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Who are the terrorists?

That's what I'd like to ask George W. Bush, his Defense Secretary, or any of the generals running the war in Iraq. It seems their definition of terrorist is anyone opposing American military force.

The insurgents in Falujah have been so labeled, in addition to being called "Saddam loyalists" and "Baathist remnants". On the other hand, they're never called Iraqi nationalists, which just may be a more accurate description, even acknowledging the fact that Iraq only became a "nation" after the British decreed it one following World War I. Nationhood, a thoroughly Western notion, is an awkward fit for the polyglot ethnic, tribal, and religious reality of Iraq.

So who are the terrorists?

Of course, I believe that the use of overwhelming military force to bludgeon an opponent into submission is an act of terrorism. Remember "shock and awe"? That was clearly, and admittedly, a strategy to terrify the Iraqi people and to shorten the war. Over a year later, we still have a war on our hands, so maybe it wasn't such a good strategy.

A better way to define terrorism is to view it as a tactic by the weak to resist, or, in this case, to fight, the powerful, sort of like the geurrilla warfare used by the Americans against the British in the War of Independence, of by the Viet Cong against the Americans, both of which worked.

I don't condone killing of any sort, but to put the issue in perspective, far more Iraqis, terrorists or not, have been killed and maimed by American military might than the other way around.

So who are the terrorists?

George W. Bush believes terrorists are the evildoers arrayed against the forces of good.

Pat Robertson (or maybe it was Jerry Falwell) said that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was a terrorist.

Rod Paige, the Secretary of Education, says that teachers, at least those affiliated with the National Education Association, are terrorists.

Anti-abortion fanatics claim that the women marching for choice in Washington are terrorists.

And environmentalists who destroy property (but haven't as yet killed anyone) are terrorists, as in eco-terrorists.

Whatever the definition, the term is widely overused. The so-called "war on terrorism" needs to be re-thought and re-phrased. As I said in my March 15 post in Joe's School:

"Despite the mounting casualties (that includes the 200 dead in Spain), U.S. strategy remains stubbornly the same: hunt down and kill all the terrorists in the world. That approach is about as likely to succeed, it seems to me, as the war on drugs."

In short, there is no military solution to the problem of terrorism, no matter how one defines it.

Karen Armstrong, Religion, and Hugo Chavez

In my last post on  Joe's School, I linked readers to Jim Wallis' column "Class Warfare", which raised the issue of the moral imperative of a just and fair --read progressive-- tax code.   And that in turn got me to thinking about writer, scholar, and savant Karen Armstrong, whose book The Battle for God I am currently reading.

I stumbled across Armstrong a couple of weeks ago on C-SPAN'S Book TV, talking about her memoir, The Spiral Staircase, and then saw her again on Bill Moyer's NOW.   My wife happened to see it too, and went out and bought both the memoir and The Battle for God, a remarkable history of the rise of "fundamentalism" in all three of the montheistic religions of the West.

Needless to say, it's topical, what with our incursion into Iraq and our war against Islamist "fundamentalists", or terrorists.  (See my April 22 and 23 posts in Joe's School.)

But putting that aside for the moment, Armstrong most intrigues me with her insistence on the unanimity, the profound similarities, within Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, as she points out  in the Moyers interview:

"I suppose one of my hopes in life is to try to get Jews, Christians and Muslims to realize the profound unanimity, the unanimous vision that they share, and to join hands together to stop the kind of cruelty, violence and obscenity, moral obscenity that we saw on September the 11th."

She repeats the same sentiment in this interview in the New York Times wherein she calls "compassion" the most important religious virtue, going "right across the board in all the world religions."

That brings me to Hugo Chavez and this article from Sojourners.  The author relates this story of a Venezuelan nun, Sister Begona Plagaro:

"Begoña, a religious sister of the Society of the Sacred Heart, has worked since 1991 in a barrio called El Estanque, one of the thousands of desperately poor "squatter neighborhoods" that surround Venezuela’s capital city. Though uncertain about Chávez, Sister Begoña decided to take her chances with the poor. 'They were the first to really understand the Chávez project,' she says. If supporting Chávez was a mistake, she would rather err with the poor than against them."

In the ongoing, admittedly minor family dispute over Chavez (my sister-in-law is Venezuelan), I would say that Sister Begona sums up my position pretty well:  I guess I, too, would "rather err with the poor than against them."

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