God's Torturers: From Torquemada to Opus Dei

Thus, love Tomas de Torquemada and the Inquisition; love the Falangist and Franco's death camps; love Himmler, the German SS and the Nazi officials running the death-camp nation of Poland -- most "good Catholics" and "good Lutherans"; love the CIA-backed Latin American fascists (see the Costa Gavras' film on Dan Mitrione, "State of Siege"); love Pinochet (see Costa Gavras' film "Missing"); love the Salvadoran and Guatemalan Armies, especially after dark when they prowled as death squads; love the CIA-proxy Nicaraguan Contras who targeted rural school teachers and doctors for torture and death; love the US "interrogators" in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and other shadowy locations; they are all good Catholics, or Episcopalians, or Methodists (like Bush and Cheney), or Baptists, or "Christians" of one kind or another, who go to churches, sing hymns and spout pieties of a "superior god" they share with Jews, a god deemed likely to win against the inferior god of the devilishly heathen Muslims, who yet seem capable of finding the exact same divine love and inspiration in their hearts to torture, shoot and behead other human beings whose presence on Earth they find offensive because they are "Shia" or "Sunni," or worse yet a Christian convert who "renounced Islam," or perhaps was a wife or daughter who was raped and now deserves stoning to preserve the male "honor" (as many Pakistani wives and daughters found out after the 1971 India-Pakistan war over Bangladeshi independence).

Picture is getting bleaker in Waziristan.

Dilemma of Left

Many conservatives and centrists allege that liberal-leftists miss no chance of slamming US and Israel for their shortcomings but often choose to stay shamelessly silent on the crimes of so-called "anti-imperialist" regimes. Here is an article highlighting that dilemma of Left.

Umar

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http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1723762,00.html

Arson, rape, massacres ... and the strange silence of the archbishop
Nick Cohen
Sunday March 5, 2006
The Observer

Like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, SaddamHussein and Slobodan Milosevic, the Islamists of Sudan claimmonstrous liars are libelling them. 'You are terrorists,' Abdel RahimMohammed Hussein, the regime's defence minister, screamed atjournalists in Khartoum on Thursday. 'Any foreign correspondent fromany foreign agency, get out - we don't want you in here.' His goonsduly expelled reporters from his press conference for inventing theincredible lie that Hussein and his friends were responsible for themurder of around 200,000 in Darfur, the ethnic cleansing of twomillion, the arson, the rapes ... well, you know the story.Or maybe you don't. After all, it has not been in the news recently,and not only because Hussein is shutting out the journalists. Fashionmatters and today the fashion is to ignore genocide. Quite rightly,the crimes of American, British, European and Israeli democracy aredissected and denounced. But an intellectual blockage - a Chinesewall in the mind - prevents the critics applying universal principlesto far greater outrages.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, made my point for me inSudan last week. Anyone who had heard the Church of England's censureof Israel might have expected to see a primate filled with righteouswrath. Consider his opportunities. While he was there, the genocidewas continuing in Darfur. The victims were black Muslims, butstrangely, the Muslim world has not revolted against the Islamistmurderers and torched Sudanese embassies.In the name of inter-faith solidarity, Dr Williams might have foundthe words of reproach they lacked. If he didn't want to talk aboutDarfur, there was the decades-long civil war, which has seen theenslavement of the Christian Dinka tribe in the south and two milliondead, more than in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo combined.On a visit to a church in Khartoum, the fearless archbishop told thecongregation: 'It will be a joy to share with fellow Christians inBritain what... I have learnt from you.' What he had learnt was ahistory of massacre, slavery and second-class citizenship, but hedidn't mention it.The next stop was the Sudan Inter-Religious Council in Khartoum. Thismight have been the place to lay into the dictatorship's murder andpersecution of Sudanese Christians. Instead, he confined himself tosaying: 'We are at peace with God when we face our failings withhonesty.' And so it went on. He travelled through a country torn byreligious mania and genocide without mentioning religious mania andgenocide.His office said he was picking his words with the care of a diplomatbecause his main concern wasn't the genocide in Darfur in the west ofSudan but the faint hope of a peace deal in the equally gruesomecivil war between the Muslim north and Christian south, which hedidn't want to jeopardise. In any case, his lecture to his Islamisthosts on facing 'our failings with honesty' was strong stuff by inter-faith standards.It may be tough talk if Anglicans are talking to Catholic bishops,but I doubt very much if it would have reduced the psychopaths ofKhartoum to trembling penitents. To me, the failure of the archbishopto speak plainly was not a sign of his diplomacy, but flowed from hisrow with the Jews. Before he escaped to Africa, he couldn't say whyhe wanted sanctions against Israel but not against countries thatcommitted far worse crimes - China, Syria, Iran, North Korea and,indeed, Sudan - or give any indication that he was morally obliged toprovide an answer.A few of his critics just wanted to protect Israel come what may.Others were concerned about the retreat from universal principle intorelativism. If you say there must be higher standards fordemocracies, you inevitably betray the victims of dictatorships byblocking your mind from thinking clearly and shouting loudly abouttheir suffering.The confusion isn't confined to the General Synod of the Church ofEngland. The United Nations tried to suppress a report that named thealleged war criminals of Darfur, in a way that it would never havesuppressed the names of alleged torturers at Guantanamo. On theblacklist was that friend of freedom, Mr Hussein. While he wasranting at the journalists, he said that if the UN sent troops toprotect the people of Darfur, al-Qaeda would flood thecountry. 'Darfur will become the graveyard for the United Nations,'he promised with what sounded like inside knowledge. Isn't that an extraordinary threat for a UN member to make? Why isn'tevery liberal newspaper and liberal party fulminating? Because genocide is out of fashion, dear. It may make a retro return in 2008, say, or 2009. Books called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow WeWill Be Killed will win literary prizes. Lachrymose documentarieswill appear on BBC2, probably narrated by Fergal Keane. The Church ofEngland will apologise, as it invariably does. They will all cry: 'Never again!' And at that precise moment, it will be happeningagain.