First we had the publications of the outrageous and long-standing cover-up of the child abuses by a not unsubstantial number of Catholic priests, child abuses that ranged from maltreatment over sexual molestation to the rapes of children. Then we read a few days ago that Israel has re-started its illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories they occupy, while Jewish settlers have committed an arson attack on a Palestinian girls school and daubed it with racist slogans, and now Wikileaks has published the announced documents about the US’s behaviour in Iraq, which show very clearly that US soldiers were advised to turn a blind eye to torture.
The reactions from the Vatican, Israel and now the USA are not surprising, nor do they shock us any longer, they are just appallingly sickening. The Vatican tried everything in its power to suppress information and down play the severity of these appalling events. It then took ages for the Pope to utter a halfhearted apology. Catholic representatives argue that he is sincerely sorry and has met victims to apologise personally. What he has manifestly not done is to state clearly and unequivocally (unequivocal is not his style unless it’s about banning birth control) that from now on if any representative of the Catholic church has any reason to believe that a priest or other Catholic person of authority is abusing a child, they will instantly report this to the police. Failure to report is itself a crime, but one for which no Catholic clergyman has yet been tried.
Israel doesn’t even pretend that it is in any way or form concerned about the peace process, which is once again jeopardised, while the first reaction from the Pentagon is, as usual, sickening:
"We deplore Wikileaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies. We know terrorist organisations have been mining the leaked Afghan documents for information to use against us and this Iraq leak is more than four times as large. By disclosing such sensitive information, Wikileaks continues to put at risk the lives of our troops, their coalition partners and those Iraqis and Afghans working with us.”
(BBC website 22/10/2010)
This statement does not even refer to the allegations. It doesn’t refer to the crimes committed nor does it address the fact that these are violations against human rights or violations of the Geneva Convention. All it does is turn the whistleblowers into the bad guys, into the criminals. The US has been involved in more wars than any other country in the world. The USA is responsible for endless civilian suffering in Iraq, has held countless people without trial in Guantanamo Bay, has tortured at Abu Grail, has via ‘extraordinary renditions’ flown suspects into countries where they could be tortured. The USA and her allies have been directly and indirectly responsible for over a million of civilian deaths in Iraq alone, not to talk about their constant support for Israel’s devastating policies in Palestine, the upheaval they have created in Pakistan and the constant threats uttered against Iran. The USA and her allies have made the Middle East a desperately unsafe place.
And now this country has the guts to accuse people who tell the truth of ‘putting lives at risk’. Whose lives? The lives of their soldiers. But it is a soldier’s job to put their life at risk, isn’t it? That’s what an attacking army does: put the lives of its own men and others at risk. Associated Press has now obtained a Pentagon document which makes it clear that no lives have been put at risk by publication of the Afghan documents, and the same may be expected of the Iraq leaks. The reality is that by exposing the routine abuse and torture of Iraqis by their police and military, the current appalling situation may, perforce, be improved and lives saved. In which case, publication has to be a pretty non-existent risk worth taking.
Most informed people are unsurprised by the official reaction. The USA’s representatives who can’t utter a few sentences without talking about God and asking for his blessings, the nation which has proved itself to be the most influential supporter of Israel, the nation of God’s chosen people who are to an extent responsible for many of the troubles in the Middle East – they have done it again. They have, ‘in the name of God and Democracy’, allowed, encouraged and contributed to actions that should make every Christian’s heart ache. Does this God really want us to torture, maim, kill, conquer and mutilate? Does this God really support and bless a nation that seems to disregard basic human compassion?
But the USA is not alone here. Does this Christian God really turn a blind eye to severe and ongoing child abuse, to the stealing of land, to the imprisonment of a people, in this case the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Does he really care so little about what his chosen people, the Israelis, and his representatives on earth, the pope and his priests, actually do?
Well, it depends which God we are talking about. The God of the Old Testament, which seems to underlie most of the more fundamentalist, but nevertheless mainstream, churches in America, certainly has no problem with war, conquering, slaughtering and torturing. He seems to have no problem with taking land and is certainly quite happy to support greed and selfishness and the condemnation of ‘disbelievers’, in form of people who believe in other deities than this one and only true God. The God of Moses, this all-male deity, whom we have to fear and to whom we must submit, who has chosen but a few to be his people and is asked by Americans to bless them, has little time for compassion, let alone for equality, sharing and respect of human life.
What God is it that goes on blessing America, excludes half of humankind, namely women, from his major Church while it is run by child-abusing priests, and who looks after his ‘chosen people’ to the utter devastation of others? All we can assume is that he is a man-made God – a God formed in the image of a human being of the worst kind. Not the divine power of love in which many of us believe, but a nauseating archetype dredged from a diseased part of our human consciousness – a ‘God’ we can certainly do without!
To click into wikileaks: http://wikileaks.org/
Here is the torture video and other information from wikileaks: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/wikileaks-press/
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