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Arab News SAUDI ARABIA'S FIRST ENGLISH LANGUAGE DAILY http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=19498 The Moral Majority in the sewer By Fawaz Turki Published on 17 October 2002 Not that there ought to be a law against monomaniacs who publicly verbalize incendiary views about another people�s faith, or jejune ideas about the One Absolute Truth. After all, McCarthyism is no longer on the books, and one�s constitutional right to free speech, enshrined in the First Amendment, remains sacrosanct in contemporary American life. But what happens when free speech to some individuals is a chimera in bigotry and a call to violence? That is a question that should be raised when it comes to Jerry Falwell�s malicious observations about Islam and the Prophet in a recent interview on the popular �60-Minutes� show two Sundays ago. Never mind that Falwell is a mentally dull, dimwitted and naive individual who has not read half-a-dozen decent books in his life. He is leader of a movement, claiming 30 million adherents, that superciliously calls itself the Moral Majority and that carries a lot of clout. Like those people not too long ago who, before political correctness overtook them, used to speak of the �civilized world,� implying the existence of an uncivilized one out there, members of the Moral Majority self-righteously believe that all other mortals, who do not espouse their views, are by definition immoral. In the United States there is a law against hate crimes � the infliction of violence on someone purely on the basis of his ethnicity, race or nationality. That�s all well and good. But what of hateful words that incite violence? A society is made up of words, and hateful words contribute to the coarsening of culture and crudeness in social discourse, both of which in turn conduce to violence. No one is saying here that the Supreme Court should rule against the kind of hatefulness that Falwell manifested on 60-Minutes. Hatefulness, like its sister expression, pornography, is an illusive term to pin down in jurisprudence. But the US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart�s famous pronouncement about obscenity in literature and the public debate applies in this case: �I know it when I see it.� In his 60-Minutes interview, Falwell remarked with serene calm, as fanatics are wont to do, that if you do not see Islam and its Prophet as he does, and you do not see Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, a sacred credo in fundamentalist Christianity, then you are wickedly sinful, sure to go to hell, and a call will go out to Evangelicals for all hands on deck, to fight you relentlessly, because you are interfering in the �Way of the Lord.� Fascist rhetoric? Yes, but all true. Not since the Inquisitorial tribunals of the 13th century, set up to discover, repress and punish heresy, and the time of the Puritan bullies in the 16th, who insisted on a �pure� interpretation of the Bible (hence their name, which was given them in derision) has a Christian movement debased, cheapened and, above all, so mockingly and intolerantly misinterpreted the Christian faith. You want to know how kooky that interpretation is, then get a transcript of the 60-Minutes segment where Falwell, along with other fundamentalist zealots interviewed on the show, articulate their version of the future world order, what they rapturously call the Armageddon. Israel is proof that biblical prophecies are coming true, they assert, heralding an apocalypse in which Jews, whom they love desperately but who are now and have always been spiritually blind for not embracing Christianity, will either perish or �accept Jesus� upon his second coming. �The most dramatic evidence for Christ�s imminent return,� Falwell stated, �is the rebirth of the nation of Israel.� But there�s a catch to the support these folk extend to what they call the �realization of Zion� in the Holy Land. �Evangelist Chuck Missler once told me that Israel gets more support in America from Christian fundamentalists than from ethnic Jews,� wrote Gershom Gorenberg, Israeli author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the struggle for the Temple Mount, �yet he has asserted that Auschwitz was �just a prelude� to what will happen to Jews in the approaching Last Days.� Great friends to have around, no? The long and short of it is that Falwell would not have made those egregious remarks about Islam, on national television, were it not for the ambience created by President Bush, along with his administration officials and foreign policy intellectuals, who has monotonously called, with condescending hauteur, for �regime change,� �democracy promotion,� �respect for human rights,� and the rest of it, in the Islamic world. In other words, let�s make �them� more like �us,� in the meanwhile offer these wretches, much in the manner of Britain�s the �white man�s burden� and France�s the �mission civilizatrice,� the gift of Western culture. And if they don�t see reason, then by Jove, let�s send out the Bengal Lancers or the Foreign Legion � in today�s parlance, the Special Forces and the B-52s. You wonder, though, why this much-touted system of government, that they are anxious to export to us or thrust down our throats, a system seemingly imbued with great reserves of compassion, fairness and equality, never once acted, in the 19th century, as an impediment to bestial oppression of people of color or, in the first half of the 20th, to concentration camps and wanton slaughter. If you haven�t figured out that in the US the national mood has changed, becoming more responsive to the hate-filled rhetoric of the likes of Jerry Falwell and his ilk, you really need to get out more. Already, Reinhold Niebuhr�s dainty observation about Americans� sense of their own global mission is being bandied about: �Tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection.� Funny, I don�t feel tutored, do you? 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