NPR – Excerpt: “‘Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible,’ Jenkins says. Jenkins is a professor at Penn State University and author of two books dealing with the issue: the recently published Jesus Wars, and Dark Passages , which has not been published but is already drawing controversy. Violence in the Quran, he and others say, is largely a defense against attack. ‘By the standards of the time, which is the 7th century A.D., the laws of war that are laid down by the Quran are actually reasonably humane,’ he says. ‘Then we turn to the Bible, and we actually find something that is for many people a real surprise. There is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which we can only call genocide.’ It is called herem, and it means total annihilation. Consider the Book of 1 Samuel, when God instructs King Saul to attack the Amalekites: ‘And utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them,’ God says through the prophet Samuel. ‘But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ When Saul failed to do that, God took away his kingdom. ‘In other words,” Jenkins says, “Saul has committed a dreadful sin by failing to complete genocide. And that passage echoes through Christian history. It is often used, for example, in American stories of the confrontation with Indians — not just is it legitimate to kill Indians, but you are violating God’s law if you do not.’
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“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.”
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What Obamas new year message really means
I say this to the Iranian people: do not compare yourselves with others, for if you do you will think yourselves equal to your neighbors, and this is not so. Do not look towards India and Pakistan, which already possess nuclear weapons but are not signatories to the NPT; they are our allies and we do not hold them to the same standards.
Do not compare yourselves with Israel, for even though they too have nuclear weapons, 200 by some counts but it is only an estimate as they refuse to even admit they even have any, let alone sign the NPT. The Israelis are our special friends and can do as they wish.
Lastly, do not compare yourselves to America, a country actively supplying unlimited arms and finances to your sworn enemy, a country that has invaded and occupied two of your neighbors, the only country in the history of the world to actually use atomic weapons, and those against civilians, and although we have at least 5000 nuclear weapons, many of them pointed at you, we say to you, ‘do as we say, not as we do’ for we are the United States of America.’
Iran’s leaders have sought their own legitimacy through hostility to America.
This is one of many American cliches about the Middle East. Legitimacy for Iran’s or any other government does not flow from hostility to America. Legitimacy flows from doing what the people of a country consider to be the right thing. Ronald Reagan did not get legitimacy from his opposition to the USSR as a country, Kwame Nkrumah did not get legitimacy from his opposition to South Africa as a country. Ronald Reagan led a country that had come to perceive communism as its enemy. Nkrumah led a country whose people opposed the institutionalized White supremacy embodied in Apartheid.
Iran’s leaders rule a country whose people do not share with Americans the belief that Israel’s security – a strategically invulnerable majority state for about 5 million Jewish people in Palestine – is the overarching moral consideration of the entire region. And if America’s leaders, including Obama but unlike Iran’s leaders, were not afraid to discuss that topic directly then this would be the single disagreement that must be resolved to end the war the US is leading, to some degree unknowingly, against Israel’s region and to a greater or lesser extent against the entire Muslim world.
It is really difficult for Americans to understand that US policies generate hostility. There is an intense egocentrism reflected in this difficulty, an idea that opinions, priorities and sensibilities held in America are held universally. Obama’s statement that Iran’s leaders have sought legitimacy from hostility to America is his echo of George Bush’s statement that “they hate us for our freedoms”. It is difficult to believe anyone is that naive to believe an idea this unserious and silly, but then you hear it repeated again and again.
http://mideastreality.blogspot.com/2010/03/obamas-2010-nowruz-message-lying-by.html