Christians have been present in the Middle East since the first century, living harmoniously with Muslims for long periods. Some claim the problems are with a more assertive Western Christianity that uses its wealth in manipulative ways.
"There are very sincere missionaries whom Muslims like," says Dr. Nasr. "But what makes them angry is that US proselytizing is combined with worldly advantages: Poor people are wooed with medicine for their children, syringes for their cows, and then are expected to attend services."
Broadly speaking, a more assertive Western Christianity "using its wealth in manipulative ways" could include things like bombing and invasion. Especially since the purported rationale for the war — WMD and terrorism — has so far turned out to be an utter fraud.
Now the conquered people can suffer further indignities, bartering their spiritual lives for medicine and food. Aren't we nice for helping the armless orphan boy, whose family we killed and whose arms we blew off? I wonder if he has yet accepted Jesus as his true savior.
The way all these people act in the name of God — George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, Franklin Graham, millions of others — only supports the idea that if a deity exists at all, it is nowhere in the vicinity of any of them.
The head of a U.S. presidential panel on cultural property has resigned in protest at the failure of U.S. forces to prevent the wholesale looting of priceless treasures from Baghdad's antiquities museum.
"It didn't have to happen," Martin Sullivan said of the objects that were destroyed or stolen from the Iraqi National Museum in a wave of looting that erupted as U.S.-led forces ended President Saddam Hussein rule last week.
Sullivan, who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years, said he wrote a letter of resignation to the White House this week in part to make a statement but also because "you can't speak freely" as a special government-appointed employee.
The president appoints the 11-member advisory committee. Another panel member, Gary Vikan, also plans to resign because of the looting of the museum.
The President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property has its own website stating that the United States Department of State is responsible for implementing the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act.
Even though he was lone dove of the Bush bunch, former military leader Colin Powell is going to get the Chaos of the Chickenhawks pinned on him.
Some looters emptying Iraq's museums of centuries-old treasures were possibly professional thieves who used keys to enter locked safes and vaults, experts said today. [...]
A gathering of 30 art experts and cultural historians in Paris said that while much of the looting in Iraq was haphazard, some of the thieves clearly knew what they wanted and where to find it -- suggesting they were prepared professionals.
"It looks as if part of the looting was a deliberate planned action," said McGuire Gibson, a University of Chicago professor and president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad. "They were able to take keys for vaults and were able to take out important Mesopotamian materials put in safes."
McGuire Gibson is coincidentally the same expert who repeatedly conferred with the Pentagon (Washington Post) in advance of the war.
We wrote about the deviousness behind this "looting" previously.
In January 2003, we imported only 600,000 barrels of Iraqi crude a day. In anticipation of our invasion, we upped our order to 909,000 barrels per day in February.
Hopefully we put the purchase on a credit card so we can skirt the bill and also get a half-billion frequent flyer miles for Colin Powell.
Accounts of the U.S. military's dramatic rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch from Saddam Hospital here two weeks ago read like the stuff of a Hollywood script. For Iraqi doctors working in the hospital that night, it was exactly that -- Hollywood dazzle, with little need for real action.
"They made a big show," said Haitham Gizzy, a physician at the public hospital here who treated Lynch for her injuries. "It was just a drama," he said. "A big, dramatic show."
This may come as a surprise to average Iraqi civilians and other recent amputees (see the same article above), but the American style of leadership is now 100% show business. The scripts, editing, camera angles, costuming, sets and props are much more carefully planned than any other aspect of government actions. The Jessica Lynch Show, like the The Fall of the Statue Show, is a fraud.
The war between surface and substance is over. Surface won. Why else put an empty suit in front of a painted warehouse backdrop — inside a real warehouse?
...I had found myself wondering, too, if the situations were reversed and Lori Piestewa, the Hopi woman who was killed in Iraq, had been rescued, and Jessica Lynch had died, if we would not now be seeing the tragic death as more important than the rescue. If we wouldn't be thinking, yes, thank God that one woman was rescued, but we must not forget the brave, blonde girl who died at the hands of evil men, and fight all the harder in her memory. The word "wondering" is the key there. I'm aware of how often the issues and concerns of anyone who isn't white, male or middle class (preferably all three) get shoved to the margins, and when something like this happens, it's pretty hard not to notice that the media is obsessed with one particular woman, and that her pigmentation is different from that of the majority of women in the military.
Lori's story is told in "What about Private Lori?" in The Guardian.
What Enron hoped would be a world-class collection of contemporary art promoting its cutting-edge image will go on the block next month.
The first round of the auction, approved by a U.S. bankruptcy judge on Tuesday, is scheduled for May 15-16 in New York. Up for sale will be the most valuable pieces, including Claes Oldenburg's Soft Light Switches and nine other artworks.
About 50 other pieces will be auctioned by Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg in the fall.
Much of the collection was bought by an in-house art committee, chaired by Lea Fastow, wife of indicted former Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow. Given a $20 million budget, she traveled to New York; Venice, Italy; and elsewhere in search of pieces.
The spree continued from late 2000 to the following fall, when Enron went into the tank and shopping was stopped, having spent about $4 million.
"It's like The Beverly Hillbillies," said Hiram Butler, co-director of the Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery in the Heights. "What's not fun -- flying around, buying art?"
Examining a partial list of the artists and pieces represented in the collection, Butler, who specializes in contemporary art, "I'm wondering, 'Who are these guys?' "
Five pieces that will be auctioned May 15 are the highlights "are all 'A' quality" representative pieces of contemporary genres, including pop, op (for optical) and minimalism, said Amalia Dayan, a contemporary art specialist at Phillips de Pury.
The majority of the collection, to be auctioned this fall, is "lower value work," Dayan said. "It was a corporate collection. You have huge spaces you have to fill with art. When you have to fill huge spaces, you buy less valuable art. You combine that with a few quality examples."
Oldenburg's Soft Light Switches, a vinyl pop sculpture of what appears to be a melted light switch, is by far the most valuable piece in the collection. Enron bought it from Phillips de Pury three years ago for about $590,000, including commission.
Light switches, energy company — get it?
Effortlessly mixing the sublime with the banal, Enron's hamburger-helper art collection will be auctioned instead of looted, as if that makes any difference at all to the acquirers of such fabulously expensive objects.
I picture Lea Fastow in a Venetian gallery, haggling over price in louder and louder English with an Italian dealer. Ugly art for ugly Americans.
The Enron quote of the day for these "Beverly Hillbillies" is "What's not fun -- flying around, buying art?" For a contemporary art expert with a sense of humor, I give a lot of credit to the immediately likeable Hiram Butler.
Image credit: Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg, who receives luscious commissions on both the original purchase and the subsequent auction of many of these artworks.
May 1, 2003 UPDATE: Photos at this post: Lea Fastow is charged and surrenders to federal authorities.
...Neil infamously served as a director of Silverado Banking, Savings & Loan. The S&L failed in the late '80s, costing taxpayers more than $1 billion. Neil received federal sanctions and, with 11 other defendants, agreed to pay $49.5 million to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The family moved to Houston in 1991.
Maybe that $49.5 million is why Neil's final settlement offer to Sharon was $1,000 a month, which she refused. The case goes to jury trial this month.
According to gossip columnist Cindy Adams, Neil is involved with Maria Andrews, mother of three (the youngest 18 months), who divorced her husband in October. Neil met Andrews when she worked for a Barbara Bush foundation. Dozens of letters from Neil to her have been admitted as exhibits. Ouch. Houston insiders expect Neil and Andrews to marry once his divorce is settled.
Adultery among parents! It's always refreshing to see Republican family values as they're actually lived.
Neil's offer of $12,000 a year precludes any more fancy Egyptian vacations for Sharon Bush. What a contrast from Neil's remarks about their March 2001 family getaway to a painfully obvious destination — the Mideast:
First of all, this is our first visit to Egypt as a family. My wife Sharon and my daughters have been to Luxor and Cairo, but never to the Red Sea. We’ve heard so much about the snorkeling and diving here, so we decided to spend a portion of our trip in this part of Egypt. I dive, but I’m not a master. My wife has been diving many times, but this is actually the first time for us to dive together as family.
Perhaps it also turned out to be the last time they would dive together as a family.
Sharon's refusal of the thousand-a-month offer was understandable, given the lifestyle to which she's become accustomed as part of the Bush dynasty.
Also interesting in the Egyptian article is the dyslexia angle, trumpeted as Neil's triumph of entrepreneurial insight:
Neil Bush has recently initiated a revolutionary interactive learning tool in the United States, which he calls the Ignite! Learning System. Ignite! is a computer program designed to replace classroom textbooks and help teachers teach and students learn more effectively. In his youth, Neil Bush suffered from dyslexia, and his 7th grade teachers told his mother, Barbara Bush, that he would not graduate from high school. Bush triumphed in his challenge to live with dyslexia, and was inspired to promote ways of learning such as Ignite! to enable children to be better educated by methods that help them develop their full learning potential. Ignite! will be launched in the United States this summer, actively promoted by members of Neil Bush’s family, including two of his children, Ashley and Pierce.
Readers in Texas and especially Houston — you know who you are (wink!) — are invited to email me as many local stories as possible as the divorce trial proceeds.
UPDATE:The Daily Kos reports on a New York Observer story about Sharon's pitch for a tell-all book. Sharon is supposedly willing to break Bush family silence about its overt dynasty-building, since they collectively refused to budge on the $1,000 a month offer.
Bush's chief campaign financiers included Enron, one of the masterminds behind the California energy crisis that wiped $45 billion from the state economy.
The new Homeland Security Department's budget is about $38 billion, but as little as $3 billion to $4 billion in new money is going to state and local coffers, according to state officials. That isn't even enough to cover new federal security mandates, according to the complaints of some governors and mayors, who have had to increase taxes and lay off municipal workers, such as firefighters and police officers.
For defense contractors, the new government money is helping stem a decade-long decline in military orders. But the companies are still hurting from a recent collapse in their civilian business and are saddled with facilities that have been half-empty for years. Productivity gains in manufacturing also have helped the companies add work without having to add workers.
Adding work without adding workers is every capitalist's dream. But We the People have to account for some of this spending by the pluto-bureaucrats.
How did only $3 or $4 billion get allocated to state and local governments? Who was responsible for making the numbers line up with the new mandates? Talk about fuzzy math.
September 11 was supposed to have shown us how important firefighters and police officers are (especially to Peggy Noonan). But the irrationality of Bush spending is forcing them to be laid off.
So if only $4 billion goes to states and municipalities, $34 billion is staying right in Washington for... what?
In metropolitan Washington, the unemployment rate was only 3.5% in January, the lowest of any metro region with more than one million workers. The region contains tracts of suburban Maryland and Virginia and is home to many companies that have landed homeland-security contracts, often for computer services. It gained more than 42,000 jobs in 2002, far more than any other metropolitan area.
$34 billion for a handful of computer consultants in industrial parks in Chevy Chase and Fairfax County? Sounds a bit steep.
While computer services companies outside the Beltway thrive on federal generosity, public health labs — the ones who would be called upon in a real terrorist event involving, say, a bioweapons or toxic chemical attack — are calling the homeland security effort and its funding "missing in action."
It is a cultural catastrophe. Yesterday the [Iraq National Museum]'s exhibition halls and security vaults were a barren mess - display cases smashed, offices ransacked and floors littered with hand-written index cards recording the timeless detail of more than 170,000 rare items that were pilfered.
Worse, in their search for gold and gems, the looters got into the museum's underground vaults, where they smashed the contents of the thousands of tin trunks.
It was here that staff had painstakingly packed priceless ceramics that tell the story of life from one civilisation to the next through 9000 fabled years in Mesopotamia.
In tears of anger and frustration, archaeologist Moysen Hassan, 56, itemised the pieces he was certain were stolen: a solid-gold harp from the Sumerian era, which began about 3360BC; a sculptured head of a woman from Uruk, one of the great Sumerian cities; gold necklaces, bracelets and earrings more than 4000 years old, and a rare collection of gold-trimmed ivory sculptures.
Too distraught to talk about the collection, he gave me a copy of the catalogue for The Grand Exhibition of Silk Road Civilisations, which toured the world in the late 1980s and for which the museum set aside its traditional reluctance to allow any of its treasure abroad.
All the items that made it safely around the world and back to Baghdad have been looted.
They include centuries-old carvings of stone bulls, kings and princesses, shoes made of copper and cuneiform tablets, pieces of tapestries and ivory figurines of goddesses, women and Nubian porters, friezes of fighting soldiers and ancient seals and tablets on geometry, and ceramic jars and urns and bowls, all dating back at least 2000 years, some more than 5000 years.
[...]
The sacking of the museum took two days, interrupted only for 30 minutes when pleading staff convinced members of a Marines tank unit to go to the museum and scare off the looters with a few warning shots over their heads.
Abdul Rakhman, the museum's live-in guard, 57, was a gibbering wreck as he told of the arrival of a shouting crowd armed with axes and iron bars to smash the doors and cases.
The history of civilization is a small price to pay for the continued fuel inefficiency of American automobiles and SUVs. Meanwhile, consider how the Halliburton logo would look rendered in cuneiform.
Bush's earnings were outpaced by Vice President Richard Cheney's $1.166 million in adjustable gross income and $945,051 in taxable income [in 2002]. But the vice president's earnings were down from more the than $4 million in taxable income for 2001, which included bonuses and stock options from his previous employer, Halliburton Co.
Cheney, who took $221,684 in deductions, had a tax bill of $341,114 for 2002. This entitled the vice president to a refund of nearly $95,858, but he chose to apply $20,000 to his 2003 tax bill.
Cheney reported $162,392 in deferred compensation from Halliburton, which he served as chief executive before becoming vice president. His office said the pay is unaffected by the financial performance of Halliburton.
A subsidiary of Halliburton has been awarded U.S. contract reportedly worth up to $7 billion to put out oil fires in Iraq stemming from the war launched by the Bush administration. Democratic lawmakers have requested an investigation into whether Halliburton received special favors, but the White House has denied this.
The earnings of Cheney and his wife, Lynne, also included $490,999 in dividends and $129,000 in business income. Mrs. Cheney in 2002 earned money from service on corporate boards and work for the American Enterprise Institute think tank. The Cheneys donated $121,983 to charity, primarily from book royalties earned by Mrs. Cheney.
Where should we begin with this analysis? Let's start with the $4 million in income "which included bonuses and stock options from his previous employer, Halliburton Co." for the year 2001 — a year which was notable for Cheney's eleven-plus months of service as vice president while receiving corporate benefits, his six secret and sealed energy policy meetings with Enron, the al Qaeda attacks on the US, and Cheney's initial planning of the war against Saddam Hussein, which coincidentally rewarded Halliburton with a no-bid $7 billion contract announced only days ago.
Even in 2002, Cheney was still on the take from the Halliburton till, to the tune of $162,392 in deferred compensation. "His office said the pay is unaffected by the financial performance of Halliburton." But they got it the wrong way around — the financial performance of Halliburton is inextricably affected by Cheney's office.
But here's the part that is perhaps the sickest of all: $490,999 in dividends and $129,000 in "business income," whatever that might mean, since no one is bothering to define or question it. A half-million dollars in dividends that he wants tax-free so you can pick up the tab for his war. Don't you hate guys in bars who think that because they told you a joke and clapped you on the back, you ought to buy them a drink? Except Cheney never told you a joke or clapped you on the back.
Note also that more than half of Cheney's income was in dividends — he didn't work for it. Everything about the Bush dividend-promoting "stimulus package" is a big juicy kiss on the asses of the wealthy and a slap in the face of anyone who works for a living. Those who own will get ahead. Those who work will fall behind. Talk about simplifying the tax code!
Then add in Lynne's earnings — at corporate boards where she is working so hard to destroy shareholder value, and at the American Enterprise Institute which toils ceaselessly to destroy our nation's judiciary. (And just who is buying those Lynne Cheney books that earn almost $121,983 in royalties?* You can almost see the dagger in the New York Times bestseller lists: "This book reports having bulk orders — from the American Enterprise Institute.")
I can't decide which is more stunning — the speed, or the scale, of their immoral perversions of American justice. The obscenity of their abusive policies, pathological secrecy, class warfare, and military war profiteering are all the more pointed now that the insult of Tax Day is upon us.
Whatever happened to centrist Republicans? As We the Little People send the wages from our little "jobs" to the US Treasury, somewhere a Republican cell is quietly metastasizing into yet another plutocratic malignancy.
*An Amazon reader's word-for-word review of Lynne Cheney's Sisters: "If you want to read about the USA and how it works, from the perspective of a rich, dillusional white lady, run right out and by this book. Lynne Cheney has a warped perspective on everthing (unless you're rich and white, then maybe you can relate). I'd say wait till it shows up in a trash can near you. That's when the price would be right." I guess that's another way of saying that if our markets were truly free, Lynne Cheney wouldn't receive $121,983 in royalties.
