A "Letter to the Editor" In These Times Declined to Print

In the January 2016 issue, the democratic socialist newsmagazine In These Times (ITT) published two whiny, hand-wringing articles on Islamophobia that were filled with "leftist" anti-Western masochism that I felt compelled to responsd to through the "Letter to the Editor" posted below.  These two articles, Saqib Bhatti's "Our Best and Bigoted," and Jane Miller's "Paris and Provocation" [both of which are linked below], were just too much typically "politiclly correct" (PC) masochistic beating of breast, as well as too much beating up on fellow citizens for alleged "insensitivity" to persons of color generally, and Muslims in particular, despite three murderous, cold-blooded atrocities perpetrated in the name of a particularly vengeful, bloodthirsty version of Islam itself--the 9/11 attack on the World Towers by suicide operatives crashing planes into these buildings' sides and thus killing not only the perpetrators, but thousands of others who had nothing to do with the wars in the Middle East; and the late 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris that followed the murder the editorial staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hedbo nearly a year earlier for allegedly "insulting the prophet Mohammed."  The gist of these two articles was, "What do you expect?  the West caused all this, on all three counts!" something I profoundly disagreed with--as a socialist opposed to all real forms of racism and discrimination, certainly, but also as a civil libertarian of the political left upholding the rights of free speech, including "offensive" speech, and the right of persons to be "safe and secure in their persons" despite the foreign policy of their government, over which they have very limited, if any real, control.  However, ITT evidently disagreed that this was a "legitimate" political position for a left publication to publicize in a "Letter to the Editor" concerning articles it itself published.  Joel Bleifuss, Editor and Publisher of In These Times, finally responded to numerous einquiries abbout my "Letter" with a terse "In These Times doesn't publish every letter submitted," nothing more.  Yes, I suppose not--especially, comrades of In These Times, a publication/website which has published several articles of mine in the past it had no ideological quarrel with, but somehow can't find within itself the intellectual honesty to published a concerned editorial letter critical of two articles it did publish? Or is the purpose of  ITT's readers' forum only to publicize "Letters to the Editor" that it agrees with, or which praise what it does publish?  Yes, oftentimes the left does indeed have a very selective understanding of "free speech," notably on topics such as "Islamophobia," where properly adhering to PC guidelines is very important.  Be that as it may, my "Letter" below was very fulsomely praised by a prominent extensively-published socialist writer of my acquaintance, and I still believe, was indeed worthy of publication by ITT.  Whose decline to publish I can only see as PC self-censorship.--GF

To the Editor:

Jane Miller's and Saqib Bhatti's whiny articles in the January 2016 In These Times  do a disservice to ITT, to leftist and socialist values, and to true religious tolerance and fighting honest simply because they are Muslim, and does not mean refraining from criticism of Islam or Islamic organized groups). [Miller’s article can be accessed on the Internet at http://inthesetimes.com/article/18646/Syria_ISIS_Paris_UK-Parliament, Bhatti’s at http://inthesetimes.com/article/18647/why-race-relations-on-campus-must-be-challenged-and-transformed.]  Both authors conveniently overlook that al-Qaeda and ISIS openly bragged about their complicity in 9/11 and the Paris attacks, along w the bragging and complicity of self-identified Muslims in other terrorist attacks, all the way from the murder of the Charlie Hedbo cartoonists of a year ago right up to the celebration by ISIS of the lone-wolf but Islam-inspired killings in San Bernardino.  Tellingly, while professed Muslim Bhatti has nothing to say about direct Islamic complicity in 9/11, as admitted at the time by al-Qaeda itself, and while also refusing, same as Jane Miller, to admit that al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, the repressive authoritarian regimes of both Iran and Saudi Arabia are, in fact, just as Islamic as Pat Robertson is Christian (both reprehensible, of course, but both equally supported by direct reference to their respective Holy Books, the Qu'ran and the Bible, both of which I have read completely, without cherry-picking only for the "good parts"), and while Bhatti does properly denounce and make us aware of the individual acts of bigotry and intimidation that followed in the wake of 9/11, he would rather lecture Westerners on Islamophobia after 9/11, despite clear Islamist gloating over this despicable terrorist attack.  Further, while I certainly have no interest in justifying in any regard the acts of blatant racism he scores, I also have no interest in being, like so much of the "regressive left," silent about the clear links to 9/11 and other acts of Islamist terrorism deliberately promulgated in the name of Islam itself.  Now, if Bhatti and Miller wish to blame such atrocities on a rogue Islam, a dangerous deviant from "mainstream" Islam, they need to say so directly, and not somehow backhandedly support or justify such actions committed in the name of Islam.   Because, frankly, as one of those supposedly benighted Western socialists and upholder of Enlightenment ideals, I am sick and tired of all the cant promulgated by Ben Affleck and others about "devout" Muslims who wish only to be left in peace and who are supposedly foes, not silent partners of, Islamist terror, correctly called Islamofascism--by, among others, persons of Muslim background themselves!  (Such as ex-Muslims of distinction as British humanist, socialist and atheist Maryam Namazie, author Salman Rushdie, the American Muslim magazine, and many others).   I do not apologize in the least for regarding Affleck's "devout" but silent Muslims as every bit as complicit in the spread of Islamofascism as were all the "good Germans" who were also noticeably silent about the Nazis and their atrocities, and were thus at least de facto collaborators with the Nazis rather than resistance fighters against it.   (But of course, all too many of these "devout" European Christians actively collaborated with the Nazis and informed on the whereabouts of their Jewish and other "undesirable" neighbors, so that they could be carted off to the Final Solution.)

Jane Miller is equally disingenuous in her tortured attempt to somehow paint some sort of "moral equivalence" between aggressive acts in the Middle East by US and other Western forces and the targeting of individuals or groups of individuals by Islamist-inspired terrorists.  She is simply committing the logical fallacy of comparing apples and oranges here, and though she tries to justify this somehow by the same tortured logic that the Weathermen used in the 1970s to defend their bombing of unconnected, or only vaguely-connected, groups of individuals to the foreign policy of the US and its allies in Vietnam, it simply doesn't hold--it didn't hold then, and it doesn't hold now.  That somehow, rock concert attendees and restaurant patrons are as "complicit" in the foreign policies of the US and France in the Middle East same as their governments, and have no more claim of innocence than direct Islamist repressive, terroristic organizations as ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their devotees are internationally, and as Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban are in their national homes. No, I do not see the bombing or ISIS headquarters in Raqqa and Europeans and others willingly, even eagerly, travelling to join ISIS as the "moral equivalent" of Islamist terrorism in the West.  The unfortunate fact of modern warfare is that the doctrine of "total war" in which civilians are as "justifiably" attacked as are military forces has prevailed everywhere ever since the Civil War; but no, that does not make Sherman's March to the Sea, or the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden, or even the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the "moral equivalent" of the Confederacy's war to preserve and extend slavery, the Rape of Nanking and Japanese atrocities in the Philippines and elsewhere, or the Nazi death camps and puppet governments such as Vichy France, all to be "equally condemned."  There are obvious moral differences, despite the atrocious nature of the first five, and in defense of "benighted" Western values, I would pointedly note that while groups such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other Islamists have arms and territories, not to mention--Yazidi and other "non-Muslim" sex slaves!--the "benighted" Enlightenment-inspired secularism of the West grants to the likes of Pat Robertson and his ilk only TV stations, or the ability to run for office and publish in print and social media, despite the wishes of his (and their) rabidly religious followers to be able to do what ISIS and others do, not only to non-Muslims, but to what they consider to be "bad Muslims" in their controlled territories!

Last, I would extend to Jane Miller and Saqib Bhatti my eager hand in building a truly socialist movement that would extirpate the likes of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and other Islamofascists of the East as thoroughly as an earlier generation of socialists, Communists, and democrats extirpated the threat of state-controlling Western and Japanese fascism.  Are they game for it, or will they shamefacedly refrain from such a necessary task in our time?  Same, I might add, as the Quaker socialist I know here in Indianapolis who stated that "It would "have been all right with me" if Hitler had conquered the world rather than have fought World War II, conveniently overlooking the fact that, had Hiller prevailed, he wouldn't have been talking such to me, but would, instead, have been a casualty of the Final Solution to the Quaker/Pacifist Problem! 

George Fish,

Indianapolis, Indiana

[Author's note:  I am a contributor to both ITT in print form and to its website since the 1990s, most recently having published on its website two articles on social justice advocate Roy Bourgeois, in September 2012's "Boy Bourgeois' Journey" and August 2011's "The Rebel Feminist Priest."]

 

Religion is not the solution to the problem. Religion is the problem.

This paraphrase of Ronald Reagan’s famous words as President (“Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.”) becomes so apt, so tellingly truthful, upon even the most cursory, but honest, examination of religion and its influence on public life. We need look little beyond the headlines of the day, the leading news stories involving religion, for confirmation. First, and obviously, is the continuing scandal of priest-pedophilia and its even worse, even more reprehensible, cover-up by the Catholic Church, especially in Ireland, where the Vatican’s deliberate intervention in preventing action against pedophilic priests drew the ire of the Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who angrily denounced “the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.” There were further determined protests on the issue of the Catholic Church’s denial of women’s ordination to the priesthood, a conflict that’s been raging now for years, but has only been met with demands for silence by the Vatican. These issues were extensively reported in the New York Times of July 10, July 13, July 22, July 23 and July 25, 2011. (See “References” below)

The death of Osama bin Laden brought back to memory yet another set of crimes committed in the name of a certain type of Islam, those of Al-Qaeda, not only in terms of 9/11, but also in regard to al-Qaeda’s bloody attacks against Muslims who did not share its repressive theocratic authoritarianism. (See Karima Bennoune, “References”) The unholy alliance between the socially hidebound fanatics of the Religious Right with the “secular” economically hidebound fanatics of the Tea Party is still another example. (See Ted Kilgore, “References”)

Does the nefariousness of religion in the public realm ever end?

The religious liberals and mainstream pastors and laity will cry out, “But that’s not us!” But they will do so in vain, for they have not only been silent too long, but have even lent the cover of “religious tolerance” to such theological ugliness. So while their disingenuous acquitting of themselves is technically true—for they are not the ones committing the nefarious deeds—they fail the moral test of at least one mainstream religious current, i.e., Quakerism, in failing to “speak truth to power.” They fail the test of mandatorily speaking out against injustice and deliberate cruelty that’s expressed in both atheist and Christian perspectives: in the atheist Jean-Paul Sartre with his “Silence is complicity,” and in the Catholic Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois, about to be laicized for speaking out against the Vatican’s “sin of sexism” in ruling that the Catholic priesthood was a strictly male prerogative. Echoing Sartre, Bourgeois said, “Silence is the voice of consent.” (See George Fish stories on Bourgeois, In These Times, “References”) We need look no further than the silence of mainstream Protestantism in the face of Catholic priest-pedophilia and cover-up. For where were the voices of Christian compassion for the victims here, victims who were obviously receiving no such Christian compassion from the Catholic Church, only the barrage of the Church’s lawyers?

As for Islam, while we can properly note that not all Muslims embraced the methods, or even the aims, of Al-Qaeda, Muslims of note did not speak out against the placing of a bounty on the head of novelist Salman Rushdie, nor the riots by Muslims engendered by the irreverent Danish cartons, acts which are commonly regarded in the “Great Satan” West (to use a popular fundamentalist Muslim characterization) as permissible expressions of free speech. (See Ibn Warraq, “References”) We can talk as well of an assault on a Muslim people themselves in the name of a non-Muslim religious “mandate”, the continued denial of human rights to the Palestinians by the Israelis. Of course, all this above is denounced within the Christian religious tradition itself, in the words of the one Christianity calls the Messiah: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” But where are the voices of Christianity heeding this, acknowledging its telling admonition? Certainly not on the public record, nor, as I’ve found, even in private conversations!

As an accountant might say of the above moral bookkeeping by religion, “There are definitely two sets of books being kept here.” This is something I’ve experienced personally also, in my daily life lived among the believers as well as in being someone who reads the newspapers. This gives a new dimension to my atheism: moving it beyond a strictly intellectual objection to the teachings of the world’s various theologies, to a moral objection that pointedly notes that deliberate cruelty, abuse of power, hypocrisy and the promulgation of double standards are an integral part of religious practice—something I learned early in life growing up Catholic (but didn’t become aware of its causes until later), surrounded on all sides by the emotional and verbal abuse of Catholic parents and family, on the one hand, and, on the other, the abuse of power, censorious repression, and looking the other way when evil was done to me by the Catholic school system and the clerical and lay teachers and fellow classmates within it. So I can truly say I’ve directly experienced the malevolence of religious practice as an integral part of my life experience. A malevolence that by no means ended when I left Catholicism through entering the university, but a malevolence that’s also directly manifested itself in my life here in Indianapolis. A malevolence that’s been, and still continues to be, part and parcel of my treatment by the Indianapolis “peaceable religious progressives;” a malevolence that started with the lies and deliberate character assassination promulgated and broadcast extensively since 1980 by one late “good Quaker woman” who was believed uncritically, and who did permanent damage to both my reputation and to my standing among others. (See George Fish blog, “References”) Fortunately I’ve been able to free myself somewhat by discovering good people who are not motivated by the sanctimonious self-righteousness, that sense of being part of a sanctified elect, that’s so integral to the de facto self-definition of Indianapolis “religious progressives”—even though they will (unsuccessfully) try to deny it.

But this is not merely my own sui generis view. This dissection of Christian morality finds solid intellectual foundation in that seminal work by the 19th Century German atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity. In it, Feuerbach not only tellingly depicts the self-estrangement of Man from his better nature through adoption of theology (which he distinguishes from the “natural” but vague religious impulse toward love of self and one’s neighbor, but which is corrupted, and has this corruption codified, by theological systems), but shows amply that through such theological embrace, the most cruel and perverted, the most unloving, the most destructive, forms of human behavior are not only tolerated, they are actually celebrated as the will of God and walking in the ways of God himself! Needless to say, history abounds in real-life examples, of which we need only mention the over 900 wars in the West during the Christian era, the Inquisition, the persecution of Galileo, right up to our own day with the priest-pedophilia scandal, the televangelism and political activism of the Religious Right, the televangelizing message of “God wants you to do well in the stock market” as preached by Robert Schuller and his devotees, right into my own personal life of active child abuse by my own “loving” devout Catholic parents, the character-assassination grousing behind my back by the late “good Quaker” mentioned above, and the gleefully active assault on my character and personality by the Indianapolis “religious progressives.”

Even leading Indianapolis “religious progressive” Jim Wolfe concedes that eminent British philosopher and logician Alfred North Whitehead was right when he stated that religion has probably done more harm than good in human affairs. He’s even willing to concede that “there have been more than enough of crusades, holy wars, pogroms, massacres, despotisms, spats, bigotry, abuse” committed in the name of religion. (Jim Wolfe, “Making Peace Among Religions Within Myself”) Atheist writer Christopher Hitchens states appropriately that, while religion is not the cause of what’s bad in human behavior, he also goes on to state incisively, “But the bad things that are innate in our species are strengthened by religion and are sanctified by it…so religion is a very powerful re-enforcer of our backward, clannish, tribal element.” (Quoted in Be Scofield, “5 Things Atheists Have Wrong About Religion," Tikkun, reprinted by AlterNet, www.alternet.org/story/151396/) Put all the above together, and a powerful case is made for regarding religion not as a good in our individual and collective lives, but one of the great evils within these lives.
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My good friend Greg King had a long, but most appropriate comment on this blog entry:

Even Karl Marx said something like, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed; the heart of a heartless world." I'm sure I don't have the quote exactly right, but it's close to that. Many hundreds of millions of oppressed people around the world, for thousands of years, would have killed themselves, were it not for that "pie in the sky when you die" as Joe Hill sang -- that promise of a heavenly reward, if only they can keep trudging through this vale of tears. It has given them a reason to carry on.

Of course, terrible things have been, and continue to be, done in the name of religion, but if it gives people a little comfort, a little solace, it's played a useful role. Of course, for many people throughout history, it has placed them on the wrong end of a pounded nail, a crossbow or a scimitar,faggots and torches, a noose, some stones. There have been many innocent victims of religious blindness and bigotry. But there have been hundreds of millions, or, over the last thirty thousand or so years, even billions of people, for whom it has played a useful role. No, I don't mean the role it has played for the pharisees, the popes, the bishops, the caliphs or the mullahs. I mean, as I've stated, the role it has played for the downtrodden peasants and workers. Buddha, Lao Tse, Jesus, St. Theresa, St. Francis, Dorothy Day, Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Buber, Maimonides, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Romero, Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, Fr. Roy Bourgeois, have all played very good roles and each, in their own way, has provided some comfort for the oppressed.

Of course it's better that the oppressed rise up and throw off their chains. But you know as well as I do many people have not had a real opportunity for that. People with the ability to lead, like Spartacus, John Ball and Wat the Tyler, Jean D'Arc, Danton, St. Just, Robespierre, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Sam Adams, Mary Wollstonecraft, St.Simon, Robert Owens, Karl Marx, Proudhon, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Ho Chi Minh, Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Mother Bloor, Mother Jones, Anne Burlak Timpson, Amilcar Cabral, Sekou Toure, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Kenji Miayamoto, Tom Hayden, Rudi Deutschke, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, Angela Davis,Carl Davidson, Carl Boice, Wayne Hayashi, Carol Amioka, Stan Masui, Kalani Ohelo, you, me and countless others, mostly unmentioned, who played major roles or very minor roles (like some of those listed), have to come along and provide inspiration and leadership. Not all of that leadership was good, but it had its good aspects.

Now, you know just as well as I do that the alternative to political leadership -- religious comfort -- may be based on a lie or, in any case, an illusion, a delusion. But we don't know that. We won't know until after we die. Most likely, we'll just insensately feed the grass, or our ashes will be scattered to the wind, and that will be it for us. But we may wake up in some way station between birth and rebirth. We may find ourselves in paradise or purgatory, or a hell somehow worse than the one we came from. We don't know. We may think we know, but it's much easier to prove the existence of something than the non-existence of something. So we might as well try to lead good lives, be considerate of our fellow beings. All our fellow beings.

Me? I don't know what to believe. Maybe Camus was right, and life is a cruel joke. We humans have this wonderful ability not only to experience, but to contemplate the world. But it's all going to be obliterated in an instant. As Simon and Garfunkel sing, "All lies in jest, yet a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." But I have found that appealing to something outside myself helps me through rough times. "When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comforts me," as the Beatles sing. I know it may just be an emotional crutch; that what I'm appealing to is just air, and nothing more. But it provides some comfort. I suspect that's pretty universal.

REFERENCES, ALL SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Bennoune, Karima, “Remembering all al-Qaida's victims,” Guardian (UK), May 3, 2011

Dalby, Douglas, and Rachel Donadio, “Irish Report Finds Abuse Persisting in Catholic Church,” New York Times, July 13, 2011

Donadio, Rachel, “Vatican Recalls Ambassador to Ireland Over Abuse Report,” New York Times, July 25, 2011

Dowd, Maureen, “The End of Awe,” New York Times, July 23, 2011

Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, translated by George Eliot, Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1989 [Originally published in 1841]

Fish, George, “Roy Bourgeois Faces Excommunication,” In These Times, March 2009, www.inthesetimes.com

Fish, George, “No Indulgence for Father Bourgeois,” In These Times, October 2010, www.inthesetimes.com

Fish, George, “Politically Incorrect Leftist” blog, www.politicallyincorrectleftist.blogspot.com, esp. entries “Guest Blog from my friend John Williams: The Woman You Thought You Knew” and “On Mother’s Day: for those mothers who were really ‘mothers’”

Frosch, Dan, “Accusations of Abuse by Priest Dating to Early 1940s,” New York Times, July 10, 2011

Goodstein, Laurie, “In 3 Countries, Challenging the Vatican on Female Priests,” New York Times, July 22, 2011

Kilgore, Ted, “’Teavangelicals’: How the Christian Right Came to Bless the Economic Agenda of the Tea party,” The New Republic, www.tnr.com/article/the-permanent-campaign/91661/tea-party-christian-right-michele-bachmann

Mackey, Robert, “Video of Irish Leader’s Speech Attacking the Vatican,” New York Times, July 25, 2011

Scofield, Be, “5 things Atheists Have Wrong About Religion,” Tikkun, reprinted by AlterNet, www.alternet.org/story/151396/

Warraq, Ibn, Why I Am Not a Muslim, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2003

Wolfe, Jim, “Making Peace Among Religions Within Myself” speech text manuscript, n.d.

Special Celebrity Pizzas

I've been away from my blog for awhile due to illness and work. so I thought I'd start again by posting a little satirical humor. "Specialty Celebrity Pizzas" grew out of a conversation with friends about a pizzeria that specialized in unique offerings named after celebrities. Sh here are my own Specials, brought to you by Chef and Humorist George Fish!

Barry Manilow Pizza (has to be really lame)--topped with Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and meatballs

George W. Bush Pizza--a half-baked pizza crust topped exclusively with American cheese. Hold the hummus!

Glenn Beck Pizza--severely undercooked male cow meat on a half-raw pizza crust: 100% bull, and the whole thing only half-baked

Barack Obama/Bill Clinton Pizza--topped with waffles

Rush Limbaugh Pizza--topped with corn and sprinkled liberally with bullshit. Served with vitriol on the side

Fox News "Fair and Balanced" Pizza--all the toppings so placed that the whole pizza tilts sharply to the right

Hu Jintao Pizza--topped with American-style club sandwich. Hold the Ma-o!

Benjamin Netanyahu Pizza--stolen pita bread topped with Kosher corned beef

Islamic Suicide Bomber Pizza--a heavenly delight served exclusively by virgin waitresses

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Pizza--we deny this pizza contains any Kosher pastrami, lox and bagels, or Gefilte fish! Or that it ever did!

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer Pizza--Mexican-style taco pizza with 100% made-in-USA ingredients only

Senator Mitch McConnell Pizza--contains absolutely nothing, because we can't afford it!

Rand Paul Pizza--topped with ribs, collard greens and chitlins: proprietor reserves the right to refuse to serve it to anyone he pleases!

Wall Street Pizza--topped exclusively with massive amounts of money

BP Pizza--massively spread all over with Louisiana Gulf oil: so popular Bobby Jindal demands more!

Healthcare Reform Pizza-- a healthy mixture of fruits and vegetables with no recisions, but sprinkled liberally with deductables, exclusions and loopholes

Afghan War Pizza Buffet--all you can stomach, with no end in in sight