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One featured endorser of “Proper 29 Project” is David Gushee of Evangelicals for Human Rights, which targets U.S. “torture” policies. “The WikiLeaks report tells us what we have tried to avoid knowing; our beloved nation brought or was complicit in tens of thousands of acts of torture and murder of civilians in Iraq,” Gushee gushed in his blurb for “Proper 29 Project.” He enthused that this project would enable “preachers to do what they are called to do.” That vocation for preachers is apparently denouncing America, however incoherently, while ignoring the crimes of more authentic murder regimes.
Honest and coherent religious pacifists, with other religious anti-war critics, might be more persuasive if they freely acknowledged that Saddam Hussein’s regime was a charnel house of mass murder, torture, mutilation, orchestrated rape, imprisonment and police state oppression. They might also admit that the contending militias and terrorists who arose after Saddam’s overthrow sought to murder their way to power and to erect an Islamist theocracy that would equal Saddam’s brutality with the added varnish of religious zeal. Within that horrifying context, religious pacifists could then present their hard and ostensibly holy truth that no matter the vast carnage of such a regime, or its likely alternatives, no military action by the United States or its allies under any circumstances could be morally justified.
The Religious and Evangelical Left’s uncompromising doctrine of non-violence essentially means that hundreds of thousands of innocents may die, but no permissible armed intervention may deter or rescue, possibly excepting some imaginary international “police” force wielding bobby sticks, at most. Sadly, the Religious and Evangelical Left’s crocodile tears over the real tragedy of Iraqi civilian fatalities are motivated primarily by antipathy towards America. They ignore the main killers, and disregard the nastier alternatives to American intervention. Such exercises in self-delusion may titillate some seminarians but likely won’t persuade very many minds off campus.
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