Peace and Justice Post

By the Rev. Howard Bess, Consortium News, December 24, 2010

(Originally published December 5, 2009)

Editor’s Note: In a modern era when ancient religious myths continue to set nations at war against one another at the cost of untold human suffering, it is no longer possible to look benignly even at some of the innocent myths like those that surround the birth of Jesus.

Anything that suggests the superiority of one religion over another carries with it the risk of justifying yet more killing. Indeed, one of the bitter ironies of this season’s joyful praise for the “prince of peace” is that his gentle teachings have been twisted into possibly the most violent and warlike religion in history.

If Christians don’t like to hear that – if they wish to think of, say, Islam as a particularly violent religion and Christianity as one of peace and human kindness – they should recall the endless bloodletting done in Jesus’s name, from the days since Christianity was adopted as Rome’s official religion through the Middle Ages to today.

For instance, think of:

–The “heretics” tortured and burned alive for transgressions such as disagreeing over interpretations of the transubstantiation of Christ in the communion or for deviating from Christian doctrine that clashed with scientific discoveries;

–The Crusaders who slaughtered the Muslim and Jewish populations of Jerusalem in 1099, hailed in Europe as a great victory;

–The interminable religious wars that ravaged Europe for centuries and the suffering that kings inflicted on their subjects after claiming a divine right under Christianity.

–The Christian-led genocides against and enslavements of indigenous “heathens” of the Western Hemisphere, Africa and Australia as well as brutal imperial incursions into Asia;

–The European pogroms against the Jews based on an anti-Semitism rationalized by labeling Jews collectively as “Christ killers,” laying the groundwork for the Nazi Holocaust as the Vatican and many Protestant religious leaders stood by silently.

–The religious justification for even more torture and butchery against “godless” leftists during the Cold War, again aided and abetted by the Vatican and fundamentalist Christians;

–Today’s “war on terror” or “clash of civilizations” directed against Muslims with the strong support of many deeply religious Christians (and Jews) who decry Islam as a violent religion bent on conquest.

So, given that grim history – and in the hope that Christians might pause in their celebrations to reflect on how far Christianity has strayed from the peaceful teachings of Jesus – we are republishing the Rev. Howard Bess’s article from 2009 about some of the cherished myths about Jesus’s birth:

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Last week, Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of giving classified materials to Wikileaks, spent his 23rd birthday in the brig of the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. He has been convicted of no crime, but endures the kind of highly restrictive detention that’s usually reserved for the most dangerous criminals in America’s supermax prisons. He is kept isolated in his cell 23 hours a day, where he is cut off from most human contact, denied reading materials and personal items, prevented by the guards from exercising and regularly awakened from his sleep. He has been at Quantico for five months, following two months of detention in Kuwait.

The circumstances of Manning’s detention gained prominence last week after Salon’s Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing exposé of what he called “conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture.” As AlterNet’s Sarah Seltzer noted, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture has started a probe to determine whether Manning’s solitary confinement constitutes torture under international law.

The Pentagon reacted to the story by claiming that Manning is “a maximum custody detainee” who can “receive the same privileges that a detainee classified as general population may receive … [including] daily television, hygiene call, reading and outside physical activity without restraint.” But David House, one of the few people able to visit Manning, said that Manning told him he’d only been allowed outdoors sporadically, and his exercise consisted of being placed in a room where he can only walk around in circles.

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SAYS CONFIDENTIALITY NOT UNCONDITIONAL

New Delhi, Dec 23: Barely few days after a WikiLeaks cable revealed that India was “condoning torture” in Kashmir, the International Committee of the Red Cross has defended passing sensitive information about the torturing of prisoners to US, saying it was “frustrated due to the lack of dialogue” with New Delhi.
AlertNet, a Thomson Reuters initiative,  Thursday quoted Alexis Heeb, the ICRC’s spokesman in New Delhi, as saying: “We confirm that a meeting took place between the ICRC and the US embassy in 2005 at a time in which the ICRC was very frustrated due to the lack of dialogue with the Indian authorities,”
Heeb said: “The ICRC works always in a confidential way with the authorities. However, in specific instances, when the dialogue is blocked for different reasons, we may change our strategy.”
According to a 2005 cable, released by WikiLeaks and published by the Guardian newspaper, the ICRC told American diplomats in New Delhi that it had found “systematic prisoner abuse by armed forces during detention centre visits in Kashmir from 2002 and 2004.”
The cable said the ICRC had told US diplomats that “police and paramilitary, who are fighting in Kashmir, beat suspects, subjected them to electric currents and tortured them with water in widespread human rights abuses.”
Among 1,500 detainees that the ICRC staff met, more than half reported “ill-treatment”, the cable reported. Of the 852 cases recorded, 171 detainees said they had been beaten, while the rest said they had been subjected to one or more of six forms of torture.
The cable revealed the ICRC had raised the issue of prisoner abuse with the Indian government for more than a decade, but because the practice continued, “it is forced to conclude that the government of India condones torture”.

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PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN – As drone-fired missiles drop with furious frequency in the tribal area of North Waziristan, so do the bodies.

As often as seven times a week, tribesmen there say, corpses appear in fields and on roadsides with dark warnings pinned to their tunics: All American spies will meet the same fate.

Espionage has long been viewed as an egregious offense in the lawless borderland, but residents say the current pace of assassinations is unprecedented. The escalation parallels a massive surge in CIA drone attacks on North Waziristan, home to a nest of insurgents that includes al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network, an Afghan militia considered the most lethal foe of U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan.

CIA drones have fired 112 missiles on Pakistan’s tribal areas this year, 88 percent of which hit North Waziristan, in a campaign whose effectiveness is hotly debated. But tribesmen say the U.S. campaign has had far-reaching consequences for the way of life in North Waziristan and provoked cycles of violence that, once in motion, are difficult to predict and impossible to control.

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Christian clergy will commemorate the birth in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem of their saviour as the son of God who had no place to lay his head and was, accordingly, born in a manger.

In Palestine today, lack of shelter remains a major problem for the people of Gaza, many of whom have been condemned to live in tents for the past two years.

Monday will mark the second anniversary of Israel’s unjustified military assault on the coastal enclave, when its armed forces wiped out over 1,400 Palestinians in just over three weeks.

The attack was designed to destroy social infrastructure to make people’s lives unbearable as a way of turning the Palestinian people against Hamas, which they had backed in free and democratic elections.

Israel has tightened the blockade against Gaza, despite international condemnation of this collective punishment of civilians, which is classified by the Geneva conventions as a war crime.

The occupying power, which presses ahead with its illegal colonisation of the West Bank, refuses to allow concrete or other building supplies into Gaza, preventing both the Palestinians themselves and the United Nations from beginning vital reconstruction.

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Information Clearing House, Dec  22, 2010

Video Documentary,

John Pilger says in the film: “We journalists… have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else’s country… In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us… Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.”

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by Gareth Porter, CommonDreams.org, Dec 23, 2010

WASHINGTON – This week’s leak to the New York Times of a proposal for U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids against Afghan insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan may be intended to put more pressure on the Pakistani military to take action against those sanctuaries.

Spc. Randy.J. Lockwood of Muskegon Michigan of 2nd Platoon Bravo Company 2-327 Infantry stand guard as Afghan men greet each other in Chowkay district near Pakistani border in Kunar province, eastern Afghanistan, Wednesday, Dec 22, 2010.(AP / Rafiq Maqbool)

But the proposal for such cross-border raids also reflects a real demand from the U.S.-NATO command in Afghanistan to target insurgent leaders inside Pakistan if the Pakistani military does not respond to the threat, according to a U.S. source familiar with discussions at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters in Kabul.

And the position of the Barack Obama administration on the necessity of attacking insurgent safe havens in Pakistan appears to be in line with the proposal for cross-border raids.

Carrying out such raids would probably provoke a new level of anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan, with dangerous political consequences in that country, according to experts on Pakistan, but the behaviour of the national security organs of the United States in the recent past suggests that such dangers are being rationalised.

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