Because this is how holy men talk.
In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani urged anyone who can carry a weapon to volunteer for the security forces and help “defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.”
I’m sorry that my country’s former government is largely responsible for the chaotic violence in Iraq, but I have so little patience for this kind of sectarian fighting. I struggle to tolerate the religious ravings of so many of my own countrymen, but they aren’t trying to kill me because I think they’re lunatics. At worst, they’re trying, mostly without success, to impose their views on me through political means. I don’t like it, but I can tolerate it.
For a Grand Ayatollah to call people to arms rather than offer to mediate for peace is very frustrating. Perhaps things are just desperate enough for the Shi’ites in Iraq that this call had to be made. But it strikes me as completely absurd in a Vonnegutesque way.
I am enjoying the mindless pontificating about “what went wrong” from the people who got us into this to begin with.
It makes me remember this old piece.
That’s Islam. The whole religion is about death. Is Salman Rushdie still in hiding? And of course, some moron in the USA makes a tasteless video, so people have to die in Libya. That’s Islam.
Seems to me that it was US Christians assisted by a small group of Zionist Jews that killed and maimed tens thousands of Iraqis, destroyed their homes, and infrastructure for no objective defensive purpose. And you have the audacity to label Islam a religion about death.
Islam or Christianity its wacko. Lets not forget Judaism their claim to fame is they were the first to believe in ONE GOD. What fucking difference does it make. A little pregnant?
Christianity claims to be about forgiving your enemies, but Islam is about killing your enemies. So-called Christians are just as nasty as Muslims. I’ll grant you that. But the Christian Holy Book is about peace and forgiveness, while the Koran is about killing and death.
They are not equivalent.
I don’t know enough about the Talmud to say one way or the other.
I see you’re following that age-old sage advice: when you find yourself in a hole of your own digging . . . keep digging!
(Hint: the problem here is the bigotry of attributing to and condemning an entire group for the actions/beliefs of a subset of that group; now compounded by selective citation of each group’s “sacred” texts.)
From “the Christian Holy Book . . . about peace and forgiveness”:
“Old Testament”? OK, sure, though I somehow missed where you (or the church!) excluded the OT from “the Christian Holy Book . . . about peace and forgiveness”.
What an utterly bigoted thing to say.
The truth hurts.
The Age of Enlightenemnt dragged most all of Christianity, kicking and screaming, into some semblance of modernity. Islam, by and large, has still not come to this kind of reckoning. That is what makes such a huge part of that religion so vile and repugnant.
Given the 20th century massacres and slaughters by “modern” peoples, your claim is weak.
Simply not true. Christian countries did enormous damage via colonialism during and after the age of enlightenment via colonialism alone; and don’t get me started on the fundamentalist christian underpinnings of modern american military power. Do the deaths and suffering just not count if the power in charge is not explicitly muslim?
Interesting to see the number of voices here that mimic those of the 12th and 13th Centuries. Attempting to recapitulate the Crusades but with a different outcome for the Christians.
Show me where Jesus approved colonialism. I’m talking about the religion itself, not what men belonging to that religion have done.
That’s (attributed to) Jesus hizownself, btw. And no, you can’t (validly) selectively apply it to Christians, but not Muslims. Nor vice versa.
GMAFB —
Can’t imagine anywhere that the “holy men” wouldn’t be preaching the same message if their community was under the same threat as what appears to exist in Iraq at this time.
Pulpits across this country preached the “Good News” of GWB and supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The difference between “their lunatics” and ours is that ours are rich enough to slaughter peoples and communities outside our borders, and we ordinary citizens don’t have to get our hands dirty or experience the destruction.
More motivation:
What do Christian churches say to their boys as they go off to war? Sounds like the same rot to me.
What does the New Testament say? You have to look at the roots of the religion not what followers have done in its name. Every religion has had horrible things done in its name, but not every religion condones killing or even demands it. Dagon demanded the sacrifice of babies. Neither Christianity nor Islam do, but Christians AND Muslims have slaughtered babies. The religion is not what some adherents claim, but what their source documents say.
Well, those who have actually, you know, read the sacred texts of Islam, claim that it too is a religion of peace.
Religions are not the books that some humans wrote. They are what their adherents preach and do in the name of their gods. The four major world religions are all bloody patriarchal rot, and in the past 2,000 years, Christianity has been the bloodiest.
Could be what Putin tells Russians he gives tanks to living in the Ukraine.
“Bring out the holy hand grenade!”
“Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.”
“I’m sorry that my country’s former government is largely responsible for the chaotic violence in Iraq!!!???”
PLEASE!!!
Enough with the jiveass talking points!!!
How “former” is it, really? A thin layer at the top is nominally “different,” but all the way down through both houses of Congress? The PermaGov bureaucrats and corporate
shills…errr, ahhh, “lobbyists”…who haunt the back rooms where the deals are really made? The media opinion makers who were on board during the entire runup to the Iraq invasion? The State Department, military and intelligence people who were also on board? The high-level decision makers who did not move to prosecute the plainly criminal actions of the Blood For Oil profiteers, some of whom held high elective office during the carnage and now walk free?C’mon, Booman. Take the blame. “Mea culpa” your ass off!!! You are fronting for the same interests that dropped that war on Iraq. The war that resulted in this chaos that we are now seeing in all of the Middle East.
Same company, different managers.
Get real.
AG
You really havent noticed that obama removed most troops from iraq, have you.
In accordance with the agreement put in place at the end of the Bush/Cheney regime. Obama’s role was the timing of the withdrawal and not the withdrawal and he didn’t do it swiftly.
I take it that you haven’t noticed the US-NATO bombing of Libya (which came after CIA activity in Benghazi assisting with fomenting the revolution) and US “meddling” in Syria and Ukraine. So, pardon me if I don’t wear Obama shades.
They’re still there. Because the oil’s still there.
Just like Libya. Remember if there’s oil there, we invade. And when we invade we never leave.
I’m not sure whether that’s why we’ve got thousands of troops in Syria, or that’s why we don’t have thousands of troops in Syria, but I’m working on it.
Also Afghanistan. We do have thousands of troops there — near as I can figure, they’re looking for the oil.
Um…I’m gonna call bullshit here, and not just for the reason that other commenters have mentioned: namely, that Christianity is really the only major religion that has far, far more blood on its hands than Islam, including in modern times.
And I’m also not just calling BS because any successful religion becomes successful specifically because it let the rulers of its time do what they want to do anyway, which invariably means killing people and trying to expand their own wealth and power.
But in this particular case, ISIS, as a radical variation on Sunni theology (which rejects mediation between people and their god through things like shrines), has explicitly promised to destroy some of Shittes’ holiest shrines – most immediately at Samarra, Najaf, and Karbala. ISIS could control any of these within days.
You may remember that when a bomb damaged the Samarra shrine in 2006 it kick-started the deadliest phase (to date) of Iraq’s civil war, resulting, among many other things, in the effective ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad. The scale of this threat, from a Shiite perspective, dwarfs that one – and the Shiites also have already faced oppression in Iraq itself for generations, and in Iran for much of the 20th Century as well, including Saddam’s 1980-88 invasion and war that killed probably a million people.
I know of no major religion which, when faced with an existential threat like this to its holiest sites, wouldn’t respond in exactly this way, ideals and holy texts notwithstanding. What do you think would be the reaction of various holy men if Saint Peter’s Basilica, or any key Hindu shrine, were destroyed by enemies of the relevant faith? It’d be just as visceral and violent. It has nothing to do with the inherit bloodthirstiness of Islam, and everything to do with tribal identity, faith, and human nature.
that’s why I said that maybe things are so desperate that this was necessary but that I find it absurd coming from a supposedly holy person.
Unlike some in the comments, I did not say and did not intend to imply that this is inferior feature of Islam. But I do think it would be healthier for such calls to arm to come from civic and tribal leaders rather than religious ones.
When the immediate threat is to religious shrines the call to arms could only come from religious leaders. There’s also a fallacious assumption at play here – you equate “holy” with “non-violent” but that equivalence isn’t asserted anywhere besides Buddhism, I believe. Possibly Hinduism, but I’m not certain.
Boo, it seems this story was false: Sistani has always been committed to nonsectarian and peaceful solutions and still is.
This is close to what I thought to reply, except I would have also asked Booman if he was fully aware of the gloating threats of the ISIS spokesman that you reference when he wrote it.
So thx for saving me the effort. (Been a long day, and I’m tired.
You’re right Boo, it isn’t holy, but the tribal instinct is very human. Here’s hoping we can all evolve beyond it someday.
After all these years, this still makes me want to puke:
If those that sorted through the available public information and applied freshman logic could get it right, she has no excuse other than not being half as smart as she pretends to be, having extremely poor judgment and instincts are the most important questions, or everything other than her own ambitions are secondary. Any one of them makes her unsuitable for President.
Things I missed the first time around:
That’s like GWB/Condi speak.
Then this:
My only reaction to this is,’Where does TV dig up these goofy, tacky sets politicians are inverviewed in?’ Only the bookcase is missing.
The one above appears to a State Dept Office. Probably hers at the time. Likely the only SOS to laugh on camera about the murder of a foreign head of state.
Maybe so. But such ignorant flippancy is definitely in the same league as her ladyfriend and one of her predecessor’s (?) remarks that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of babies in Iraq because of sanctions were well worth it. A lot of those deaths occurred with the consent of Hill’s hus’ Bill. My bottom-line evaluation of Hillary Clinton is that she owes her presentday celebrity largely to Monica Lewinsky.
Too many uppers.
Way too many, that day.
It’s hard being Secretary of State!!!
Alla those early morning crises, don’tcha know.
Colonel Dr. Feelgood had a busy time with Secretary of State Clinton, I think. Imagine how busy he’ll be when she’s preznit!!!
AG
You spent a year of your life humping her campaign.
I thought the same, Boo, but didn’t want to rub it in.
How would those that weren’t here in 2007-2008 know that if someone in the know doesn’t rub it in?
Who wasn’t here then?
Probably many. Me for one. I did my slugging it out on primaries at dKos beginning in late 2002.
You can’t “rub it in,” because there is no wound in which to rub. Come this next election I will make the same sorts of choices…decidedly non-partisan choices, bet on it…based on the best remaining possibility for the survival of the country. I root for no one, unlike you all. I am not a Democrat, not a Republican, not a Libertarian and not anything else that can be pinned down. I’m am a social survivalist, and I see this society going down. Rapidly. You don’t see it? That’s why you’re an Obama rooter.
AG
I thought she’d be better than Obama…in a technical sense. She would have known where the levers of power really are and how to manipulate them. Plus…the PermaGov media was most obviously hyping Obama. Now we know why.
I have pretty well given up thinking that anybody who really wants to change this system in effective ways can even be nominated for president, let alone win a national election. Better an efficient jailer than a lazy, self-absorbed narcissist. That way at least the prison itself will run well.
Now?
It’s a shambles.
AG
Yes it is, isn’t it? To say the least.
Maybe she has a more convincing excuse: she lies, unabashedly and repeatedly. Her favorite repugnant is Mr. Mc Jiggers, don’t forget that. And all the silly talk about how ‘smart’ she is. It’s all so in your face. She pillow-talked with her Bill in the White House for eight years and she didn’t even learn that presidents lie to get their way. That must be why she believed Colin Powell’s show-and-tell routine at the U.N. It’s rich that just when she finally got around to admitting that her vote for war on Iraq was mistaken in a transparent attempt to sweettalk her critics, Iraq goes into overdrive crisis. Her name is neo-conservative war.
Check this out – NPR June 2012
She shares giggles with the war-mongering Kissinger. If she hadn’t met Bill, she could have ended up working in the Nixon WH with Kissinger.
The interview is NPR June 2014.
“Religion is supposed to comfort people, not scare them to death!” – Bert Cates, Inherit the Wind.
Gotta love those reality based liberals.