Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

ABC Radio National - Background Briefing: 3 April 2005 - Condoleezza, Condoleezza

Condoleezza Rice: I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of 4 young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair….

Condoleezza Rice: You may find this hard to believe, but I started school in 1960. I did not have a single white classmate, and I had one white teacher, until we moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1968. I remember too, my first trip to Nashville. I was 7 or so years old, and we travelled here to Fisk University to hear the Fisk Jubilee Singers. There would have been no thought of dinner in a restaurant, or lodging in a hotel. No, the American South was still quite separate and quite unequal.

Number of Displaced Iraqis Has Soared, Aid Group Says - washingtonpost.com, November 6, 2007

BAGHDAD, Nov. 5 — The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has more than quadrupled since the U.S. troop buildup began in February, leaving 2.3 million Iraqis displaced and further dividing the country along sectarian lines, according to a new report from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society.

The figures, which measured the number of internally displaced people at the end of September, present a grim accounting of the humanitarian crisis unfolding as Shiite militias and Sunni insurgent groups drive civilians, usually from the opposite sect, out of their homes, neighborhoods and cities.

More than 83 percent of those displaced were women and children, and most children were younger than 12, the report found. Most lived in Baghdad. Many lack adequate health services, cannot transfer their children to new schools and cannot find jobs.

The number of internally displaced Iraqis at the end of September represented a 16 percent increase since the end of August, and was more than 40 times higher than March 2006, when sectarian fighting accelerated following the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Sammara, a Shiite shrine, according to the report.

Yoel Marcus, In cold blood - Haaretz, November 6, 2007

Many of those who took part in the memorial rally for Israel’s slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin showed up this year mainly to protest the circumcision ceremony of Yigal Amir’s son, being held on the anniversary of the day that Amir shot Rabin in the back. We saw people at the rally who were boiling mad - at a legal system with no death penalty for the murder of a prime minister; that allows an assassin to sit in jail, marry, shack up with the missus and bring a child into the world; and at having religious laws requiring baby boys to be circumcised when they are eight days old, and that day falling on the same day that the proud father murdered an Israeli prime minister in cold blood.

That day, the walls of Jerusalem were covered with posters showing Shimon Peres wearing a keffiyah, with the words “Liberator of terrorists, president of the Arabs” plastered across a black background - the handiwork of right-wing activists Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Twelve years ago, posters of Rabin in a Gestapo uniform were held high at Jerusalem’s Zion Square. The forces of darkness and the potential political assassins are here today, organizing openly and in secret to disrupt, in blood and fire, any moves taken to evacuate more settlements.

“As a religious person, I know nothing in life is mere chance,” says Amitai Amir, Yigal’s brother. “On November 4, Yigal made a covenant with the people of Israel and sacrificed himself for all of us. He saved us from the Oslo Accords and Rabin. Twelve years have passed, and the covenant continues. The Oslo Accords are dead.”

In the videotape of Amir’s first interrogation after the assassination, aired on television two weeks ago, we saw a devious and determined man with no qualms about the killing. Asked by the interrogator whether he regretted his actions, he didn’t beat around the bush: “God forbid,” quoth he.

Yigal Amir’s thousands of sons - Haaretz, November 6, 2007

It is no coincidence that the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies stands deserted, while on the soccer fields, the murderer is cheered and the victim is booed.

The real Rabin legacy should be sought on the soccer fields, in the classrooms, the outposts, the yeshivas, among the secular, the religious and the traditional; in fact, everywhere in the country where - according to surveys - 38 percent of the religious public view Yigal Amir as a hero. The Rabin legacy is in fact the anti-Rabin legacy. At the present time, ahead of talks with the Palestinians, the legacy will be updated to become an anti-Olmert legacy.

The rally in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square was a protest against Amir and his growing status. The preoccupation with the circumcision of his son has resulted in an unfortunate deviation from the main issue, because the problem is not Amir’s biological son, but rather his spiritual sons, who walk among us by the thousands.