U.S. Election Diary: Religious Right

By Rob Reynolds in Columbus, Ohio

McCain has warned of the threat from extremism in Islam, not the religion as a whole.

On the road to clinching the Republican party nomination for president, John McCain worked hard for the endorsement of influential Evangelical Christian ministers.

The ministers are helping shore up McCain’s support on the party’s right wing, which has always been sceptical about whether the Arizona senator is a true-blue conservative.

But one of those minister’s beliefs about Islam and Muslims raise disturbing questions.

Rod Parsley, the pastor of a large and profitable Ohio mega-church, calls Islam a false religion. He says Allah is a demon spirit and that Muslims are bent on world conquest.

Parsley endorsed McCain in February, praising him as a “strong, true, consistent conservative”.

Sharing a Cincinnati, Ohio, stage with Parsley, McCain said: “I am very honoured today to have one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide, Pastor Rod Parsley. Thank you for your leadership and your guidance. I am very grateful you are here.”

He certainly had reason for gratitude – a week later, Parsley’s support helped McCain win the important Ohio primary.

Evangelist

Reverend Parsley, who often holds services in which people are supposedly cured of disease by divine intervention, runs the sprawling World Harvest church near Columbus, Ohio.

World Harvest has a 12,000 member congregation, a bible college, and a television studio, which broadcasts his sermons.

A frequent theme of those homilies is the threat to Christian values posed by gays, liberals and Muslims.

In his book, Silent no More, Parsley says the United States was ordained by God to defeat Islam.

In one chapter, titled The Deception of Allah he writes: “I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is. In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfil its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.”

MLK Jr. on Non-Violent Resistence, Love & Malcolm X

Martin Luther King Jr. responding to some questions about Malcolm X and responds to the questioning of the non-violent resistance.

No Small Dreams

By Michael Eric Dyson, special to Britannica.com, 17 January 2000

As a literary figure, Martin Luther King, Jr., stands as possibly the greatest American rhetorician of the 20th century. As a citizen, his singular contributions to the legacy of American democracy helped this nation realize its political and moral aspirations to an arguably greater extent than any other figure. And while much of the literature about King portrays him as a dreamer intent on rhapsodically transforming America through eloquent speech and writing, in reality he was much more. He was a visionary activist whose disturbing words and courageous deeds cost him his life. It is unfortunate that we have largely frozen King in his “I Have a Dream” stage while neglecting the radical evolution of his later years. Perhaps by revisiting the impressive body of literature King left behind we can come to a deeper understanding of his thoughts and his abiding legacy.

One of the more misunderstood and underappreciated features of King’s mature thought is his skepticism about the earlier methods of social change that he advocated. For the first several years of his career, King was quite optimistic about the possibility that racial inequality could be solved through black struggle and white good will. In The Preacher King, Richard Lischer captures the civil rights leader’s early views in a revealing quotation by King:

“Maybe God has called us here to this hour. Not merely to free ourselves but to free all of our white brothers and save the soul of this nation–We will not ever allow this struggle to become so polarized that it becomes a struggle between black men and white men. We must see the tension in this nation between injustice and justice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.”

But during the last three years of his life, King questioned his own understanding of race relations. As King told journalist David Halberstam, “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.” King also told Halberstam something that he argued in his last book, Trumpet of Conscience: that “most Americans are unconscious racists.” For King, this recognition was not a source of bitterness but a reason to revise his strategy. If one believed that whites basically desired to do the right thing, then a little moral persuasion was sufficient. But if one believed that whites had to be made to behave in the right way, one had to employ substantially more than moral reasoning.

Macolm X read by Mos Def

Mos Def introduced by Howard Zinn…

Malcolm X, in Detroit, Michigan, 1963–2 years before his assassination.

West, Cornell. Race Matters . New York: Vintage, 1994: 149-51

THE CONTEMPORARY FOCUS on Malcolm X, especially among black youth, can be understood as both the open articulation of black rage (as in film videos and on tapes targeted at whites, Jews, Koreans, black women, black men, and others) and as a desperate attempt to channel this rage into something more than a marketable commodity for the culture industry. The young black generation are up against forces of death, destruction, and disease unprecedented in the everyday life of black urban people. The raw reality of drugs and guns, despair and decrepitude, generates a raw rage that, among past black spokespersons, only Malcolm X’s speech approximates. Yet the issue of psychic conversion, cultural hybridity, black supremacy, authoritarian organization, borders and boundaries in sexuality, and other matters all loom large at present-the same issues Malcolm X left dangling at the end of his short life spent articulating black rage and affirming black humanity.

If we are to build on the best of Malcolm X, we must preserve and expand his notion of psychic conversion that cements networks and groups in which black community, humanity, love, care, and concern can take root and grow (the work of bell hooks is the best example). These spaces-beyond the best of black music and black religion-reject Manichean ideologies and authoritarian arrangements in the name of moral visions, subtle analyses of wealth and power, and concrete strategies of principled coalitions and democratic alliances. These visions, analyses, and strategies never lose sight of black rage, yet they focus this rage where it belongs: on any form of racism, sexism, homophobia, or economic in justice that impedes the opportunities of “everyday people” (to use the memorable phrase of Sly and the Family Stone and Arrested Development) to live lives of dignity and decency. For example, poverty can be as much a target of rage as degraded identity.

Does imperialism have any moral fibre whatsoever?

Cecil Rhodes: the man who financed the Cape-Cairo railway project, founded the De Beers Mining Company, and owned the British South Africa Company which established Rhodesia for itself. He wanted to “paint the map British Red” and declared “…all of these stars … these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets”.

21st Century Imperialism

IMPERIALISM…. the conceptual reality of conquering foreign territory in the name of political and economic dominance, for the desire of ‘empire building’, requires at its most fundamental level a subdued racial prejudice. One of the most dominant political forces of our time, imperialism has been, and continues to be, in a state of perpetual change. Once blatantly obvious, imperialism has survived through its ability to evolve. Imperialism is a well oiled machine that realizes it can no longer prevail unless it works in the shadows, behind the scenes; whereas once you sent your explorers overseas, dominated local tribes with your military might, established colonies, exploited natural resources and created new markets, we now send our bankers to G7 meetings or WTO forums and simply create global economic policies that continue to serve the same empire building objectives that traditional forms of imperialism did (prosperity for the powerful at the expense of ‘the other’). What traditional imperialism and newer forms of economic and political dominance have in common is a reliance on an inherent form of racism that allows the population of the prosperous nations to feel a sense of greater entitlement than the people who populate the countries we continue to exploit. Fanatical patriotism erodes our ability to feel empathy for ‘the other’; separated by seas, by differences in culture and belief, by skin colour, these differences are perpetuated by imaginary social barriers that the ‘empire builder’ has constructed over time and engrained in our culture. How is it that 3 families can have more wealth than the poorest 48 countries combined? How is it that we in the west do not feel a moral sense of obligation to our brothers and sisters in Bolivia, in Nigeria, in Lithuania, in Burma? Patriotism is so deep and engrained that to question the direction and the moral fibre of one’s nation is to be ‘unpatriotic’. Without social support networks to reinforce one’s convictions, it is very difficult to stand out in a crowd where your beliefs, ethics and morality will see you chastised. Blind faith in the direction and leadership in our leaders without questioning the consequences of their actions on our country or on the countries of others is anything but patriotic; we need to encourage debate, we need to encourage and challenge people to seek a new direction, we need to encourage people to realize that dissent in the name of real progress is a fundamental responsibility for every citizen fortunate enough to live within a democracy.

Peace and Love to all,

D-Fungus