A reader writes:
Just making sure I’ve got this straight:
Involvement in community theater is enough to not just disqualify, but actually remove someone from military service, while a "moral waiver" allows a high-school dropout with a criminal record to enlist in the millitary days after his last arrest.
Look: they may be criminals, but they’re not fags. Is there anything else about the military’s attitude we don’t understand?
Greg Djerejian comments.
Important context from the Jerusalem Post:
Some 150 rockets were fired from the Lebanese village of Qana over the past 20 days, Air Force Chief of Staff Brig.-Gen. Amir Eshel said on Sunday evening.
Speaking to reporters, Eshel added that Hizbullah rocket launchers were hidden in civilian buildings in the village. He proceeded to show video footage of rocket launchers being driven into the village following launches.
My take in the Sunday Times of London.
"These are all civilians. There’s no base here. This isn’t a military area. There’s nothing around here. People thought they were safe in the shelter," – Bassam Muqad of the Red Cross, about the immense tragedy in Qana.
I do not know the details of this awful event. If it was a mistake, it will damage Israel’s standing even more in the Arab world and foment more fanaticism against the Jewish state. If not a mistake, and the Israelis were being cavalier about innocent human life, including children, it is a horrifying war-crime. We’ll see.
The Los Angeles Times asks the right questions. Money quote:
"All that stuff about favorable treatment is something that needs to be looked at," said Mike Gennaco, who heads the Office of Independent Review, which investigates allegations of officer misconduct and monitors the department.
"I’d like to see if there was a legitimate law enforcement reason for asking that the report be altered," Gennaco said. He said his investigation will be wide-reaching, looking at Gibson’s ties to the department. In the past, Gibson has actively participated in a charity created by Sheriff Lee Baca…
Gibson has had a close relationship with the Sheriff’s Department. He served in 2002 as a "celebrity representative" for the L.A. Sheriff’s Department’s Star Organization, a group that provides scholarships and aid for the children of slain sheriff’s deputies.
A poll on the Christianist website, WorldNetDaily.
Stephen Pollard notices that the BBC, Reuters, and Sky News in Britain have not reported the content of Mel Gibson’s "despicable" remarks about Jews. I cannot find a reference in the Guardian/Observer either. I guess exposing anti-Semitism would be off-message given the British media’s coverage of the Iran-Israel war in Lebanon.
Update: CNN and the AP also airbrush out the content of Gibson’s dranged anti-Semitic rants. If this were just another celebrity skirmish, that would be fine. But this man created one of the biggest-selling movies of all time, marketed it in the Middle East, where Jews are ddeply vulnerable, and was accused of having anti-Semitic motives in reviving a medieval anti-Semitic genre. The Christianist right embraced Gibson and exonerated him from all suspicion of anti-Semitism. Now we have almost surreally graphic evidence of the mindset behind the director of "The Passion of the Christ." And the MSM censor it. Once again, the blogopshere is providing far more information than the mainstream. Thank God for Drudge.
Derby, Kansas, 4.30 pm.
The long hard slog to rescue American Christianity from the politicization of Christianism seems to be gaining ground. This story from the NYT this morning about pastor Gregory A. Boyd is a must-read. He’s not a member of the religious left. He’s a Christian, interested in serving others and exhibiting the humility and detachment from worldy power that Jesus exemplified. Nothing could be more alien to the religious right, whose pursuit of power and arrogant fundamentalist certainty have begun to tarnish the teachings of Jesus in the eyes of many. Read the whole thing, but here are a couple of beautiful qotes that sum up our predicament perfectly:
"When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses. When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross."
Tell that to Karl Rove, who sees religious faith as a tool to manipulate for political ends. Here’s another dissent:
"There is a lot of discontent brewing," said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the ’emerging church,’ which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.
"More and more people are saying this has gone too far ‚Äî the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right," Mr. McLaren said. "You cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can‚Äôt say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people. Because people think, ‘Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about ‘activist judges.’"
And we all know those are the centerpieces of Jesus’ message: a peace-seeker who never mentioned homosexuality and believed in separating God from Caesar. That’s why I use the term "Christianist" to describe the Republican operatives fusing their ideology with the Gospels. Whatever else it is, their ideology is not synonymous with Christianity. Three words: vive la resistance.
The Dish 