehvehistic Fundamentalism: whether Christian, Islamic or Jewish is merely a matter of locale. Secular zealots don't help either.

Though I must also confess a certain bias: my recollections of what the Nazis did to the Jews still make it very difficult for me to find fault with Israel. (I was a child during WWII and remember vividly the war's-end disclosures of the Holocaust, covered extensively in Life and Look: the memory-life of such photographs is about a zillion times that of a video image. Then as an adult in New York City I met some Holocaust survivors, conversations with whom made all those images forever emotionally real.)

[Wetzelbill]

19. I have a link for you

The Logic of Suicide Terrorism
It’s the occupation, not the fundamentalism
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_18/article.html


Yeah, I don't like flame wars, I like to learn stuff and will listen to valid arguments. What you are saying is true, but it's only half the story, you know? Of course fundamentalism has an impact, there are just other factors involved too. That's why I said if you hear an argument where somebody is trying to suck you into believe it is one or the other than beware, because more than likely they are overlooking a big part of the problem.

I don't know of anyone who couldn't honestly be affected by the images from the Holocaust. Something that heinous, you just can't be rationale about. I like your point about Yehvehistic fundamentalism. I'm going to look into some stuff on that and the troubles caused by it. Good point. I hope that article helps you out too. It's very interesting. Also, if you're really interested get "Imperial Hubris" by Anonymous (aka Michael Scheuer) It's a great book. Really is the most important book on terrorism out there.

[Spider Jerusalem]

17. Reminds me of the story about the blind men and the elephant.

A lot of Western commentators don't seem able to move back and get the perspective required to see what's really there (of course, that would entail a bit of socio-historical self-analysis, too).

[Wetzelbill]

18. I think some fear that self-analysis

[muriel_volestrangler]

23. But in the case of the British bombers

(assuming their identification is correct; I think it is) it is about religion. They grew up in Britain, but are not protesting that their country is occupied, or that they want independence for their part of it. Their ancestry was Pakistani and Jamaican, but I don't think they were protesting the policies of the British Empire 60 or more years ago. It's the self-identification of the bombers with other Muslims, and against any westerner, that justifies, in their minds, killing random westerners. If it wasn't for the fundamental division of the world in their mind into "Islamic" and "non-Islamic", they couldn't justify killing people whose individual policies they have no idea of. And it's no use saying that, as British voters, the victims were responsible for British policy - so were the bombers.

[ikojo]

24. Leonard Fein spoke before a Jewish Peace Group in

St Louis a few years ago and he said that contrary to the image that suicide bombers are poor disenfranchised youth, many of them are well educated and come from what would be called "good families" in the US. He said there is little connection between poverty and the tendancy to become a suicide bomber.

I agree that suicide bombers arise when their countries are occupied by a foreign army.

[ixion]

20. interesting how the author speaks of jewish and xian radicals in the past

tense.

As I see it, a small group of religious zealots from Islam, Christian and Jewish sects are making life miserable for the rest of us.

Any religion that commands you to kill is probably not a good religion to pursue. In my opinion, people should pursue spirituality rather than religion, because it's more meaningful. Religion has been reduced to a set of instructions and rituals to follow. Religion is institutionalized spirituality, and leads to acts of zealotry because of the nature of the institution.

[trotsky]

22. Yep. For example, Eric Rudolph.

Or far-right extremist Christian militia groups.

Doomsday sects, fringe movements, "Constitution Party," white power groups, etc. Those Xian radicals are alive and well in the US and have shown their willingness to kill to advance their agenda.