Has Gulf War II shown
the mockers to have a case?
Pamela Bone of The
Age is not my favourite writer. She has a particular side interest in
snide attacks on Christianity. Yet she has hit the mark with her latest
commentary, “Why
the Hypocrites are Right This Time”.
She’s not, this time,
writing about Christians. The hypocrites in her article are actually those,
like me, who reluctantly believe a war is – unfortunately – needed to free
the long-suffering Iraqi people from one of the great tyrannies of our age.
She finds herself in agreement:
Almost everything I
write and think on this issue is coloured by having been in
Rwanda in the
aftermath of the genocide - a genocide that happened because the United
Nations allowed it to.
…It is coloured by
having been in southern
Africa last year,
where a silent holocaust of AIDS and famine is wiping out populations….No
protest marches for them.
And it is coloured by,
years before September 11, before most people had even heard of the Taliban,
having listened to exiled Afghan women asking in anguish, why does the West
not help us? It is the same question many Iraqi women and men are asking
today.
Yet our clergy seem
overwhelmingly to
have decided that this liberation of the Iraqi people must be opposed. A
leader of my denomination took part in a 10-day lunchtime peace vigil
outside Melbourne’s St Paul’s Cathedral.
Our denominational
newspaper reported his reasons: “I am here because of Jesus. I try to follow
Him, and nothing I read or hear about Him allows me to condone these awful
lies and threats of violence.”
Fair enough. But the
question must be asked: Does Jesus only oppose those wars initiated by
America?
Did this church leader
attend a 10-day peace vigil when Saddam Hussein was gassing Kurdish
villages? Or slaughtering tens of thousands of Shiites in southern Iraq?
Pamela Bone writes:
In
Congo an estimated
three million people have been killed in the past five years of war. More
are killed there every month than in the past two-and-a-half years in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But though you'll see plenty of "Free
Palestine" posters among the peace marchers, you won't see any "Free Congo"
ones.
Nor will you see our
church leaders, every one of them inspired by the love of Jesus, organising
peace vigils for the people of Congo. Or for the suffering peoples of many
other war-ravaged countries.
Perhaps it is as
Andrew Sullivan wrote on his weblog
recently:
These protests are
about no-one but the protestors. It's their anti-Bush therapy. They're going
to need much more of it in the near future.
But a more likely
explanation comes from Melbourne journalist Andrew Bolt, who this week
wrote about a cultural elite that “prefers orgasmic moralising to
analysis” and which “stifles our arts, media, academia and clergy”.
Yes, once again, as so
often in our history, it seems our church leaders have capitulated to the
culture.
March 22nd, 2003
