The Apostles of Deception

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The Apostles of Deception

 

By Charles Sullivan

 

04/15/07 "ICH" -- -- What passes for Christianity among the people, like so many things American, is not the genuine article. The sermons that rise from many of the pulpits of the churches of America are, I suspect, as counterfeit as a six dollar bill; as phony as the people running the country. But those whose faith is blind are incapable of seeing truth. That is the trouble with blind faith. It does not, it cannot, see. I have always been wary of organized religion.

 

Every pastor, every minister of every church in the land should denounce what is happening in America and violently projected upon the world. They should criticize the wretched lies of the president and his murderous regime. They should condemn union busting, racism and sexism, corporate greed and war. They should deplore the obscene accumulation of property and wealth, while emphasizing service to the community and the poor. Most often, however, a perverted version of Christianity gives the appearance of moral credence to war and conquest.

 

It appears to me that the majority of the American people are followers who willingly bow down to that which they perceive as authority. The people want to be lead. They have a deep seated desire to be directed, to be told not only what to do, but how to live. Millions of them are waiting for a messiah to appear who will lead them to the Promised Land—a messiah that requires nothing from them before the judgment day. They only have to profess their faith and to follow—to do as they are told by the religious hierarchy, and wait.

 

Of course, followers require leaders, and that makes them vulnerable to charlatans and frauds. The trouble with leaders and followers is that leaders often mislead and followers obediently trail them to the very gates of hell. During the course of the journey, superstition and ignorance gradually replace rationality and knowledge. Truth gets lost in the shuffle or is cast into the flames of desire. Thus we find ourselves standing at the brink of an old and familiar abyss, the onslaught of a new age of darkness and fear. Lies supplant truth, darkness replaces light. War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. The lessons of history remain unlearned and endlessly repeat themselves in rhythmic cycles of human comedy and tragedy.

 

We cannot avoid the responsibility of citizenship by simply following the lead of others or waiting for the return of Jesus. To do so is to give up our humanity and to become the mere servants of power. We have a responsibility to the truth, to justice, the earth, and toward one another that must supersede all else, if we are the moral beings we purport to be. That is why each of us is endowed with a conscience. We must decide right and wrong for ourselves and struggle against the swift current of public opinion more often than not.

 

In many ways we have abrogated our responsibilities as citizens to others in our consent to be governed. This was a grave mistake. The idea of leadership sets some up above others. It gives special power and privileges to a few and hence unwarranted influence and power over the many. We do not need leaders. We need those who will genuinely represent us and the public welfare. We need people like ourselves. We need us, we the people, to run things. There is no substitute for being informed, active, and conscientious citizens. It must therefore be understood that real citizenship will require physical, mental, and spiritual effort on our part, especially since truth is kept so well hidden from public view. This does not appear likely to happen any time soon.

 

We see this phenomenon of following, which is akin to giving up our freedoms, at play in the political arena, as well as in other circles of power. The hapless people are always looking for a redeemer, a quick fix—a liberator. We are conditioned to think that we can simply take a pill and our disease will miraculously disappear without effort on our part. Nature does not work that way. We expect miracles to occur in place of doing the hard work of citizenship. If there is a promised land, we must get there by our own collective effort. We must arrive not as individuals, but together as working class people struggling in common cause.

 

Yet we continue to believe in knights in shining armor, rather than saving ourselves and the republic of which we are a part. Now we are asking ourselves: Is Barach Obama the one to lead us to peace and prosperity? Will it be Hillary Clinton? John Edwards? John McCain? Is it Rudi Giuliani? If we believe that any or all of these people—each of them put forth by the money changers—is the answer, we are looking in the wrong places. By definition, darkness is the absence of light. We must at least start looking in the light.

 

We must stop expecting miracles and rescuers to make things right for us. We must realize that justice is our responsibility. Justice doesn’t just happen. Good people have to care enough to make it happen. Failing this, we will continue to have pervasive corruption—a government that betrays the public interest and pursues an agenda of its own. We will have wars in Viet Nam and Iraq and social and economic disparity at home. We cannot afford to wait for an oracle to appear. Global climate change is upon us and it demands something from each of us here and now.

 

Heretofore, justice has not been the American way. We must make it the American way, and we must do it now. If we want to be more than economic slaves and pawns to the super rich, we must get involved in the issues. We must make government serve us, and we must make it just.

 

Millions of Americans claim to follow Jesus. Some even claim that we are a Christian nation. Yet every generation seems to crucify Christ all over again, to nail him to the cross and parade him through the streets with a crown of thorns on his head. We had Dr. Martin Luther King, the genuine article, but those in authority—the gluttonous counterfeiters of power—crucified him, aided by cheering throngs of racists. Dr. King, perhaps more than any man who has lived in our time, embodied the moral teachings of Jesus.

 

It is no irony that the most Christ-like among us today continue to be crucified by the money changers living in the present.

 

Clearly the spirit of Jesus lived and breathed in our time in the person of Dr. Martin Luther King. So did the spirit of Allah and all the great religions of the world. Dr. King gave more than lip service to religious doctrine, he breathed life into them—he made them real and relevant again. And, like Jesus, he too was crucified by the money changers. Blind obedience to authority—mob mentality—is a very dangerous and destructive force.

 

So put away your toy American flags, your yellow ribbons. They are irrelevant to the issue of social justice. No nation has a monopoly on virtue. Real faith, real service, are not confined to national borders. Integrity lives and breathes in the hearts of men and women doing the slow work of justice, often alone and in opposition to the formal conventions of society—as history attests.

 

Dr. King understood that there was no easy way out; no time to wait for a second coming. Like Jesus, his path required struggle against injustice; direct non-violent confrontation with evil that lived deep in the belly of the beast. It required courage, conviction, personal sacrifice and moral vigilance. It required character, a willingness to die for one’s beliefs. Through his extraordinary moral example, Dr. King was not so much a leader as he was an emissary for truth and justice, which must be the core of any faith worth its salt. Dr. King’s beliefs, unlike the counterfeiters who have come after him, demanded equality and justice, reckoning with truth. That is what made him so dangerous, so feared by the purveyors of violence and injustice.

 

Now we have fools and con men, pretenders and flim-flam artists: hucksters, jilters, jokers and clowns fleecing the hapless flock. We have Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, George Bush, Hillary Clinton, and those masquerading as the Christian right marching us into war after war, and carrying us down the stairs to hell and despair—misleaders and pompous frauds one and all!

 

The phony evangelicals have stolen the pulpit and the ignorant and foolish have fallen under their spell. Blind followers seduced by a belief in specters and miracles obey their every command and do their bidding. It is just another scam to grab power and influence over the trusting flock before the slaughter. Such people are serfs and fools, not thoughtful citizens or seekers of truth. Beware of any faith that is not organized around justice and equality. Snake oil salesmen abound.

 

Within the religious hierarchy the high priests of fraud are treated like deities with a direct conduit to god, entitled to power and privileges that ordinary citizens do not have. They are no better than fortune tellers dressed in bright robes. Once again they have diverted the masses from the real path to salvation and led them astray. They have erased the thin line that separates church and state and made a mockery of humankind’s quest for understanding and justice.

 

It was they who, in the words of song writer Woody Guthrie, “laid poor Jesus in his grave”. They do it every time.

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Don't Trust Government

 

By Charley Reese

 

06/08/07 "Lew Rockwell" -- -- In reading an excellent book, Satanic Purses: Money, Myth and Misinformation, by R.T. Naylor (publisher is McGill-Queen's University Press), I suddenly realized why Adolf Hitler was so popular during the first years of his administration.

 

The funny thing is that the book is not about Hitler or Germany, but about the U.S. and the bogus war on terror. It is an outstanding book, carefully researched and footnoted, and written in a reasonable manner, though with delicious dollops of sarcasm.

 

It's the carefully detailed accounts of injustices committed by the U.S. government against American Muslims that gave me the insight about Hitler. In the early days of the Third Reich, if you weren't a criminal, a communist or a Jew, you never saw the dark side of the Nazi government. You saw an economy being revitalized, superhighways being built, Germans being put back to work, the disgraceful Versailles Treaty being scrapped. It must have looked a lot like morning in Germany to the people who had suffered through runaway inflation, economic depression and street riots.

 

Similarly, if you are not a Muslim or an Arab-American who has been a victim of the Patriot Act and other laws carelessly passed in the hysteria following the attacks in 2001, then the Bush administration probably looks perfectly normal. You probably even believe that it is really protecting you from terrorists, just as many Germans believed Hitler was protecting them from the "bad guys."

 

What Taylor's book demonstrates is how often this is pure nonsense, and at the same time what terrible damage is being done to the rule of law and America's traditional respect for human rights.

 

Typically, the government will swoop down and seize an organization's records and computers, while making public accusations of the people being "involved" with terrorists. The important point is that this is done before any determination of guilt or innocence has even begun. By the time a defendant gets to court, if he ever does, he's ruined. Quite often then, the fearless feds will say, "Well, never mind about this terrorist business, just plead guilty to a minor immigration violation." Often defendants are bullied into admitting guilt they don't deserve by threats of being declared an enemy combatant, which means indefinite imprisonment, probably for life.

 

You can see the process going on with the four men charged with planning to blow up the fuel lines to JFK International Airport in New York. In the first place, it is common knowledge that if you blow up a fuel line, you will get an explosion and fire at one point. The claim that the whole pipeline would blow up for miles is nonsense, and the government knows that, but it threw that out to claim the plot endangered "thousands" of lives.

 

The real question is, Did these guys actually plan it, or were they set up by the government's federal informant? The federal government has a terrible record of using informants to entrap people. The whole tragedy of Ruby Ridge, which cost the lives of Randy Weaver's wife and son, resulted from a federal informant who nagged Weaver into sawing off the barrels of a shotgun, something any kid can do with a vice and a hacksaw. The feds then arrested Weaver with the intention of forcing him to become an informant, and the tragic farce ensued.

 

So even though you haven't felt the arbitrary and unjust power of the government, you should read this book and find out just how much deception is involved in this war on terror. You'll discover how often oil, diamonds and big business play behind-the-scenes roles in this current so-called war.

 

As the German people discovered, once a government has unlimited power, it will eventually use that power against everyone.

 

Charley Rees has been a journalist for 49 years.

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Talking to Fisk

 

Truth as a Causality of War

 

"Just as the Wall is Called a Fence, So are the Mercenaries Called Contractors"

 

By Dan Glazebrook

 

19/04/08 "PalestineChronicle" -- -Robert Fisk has a well-earned reputation as one of the most honest and hard hitting foreign correspondents in the British media. He has worked in Northern Ireland, where he exposed the presence of the SAS in the mid-1970s, as well as Bosnia, Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon. It was here, as a witness to the immediate aftermath of the Israeli-organised Sabra and Shatila massacre of 2000 Palestinian refugees, that his journalism took on its current form: angry, passionate, and as he puts it "partial on the side of the victims"--a style of journalism which, unfortunately, is not shared by many of his colleagues in the profession. In the midst of a torrent of lies and propaganda emanating from our media about British and US policy on the Middle East, Fisk's writings are a breath of fresh air--although the hellish reality he depicts does not always make for pleasant reading.

 

When I met Fisk in Christchurch College, sandwiched between an earlier speaking engagement in Bristol, and a lecture at the Oxford Literary Festival--seemingly without a moment's rest--we began by talking about the role of journalism in times of war. Firstly, I wanted to know, does journalism, by sanitising or justifying war, also have a role in perpetuating it?

 

There are several things. First of all, there's the inability of many journalists from the United States to actually tell the truth about the Israel-Palestine situation--hence, occupied territories are called disputed territories, the wall is called the security barrier, a colony or settlement is called a neighbourhood or an outpost. Which means that if you see a Palestinian chucking a stone, if it's about an occupation, you can understand it, but if it's about a dispute, which you can presumably settle over a cup of tea, then obviously the Palestinians are generically violent. So you demean one side in this appalling conflict.

 

Then you have this business where television will not show what we see, for reasons of so-called "bad taste". I remember once being on the phone to a TV editor in London when Jazeera were asked to feed some tape of children killed and wounded by British shell fire in Basra, and the guy started saying, "there's no point feeding us this, we can't show this"the first excuse was, "people will be having their tea, so we can't put it on", and then it was, "this is sort of pornography, we don't show this". And it ended up--it is mesmeric to listen to this stuff - the last thing was "We have to show respect for the dead". So we don't show any respect for them when they are alive, we blow them to bits, and then we show respect for themSo because of this - and these bloodless sandpits with ex-generals pontificating - it becomes a game; you start propagating this idea that war is primarily about victory or defeat - when in fact, it's about death, and the infliction of massive pain.

 

I was in Iraq in 1991, when the British and Americans had been bombing one of the highways. There were women and children dead and in bits, and all these dogs came out of the desert and started eating themIf you saw what I saw you would never ever think of supporting war of any kind against anyone again.

 

But of course, the politicians--our leaders--are very happy that these pictures are not shown, because they make war more attractive, less painful.

 

Do the British public never get to see this, more realistic, picture of war?

 

Look, if an Iraqi soldier is obliging enough to die by the side of the road in a romantic pose, and you can get him against the skyline without any boiled flesh - you know, "the price of war: an Iraqi soldier lies dead", you know the sort of caption by now - you can do that." But that's about it.

 

Journalistic standards are degenerating rapidly in other areas too. Watching the news two weeks ago, I was shocked to see Yassin Nassari and Abdul Patel referred to by the BBC as 'terrorists'--not "alleged" or "suspected", but straight down the line "terrorists" - when the only charges they faced related to "possession of materials" (Islamist literature and video), and they had not even been accused of planning terrorist attacks, let alone carrying any out. Has 'terrorism' become a 'catch-all' phrase?

 

I've seen cases in the United States where the evidence of terrorism is a copy of a Lebanese newspaper.

 

I've just had an interesting example of what's going on. I was lecturing in Ottawa to 600 Muslim Canadians, and I said to them "you are absolutely right to exercise your right to free speech to attack the United States and Israel when they kill people, commit torture, occupy other people's lands- but why don't I ever hear you condemning the regimes in Egypt, Damascus, Libya and so on?" Silence. I couldn't work it out.

 

So what was going on?

 

Later, I was driving across Canada with two Muslims and they told me. In Canada, if they speak out against these regimes--the Syrian regime, or the Egyptian--what happens is that these various countries have their own muhabarat people in Canada--security people--who will then pass home the message that certain people are speaking up against Mubarak, Assad, or whoever. Then, under the new friendship between intelligence services, the Syrian or Egyptian regime tells the Canadians that there is a potential terrorist--anti-regime, right?--and CSIS, the Canadian version of the FBI, starts putting taps on them. So, by exercising their freedom of speech against dictatorships, they end up being suspected of terrorism by their new country of citizenship. So the result is, at the end of the day, they are silent. As I would be too, in their position.

 

What about the silence of the rest of us, who are not so easily excused? With ever dwindling numbers on the anti-war demonstrations, have we forgotten what is really going on in those countries suffering Western "liberation"?

 

You keep having to say to people in London, "but it's real"--because most people don't have any experience of war in the West anymore. There isn't a single one of our political leaders with any experience of war. Bush dodged it, Cheney dodged it, Powell was in Vietnam, but he's gone. Hollywood is their experience of war. And when you send people off to war, and your experience is Hollywood, you might be a bit shocked when they start dying. At the end of the day, it isn't real to them.

 

But it's all too real to the inhabitants of the Middle East, who have been subject to Western sponsored blitzkrieg and massacre for decades--from the ongoing nakbah against the Palestinians, through Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the US arming of Iraq in the 8 year war against Iran, the 1991 Gulf 'War', and subsequent economic genocide of UN sanctions on Iraq--not to mention the West's backing for the dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. All of this has been witnessed first hand by Fisk, who believes the Muslim world has shown incredible restraint in the face of all this oppression:

 

I'm surprised 9-11 didn't happen before, that it took that long. Now, whether that is because it took a lot of planning, I don't know, but I am amazed that you can knock on a front door in the West Bank and not have them slap you in the face--instead of that, they offer you in for coffee and a meal. Can you imagine putting it the other way around--if we were being bombed and occupied by Arab armies and a friendly Arab reporter turned to chat, I don't know if I would open the door; would you?

 

The true extent of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan has been masked by the massive use of mercenaries--hidden from the troop figures. Estimates suggest 1000 have been killed in Iraq alone. Fisk is one of very few journalists to call them by their name, as opposed to the "contractor" euphemism:

 

"Just as the wall is called a fence instead of a wall, and it's a neighbourhood not a settlement, so these are now contractors rather than mercenaries. I've always called them mercenaries. When they say two 'contractors' have been murdered, the idea that they are going around in an armoured humvee loaded with weapons doesn't come into the brain pod immediately does it?"

 

What is your experience with these mercenaries?

 

I noticed that in 2003, they were popping up with belts loaded with machine gun bullets in the hotel I was in. It was obvious they were going to attract attacks like honey. So I went to some of them and said "look, for god's sakes, can't you just keep your weapons in your room?" - in those days, you weren't being attacked in the street - "you're making this out to be a barracks--you're endangering yourselves and you're endangering us" And this guy walked up to me with two rifles--he'd overheard the conversation--and he said, "well when you're in trouble mate, don't come asking me for help". I said, "I don't want your ******* help, I want you to leave."

 

But they didn't leave. And the big excuse for staying now is, of course, the looming spectre of civil war. Is there, then, a functional value to the occupation of the "civil war theory"?

 

The first man I ever heard mention the danger of civil war in Iraq was Dan Semor, spokesman for the occupying power in the Green Zone in August 2003. No one had ever heard about the danger of civil war before, no Iraqi ever mentioned it. I remember thinking, what are they trying to do, frighten the Iraqis into obedience?

 

I'm not suggesting that the American military are trying to stir up sectarian strife, but it's not impossible that there are certain institutions operating either at one remove--i.e. with Iraqis or not - in order to get militias to fight each other rather than fight the Americans. The French did that in Algeria--it's a fact. I don't know if the same thing is happening in Iraq, but given everything else that's gone on--murder, torture, etc--who knows?

 

But you don't actually have to set off car bombs to do this. Look at the way we as journalists publish all these maps, you know--Shi'ites at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle, Kurds at the top. The British did the same in Belfast - green for Catholics, Orange for protestants, medium sherry colour for mixed areas, for people who are inconsiderate enough to marry across the religious divide. But we don't, obviously, do these ethnic maps about Birmingham or Bradford or Washington. I could draw you an ethnic map of Toronto, with the suburb of Mississauga green for Muslim. But they wouldn't print it. Because in our superior, civilised Western society, we don't acknowledge it. In their society, we spend our time pointing it out to them. I was in New York some months ago, and on the front cover of Time was "How to tell a Sunni from a Shia." Can you imagine it? And one of the ways was look at the licence plate of the car. So, you know, we contribute to civil strife, by constantly saying, "look at the guy in the next village". So you don't need to set up car bombs to divide people, you can do it quite successfully just by constant repetition - civil war, Shiites, militias, Sunnis, power. You create the narrative. And then in due course, people fall into line because it is the only one they get.

 

I once asked the brother of s Sunni dentist who had been shot dead, "So, will there be civil war?" He replied, "Why do you people want us to have a civil war? I'm married to a Shi'ite--do you want me to kill my wife?" He said, "We're not a sectarian society, we're a tribal society--the Duleimis have got lots of Sunnis and Shias." And that was a response, you see, to an idea that had been set off by Dan Senor, the official spokesman for the occupying power.

 

Unfortunately, the sectarian lines are becoming clearer in Iraq by the day, with the US army building walls to create separate ghettoes in Baghdad, and with the Kurdish north now negotiating its own oil deals. The Western imposed solution for Bosnia was full-scale ethnic partition. Will this be the future of Iraq?

 

Bosnia was in Europe, so eventually, we wanted to switch the war off. Iraq is a different matter--we're in Iraq for oil. If the national product of Iraq was asparagus, we would not be there, I promise. There are parallels with Bosnia, not least indifference towards the Muslim victims--we did nothing for them until the war had consumed a quarter of a million of them--and we don't care about the Iraqis. But I think there are big differences with Bosnia. There are more parallels, I think, between the NATO-Serb Kosovo war, because that is where we got people used to the idea that bombing civilian trains on railway bridges, bombing hospitals, bombing TV stations was OK. So when we hit lots of civilians in Iraq, it was "well, we were doing that back in Serbia, weren't we?". We bombed Al-Jazeera in Kabul, they bombed Al-Jazeera in Baghdad, which was not even an Iraqi station. So I think the Kosovo war started off the acceptability of doing these things.

 

Whatever the occupier's plans for Iraq, and whatever barbarities it imposes, one thing is for sure--the future of that country is not entirely in their hands. Even with their full scale promotion of sectarian violence in 1950s Algeria, the French were still forced to leave. The dilemma for the US in Iraq, as Fisk puts it, is that "they must leave, they will leave, but they can't leave--that is the equation that turns sand into blood". For those who want to understand this process, and what it means in human terms, rather than simply be lied to about it, Robert Fisk's reporting is a good place to start.

 

Dan Glazebrook writes for the Morning Star newspaper and is one of the co-ordinators for the British branch of the International Union of Parliamentarians for Palestine. This article was contributed to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact the author at: danglazebrook2000@yahoo.co.uk.

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Denying Responsibility for the Wars One Cheers On

 

The NYT columnist who has supported 4 wars on Muslims in 6 years decries the Islamic disregard for human life.

 

By Glenn Greenwald

 

November 11, 2009 -- "Salon" -- David Brooks' column today perfectly illustrates what lies at the core of our political discourse: namely, self-loving tribalistic blindness laced with a pathological refusal to accept responsibility for one's actions. Brooks claims there is a unique evil that one finds in the "fringes of the Muslim world":

 

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.

 

That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don't see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

 

This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics. They are the ones who go into crowded rooms, shout "Allahu akbar," or "God is great," and then start murdering.

 

But Brooks himself was a vehement, vicious advocate for the attack on Iraq, which caused this:

 

The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has resulted in the deaths of many Iraqi civilians . . . Many international organizations, governments and non-governmental organizations have counted excess civilian casualties using such methods; however all have reported different numbers. Reports range from 128,000 to 1,033,000.

 

That's at least 128,000 innocent human beings -- at least -- whose lives were eradicated by the war Brooks repeatedly cheered on. It also resulted in this: "More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country." But Brooks accuses Islamic fanatics -- but not himself -- of "causing incredible amounts of suffering."

 

Brooks also justified the Israeli attack on Gaza, including its worst excesses -- a war that wiped out the lives of 1,400 Palestinians (including 252 children under the age of 16) and that entailed "the shooting of [Gazan] civilians with white flags, the firing of white phosphorus shells and charges that Israeli soldiers used Palestinian men as human shields," all of which, according to a U.N. investigation, were "the result of deliberate guidance issued to soldiers." He also cheered on the Israeli bombing campaign of Lebanon and derided those calling for a cease-fire, even as the war wiped out more than 1,000 Lebanese people, at least 300 of whom were women and children, during which "Israeli warplanes also targeted many moving vehicles that turned out to be carrying only civilians trying to flee the conflict." And Brooks is now demanding escalation of the war in yet another Muslim country, this one in Afghanistan -- making it the fourth separate war on Muslims he's cheered on in the last six years alone.

 

So here's a person who is constantly advocating and justifying the killing, bombing, and slaughtering of Muslims, including well over 100,000 innocent civilians. And yet today he writes a column saying: Look over there at those radical Muslims; can you believe how degraded and inhumane they are? In fact, he says, "they" -- those Muslims over there -- "don't see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so." That's from the same person who cheerleads for the endless deaths of Muslims and destruction of the Muslim world while thinking that it makes him strong, resolute, Churchillian, righteous and noble -- exactly that which he accuses "fringe Muslims" of doing. And even as he blames the U.S. for "absolving" radical Muslims for the "evil" of their choices, Brooks will never make the connection between what he does and its results because he believes he is free from accountability and that his righteousness justifies the killings he desires -- again, exactly that which he says today is the hallmark of Islamic monsters ("They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so").

 

The tribalistic narcissism and depraved refusal to accept responsibility for the consequences of one's actions on vivid display here is hardly unique to Brooks. The very same people who express such moral outrage and self-righteous horror over events like the Fort Hood shootings themselves have immense amounts of innocent human blood on their hands, but they simply avert their eyes from what they have caused or believe that they are too inherently Good to be responsible, let alone culpable, for what they unleash.

 

Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory - I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. I am the author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?" (May, 2006), a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, and "A Tragic Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. My most recent book, "Great American Hypocrites", examines the manipulative electoral tactics used by the GOP and propagated by the establishment press, and was released in April, 2008, by Random House/Crown.

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