Month: August 2006

Anti-Gay Pogroms in Iraq

The brutal Islamist war on gay people is proceeding apace in Iraq:

Graphic photos obtained from Baghdad sources too frightened to identify themselves as having known a gay man, and seen by the Observer, show other gay Iraqis who have been executed. One shows two men, suspected of having a relationship, blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs – guns at the ready behind their heads – awaiting execution. Another picture captured on a mobile phone shows a gay man being beaten to death. Yet another shows a corpse being dragged through the streets after his execution.

One photograph is of the mutilated, burnt body of 38-year-old Karar Oda from Sadr City. He was kidnapped by the Badr Brigade in mid-June. They work with the Ministry of Interior and are the informal armed wing of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who make up the largest Shia bloc in the Iraq parliament. Oda’s family were given an arrest warrant signed by the Ministry of Interior which said their son deserved to be arrested and killed for immorality as a homosexual. His body was found ten days later.

We liberated a country for this?

Hewitt and Caesarism

A reader writes on some interesting historical parallels to the faith-based leader-cult that best describes Hugh Hewitt’s political-theological position:

It might not be far from the truth to see in Hugh and his ilk the same phenomenon that Donald Rumsfeld once characterized as dead-enders. But there’s another aspect of his thinking that troubles me very deeply.

Back in the late 19th century there were a group of thinkers centered in Middle Europe who called themselves "Caesarists" – they held that the most promising social organization was a highly structured, authoritarian society led by a charismatic leader with at least a measure of religious attributes (by some formulations, this leader should be simultaneously a secular and a religious leader, which of course fit the Julian concept to a T). Western style democracy, they argued, was lazy and weak (actually they regularly used the German word "faul" which means either lazy or rotten, a carefully calculated ambiguity), and only the Caesarian variant could inspire men to fulfill their great potential.

Many intellectual historians see in the Caesarists the seeds of the fascist movements of the 1920’s, and that’s true, but one could just as easily link them to the Napoleon-worshippers in France, other authoritarian strains of conservatism, and even to Leninist notions of democratic centralism. They were defined by a contempt for liberal democracy, and consequently they provided amunition to all of liberalism’s enemies.

The Bush campaigns in 2000 and 2004 were different from prior election campaigns I have witnessed in that there was a carefully maintained aura of this "Caesarism" about them (always on the fringes, always deniable, but nevertheless there).  And now that Bush’s popular support collapses through floor after floor, we find his hardcore support, say a quarter of the voting population, heavily populated by this "faith" Caesarian contingent.

Liberal society can and should allow free space for such conceptualizations and movements, but it must also recognize the threat that they present to basic democratic concepts. We are living those threats right now. The mainstream media and our punditry have failed to engage these issues in a serious way. Your book, when it is out, will perhaps make an important start.

Hewitt’s Confession of Faith

Here’s Hugh Hewitt’s creed:

"I do believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Gonzales and Ashcroft have run the global war on terror about as well as it could have been run, and their commitment to its prosecution has been unyielding. I admire their courage and their consistency.  This presidency is already among the most significant of our nation’s history, and like Reagan’s, will be admired for generations long after the Bush haters have been forgotten."

He can see no flaws in the war strategy as run by this administration. The secretary of state may have confessed to "thousands of errors" – but not Hugh. Then he accuses yours truly of being an anti-Christian bigot and a Bush-hater. I am a Christian myself and find the notion that I am an anti-Christian bigot deeply offensive. Readers of this blog also know that while I am extraordinarily angry at the incompetent recklessness that has characterized this presidency, I find it impossible not to like the president personally. Except when his cruel streak emerges – laughing at women on death-row, endorsing torture, telling Islamists to "bring it on" against U.S. troops, for example – he seems like an amiable fellow, if completely out of his depth. This realization came too late for me. I once lionized the guy in the wake of 9/11, letting my fear and hope overcome my skepticism and better judgment. To equate me with haters like Michael Moore is preposterous. I gave this administration every single benefit of every doubt until it became impossible not to acknowledge their dangerous incompetence.

But Hewitt says something else about my use of the term "Christianist." He writes the following:

"Sullivan’s "christianist" rhetoric, like a great deal of other similar rhetoric, is deeply offensive, and is in fact hate speech, designed not to describe but to incite, specifically to incite an emotional, irrational hatred of the person(s) to whom it is applied. Sullivan has never defined the term, but its accordian-like quality allows it to expand to take in Roman Catholic-turned-Presbyterian, Arlen Specter-supporting big tent Republican me." [my italics]

Hewitt is not telling the truth. I have defined the term very carefully and very often. My most thorough attempt was in a very widely-disseminated Time essay, which Hewitt read. You can read it here. Money quote:

Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

I have also repeatedly and carefully defined it on my blog – here, here, and here, for a few recent examples. Hewitt needs to issue a factual correction. He won’t, I’ll wager (and I’ll link if he does). Like most fanatics, if the truth contradicts him, he simply reasserts more forcefully his own dogma. Like George "we do not torture" Bush, Dick "last throes" Cheney and Don "stuff happens" Rumsfeld on Iraq. But saying something does not make it so, as any sane person must now concede. A lie is a lie is a lie.

I should add that Hewitt still refuses to acknowledge or account for his own role in credentializing, supporting and using for political purposes the work of fanatical anti-Semite Mel Gibson. Again, his inability to cop to even basic moral and intellectual responsibility is a feature of the very Christianism I have tried to sketch. He still insists that "The Passion" is not an anti-Semitic movie, but does not make an actual argument against the many Christian and Jewish scholars who see in it deep tropes of medieval Jew-hatred, perhaps invisible to a contemporary Christian. Hewitt backed the movie for political reasons. If abetting anti-Semitism (or homophobia, for that matter) can achieve the party’s aims, then so be it. As he once used as the very slogan of his site "The Power of the Democrats Must Be Destroyed." It’s the one coherent thread in everything he writes. It is his true faith.

Invest Now

Britain’s top scientist urges emergency investment in non-carbon energy technology. I’m reluctant to see government take the major role in this. The model should be the HIV crisis. Governments should fund basic research, but should merely spur the private sector to invest in energy solutions. The on indispensable element of this is a gradual but serious increase in gas taxes in America.