The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> open letter to Christopher Hitchens..

open letter to Christopher Hitchens..

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Wednesday, October 6 2010, 17:58:32 (UTC)
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Dear Mr. Hitchens,

Thanks you so much for your courageous and highly moral and ethical stand against all religious dogma and nonsense and stupidity. I wish you all the best in your current trials and if prayer had any effect I would be on my knees daily to ask for your health and continued presence among us.
You can´t possibly appreciate people fawning all over you so I won´t. I get the sense that you far prefer a good, honest, tussle, and so I make so bold as to give you one. I want to speak, not in defense of Islam but in defense of the right of all people to follow Darwinian precepts and be allowed to evolve naturally with as little outside, violent intervention, as possible. By your own admission the human species has come a long way, but not all humans at the same rate. People who started out pretty awful are today a credit to us all...so I would suggest that we stop attacking those who may be less far along the evolutionary curve...after all, someone could have strenuosuly objected to your ancestors, or mine, and justified wiping them off the face of the earth before they learned to learn better.
I am not "for" Islam...but I´m concerned that "you people" are at it again. By you people I don´t mean Christians, or Christians alone. Let´s just say that "you people" refers to what people like you have done and are doing again. Judaism was very recently condemned in pretty much the same terms that you are now using against Islam, and please, let´s not debate the actual teachings of each religion for that is not the point. My point, at least, is that people use religious differences to justify the most awful things...such as were done to Jews for centuries and seem to be starting out all over again against Muslims and Islam. People as wise, for their day, and humane and passionate as you yourself are considered today, were convinced that Jews were inherently evil, dangerous and bent on destroying the world. It didn´t matter to them what Judaism actually was, or that most if not all of the distasteful and repulsive behaviors acribed to the very teachings of Judaism, were in reality adaptations to the incredible barbarity and unjust treatment meted out to them by Christians for centuries,,,,that these behaviors were survival mechanisms, if you will, thurst upon them not by their religion but by the cruel treatment of them and their religion by others.
You and I may agree that Islam is as replusive as you say it is. But has it really been a threat to the West in the last century or two?. Is your moral outrage at the inner workings of Muslim society justification to declare our own holy war against it and its practitioners without any clear evidence that their religion set them on this course long ago, or that they are a "natural" and inevitable danger to everything we hold dear and that whatever we have actually done to Muslims is no justification for ANY retaliation on their part? Is this reasonable? Is this the way human nature works?

Should we declare something as drastic as modern warfare against a people, if they present no actual, real and present danger to ourselves? Are we to elect oursleves the Elect, the moral arbiters of the universe, whether we believe in Christianioty or not? It has always outraged me that some Muslim countries practise female circumcision and infibulation...as much as it does that Jews still get away with male gential mutilation, as do Christians. But I wouldn´t wage a war against those people and in the process starve to death or otherwise murder the very children I say I want to save from such practices. If I did anything in that regard it would be first to wage what campaign I could to abolish these very practices in the West, in my own home turf.

It´s seems to me oddly messianic and smacks of the missionary position to do as the old style missionaries did who ignored the lynchings and racism and crimes in and of their own countries in favor of going around the world and "saving the heathen".

Why do we think Islamic countries are hostile to us? Could it be for anything, anything at all, that we are responsible for visiting on them? In other words, can it be possible that Jews had more reason to hate Christians than Christians ever had to hate them? And can Muslims have far better grounds to resent and fear and want to strike back at what Christians are doing to them today, than Christians have for wanting to do the same for what Muslims have done to them...certainly for what Iraqis have not done to them?

I am not defending Islam, as a religion, at all....I am only defending people´s right not be warred against in the name of "improving them" or to save ourselves form them, when they were not the ones to strike the first blow, in the modern era.

You don´t like Islam. I don´t like any of them. But you not liking a religion doesn´t make it right and good for you to support a war against the people who believe in that religion, especially when, left to themselves, they never would have bothered you. Islam in many places , and at this stage in its development, is cruel and hostile towards its own people. But surely you recognize that it wasn´t too long ago when the same could be said, and worse, about Christianity. After all, as a religion, Christianity has had some 700 more years than Islam to get it right...and though there are obvious ways in which it has improved, or rather that its power to cause harm has been forcibly reduced, the same is not yet true of Islam. Go back 700 years in Christian development and I think you´ll find every practise and crime you complain of now in Islam alive and very well among Christians.

Let´s let Darwin have his way...let's give Muslim countries the chance to evolve in their own way without our own intervention....it´s sad and yet wonderful to contemplate what Aztec or Inca society could have become if a holy war had not been waged against them. Let´s admit that no matter how distasteful or reprehensible we may find Islam to be, or Judaism to have been, there is really nothing in either to make us go to war against their children...and that if we find the members of either religion to have been, or to be now, obnoxious and even dangerous to us, it may be because of what we did to them....in your own words, morality consists of taking personal responsibility for your actions and not placing the blame, or praise, on another.

Christians and "those" kinds of people have done this before...they have identified a religious group as dangerous to their well-being and used that argument to wage preemptive war against it and in the process committed the most unimaginable and horrific crimes the world has ever seen, so foul that an new word had to be coined, genocide, just to deal with it. Are we not seeing the start of yet another such war, against another religious group we as staunchly believe is yet another supreme danger to our way of life etc.? Do we really believe this, or is not highly likely that, after a few more centuries of increasing barbarity against a people so ill-equipped to match us in weapons of mass death, we may not someday apologize....again? Christians love confession and redemption....but both those states require them to commit crimes...the worse the crime the greater the relief at expiation, the more "cleansed" they feel, regardless of how much filth they had to first wallow in to later feel so correspondingly "blessed".

Instead of going that way, instead of committing acts, no matter how firmly we may believe in them now, would it not be better to remember what Hitler did to his own country and people in his desire to "save them" from the evils of Judaism? Might we not also do incalculable harm to ourselves by mounting yet another Holocaust...on such flimsy grounds as we now admit we had against the Jews? can WE not evole a better way of judging dangers...or judging people we find exotic purely based on our own ignorance and lack of sophistication...?

I know you underscore your warnings against Islam by pointing out that Pakistan, a Muslim country, now has nuclear weapons and therefore we MUST attack, in order to save ourselves. But leaving aside atomic weapons and how likely Muslims are to use such things, what about when Saddam was being roundly defeated at the same time he was supposed to possess weapons of all sorts and was described as a mad man who would not hesitate to use them....why didn´t he when Israel was bombing his country? If he, a Muslim leader, wouldn´t do it then, even to save his own life eventually....why would a leader of Pakistan, or any leader of an Islamic group, use such weapons now? What has intervened in the last 20 years to perhaps radicalize Muslims, or a portion of them, to such an extent that you now fear that THEY will use such weapons....when so far only Christians have?

Anything? Has anything been going on in the MidEast between western Christian nations and Islamic countries in the last few decades? If so could that explain why we, and you especially, are so afraid of what might happen? Or is it just that Islam taught this stuff all along, but here come atomic weapons? But then why didn´t Saddam use the weapons he had, that we knew he had because the West sold them to him, nay insisted that he needed them to fight Iran (and test them for us), which it was also supplying?

To you of all people it should be clear that the Christian West has inflamed Muslims and roused their justifiable wrath against anyone, Christian or not, who has treated them as they have been treated....and that if you feel justified, because of your fear of them, then think how much more cause they have to be afraid of you and those whom you excuse in the name of "saving" you and yours and your world.

In other words...who started this latest jihad....Christians or Muslims? And, if people are attacked, people we all know now were innocent of any desire or intention of harming us, should we really be so surprised and on top of that blame THEM for responding to what we did to them and continue to do? Where is the personal responsibility in not admitting what we have done to wrong people, but instead focusing on what they MAY do in defending themselves from us and using that "fear" as grounds for even more violence and mayhem against them?

sincerely and most admiringly yoors trooli,

pancho

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